Category Archives: Editorials
Reflections on 2016: Thank You for Everything
Source: The Squid Girl author’s twitter
Let’s recap the 12 Days of Anime and the whirlwind year that was 2016.
Reflections on 2016: Making Friends with the Anime Feminists
In October 2016, a friend of mine launched a website called Anime Feminist. I’m really surprised at how well it’s been doing so far. Although I’m not actively involved with creating content, I’m close enough to the action to see just how hard the staff has been working to keep things going. It’s been a real privilege to see the results of their work, and I hope that the site meets all its funding goals in 2017.
I’ve already talked about my motives for supporting Anime Feminist elsewhere, but I do want to talk for a bit about how I first became friends with the site’s editor-in-chief, Amelia Cook. Looking back, it was a rather unlikely friendship….
Reflections on 2016: NOT HAVING TIME FOR ANYTHING
Today’s post will be short because as the title subtly implies, I’m somewhat pressed for time.
Reflections on 2016: My Taste Has Changed
I don’t know what I’m looking for when I watch anime. Do I want something with good animation? Do I want something to relax to? Do I want a thrilling story? I don’t know. I don’t have any specific preferences.
Because of that, I can’t really explain my anime taste to anyone. I joke a lot about liking harems and light novel adaptations and whatnot, but when it comes to my absolute favourites, I don’t know how to describe them. Maybe it’s because they don’t fit easily into a single genre, or perhaps it’s because I can’t think of a particular reason for why they’ve captured my heart.
I’m looking at you, Code Geass…
Despite not being able to describe my tastes, however, I am certain of one thing: my taste has changed over the years.
Reflections on 2016: Mixing Anime and Reality
2016 was the year anime and reality started to mix.
Until this year, I had been careful to keep my online identity (and, by extension, my anime fandom) separate from my real life. This was mostly for privacy reasons, although if I have to honest, it was also because I’m more confident expressing myself through writing than through speaking. I still don’t put pictures of myself online, and that’s probably for the best.
Eventually, however, I ended up identifying under my real name for Anime News Network and Crunchyroll, and I’ve met several internet friends in person throughout the year. The result? Nothing really changed. On hindsight, I realise that there was never a clear separation between “reality” and “online” in the first place.
Reflections on 2016: Writing for Crunchyroll
If you’d told me just a few months ago that I’d end up writing for Crunchyroll, I would have laughed in your face. Even now, I still don’t know what I did to deserve it.
This isn’t false modesty speaking. I do have concerns, not with Crunchyroll itself, but with the platform and privilege I have been given. While the editorial team proofreads my articles and offers me feedback, I don’t get fact checked. If I spread inaccurate information through my articles, it would be entirely my own fault. It would be one thing to talk out of my ass on my blog, which I frequently do, but on Crunchyroll, where tens of thousands of people read my articles, the consequences are more serious.
I’m not sure whether the other writers experience this feeling, but for me, it’s been a pressure since day one.
Reflections on 2016: How I Became “The Light Novel Blogger”
2016 was the year I finished writing my honours thesis and graduated from university. The thesis, which drew heavily from my personal observations as a light novel fan translator, was called “Exploring Foreignisation/Domestication Post-Editing Strategies in Machine-Assisted Fan Translations of Japanese Web Novels” (what a mouthful!). Later this year, I published two articles based on my research on Anime News Network, explaining the basics of the subculture.
And now, for some inexplicable reason that I can’t quite fathom, I’m known to the fandom at large as… “the light novel blogger”.
Reflections on 2016: For Japan, the Postwar Extends Forever
戦後は続くよ、どこまでも
“Postwar extends forever.” This is one of the most memorable lines to come out of Shin Godzilla, Hideaki Anno’s ambitious reboot of the Godzilla franchise. In context, it’s a powerful moment. Our protagonist Yaguchi looks around at the world disrupted by Godzilla’s existence and voices something that he has always felt – that the problems which Godzilla laid bare were always there, and that this is the burden Japan must bear into the future.
Reflections on 2016: Getting into Sakuga… Sort of
2016 was the year the sakuga cartel enacted their sinister plan of world domination. For years, they had been lying in wait, angrily debating the best Megumi Kouno cut behind closed doors. But now, they have moved out into the open. You can find these diabolical nerds in the streets, dancing around the statues of Naoko Yamada they have erected using Precure and Doremi storyboards and genga sheets. But worst of all, you can find them wherever you can find anime fans, crying over their favourite anime and arguing about pointless shit on twitter.
That’s right, any of us could be an agent for the sakuga cartel… even you or me.
“Say what?!?!?!”
November 2016 Update: I Watched Kimi no Na Wa Twice in Three Days
Here’s my current wallpaper
Here in Down Under, we were pretty lucky to get a theatrical release of Kimi no Na Wa (or Your Name) before the year ended. I’m not the biggest Makoto Shinkai fan there ever was, but after seeing all the buzz around this film, I simply had to watch it. So I did, and I loved it. I watched it again two days later, the second time with an English dub. The dub wasn’t bad either!
I won’t say anything more about the film because the majority of you reading this post probably haven’t seen it yet. I also don’t particularly feel like sharing my critical reaction to it because that would also be spoilerific in a way. But I do want to talk a bit about what the film meant to me – not the plot, but the circumstances in which I watched it.
