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Motherhood changed how I write about anime

May 13, 2023Lauren Orsini

This will be my third Mother’s Day as a mom. 

This time last year, I was still recovering in the hospital after giving birth. (It had been an easy birth, and I remember drinking a smoothie while watching an episode of Ya Boy Kongming! on my iPad.) My son’s birthday wasn’t so close to Mother’s Day last year; I remember hauling my nine-months-pregnant self to a solo lunch that day. With my son squirming around in my belly like something from Alien, I craved a semblance of solitude more than anything else.

A lot has changed since then. My daughter is in preschool now. My son is no longer a baby, and every day he becomes more independent. That I have the time and energy to write again is evidence of how much they’ve grown up already. In some ways, my life is “going back to normal” after having kids, but in other ways, I realize I am irrevocably changed. 

I never wanted to become the kind of mom who only talks about being a mom. But right now, it’s what I most want to write about when I write about anime. The article I am most proud of out of the last few years is about motherhood: How Chihayafuru frames breastfeeding as an early parenthood challenge. I’m finally finished nursing both of my kids, which gives me the perspective to realize just what a huge, emotionally draining, time-consuming undertaking it was—and one which my kids will never remember, either! While I want to respect my kids’ online privacy with my writing, this article was about my breastfeeding journey alone: something that will be invisible to others and forgotten even by my own kids, but which I wanted to memorialize in an essay. Because it was hard, but I did it anyway, and I got through to the other side!

Since I spend the majority of my waking hours doing the invisible and endless labor of motherhood, it certainly affects the way I see the world. On Wednesday, I wrote in my latest Oshi No Ko review that I felt sorry for poor Ruby breathing into a nebulizer after a punishing endurance workout. “Is that what it is?” a commenter wrote in the forums. I had clocked it immediately because sometimes you give portable nebulizers to little kids when they have coughs—and my kids have been sick a lot. Since I find myself identifying with parental figures more than protagonists while I watch anime, reviewing Oshi No Ko has been a particularly interesting experience for me. Even now in episode five and beyond, after A Lot Of Stuff has happened and the story’s focus has shifted to her son Aqua, I still see his mother, Ai, as the main character whose star power haunts every scene. 

Ai has been treated more kindly than most anime moms who occupy minor roles and are quickly forgotten, or who exist only within the protagonist’s memories. But there have been some standouts. If you see this post, I’d like to hear from you: who is your favorite anime mom? That was initially going to be the topic of this post—a list of some of my favorites—but my kids have been sick for what feels like a month and I’m tired. And it’s Mother’s Day weekend! So I’m going to go to sleep instead.

Lead image: screenshot from Oshi No Ko episode 1.

How I’ve been spending my 2023

May 2, 2023Lauren Orsini

This January I read the life-changing book Atomic Habits, which challenges you to improve your life by reminding you that your habits, the tasks and routines you repeat every day, form your identity. This resonated with me deeply. Over the past three years, the bulk of my time has been spent on parenting and care tasks. As a result, I’ve felt more like a frumpy mom than the author of Otaku Journalist—even though I’ve been the former for far less time than the latter!

My life has gotten significantly easier in 2023. Eva (3) is in preschool now, and Bryan (almost 1) has a regular weekly sitter, which means I finally have time for leisure, work, and writing. And yet, I’ve been struggling to return to Otaku Journalist, even though I crave the connection that it brings me to the community, the feeling that I’m participating in something bigger than myself. This is because it’s been such a long time since my habits have reflected my identity as a member of anime fandom. 

I’ve started and put down this post several times over the past week. Now it’s been eight months since my last post, and about five years since I updated this blog regularly. I think that calls for a status update. Here is what I’ve been up to in 2023:

Working again

This entire time, I never quit curating ANNouncements, Anime News Network’s weekly newsletter. I am still proud of wrapping up a draft while I was in labor! It has kept me feeling informed about what’s happening in the fandom even when I felt my most disconnected. Lately, I’ve also been writing weekly streaming reviews for ANN as well: Tsurune 2 last season, and this season I lucked out and got the controversial but fantastic Oshi No Ko (just trust me, bro).

