My reviewing gig at Anime News Network!

Update: Read all about ANN Streaming Reviews here!

All right, I already pushed back publishing once, but everybody knows about it. I blabbed about it in a podcast at Beneath The Tangles, ANN has hinted at it, and I’m not sure exactly when it will all be made official, but here goes.

I’m now a weekly streaming anime reviewer for Anime News Network.

It started at Otakon actually, when Mike Toole casually mentioned during our panel that ANN was looking for people to review anime part-time. This season I’m watching a lot of shows as they come out so I thought, why not write about them, too?

I wrote a cover letter to Zac Bertschy and attached my recent Mushi-shi/Natsume blog post as a writing sample. (See, this is where having your own anime blog can translate into getting jobs.) He liked it, and offered me a trial position, along with 9 other people. This is a paid position, but, as is pretty common in freelance writing, I’ve been asked not to disclose what I’m making.

This season, I’ll be reviewing Free!, Bakumatsu Rock, and Nobunaga Concerto on Crunchyroll each week as they come out. I was assigned two shows I’d never seen, so I had to spend some time catching up. It’s my own fault actually—Zac wanted to make sure each of us had two shows we actually wanted to watch. I had asked for (and was assigned) Tokyo Ghoul, which I had heard great things about from my friends. But when I tried to actually watch it, at midnight in my darkened bedroom, I couldn’t keep my eyes open through all the gore! I asked if I could be reassigned, and if I could possibly get some new friends.

After Zac got over his perplexedness at a reviewer requesting a show they knew nothing about, he asked me to choose one of the anime nobody else had picked. Nobunaga Concerto is one of the lowest-rated shows of the season and I think I was fair in giving it a D. But there’s a certain joy to writing negative reviews, and I’m hoping you’ll read along as I have fun with it.

I am not a completely amateur reviewer. I used to do weekly reviews when I was at Japanator, occasional analysis for this blog, and in a burst of hubris I even wrote How to write anime reviews people actually want to read (whether I actually can do that, well, you be the judge). But the wide majority of my portfolio is reporting work. I’m hoping that my new position at Anime News Network will help me to become a more well-rounded writer.

Reviews should be up either tomorrow or later next week. I’ll back-link them here. Stay tuned for a blog post later when I let you know what I’ve learned from this experiment!