Or “Let me tell you how I went from watching 0 to 20 series, and so can you!”
I’m always loathe to write non-review posts because I feel that they’re like navel gazing: disconnected from actually enjoying anime. They also bring me out of my comfort zone of critical and analytical thinking, which can only be a good thing right?
Digression, must stop. As if a post about how I write about anime (which itself I’ve had to write) could get any more meta, evidence that I’ve tried and failed before to write about my “process” (air quotes) looms large. But in the same vein as something like The Setup, there’s a voyeuristic pleasure to be gained from peeking into the lives of how other people create.
So here it is, unadorned, how I go from watching to writing about anime. In that order.
For the impatient: if you are viewing this in a feed reader and were expecting this to be a post about anime, I strongly suggest you change your feed subscription to the anime category rather than the general site one. In the very near future there may be some non-anime related posts that, if you’re just here for words on Japanese cartoons, may not appeal.
With that out of the way. I seldom post anything about my site itself primarily because it very rarely warrants it and accruing that much meta will no doubt bite karmically later. However in this instance there’s a few noteworthy topics, so in order of perceived importance:
Sometimes blog posts just don't turn out the way you want them to. Whether due to the content or the implementation, they'll often end up smashing through the central reservation of the Good Intention motorway, hurtle down the Mediocrity slipway and end up in Dumb Idea ditch, back wheels still spinning.
the results made for nuanced [...] reading. And when I say nuanced I of course mean dull
My drafts folder is littered with these. Some are just a single word, like the opening to my Final Fantasy XIII review which was simply "bleh"; or they're almost complete and all that prevented pressing the enticing curves of the publish button was a lack of faith.
This is what happened with the firebrand titled "Does modern anime suck?", a post from one year prior which attempted to use Science™ to prove that modern anime doesn't suck and the familiar cries that echo every quarter of a year claiming as such were flat wrong.
That was the theory, the practise turned out to be less than convincing.
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.
