I should know better really, I do it every year. The summer or autumn anime season rolls around and my interest in keeping up week-on-week ebbs as quickly as the long nights. It doesn't so much break a habit as press pause on a lifestyle, leaving other hobbies and interests fill the vacuum.
I would rather read a book about hikkikomori syndrome than I would about media theory and Nausicaa
As the source dries up, content for this blog follows suit like an abandoned tributary. As with anything you do for sixteen years, I never wholly stop. I follow hang-overs from the previous season (Accel World, Eureka Seven AO and Hyouka in this instance) in spurts and sprints but the impetus to write anything about them is vanishingly small. Though not for lack of trying. I've tried to elucidate my qualms with Hyouka no less than three times only to end with the digital equivalent of crumpling up a sheet of paper and hurling it towards the bin (pressing delete on a Wordpress draft).
You do something often or long enough and eventually you have to succumb to insanity or ask the question as to why you do it. It has taken me a while but, for now, I have a grasp on why I write about anime. That reason however is tied to why I started writing about it.
You, with your opinions, your desires, passions and language
The first canonical post I wrote on anime was in September 2007 and was on the Lucky Star TV series which had finished airing just over a week before. I say canonical because I have written about anime before, however those are locked away as protected posts under the category fearfully titled: "Deadjournal". At the time I had decided to set out my stall as someone who wrote eruditely about anime, something which at the time I believed was lacking in anime blogging. "This aniblogosphere deserves a better class of blogger!" How arrogant.
Based upon well-known Japanese literature, no opening music and a simple perfunctory closing animation, Aoi Bungaku could barely be more art-house. It's an odd situation coming from a media that is still mostly marginalised, even in its country of origin: aiming for a further niche would seem counter-intuitive especially for something with such stunning production values.
when the only noticeable fault is a merely proficient soundtrack, one knows that the series is something particularly special
At times it is breathlessly beautiful, judicious use of soft filters and colour grading means everything has an ephemeral reality to it - helped by a keen eye for details in the most fleeting of scenes. Combined with a story of childhood, loss, sex, suicide and emotion it's dangerously easy to fall in love with the series and be utterly enthralled by it. A live action introduction by Sakai Masato, notable drama actor, explains the aim of the series is to introduce viewers to well known stories, the first of which is "No Longer Human" by Dazai Osamu. At only twelve episodes long and six works to get through, the first story is the longest occupying four complete episodes and tells the life of the troubled Yozo Oba.
