Writing For the Culture
How I changed my view on anime content
Tonight I published my first scripted anime analysis video in quite a while, and I wanted to analyze the elements of my approach which might illuminate what I consider to be the difference between this and the videos I used to make (besides the ones still up on the channel) stylistically.
In a presentation by KRS-1, the legendary hip-hop emcee explains the difference between “rappers" and “emcees.” A rapper is someone talking about themselves and their perspective, while an emcee is a storyteller drawing on many perspectives to create something that can be useful to others.
For much of my career, I have alternately been deliberately a rapper, and also wishing I were more of an emcee. After all, media criticism is an inherently egoistic endeavor, especially if you agree that there is no such thing as an objective quality standard--but that doesn't mean there isn't a way to encompass more perspective into writing about a show’s quality, or to write it in a way which is specifically in service of the audience.
Most of the videos I've kept up are on some level research projects and expositional about the things that make certain anime and their creators great--but you can best see the difference between my old writing and current approach by comparing my K-On A Loving Thesis videos (still up) against this new one.
The old videos almost slavishly attempt to follow my train if thought as I am having it--they are a stock-taking of my emotional reactions, and explanation of how they were arrived at over the course of rewatching the show, and they go on for something like an hour and a half. As a result, they are plagued with redundancy, awkwardly paced, and way too fixated on personal emotions and interpretations which were always bound to change as time went on. They lack the compartmentalization of thoughts needed to communicate efficiently and effectively, and are resultantly dizzying and somewhat confusing to listen to--the kinds of things that leave you tuning out and in as they go based on how exciting each section is.
Many of the points I made in that and other videos about the show, such as K-On: the ultimate adaptation (no longer up), are reframed here into something more tightly explanatory, without references to my personal emotions beyond what is implied in my opinions. There is also a heavy element of creator worship, and attempts to create a sense of historical context to place the series in for those who didn't get to experience it at the time it aired or see it's reputational shift in the English-speaking anime community.
If my videos have a good reason to exist, it is as a service to the people who love or want to know about the shows I discuss. Whereas much of what I made before was reactive to the community, or an attempt to affect the conversation in ways that would drive people to think more like me or learn to analyze anime for themselves, my new methodology is dedicated to simply servicing the viewer--giving them words and perspective into things they already care or are curious about, and then inviting them to come to their own conclusions or do their own investigation based on that information without injecting my own conclusions. Again, it's not that this was something I never did, but I think making a concerted effort to write in service of informing gives the videos a longer shelf-life, and is less subject to the whims of my changing emotions and interpretations. At least, that's the theory!