[skade]
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s funny how the strangest things can cause bloggers to appear and disappear. For many writers, the pressures of work and school build up and eventually lead to a hiatus – for others, the worst case scenario of actually having a social life proves to be the finishing blow.
Of course, I haven’t suffered anything like a finishing blow. I simply took a little reprieve, much like last year. It’s a shame since the Aniblog Tourney is currently running, but it can’t be helped (thanks for voting for me by the way – and don’t forget, my second match is coming up!)
Anyway, something interesting occurred to me while I was not writing. The first is that it’s not very relieving to take a break from writing when you know you ought to be writing anyway, which makes me glad that I didn’t do it intentionally. The second, though, is a bit more important. After all, it’s not like I’m behind in Angel Beats because I have exams or real life tasks to take care of. I’m behind because I haven’t been able to separate myself from the very subculture that I’m writing about.
And that leads me to the point of this post: the hidden benefits of not blogging.
Let’s get the straightforward stuff out of the way first. My disclaimer is that this theory works primarily for editorial bloggers whose only draw is their style and content – without the ability to attract readers by providing information or entertainment, we have nothing to rely on but ourselves. The experience (and lack thereof) of the blogger is often visible in their posts.
With that out of the way, here are the basic facts of aniblogging: to be an anime blogger, one must consume anime, or any similar media. Then, one must process this media and write about it in some way, shape or form. In order to maintain a blog for a significant amount of time, the blogger must consistently consume and process media in this cycle, regardless of their other priorities.
Now, this cycle might be perfect if a person’s sole purpose within anime fandom is to increase their MAL stats and memorize the ANN database, but for many bloggers, this isn’t the case. After all, we refer to anime fandom as a subculture for a reason. There are countless activities that we can do within our fandom – finding new singers and doujin circles to listen to, reading doujinshi, browsing fanart, translating anime, playing anime-style video games, hanging out on the internet. The list goes on and on.
The problem is that most of these activities don’t generate posts.
To me, this is the greatest dilemma of anime blogging. Managing real life is easy – life can have its ups and downs, but at least for me, my life on the internet is rarely affected by my other responsibilities for anything more than a couple weeks at a time. The real challenge is in delving through the farthest depths of the subculture while emerging twice a week with enough material to write a post. It’s an interesting dilemma because both extremes are bad – you either abandon your productive activity in favour of sheer consumption, or you continue to produce without gaining any new information. It doesn’t even need to be said that activities like blogging aren’t only good for the community, but also for each individual writer, so they can’t be given up easily.
Anyway, after giving the issue some thought and drawing from my past experience, I’ve come up with a name for my personal theory: the anime investment.
Generally speaking, good blog posts require a wealth of knowledge. There’s a reason why the oldest, most knowledgeable, and most experienced anime bloggers attract more readers than your average amateur episodic reviewer. However, it’s easy to forget to question where this wealth of knowledge came from. Some spent years of their lives fansubbing and scanlating; some created influential websites and brainstormed new ideas for their community; some spent their high school years lurking on HongFire in search of new CG packs to put to their appropriate use.
The point is that there are an incredible amount of activities that anime fans can do to immerse themselves in the subculture, and even if those activities don’t bring any momentary rewards – and certainly no momentary blog posts – they increase the writer’s own knowledge and experience, aiding future writing endeavors. The opinions that we respect and the reviews that we nod along to don’t come from an endless stream of currently airing anime – they come from currently airing anime in addition to the full breadth of the culture, from AnimeSuki debate to /a/ chatter. There’s no shortcut to experience.
That’s why I believe in making the anime investment: it can make a mess of things in the short-term, but every investment pays off eventually. Danbooru sessions can lead to a fanart post; fighting games can lead to social matches that bring you closer to your friends and peers. No matter how tangential and unrelated they may seem, every experience that the subculture has to offer will contribute to your growth as a fan in some way, even if it’s invisible – and it’s that growth that will encourage your readers to spend 1000 words of their lives listening to what you have to say.
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As the title of the post implies, this is a meta post – in other words, it’s a long and pointless repetition of previously established facts that serves as a bad alternative to contributing with real content. That said, I still believe that some bloggers would benefit from making the anime investment. A high post frequency and a consistent 20+ comment count may look good to newcomers, but only experience can push your content forward and allow it to be the best that it can be – and we all know that blogging is about content.
~ ETERNAL
つづく
