Somehow, I made it: Updates and Thoughts on Weekly Blogging

At last we’ve arrived at the epilogue.

It’s been a long but seriously enjoyable twelve weeks since I decided on a whim to cover Oregairu’s final season weekly. When I first started doing this thing, I knew that I’d be able to finish somehow but the quality of it all was very much up in the air. It’d been about 6-7 months since I’d last published anything on the site and just about as long since I had written anything of substance. The interim period was also some of the most stressful months of my life for a variety of reasons and I was really worried that I wouldn’t be the right headspace to tackle the show properly.

The quality of the posts themselves in my mind is still very questionable but all-in-all, I’m glad that I decided to go through with it. Even beyond the regular joy that came from seeing people read my stuff, I found a lot of comfort in having something that felt both productive and enjoyable to do that I could focus on for a couple days in a week, which was a side effect that I really didn’t expect. Who would’ve guessed that in this year of never-ending horrible surprises, having something to look forward in a week would do wonders for the mind.

All that aside, I came out of this experience with a lot of feelings and thoughts about weekly blogging and aniblogging as a whole. And so, this post is mostly going to be me dumping all of them, hopefully coherently, into one place.

To start, I really didn’t know where to start with my posts. I thought that I was fairly familiar with the format of reviews from all of the posts that I’ve read since my days as a simple ani-blog fan but the variety of ways that everyone uniquely tackled “the episodic review” threw me for a loop. I needed to decide on whether or not to assume knowledge about the episode, whether or not to summarize the events of the episode, and to decide on what exactly to focus on. A long time ago, I wrote about my desire to write about shows while unfortunately having little useful background to provide extra insight and things have not significantly changed since then. So, this “thing to focus on” was still a very big question mark in my mind right up until the airing of the first episode.

Luckily for me, Oregairu was and has always been the kind of show that really didn’t like to tell the audience directly all that was going on and so the decision was pretty easy. I decided to make the posts a sort of structured version of episodic notes on the series. I ran through the events of each episode pointing out interesting bits and generally trying to explain things to myself. It made the weekly posts a lot easier to finish but I came out of almost all of them relatively unsatisfied with the amount of actual insight from my end in them. These write-ups were very different from my usual weirdly-tangential-to-the-show-in-question sort of posts and it felt like they existed just so that I’d be able to write a ‘regular’ post of mine later on in the year. It’s a feeling that I still very much have, and I completely expect to write something between now and the end of the year about the series.

This is a bit of a weird aside, but I was also secretly very relieved that a certain well-known ani-blogger I’ve been following since forever decided to hold off on writing or even watching this season until it was all done. Nick’s Oregairu reviews were some of my favorite pieces of writing from him and so I’m certain that I wouldn’t have even started if he was already covering the season weekly. That being said, he’s actually started to work through the episodes now and I’m really glad that I went through with this because I can compare notes now. I realize that being happy that I’m able to see if a writer I respect shared some of the feelings I felt for a show is really weird and geeky but that’s honestly how I feel so, here we are. On the topic of Nick, his Oregairu re-watch thread for the first two seasons alongside the many other threads for other shows that I’ve seen in the last few months really made it hit home for me that anime analysis has found a new place on Twitter. It feels like it’s been a really long time since I needed to click into someone’s site to read their thoughts or opinions about a show and it’s hard not to attribute this, at least partially, to the lack of blog posts I see now. I don’t know if this is truly the case but if it is, it’s a real shame. I’m still holding out on the hope though that annual end of year blogging event will bring at least a little bit of life back into the community.

And that just about does it for my assorted thoughts on blogging. This whole thing was a lot of fun and I feel like I’ll be at a loss on what to do starting next week. We’re also just about a month away from the 4^th anniversary of this blog which is a fact that I realized at the start of the writing of this post and I am still reeling at the thought. I likely won’t be doing anything to celebrate (including writing anything) but it’s a crazy thing that I’ve been doing this for so long now. We’re almost at twice age of the average ani-blog now and I remember mentioning that very fact in my 1 year post as if it were yesterday.

Anyways, I’ve been rambling for way too long and there’s basically been no updates despite the title. I’ve been mostly good, and I suspect I’ll be back in December at the latest. I don’t know when I’ll break my streak in participating in the 12 days of Anime but I don’t think this year will be it. But who knows what else 2020 will bring.

Thanks as always for keeping up with little old me and I really hope that all of you, my dear readers, have been well. Let’s see if we can get through the remaining sixth of this year intact.

Thanks for reading,

Carriage.