Brief Update

Good morning, all (or good afternoon or evening, depending on where and when you’re catching up with anime blogs). I just wanted to provide a brief update on reviews and articles related to this current (Spring 2022) season.

It’s always my goal to (eventually) get around to every non-sequel series airing in a season, and that hasn’t changed. I realize I’m not the quickest (and in fact am probably the slowest) at posting these impressions, and my process and writing isn’t especially unique, but I find it valuable to give everything a fair shot as I’m able to no matter how long the journey happens to take. That said, there are some extra obstacles to timeliness that have been causing me a lot of problems over the past month or so in particular, and especially the past couple of weeks, so I thought I should post something just to air it all out.

Firstly, I’ve been going through some health stuff. Nothing dramatic or even particularly worthy of note other than that it’s been occupying a lot of my energy. Related to that, I’m also on some (temporary) medication that has some consequences to both energy and mood so it’s been difficult to keep focus once I get home from my day job. This ought to be less of a factor after the end of this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to do some watching/writing this weekend.

Secondly, the world outside of fandom stuff has just been testing my emotional strength lately. Without going into the politics of the situation, I’ll just say that there are issues with far-reaching implications being discussed and not in a way that helps anyone (and in fact has the potential to do a lot of harm). It makes one feel very stressed and vulnerable. When things get like this it become extremely difficult for me to concentrate on anything related to hobbies or other fun activities – it’s like I’m just trying to stay emotionally afloat. As much as I enjoy anime, it doesn’t serve as escapism for me; some of you may remember that I went on a long unintended hiatus beginning around March of 2020 for similar reasons.

This time I don’t want my absence to reach those same lengths, because I’m still trying to fill in the gaps of that year in the aftermath. But I also don’t want to force myself and burn out, either. Mostly I just wanted to air this out in the hopes that putting some words to my feelings would help smooth things out a little bit and allow me to re-focus. I realize I don’t “owe” anyone anything here, but at the same thing I do care about the people who read my work and enjoy that over the years I’ve managed to build a small and kind community of people here and over on Twitter that I can talk anime with – something that I can’t always share with the people I interact with in person on a regular basis.

Anyway, that’s about it. I just wanted to give a little bit of an update so folks didn’t think I was completely flaking out on this season and my writing in general. I hope everyone is doing as well as they can and getting by in whatever way they need.