That old beast, The Aniblog Tourney, has started up for the second time. The aim is quite simple. Smash the egos of bloggers who get crushed under the weight of voters from well-established blogs who barely register the tourney’s existence. Actually the aim of the tourney is to provide a tool for people to discover new blogs in the form of a competition. This early on with a full 168 blogs, it can be a bit intimidating to jump in and start checking everyone out, but it will give you a good idea of the general standard of quality in anime blogging (ie not very high). If you don’t follow many blogs, or were barely even aware that there were this many, I might recommend leaving it for now and coming back a month later when the group stages come around. By then you should have a *cough* slightly higher quality selection of blogs to check out and possibly add to your reading list.

My blog is the last blog out of every single one in the tourney to actually get a chance to compete, being the very last group leader in the very final bracket. As one of the tourney admins, I’m not particularly bothered whether I do well or not, although I have to admit a potential rematch against Sea Slugs does sound appealing. However really I’d just like for people to visit, vote, and hopefully find new blogs that they like.

How far can curiosity take us? What does a single, absent-minded moment weigh? The decisions we wear can alter our lives in ways we can’t imagine. Bringing us to locales we never fathomed, consequences we never considered, love we never expected. Just a single moment, just a puddle of spit, and your life, too, could change, just like that. Tempted?

Well, maybe not quite. But for Akira Tsubaki, your average high school student who’s a bit of a sci-fi movie nerd, it’s not surprising that he decides to go for it. The mystery that Mikoto Urabe has to offer provides us a number of options to consider. Is she the source of the substance dependency? Or is it all in Tsubaki’s virgin psyche? Let us rule out the latter because, well as boys we’ve all been there… virgins and we didn’t turn into saliva junkies after our first kiss.

So in a sense, Mysterious Girlfriend X takes place in an idealized world. The elevation of not just sexual but emotional attraction to a unique physical response seems to speak to the uncertainty which can accompany a first love. This plays into the work’s larger themes regarding the ritualization of the taboo into the mundane. What society sees as strange behavior is realized in a sort of microculture containing just a few people, but is it valid to dismiss a culture merely out of an argument of numbers? As ritual becomes culture it becomes what society expects from normal humans.

Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga once wrote that our modern institutions are born out of a ritualization of basic human behavior. The centrality of drool in NazoKano deconstructs romance as standardized ritual, and, by association the standard notions of stereotyped romantic relationships in media in general are a target for critique. The general media perception is that anything beyond normal must come from characters who defy social norms. No normal person could be in that kind of twisted relationship. Here, we have a normal teenage boy entering into the most important relationship of his life in the most abnormal of beginnings. Urabe’s declaration of sexual intent jars the audience in its straightforward ripeness, as does Tsubaki’s ripping of his old crush’s photograph.

Both actions teem with an eccentric dramatic flair – and yet, seem natural in their own strange right. They over-brim with the budding sincerity of young love, the kind look that shone through Urabe’s eyes as the safety scissors stab-… No just kidding that didn’t really happen. But that does bring up largest mystery in my mind right now: what is with those scissors? Past the lol erodrool aspect the first ep of nazokano is actually pretty normal, and yet stands out from its genre peers with its bizarre and rather gut-turning use of metaphor.

Not that metaphors aren’t a staple of anime romcoms, the most obvious case being the nosebleed symbolising the rushing of blood to somewhere else. But the gushing of saliva to represent ‘extreme happiness’ is perhaps too obvious a metaphor for sexual excitement, but it’s not like the show is going for subtlety anyway. It reminds me of FLCL and KareKano which beat us over the head with their metaphors and ended up better thanks to it.

I suppose the old school aesthetic dovetails nicely with the occasionally seedy mood of the show, but said mood is often nullified by the extraneous amounts of sexual innuendos mainly perpetrated by the female lead. Most risque of all these situations has got to be, of course, Akira’s constant drinking of Mikoto’s drool is being played off as some kind of glorious, heart-fluttering moment in Akira’s life, reinforced by the recurrence of the subtle-like-a-badger-to-the-face flower and nectar imagery. Mysterious Girlfriend X’s grasp of subtlety is tenuous at best, and the drool-licking is a little icky, but its first episode is excellent.

