Category: Anime

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

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.

What I want the parents of anime fans to know

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Last week, a parent asked for my advice about his teen daughter’s new interest in anime.

I was down in Florida, visiting my own parents when I got the email. “What would you advise him?” I asked.

My mom and dad weren’t sure. After all, when they raised their own anime fan daughter, there wasn’t really anyone they could ask. Anime was not as popular then and they didn’t know any fans their own age. As I wrote in my 2016 post, What I want the next generation of anime fans to know, “I wish there had been someone like me to talk to my parents when I was a kid.”

Today, anime is more ingrained in popular culture than ever. Celebrities like Michael B. Jordan and Kim Kardashian West profess their love for it. And there are lots of adult fans like me who are old enough to sympathize with parents’ concerns about anime while still remembering what it was like to be a tween or teen discovering anime for the first time.

So when uninformed parents need somebody to ask for advice, I’m thrilled when they go to me. Bill is one of those parents, somebody who found me through my Forbes page. He gave me his permission to repost a short version of his original email.

I am the father of a 14-year-old girl who loves anime and doing art related to anime. Although she is a very intelligent young lady, she is still a child is so many ways. She has been very open with us about what she is doing online and her interests.

Lately, she has been telling us about Anime Amino, a site where she posts her art and receives feedback. After reading the negatives from people on Common Sense Media, it appears that many of these anime and cosplay (not sure what this is exactly other than dress up) activities lead to sexual content at some point. If that is the case, or there’s a high likelihood of it occurring, I’m inclined to prevent her from going any further.

Online addiction aside, if she can get some positives from these experiences then I would want to continue to support her efforts. Since you are very knowledgeable in these areas, I would really appreciate any thoughts you might have regarding our situation.

—Bill

When people write to me, I try to balance my adult mind with how desperately my young anime fan self simply wanted to be understood. That’s what I was channeling with I wrote to Bill.

Hi Bill,

Anime is a medium of entertainment, not a genre. So there are many kinds of anime: action, comedy, drama, stuff for kids, and stuff for adults. Just like with the entertainment medium of movies, there’s anime that’s age-appropriate for your daughter and anime that isn’t.

So where to start? Anime Feminist is a website organizing a list of anime that is good for teens and tweens. Beneath the Tangles is an anime blog for Christian anime fans and their families. There’s also Common Sense Media’s list of anime for kids. Maybe you could check out one of the shows on the list with her as a way to check it out while also showing interest in her and her hobby.

One thing I do want to say is that cosplay (you’re right, it’s dress up) is not considered sexual. It’s about wearing costumes of characters fans admire from anime, video games, comics, or movies. (I’m certain it can be made sexual, just like anime, movies, video games, and comics can be made sexual, but it isn’t on its own.)

As far as I know, Anime Amino is a forum for mostly teen participants. You can just scroll through it to see the kind of stuff kids talk about there. Additionally, it has a lot of stuff that’s against the rules, including hate speech and explicit words or imagery.

Finally, it’s great that your daughter is being open with you about her activities because it shows a bond of trust. She’s not scared that you’re going to judge her or try to stop her from participating. I think that means that if she has a problem or does find content that makes her uncomfortable, she’ll feel comfortable coming to you about it.

Best wishes, Lauren

Thanks to the Anime Feminist team for helping me develop this response—especially the final paragraph. It’s important to remember that there are people of all ages in our community and to make it something kids still feel as comfortable as we did participating in (and something their parents feel comfortable condoning, too).

What kind of advice would you give to a concerned parent of an anime fan?

Otaku Links: New year, new links

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Happy new year, readers! Did you miss me? Regular posts resume Monday.

Top image via Hisako Akagi via SakugaBlog.

Eight Years of Otaku Journalist, Part 2

Tomorrow is November 14, 2017—eight years to the date that I started this blog.

I was 22 then, getting my Master’s in Print Journalism at American University. I had temporarily broken up with my college boyfriend (who you know as my husband, John), and a lot of things were up in the air. So when my professor instructed us all to buy domain names and start portfolio sites, I thought, why not start a blog? There’s never a right time, anyway.

