Otaku Links: Miracle La!

Otaku Links

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  • Fushigi Yuugi is now streaming on Crunchyroll in its entirety. This is one of the first anime I ever heard about, though in the Before Times I couldn’t get my hands on more than a couple episodes (on VHS!). Now that there are three major anime streaming services between Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Daisuki, I think collecting the rights to classic titles is a great differentiating move.
  • Looking for more old anime? The Anime Nostalgia Tumblr has a fairly comprehensive guide to watching streaming anime 12 years or older. Usually it’s hard enough keeping up with current good anime, but this Winter 2016 has been a little blah for me and perfect for digging into the archives.
  • Here’s an idea, how about we all stop trashing convention hotels? While stuff like this has happened for as long as I have been going to cons, our bad behavior is only going to get more visible as our fandom grows and grows. It would suck if hotels and convention centers stopped putting up with it.
  • Speaking of games, Jet Set Radio is free on Steam right now. No time to play? Do what I do and tune in to JetSetRadio.live to make work a little more awesome.
  • Why do people love anime? Like, as opposed to other kinds of media? Justin Stroman interviewed me and a bunch of other professional fans, about why it resonates so intensely.

Scan from Fushigi Yuugi manga

The Seven Year Itch

Fandom

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This weekend would have been my seventh Katsucon. If I had gone.

In the past six years, I haven’t missed it. Held first in my neighborhood and later a modest ten-minute drive away, it’s far and beyond my closest convention. Despite the lines and chaos, I always found time for it between my senior year of college, grad school, and beyond. My first Katsucon was a journalism class project in college. My second Katsucon, I embedded in the maid cafe to record participants and guests. Since then nothing has kept me away, from a blizzard that threatened to shut it down to breaking my foot the day right before and attending anyway, in a wheelchair, so I could report on an Artist Alley scandal. Between all that, I treated the show as a friend reunion, meeting up with people I rarely saw the rest of the year.

Over the years, however, my friends began to lose interest. Katsucon wasn’t about piling into a hotel room and catching glimpses of each other between our seven diverging schedules. At first it felt fancy and grown-up for John and I to get a hotel room all to ourselves and skip the gobbled fast food meals in favor of sit-down dinners. But as the novelty wore off, we began wondering if this was how we wanted to keep spending our hard-earned vacation money. In 2015, John and I spent a good $500 at Katsucon (you can thank a Perfect Grade, the most complicated and expensive Gunpla model, for that) and decided enough was enough.

Kind of. I have been murmuring on Twitter about my intent to show up, despite not having secured a badge yet. Until I woke up on Saturday morning and just… didn’t go. I had planned to interview couples about love, and tie it into the way my husband and I have spent over five years dedicating our Valentine’s Day weekend to Katsucon. But the thought exhausted me, and not because I’m afraid of hard work. (Heck, instead of going to Katsucon, I built an entirely new affiliate site, for fun.) What tired me out was that I could already see my long day unfolding in front of me without even leaving my bed—I would brave the cold, wait in at least one long line, and spend too much money on food and in the Dealer’s Room to “reward” myself for reporting. I would spend time attempting half-hearted hellos with former friends I’ve grown apart from, none of us having enough time to give ourselves the proper reunions our friendships deserve.

In short, Katsucon had become a routine for me, and I wanted out. I probably should’ve stopped going last year. But when you want to cement yourself as a Name in the fandom, the way I wanted to be known as the Otaku Journalist, cons are the social events of the season. I had serious FOMO thinking about the opportunities and meet-ups I might miss.

And if I’m honest with myself, it goes a layer deeper than that. I’m afraid of changing.

If I stop enjoying conventions, what’s next, that I stop being a part of anime fandom? And if that happens, who have I become? You may recall me having a similar identity crisis when I took on a part-time job as a web developer, putting my Otaku Journalism to the side. When you write in the same blog for six years, you (and everyone else) see your evolution as a person right out there in the open. And my biggest fear is that I’ll become somebody so different, so unrecognizable even to me that the title “Otaku Journalist” no longer fits.

