This fall I joined a running club. Every Thursday night, I go out on a three or four mile run in the dark with the occasional freezing rain pouring down. I come back exhausted, but I can’t stop smiling for the rest of the night.

My husband and my friends think I’ve gone a little crazy. But when I think about the encouragement of the other members, the high-fives and pats on the back, I realize I’ve finally found what I’ve been looking for after watching all this sports anime all year: a team.

At the beginning of the year, I blogged about how shows like Free!, Kuroko’s Basketball, Haikyuu!, and Yowamushi Pedal were actually getting me into shape. I can’t swim, play basketball, or even ride a bicycle very well, but I can run. Onoda, the scrawny nerd who stars in Yowapeda, was a huge inspiration to me. He doesn’t look athletic, but he has heart. Slight of build but passionate, sports anime main characters like Kuroko and Hinata follow this same personality recipe.

Growing up, I always thought that being a nerd was in opposition to being athletic. I ran JV Track & Field because I had friends in it, but I never tried all that hard to be fast. In fact, when I wasn’t fast, I felt justified in an odd way, like it proved I was a “true” nerd. Of course, personality traits aren’t so black and white as they felt in high school. Even as they continuously break the sound barrier with their speed and skill, what makes sports anime heroes so sympathetic are their oddball characteristics. From Midorima’s quirky obsession with horoscopes to Makishima’s terrible fashion sense to Tobio’s socially awkward small talk, sports anime wouldn’t be worth my time if weren’t rooting so hard for these losers.

The lesson here is that it’s difficult to resist categorizing people, including yourself. Running a blog called Otaku Journalist for five years, I’ve highlighted my otaku side online because doing fandom activities in real life makes great blog fodder. However, I have a lot of other interests. I enjoy hardware hacking, knitting, experimenting with makeup—and now, running.

You don’t hear about this stuff very much because it doesn’t fit in with the online perception I am trying to convey. With “otaku” and “journalist,” I already have two identities to manage! And I don’t plan on starting to cover my other hobbies more often, either. Instead, sports anime has encouraged me to live a more offline life, with hobbies I don’t feel compelled to document on my blog. My favorite sports anime characters don’t usually bring their non-sports activities to the competition, but these interests shine through their personalities anyway and make them more memorable no matter what they’re doing. I hope the same goes for me.

Screenshot via Kuroko’s Basketball. 

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This post is the third installment of The Twelve Days Of Anime, a blogging series in which anime fans write about shows that inspired or impressed on them this year. For all the posts in this series, visit my table of contents.

The first thing I thought of when I watched Shirobako was my little sister. (Yes, the one I explained 2D crushes to once upon a summer.) It’s not just that both she and Aoi are beautiful young women with insane driving skills. It’s that they’ve both been firmly set on a goal since college and have devoted their daily lives to achieving it.

For my sister, that was becoming a lawyer. An English and Spanish double major in college, my sister is a great communicator who wanted to use her skills in the realm of labor law, where competency in both languages is necessary. This year, she graduated school, passed the bar, got a prestigious position at a world famous law firm. From the outside it looks as if she’s been simply blessed with good luck, when in reality enormous effort went into her successes. I watched my sister devote her life to school, internships, and exam studies for three years. And after all that, she’s still usually at the office until seven at night.

Meanwhile, Aoi has a job any anime fan would covet. She is working as a production assistant at a major anime studio, a career that sounds amazing on the outside. But just like being related to my sister has offered me a glimpse into just how difficult her job is, Shirobako pulls back the curtain to show us how our anime sausage is really made, with impossible deadlines, overworked animators, and one crisis after another. And let’s not forget about that infamous chart that shows just how underpaid Aoi and her friends are!

Both Aoi and my sister’s experiences parallel one underlying lesson—the difference between a dream and a goal is a lot of hard work.

For me, this was 2014’s greatest lesson. You see, it’s always been my dream to be a published author, and this year I wrote three books—one self published, two traditional. The first of these is already out; the second is the cosplay one I keep talking about.

Dreaming about writing a book was easy and fun. Turning it into an actionable goal made me want to die. With non-traditional publishing, I dumped a ton of my own money into the process. Traditional publishing wasn’t much better, as I was consistently paid months after I did the work (which I’m learning is normal for low profile authors). The flat rates I was paid were far from glamorous, and edit after edit and proof after proof got boring and tedious. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful I got to write books this year, but it wasn’t a walk in the park!

Aoi is living her dream life, but she still has moments when she’s close to tears in her frustration. Dreaming is easy. Living the dream, the show teaches us, is not.

