Didn’t mean to do such a bummer roundup this week, but it’s fitting as one of my final link lists for 2016. Enjoy?

• Not sure this GateBox commercial is intended to be as depressing as it comes off. Watch a salaryman text his anime clock all day. “Feels great to have somebody at home for me,” he says. Womp womp. HT @AnimatedInk.

• Japanese anime fans rank anime’s most tragic endings. Gundam is on here three times and I wouldn’t have it any other way. HT @Dormouse42.

• Watching Long Riders right now and surprised to see its Engrish subs alongside other Daisuki shows, like Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, that are fairly legible. Answerman addresses this in “Why Do Subtitle Styles From The Same Company Differ?“

• “Which horrible pun is Wave Motion Cannon going to make next?” is a game I’ve played with myself ever since their Gundam Build Fighters article titled War Is Sell. This time: Ice Have A Dream, an extremely rare piece of Yuri!!! on Ice commentary that isn’t about how gay it is (answer: still pretty gay).

• Can This American Disrupt Japan’s $392M Young Adult Novel Industry? My Forbes piece this week is about the business plan behind J-Novel Club. You might recall I worked for them and designed the J-Novel Club website, but they didn’t compensate me for this piece; just thought it’d be cool to write about.

• Relatedly, what makes a light novel popular? Frog-kun wrote a helpful explainer about how to understand Japan’s light novel rankings and what they mean for a title’s popularity.

• This week we said goodbye to Ben Schoedel, an anime fan and convention panelist who was only around for 30 years, but who definitely made his mark. Evan wrote a thoughtful obituary that reminded me just how much of an impact fandom activities can make, even after the fan himself is gone.

• I’m not doing the 12 Days of Anime, but Emily is! I loved this post tying her anxiety-calming methods to Pikari’s daily routine in the very relaxing scuba diving anime Amanchu!

Photo by Robert Schwenzer

• Sad to hear the 1:1 scale Gundam at Odaiba is going away and, even worse, the Gundam Front Tokyo museum is shutting down too. If you won’t get a chance to see it before March, I wrote an intensive essay on my trip there last March. Want more? Anime News Network has an even longer report!

• As you may have noticed in last week’s roundup, I started blogging at Forbes again. I get paid $0.005 per click (but only up to two so don’t bother refreshing) if you feel like reading about the overlap between wrestling and anime fandom, Fakku’s fight to protect your right to read hentai, or an interview with American translator Jenny McKeon about how your manga gets made.

• Oh yeah, NaNoWriMo happened. Kara Dennison is the only person I know this year who actually finished it! Here’s 7 things the anime localizer and webcomic artist (among other things) learned while finishing her latest novel.

• Colony Drop just released a fanzine all about Patlabor, with 50 pages of art and writing produced by fans of the 1989 mecha anime. I’ve recently been watching the TV series and it holds up really well.

• I also wrote about Patlabor, for Anime Feminist: a very specific look at Noa’s insecurities in episode 36. My favorite line, which my editor Amelia actually came up with: “When Patlabor was created, it was more realistic to imagine a future with giant robots than one where women were treated equally all the time.”

• Figure skating anime ‘Yuri on Ice’ is one of the best shows of 2016. Guess we all have to watch Yuri!! on Ice now, since news outlets like the Daily Dot are picking up the cause. I’m hardly watching anything regularly except Yuri!! and Keijo, and I apologize in advance for my many racy tweets about the latter.

• Working your way through a long-running anime or manga can sometimes seem like a slog—like when I caught up with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure earlier this year, I just wanted to be current! At Manga Therapy, Tony writes a brief and thoughtful defense of the middle volumes of a manga.

Photo by my good pal @patzprime (Instagram here).

• Did the US election influence fanfiction production? According to toastystats, there’s been a 30% increase in fanfiction following November 8, with the biggest spike in the “angst” genre.

• I got the above link from my favorite newsletter, The Rec Center. Every Friday Elizabeth and Gav send out fandom news and fan fiction recommendations—and when I’m lucky, it’s about anime.

• I was on two Gundam-centric podcasts last month! The first was Women in Gundam with Josh Dunham of Senpai Coast to Coast. We talked for over and hour and still didn’t get to every show, but I loved our discussion on the ladies of Zeta the most.

• The second was Wave Motion Cast – Talking Gundam. I joined Wave Motion Cannon’s crew to talk about my favorite Gundam show and my favorite Gundam mecha, and then things got weird.

• Reverse Thieves does a helpful monthly feature called The Lineup, in which they list new licenses, crowdfunding projects, streaming announcements, and more. I’m predictably excited about all the new Gundam licenses coming to Right Stuf!

• On Anime Feminist, we went around the room and shared our favorite “trash” characters in anime. For more on what that means to us, check out the full conversation.

• Athletes: they’re just like us. Tumblr user Seiyuna posted an extensive list of all the professional figure skaters watching Yuri!!! on Ice. Meanwhile, I revived my Forbes blog with my first post in a while, about all the pro wrestlers who are avowed anime fans.

Photo by Jenny on Flickr