When I have time I usually like to try to watch anime that’s not at the top of my watch-list. I like to distinguish this from “hate-watching” a show, which is something I try not to do – it’s a practice that makes me angry, makes fans of the series in question angry, and doesn’t really serve a constructive purpose. Instead, I look at this as an opportunity to expand my horizons or even push my boundaries in some cases. Establishing personal boundaries is a good practice, but I’ve found that every once-in-a-while a re-examination and re-centering can be helpful.
While I hate to keep mentioning my recent out-of-town trip since it’s not relevant to this site otherwise, it continues to be on my mind because these types of mini-vacations (work trips to other cities where my evenings are basically free to do as I please) are great opportunities for me to keep up on my anime-watching. Aside from The Promised Neverland, the other series that kept my company that week was Dororo. For whatever reason I was getting seriously intermittent access to Crunchyroll where I was staying (I blame it more on the Android app itself, which has always worked spotty for me even with great internet and a brand new cell phone), so I stuck to Amazon Video this time around.
This post discusses plot spoilers through episode 5 of the anime, and links to offsite content with manga spoilers later in the story.
I’m usually not great at keeping up with anime series as they’re being simulcast. A lot of that is due to my personal workflow and my resistance to watching anime where there are still other anime remaining for me to review. I realize how ridiculous that sounds but I’m someone who easily wanders off-track and procrastinates, so I have to set some weird rules in place to keep myself from becoming distracted. There are rare times, though, where watching weekly broadcasts becomes a necessity rather than a luxury, and as soon as I started watching The Promised Neverland I suspected that it might be one of those anime.
I generally try to look past hype and not let internet chatter influence my own opinions, but the discourse around this series was difficult to ignore. I read an essay about the restrictive gender roles as they exist in the story’s universe (caution for both big-time plot spoilers and some disturbing imagery), and from that point I was intrigued. Since the anime adaptation of the manga series had already been announced, I tried to put the spoilers out of my mind (I was at least partly successful due to the length of time in between the post and the first episode, which was helpful!)
I’ve been very lucky in life to have been surrounded by acquaintances and friends whose intelligence and wisdom has served as an inspiration for me. Being an ani-blogger has turned out to be no different, as I’ve had the chance to read some interesting and insightful commentary from other bloggers on a fairly regular basis. Because of that I’ve been given the opportunity on many occasions to examine my own opinions in various ways.
Lita Kino at Lita Kino’s Anime Corner posed an interesting question in a recent post in regards to the responsibility that more experienced fans have towards welcoming new fans into the fold. To paraphrase her question, she asks whether certain types of anime criticism, which can occasionally be laser-focused in on very minute or one-off issues in a series or on trying to extrapolate author viewpoint or intent from limited evidence, deny newer fans the experience of enjoying and engaging with anime on their own terms. As someone whose goal has always been to make anime and anime fandom approachable for many different people, the question definitely struck a chord.
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).
We’re a few days into the new year, and while weeks, months, and years are arbitrary markers (at least as far as what specific days they encompass), there’s something about the darkness, quietude, and chilly nature of this time of year (at least in the Northern hemisphere), that leads one to some introspection. I’ve already posted a little bit about some of the plans and goals I have for 2019, but I read a post from Karandi at 100 Word Anime that got me thinking more about what things sustain me as a blogger, and I’d like to try my hand at answering the question that she was given: What will keep you blogging in 2019?
I think the obvious first answer to the question is “new anime.” From the beginning, my writing has been focused around examining new anime series as they’re released each season, and on being one of the voices that helps other viewers to hone their personal watch list. While sometimes, by the time I get around to them, the anime series aren’t quite so new anymore, I’m always surprised to learn from other people that they don’t independently keep up on what’s available for them to watch, so I feel like this singular purpose can keep me afloat for a while.
I tell myself that I never intended for my “favorites” lists to get this out of hand, but I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m 4 posts in and only now winding down. There’s a lot of good anime every year, as I always say, but the past year has been exceedingly fruitful in terms of great, unique, or just entertaining anime series. It’s difficult to stop talking about them all!
Aside from a couple in this group which were listed here due to space restrictions on the previous post, these are series that I didn’t have a chance to finish, either due to timing or other factors, but which I wanted to talk about anyway. In some cases I will likely get back to them later and close the loop; in at least one case that’s questionable, for reasons that I hope are clear. In all cases, though, there was something about these series that caught my eye and excited my imagination, so I felt it would be a failure on my part to ignore them.
While I had a lot of top favorites last year (see Part 1 and Part 2), I also watched a lot of anime that I’d classify as good or even great, but which didn’t break through and affect me the way some of the others did. This doesn’t mean that these series weren’t worth talking about, so I’d like to give a little bit of the spotlight to some of the “also-rans,” the series that I think are worth watching from the past year.
I limited this list to series that I’ve either completed, or
in the case of multi-cour series, ones where I’d watched at least half. This
isn’t an exhaustive list of every series I completed last year, just ones I
wanted to talk about and signal boost. As a reminder, my “year” runs from
Autumn 2017 through Summer 2018.
As we embark on a brand new year, many of us are resolving to better ourselves in various ways. I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions, mostly because the stress of setting expectations and being unable to meet them is often more detrimental to my psyche than continuing to be the same old person I’ve been for years, warts and all. I also think that the calendar year is a pretty arbitrary concept, and that modest goal-setting can be a year-round process rather than a huge one-time ordeal that takes place on January 1st.
That said, I was thinking about an exercise that we complete at my workplace every year, where individuals provide feedback to their supervisors and managers in order to help them improve. One of the questions on the formal survey asks “what things should this person start, stop, or continue doing?” This is closer to how I like to approach thinking about the New Year. There are things I’m already doing that I want to maintain going forward, there are bad habits that I should probably attempt to curtail, and there are potentially new things I could start doing to make my life easier and more fulfilling. It’s a good way to take stock of the good things that are already happening while still leaving room to make tweaks and improvements.
Looking ahead, there are definitely some blog-related things I’d like to start, stop, and continue doing. While it’s been a good year around here, I feel like there are some bad habits I’d like to break and some new avenues I’d love to explore. Below are some thoughts.
2018 has been a good year for me. This year I finally feel like I’ve gotten back in the writing groove, which after a very dark time in my life seemed as though it had maybe disappeared forever. That might seem a little over-dramatic (definitely one of my talents), but there truly were times where I’d sit down at my computer in front of a blank WordPress entry and be completely unable to produce anything. Now, though I go through short spells where writing isn’t my tip-top priority, I always manage to make my way back to blogging. From about March onward I managed to post at least every couple of weeks, and the Summer and Autumn seasons got me back in my first episode reviewing process. So overall things have been on the upswing.
Because I feel like there’s finally enough content to make a post like this, I wanted to toot my own horn a bit and call out some of the writing I’ve done this year that I’m the most proud of. These picks aren’t necessarily my most popular entries (I don’t get a ton of traffic anyway, so there’s not that big a difference between “popular” and “overlooked” here at S1E1), but they’re ones that I still think about from time-to-time and hope you’ll enjoy reading (or re-reading) as well. I’ve tried to provide a little context around what I was thinking when I wrote them. I hope you’ll check them out!