Screenshot via Shirobako.

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This post is the second installment of The Twelve Days Of Anime, a blogging series in which anime fans write about shows that inspired or impressed on them this year. For all the posts in this series, visit my table of contents.

Recently a friend of mine became interested in anime. She’d never seen anything but Studio Ghibli movies, so she went to me to ask for suggestions.

“I heard about this show, Kill La Kill, that was supposed to be pretty good,” she said.

“No! Not that! I mean, there’s so much else to watch first,” I stammered.

Kill La Kill is many things, but it is not the anime you show to mom and dad to demonstrate what a well adjusted adult you’ve become. It is not something you want the TSA to find in your carry-on at the airport. And it is certainly not an ideal “gateway” series for my anime-beginner friend.

I’m not saying that Kill La Kill isn’t much more nuanced than it looks on the surface. It’s one of the most important shows of the year for the depth of its message. My friends Charles Dunbar and Katriel Paige made a powerful academic case for Kill La Kill being based on the clash in Japanese 19th century history between eastern Shinto myths and western cultural reform.

And that’s only one interpretation. Earlier this year, I published Grant’s guest post on Kill La Kill and the way our families make us who we are. Later, Mike Rugnetta of the PBS Idea Channel saw it as an ill omen about the future of wearable technology.

It’s a very deep story open to many analyses—but it still centers around two girls who are frequently wearing little to no clothing while cutting peoples’ limbs off.

Loldwell had it right in a comic (top) about the difference between anime fans and outsiders watching the show. You can’t expect people to grasp any other message when a show is utterly and unapologetically sexually and violently explicit on the surface. Intentionally or not, Studio Trigger made a character design decision that severely limits Kill La Kill’s audience.

Kill La Kill blurs the lines between anime that’s designed to make you think and anime that’s meant to turn you on. A new fan asks me about it and I’m twelve again, standing in the local Blockbuster, trying to explain to my parents that anime isn’t porn even though the store groups tentacle sex and Pokémon together in one section labeled “Anime.” Usually when an especially sexual or violent anime comes out, you can tell people to ignore it. But Kill La Kill is too important to ignore. I don’t want to disparage it, but I don’t want it to be anyone’s first impression of what anime is.

I decided to start off my Twelve Days of Anime with Kill La Kill because it is the quintessential 2014 anime, the one we will remember. But not necessarily for purely positive reasons. It brought an adult-content anime into the spotlight, and with it my old feelings of defensiveness when called upon to explain what anime is all about.

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This post is the first installment of The Twelve Days Of Anime, a blogging series in which anime fans write about shows that inspired or impressed on them this year. For all the posts in this series, visit my table of contents.

It’s that time of year again! Welcome back to The Twelve Days of Anime. Popularized by Scamp of The Cart Driver, Twelve Days of Anime is a blogging meme in which we revisit twelve memorable moments from a year’s worth of anime watching around the holidays.

Last year, I diligently did all twelve days, but I didn’t really give my posts a place to live, which is a shame since I worked really hard on each of them. So I’m turning this post, on Twelve Days of Anime Eve, into a master table of contents. Watch this space!

Twelve Days of Anime 2014

Dec. 14 — Why Kill La Kill won’t be a gateway show

Dec. 15 — Shirobako, dreams, and goals

Dec. 16 — How sports anime made me more of myself

Dec. 17 — My Yowamushi Pedal confession

Dec. 18 — When anime sucks

Dec. 19 — Anime comfort food

Dec. 20 — Gundam Gundam Gundam

Dec. 21 — My favorite shows of 2014

Dec. 22 — My favorite female characters of 2014

Dec. 23 — My favorite male characters of 2014

Dec. 24 — A very special Christmas special

Dec. 25 — Another year of anime

Twelve Days of Anime 2013

Dec. 14 — How The Devil is a Part-Timer got me back to work

Dec. 15 — On watching Free! with straight men

Dec. 16 — Everybody loves Madarame

Dec. 17 — My little Kuroneko can’t pander like this!

Dec. 18 — Psycho Pass is a Dickian dystopia

Dec. 19 — Watamote and the awkward stage I don’t remember

Dec. 20 — My top five anime songs in 2013

Dec. 21 — My five favorite anime in 2013

Dec. 22 — My favorite female characters of 2013

Dec. 23 — My favorite male characters of 2013

Dec. 24 — Attack on Titan as a gateway drug

Dec. 25 — Burnout, what burnout? A year in anime consumption

Screenshot via Denki-gai no Honya-san