Archives for 2012

How Twitter has changed the anime online community

There’s no denying that Internet social network sites have rapidly changed the meaning of communication. We can now instantaneously share all manner of news, from breaking political events to what we’re having for lunch. One such site – Twitter – has brought about a massive change in terms of how we relate to each other with this ability to share links, videos, pictures, and our thoughts in real-time. As someone who’s been running an anime site for nearly a decade now, I wanted to discuss how I’ve experienced Twitter change the anime online community, especially in terms of blogging…

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Nisemonogatari and the art of ambiguity

Nisemonogatari, the anticipated sequel of 2009’s Bakemonogatari, has recently finished airing. I didn’t become as enamored with Bakemonogatari as a lot of others did, but I found it to be a unique and memorable series nonetheless. It was a rather strange and ambiguous anime too, though not necessarily in a bad way. And, much to some fans’ pleasure and other fans’ dismay, Nisemonogatari ups the ambiguity even more…

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The paradox of an anime’s quality versus its popularity

In a recent post on Anime September, Alterego9 brings up a great point about a paradox that exists between our individual view of an anime and how popular it is among the general populace. When an anime that we really love is also very well received among overall anime fandom (which can be seen through merchandise sales and social networking discussion), we rejoice in this and use it to further bolster our belief that it truly is a good anime. However, when an anime we really love isn’t popular among overall anime fandom, we say the reason for that is because the overall fandom has bad taste and so popularity is irrelevant when determining quality. It’s a very interesting paradox and one that I felt like examining further…

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50 questions

A list of 50 questions recently posted by AceRailgun has been making its way to various anime blogs, with the respective bloggers taking a shot at answering the questions. The questions are a mix of anime-related and personal questions. It looked like fun, so I decided to give it a go…

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What is a guilty pleasure?

When someone calls an anime they watch a “guilty pleasure,” they usually mean it’s a series that they know is bad but they enjoy it anyway for whatever reason. There are some people who enjoy nothing but anime that others would call guilty pleasures, whether they agree with that label or not, as well as people who don’t enjoy anything they can find significant flaws in. With such a wide range of feelings on what exactly defines a guilty pleasure amongst anime fans, I want to explore the subject further…

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The value of silence in anime

A couple of weeks ago I went to the theater to see The Secret World of Arrietty, the latest Studio Ghibli film being released in the US by Disney. Unfortunately I saw the movie on President’s Day, so the theater was packed with kids and families who had the day off. But despite this, the kids weren’t as loud as they could have been throughout the movie and it was indeed a very good film. However, it also got me thinking about a very noticeable difference between an anime production like Arrietty, and most other animated films kids here are exposed to nowadays…

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Weekly anime viewing vs marathon anime viewing

A fairly standard topic today but one I don’t believe I’ve fully touched on in previous posts. There are many ways to watch anime, the two most common being watching an episode a week of a currently airing show, and watching many episodes in one sitting of a completed show. And, like most things in the fandom, each method has its good and bad points…

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Anime time management

This is a topic that’s been going around various blogs recently, but I was reluctant to write my own post about it since I sort of already did in a previous post. However, after giving it some thought, I realized that enough time has passed since then for me to say something different about the subject…

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The introverted fan, the extroverted fan

While sitting in the waiting room waiting to get my taxes done the other day, I read an interesting article in Time magazine about a study comparing the qualities of an introverted personality versus an extroverted personality. As expected, it got me thinking about these two temperaments in terms of anime fans…

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Why watch anime you don’t like?

Most of us drop anime we don’t like after a certain amount of time, whether it be after one, two, or any number of episodes. However, there are some that commit themselves to getting through every anime they decide to watch even if they never grow to like it…

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