Some Hard Thinking After Ten Years Of Anime Blogging

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Beginners Guide to Blowing Money On Anime Merch

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Depression Reviews w/ Zetsubou-sensei! – Taco Bell

The Pokemon Generation Reaches Adulthood – A Pokemon Lifer’s Retrospective

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Nominations for Anime Music Tourney

Oh look! A post about anime. Taka here! Yes I have risen from the depths to once again place a post upon Digitalboy’s humble little blog about Ponies.

Gasp! The light of the viewer’s gaze chars my flesh. I shall be with you but a moment.

In case you have been under a rock…blah blah blah…etc. Anime Intstrumentality is hosting an Anime Music Tourney. The nominations process is over by tomorrow so I submitted mine last minute this morning. Let me tell you, picking 15 songs was hard. I stripped my list of anything I thought was a guaranteed for a nomination (most modern anime music and Cruel Angel’s Thesis/Tank/Higurashi) or if I did I put them low. Mostly I stuck to some older songs I enjoy. So without further ado the list!

Celebrating 1 Year of Bronydom!

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Dramatic Reading: The Mullet and the Muff

Today I got in some new mic equipment, and decided to test it out with a dramatic reading of The Mullet and the Muff—an erotic Madlax hatefiction which I wrote last year.

This audio is not safe for life.

The original post can be read here. This story will be altogether easier to understand if you’ve read my episodic blogging of the first eleven episodes of Madlax.

The Fandom of Media vs. The Cult of the Work

When I call myself an anime fan and a video game fan, it implies an open-ended fandom of the mediums in general. However, it’s something totally different when I call myself a My Little Pony fan, or a Dark Souls fan, or a Touhou fan, etc.

I think that every work has the potential to form a cult, but I don’t think that every work has such a cult, even if it gets a lot of attention within its medium. If you’re not sure what’s the difference, go find the Reddit board of an individual work, or an active forum or wiki, whether fan-made, or on a place like GameFAQs. Compare what you find there against what you find on a blog or site that covers a medium in more general terms.

The first time I felt the difference between being in a fandom and being in a cult following was when I got into Touhou. I didn’t love Touhou as an anime fan, because it has no anime; and I didn’t love it as a gamer, because while I do enjoy the games, I don’t like them nearly as much as any of my favorite games. My love for Touhou wasn’t bound to its being an exemplary piece of a medium which I was already a fan of—I was a fan of it as an individual being, apart from any one medium.

Touhou is too broad to make the implications of this obvious, but other works do a fine job.

If I look at My Little Pony or Homestuck—two things with huge cult followings that I’m a big fan of—I can really see the difference. While there are non-Japanese cartoons and webcomics which I love, I don’t consider myself a fan of either medium in general. MLP isn’t my “favorite cartoon,” nor is Homestuck my “favorite webcomic,” so much as I enjoy those works outside the context of their mediums.

Perhaps better than these as an example is Dark Souls, which is even more cult than the other things I mentioned, and continues to intrigue me as I interact with it more. Dark Souls is an amazing video game, and I certainly am ready to compare it with other games. However, I don’t play it or interact with it the way that I do other games, and simply calling it my “favorite video game,” doesn’t do justice to the different way that I communicate with it.

Particularly interesting is that if I can split up the definition between being a video game fan and being a Dark Souls fan, then I can further split the definition wherever I can see that my appreciation of two subsets of a medium function differently.

Better than myself, I will use my friend Shinmaru as an example. Shinmaru has what I’d call a passion for terrible anime, and he’s tried, but never really broken ground at, explaining how his love of them is different from his love of great anime. I think the problem is that he, and everyone else, are grouping these things together because they happen to be a part of the same medium, when in reality, he views them in two completely different ways. I think rather than calling Shinmaru an anime fan who loves bad anime as well as good, he should be called an anime fan who’s also a fan of terrible anime, or a fan of good anime as well as a fan of bad anime.

This is the kind of thing that I’ve tried to capture in my Canon. You’ll notice that there’s a whole section just for My Little Pony, which is separate entirely from the Cartoons section. It’s because having MLP among a list of other cartoons that I like betrays the nature of my fandom of those different things. Likewise, there’s an anime section, which accounts for pretty much everything, because for the most part, I appreciate anime the same way—but there’s also a section for shows made by Bee Train, because I hate them in such a spectacular fashion which isn’t like the way I hate other anime.

I think it’s a good idea to break down and define things like this, because there’s such a difference in perspective between people who like something in the way of general fandom, and people who like something in the way of a cult fandom. I’ve read and seen a lot of opinions about Dark Souls, from people who loved it, hated it, appreciated it and didn’t like it, or didn’t understand it at all, and none of them reflects the way that people view it who are fans of the game in a big way.

THIS. FUCKING. NOTEBOOK.

Look, my room is already overwhelmed with notebooks full of shit like lists and more lists and story concepts and also the occasional list. But I was at Office Depot today, saw this notebook, and needed it. I think it was designed for me specifically.

Fuck me, the lines are numbered and list-like! They’re just long enough to fit a title. I don’t mind the margin thing because I found a use for it, as seen on this page. The numbers are perfect to be checked off. The title box is two lines long, which is really nice. The last notebook I was using for lists had a title line, but it was fucking tiny and I could never fit any titles on it. There’s also a date box, which is nice, and even a name box, which is a little pointless, but nonetheless something I’ll probably fill in every time.

The upper-right box is what gets me, though. It’s a box for you to write in the page number. Why couldn’t they have just printed the page numbers on the pages? Maybe it’s so you can tear pages out and still continue, though if you write in pen you’ll make that useless rather quickly. I really don’t know, but I do know that in some of my notebooks I’ve made a habit of numbering all of the pages manually, and sometimes make a table of contents in the front of the book. It’s like the box knew.

It also has two covers. Don’t know why, but it’s pretty cool.

Okay I’m going to bed now.

My Entire Goddamn Collection (with notes)

Look, I’m a showboating otaku (if that wasn’t blatantly fucking obvious). Of course I love to see people’s otaku rooms, and I love to try and show off my own, even though it’s less of an otaku room than it used to be.

I used to have fuckloads of posters covering my walls—mostly stuff from Megami and other magazines, the majority of which were given to me by a friend. (He kept the stuff he liked and gave the rest to me. I was less discriminating because I wanted a room completely covered in anime posters.) I also had a bunch of posters that came with DVDs, and a number of DVD covers (the ones with a full image on the back) stuck to my walls. I took a ton of old Anime Insider magazines, tore out full-page images that I liked, and put those up. None of these remain.