Found this over Twitter:
Working!! seems to be the latest victim of some bloggers who delight in harshly criticizing certain animes. Since I’m relatively new to this world, I didn’t really notice this trend until last year, when I saw that suddenly many bloggers were making fun and criticizing the anime Kampfer – I almost decided not to watch it, but something caught my attention. That was that in a very short span of time, several blogs had panned it, often in a similar style and only after watching one episode. Of course, after watching it I realized it wasn’t half as bad as they said it was. In my old blog I termed this the “wolf pack mentality” of some bloggers.
Here we should make a distinction between not liking an anime and bullying. It’s fine if you don’t like K-ON or Working! or Kampfer and write about that. You comment why you don’t like it, fine. However, many people just enjoy bullying both the show and its viewers. It appears that certain blogs exist with the sole purpose of criticizing shows all the time, and I wonder why those people watch shows they don’t like – is it only so they have material to criticize? And if you only watched a couple of episodes and then dropped it, why keep talking over and over about it?
In fact, this is related to elitism. You don’t gain respect -that is, you don’t look like you have good taste- if you don’t criticize a show every week. Elitism, criticism and taste equating that there are some shows, especially popular ones, that you must criticize just for the sake of building and maintaining a reputation. I dealt with this in another essay.
Personally I’ve been trying to avoid this, to actually look positive, ever since I started this blog. There is a scene in Aria the Origination where Alice-chan is talking with Alicia-san and she asks why Alicia never gets angry when Akari (or even Aria-shachou) makes a mistake.
I want to do something like that. I prefer to focus on the positive qualities of any show I follow – it doesn’t mean I won’t say I didn’t like something, but I won’t insist on that, I don’t want some black aura coming out of my blog. And if I don’t really like a show, I will just quietly drop it, maybe comment why I dropped it, and end of the story. For example, Queen’s Blade. I dropped it, I didn’t like it. Should I make fun of it -and its viewers- every week?
Source: My extended anime “tweets”
QFT’ed.
This is why when people ask me about Omamori Himari or Negima anime… OH WAIT THEY DON’T EXIST.
