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The ‘Free! -Dive to the Future-‘ friend circle is familiar, but not unchanged

July 16, 2018No Comments

Free! -Dive to the Future- marks a new era in Haru’s life. Our swim boy protagonist is attending college now, a major milestone in anybody’s life. But while college is normally a time to branch out and experience new things, Haru is spending an awful lot of time with his old friends.

You could call this lazy storytelling. Or perhaps smart marketing, to not give up on the characters Kyoto Animation has spent so much time developing and selling merchandise for. But for a few viewers, myself included, I’d say this experience is pretty true to form.

I’ve never liked change. When I was looking at colleges, I only searched nearby. I ended up picking a place about an hour from home, the University of Mary Washington. Several of my high school friends also decided to go there, and I was so incredibly relieved. Once again, I could stay in my comfort zone and spend time with people I already knew.

Today, I’m regularly in touch with exactly one person I met in college: my husband, John. He was the president of the college anime club that I and some of my friends attended. If he hadn’t made his way into our group, I might not have gotten to know him.

It’s not that I’m snobby or even particularly shy, but I’ve always had a difficult time making new friends. Growing up, I was bullied a lot because I tend to get very enthusiastic about things I like, which made me a target. (A great example of this is when I studied abroad in Italy and made zero friends. On the way to Tuscany, I kept excitedly pointing out the animals and birds, assuming other people would also care, not realizing it was obnoxious. People called me Nature Girl and either laughed at me or ignored me for the rest of the semester.)

For most of my life, I was like Haru. I think it’s easy for plenty of fans to relate to this introverted, socially anxious swimmer. I wasn’t reserved the way he is, but I could relate to how cultivating existing friendships feels like a safer bet than making new ones. I used to think this was the most low-risk strategy, too. I used to think there was actual strategy involved, and that the right one earned you a group of friends who never judged, fought, or left you.

For me, the most prominent example of how unlikely this is occurred this week in 2017 when a friend of mine died unexpectedly. It took us until November to find out why: a congenital heart defect. She was a wife, a new mom, and an incredible friend. Not a day has passed this year that I haven’t thought about her. She would have teased me so much about being on my anime blog again, in a post about Free! of all things. The enormity of her legacy could never fit into a couple of trite blog posts, but I bring up her impact again because on this anniversary, I am reminded that change happens no matter what. The people you love have a fixed amount of time in your life, and no method of making friends, or closing yourself off from others, will ever make you “safe” from heartbreak.

The Free! franchise has always been surprisingly good at portraying nuanced relationships, and -Dive to the Future- appears to be a story about exploring the intricacies of friendship. None of the characters we meet are new (though two might seem unfamiliar if you haven’t seen the movie). But while Haru has been growing up, they certainly haven’t been standing in place. Even when you’ve known somebody since middle school, the unexpected can strike. People grow apart or together. Acquaintances can become best friends. Best friends can become rivals. Friends can stay by Haru’s side for years, like Makoto, or travel thousands of miles away from him, like Rin. Change is inevitable.

This past year, I’ve been trying to embrace change for the first time in my life. My Japanese English conversation group has become a surprisingly big part of my social life for a group of people who are constantly speaking to each other in their least fluent language. I’ve met people through anime conventions, groups like Anime Feminist, and my local entrepreneur circle. My core group of friends from high school is still very important to me, but the way I interact with them has changed, too. I try harder to reach out, to not take people’s friendship for granted. I can’t keep friends with me forever, but I can appreciate them more while they’re here.

An anime where nothing changes would be boring, so I get how people might be concerned to see the same old characters returning and making an exciting new setting all too familiar. But as someone with a similar lived experience, I’m confident there’s more than enough to explore.

How I unexpectedly found myself doing PR

July 9, 2018No Comments

Usually, my name can be found in the byline of an article. But last week, it was in reporters’ inboxes, too.

