Episode Commentary De-Emphisisization

After thinking a little on bateszi’s post, Thoughts on blogging; mass-market episodic anime blogging, I’ve decided to de-emphasis my episode commentary posts.

I have no problem with opinion and commentary on an episode-by-episode basis, and enjoy a good in-depth piece.

Back when I started writing my Petite Princess Yucie and Seven of Seven, I didn’t know anything about existing anime blogs. I simply wanted to write. I decided, “I’d better put in an episode summary as well, for anyone unfamiliar with the series. After write a number of entries like this (but without posting anything yet), I thought, “Why would I want to read commentary on a series I haven’t seen?” If I was interested in the commentary, I’d want to actually see for myself what I was reading on. I removed the episode summary parts, although for these two series, the summaries can still be seen in the structuring of the commentaries.

For other series, such as A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, it’s pure thoughts and commentary. Sure, I allude to what happens in the episode a little here and there as it pertains to moving from commentary on one piece to another, but that’s expected. After all, it’s hard to comment on something without pointing out what you’re commenting on. Rather than taking a little time out to say what happened, I explore what happened:

It’s only after we know everything we need to know about Saga’s personality, strictness, and social relations when the titular character, the Snow Fairy named Sugar, may be introduced. This pace pleased me, whereas other series might have started out with Saga and Sugar’s meeting within the first eight minutes, leaving little time to get to know anything about the characters individually.

When writing like this, it’s easy to write over ten paragraphs of insightful commentary. Or at least ten decent sized paragraphs of commentary.

Maybe I just like to speculate on where things will go, such as with Janggeum’s Dream:

And the young king, I keep wanting to refer to him as a prince due to his youth. If he’s king at such a young age, then something may have happened to his parents, leaving him orphaned and having to take his place as king earlier than normal. I don’t know anything about Korea’s past, or if they had castles and kings, so I don’t have any information to go on beyond what the series presents to me. It’s actually rather exciting in this way.

With Princess Tutu, I take it in a different direction, leaving out commentary and instead focusing on what music is used where:

Up until Mr. Cat’s entrance, “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” was probably the most recognized piece played during this AKT, but the piece heard here might be even more well known, at least in the USA. The piece associated with Mr. Cat is from Felix Mendelssohn’s piece, “Wedding March”, written for William Shakespeare’s play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.

Because of the special nature of those posts, commenting on them is enabled, whereas it’s often disabled on my episode commentaries. Actually, I also have something in mind for Cardcaptor Sakura episodes, and that will have comments enabled as well. I hope one day many people will participate in those posts.

De-emphasising the episode commentaries also removes all images from the front page of the site. Nice. I’m going to have to start putting random (but relevant) images in posts to spruce up the front page just a tiny bit. But not image for this post. It’s way after my bedtime.