A moment of introspection, if you please. [Cue the spotlight.]
I read a very interesting blog post called “The Two-year Death and History Repeating Itself in the Aniblogsphere” recently and it ushered in a legion of thoughts about blogging, anime`, and human motivation. First, it does seem that there’s a lot of churn in the anime` blogging world — not that I regularly read any anime` blogs — and that’s probably because there’s a lot of churn in the anime` world.
With an community devoted to watching things (wow, do I make us sound shallow here or what), there’s probably not as much stickiness as there is for real-life communities (like say pencil and paper roleplaying). I.e. it’s easy — for some — to just lose interest in watching something and instead watch something else. If they are blogging about it, then they tend to have a little more invested, and thus the two-year death sentence. They last a bit longer.
So why would they last even two years? Writers are stubborn! I’m sure people also get into this whole swirl of commenting and virtual friendships and all that, none of which has ever felt very real to me. That’s because most of the people that find my stuff Loathe It With a Passion, so there’s never been any community there for me. Sure, I’ve written things with an eye for getting attention from time to time; who hasn’t? But nearly all of the comments that come my way are disdainful hateful rants, so I just don’t care about comments. Thus the policy on this site.
But back to the main point. Churn in any blogging arena is inevitable because no-one can stop you from creating a blog. So you’ll always have the shallow flame-outs who move on to do whatever is new; and I’m not advocating for stopping those people. Part of life is exploring and if you do something and learn it’s not your thing, hey, that’s valuable experience. I don’t think we should raise the bar so high that potential writers are scared of even trying.
Also, I don’t think that there should be some kind of built-in commitment. That two-year death sentence is the two-year cell phone contract. Why require people to write for two years? What if they get lupus or something? What if they make it big in singing or whatever else they like to do? Big picture here, writing about anime` is actually less important than some other things. (Haters, that’s your cue.)
Now I’m not saying people shouldn’t care about their writing or make it as good as they possibly can. They should. You should do your best and be open to getting better and growing and all that. But I just disdain hectoring, finger-wagging statements like “blogging is like a sport — you need to be committed”. Blah. I’d rather just reward the good than yell at people for churning out pages of suck. They don’t listen to that stuff anyways.
I’ve been at this for three and half years. So I’ve avoided the two-year die-off, even though it’s been hard from time to time to keep going. But I guess part of the endurance is that I don’t think of as keeping going, as though I were the last survivor on a battlefield, looking for some resting point, lumbering on through incredible amounts of pain. I just look at this blog as a place to capture occasional thoughts on series that I like or dislike, and hope that it helps others in the same boat. There’s no requirement for me to write X words a day here; there’s no requirement for me to cover every anime` series; there’s no requirement for me to deal with haters; I just write about what I’ve been watching and that’s that.
So in a weird way, OO has survived because it is timeless. Even the blog layout is set up that way — to be content-focused and not time-focused. I think that might be part of some bloggers’ problem. They look at the months they’ve been blogging, sigh, and then wonder what it’s all worth. Me, I look at the guides and such that I’ve written and think, hey, here’s a signpost for anyone else going this way, and I did a decent job of it. I’ve done something good.
As long as I’m able to do something good, then OO will exist.
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Oduza, Okasa 