Anime blogs of old

Anime blogging has been dead for a decade or more by now, but Anime Nano somehow still seems to be putting up activity. Not only that, but revisiting it led me to discover there's a new attempt now with AniBlogTracker.

There is a lot of surviving evidence, and memories, to remember that most anime blogs were crap. Colony Drop, in their usual aggrandizing way, once sorted anime blogs into three camps: Sukebe-Panda, ~SkyGazer~, and Panopticus Æternum. ~SkyGazer~ embodies the rote churn of episodic blogging, short on value but mostly an excuse to be a hub for post-episode chat. Panopticus Æternum was the aspiring critic in undergraduates or ambitious teenagers, usually flexing that they knew what a colloquialism was. All of them have expired not only because community has moved on to faster formats, but probably because the written word has diminishing celebrity overall, especially paired to visual mediums.

Even at the time, there were still people able to elevate anime blogging with a dignity that wasn't strictly purple prose. Below are just a few that I was able pull out of memory or that sit in the "defunct" folder on my feed reader. I can't honestly say if they all hold up in total as fondly as I do remember them, but I still attribute a lot of my ambition to blog about subculture to them, far past Google Reader's demise (how many "blogs" don't offer feeds anymore?) and a general period where blogging appears to be in stasis. I do say anime blogs, but there's some subculture variety in here.

Especially compared to the way audiences have scaled elsewhere, a lot of these blogs realistically never gathered any significant readership either, even during what could be considered anime blogging's peak. My own trials back then were half-hearted attempts to swoon the ~SkyGazer~, or desperately wanted to earn a seat at the Panopticus Æternum table. As I collect this list, many of the authors have vanished or have left little digital trace. Now that I've gotten over the 2-3 year hump of burst activity for a blog that usually ends with an announcement promising more posts soon, I don't feel the energy has dissipated entirely.