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Hi folks, apologies for the lack of episode 1 review today (and most likely tomorrow as well). I spent most of the weekend with family members who were visiting, and then spent the last couple of days decompressing from that. But! I did want to mention that I’ll be speaking at a local, in-person convention – Anime Fusion, which is coming up the weekend of October 22nd-24th. My spouse J.C. and I will be presenting on several topics, since there were many programming slots to fill and we were able to update a few of our older presentations.

The Anime Fusion convention staff has recently posted the full convention schedule. A few of the time slots are livestreamed (denoted by bold text), so even if you aren’t local, you may still be able to purchase a virtual registration and see what’s going on online.

Below are our scheduled panels. If there are any panel materials associated with these topics, I’ll make sure they’re posted after the presentation is over.

Friday, October 22nd

9:30pm – 10:30pm in Panel 1- “Shiny New Anime” (Livestreamed)
Our annual-ish panel focused on new anime that’s come out over the past year or so. There was a ton of great anime over the past 12 months, so I’m still not sure how we’re going to choose where to focus our efforts for the short hour’s worth of time we have to talk, but I’m glad we get to share our tastes with everyone!

Saturday, October 23rd

2:00pm – 3:00 pm in Panel 1 – “Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective” (Livestreamed)
Now that the final Eva movie is available and we’ve had time to watch it, we’d like to discuss the series as a whole (or, at least, the various animated portions of it). We’ll be talking about overall themes and what we liked/loved/had critical feelings about as it pertains to this important franchise.

11:00pm – 11:59pm in Panel 1 – “Anime About Anime 2.0” (Livestreamed)
A few years ago, I broke down series such as Shirobako and Animation Runner Kuromi and looked at what we could glean from them regarding the anime production process. In this revamp of the panel, we’ll be looking at a couple more new entries into the pantheon of “anime about anime” and move the discussion more toward how they reflect the state of the Japanese animation industry as it stands today.

Sunday, October 24th

12:00pm – 1:00pm in Panel 2 – “The Odd World of ODDTAXI”
J.C. and I talk at length about one of our favorite anime of this last year. We’ll discuss what we love about ODDTAXI, its themes, its extended universe (for example, the radio drama) and other things related to the series.

2:00pm to 3:00pm in Panel 1 – “Madoka and Homura: the Trap of Selflessness”
With the announcement of a new (final?) film in the Madoka franchise, as well as other peripheral franchise entries like Magia Record, we return to the discussion of Homura’s motivations toward Madoka, and the duality of selfless versus selfless love.

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*whew* that’s definitely the most full schedule I’ve had to deal with in quite a while! Though I’m going to try not to let my general review schedule suffer too greatly, final convention prep is going to take the front seat over the next week before the convention, so apologies for any gaps that might be due to that.

Hi readers, how have you been holding up? I hope everyone out there is able to stay healthy and that any quarantines, work-from-home measures, or shelter-in-place orders aren’t getting you down too much. In Minnesota, today marks the first day of a couple of weeks of enforced shelter-in-place, with leeway for necessary activities like going to the pharmacy or shopping for groceries. Restaurants with delivery or drive-through options are also operating. People are still allowed to “be in nature,” meaning we can walk outside and in local parks, which my husband and I have taken advantage of a few times already since we’re both now working from home. As much as I like being able to roll out of bed and log in to do my job, though, the social isolation and relative lack of bodily movement required of sitting at my kitchen table and tapping away at my laptop definitely has its downsides. Thank goodness for Nintendo and Animal Crossing, as I still get a chance to interact with my friends that way.

You’d think this would be a great time to catch up on some anime, and for many folks I think that this is the case. The anime club I attend has gone online-only for the time being (thank goodness for streaming apps!), so I’ve gotten a little bit through that venue. I was all ready to put together a schedule and indulge, but as you might have guessed from the lack of updates here, I ran into some (emotional) road blocks that made it difficult to want to do anything, much less consume anime and talk about it.

Hello, friends. I just got back from a week-long business trip, and while I was gone I had a lot of free evenings to think about different approaches to things on this blog. Now that I’m mostly finished with first impressions, my typical “next step” would be to start tackling the follow-up posts – posts about the subsequent 2-3 episodes of all the series I didn’t find completely off-putting during the first round of reviewing. One thing I didn’t really realize until I’d had the chance to really think about it was how much I sometimes dread these follow-up posts. To be honest, I find them to be a chore, the reason being that they’re so formal and that they force me to use a lot of mental energy writing about series that I find decent, but which I’m not really passionate about. That’s difficult enough when writing about one episode, let alone several additional ones.

Rather than continuing to force the matter, I realized that I’d rather spend more time writing about the things that I’m actually choosing to watch, whether they’re current season shows or things from the past I’m catching up on. I also want to write less buttoned-up content rather than just first episode or other reviews, because I feel like that conversational style better reflects how I talk about anime in “real life;” not necessarily less analytical , but not quite so focused on formal summaries, production information, or formatting into certain blog post templates.

What I’m going to try to do is post more throughout the season, checking in on certain series that I’m watching when I feel compelled to write about them. It’s kind of like a follow-up, but less beholden to a format or timetable – it’s just some thoughts on things that I’m watching at the moment, whenever I’m driven to check in. It could be after 2-3 episodes, 6 episodes, or after watching a particularly dramatic or interesting (or problematic) episode. I feel like this gives me a bit more freedom and I’m less likely to give up partway through as has been an issue in the past.

I think the lesson to be taken away from this is that one should never feel too beholden to a format that’s not working for them, especially if it’s attached to a personal project. Write and learn and write some more!