I’ve been doing some contract work for Forbes. I worked with a great team on the Forbes AI 50 2023 list, and I’m truly thankful that they paid reporters to work on it instead of trying to have Chat GPT hallucinate an article or something. I even returned to my Forbes blog after three years—I interviewed Elena Vitagliano, who I previously interviewed on Otaku Journalist in 2013(!) about becoming the first European woman to be published in Shonen Jump+. If you haven’t read her manga yet, it’s in English here (just flip past the Japanese version). 

Gunpla 101 is still active, even though it’s been a year since I’ve been able to work on a model without worrying somebody will eat the tiny pieces. That means I have edited and published an impressive list of contributors (and I am always looking for more paid writers)! If nothing else, I publish a monthly update on the latest kits and news in the Gundam-verse. 

I’ve also been keeping myself sharp with a select group of web design and development clients, mostly maintenance and upgrades on existing WordPress websites. 

Watching, Reading, Making

(This section is full of affiliate links so this is my obligatory notification.)

Forgive me: I quit my Crunchyroll subscription with a lot of noise, but I recently got it back. For a few seasons I stuck to HiDive, but it’s hard to compete with a near-monopoly. Since then, I’ve caught up on the biggest and buzziest: Chainsaw Man, Trigun Stampede, Mob Psycho 100 3, and the mesmerizing Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. 

I’ve been reading a lot of manga and Webtoons. Some of my favorites recently: She Loves To Cook And She Loves To Eat, My Dress-up Darling, and Akane-Banashi (free on Viz). Links go to digital versions because that’s all I read these days: my baby likes to eat paper. 

After a long time of only playing MarioKart 8 (my daughter is obsessed with it and wants a Player 2), I’m finally playing a new video game: the “cozy-horror” fishing game Dredge. Well, it’s more like I’m watching John play it while I knit socks. 

I’ve been making an effort to be more creative this year. When I’m helping my daughter design new Mario Kart levels in Magic Marker, I’ve been drawing on my iPad. Earlier this year I shared a few of my digital artworks, back when I still used Twitter. 

Looking to Reconnect

Where is everyone hanging out these days? I quit Twitter and I don’t have a Bluesky invite, so I’ve been spending most of my time in Discord servers. I also don’t want to waste my limited free time on social networks where nobody I know is (which is why I blocked Reddit, TikTok, and Facebook from my phone). 

I’m even planning to go to an anime convention in person. Between parenting and COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve taken a multi-year leave of absence. But I finally feel ready to return to Otakon, at least for a day, and even resubmitted my panel. We’ll see if they are willing to give me a second chance on the panel I backed out of presenting in 2021. If I do go, I might even bring my oldest kid, who is REALLY into Mario; the cosplay there might make her day! 

It’d be cool if the slow demise of Twitter led to a return to anime blogging, but I highly doubt that; looking at my own habits, I only read anime blogs when I subscribe to them and get updates in my inbox. But if you have found this post and read it all the way to the bottom, this is my way of saying hi. I’m still here.

What I’ll do instead of watching the fall anime season

September 28, 2022Lauren Orsini

Last week, in a burst of emotion, I wrote my first blog post in a year.

In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to boycott the fall season (or at least the bulk of it, which is on Crunchyroll), at a time when I already feel isolated from the anime community. But consuming anime to talk about it only one of the ways I can reconnect with my fellow fans. I can also write a new blog post and share my thoughts in something longer than a tweet. 

Previously, I thought my fall would be totally consumed by anime. I joked about not even having time to sleep because I’d be watching so many shows. Now that I’ll only be watching a handful, here’s what I’ll be doing—essentially what I’ve been doing—since last updating this blog.

Curating ANNouncements

Curating the Anime News Network newsletter is my only remaining fandom gig and I take it very seriously. I have held this role for 74 weeks straight. I did not take a week off when I was in labor with my son—I was honestly afraid that  if I did, they’d find a replacement curator that they liked better! So I wrote ANNouncements #54 while timing my contractions, and then John drove me to the hospital. If you received that newsletter, you’ll see that it was written by “Lauren and Bryan,” though I have to say that he wasn’t very much help.

Parenting my two small children

Wait, I have two of them now? And they’re both named after Gundam characters? I guess it’s true what they say: everything happens so much. I spend 90% of my waking hours taking care of them, and that’s a low estimate. With a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old, I’d say it’s a mix of janitorial work and answering philosophical questions. As the archives show, I didn’t plan to be a stay-at-home mom but then quarantine happened, I lost a bunch of gigs and didn’t get new ones, plus childcare is super expensive in my area, so here I am.

