Housekeeping- Awards, Nominations and Lists

Ain’t no one who cleans like Levi.

Now there’s more to life than just statistics, but a couple months back, WordPress informed me that Anime Monographia hit the 100,000 hit milestone. Now that’s small beans compared to the big-name aniblogs out there, but in a small, awkwardly shaped corner in mind, the aniblogger in me is dancing.

Another cause for celebration is that Anime Monographia’s been nominated for some cool blogger awards. Many thanks to frog-kun at Fantastic Memes and Fiddletwix at The Anime Madhouse for nominating me for the Sunshine/Liebster/Creative Blogger Awards.

I’ll answer the same questions Frog-kun presented on his blog and include 5 facts as per Fiddletwix’s nomination guidelines suggest.

1. To what degree do you separate your blog content and personal life, and why?

Unlike many bloggers, I actually do my best to keep my blog content and personal life fairly separate, which I do for two reasons: 1) because I’m a pretty private person IRL; 2) my personal life is not at all like an anime, so it’s not really that interesting.

That being said, blogging is a major source of stress relief so even if I don’t give you the nauseatingly mundane details of my day to day happenings in every post, my personality comes across strongly anyway.

2. If you could be anyone else, who would you be (real or fake)?

I like being me, so I can’t imagine wanting to be anyone else.

3. If you could be Liam Neeson in any movie he has been in, which movie would it be?

Who the hell is Liam Neeson–ohhh, he’s Qui-Gon in Phantom Menace. Guess that’s the only movie I’ve actually seen him in, except apparently he does Aslan’s voice in Chronicles of Narnia. So I guess, I would be Qui-Gon.

4. Are you frustrated how online streamers don’t release the material you want?

My tastes run mainstream and I live in North America so I fortunately haven’t had the problem of finding the stuff I want to watch. It’s very hard to find Yu-Gi-Oh! subbed episodes though, since very few (legal) streaming services offer it.

5. Do you think the mainstream West will ever understand Japanese media?

Probably not. Unless you actually go and live in Japan and immerse yourself in their culture, I think you’re fighting a difficult battle. I may have watched a ton of anime but that doesn’t mean that I understand it any better. As “Japanese” as anime can come across as, anime rarely presents an accurate representation of Japanese culture and society. And given the less than stellar track record of American adaptations of Japanese media, I don’t see live-action dramas or movies breaking in US markets either (might have better luck in Europe, yeah?)

Anime will always be a niche market in the West. So even while we have Pokemon, Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Attack on Titan making waves in the Western market, those waves are pretty limited. I mean, if Asian American actors can’t even get a decent foothold in the US, what makes you think foreign actors can?

And now for five facts about myself, in various shades of boring.

1. I have never won a single game of bingo. Never. Five year olds are better at bingo than I am.
2. I was really into dinosaurs when I was a kid. My childhood dream job was to become a paleontologist and discover a new raptor dinosaur. This was quickly followed by dreams to become President of the United States (my presidential platform was offer every person free spaghetti & meatballs and ice cream three days of the week), a conservation biologist (to save all the poor manatees), and to become a best-selling writer like J.K. Rowling.

3. I used to keep a Yu-Gi-Oh! card in my wallet. It was just a regular vanilla monster–not even a powerful one–but it was the first Yu-Gi-Oh! card I ever had and was given to me by a very good friend. Because I’m a sentimental guy, I used to carry it around me everywhere I went. Too bad the Heart of the Cards never seemed to work for me.

4. I can read really fast. One time for a class, I bought the wrong Virginia Woolf novel–I bought “Waves” instead of “To the Lighthouse” and only realized my mistake less than two hours before class. Because the class was seminar-style and I would have been totally screwed not even a minute in, I ran to the campus bookstore, purchased the paperwork, and sat there and read through the entire damn thing and literally finished the last page as I was walking through the classroom door.

5. I became infamous on my college’s archery team for having the most inconveniently timed equipment failures. Not that I had a shoddy set-up but something always went wrong in competition. I had my bowstring snap on me during a tournament and nearly punched myself in the face in the process. Another time my sight snapped off during a national archery tournament so I couldn’t see a thing. Because it was an elimination round, I couldn’t call out an official timeout and had to do a quick fix. I had to shoot pretty much by guess-timating and instinct–and hey, all my arrows managed to hit and somewhere around the bulls-eye anyway.

