Critique us please

So it first star­ted with the Otaku Elim­in­a­tion game and the cri­ti­cism of anime blogs they decided to dis­trib­ute. While some people seemed to recoil at the pos­sib­il­ity of their writ­ing being cri­tiqued (usu­ally from the people whose writ­ing was in dire need of a kick up the hole fun­nily enough) most of the anib­log­sphere embraced the pro­spect of finally receiv­ing some con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism. How­ever, lets face it, the OEG isn’t exactly giv­ing won­der­ful advice on how to improve your blog, cer­tainly not while they’re in Danny Choo suck up gen­o­cide mode at the moment. So a man dan­ger­ously low on hit points decided that the best idea was to simply ask on the blog for con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism. This fol­lowed suit over at Anime² (::Edit:: and later over at Mikito­ism) so now over to Bok­uta­chi no Blog.

I invite you all to provide us with con­struct­ive criticism.

It doesn’t neces­sar­ily have to be about me either, it can be for any of the writers on the blog. Although I will say that none of us have any sort of cod­ing skills what­so­ever so the lay­out will have to stay the exact same.

Upcom­ing is a long, mean­der­ing ramble that you can ignore if you would just like to provide critique.

*********************************

I really don’t think this is the ideal way to provide con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism for the blog, or the anib­log­sphere in gen­eral. You’re instantly lim­it­ing your audi­ence to people who obvi­ously already read your blog and hence feel that your writ­ing stand­ard is up to scratch, obvi­ously oth­er­wise they wouldn’t be fol­low­ing you. This instantly lim­its the array of people provid­ing cri­tique. Then there’s the prob­lem of how dif­fi­cult it is to provide cri­ti­cism. Lets say you do have an idea of how a writer could improve. You’ve got to first over­come the huge men­tal bar­rier of ask­ing your­self what the hell gives you the right to give cri­tique. This can espe­cially ring true for non-bloggers and lurk­ers who might feel that, since this guy has been blog­ging for ages and you haven’t, he clearly knows bet­ter than you. Then there’s the dif­fi­culty of nat­ural human kind­ness. I know this is the inter­net where anonym­ity reigns true but to say some­thing truly harsh still takes quite an amount of men­tal strength. Even if you man­age to over­come all these men­tal block­ades you then have to deal with the prob­lem of try­ing to form your cri­tique into coher­ent eng­lish so the writer will under­stand what he feels you can improve on. This is much easier to do if you were just com­ment­ing on the design and lay­out of the blog but try­ing to com­ment one someones writ­ing is insanely dif­fi­cult and there’s a high chance you might just dive into vague sen­tences that mean noth­ing. I know this from per­sonal exper­i­ence with try­ing to provide cri­tique on Anime squared. I must have spent 10 minutes delib­er­at­ing over that comment.

Hence, I believe an Otaku Elim­in­a­tion Game styled blog is the ideal way to go. Lets face it, the OEG at the moment, while cer­tainly fun to watch and has opened my eyes to the extraordin­ary num­ber of Danny Choo suck ups there are, is hardly that far from a trolling site. But a troll that gets this much atten­tion gets it for a reason. It hits on a nerve. Would End­less Eight have had as much an effect if it wasn’t Haruhi who pulled it? The dvd sales are prov­ing exactly what people pre­dicted, that people would scoop up the same crap, even if every epis­ode was the same. The OEG hit on the fact that there is no form of con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism on the anib­log­sphere. People claim that the blogs are the greatest medium for uncensored opin­ion but there’s a hell of a dif­fer­ence between cen­sor­ship and someone help­ing improve your writ­ing skills.

So this OEG style anib­log cri­tiquing blog thing. Ideally, it would have between 10–20 people behind it, prefer­ably not all of them being blog­gers already, each with notice­ably dif­fer­ent tastes, to review the anib­log­sphere. Not an elim­in­a­tion game though. That’s noth­ing more than a com­pet­i­tion, which is just a step away from pat­ting the big boys on the back and telling them how mar­velous they are. That’s where the Anime  Blog Awards failed. It’s aim was to high­light great blogs that might not get enough atten­tion but I think there’s already plenty of ways these new blogs can be found. Some­thing I’ll do every few weeks is click on the most recently joined blogs on Animen­ano and take a look at each of them. Plus, isn’t that exactly what the inten­tion of a blogroll is? Telling every­one what blogs you think are worth vis­it­ing? So yeah, the OEG styled cri­tique blog. The pros of it are huge. Since these guys are in the are of provid­ing con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism, that pretty much renders all men­tal blocks obsol­ete and repeated cri­tiquing will mean they should develop a knack for doing it. Prac­tice makes per­fect. The more blogs they review, the bet­ter they get at provid­ing con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism. The gen­eral qual­ity of the anib­log­sphere increases and every­one is happy.

So why don’t you start one then instead of whinge­ing about it? First, this is not the ideal time to go start­ing a pro­ject like this. The OEG has still only begun and it’s still very much a ‘wait and see’ situ­ation going on. I’d argue that any pro­ject like this shouldn’t start until at least next year. The other thing is: I’m Scamp. I’m hardly a behemoth in the anib­log world. Bok­uta­chi no Blog appears on about 10 blogrolls. I’d love to be part of such a pro­ject but this post will hardly be the ral­ly­ing cry. But hope­fully we have enough influ­ence to at least put this idea in the back of peoples minds. If the OEG burns out, which I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance they will by the end of the year, then hope­fully some big­wig, or maybe a col­lec­tion of small­wigs, will remem­ber this post and get the pro­ject going.

*******************************

tl;dr Just provide cri­tique for now. It’s the sys­tem being cur­rently sug­ges­ted and we’re always open to ways that we could improve the blog.