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| Shin Sakura Wars... Hell yeah. |
Hello again, reader! Or maybe this is just hello. Either way, the moment that was all but guaranteed is here! I expected that I'd be doing an update post before I got to any actual content. It's just the way things are.... or maybe it's that I'm lazy and have a bad work ethic, and I just want to screw around and write about whatever instead of doing research. I mean, can you really blame me at a time like this? Tokyo Game Show wrapped a couple of days ago, and there's been plenty to sink my teeth into. And by so much, I mean I've literally just been thinking and talking about Sakura Wars nonstop since the gameplay livestream. I mean, the main thing I've been thinking about is how I really REALLY hope that those t-shirts and hoodies they were selling at the booth make it to the secondhand market. God, I really want that hoodie, so cool... But in the meantime, I've been blankly staring at the pieces of Sakura Wars merch that I've picked up over the course of this year, which I will show in the image gallery below (editor's note: you can't make galleries on Blogger, so there's that EDIT2: Guys, I'm pretty hyped, I figured out galleries on here!).
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| Real Model Shinguji Sakura - Real Model - 14 (SEGA). |
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| A poster for Sakura Wars 1 on Dreamcast. |
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| Some Sakura Wars 4 gashapon figures (I think). |
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| Sakura Wars TV anime mook with interviews 'n stuff. |
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As far as content that's actually coming soon to this blog, I've got a few things in the works. In the first post, I gave a really vague, obfuscated (vocab word of the week) explanation about what I was going to be writing about here. Since none of it is actually ready yet, I'll take this space to elaborate. The main series that I'll be doing is called "Otaku Culture Concepts Explained", which is exactly what it sounds like. There'll be obvious stuff like doujins, Comiket, Akihabara, maids, and such, but also more obscure topics like the history of late night anime, hobby magazines, and a four part piece on otaku music (which I'm really really excited to start working on, but sadly it is going to be a bit farther down the line.). In tangent with this series, I'll have three side series I'll be doing from time to time. The first one, I've labeled "Otaku Media/Retro Japanese Media Retrospectives", which will be me taking a look at media franchises that were popular with otaku circles over the years. The second one is "Otaku Media Creator Breakdowns", which will be looking at creators who either created landmark otaku staples, or came up through things like doujin circles. The third series, and my original motivation to start blogging again, is called "Otaku Portrayal in Otaku Media", which, as it sounds, will be a look at the different ways otaku culture (and more specifically, otaku themselves) has been portrayed in things like anime, manga, and games over the years. This would be the main series, except that there's actually not that many pieces of media that would warrant their own piece of writing, because a lot of media that features otaku characters either have them mostly as a background character, or, like in the case with a lot of isekai anime/manga/light novels, uses their otakuism as a vehicle for them to be cultural ambassadors. So what I'm trying to say is that a lot of those types of shows would just be me writing the same sort of analysis over and over again, but there's a really good handful of media that really have something interesting to say about otaku, and I'm really excited to explore that with you guys. This is getting really long, so I'm going to put a paragraph break and a picture here.
Very cool stuff, I know. I'd been posting my high level catches for merch on Twitter, but like everything else, I got lazy and stopped doing them. I'm going to try to get back to doing them more regularly. I thought about just doing all my update posts here instead of Twitter, but ya know, I gotta do the whole "post some actual content on social media to grow an audience that will carry over to the actual meat and potatoes of your work" thing that all those social media influencers talk about. I mean the real reason I would rather post them on Twitter is to justify having a Twitter account other than retweeting funny Comiket cosplays twice a year. This is probably a super minority opinion, but I don't like to have accounts for things open if I don't post anything on them, it just feels like a waste of space to me. Which, I know, doesn't really make any sense, but hey.
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| Kamen Rider Gaim |
Alright, still with me? Great, good. So aside from all of that stuff, I have two sort of extra series that will be much more infrequent than the main series and the three sides. Essentially I have a big list of media that I'm chugging my way through over time. This is what that little "Currently Watching:" bit in my bios refers to. It's been on Cardcaptor Sakura for the longest damn time (I'm actually pretty sure it was still on CCS when I made my Twitter account). It includes a bunch of anime, manga, games, books, etc. So the first extra series will be a sort of review/discussion piece about the anime I finish, and the second will be a series of analysis pieces over this list of writings about anime/otaku that I'm trying to get through at some point. That second one might not make a whole lot of sense, but basically I have this list I made from a thread on 4chan's /jp/ board of books and various academic writings about otaku history and culture. So like, Beautiful Fighting Girl and Otaku: Japan's Database Animals and stuff like that is on it. So I'll be doing analysis pieces on those, and I'll especially be using that material in my series on Otaku in Otaku Media. So it'll be a little boring and dry to be honest, but I think it'll be a good tool to show people what all sort of academic resources are out there on this stuff, like if they wanted to do a school paper on it or something like that. I just know it's the type of thing I would have appreciated at that time. Like a SparkNotes for otaku culture research or something. Actually, there is one really good resource out there for that right now, it's the
Anime and Manga Studies blog (that's a clickable link for it, heeeey), I recommend you go check them out if you're interested in that kind of thing.
Well, that's pretty much all for the content thing. I have some bits and pieces I plan to do on Twitter, so look out for those as well. They will just be little fun things I'm interested, like those rare merch things I'd done before (editor's note: and actually already in this post, whoops), but stuff like noting character and series birthdays and fun shit I like like that. It'll be great. Also, I need to replace the header for the blog... I just used the picture that's up there now because my old blog also had that header, but it doesn't match the header on my Twitter and YouTube at all, so... yeah. It's not even my bookcase, it's just a picture from one of the Japanese Photography threads on /jp/. A really great image, I think, but at the very least I should replace with a picture of my own bookcase, which, while not quite as lavish, is still pretty nice I think. And I think that'll mostly be it from me for now. I'll go back through this and clean up the spelling/grammar errors and what not... gotta add a lot of that stuff to spellcheck though, because "otakuism" actually is correct, thank you very much. I guess if you want to know what I'm up to generally around the web...well, I do a lot of different things in a lot of different places, but for this stuff, I'm obviously on YouTube and Twitter, so that's the best place to hit me up, but also if you recognize my writing style on /jp/ or /m/, then feel free to say hi I guess... I don't really use a trip or anything, but hey. Also, I just remembered that I needed to mention this. I run a playlist on YouTube of old otaku video things, so like TV interviews, vlogs, commercials, stuff like that. I'm also personally archiving all of them, so if you find any stuff like that around online, then please send me a link to it so I can archive it and add it to the playlist, and if it's not on YouTube, that's also OK since I can throw a copy up. So yeah, there's that. And that's actually everything. I don't know when the first "real" post will be out, but I'm going to make a series effort to have it out by the end of the month. So see ya then!
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