Header image from Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. I haven’t finished it, so please no spoilers!

---

This is not a goodbye. At least not permanently, but things are going to be slowing down significantly here on Magic Planet Anime, and that very well might be permanent.

There are a lot of reasons for this, which we can broadly sort into the emotional and material. The former are more relevant to why any of you actually read this stuff, so let’s start there.

I have been, as I alluded to in last year’s Year-End Ranking article, very depressed for quite a long while now (we’ll get to why in a bit), and it’s seriously impacted my ability to keep up with seasonals on a simple schedule basis, and it’s also really dented my ability to follow even very simple plotlines of what I am watching. I get very bad “brain fog,” and it sucks. I frequently miss entire lines of dialogue and find myself having to rewind what I’m watching, etc. This has also dinged how much I actually enjoy these anime, because if I’m not keeping the plot straight I am having a much harder time parsing anything deeper than the literal goings-on. The haze is real, and it sucks.

By and large, I still like most anime I actually finish, but the amount of anime I do finish per season has been dropping for a while now, and even if I like a show, keeping up with it can feel like a chore because of all this. At this point, I’m a fair bit behind on even some shows I’ve really enjoyed this season, like Yohane the Parhelion. Instead, I’ve increasingly turned into one of those people who watches random old anime I hadn’t previously seen. (Not for nothing is my Devil Lady article one of the better things I’ve written recently.)

None of this is to say that I’m about to turn into one of those people who only watches Patlabor and berates others for watching anything made after the switch to digipaint, but it’s hard not to notice the change. And I guess, really, that is what this article is about. Because while this is not a goodbye, it is definitely the start of a different, slower phase of Magic Planet Anime’s existence. I do still want to write, but I want to feel like I don’t have to write quite as much. Possibly not nearly as much. Accordingly; another part of what I’m doing here is just giving myself permission to write a less if it will (hopefully) make what I actually do write a little better. I have no delusions about turning into the greatest anime critic who ever lived overnight, but maybe I can finally dream up some things to say about anime that are not “this sucks”, “this is pretty good”, or “this is weird;” a pattern that I feel I’ve been stuck in for the past good while. There is more to this medium than those three points on the chart.

All this to say; I need to do some soul searching. I don’t really have a strong idea of what I want this site to be or accomplish anymore, and that really sucks. I feel like “I just want to write about anime” is not quite enough anymore. So I’m putting a lot of it on hold. I’m definitely not going to be doing any weekly watches this season—although you’ve probably guessed that by now—and my other columns are going to be very sporadic things. Probably coming out in occasional fits and spurts when I manage to get my head sorted for a week or two. I want to get a Year-End List out again this year, but beyond that, I really don’t want to promise anything at all.

With a few half-exceptions; I have a few commissions that I still need to finish, and my ongoing podcast projects with Sredni are going to continue (however slowly or quickly that may be), but otherwise, I am releasing myself from all of my imagined writing “commitments.” All I have done is stress myself out for no good reason, at the end of the day. I want to care more about whether what I’m writing is any good than I do if I’m putting out 2 articles a month or 20. My hope is that, however many or few pieces I write over the remainder of 2023, those that do go up will at least give you something to appreciate or think about. There will be more articles this year, and I’m hoping that maybe putting the brakes on my attempts to be ‘relevant’ will make those articles that do come out more interesting, whether they’re involved analyses or off-the-cuff ramblings.

So, those are the personal reasons. What about the material ones?

Agh.

Dear reader, have you ever been considered a legal non-entity by your state government? No? I recommend avoiding it, if at all possible.

I don’t want to go into too many details here, but suffice it to say, the ten-car pileup of health problems, legal issues, and the intertangling thereof that plagued me last year has only gotten worse this year. This is definitely a massive contributing factor to my stress, and I have spent a decent chunk of this year so depressed that I have genuinely wondered if I’m ever going to sort this out, and I’ll cop to having contemplated suicide more than once.

For complex reasons, a lot of the basic necessities of being an adult in the US (health insurance, a driver’s license or equivalent, and a steady income, just to name a few) are denied to me. That’s all been true for pretty much the entire time I’ve been working on this site, and maybe that, more than the fiddlier and more emotional stuff, is the real reason I should be setting much of what I do on this site aside for a while. Not that the two aren’t intertwined; I’m starting to hit my limit with how much more of this crap I can take, and it’s definitely been affecting me mentally, as outlined above.

So, all of that is the very long version. I hope you’ll forgive me for being reluctant to offer a shorter one this time around, I think conveying the context for why I’m doing this is important, since I didn’t want to feel like I was just abandoning all of my regular readers to the wind. And as a result, I really struggled with putting this article together. (I had to cut a bunch of stuff that I imagine would’ve come off as just overly self-deprecatory, among other things. I’m not trying to commit emotional self-harm, here.) But in spite of everything, I’m pretty optimistic. I think—much like last year—I really just need some time away, and to do some reflecting on what I really want to do with my life, and how Magic Planet Anime fits into those plans.

I think I’ve gotten my point across by now, more or less. To a future filled with fewer, but hopefully better articles. To my own mental health. And to a brighter tomorrow. If I round up, I’m nearly 30. But life doesn’t end there, and otakudom doesn’t have to either.

See you when I see you, anime fans.

---

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.