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Confused? This is actually a group post compiled by 8C with writing from processr, SeHNNG, lvlln, emperorj, bitmap, Kylaran, bobbierob, R1CK_D0M, ghostlightning, vucubcaquix, uncreativecat and of course myself, where we only knew the last 10 words of what the previous author wrote. First person to pick out the 50 words in this that are mine gets a cookie.

The next Aniblog Tourney thing I’ll leave aside for now. Instead I feel like being a little bit meta and talking about how I perceive anime blogging has changed in the past year and a bit since the last tourney. Well, OK, I lied. I’m not being a little bit meta. I’m being very meta. You have been warned.

One of the biggest fronts to kick up in the past year was the rise of the warrior moe fans. It was less a charge up in defence and more a huddling together, afraid of critical thinking and throwing their hands up in delight at Infinite Stratos. They even set up a group called the ‘Moe Coalition’. Thankfully this trend appears to have died down, especially with Seanver’s Anime Blog kicking the bucket, which was not only their hangout, but the site that hosted the Moe Coalition homepage. Not that those people have all gone away, but organised anti-critical thinking in that form was a scary sight.

This group kicked up as a sort of response to the crowd who congregate around Colony Drop, who are still alive and kicking. They, thankfully, have become less abrasive and more insular since. If anything, they were already dying down in controversy when the tourney kicked off. The actual writing on their blog isn’t half bad, although the writers are still contractually obligated to force in spitting hatred and bile towards anime fans at least once per post. The main irony of their site still remains though. Proclaim that anime blogging sucks and that you are going to create a good anime blog, then the blog you proceed to create caters to only a very niche group and rigidly refuses to appeal to outsiders. Except now there’s the extra irony that the ‘Example Of The How To Make A Good Anime Blog’ now updates at the rate of one post every 2 months. They’re far too busy posting dumb stuff insecure people say on the internet, in one of the most pathetic cases of internet bullying.

When I started blogging, one of the big things sweeping the sphere were the academic editorial blogs, only for all of them to mysteriously die off in the space of 6 months. All that was left when the tourney was on were a few who only update once every 6 months, and We Remember Love. But, with blogs like SnippetTee and Altair and Vega popping up, I think these style blogs are due a revival. Personally, I find this kinds of blogs too dense and dull, but there is an audience for them. So long as they don’t make the same mistake of assuming their exist on a higher plane to everyone else, as the older academic editorial crowd seemed to think. Still, the rise of these style blogs makes me glad that 2DT hasn’t hung up his blogging cane for good. He is a man who Gets It. How to make those style of posts approachable and interesting to the layman. Although it might be nice to have your anime podcast be about actual anime.

Episodic blogging has never had it better. Some might say it’s over saturated, but I don’t see how that’s a problem. Back in the old days, episodic posts all seemed to stick to the same formula of screecaps, synopsis, impressions. It was 20 posts on Clannad episode whatever all looking the exact same. Finally it appears anime bloggers have grown out of that format. There is no longer an established format for how to do episodic bloggings, so almost every blog out there approaches it in a different manner. OK yes, some blogs like Sea Slugs still use the old format. But at least now not every blog’s episodics look similar, so that style is as much a difference as everyone else’s. Plus the perceived over-saturation means that you can be guaranteed someone is covering your favourite show of the season. If you’re the kind of twat who thinks episodic posts are rubbish, just pretend each post is titled “The Art Direction in Steins;Gate” or something, and pretend this person is writing an editorial where he just so happens to use the latest episode of a currently airing series to discuss some points about it.

I love Anime Nano, but could someone please create a suitable successor. Nano is bugged up the bum with the creator being rather indifferent towards anime as a whole. I have a lot of respect for Hung, and I’m sure running that website is far more difficult than I could imagine, but I really do think it’s time for a competitor to replace, or at least challenge, Nano. Mind you, trying to get people to adopt a new site like that is a difficult task. There are still plenty of people who use the Animeblogger Antenna. Damn, that site really needs to lie down in the grave and let itself be covered in dirt. Let the aniblogpshere evolve! It’s hard with dinosaurs like Animblogger still kicking.