And here are the nominations. Apparently, I was supposed to pick 15-20 blogs…uh, I don’t think I even know that many but here are a few that have hopefully not received nominations yet:

Atelier Emily

Chromatic Aberration Everywhere (Josh, this is my attempt to stir you out of your hiatus)

Anime Commentary

Draggle’s Anime Blog

Standing on My Neck

Mage in a Barrel

And no, I did not just copy and paste some blogs from my blogroll…

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As a fairly non-frequent aniblogger, I don’t find myself being plagued by surges of guilt for not posting on a more regular and frequent basis. Not that I don’t love my readers (my affection is for you all is like a D-Wheel–fast, furious and  prone to crashes), it’s just that time is not something I wish I had more time of and writing is something that takes me a long time.

That doesn’t mean I won’t keep writing! One perk of an infrequent blogging schedule is that I have a lot of time to think about what I’d like to write and what readers may be interested in having covered. Judging from the hits, overwhelmingly, readers ultimately want…

…more children’s card games. (YES. Why am I not surprised?)

The Top Ten Duels: A Perfectly Scientific Analysis series was a project that was part sheer ambition and mostly tongue in cheek. There are a crapton of duels out there–why the hell not talk about which duels are worth watching (blasphemy! ALL duels are worth watching). But hey, what was solely intended to be a one time project suddenly mushroomed into a series, and now I’ve pretty much signed my life away with doing Top 10 duels for every YGO spinoff series.

Anything looks cooler on a motorcycle!

Does this mean a shift in focus for Anime Monographia? Of course not. YuGiOh, the reliable balm to my battered soul, is certainly not the only anime that will be covered. Despite my tendencies for rewatching old favorites, I do keep up with current airing anime (~5-7 titles per season), which will probably end up being covered in a 12 Days post.

Because I have a thing for lists, here’s a list of current & future project I have planned for the next couple of months. Granted, my fetish for large, ambitious posts is not going to improve my pacing much but I’ll do my best to intersperse these projects with smaller, more manageable ones.

Current/Ongoing  Projects

What Makes a King: Monarchical Representations in Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic– a five-part series examining the political, philosophical and social implications of having a monarchical system and the show’s ultimate criticisms of said system. The first four parts focus on Prince Alibaba of Balbadd, Princess Hakuei of Kou, Headmaster Mogamett of Magnostadt, and High Priestess Scheherazade of Reim. The last and final post will feature King Sinbad of Sindria.

So You Want to Read a Fanfic: A Beginner’s Guide to Finding High Quality Fanfiction – A four part guide to finding decent fanfiction, with a focus on anime fandoms. The first part discusses what good fanfiction should look like, and the latter three posts will offer strategies and tactics for navigating Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own, the two largest fanfiction hosting sites on the Internet.

Top Ten Yu-Gi-Oh! Duels: A Perfectly Scientific Analysis – So many duels, so little time. Be confident in jstorming’s perfectly scientific method of duel evaluation and check out the best of the best duels in each Yu-Gi-Oh! series. Duel Monsters and GX lists are up–a list featuring more card games (this time on motorcycles) is in the works. And if you bug him enough, you might be able to wrangle a Zexal list out of him too.

Planned/Future Projects

Girls Play Card Games Too! – As much love and awe is heaped on our Yutagonists, we all know that without our ladies, card games just wouldn’t be as fun.  A multiple-part post series analyzing the dueling prowess (and fails) and commentary on feminist and anti-feminist characterizations of selected Yu-Gi-Oh! girls, including Mai Valentine (Kujaku Mai), Alexis Rhodes (Tenjoin Asuka), and Akiza Izinsiki (Izayoi Aki).

Naruto Marathon Notes (tentative) – jstorming will max out his masochistic capacity by attempting to watch all 600+ episodes of Naruto & Naruto Shippuden episodes (fillers and all) and will be documenting his progress in the name of anime and science.

Homura’s Satanic Monologues (tentative) – A not-so-transparent attempt to merge my appreciation for Milton’s Paradise Lost–one of the best (and ambitious) poems of all time–with the fascinating, controversial masterpiece that is Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion.

12 Days of Anime – Because I’m so bad on posting about current/ongoing anime, this is my twelve-part guilt trip where I pick twelve anime that aired this year to talk about.