Seasonal Previews and Why I’m Terrible at Them

Me, about a week ago: “Wait, crap, the new anime season is about to start!”

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months trying to get into a rhythm with my anime writing, and I think, compared to some, eh, historical periods of time around the blog, I’ve been doing okay. I achieved my goal of writing first impressions of all the new (non-sequel) series from Winter 2021, kept up with several of them for a least a few weeks, and naturally let ones drop off as I lost interest. It was pretty much an ideal situation for me, as I see it. I also had time to write a few longer-form, more philosophical posts, and that made me happy even though I suspect they tend to be a little uncomfortable to read and thus of less interest to people just looking for information on new anime (which is fine).

The burden of watching seasonal anime, though, is that the seasons eventually change, and usually more quickly than you might expect. I feel like early March was about 3 days ago, and yet here we are with Spring anime premieres already appearing in streaming queues. This always happens to me! This past year has given me the opportunity to understand myself a lot more, and this feeling of misperceiving the passage of time and being unable to plan ahead effectively feels like an extension of a lot of the mental issues I’ve dealt with over the years. I use up a lot of my time-management quota at work, juggling several different tasks and a few projects at a time, so in my personal life I just don’t have the energy to pre-plan and follow through on everything within a specific timetable – unless I get a burst of that sweet, sweet hyper focus energy, but that’s anything but reliable and usually leaves me feeling exhausted (just ask me about unpacking the rest of the items in my office and putting together multiple pieces of furniture a recent evening… yeah).

Recently I had to deal with kind of a tough situation. I run an AMV contest for the convention I volunteer for, and because we’re online this year the AMV show just wasn’t going to work out. Without getting into gory details, it had to do with perceived copyright issues, as well as the fact I received a really small number of entries (and most of them in the same category, to boot). Not much of a contest, no potential for an official AMV show, even – all I could really do is cancel. If I had known this would be the case I wouldn’t have even opened up for entries, but decisions got made at too late an hour and I had to act and plan as though things would be normal, even though I strongly suspected they wouldn’t be (basically, out of my control). I’m a people-pleaser, and having to cancel (and thus disappoint a whole slew of people) really made me fret.

It’s the same feeling I get when I think “oh, I should probably do some research for a seasonal preview” and then never get around to doing it; I feel as a long-time anime blogger I should know what I’m doing by now. I get a sinking feeling sometimes that there are folks out there on the internet thinking “why can’t she get on the ball?” I don’t like to disappoint people – and in this particular case, whether I do a post or not and when is completely within my control (in most cases).

Of course, when dwelling on this particular failure of mine, I realized – you know what? I just don’t like making seasonal anticipation posts. It’s not that I’m unaware of the anime that’s coming out each season, because I generally have a few anime series I’m anticipating and I try to stay on top of anime news. After thinking about it some more, I just find the process of making predictions and attempting to have pre-formed opinions to be distasteful. I always give a disclaimer that every season has its surprises, and for me that has often translated to me feeling as though trying to assume anything is an exercise in futility. So why put in so much work to be wrong? One of my most anticipated series this past season was the continuation/conclusion of The Promised Neverland, and we all know how that turned out.

So, this is all to say that I appreciate the seasonal previews that other folks put together and like to read them for my own education, but I really prefer to write about my opinions as they relate to what I’ve actually seen and experienced. I’m no psychic and it can be a chore sometimes to put into words the factors that make an upcoming anime series potentially interesting to me (it mostly boils down to unique subject matter, attractive characters, the involvement a particular staff member, or some other factor that’s just not that interesting to talk about at length). Like all things in my life, it’s been a long road getting to this place, but as I continue to shed what hasn’t worked for me, I feel lighter and lighter.