Of course we all know how that adage ends – “…then don’t say anything at all.” But that’s difficult to do when you’ve started to make a habit of sharing your anime opinions online. As a hobbyist writer and reviewer, I think it’s important to have a good attitude toward what media you’re examining, but sometimes that can be a challenge and no one can be expected to enjoy everything that they watch. I think fandom spaces in general aren’t always the best spaces for nuanced discourse, because they’re filled with passionate feelings and not everyone is interested in taking a deep look at why they like or dislike certain material. It’s just kind of how it is.
Irina wrote recently about anime fandom’s bad habit of bringing down the level of its own discourse by confusing the act of having negative opinions about a particular anime with expressing negative feelings toward fans of said anime, which is a subject I’ve been forced to think about a lot over the years. Alongside her own thoughts, though, she also issued a challenge: for those of us out in the blogosphere to say something nice about our lowest-rated series on whatever anime tracker we use. I thought that sounded like a fun challenge. Even as a pessimist (don’t mind me, it’s just a coping mechanism), I feel like I’m generally pretty good at finding the silver lining in most of what I watch.