New York Anime Fest 09: BLOGGER ROUNDTABLE OR "HOW DO I PROMOTE COLONY DROP"

How, indeed. How to go to an anime convention and promote a website that stands firmly against the most firmly held cartoon-related beliefs of nearly all of its attendees? After that panel, I still don't really know. But in any case, I brought fliers that only say the mean things people have said about us on the internet! At the start of the panel I went around the room handing these out and the reactions were interesting. A couple people laughed, someone asked me "did people actually say this stuff?" (they did) and one guy who I thought was saying yes was actually saying no, and insistently refused the flyer. Did he know us? Maybe so!

Let's get to the conditions of the panel: we were up against the Masquerade and the Evangelion movie. Looking out from the panel I saw a sea of red press badges, and when we did a show of hands, it turned out our crowd was composed almost entirely of other bloggers. Some old acquaintances of mine showed up, and they left fast. A lot of people left fast.

So then let's get straight to the issues, which we've talked about at length amongst ourselves since the panel. This was a first shot, so it was rocky. The panel itself was too big (ten people!), and it didn't really help that we all took turns answering questions: I think we got through three out of many, and when we were finished I felt like we'd only really finished our personal introductions. Blogging had only kind of entered the picture by the time we'd finished.

Around the end, we got to the kind of situation we hope to establish on these sites: a utopia where we aren't all broken up into cliques, where have a respectful discourse, tolerant of criticism, that we can all gain something from. Obviously Colony Drop took a couple of shots: the first was "well, you can't just make inflammatory posts and troll!", at which both the audience and the panelists' eyes went to me. Another time it was "you guys can take all the negativity and the rest of us cool kids will have all the productive discussion!" Ah, boy. I guess things like this are part of the job. If you can't read the air with CD, man, there's nothing I can do to help you. I didn't really get a chance to adequately explain (I told the crowd to "troll what you believe in" which doesn't quite say it), so I'll tell you this: we at CD aren't trolling-- we do essentially believe the stuff we say, I really do feel that way about Haruhi and Key-- but we aren't taking ourselves (or anime) overly seriously either. We're having fun. You should be too.

Speaking of which, here is my practical advice to the prospective anime blogger, which I regret not having gotten to in the panel (with the exception of "swear more so that you get hits from people looking for porn"):

Like I just said, have fun. If you aren't having fun, stop what you're doing and try something else. Write to entertain your audience, not to feel good about yourself. Try new things: don't stick yourself in the past, the present, the future, a genre, a weird otaku fetish, whatever. Just don't get stuck. There is always something interesting to post about: you just haven't thought of it yet. Blogging about blogging (like this post) is almost always a bad idea, because unless your audience is entirely bloggers, you will bore the hell out of them.

In any case, it was a good first try. I had a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next one of these: hopefully we'll get a little more done.

Comments

[Brack]

I should organise one of these for one of the UK cons (because no one else will...). Not that I know any of the other UK anime bloggers personally, but the last time someone tried something like this it was just one site telling you how to set up an anime site, and me trolling them them with Web 2.0 questions and claiming that only an idiot would try to run a forum (I was such an idiot). Everyone else just sat in silence.

[Robert Kelly]

We at CD aren't trolling-- we do essentially believe the stuff we say, I really do feel that way about Haruhi and Key-- but we aren't taking ourselves (or anime) overly seriously either. We're having fun. You should be too.

I would say this doesn't parse for me, but then I remembered you can't troll on your own blog that you write on.

Not that what was said about CD wasn't all valid, it was just worded badly.

[Sean]

I think what's most confusing about Colony Drop is that we're explicitly trying to have fun, and at the same time also presenting ideas (which we genuinely believe in) that often go against the common beliefs of the bloggin' fandom. As a result, people don't know what to make of it and assume we're trolling.

The answer, of course, is for people to lighten the fuck up and stop taking these cartoons so seriously, while at the same time having the balls to actually be critical. This won't happen anytime soon, though.

[Brack]

The problem I have with the bulk of anime blogging isn't so much that they take these cartoons so seriously, it's that they take them seriously in a way that has nothing to do with the fact they are cartoons.

They'd invariably be better off discussing visual novels, light novels or manga, because nothing they want to talk about has anything to do with animation. Because so much anime is adaptation, often there is little point discussing the story, only how the story is told. Like how so much comic blogging treats art as an afterthought, anime blogging often treats storyboarding, animation, direction and editing likewise.

The other major problems I have are a lack of research and idea of where the object of their otaku obsession falls in the grand scheme of things.

[Narutaki]

It certainly wasn't our most successful panel attempt but hey you have to start somewhere. If it happens again I have a feeling it will go a bit better.

[Superdeformed]

I like critical analysis of anything. I hated when my mom or other people would tell me to shut up, "it's just TV!"

Any asshole on the street can sit down and be entertained, it takes a whole other level of asshole to actually think about it.

[Brent P. Newhall]

Hey! I was the guy who refused your flyer. For what it's worth, I was already thoroughly familiar with Colony Drop, and didn't want another piece of paper to carry around. No offense meant; I just didn't need the flyer.

I think the main problem with Colony Drop's approach is that the reviews often come across as completely serious. It's hard to lighten up about a review when it appears to be the exact opposite of light. The purpose of the reviews and commentary on here is often unclear.