That’s because I was in charge of sending the J-Novel Club Anime Expo public relations (PR) announcements. I’ve been working with Sam, the J-Novel Club founder, since before he launched the site. I even designed it! I never planned to do PR there, but the role fits surprisingly well. I use my own name and my own press contacts that I’ve built over the years. As a journalist myself, I feel confident writing emails that I think other journalists will find helpful.

In the past few years, I’ve realized I really enjoy this kind of writing. I got my first taste of PR while writing my own press releases to announce each of my books. I’ve managed publicity for other clients and I’ve also helped friends working on cool projects workshop their own press strategies. The highlight to date was when a young communications student at my alma mater and I had a phone conversation about writing PR that’s earnest and doesn’t suck.

When I was getting my Masters in Journalism, there was this idea that press and PR were polar opposites. One of my classes met in a communications building classroom right after the PR track had met there. We’d laugh at the professors’ obsequious strategies on the board about winning reporters over. At the time, I guessed PR and the press had a combative relationship. PR reps would push me to write glorified ads, I thought, and I would have to push back.

But while I’ve gotten my fair share of terrible press releases on boring or irrelevant topics, public relations point-people have helped me immensely. They send topics right to my inbox so I don’t have to search so hard for stories. They set up interviews with hard-to-reach people. They trust me with news ahead of time so I can publish timely exclusives. They offer to send me free stuff, which I usually refuse unless they send me something I am going to review because as nice as PR contacts are, they are not my friends and nothing they send me is really free.

You’d assume there are more strings attached here, but I somehow maintain good relations with PR contacts even when I write negative stories. I incorrectly called my Amazon Anime Strike piece a bridge-burner, because I used my connections and privilege as a reporter in order to write a negative piece about how much the service disappointed me. But after I sent them a link to the article, the PR contact said they looked forward to working with me again.

Just last week, a PR contact thanked me for my critical article about Cosplay Token. So if there is a string attached, it’s this: if I write anything, they win, because they get attention.

Honestly, I wish somebody had told me this earlier in my career: there’s nothing “brave” about writing negative stories that benefit my readers because no ethical company is going to cut my access because of a legitimate, if negative, story. That would just make them look bad.

The thing that does restrict my coverage? Well, doing PR. I wrote exactly one article about J-Novel Club before I started doing regular PR for them, and even that has a caveat about my ties to the company. I wouldn’t have written an article like that today, because I indirectly benefit.

Still, I would be comfortable with say, being a whistleblower if I learned about bad practices there (fortunately, I have not). I feel the same way about basically anywhere I work. Even though I’ve been writing at Anime News Network for four years, I’ve spoken publicly about being disappointed with CEO Chris Macdonald’s decision to join the Otaku Coin board (and following that up with how glad I was when he backed out of that).

You see, none of the places I work really need me. I am not an employee of anyone. A fellow freelancer recently shared a story on Facebook about these tenuous connections: after a year of turning in well-received work, she got pneumonia and was two days late on a deadline. The company paid her promptly as usual, and never contacted her again. It was perfectly legal. Anyone I work for could just as easily sever ties with me.

But there’s a kind of freedom in that, too. I don’t have one master. No one outlet has so big a vise on my wallet that I can’t up and leave. If one of them does something so poisonous that I don’t want to be associated with them anymore, it’s not a major financial hardship for me.

Lives and careers are messy. Even if I never did PR, this would be the case. My articles are full of editor’s notes: “I donated to this Patreon,” or “I met this founder at a con.” I have a lot of allegiances, sure, but my sense of right and wrong is stronger. Ultimately, my most powerful relationship is to my readers, without whom I wouldn’t have anything. As long as I feel like I’m doing right by them, I can sleep well at night.

On writing about cartoons in Hell World

June 25, 2018No Comments

There’s no going around it: this month has been a hellscape. The discovery that my country is imprisoning children and babies is horrific, even if it’s what we’ve always done.

I have lived in DC for decades which means politics have always directly affected my life. Many of my friends and family are government employees or contractors, so when Trump tweets something stupid, they are the ones who pay the price—getting downsized, losing half their office budget, or spending valuable time creating a report on why it’s not possible to restore WWII era technology to the military, and yes that really happened.

