1. about

    So the thing on the sidebar is kind of melodramatic, but that’s basically the idea. So much anime that subscribes to the “moe aesthetic” gets derided as forgettable and vapid, but I don’t see how dozens of people shaping a cohesive narrative for three or more months straight could even *accomplish* the task of having literally-zero literary value.

    I’m by no stretch unique as far as anime blogs with the word “scholarly” in their about, so a clarification of my methodology is probably appropriate:

    1. My analyses will be, as a rule, limited to the scope of the show itself and the anime industry in general. Other blogs are connecting anime to outside history and higher literary theory with much more skill than I could hope to, and I just don’t have the background to do it well.
    2. Analysis will focus primarily on character development and *methods* of storytelling. This one’s more descriptive in nature: I won’t avoid other subjects consciously, I simply don’t often care about plots, and don’t have the technical skill in most cases to talk about the relevance of sound editing or animation to a show’s message.
    3. What I personally like or dislike will be either irrelevant or played-down as heavily as possible. My opinions of a given work will most likely *show up* often enough, but only as a framing device for the actually-relevant point to be made, or as a source of data for the effect of a given storytelling device. What I liked as evidence for what worked well, as opposed to what worked well as evidence for what I liked.