Hi folks! As with a couple other things I’ve written lately this is less an article and more of a PSA, though it’s a bit more involved than some of the others I’ve put up recently.

Basically, now that all of my material for the year’s end is written and published (capping with my end-of-year list from yesterday. Read that if you haven’t!) I wanted to talk about my plans for 2022. Mostly in terms of what you can expect from this blog on a week-by-week basis, but I’ll also briefly touch on some other stuff. Before I start, I do want to get out that I know my reader base (that’s y’all) are pretty understanding and few people, if anybody, expect me to be mechanically consistent 24/7-365.

Nonetheless, I do want to try to hold myself to a higher standard in the coming year. I don’t like to talk about this side of running the site because I feel it’s a bit tasteless, but it’s pertinent here; 2021 was the year I started genuinely making some decent money off Magic Planet Anime. I’m still not where I’d like to be in terms of income, and if I’m being perhaps way too frank, I can still only just barely take care of myself even with the assistance of my loved ones, but it’s a great start, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who’s donated any amount even once.

I bring all this up because part of the reason I want to hold myself to that higher standard is because I want to make you all feel like you’re actually paying for something worthwhile. I can’t realistically promise to always be the smartest or most insightful anime critic on the internet, but I can aim for honesty, thoughtfulness, and consistency. Your donations over the past year have allowed me to do that, and I’m hoping I can deliver on that front even moreso in 2022.

So, with that out of the way, let’s talk plans.

The Future of Let’s Watch

Let’s Watch was one of the things I started on in 2021 that I was least confident in. Which, in hindsight, is pretty funny. It served as a replacement for my former work for GGA. Recap-breakdown-writeup-whatevers about an anime episode once a week, more or less. While it didn’t go perfectly, my takt op. recaps were some of the most engagement my site’s ever gotten. Obviously, I intend to continue doing these in 2022, since people evidently want to read them. But there is a change to take note of.

Most seasons, I will be covering two shows a week, not just one. One anime will be a seasonal Community Choice. You can find out more about the latter here (and get in a last-minute vote if you haven’t already. I plan to close the poll sometime shortly after the new year). The other will be whatever I happen to pick from the seasonal crop of anime I do First Impressions posts on. In the rare event that I can’t find anything I want to cover; I might run another poll or just stick to one show for that season. (I don’t expect this will happen terribly often, if ever, but it’s nice to have a contingency plan in place.)

Reviews in the Rearview?

Traditional Reviews have historically been a thing I focus on here. While I’m certainly never going to stop writing them here, they will be less of a focus going forward, especially in terms of writing them for seasonal anime. Aside from the fact that when I do write a traditional review, it will hopefully make it “mean” a bit more, there’re a couple of other reasons for this:

1. Everyone does reviews. When I write a review I’m competing with every user-written review on MyAnimeList and Anilist, dozens upon dozens of other blogs, and so on. They simply aren’t a good way to get new eyes on my site most of the time.
2. My ability to advertise reviews is very limited. I can do some amount of SEO magic, but there’s ultimately a limit on that. And since Anilist no longer allows me to advertise my site when I mirror reviews over there (a way I was able to get some users to follow me from that site to this one), I have even less incentive to review every seasonal anime I finish.
3. Seasonal coverage always competes with Youtube videos. This is the big one. I simply cannot compete with the pace and engagement that your average Youtube video on seasonal anime gets. In some cases (like my Let’s Watch column) it’s still enough that I’m willing to try anyway. But review posts on this blog are never going to get even a meaningful fraction of the views that, say, a Youtube video with a flashy thumbnail and a title like “The PROBLEM With takt op.Destiny!” is going to get. That’s just the nature of the landscape right now and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

What all of this boils down to is; I’ll be largely saving full, traditional reviews for either A) older anime, where there tends to be far less of a glut of competition, B) seasonals I have very strong feelings on, whether positive or negative, and C) movies, which brings us to our next subheading.

Monthly Movies & Manga

This is the big change. For most of this blog’s lifespan I’ve been very lax about getting “extra articles” out there. Stuff like my Monthly Movies column or my Manga Shelf column. I want to change that, because these are some of the projects here that I’m most passionate about, and they are the sort of thing that there is less of, so the field isn’t quite as crowded.

I want to do at least one Manga Shelf column or one Monthly Movies column a month. If I’m going at a good clip by mid-year and am feeling ambitious, I might up it to two. Consequently! If you’re a big anime film buff or read a ton of manga, feel free to toss recommendations my way, I’ll even credit you in the lead-in for any articles I write on them. (And for our purposes here, single-episode OVAs count as “movies.” I won’t tell anyone if you don’t, alright?)

The Front Lines March On

The Frontline Report, my honestly pretty stupidly-titled weekly writeup of whatever I happen to be thinking about at the time, is the column that will change the least going into 2022. I will still aim to write it once a week, although it’ll remain the column I’m most likely to suspend if I’m ill or something of that nature. The only real change here is that the specific day I publish the column on might change from season to season as different things will work better with my schedule.

That’s most of the specifics. I do have some more general goals, such as wanting to do some more collaborative stuff, and some longer-term ideas (I’d like to break the readership record I set here this past October, for instance.) Beyond that, though, that’s pretty much what 2022 is going to look like, barring some kind of unforeseen circumstance.

With all that laid out, I hope to see you all back here in the new year. I don’t have my plans for next season entirely set in stone yet, but it shouldn’t be too long into January before you start seeing me post here again.

Until then, anime fans, thank you for your support over the past wonderful two years of running this blog, and happy holidays. 🙂

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