During these times, fandom has been an escape for me. But last week crushed that solace, too, when we learned that there is going to be a white supremacy rally about a mile from Otakon. I’m well aware of our ties to the alt-right; I know that hate is always just a click away in the Crunchyroll or Anime News Network forums. But this is a new kind of closeness.

Times like this, it is more difficult than ever to be motivated as a pop culture journalist. These past few weeks, I haven’t even published anything on my Forbes blog. Reporting is like shining a spotlight, and I keep second-guessing if my coverage deserves people’s attention. When the world is a mess, can we still afford to focus on fandom?

I knew I couldn’t be the first writer to have this concern and I’m not—Vinnie Mancuso wrote What Is the Point of Pop Culture in a World Gone Mad? in 2016. Unfortunately, his essay is even more relevant in 2018: “What’s the use in marveling at dragons on-screen when the dragons are all here, and they’re more terrifying figures than any CGI budget could afford?”

It’s exhausting. When this all began I was calling my senators daily. Now I throw donations at organizations like RAICES and the ACLU as if money will excuse my inaction. At the very least I vote in every election, even dinky little local primaries. I know this isn’t a whole lot. As a white cis woman, I know that I have it easy and that I should be doing more.

This has been the deafening background noise of my life for months, but I checked out my archive here and realized I haven’t written about what it feels like to live in DC in this era. (The answer: suffocating.) Instead, I’ve been posting about cartoons as usual. Part of it is that I feel I should stay in my lane: I’m not a political reporter. Still, everything is political now: from the survival of my LGBT friends to the presence of immigrants like my father in this country.

There is no roadmap for where we go from here, but I know the answer isn’t black and white. The solution won’t be a total retreat into subculture writing nor full-time rage. I think it’ll be a little different for everybody reading this—what we can each contribute, the ways we can support each other in a world that has gone off the rails.

Additionally, I think fandom will be a part of what saves us. What’s incredible about conventions like Otakon is that even when there are 30,000 people in one spot with all the differences that come with that, there’s still at least one shared interest we all have in common. Its very existence refutes what the Nazis next door would have us believe—that some people are so different, they’re not even the same species. We know that’s flat-out wrong.

I’ll be sticking to fandom moving forward, but don’t think for a second that I’m not angry, that I’m not fighting. But like Mancuso concludes, there is a point to all this: “Pop culture doesn’t exist to save lives, but it can be a reminder that every single life is as valuable as your own. Just think to the last time a piece of art truly moved you, and realize there’s a good chance it moved someone half a world away.” I want to believe that still, so I’ll keep writing.

Standing still in 2018

June 18, 2018

First off, I wanted to let you know I’m giving a talk at the Japan America Society this Friday. You can still sign up for it here. I’ve been a member and language student there for four years, so when they asked me if I would volunteer to give this talk, it was a no-brainer.

This talk is coming two weeks after I gave an earlier version of it as an AnimeNEXT panel. It was one of four panels I gave at AnimeNEXT with John. Five if you count our participation on the AnimeCons TV panel, in which we talked about supporting the next generation of anime fans, something I have a lot of opinions on.

With these speaking events combined, I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of resting on my laurels lately. I’ve been giving talks about things I have done in the past, without really having anything in the works at present.

Somebody asked me what happened to Anime Origin Stories. I stopped putting these up regularly right after a friend of mine passed away, and never got back to them. I haven’t posted any since November 1, and I still have 100+ stories waiting to be followed up on.

Also in November, I wrote a novel, which I’ve been meaning to edit. But I’ve only sat down with it once since then. That hardly counts as “in the works.”

I wanted to investigate more serious stories about fandom. Now that actually is something I’ve got in the works but no thanks to my own efforts—I found a place interested in assisting me with the resources I need to do this, so uh, stay tuned on that.

I’ve been letting Tom Aznable do the lion’s share of work for Gunpla 101.

Then there’s that blog series I said I was starting in March and stopped after one post. Nobody’s asked about it, but it still grates at me that I haven’t added anything new to it.