Otaku Journalist was first called LaurenRaeOrsini.com. It was supposed to be a general portfolio in hopes that I would be palatable to the largest number of employers. But when I graduated with my MA to zero job prospects except retail, I decided to treat my blog as my job, writing about my favorite topics in anime and fandom analysis. In the following eight years I’ve worked a number of freelance and traditional writing and web development jobs, but Otaku Journalist has always been the place at which I center my core interests and identity.

This year is the first one, I think, where my career is finally where I want it to be. I’m self-employed with income so stable I no longer think it’s helpful to write income reports. I’ve come a long way and I have a memory like a sieve, so it’s great to review my top 20 most popular posts as the “cornerstone content” I’ve come to be known for. Last week I reviewed posts 20-16. This week I’m going over 15-11:

15. Why every anime fan should be worried about cartoon porn laws

Nov 5, 2014 | 10,882 pageviews

Getting into the five figures! This topic is so important to me that I wrote an updated version for Forbes last year: Am I Going To Get Arrested For Bringing All This Cartoon Porn Into The US? I sort of hammed it up in the title here, but I actually did bring back doujinshi with me—I just mailed it from the Shinjuku post office to avoid getting stopped with it at the border.

Generally, I wrote this piece because I was hearing a lot of sentiment that people getting arrested for hentai doesn’t apply to fans of nonpornographic anime. But since authorities have mistaken PG manga for porn, and adult manga for child porn, this is a problem for everyone. I’m just grateful the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has our backs.

14. Maybe you’re the reason anime is dying

Aug 21, 2013 | 11,317 pageviews

This is certainly one of the most provocative post titles I’ve written on Otaku Journalist. Even though this post is 4 now, people still talk about how anime isn’t as good as it used to be. I refined this same idea in a 2015 post: The “good old days” of anime.

But this post also has a second prong, and it’s that we need to be kind to new fans. If the Anime Origin Stories project has taught me anything, it’s that we were all newbies once. If we are snobby about new anime compared to the old classics and turn our noses up at people just discovering anime for the first time, nobody’s going to want to be an anime fan anymore.

13. Why Gundam Build Fighters means now is a great time to get into Gunpla

Oct 21, 2013 | 13,233 pageviews

This article was John’s idea. It was still a few months before we started Gunpla 101, and he suggested that I keep testing the water to see if people were interested in Gunpla content from me. I probably didn’t have an idea to write about this week and went with it, because this is not the kind of deep analysis I preferred to do in 2013. But hey, it was popular!

By the way, you’ll notice that a lot of these older popular posts have exactly 0 comments. That’s because I switched to the Disqus commenting system per reader request in 2014, which overlaid a lot of the WordPress native comments that were here before. If I look at the editing screen for this one, for example, I can view eight comments that used to be here.

12. Fashion, Femininity, and Fascism, but Family Foremost: The Themes of Kill la Kill

Feb 12, 2014 | 13,721 pageviews

I rarely allow guest posts on Otaku Journalist—in fact, I think I have only allowed one guest post ever. This essay by my friend and neighbor Grant is the only post on Otaku Journalist that I didn’t write myself. Not only is it a great piece by a talented writer, but PBS Idea Channel linked to this essay in their video about Kill La Kill, and the views for this post skyrocketed.

I just notified Grant that his essay is one of my top 20 most popular posts, and when I did I asked what he’s working on now, since he’s also a professional writer. He said, “an essay on Gurren Lagann and libertarianism for a pop culture anthology.” Pretty cool. Still, not sure I’ll ever do guest posting again, because it means putting somebody else on my top 20 popular posts list!

11. Christmas present ideas for anime fans

Nov 17, 2014 | 15,179 pageviews

This is why picking the correct SEO keywords matters. The posts that say “gift ideas” and “holiday gifts” may be more PC, but they never get as much traffic as when I say “Christmas” because when it comes down to it, that’s what people are typing into Google.

I really enjoy putting together this list every year because as anime fandom gets increasingly mainstream, the merchandise gets so much more varied and better designed. I remember when I was 14 and the only, I repeat only, anime T-shirt you could buy at Another Universe was the Nerv logo from Neon Genesis Evangelion on a black background in a men’s size large.

It’s still NaNoWriMo, so once again I’m going to conclude this post with my word count as of the night before this post went up: 20,730. Almost halfway there!

Previously:

Eight years of Otaku Journalist, Part 1

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Eight years ago in November, I pressed “publish” on Otaku Journalist for the first time.