Finally, the animeblogosphere is alive, kicking and quite pointedly Not Dying. I don’t pay as much attention to what new blogs are breaking in on the scene as I used to, but there are enough decent quality new blogs appearing of a fairly wide variety that I can safely say we’re fine for now. For good new blogs I’ve seen, I really like Anime New Modality’s People Who Shaped Anime post series. There’s something strangely amusing about Strawberry Milk’s MS Paint anime characters. Baka Laureate has some really interesting stories to tell. It can’t be helped is a big stinkin’ elitist like myself (although man, put yourself up on AnimeNano! At least, until the fabled successor to it appears). It’s evolving, albeit slowly, and I wish the useless products of the bygone ages would just drop off instead of sticking around uselessly like a metaphorical appendix, but it’s certainly a healthy place.

First, the self-imposed rules

1. I cannot write anything on twitter for a month from the 23rd February to 23rd March
2. Anything I would have written on twitter I must instead write inside this blog post
3. I can still visit twitter. However I obviously can’t @-reply anyone and I can’t either write these @-replies in this post nor do anything else do somehow reply to what they’re saying on twitter (except in emergencies)

Below this spoiler is the list of tweets I would have written over the course of the month. Fair warning: there’s a rather lot of them.

Show ▼

Findings

Judging by the amount of tweets I wrote in this post, my urge to use twitter didn’t diminish in any way. Any days where twitter activity either dropped or rose were merely to do whether I had anything to tweet about, not to do with my inactivity. My twitter etiquette dropped pretty quickly though, such as the use of hashtags or keeping to the 140 character limit.

What did change drastically over the course of this experiment was reading other peoples tweets. When I first left twitter, my urge to visit the site dropped instantly. I would go on perhaps once a day to check if I had any @-replies then not bother to read any older tweets. But by around 2/3rds of the way through the experiment, I started visiting twitter a lot more. The urge to @-reply people on twitter obviously increased massively and I found myself counting down the days which I could go back on the site.

My interaction with other anime blogs changed slightly too. Again, there was no obvious change in the first few weeks on the experiment, but come the 2/3rd way mark, I started to visit and comment on blogs I had never done so before, such as Metanorn and Sekijitsu. I also subscribed to a load of new anime blogs too. I guess the reasoning you could draw from here is that, with such little opportunities to interact with other anime folk on the internet, I started to search for more people to talk to.

Beyond subscribing to more anime blogs though, I didn’t necessarily do anything else to interact with more anime fans. I still don’t bother with IRC groups, nor did I start posting on any anime forums. A bunch of folk on twitter set up group anime viewings sessions over Skype back over Christmas, which I was technically one of the founders of, so I still interacted with some of the people on twitter over those Skype sessions. However I only go on once a week for shipping wars and Terribad anime (Karaoke sessions can go fuck a goat) and my involvement with the Skype sessions didn’t increase nor decrease over the course of the experiment.

For my own anime blog, it’s difficult to tell whether going on twitter changed how I approached blogging. I wasn’t any more nor less inclined to reply to all my commenters. Nor did twitter folk come flocking to the blog comment section when their saviour no longer graced them with his presence on twitter. The comments section remains a place mainly for those who don’t follow me on twitter at all. This does bring up the question of whether people who follow someone on twitter are therefore less likely to comment on an anime blog, but that comes with the mistaken assumption that those who follow you on twitter necessarily care about what you write on your blog.

There was a suggestion from a commenter that leaving twitter was like removing training weights, resulting in a massive improvement in my posts. Now I’m perfectly happy with the idea that my already glorious posts have somehow improved beyond their current standing, but I think it’s a mistake to suggest that this could be because I left twitter. One of the reasons for any apparent improvement is partly down to asking people on twitter who didn’t read my blog why they didn’t like it, which was hugely insightful and useful for helping me improve the quality of my posts (the advice was mainly to tone back on the rage and cynicism and do more tongue in cheek). Obviously though, if my post quality experiences a dip in the next few weeks, then perhaps we might be onto something here.