I’m already a different person than I was when I discovered Katsucon seven years ago. Deciding not to go was a matter of summoning the bravery to acknowledge that—and the will not to see it as some sort of anime fan failing. It’s about seeing Katsucon for what it is: a yearly event, not a tool I use to grasp onto my identity. Skipping a year doesn’t mean I’ve unalterably changed as a person, just that it’s not one of my priorities right now. Just like that, I was at peace instead of anxious. Saturday evening, I scrolled through my Twitter and Instagram enjoying everyone’s photos, but never once wondering if I should be there, too. And at the same time, I felt the contact high from the thrill of anime con energy, and came up with some plans for next year’s Katsucon. Panels, reporting ideas. Projects I’m ready to dive into for Katsucon 2017 now that I’ve removed all the baggage of “making an appearance.” I broke out of some kind of mental prison in which Katsucon was something mandatory for me—and now I can’t wait to go back.

If you went to Katsucon, I’m sure you had a wonderful time (despite that electrical fire snafu). It’s one of my favorites for a reason. I hope to see you there next year.

Photo of the Gaylord National, where Katsucon is held, by David Clow

Otaku Links: Japanic and Nihorror

Otaku Links

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  • With my Japan trip about a month away it’s time to Japanic! It’s my first time traveling internationally in eight years and I’m rusty. But this packing list and this one are two of the best I’ve found so far and are giving me a little bit of confidence that I can be ready.
  • The creators of Psycho-Pass teamed up with a consumer electronics company to make a super realistic transforming Dominator. Watch the demo and you tell me if you think it’s worth $700.
  • First Gurren Lagann, then Kill la Kill, and now… Space Patrol Luluco? Our first look at the surprisingly simple and cute new anime from Studio Trigger. HT Zoe!
  • When a Japanese TV personality had an affair with a married musician, he went on with his successful career while she took all the blame and saw her career destroyed. And this is 2016. Looks like it’s not only idols who have to keep spotless personas in order to find professional success.
  • While we’re on the subject of me, a reader asked me for an email script for reaching out to an anime scholar he wanted to interview, and while I was writing my suggestion I thought, wait, haven’t I done this before? So I halved the price of Niche Journalism Workbook to $5.
  • And finally, this vaguely accurate History of Japan video is the seapunk primer I never knew I wanted.

Photo by Osamu Kaneko

5 signs getting paid to watch anime isn’t for you

Uncategorized

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It’s been a busy week here in Laurenland. There’s the affiliate guide I just finished plus some new client work on top of my usual responsibilities, like my web developer job, writing for Forbes, studying Japanese, and doing my weekly streaming reviews. And even that’s on top of stuff everyone has to do, like laundry and cooking dinner and commuting.

In the midst of planning how I’d getting it all done, I got an email from Zac at Anime News Network asking if I could review the new Zeta Gundam Blu-ray release. We try to review shows with a very quick turnaround to make things timely for readers, so I knew this meant that I’d be aiming to, on top of everything else, watch 2 hours of Zeta every day.

“Sure!” I emailed back without a second thought.

Now, whether you think my week was hell or awesome says a lot about you. For many people, myself included, getting paid to watch anime is a dream come true. But the funny thing about dreams is that they never quite match up to the reality of the situation. No job is fun 100% of the time, and that means there are some un-fun parts of watching anime for a living, too.

I’ve blogged a lot about how to get paid to watch anime, but never why or why not to do it. Here’s a list of reasons that you might not want to pursue this line of work:

1) You don’t want to marathon shows at a moment’s notice.

Sites that publish anime reviews, like Anime News Network, have a duty to readers to deliver reviews in a timely fashion. That means the onus is on reviewers to watch anime in a timely fashion, too. You can’t watch something at a leisurely pace or “only when you have time.” And because anime releases in the West depend on translations and a whole slew of other contingencies, it’s not like reviewers can often get “early” review copies.