My first post, “Welcome” is so laughably vague compared with how specific I’ve gotten over the years. Today I’m not only occupying a specific niche topic; the main purpose that Otaku Journalist is still around is to help others with their niche (usually geeky) pursuits, too.

Eight years is an incredibly long time to have a blog. I’ve gone through four visual redesigns and countless directional shifts, in which I prioritize different topics. But I don’t blog in a vacuum and it’s always been my readers who have set the pace.

With that in mind, I’m going to take the rest of November to look at the 20 most popular posts of all time on Otaku Journalist, according to the Google Analytics tracker I first placed in the site code on November 14, 2009, and share my own insights.

Let’s get started with #20-16 this week. We’ll end with #5-1 on November 27.

20. How to start a career in anime journalism

Sept 29, 2010 | 7,458 pageviews

It goes without saying that the older an article is, the more time it had to build up pageviews to get on this list. But I think the reason this article is on the top 20 is because it stars three big names—Colette Bennett, Patrick Macias, and Gia Manry—who are still active in the industry.

Seven years later, Patrick Macias and I co-edited an edition of Otaku USA magazine. I still chat with Colette about our Korean skincare routines. Gia moved to my city to work for Bethesda, but I only recently met her and her husband for the first time at an Otakon happy hour. I will always be grateful to the three of them for giving me a chance when I was nobody, and somehow still popping up in my life now and then almost a decade later.

19. Why is the media covering Space Dandy while other anime get ignored?

Jan 6, 2014 | 7,627 pageviews

You’ll see that a lot of the top 20 have these question-format titles. This particular one has not aged well. Anime is practically mainstream these days, with the New York Times reviewing Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name like they would any other blockbuster.

Space Dandy marked a sea change in how anime was produced. More and more, we’re seeing not only simulcasts, but co-productions where an American company funds a Japanese anime project and the resulting production is equally marketed toward an overseas audience, too. To this end, I’ve noticed more and more shows have Crunchyroll listed as a producer.

18. The truth about Boys’ Love and rape culture

Oct 14, 2013 | 8,237 pageviews

The likely, ugly truth is that people Google “anime” and “rape” and this pops up. It’s definitely a fetish thing, but my article is clearly not about that and I guess people are still clicking.

Like most older posts, I read this one and think I could rework it to be better now. It takes a while to get to the point. It makes it sound like anime fans invented slash (actually, Star Trek fans probably did). Plus, I think at this point, I still felt a lot of shame about enjoying BL, while today I realize it’s a fairly simple concept—just one of many sexual fantasies people enjoy.

17. How to make money anime blogging

Aug 28 2013 | 9,066 pageviews

I believe this is the first time I ever wrote about affiliate marketing on Otaku Journalist. Today this is one of the cornerstones of my career, through Gunpla 101, my candle blog, and this one.

You can tell just how long it took me to develop techniques to make affiliate blogging profitable. First I made $150 in eight months, then I made $150 every month. (Now I make $150 every couple of days, or once a day around Christmas. For more on how I did that, you can read way more recent articles.) There are also some references to projects I no longer have, like my “free guides” which actually became the chapters of my book Otaku Journalism. I hope that my more recent courses and posts on the subject surpass this post’s popularity, because I have absolutely refined my blog money-making techniques a lot since then.

16. How to write anime reviews people actually want to read

Dec 17, 2012 | 9,469 pageviews

Amazingly, I wrote this post before I was even writing reviews professionally. (I started as an Anime News Network reviewer in 2014.) So this advice isn’t using the full extent of my knowledge and experience on writing reviews week after week for four years. Some of it I don’t even agree with anymore (who cares about audience reception, actually).

Even in 2012 I knew that it was important to give reviews a recognizable grade, but this is the hardest part for me even now. I wrote a blog post about it in 2015: My Biggest Weakness: Grading Reviews. I tend to write a review that says what I really think and then give it a higher grade than it deserves to get the hecklers (who are just coming to check the grade and not to read the whole review) off my back. But lately I’ve been working with my editor to give more critical grades that better reflect what the episodes deserve.

Since this is NaNoWriMo, I’m going to conclude each post this month with my word count as of the night before this post went up: 8,253. Still on track!