New Year Housekeeping

Happy new year, guys. 2020 was sure a year, huh?

Throughout the year I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this blog. I obviously am not going to quit any time soon, but the more I organize the pages on this blog, as I do the 'pages' on the right hand side and do lists of episodes and series that I covered, I do realize that there are a lot of things in the past that are... not done particularly well, or are simply things that I'm not proud of. And as I've been sorting out a lot of the older things I've done, I realized that maybe it's time to do some cleaning. I've been blogging since... 2014? Shit, it's been a long while. And... there are a lot of posts from back then that I wasn't the most proud of. So over the past couple of days I've done a bit of house-cleaning.

A lot of those 2014-2015 era reviews are honestly done without any real foresight or amounted to much beyond my reactions, and the quality of said reviews are... not the best, let's leave it at that. I do mean to be transparent, so I'm going to list the things that I took down. Gone are the JoJolion, HxH, Magi, Akame ga Kill, Attack on Titan, Berserk, One-Punch Man and like the half-dozen Boruto, Naruto, Bleach and Promised Neverland chapters that I did. 

It's not a manga thing, because I still enjoy a good chunk of the manga I've read! It's just that... I'm really not proud of a lot of the reviews I've done; half of them felt more like at-the-moment reactions than actual reviews. Most importantly some had... pretty crass or immature jokes that I'm not very proud of five years later. I almost removed the One Piece, Academia, Toriko and Taizai reviews circa 2014-2015, but they'll stay up for a while while I slowly work through them. 

Also gone from the blog are RE:Zero anime episodes; as well as Justice League Action and Westworld episodes. Due to how hurried I talked about them back in the day to cash in on views, they were written pretty shoddily, and there were a couple of things I said in RE:Zero episode reviews that I'm not very proud of. A bunch of very short movie reviews and my coverage of Chronicles of Blood monsters were also taken down -- they weren't written well and had a lot of broken links.

I also took down a lot of "News Reactions" pages and "Top Ten" video game attempts. It's mostly just very outdated Hearthstone or Pokemon stuff that was my rather poor attempt at cashing in on some click-bait nonsense back in the day. A lot of them have essentially became defunct with my far more extensive talking about the cards and monsters anyway. I also wiped out my very, very old and clunky text-based let's play for Minish Cap, ALTTP and ALBW -- which, at least, is good practice for a lot of my newer let's plays. There was a pretty terrible Chronicles of Blood 'reviewing monsters' bit, which was the prototype before I actually did Pokemon reviews. 

Not taken down, however, are the old Gotham, Agents of SHIELD, Flash and Arrow reviews. I almost did so, but since there's a neat sense of continuity to the newer TV reviews, I decided to leave them up. Maybe I'll fix them at some point. Ditto for Fairy Tail chapter reviews, which had a lot of fun discussion in the comments that, against my better judgment, I decided to leave up. I'm going to go through some of the Toriko reviews with a fine comb later on and decide if they're worth leaving up.

EDIT: After consideration, I took down the Tokyo Ghoul reviews. Some of the earlier ones from when I started blogging were pretty iffy, and there are certain topics about which I don't agree with what I have said in the past. A lot of the manga reviews from that period of time were also very hastily written and terribly edited, feeling more like an attempt to garner reviews as much as possible while the chapter is still fresh, so instead of a review it felt more like half-baked reactions -- particularly in chapters where not much happened. So I've removed them all. 

There were also a bunch of reviews that I merged together, mostly the Digimon Tri and Pokemon Generations ones. Also, I'm prepared to take down a bunch of old superhero movie reviews, too, because I'm going to replace them with brand-new ones in 2021 since I just rewatched the entire MCU. 

