But early on, as everyone knows, it’s a tough road. You have to fight for the few readers that do become your core (and trust me, I appreciate you guys in a big way), you haven’t found your voice, and at the time there was a new aniblog popping onto Nano every three seconds. Early support is key, and though they may not have thought they were doing a lot, just commenting on posts was huge for me so I still remember two guys enough to thank them: one was CCY-Senpai (aka Canon these days), and because of that I’m still doing this goofy Christmas post series. The other was Kabitzin, who ran my favorite episodic blog dedicated to Shakugan no Shana.

So when I was finally selected to write for the venerable Sea Slugs! Anime Blog, I was pretty stoked. It was my first favorite place in the anihedron, and it remains the only purely-episodic blog I follow with any regularity. The “blogosphere’s water cooler,” as ghostlightning called it, is a fun place to write. It’s a challenge to maintain an entertaining style, and with greater popularity can come some really goofy comments, but it’s a good kind of challenge.

I was technically recruited last year, but my first official post, on the somewhat lackluster belly-service anime Yumekui Merry, was published on January 8th of this year; hands down, hitting that publish button was my top anime moment of 2011.

Thanks for reading all this self-indulgent slop, Merry Christmas to all of you and may your blogs not retire in 2012.

We Still Don’t Know The Name of That Flower We Saw That Day, or AnalHana for short, started as a decent-looking, sort of understated, tasteful look at what a tragedy could do to a group of friends. Sure, it was hard to really feel their separation when we were kind of just told “this is how it is,” but the execution was fairly tight.

Then, the wheels just started to fall off. The moment I can point to where I realized, “there is no subtlety left here at all” was probably the back room of the video store. And from there, I couldn’t not notice the ridiculosity of the shouting and crying. It all culminated in the final episode, for me one long moment of agape wonder. Menma the Friendly Ghost and her friends devolved into simple crying machines guaranteed to eke a reaction out of sensitive otaku, and boy did it. Just the wrong one. My tears flowed freely, alright, but I don’t think in the way that was intended.

It was also called confusing at the end, but honestly was it? It was actually about child molestation all along, which is really fucking disturbing but ultimately almost rescued it.

Was Fractale, in the end, supposed to be a musing on Azuma’s theories of “animal” attribute consumption, the replacement of character with chara-moe, and the loss of the “grand narrative” — just a failed attempt at it? Did Mari Okada finally drop the ball? Should Yamakan give it up? Who the hell knows. But that bizarre twist at the end actually made things feel a little more tied-together and conceptually smart than most people will ever give Fractale credit for. And they probably shouldn’t give it too much credit, but it proves to me that there’s sometimes a lot to think about even in the anime we laugh off because of other things that it does clumsily (which was, you know, pretty much everything in Fractale’s case).

Anime can’t hurt me with its melodrama the way it used to, so it takes something especially well-done — or maybe it’s just something specific? — to make it work. Whatever the case, Saori’s painful emotional self-torture delivered the goods, and sealed in Wandering Son’s solid ability to use really broken characters to illustrate some very common adolescent feelings that a lot of us can identify with. Here’s the post.

And that was only one of its many strengths. Wandering Son was easily one of the best anime of this year.

Now let’s get this thing licensed for physical release over here, shall we?

Oshii seems to have reached a hybrid of storytelling and visual impressionism that feels very natural, even if it’s probably somewhat uncomfortable to a lot of folks more familiar with traditional films. But I find that there are plenty of anime fans open to filmmakers like Lynch, or who are unafraid of something that’s “slow” or “weird” or “has no overt pantyshots.”

At any rate, there’s nothing like being absorbed into an atmospheric, moody, and thought-provoking piece of art cinema and then being presented with this scene.

I mean, Shinbo you could expect anything from. He helped turn an eroge into a magical girl franchise, so why wouldn’t he want to revisit the genre? Gen Urobuchi, well, it’s a lot tougher to imagine him doing something about girls magically saving the world with the power of friendship, but in the end, that’s kind of what he did, didn’t he? And it’s not like bad things and darkness never appear in magical girls’ worlds. So the idea of the pair doing straightforward mahou shoujo still doesn’t seem that bonkers.

But it doesn’t change the fact that we let out a collective gasp when they finally turned their cards over in episode three, at the climax of Mami’s fight with Charlotte.

Whether or not the writer was a caricature for Yamakan (that’s debatable information I never heard firsthand), his arrival marked a shift in Hanasaku Iroha from a quiet meditation on family and hard work in a lovely pastoral setting to… uh… to an anime.

In the end, Hanasaku Iroha let you have your cake and eat it to: It was still all of those things that caused the praise-heaping early on, but it was also a fanservice buffet. And even that, with its lack of pantyshots and falling-on-top-of humor, was of a pretty good caliber. But I still laugh when I think of that shift in perspective.s

But Kare Kano was something I finally got around to in 2011, and it really threw me off my game: Life went on hold for a minute as I finished it with the speed that I used to get through anime I loved. You know, when you just can’t stop? I don’t have that luxury anymore most of the time, but I somehow found it (I was probably sick, actually) and that was two great feelings in one: First, the one described in the post, and second, the feeling of compulsion to finish an anime series. It’s been a while, and I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the series comes from around the time I first started doing that…

I’ve never felt a strong predilection for moe, the whole nutbladder thing evades me, and I often find myself baffled at the ships and waifus that float around the blogs, tweets, and boards. Now I’m not stupid or sterile: I watched Evangelion just like everyone else (Asuka, if you must know), I think mini-Squid Girl is wicked cute, and who doesn’t love some Minmay? But I’m not a massive Kana Hanazawa fan, and I’ve never doubled over in moe-overload until this moment:

My brain… it broke. My mouth opened slowly and my hand rose to cover it. A magical moment, or something. Now I don’t know what to do. I’m part of the cancer killing anime.

Now the SCCSAV has expanded to live-watches of shoujo, classics, movies, and of course, Terribad. I rarely am able to participate, as Saturday evenings are my time to get out of the house for the most part and I’m a busy squid, but when I do it’s a riot. We drink, we laugh, we hate on terrible anime, we listen to Loudness, and we enjoy each other’s international accents. After all the dumbfuckery of the Internet and the silly arguments and whatnot that ensue, SCCSAV has been able to distill our fandom to its core and remind some of us why we all hang out on in our virtual cartoon club.