I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was probably going to cut out the weekly/episodic blogging of anime and replace it with something else. I figure it’s worth explaining why, and what’s to come.

My original goal in starting this blog was just to see if I could do one after being a deadline-averse backseat driver while scanning some King Golf and writing for the infancy of what would become Shonenbeam. Now that I’ve been doing this for 10 months and 300+ entries, I’ve got a better idea of what I actually want this to be. My emerging goal is to gain and spread, where possible, insights on anime and manga.* There are plenty of ways to go about mission prime; music/scene analysis, plain old reviews, or collecting and analyzing any of a hundred different kinds of data. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in working on these episodic entries, it’s that (at least in my case) they’re just about the worst way to gain insights on a show. While there are definitely anime worth episode-by-episode commentary and individual episodes of anime worth 1000-plus-word writeups, by and large episodic commentary is too quick, too basic. I’ve been trying to get away from this, but every episodic entry of mine I reread feel like bullet points in sentence form. Really understanding a single episode of anime that’s good enough to be worth writing about takes at least two viewings, and episodes that notable are fairly rare.

Worse, there’s the issue of opportunity cost. Episodic entries are a deadline factory and a time sink that keeps me from doing actual analytical legwork and kneecaps the parts of the blog I enjoy doing. This fall, I had half a review each for roaring mid-major Outbreak Company and undropped/sneaky likable Gingitsune and never finished either. I haven’t even written a review for Touch yet, and I finished that over 4 months ago! I can write 400 words a week on Space Dandy, but would the fragmented series of entries ultimately read better than the same (or even a lesser) wordcount in a focused review? Longer-form analysis is the stuff I’m leaving on the table when I choose trend-of-the-day subject matter, and I’m going to switch gears a bit and do my best to flip that tradeoff in the coming months. I’ll still be covering first episodes and doing midseason/dropped updates,** but that’s about all the coverage newer seasons will be getting. I hope y’all enjoy it.

*Failing that, goal number 2 is to blindly hype the fun parts of it.

**See above note.