I haven’t been very productive this week at S1E1, despite still being in the thick of first episode reviews. While I always leave room for myself to take a break when I need one and don’t really feel beholden to any sort of timetable, this break has been a little bit unanticipated and, to be honest, unwanted. After a few things went down online the past couple of days, my head’s just been swimming with emotions that I don’t really know how to manage, and it’s kept me from focusing on reviews. I thought it might be a good idea to talk through it all just to get a handle on those feelings and what they mean.
The last couple of days have been somewhat emotionally-taxing for many individuals who participate in or at least pay some attention to the anime twitter community. To put it briefly, an individual with social connections to many other visible members of the community was revealed to have exhibited inappropriate behavior to underage members of the anime fandom, and also to have allegedly committed sexual assault. This revelation pulled the lid off of several other situations that had been whispered about but never really shared outside of very restricted or small communities. I’d rather not get into all the details here, because they’re personally upsetting to me; people’s accounts are relatively easy to search out, though, if you’d like to find out more information. There’s also a Kotaku article about some of the fallout (note that I don’t really agree with this process of “collecting names” on a public spreadsheet, which is what the article spends a lot of time on).