Ultimately the experiment is rather inconclusive. It would need a larger sample of people taking part for perhaps a greater amount of time to produce any theories with more weight to them. However I kinda hope people don’t do that, because I’d hate for as soon as I go back to twitter for everyone else to suddenly leave. What findings I’ve got suggest that a lack of interaction with a smaller group of people on twitter creates an insular atmosphere where I’m less likely to read more anime blogs. Despite following OVER 9000 people on twitter (actual number is 159), the number of people I @-reply with any regularity is closer to 25. There is also more inconclusive evidence that suggests that post quality possibly increases with the less time I spend on twitter.

In short, twitter creates an insular group of anime fans who become more interested in their small sphere than interacting or creating anything for a wider audience. Basically, the exact same thing stuff like IRC channels or closed forums have achieved in the past. Swings and roundabouts. History repeating itself.

So what better way to spend our time by pitting them against each other!

In 2008, a bunch of people, led by Impz from THAT Anime Blog, decided to set up the inaugural Anime Blog Awards. I started anime blogging just after it had ended so I didn’t really know much about it, but I did read the posts about the event. Posts pre the event occurring were quite excited about the thing, but those after the event seemed far from pleased. Many didn’t seem to even know who had won each award. There was obviously some drama, it was labled as just a chance for the big boys to pat each other on the back. I liked the idea of the awards, but there didn’t seem to be any plans to ressurect and improve the format. So I asked people on twitter about what had happened. Many of the people I talked seemed interested in some sort of knock out anime blog tournament. So, with quite a considerable amount of time on my hands, I went to AnimeNano and the now defunct AnimeBlips and drew up a list of all the anime blogs on their lists.

Not exactly the best planned procedure, was it now? It showed as well. Some of the complaints filed against the tourney when it set up were some legitimate concerns. Drama and trolling was inevitable, but we never had a set-in-stone method of dealing with them, which meant some of avoidable drama spiralled out of control (although crazy Tenchi Muyo fans is not something you can exactly plan for). It ran on for too long. It was a bit of a mistake to start the tourney without having consulted the people who ran the ABA’s 2 years back for advice on what went wrong with that, instead of drawing every conclusion from old blog posts that didn’t have the luxury of retrospect.

But the net result was definitely a positive, although often in ways I didn’t see happening. Instead of resulting in all the competing blogs with new readers, it gave a whole load of readers new blogs to read, which isn’t quite the same thing. I was wary about even allowing comments on the tourney, because most dorama could be avoided by closing comment. What it did allow was for readers to provide constructive criticism and discussion about the merits of various blogging methods, which really came as a massive surprise. This includes conversations that tread close to the dorama line, such as the merits of blogs like Colony Drop, because they still provided many different viewpoints to a style of blogging that a lot of people don’t like. Many people commented that it gave them a greater feel for what the aniblogosphere was like and made them feel like part of the sphere for a change. It also got more people to read Mecha Guignol, which is always a good thing.

Most of all, it was entertaining. It made the sphere a hell of an interesting place to watch for a while as blogs feigned ambivalence, only to change their tune and proclaim that, if they were in it, they might as well be in to win. It was endlessly entertaining to read the various call for votes posts, along with some of the surprising bitterness. It has forever warped to the way I see Tenchi Muyo. I don’t really have a moment to pick from the tourney though. The stress of running the thing made it all go by in a bit of a blur and thanks to RP and Mefloraine for helping out (along with our ninja admins that must not be named). I still plan to run the tourney again in two years time…wait, I mean 16 months time. Holy shit, that’s not that far away at all! Argh!!!

There is one train of thought that I feel I have to address though. It’s nothing about the show itself, that is all ultimately just opinions. Neither am I talking about how people phrase their arguments, despite some of the comments bringing to my attention the prevalence of people using ‘haters gonna hate’ as a legitimate counter-argument for criticism (no it’s not, and stop using it you idiots). What I want to address is the idea that this discussion across blogs in such a manner is a negative thing. That responding to each others’ posts in a manner directly disagrees with what they wrote is a negative thing. It absolutely is not. It’s by far the best thing anime blogs can do as a community. You don’t want everyone agreeing with each other in one happy circle of joy. You need dissenting opinions that show each side to the anime or subject in question. Between bloggers’ reactions to Endless Eight, the arguments over fanart recognition and other such incidents, I wish the aniblogsphere had more of this. That’s what really promotes critical thinking and challenges people to properly construct their posts when they know there are those out there who will disagree with them.

