Life after Mai-Hime
Now that Mai-Hime has ended, I’m somewhat at a loss as to what to do with my anime blogging. To be honest, although I enjoy some of the new stuff this season, such as SPEED GRAPHER and Gokujyou Seitokai, I don’t really have any particular urge to write about or screen cap anything. I think when it comes to stuff I simply like, I’m pretty much a consumer; I only rave about what captures my obsessive fancies. So, I guess there’s not going to be any blogging on new stuff for a while.
To make up for lack of fresh useful content, I decided to compile a nanchatte list of Shizuru x Natsuki resources, mostly fanart and fanfic. I can’t describe how thrilled I am that this is a major anime getting some major fan coverage, and internationally to boot. We have a bunch of great English language fics, a load of absolutely awesome Japanese fanart, highly talented doujin comics by a Chinese artist, and even some nice one shot scenes in Thai!
The way I see things, the net has really started to come into its own for fandom. Forums all over allow some brilliant (and not so brilliant) discussions, plus specialized resource sites gather people of like interests. The only problem is that it’s pretty disorderly. I mean, 2ch threads just disappear into nowhere, and it’s pretty damn hard to track down sources for the material. I want to create a universal forum where people in all languages can gather and discuss, and whatever content they post gets indexed and stored for anyone to browse easily. Fanart is of course a major target, but doujin and fanfic also deserve some kind of ordered virtual library where fans can append translations onto each piece.
I want to make fan-created media not just available at a mouse-click, I want want to make anything and everything accessible across language boundaries – boundaries not just in the content itself, but boundaries that prevent people from hunting down great works simply because they are unable to navigate links and search results in a foreign language.
I think the key to this is a professionally created site with specific features aimed towards the perculiarities of anime/manga creative fandom. In fact, a doujinshi trading site is one of the ideas my company is bouncing around for when we have a cash and resource windfall (hah… as if that ever happens to IT companies…). If I could tie all these strings together into a business model that actually delivers some reasonable ROI, dang, I think I’d be able to die happy :P
Uh, that list of SxN resources, gotta wait.