Reading webtoons

I was one of those high schoolers with a sizeable lineup of webcomics on my RSS reader. I read everything from Wendy to Penny Arcade. Now I’ve lived long enough to see both of those creators get cancelled, and I’ve also moved on to reading better comics, just in another format. I was an early webtoon adopter because I started writing about them for Forbes in 2018. Now I look forward to 9 PM every night, when the new episodes come out. Right now I’m enjoying Unordinary, Everything is Fine, Not Even Bones, and Hand Jumper, to name a few.

Books are also good

Ever since I had my daughter, Eva, I have been reading a LOT more. Like webtoons, ebooks are something that I can do one-handed on my phone, while rocking or nursing a baby. For the previous decade or so I had not been reading very much, maybe ten books a year, and now it’s more like 40. When you start reading again after not reading for a long time, at first it’s hard to find new stuff to read. But now I’m in a cycle where I keep preordering or reserving interesting new books (like Nona the Ninth and The Sunbearer Trials) and being perpetually behind. 

Ye olde anime backlog 

As it turns out, there is a lot of anime out there that isn’t on Crunchyroll and isn’t part of this stacked fall season. So it’s time to catch up with that. I’m hearing good things about Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I still haven’t watched Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash and I make a point of watching every Gundam show/movie, so it’s overdue. I’ve got a bunch of anime shows and movies on my Plex server that are due for a rewatch, too. For example, October is the perfect time to see if the spooky/sentimental Mushi-shi still slaps. 

Watching part of the fall season, actually

Since I started writing this post, I learned that a few of fall’s buzziest shows will actually be on services other than Crunchyroll. The Urusei Yatsura reboot will be on HiDive. Mob Psycho 100 season 3 will be on Hulu. I’m REALLY hoping Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury will air on the Gundam official YouTube channel. So it’s not going to be a total fall season blackout for me. 

I still think that deleting my Crunchyroll account was the right thing to do, but it’s hard to go without. Re-reading this blog post reminds me that I’ll be able to stay strong. I have zero expectations that my little boycott will sway the Crunchyroll C-suite or anything, but at least I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that at least I’m not supporting their anti-union practices. 

Why I canceled my Crunchyroll membership

September 21, 20222 commentsLauren Orsini

I still remember the first time I heard about Crunchyroll. I was at Anime Boston 2010, and this up-and-coming anime streaming service was one of the con’s biggest sponsors. I need to see if I can dig up the promotional postcard they gave us with the program guide, showing the original logo: all cartoonish black font and orange sushi roll. I used the promotion on the back of that postcard to open up my account with them. Today, I closed that account.

Over the past 12 years, I’ve been more than a Crunchyroll subscriber; I’ve also had a working relationship with the company. More recently, I’ve written scripts for Crunchyroll videos like The Evolution of Anime Figures. I’ve been thrilled to serve as a judge for the Crunchyroll Anime Awards for the past three years (prrrrobably not getting invited back to do that)! I have friends who have worked for Crunchyroll, and friends who still do. This is not about them, by the way. 

It’s about this: As Crunchyroll is increasingly controlled by its corporate overlords, I no longer think that supporting Crunchyroll is synonymous with supporting the anime community. 

My relationship with Crunchyroll began when it was a comparably tiny company. In 2013, after Sankaku Complex published the unsourced claim (some things never change) that piracy is preferable to creators over using Crunchyroll, I reached out to then-CEO Kun Gao and he made room on his calendar, the same day, to chat on Skype about how Crunchyroll actually compensates creators. I happened to be in San Francisco for business that same month, and Gao invited me to tour Crunchyroll HQ. From the “Seele” conference room to the geeky furnishings, it felt like a place where people who genuinely love anime work.

But as Crunchyroll grew, things started to change. I first noticed how different the company was after it was acquired by Ellation. I was covering Crunchyroll fairly regularly for my Forbes blog, but I always had to use a PR person as a go-between. Kun was still CEO, but his schedule was much busier and even though I was now working for a far more prestigious site, I couldn’t get an interview with him the way I could when I was just a personal blogger. I saw this as a positive change though, a sign that this company that got its start publishing illegal fansubs was worth taking seriously. As a geek of a certain age, who remembers when being an anime fan labeled you a certified weirdo, I wanted anime to go legit. 

