Open House for Aniblog Tourney Voters

A visual representation of today's match. Except with three Setsunas.

Hello and welcome, voters coming from the Aniblog Tourney. There are soft drinks and cookies in the back.

The post you are reading right now was written more than a week ago on the 18th. The reason for this – and the reason my blog hasn’t had as many posts lately – is because I’m currently in the middle of finals. In fact, if you’re coming in as soon as this post is released, I should be sitting down and writing my last exam for the year as you’re reading this! Here’s hoping I come home to some good news. ^_^

I’ve got an About page up that gives information about the site, but I’ll give you the abridged version here. My name is Yerocha, and I’ve been a manga and anime fan for several years now. Shades of Grey is a blog I started where the main focus is on manga. The average post is done in response to chapters from the series I read, although rather than simply discussing the events of the chapter, the focus is on how those events relate to the series as a whole, or sometimes what they might mean for the future. There’s almost no recap of chapter events because it’s rare for the posts to require it.

Transitioning From Anime to Manga

There are a few different ways to get into reading manga series. If you’re like me, then you usually start with the print volumes or scans, but sometimes it’s possible to start a series another way. I’m talking, of course, about the times where you begin by watching the anime and switch over when it ends. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, or at least there had better not be considering the amount of times I’ve done it. Just looking at the series I’ve discussed here, there’s Princess Jellyfish, The World God Only Knows, Kimi ni Todoke, and to an extent One Piece, among others. Since I’m about to add three more to that list, I felt it was worth the time to look at how to deal with transitioning.

People Hit Each Other With Swords

Trained warriors getting hacked to pieces. It is Wednesday already?

If you’ve been around my blog for any real length of time, you probably know that I don’t discuss every manga chapter that comes out. Part of this is due to the time it would require to discuss absolutely everything, but mostly it’s because not every chapter contains something that I can discuss. My posts would get boring quickly if I tried to go over every little nuance of a scene that’s been stretched over several chapters. I admit there are times where I don’t blog about events I should *coughKenichicough* but mostly I find that quite often, there’s just nothing to say. What I’d like to talk about, though, is what happens at the peak of this phenomenon. What do you do with a series where there’s never anything to talk about?

That Anticlimax Was Rather Anticlimactic

Do you ever hear stories about series with terrible endings? As good as everything that came before was, sometimes the end can completely screw over everything that came before. The best example that comes to mind is the manga version of Usagi Drop, where the concept of family values from earlier on got sidelined for something considerably less wholesome (and the less you know about it, the better). For a long time, these were the kinds of stories I’d been hearing about the ending of Psyren, whose production run was tragically cut short. From the very beginning, I went into the series knowing that it would have a poor ending, but I was determined to enjoy it regardless. Just the other day I finally reached the end, and there’s only one thing I have to say.

That was your big anticlimax? 

The Problem with Madoka Magica

Not too long ago, I wrote a post discussing a few things I found irritating about many review series. One of those things was the mindless praise that some series end up getting. I mentioned how it hurt the review process by both reducing the amount of valuable information the viewer gets and bundling all viewers into a single group, which hurts no matter how you feel about the work. But there’s another thing that bothers me about this kind of praise, and that’s the effect it can have on anyone who doesn’t feel the same way.

Have you ever had a series that everyone around you enjoyed except for you? The reason you don’t like it could be anything, but it’s something that can’t easily be changed. It can make you feel annoyed or possibly disturbed when everyone else praises it for reasons that have nothing to do with you. I’ve seen it happen before, particularly when one review disagrees with the others and gets shunned for it.