Archive for the ‘Review writing’ Category
I don’t understand how people can comment on anime they haven’t seen
April 1st, 2007 | 
Author: 
Here’s an interesting phenomenon that has, for various reasons, been brought to my attention: people commenting on anime series and episodes they haven’t seen. It’s something that really makes no sense to me, for reasons that are (I would have thought) obvious. People claim they are able to get enough of an understanding of a given anime that they are able to form opinions of it purely from screenshots, blog reviews, episode summaries, Youtube clips and comments in episodes, but claiming this really dismisses the fact that almost all of the impact of anime is emotional, and I consider it disrespectful to anime as a story-telling medium that people think that the act of watching it can be substituted by reviews, interpretations and analyses.
Posted in 
Writing soundtrack reviews is hard
So, I made the foolish “promise” to the staff that I’d somehow write a soundtrack review for Death Note’s (awesome) OST. Soundtracks is a bizarre section we have on our site. It’s the most neglected and I’d say far and away the toughest section to maintain. The link between these two postulates is obvious. But, with most anime series seeing one, often two, sometimes even more complementary soundtracks released, a site of our size (which, I’d approximate, manages to cover six or seven anime each season within a few months of their release, which I’d say is pretty good coverage considering our size) would have to demand at least one soundtrack review a month out of every one of our staff before we could even think about covering the soundtrack industry with the same comprehensiveness with which we do with anime. That might not sound terribly difficult until one tries to sit down and actually write a soundtrack review. Man, they are not easy things to write.
Objectivity, and the role of “bias” in review writing
So, it’s Sunday night and Roger Federer has just won the first slam (of what should be four) of the season. And I’m sitting in front of my computer trying to invent something to write about. See, I made this promise in my first post in this new blog to update weekly, and I only function properly if things are done regularly. So, earlier I chose Sunday night to be the weekly appointment for writing these entries. The problem: I have nothing to write about.