What have I been doing? I’ve had a lot of client work lately that’s not fandom related (unless you count writing about niche topics for niche audiences fandom, which I sometimes do). I’ve been doing my work for clients as thoughtfully as I know how and then logging off for the day. I’ve been going on a lot of walks. It’s a little like summer vacation.

We’re halfway through 2018, so I thought I’d give you a status update by writing this. Maybe it’s comforting to see that other people don’t have anything figured out, either? It’s weird not to be working toward a goal right now. It feels like standing still. This isn’t burnout. This is just a blank space in my career, in which I’m not sure yet where I want to refocus my daily work.

Habits are hard to form. It takes 30 days, experts say, for a repeated task to become a habit. And yet, they are so easy to break. Take Otaku Links, my Friday column for years. For the first few weeks, I didn’t post them, I felt like I was forgetting something. It felt weird, but not for long. Now weeks go by without me remembering that column ever existed. I know that in order to break out of this uncertainty, I just need to decide on a goal and start chipping away at it a little each day. But which goal?

The logical way to conclude this post would be to tell you how I’m going to break the cycle. But right now, I’m not sure what comes next for me. As I keep writing here every Monday, I’m going to continue to evaluate what matters most to me each week, and see if it forms a theme.

It’s all a long way of saying, watch this space! I’ll talk to you next week.

Where to find me at AnimeNEXT 2018

June 4, 2018

John and I will be wearing our Gunpla 101 shirts and talking about mecha.

Giving panels at anime conventions feels like coming full circle. At 19, when I attended my first anime convention, I could not believe the sheer range of topics I could hear about for no extra cost. It felt like a fun, niche version of college symposiums I’d attended.

I was so inspired by Otakon 2006, my very first convention, that I went home and wrote a short story based on a panel on the schedule that I didn’t attend, but which had a title I couldn’t stop laughing about: “Do It Yourself Bukkake.” It’s about a group of old friends reuniting and ending up having a blow-out fight in a room lined with painters’ tarps. Eventually an audience appears, mistakenly thinking they’re watching the prelude to the explicitly titled panel.

That isn’t even the cringiest part of this anecdote, which is that I wrote it for school and read it out loud to my creative writing class. Sorry for the mental scars, classmates.

The point is: panels were a major, formative part of the convention experience for me and now that I’m a decade older, they feel like giving back. So when Vince Avarello, the 2018 con chair for AnimeNEXT, encouraged me to submit some panels this year, I was all in. In fact, John and I submitted so many panels, we were invited to attend as guest panelists!

You can catch John and I at the following:

39 Years of Gundam Anime

Haven’t watched all 39 years of Gundam yet? Do you feel overwhelmed and not know where to start? Join us as Gunpla 101 covers the best and worst of Gundam-detailing those awesome highlights and unintentionally hilarious lowlights-to get you caught up.

He Is A Char: A Tribute To Gundam’s Most Famous Masked Man

Who is that masked man, anyway? Join Gunpla 101 in a deep dive into the enigmatic aliases, identities, and motivations of Gundam’s most iconic antagonist. Learn about how one character resonated so strongly with fans that he inspired dozens of copies and clones. Come to watch comedic, tragic, and inspirational clips as we appreciate Gundam’s most interesting man.

Gunpla is Freedom!

You don’t need to be a master builder or a big spender to create great looking Gunpla. At Gunpla 101, we give you a crash course in the basics of building good-looking Gunpla—and it’s easier than you’d think! We’ll give you clear, detailed instructions that will show you how to build kits at any skill level—and get you ready to start building yourself!

Otaku Journalism: How to blog about and report on the anime industry

Lauren writes about anime for Forbes, reviews shows for Anime News Network, and reports on the occasional industry controversy. This panel will go behind the scenes on how your anime news gets made while providing tips on how you can blog about and review anime—and even get paid to do so.

We will also be participating in the AnimeCons TV panel, and whatever else we can do to make it worth AnimeNEXT’s while. I have never been a featured panelist before so I really want to make my time there helpful and entertaining.

Let me know if you’ll be there!