Sorry for those of you who only read this blog, but it’s well worth your time checking out other anime blogs and not just listening to my narrow view of the world. The blogroll on the sidebar is a good place to start, as is Anime Nano. Anyway, enough of that. Onto the actual episode.

Episode 5 was a step straight into melodrama central, with varying degrees of success. It can be divided up into 3 segments.

1. Doujinshi in the Rain
2. Hugging the Heart Cushion
3. Kyousuke becomes The Cart Driver

In between these 3 massive pieces of melodrama, there were much more subtle pieces of character development. I guess this comes down to me being a massive fan of subtly and not a fan of melodrama, but the quieter pieces were far better executed.

Take Doujinshi in the Rain. I’m not sure if this was intentional, but I had a massive grin on my face the entire way through, even breaking into laughter when Ayase said “we can’t be friends” in a deadly serious tone. It was so corny and handled in such a heavy handed way that it was impossible to keep a straight face. Hugging the Heart Cushion was handled quite considerably better, probably because of the lack of ‘mood-setting’ BGM and oppressive atmosphere. But it did serve that extra annoyance of trying to depict a realistic bro/sis relationship while remaining an imouto-complex otaku-pandering anime. The two simply do not mix and it’s frustrating and jarring to watch them try to fit in the two together.

But then you take some of the smaller aspects of the show, such as Kuroneko’s reaction to Kirino rejecting them as weidos, or the dad’s oddly tsundere attitude, or even Ayase’s surprisingly level reasoning as to why she didn’t approve of Kirino’s hobby, suddenly you realise how clever and well-written this show can be. I keep wanting to say this is a well-written show at at heart that insists on pandering to the otaku, but the opposite is really the case. This is a true otaku-pandering show at heart. It’s just the layers over it are of real high quality, so much so that the core otaku-fodder isn’t readily apparent and can be dismissed as misinterpretation in the earlier episodes. But nope, pre-season predictions were correct. I was led on by those who said it really wasn’t otaku pandering and my own wishful thinking. I shouldn’t have expected anything else from AIC.

In a way, coming to terms with this is a huge relief. I no longer find myself quite as frustrated at the glaring flaws in presentations of two themes that simply cannot exist simultaneously. It’s still annoying that it tries to play up the bro/sis relationship while also depicting Kirino as the ultimate otaku wet dream and having Kyousuke being the character they project themselves into. Her spiel about how she’s the absolute perfect girl but also happens to be an otaku would have been painful to watch if I hadn’t come to terms with this.

In short, I’ve given up on this series having real substance. ‘My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute’ is a show about an older brother baffled by the imouto complex depicted in Japanese literature, mainly when it comes to eroge and otaku products. However my original thoughts was that this would lead to the show disproving that older brothers don’t want to bone their younger sisters by depicting a relationship between two in an environment where so many signs tell them that they should fancy each other. Instead what we got is the anime showing us that having a tsundere little sister can be just as awesome as having the clingy type of little sister normally depicted. I don’t think this will ever turn into an incest anime directly, as in they will never actually admit they love each other or anything like that (the synopsis of the latest book that is flying about is just a tease to get people to buy the book expecting the cocktease relationship to finally boil over). We’ll get an anime in which the little sister is just as desirable, if not more, than those depicted in the eroge they play so far. It’s kind of depressing to think that Ore no Imouto thinks that it’s subverting the genre by changing the character archetype of the imouto character.

Oh, and Kyousuke the Cart Driver? Nicking this from ExecutiveOtaku who threw up this idea on twitter. Currently what Kyousuke is doing is gathering up the hate of the world in order to protect Kirino. Sound familiar? If Ore no Imouto has a Cart Driver ending, I will drop everything negative I’ve said about this show.

