The Content Crunch of the Fall 2009 Anime Season, and what to do about it.

First of all, I’ve never really been able to cover anime seasons while they currently air because of my HSC, and now that that’s over, I am a Graduate lacking a Mrs. Robinson. For those of you who don’t know what I mean by that joke, rent The Graduate, it has Dustin Hoffmann in it for crying out loud. HE RULES.

What I’m trying to say is, there exist items in cultural history which are not anime related directly, or are anime related outside of the current zeitgeist. In short, try and experience a wider variety of culture like Kaioshin is doing here. He makes a good point that one’s local culture may well contain stuff that’s less embarassing than you think. For an example, my culture of Australia is now famous for video game and internet censorship, but it also has awesome stuff like Mad Max, the animated films of Adam Elliot, the supremely awesome The Man From Hong Kong which was filmed here, and of course we have stuff like… err… art exhibitions which are on in Sydney. Oh wait, also Wake In Fright and He Died With A Felafel In His Hand and Nick Cave are examples of Australian things which aren’t an embarrassment to our culture.

There are times I’ve wanted to talk about different things than anime like Hynavian occasionally does, but I don’t really have the same vibe as a hip and happening chick who happens to blog, I just come off as just another male nerd on the internet when I talk about these things. Yet at the same time, I struggle to comprehend why hikikomori should be idolised like digitalboy does sometimes. Yes, I sympathise with hikikomori because it’s a horrible, horrible suffering, but I don’t aspire to be one – rather it’s a life style I’d want to escape. But how do you escape it when you’re lonely and isolated, I can’t throw stones at digiboy because I live with my parents too, albeit for a very different reason I’d rather not discuss on the internet where my disorder is frowned upon.

But in the complete drought that is supposedly here during the Fall 2009 season, I think about how it’s already started and it’s whooshing past me, and by the time I can say anything of worth about any of the shows they have already finished and the cycle begins again. I’m so out of the loop over successive seasons where I was unable to blog that I feel lost and helpless… unable to fathom what I could write about that people would read. I have come to the point where everybody else is more experienced in the blogosphere than I am, and I’m lagging behind.

What do people come to read my blog for? I don’t have a clue, I’ve managed to struggle through a year of seasons without saying anything much about new shows, and I’ve paid for it in being isolated from everybody else in the sphere. It seems that I started this blog to reach out to people, and I never truly found the purpose of why I wanted to blog in the first place. Mostly to get friends, which I achieved to a lesser extent, but why do people read my blog? Most people don’t, and here’s why.

Like the Fall 2009 season, it seems like there’s a Content Crunch. The ‘crunch’ is the collective stress of trying to post stuff, anything, to try and be noticed by people. Because I don’t know what people want to read about, I’m no better than the anime studios which have allegedly failed to satisfy the anime fanbase. What do people come to read my blog for? I need to really provide content for people to continue reading me. I have varied interests and my style is mostly good, shame I haven’t really found any topics of interest in the sphere that really define what my blog is about.

Here are things I want my blog to be about:

1. Osamu Tezuka, and all things vintage that I manage to get my hands on.

There’s a man who died the year before I was born, and his name was Osamu Tezuka. He is not the only master of anime who ever lived – Miyazaki by comparison has developed his own style of Japanese animation for the current era – but Tezuka had a very specific mindset that only emerges out of very traumatic but life-changing historical circumstances: he witnessed the firebombing of Osaka, but the dude still wouldn’t give up hope in humanity. That’s what Tezuka’s works are really about, despite his depressing endings he never really gives up hope in humanity. Osamu Tezuka wouldn’t have spent hours looking at FAILBlog.com despairing at the lot of the human race, much of his work attempts to address why we are the way we are and how we can try just a little bit to improve it, even if we do fail. It’s trying at all which really defines who Tezuka is: he could have shot himself like Hemingway or Kurt Cobain did under his circumstances, but he lived till his old age still doing what he did best, drawing manga. And isn’t that really what we need as a role model for the children these days?

2. Lots of photography, anime figure reviews, manga reviews and anime DVD reviews.

Why just comment on content when you can create some yourself? I can’t draw for peanuts but I can write and I can take photographs. I’ve taken a fair bit of photos in the past month, some of which have to be extracted from my dead computer’s hard drive. I’ll show you those when I get the hard drive put in a new computer.

My computer, Reginald III the PC, in his death, was a significant setback for my blogging. For a while I felt shocked and hurt that fate would do this to me the week before my final HSC exam, but I had to roll with it. The computer is dead but my blog is still here, and I need to keep it going otherwise what was the point of it all? There’s a bit of manga I need to do more extensive editorials and reviews on, but right now I’m in mourning for a seven year old computer who really was just a hunk of junk, a machine. I have anime figures yet to be reviewed: lots of them. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe I want to share my collection with the likes of DancingQueen who has more figures than me but I hope we can swap figure photography tips. Also anime DVDs from Australia need to be reviewed.

3: The rest of the nerdy stuff I like (including Mudkips)

Here is a list of the nerdy non-anime stuff I like which I hope I can touch on in this blog and relate it somehow to anime regardless:

Video games: a sure winner for anime comparisons what with J-RPGs and the like.

Star Trek: I like this slightly better than Star Wars, but each to his own. Kirk in my opinion is better than Picard by default because I have never seen Picard in action. Only seen TOS.

Random comic books I like: Useful in understanding why manga is different in the first place, plus a Western perspective.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough, maybe in my next post I will briefly touch on some Epic Mail I recieved today…

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.