12 Days of Anime (2013) – Day 6 – 3 Year Anniversary and 500th Post

To think, on December 20, 2010, Avvesione’s Anime Blog was nothing more than a wild idea derived from my passion for anime and my desire to express it.  It may have been 0 days old and have 0 posts, but I knew this idea would grow into something special.  Today, on December 20, 2013, my anime blog has triumphed through 3 long years and amassed a total of 499 posts.  With this post commemorating the 3 Year Anniversary for Avvesione’s Anime Blog, it also marks a great, new milestone, being my 500^th post.  This is truly an exceptional moment for me and my anime blog.  Just trying to fathom all the time and anime and thinking and writing that occurred between these two time points is nothing short of remarkable.  Never did I imagine that my anime blog would ever make it this far.  And now, I wonder, where will it go from here.

As I’ve done with my two previous anniversary posts, I am using this opportunity to consolidate it with my 12 Days of Anime and review any significant lessons, mistakes or achievements that occurred during the year.  However, since this is an anniversary post and my 500^th post, I want to look back at something that has been with me since the beginning of this blog and is still a majority of the posts here.  And perhaps nothing is more notable than the disappearance of the individual anime episode posts that began with this blog.

What began as the only format of content on my blog, the individual posts were a staple and the only avenue I utilized in expressing my thoughts, reviews, opinions and critiques on the various anime I watched.  I would use these posts as a means of exploring a thought, an observation or belief that I assumed would be original or novel to readers, thus making my posts engaging or stimulating. The idea here was that each post would highlight something obscure or that would assist the reading in exploring an anime further.  Of course, this proved to be challenging to write after every episode of whatever anime I was blogging, but it became an exercise in testing my understanding and perception of these shows.  I enjoyed trying to find little details about the setting or the characters or the stories that I could extrapolate further or develop upon until it became a completed post.

However, I quickly began to yearn to write about more shows since there were a number of topics and subjects and ideas I had to forego since I was not blogging those shows.  It was then that I realized I could make do a format where I cover every show I’m watching weekly with a brief mention or idea or quip that I could document to fulfill this aspiration.  As the seasons progressed, my time became more restricted and the number of individual anime I could follow were steadily reduced.  It even came to the point where some episodes were several days late, a week late or even skipped.

I began to realize I was not lucky enough to do both formats of writing and was faced with a decision to make: continue the individual posts and scale back on the weekly posts or to marry the two together and expand the weekly posts and write in greater detail.  Based on the amount of time these posts took and the amount of views that these posts received, I decided on the latter.  It was a difficult decision but one that needed to be made.  Although I’d like to go back and do the individual posts again, I realize I do not have the necessary time to steadily write these posts at the quality and length I hold myself by.  And because of such, the individual anime posts disappeared.

The last individual anime post I made (for the time being) was the finale of the first season of Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic.  The last paragraph is a very sentimental section to me and mirrors what I’ve written in this post.

To me, this post means more to me than the last individual anime post in the foreseeable future.  To me, this post symbolizes two characteristic of blogging an anime that pushed me in this direction, one being the perturbing lateness with my posts and the frustration that stems from it.  You see, I had the idea and theme for this post since midway through the very first episode of Magi.  However, instead of writing on this subject for the very first episode, I decided to save the topic for a later episode, one that’d be more appropriate and for one that’d be on time.  As the episodes rolled on, I began to juggle more on my schedule and subsequently, I began to struggle finding time to watch anime, let alone write about it.  Trying to watch over a dozen anime each season and write about them, even something as simple as a paragraph or two proved to be more challenging now than it was last year or even a few months ago.  And when I did find the time, I often found I was neither in the mood to watch or write about anime.  It had arrived at the point where I began to rationalize that I didn’t have the time in me to write individual posts like these anymore without sacrificing quality or value.  I do wish I could return to this format and style of blogging since it allows me to do develop ideas much better than my weekly posts, especially when exploring themes, explaining my opinions, and grasping certain practices and styles of anime and storytelling in general.  If you look back at the two-and-a-quarter years of which I have done these individual posts, you’ll see how my understanding, my writing, my voice and my appreciation for anime has evolved over these years from just this blog and these shows alone.  But it also represents a period of which I had more free-time than I do now which is why these posts are going to halt for now.  So when I think back to this post and this topic on ‘the romance of adventure in Magi’, I’ll always think of it more as the post that symbolizes what I want to do with blogging and the reality that I just can’t do it right now.

I did make an exception to this when I wrote about the final chapter of the Needless manga (spoilers), but that was it.  These two were the last two individual posts I’ve written and it seems like I won’t be able to write in this format again for the foreseeable future.  I do hope to return to this style again one day.  I also want to explore new formats and new style of content, too, in order to provide some diversity to this blog beyond the weekly posts.  Since this is an anniversary post, maybe I will look back here from December 20, 2014 and appreciate what I was able to do in this next calendar year.