And since you’re visiting that site anyway, would you mind giving me a vote in my match-up? I’m up against the number 1 seed, the might of the Sea Slugs team. Now since I was the one who created the tourney it would be a total disaster if I somehow managed to beat them (oh great, more conspiracy theories flying at how the tourney was all one big scheme to drive traffic to my blog). I’m looking for something respectable, like a 52% — 48% loss, maybe taking the lead with a day left in the polls just to give them a scare.

Oh, and while you’re at it, vote in the other poll too. I really mean it when I say that there’s some real high quality blogs on display today.

Finally, since losing to Sea Slugs requires you to submit fanart of their mascot, I hired Stella to do it for me. Presenting Nama-ko~!

There’s the original burst in hits as the tourney hits the scene, followed by a sharp drop as those who never really had much interest in the tourney in the first place stop visiting. The core audience of the tourney will make up most of the hits, mainly consisting of bloggers and those who read anime blogs on a regular enough basis to already be fairly in tune with anime blogs in general. There will also be a few people who show up randomly but these will make up a small percentage of the people visiting. Also, these people might be slightly put off by the number of blogs present along with the lower quality of those blogs on display. Hence the extra hits these blogs are getting are mainly coming from those inside the sphere already. An echo-chamber, circle wank, whatever you want to call it, is what’s happening. Not that the other blogs competing in the first round aren’t getting readers from outside the sphere. The tourney has gotten hits from places well outside the sphere, but it’s mainly an echo-chamber.

However the important thing here is that (sorry if I hurt some feelings here) the tourney is genuinely voting forward the better blogs. Not those that are most known inside the sphere or those with big reputations, but on the genuine quality of the blogs in question. Many will point to the fact that it’s mainly been on first impressions, which I’ll get to later. With the second round beginning and the bigger name blogs competing, more people will start showing up because of how interesting the match ups are. It’s already clear that the more interesting the match up on that week is, the more people pay attention. The Colony Drop post is tribute to that, which is why I kinda want them to win. A lot of these people aren’t actually visiting the sites in question or even voting in the other poll, but enough are for it to make a difference. And again, the genuinely good blogs should continue to advance. Case point here would be Mecha-Guignol, a relatively unknown blogger whose popularity has suddenly increased thanks to the tourney. Just look at how much more comments he’s got on his latest post compared to the older ones. Ah, I remember when there was only about 5 people who ever commented on that blog~

The important point here is that the randomers visiting the tourney will now be faced with rounds with genuinely good blogs competing. Better yet, a lot of these blogs have been voted up on first impressions, which means the randomers with the typical Internet interest span of maybe 20 seconds will be impressed quickly. And they will too start to visit these blogs and become readers. And this shall continue as the rounds progress. More people will start to follow the tourney as the rounds progress because the quality of the blogs on display will also increase. What people tend to forget is how few people actively search out anime blogs to read. Those who follow none will start to read those who ranked in the semis and the final. Those who only read the big ones will start to follow some of the other high quality ones that have progressed further. Basically, if you’re someone reading this post and feel rather overwhelmed by the tourney, it might be better to wait for some of the later rounds.

I said it on the opening post. This tourney is to promote good blogs who aren’t maybe getting the attention they deserve. So far, people are voting up the blogs they genuinely think are better. The only problem I can see thus far is that blogs that may appeal to a specific audience are losing out, which is just something that is an inherent flaw with democracy anyway. I personally like to err on the side of originality when voting in the tourney (for example, I voted both Colony Drop and Anime Instrumentality because they both cover things almost no other blogs do). I really hope people do continue to vote for the actual blogs themselves and not based on friendships, random twitter campaigns or reputation that they were once a good blogger.

As for the question people really care about; who is going to win the thing, I’ve noticed a certain tendency to vote against episodic blogs, although pretty much all the big guns in the episodic blogging world got byes in the first round. Those thinking Random Curiosity will steamroll the thing are totally underestimating the backlash people will have to these types of blogs. I am a betting man though, so my guess would be for Sea Slugs to win the whole thing (they’re number one seed for a reason). I think it largely depends on how good the most recent posts are on the editorial blogs are when they are featured. What do you guys think?

::Note:: this is the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is that almost everyone stops caring after the first round and it becomes a total circle jerk between a select few

Of course, we all know whose side you’re going to be on, right~?