…yes, even if you’re a Japanese translator of the highest degree.

It’s a bit boring to keep discussing gender and politics whenever I want to discuss something deep, so let’s turn our attention to something a bit more broad – being able to rely on others.

What do I mean by this?

Well, we aren’t all Osamu Tezuka – most of us won’t crank out lots of series of our own manga or create our own anime studios (as much as we want to). By “relying on others”, I mean that one cannot participate in anime and manga fandom alone, no matter how much we try or think we are isolated, for that’s inherently built into the system of said fandom by both the creation and provision aspects. (Note these are rough groupings I came up with on the fly – people might have other names for these things and people might fall into multiple categories, depending on their experience.)

Creation

By “creation”, it’s not just the production of anime and manga itself – it’s also the creation of derivative works such as doujin…or say, even an analysis post like this one, which requires you already have some experience with the fandom to understand the argot I’m using.

Distribution

This is the licensors and other staff who are stuck somewhere in the middle of the process.

Provision

This is the group comprised of the translators, cleaners/letterers and editors for manga and the translators and video editors for anime, plus the other people like graphic designers who make pretty front covers – the people who you might never know the name of who interpret stuff for you and present it in a comprehensible, neat format.

Basically, if “no man is an island”, then it’s also true “no fan is an island”. It takes at least 2 to make a fandom, so please don’t go it alone.

Meta context: This is a hasty post brought out from the draft pile, as you can tell by its very short, “doesn’t say a lot of anything” nature. I’m writing this hasty apology at 2 am on the day this post is meant to come out, so I’m not happy with this post either, but I either cannot talk about relevant stuff I’m working on right now (due to an NDA) or am throwing my efforts elsewhere.

This is an unplanned announcement, but in terms of the blog, mentally I am not in the headspace to write, due to…well, not touching anime for at least a month, plus an outbreak of COVID in my extended family which is causing a lot of nasty emotions to surface as we all blame each other. (Notably, I am physically okay, since I was already infected with COVID a second time last month.)

TL;DR:

• I will probably need to step away from the blog from the time this goes live – I do not have a definite return date, but possibly until early May 2024. (Readership probably won’t suffer since it’s been down the drain, post-domain change.)
• I do not know if this will spell the end of the blog as I know it, since I have a strong memory of some months ago, of one of my aunts coming over while I worked on a blog post – currently a nasty memory – but it could.

Please keep seeking the magic,

(A sleep-deprived and apologetic) Aria.