But I didn’t think about what the side effects of bigger and bigger companies acquiring Crunchyroll would be. I guess I thought it meant the people who worked there would get rich. I didn’t think that it would mean a less than living wage for the people who sub and dub the actual product. Ninety dollars to sub 450 lines of Japanese? Getting paid $150 to dub a movie that earned $30 million at the box office? All of this and not even being open to meeting the dub actors’ union at the table, instead preferring to recast Mob? It used to be that supporting Crunchyroll was a part of how I expressed my fan identity. Now it feels like I can’t call myself an anime fan in good faith while supporting a company that does so little for them. 

I believe that there are lots of people at Crunchyroll who genuinely love anime and are as frustrated at the direction the company is taking as I am. I don’t think Crunchyroll’s fannish heart and soul have been completely crushed under the thumb of corporate overlord Sony. That’s why I’m trying to make a statement with my cancellation. Crunchyroll is counting on the buzz of the incredible upcoming fall season to drown out any fan discontent. But I’ll be staying mad.

And no, I’m not pirating shows instead. I’m seriously hurting myself more than I’m hurting Crunchyroll. I have no misconceptions that anything will change before fall, or that the “anitwitter” bubble we have is as big or influential as it sometimes feels. And I completely understand that opting out of this season is mostly not realistic for my peers, especially those who review anime, because Crunchyroll is nearly a monopoly now. But I hope the symbolic message of even one longtime subscriber taking action makes a statement.

Otaku Journalist is 12 years old!

November 14, 2021Lauren Orsini

Twelve years ago today, I began posting on this blog. One of my professors at American University’s School of Communication encouraged us each to secure our name as a dot com for portfolio purposes. So when I started this site on November 14, 2009, it was initially a generalized showcase of my writing on topics related to journalism. It was the middle of the  Great Recession, so anything to get hired right?

I got disillusioned when I graduated and found myself working minimum wage retail… with a master’s degree. I changed the name to Otaku Journalist, began posting exclusively about fandom reporting, and the rest is history. It’s safe to say the opportunities I’ve gotten through this blog have determined the course of my career in internet culture and fandom journalism. 

Now I have mainly put my career aside for various reasons, most obviously that I’ve become a stay-at-home-mom to my toddler daughter and I’m expecting a baby boy in spring. And thus, this blog has been a bit lost at sea for the last couple of years. But twelve is my lucky number and I couldn’t let this milestone pass without celebrating the year’s highlights. Though I haven’t been posting much, I HAVE been keeping track of work stuff I do just to remind myself that even if I spend most of my time at the playground, I haven’t completely left the game. In a different year, these would all have been separate blog posts! Here’s a list of every Otaku Journalist-worthy thing I’ve done this year, with commentary:

Started a Gunpla 101 Instagram

Beginning this list on a low note, since I definitely haven’t updated this in months. But it felt good to try a new direction for my most profitable blog. While this didn’t stick, what did work for me this year was expanding my monthly shopping update into a semi-news post. 

Was on AnimeCons TV

Doug invited me and my slightly offscreen husband John to talk about Otakon’s future, which was tenuous at the time. But it just turned into an informal discussion between three friends who really miss going to cons together. 

Guest on The Bebop Beat

I had huge imposter syndrome about being a guest on this podcast. Other episodes had guests like legendary voice actor Wendee Lee and graphic novelist E.K. Weaver. I did my research in advance and was able to share at least two fun facts about the mecha of Cowboy Bebop.

Reviewed Fruits Basket the Final for ANN

This was the only anime I reviewed weekly in 2021. I’m not sure how well my reviews were received because I never read the comments. I felt generally positive about the series though; it was wild to finally see these last chapters of the manga get animated for the first time. 

Expert source for Rolling Stone Brony article

EJ and I were colleagues ages ago and I’m touched that when she wrote about bronies she thought “Lauren would know something about this.” A long time ago I dedicated thousands of words in the Daily Dot to my brony coverage, and I outline some of the fandom’s history here.