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The big, major one: due to the sheer amount of troll and flame-bait that they received, particularly throughout November and December... I reverted all my Hunter x Hunter episode reviews to private. I had simply just auto-spam-deleted a lot of the "you suck, die" troll comments, and it's not that much of a hassle to do so... But it's honestly not something I care to do every day and they started commenting on my non-HxH related pages. I know, 'don't feed the trolls' and all that jazz, but it's honestly really, really annoying. I don't care to deal with the aggravation of removing comments that flame me every day, so yeah -- there's like a new batch every month, and they're all invariably just trolls that just come to very rudely and violently defend the series. Because apparently they've got nothing better to do than to hunt down every single review and bash anyone who doesn't share a singular opinion about their favourite series. Again, I honestly have better things to do with my life than to deal with an influx of flame comments, let alone respond to them. And honestly? I really don't care enough to leave it up, not if it's going to attract cockroaches every couple of months.

This is not to say that some of you very polite folk who are willing to engage in mature discussion with me in the past are the problem. Not at all! Silver Chariot and Richard, if you guys are still lurking around, you guys are amazing and very polite even when disagreeing -- and I get it! Some things that I don't like is something that other people like, and vice versa. That's what being people are, that's what being adults are. Works of fiction (or anything in general, TBH) can be very great and still have aspects of it that simply doesn't work for someone. It's okay! As long as you're being civil about it. It's one thing to discuss the different viewpoints on a piece of fiction, even though you vehemently like or dislike a series, and I enjoyed it. Anyone who I've ever replied to, you're okay in my book, because you're all polite and nice and talk like people.

I'm not ashamed of my reviews, and I still stand over my opinions. I still like the series and think it's pretty great! I also simultaneously still don't think it's perfect and has some weaker parts, and no amount of "you don't understand the perfection of this perfect series" is going to ever change that fact. And the sheer amount of juvenile commenters that are swarm to those posts just to drop the same old argument isn't something I care to deal with. I'm by no means ashamed of what I've said about the series, though -- that's my final word on it. Anyone who's interested enough to see them, drop me a message or something. Just be polite about it. 

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Also, I'm currently working on fixing a lot of the broken image links and formatting on some of my longer 'reviewing monsters' pages, although I do have a bunch of reviews ready to go up in the next month. 

What can you expect from me the next year? A bunch of old series are still going on. Among the 'monster reviews', I do plan to finish Digimon Reviews, Resident Evil and Reviewing D&D 5E monsters; both of these are technically a lot further ahead but a lot of editing needs to be done. I plan to review more Legend of Zelda monsters. I plan to finish at least the second and third seasons of Batman Beyond; and regardless of the lack of viewership, at the very least finish up Pokemon anime/cartoon reviews up until the end of Orange Island. I plan to review all of the Heisei Kamen Rider shows. I plan to review all the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. I plan to review some superhero shows, but in seasonal format -- I do plan to wrap up Legion, Doom Patrol and a bunch of other shows that I've watched but didn't have the energy to do episode-to-episode reviews. When the CW superhero shows come back, I will probably do half-seasonal reviews for them. One Piece, too, probably will continue to have monthly recap reaction reviews from me.

As 2021 goes on, I might pick up one or two new TV or anime series to maybe review (I am sort of interested in maybe reviewing one of the older Kamen Rider shows episode-by-episode; or to watch something like the older Flash live-action TV series), but I do plan to mostly just do more longer articles in general, which I enjoy so much more and is a lot less clutter on the blog. 

What to look forward to? MCU reviews for sure, which I plan to do however long it takes me. The Disney+ stuff might take a bit later for me to watch because I'm still wondering whether I care enough to be subscribed to it, and if I do, whether there's enough content per episode to want to make me do episodic reviews or do it Kamen Rider style with 2-3 episodes per post. Or just do an entire seasonal review. 

Anyway, I'm still here, I'm still going to blog about superhero movies, superhero cartoons, the odd One Piece chapter review, and video game monsters. Just expect more longer articles at a less frequent schedule than I had been doing before. I do plan to slowly go through all my 'longer' articles and slowly fixing them. Things will just be a bit slower in January and February 2021, I feel, but that's okay. I'm taking it as a break. 

Anyway, happy new year, and I'm going to work harder at writing this year.