This Week in Anime

Keeping it Professional

Chris
We get to write about games here occasionally as an appreciable bonus of working in the Japanese media space. That's mostly a fun privilege, so I feel for those trying to make a living doing it in an online environment that feels increasingly hostile to the craft.

More than that, though, all this does make me reflective, thinking about the challenges of earning a living with this craft alongside the often paradoxical nature of professionally evaluating so much material that I otherwise personally follow as a fan for "fun."

Why not take a break from reviewing anime to get all navel-gazey and see if we can't review the act of reviewing itself!

I can confirm it's been interesting paying attention to my journey of watching anime for work over the past *checks* dear lord, nine years? That much time doing it this way has altered the way I take stuff in. Even series I'm not personally reviewing get shifted to be seen through that critical lens, be it because I'm considering them in the context of TWIA topics, or knowing that I might want to circle back to them as bests or worsts at the end of a given season or year.

I've watched a lot of titles that I otherwise wouldn't have checked out. Sometimes it works out well! Sometimes.

It's a fact that all reviewers eventually end up with an arch-nemesis. James has the artists at GoHands, I have some twerp named Touya with a smartphone.

I feel for James and his creation of an actual novella in service of evaluating Momentary Lily. Even when not trying to make lemonade out of the lemoniest pablum assigned, doing enough of these things (I've written at least a thousand episode reviews, myself) means you sometimes need to break out of the routine now and then. It's why I'm grateful for editorially encouraged decisions like going as nuts with my Deer Friend Nokotan reviews as I wish the show had gone with itself.

As long as we're batting around all these inside baseballs, we might as well note for readers Rebecca's uncanny ability to remind us of series for topical run-downs, making sure a broader swatch of material is included. Or sometimes she just catches us afterwards by pointing out that we forgot to bring up Black Butler that time we were talking about anime witches. Thanks for the saves, Silverman!

Editors who know their writers' foibles and have long-running rapport with them are useful. Lynzee knows she can count on me to be the guy to talk about BanG Dream, for instance. This also runs into how writing professionally is different from just writing about anime for fun on your blog: Editors are going to have, well, edits! It's important to be receptive to editorial oversight and pay attention to how they tell you to shore up your style and approach. And also swear less, so you don't upset the corporate overlords.

It can be a shift since we get way more informal in our column chats than I would for a proper review, and even then there's drift. I'm going to be much more academic and respectful discussing a seminal work like Bubblegum Crisis than I am grappling with a single-OVA follow-up to shitpost series legend Dropkick on My Devil. As you said, time and place.

Having the context for that approach belies the other work that goes into reviewing things, beyond simply watching the stuff! It's not always necessary (or possible, given time constraints), but doing extra research and having context can help make your takes more informed. That applies whether I'm noticing when the 100 Girlfriends anime skipped a very noteworthy chapter in its airing order, or doing deep-dives into different eras of otaku culture to include extra explainer notes at the end of every one of my 16bit Sensation: Another Layer episode reviews. There's a lot that can go into these things!

I've yet to write anything for an anime publisher, so I can take on anything so long as there's a copy to review and the boss thinks it's worth covering! The closest my name comes to being in the credits is on the list of Kickstarter backers for some of the ones I've contributed to. And you better believe I'll have words, given the opportunity, for that Dirty Pair set if it ever actually lands in my hands.

Still, that kind of discussion of disclaimers and disclosure is why there's a reason we have to note if we, say, were provided codes for copies of games we review. Or going the extra way around and noting that I had to go source a physical copy of the third volume of Kamen Rider Kuuga just to confirm that Titan Comics hadn't updated the translation from the earlier review copy as they said they would. Sometimes reviews get investigative.

That calls to mind the point of context again. A review of a release isn't always going to be about the series itself, but sometimes more about the specific handling of it. I think back to the aforementioned James and his tackling of the mammoth "Collector's Edition" box set of Code Geass. Acknowledgement of the anime itself, sure, but anyone potentially going in for this is already going to be a fan of the series and more curious in this case about the whole-ass chess set packed in with this thing.

Similarly, I tagged in to review the recent Lunar Remastered Collection because I was a fan who knew the PS1 versions of the Lunar games well, and could speak to the quality of the titular remastering efforts that were the main selling point of that set. Sometimes the "extra" work of a review is just knowing from your time as a fan to prepare you for looking at new iterations.

Sometimes you must acknowledge the importance across multiple mediums along with your own love for Gridman - The Hyper Agent while still coming down hard on a Blu-ray set because the subtitles are just that bad.

I see, the editors get to swear.

I'm sure Steve still reels occasionally from how he catapulted Mob Psycho 100's Arataka Reigen into "internet sex symbol" status.

Writing criticism, compared to other articles, does necessitate being critical. It's something I have to keep in mind alongside the people who make these products, in prompting a conversation about the work that's done and how much of it is worth the audience's time. Besides, keeping an open mind can be valuable—lord knows I had very different opinions on series like How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord, Onimai, and Gushing Over Magical Girls at their end compared to when I initially came at them. It's important to be fair.

This is the kind of salient contextualized advice that readers turn to anime reviewers for.

It won't take much to provoke me (or Steve) into chatting about Revue Starlight. That's not work, that's just the nature of being a fan.

Still, I know the feeling of shifting from the watching-for-work experience. I've talked with previous TWIA alum Nicky about the niceness of letting ourselves watch anime without our fingers on the screencap button. I still like looking at things critically; it's just the way I engage with media, and some of my writings about anime and video games on my old blog helped me land this gig in the first place. It's still cool to watch something outside the anime wheelhouse like Severance or the original Total Recall and know that I'm not required to pump out a review or a column on it. A broader media diet can even help provide more context to inform my reviews in the future and—oh no! I was wrong, it's all work after all!

We're lucky to have a space to do what we love here. As you started this column with the news that areas on the internet for solid review writing are diminishing. I have noticed more sites doing episodic streaming reviews like ANN these days, which is nice, to say nothing of editors that encourage engaging with increasingly niche dalliances (like letting AJ review the insane mushroom sex manga). As we've covered here, criticism can be a valuable resource on the subjects of releases beyond just saying if we liked a show or not. Keeping it around in a professional capacity is important.