Began curating the ANN newsletter, ANNouncements

Out of everything on this list, the newsletter has altered my year the most. I’ve built my weekly routine around curating articles and choosing, with much indecision, each week’s featured post. Even though it’s not a ton of work, it ensures that I remain uncommonly informed about anime news. At a time when I worry about losing my identity to parenthood, the newsletter makes me feel like I’m still very much part of this community. I already told Lynzee I don’t want to take a break after my new baby is here; that’s how much I credit this gig with keeping my brain from turning into mush. 

Appeared on PBS Flyover Culture’s Gunpla episode

I think this is the only time all year I did a full face of makeup. I don’t consider myself a Gunpla expert (my site is called Gunpla 101, not Gunpla 400), but I’m glad Payton asked me to be on the show anyway so I could demonstrate that you don’t have to be good at Gunpla to enjoy it. Watch it to see me share the ONLY Gunpla model I built this year (an HG Momokapool).

Washington Post article

My name, in print, in a major newspaper! This was above and beyond the most impressive accomplishment of the year. I wrote a blog post about the details and what it means to me. 

Wrote a talk for Otakon and didn’t go

This talk is completely finished and really good, I DEFINITELY need to share it! But I was too panicked to go to Otakon, even though it was not only not a superspreader even, but not one of the 20+ people I know who attended contracted covid after (and yes they got tested). Good job, fans. 

Ladybeard interview for Crunchyroll

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to interview Ladybeard both on video and in person, and it’s always a fun conversation. Speaking as a reporter, naturally charismatic people like him can be difficult to interview because you get swept into feeling you’re just chatting with a friend. I don’t mean that he’s doing this in a manipulative way; I mean that Ladybeard has never met a stranger. Usually my interviews with people in Japanese media are fairly dry (like this email interview with Fruits Basket director Yoshihide Ibata) but Ladybeard was willing to talk on the record about all kinds of interesting things, particularly his genderbent stage identity. 

Reviewed Reconguista in G the Movie for ANN

This movie wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good either, and for me that’s the most challenging type of review to write—much easier to praise something or really lay into it. 

Wrote Yoshiyuki Tomino Doesn’t Want You To Read This Article for ANN

Usually, when I write an article, I don’t get to write the title, too. But with both this feature and my Washington Post article, I wrote my own title! I used to have my editors write my titles and then go on Twitter saying “No, I didn’t write that clickbait title, who do you take me for?” but in this case the title I came up with is absolutely clickbait, and I absolutely did write it myself.

Expert source for Rolling Stone cosplay killing article

I helped with some details about Danganronpa and what yandere means, but I obviously didn’t know the details of EJ’s reporting until the article came out. When I read it and realized it was a touching emotional tribute to the deceased, I cried. A lot of coverage of this incident focused on the sensational “costumed killer” angle, and this is definitely not that. 

Appeared on Baka Banter podcast to talk about journalism 

This invitation sat in my inbox for nearly two weeks, which makes me seem super ungrateful, but I was feeling so overwhelmed when I got it! I was thinking, “Why do you want to interview me, a person who has barely worked this past year?” It’s hard for me to remember sometimes that I have 10 years of experience in reporting before that! But this conversation actually turned out really well and I think I had some decent advice for aspiring reporters.

Appeared on Keepsakes podcast to talk about my book

I wrote Otaku Journalism 7 years ago, and started writing it 10 years ago. Jay gave me the perfect reason to reread my own book: such a weird experience to revisit the person I was nearly a decade ago. I am often hard on myself about this book because I wrote it before the internet morphed into the horrible form it has today, but amidst some outdated references to the “new Homestuck fandom,” a lot of the advice still stands up. After the podcast went live, 20 new readers downloaded the book, which feels like a lot to me. 

My theme of 2021 has been an inability to see beyond what I did over the past 24 hours. But listing it all out like this reminds me that I haven’t been quite as dormant as I think. As I’m writing this, I realize the 2021 list isn’t finished yet; I’m working on two article assignments for ANN now. I hope that if you have a similar tendency to mine, you’ll consider writing it all down. My brain may not be able to comprehend time anymore, but at least my records don’t lie. 

Whether you’ve been reading Otaku Journalist for 12 years or this is your first time visiting—thank you. I’m not finished with this blog yet. 

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