What’s more, we don’t have total control over when releases come out. I had Zeta on my calendar as releasing in March, but things went well and RightStuf released it early. That means my review needed to come out now—today, in fact! If that kind of schedule would simply not fit with your life, you’re going to be miserable reviewing anime for a living.

2) You only want to watch anime you personally enjoy.

Let’s transition to my Anime News Network Weekly Streaming Reviews. We review any show that readers like better than Naruto (really) and sometimes that’s not a very high bar. Take the winter season, which has been notably lackluster for good anime shows.

As a result, I’m reviewing one show I adore, another show that’s just so-so, and a third show that I’m convinced is pretty much garbage. Will I be watching all three of them to the end regardless? You bet! You can’t quit in the middle of a weekly streaming review. And sometimes shows can get a lot better (or worse) over time. And by the way, I almost always choose which anime I want to review, and sometimes, with just one episode as a preview, I choose poorly, (looking at you, Attack on Titan: Junior High). If I weren’t a reviewer I could see the error of my ways and drop a show, but I never drop a show I’m reviewing.

Could you spend your time watching shows you’re just not that into, and dedicate an hour weekly to writing 500 words on each of them anyway? If the answer is no, this isn’t for you.

3) You don’t like writing, or you’re not a fast writer.

Now about those 500 words. That’s my minimum for a weekly streaming review (for a show review it’s 1,000). Though I can get deadline extensions if I need them, generally I write those reviews three times a week whether I feel like it or not. There’s no time to wait for my muse to appear when I need to have a review out within 24 hours of the show airing.

When I was younger I used to be a slower writer and a bit of a perfectionist. But my former job with the Daily Dot, writing up to five posts a day, cured me of that. Writing for a living, whether about anime or otherwise, means treating the writing process as a job instead of an art. If that would ruin writing for you, you’re not going to have a good time.

4) You’re allergic to keeping a schedule.

Writing weekly reviews on a show means staying committed to that show’s schedule, whether it’s convenient for you or not. I’m currently reviewing Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans, which comes out on Saturday in Japan—and 4 AM Sunday my time. That means that by the time I wake up on Sunday, I’m already at a time disadvantage for getting my review done. And I have to do this every single Sunday while Orphans continues to air.

How does working on the weekend sound to you, even if it’s for anime reviewing? What about altering your schedule for twelve to 24 weeks at a time to do that work? If that sounds impossible, or simply unsustainable, this work might not be a good fit for you.

5) You wouldn’t be able to enjoy your hobby as your job.

I recently tweeted, “I have monetized everything I enjoy and now I don’t know how to relax.” What was going through my mind was that, if I’m going to watch anime, I really ought to review it; if I’m going to build Gunpla, I might as well document it for Gunpla 101; same goes with lighting a candle; and with writing for fun; or dabbling with web design. This was a joke tweet, because I’m a bit of a workaholic and mixing business and pleasure works for me. But I realize that for other people, it could be suffocating. Think carefully about whether knowing that there’s anime you are now obligated to watch would totally ruin it as a hobby for you.

If these five reasons apply to you, that’s not a judgement against you. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to watch anime for fun, end of story. It’s just best to figure it out now before you find yourself in an unenjoyable situation.

After reading this, do you still think getting paid to watch anime would be fun for you?

Photo via elderleaf

Otaku Links: One thing leads to another

Otaku Links

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  • When I first heard about the so-called “cosplay lawsuit,” I thought it was overblown. It’s about cheerleader uniforms, not costumes! However, here and here are two great articles that showed me just how likely the current suit is to have an effect on cosplay. HT Zoe!
  • Confessional articles are a huge blogging trend, so I guess it was only a matter of time before news sites industrialized them. Gawker found out that women’s site Bustle gives new writers an extremely personal survey to better help them share their most intimate stories online.
  • Christian anime blog Beneath the Tangles has a new logo. I love hearing about how other bloggers work behind the scenes, and I especially love the thought they put into the process.
  • Is it because I’m an American that I love United Kingdom accents so much? All I know is, this Tatami Galaxy Irish fandub is incredible. Ozu is basically a leprechaun anyway.

Screenshot via Tatami Galaxy