Keeping it Professional – This Week in Anime

More than that, though, all this does make me reflective, thinking about the challenges of earning a living with this craft alongside the often paradoxical nature of professionally evaluating so much material that I otherwise personally follow as a fan for “fun.”

Why not take a break from reviewing anime to get all navel-gazey and see if we can’t review the act of reviewing itself!

I’ve watched a lot of titles that I otherwise wouldn’t have checked out. Sometimes it works out well! Sometimes.

I feel for James and his creation of an actual novella in service of evaluating Momentary Lily. Even when not trying to make lemonade out of the lemoniest pablum assigned, doing enough of these things (I’ve written at least a thousand episode reviews, myself) means you sometimes need to break out of the routine now and then. It’s why I’m grateful for editorially encouraged decisions like going as nuts with my Deer Friend Nokotan reviews as I wish the show had gone with itself.

Editors who know their writers’ foibles and have long-running rapport with them are useful. Lynzee knows she can count on me to be the guy to talk about BanG Dream!, for instance. This also runs into how writing professionally is different from just writing about anime for fun on your blog: Editors are going to have, well, edits! It’s important to be receptive to editorial oversight and pay attention to how they tell you to shore up your style and approach. And also swear less, so you don’t upset the corporate overlords.

Still, that kind of discussion of disclaimers and disclosure is why there’s a reason we have to note if we, say, were provided codes for copies of games we review. Or going the extra way around and noting that I had to go source a physical copy of the third volume of Kamen Rider Kuuga just to confirm that Titan Comics hadn’t updated the translation from the earlier review copy as they said they would. Sometimes reviews get investigative.

Similarly, I tagged in to review the recent Lunar Remastered Collection because I was a fan who knew the PS1 versions of the Lunar games well, and could speak to the quality of the titular remastering efforts that were the main selling point of that set. Sometimes the “extra” work of a review is just knowing from your time as a fan to prepare you for looking at new iterations.

Writing criticism, compared to other articles, does necessitate being critical. It’s something I have to keep in mind alongside the people who make these products, in prompting a conversation about the work that’s done and how much of it is worth the audience’s time. Besides, keeping an open mind can be valuable—lord knows I had very different opinions on series like How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord, Onimai, and Gushing Over Magical Girls at their end compared to when I initially came at them. It’s important to be fair.

Still, I know the feeling of shifting from the watching-for-work experience. I’ve talked with previous TWIA alum Nicky about the niceness of letting ourselves watch anime without our fingers on the screencap button. I still like looking at things critically; it’s just the way I engage with media, and some of my writings about anime and video games on my old blog helped me land this gig in the first place. It’s still cool to watch something outside the anime wheelhouse like Severance or the original Total Recall and know that I’m not required to pump out a review or a column on it. A broader media diet can even help provide more context to inform my reviews in the future and—oh no! I was wrong, it’s all work after all!