700 Blog Posts! Top 10 Passion Projects!

This is the last post of the top ten series finally. This list has been the most difficult to come up with because these are the posts I care the most about, have spent the most time on and am the most passionate about.

I call these passion projects because they are blog posts or blog series’ that I’ve spent a massive amount of time on and just care a lot about. So let’s get into it!

10. Comedy Anime Needs to Feed into Itself (series)

Sometimes you just have an idea that has been melding in your head for a long time and it just comes out really well. Well that was what the project was.

It was basically looking at two of the things from my favourite comedies: Konosuba and Prison School to look at one of the things they have in common: jokes that feed into themselves.

Some of you probably get what I mean from that however I still explain what I mean and why it works so well. It’s simply a concept that I want to see more often in comedy anime and that’s what the point of the posts tried to get across.

SPOILERS INCOMING FOR SCHOOL DAYS (In the title)

9. School Days: Was Sekai Actually Pregnant? (Post series)

School days is a seriously good drama in my opinion and I like it for just how sad and depressed the drama makes me. At the center point of the drama towards the end was Sekai’s pregnancy which made me so sad to watch. Even the image of Sekai rubbing her belly that the baby’s in makes me feel sad.

So at the end Katsura kills her and cuts her up to see if she has a baby inside – with the show ending on Katsura concluding that she wasn’t pregnant.

I was not so sure about this, I did not find it that convincing to believe. So I made two posts, one for and one against Sekai being pregnant coming to a conclusion in the last one.

Even now it’s hard to be a hundred percent sure since theirs so many possibilities. That’s why it was such an interesting series to me. Getting into stuff like “Is Katsura trustworthy considering her mental state would condition her to deny any evidence of her being pregnant”

8. Golden Boy (Series)

This series of posts was written as part of a different series, but I like it enough that it can stand on its own in my opinion.

Golden boy is a series so bafflingly amazing to me. On the one hand you have seriously perverse comedy and then you have great moral and uplifting messages to end the series. And due to that it was so fun to review episode by episode, talking about the completely random stuff that took place as well as the actually interesting things about it.

It was such a strange mix however it fit together perfectly and was so great to watch. I also made a point of watching it in dub for some really, really great lines.

“The wild beast inside of you has awoken the wild beast inside of me”

7. JEARETTAS (series)

JEARETTAS was the project that golden boy was apart of. JEARETTAS stands for July’ke Episodic Anime Reviews Even Though They All Suck. And that is a pretty bold title but I’ll explain.

The series was a thing where I had to write two episode reviews a day for the entire month of July 2017, which was actually a long time ago! Writing it was actually very good for me because it converted me to liking episode reviews, which goes against the whole point of the project in the first place (which was to make anime episode reviews)

The point was to make them as easy and dumb as possible but it didn’t actually work out that way, as I continued I started to actually care a lot about the posts that I put out and I started dedicating lots of time towards doing them. It was actually pretty fun for me to do so I’m very glad I did it! This project also led to bigger and better things that I will talk about later since they’re sure to come up in the rest of this post!

(This is the point where I realise theirs 6 more left and I’m already on 730 words – gonna be a bit of a long one)

6. ‘A silent voice’ is an excellent film (Individual post)

This was one of the longest individual posts I’ve written and it talks really thoroughly about the film in detail. Basically after I saw it I really, really liked it so had to write a post covering everything.

Do you remember everything I said about barefoot gen? Well this is what I wanted to write instead of what I wrote for that.

I took very thorough notes on the show and talked about everything I could think of, all aspects of the show. Instead of reviewing it chronologically (like I normally tend to do) and that actually made the review a lot better in my opinion.

It’s also very personal and special to me because I talked in pretty sad detail about my own personal experiences in reference to this film and why it did resonate a lot with me.

5. The Shiki Diaries

I do like the title of “Shiki Diaries” quite a lot because it makes the post series sound like a series of recovered documents about some sad tragic events that happened to someone.

Shiki of course is not like that. Last October I realised that it was indeed October and that I should do some horror anime stuff. So I decided to watch what was well known as the best horror anime has to offer – so far I’ve not found a better horror.

The diary format was supposed to be there to catalog my growing insanity and decent into fear and paranoia as the show was supposed to scare me a lot. It didn’t actually work out that way though and I just really found it’s messages and themes very interesting to think about and discuss.

Even though I am very biased in my posts I still think that it’s interesting, especially for those who disagree with me. Those disagreements were great because you got to really think about your position and stance on the world.

The ideas themselves were pretty scary in the show, which was what made it so fun to review.

4. Evangelion Month (post series)

How could I not talk about this one? Every episode of Evangelion is completely packed with so much intrigue and interesting things to discuss and talk about, and great discussions I did have, some parts of the show were just that good.

It was also a real challenge for me to overcome. For previous episodic review series’ I was able to keep the posts somewhat short. However for this the posts just went on and on because I just had that much to talk about. It got really bad too because I was spending so much time watching and then even more time writing a review!

It got really bad at the end because the first 26 days was for reviewing NGE, however the last one was for the films. Yep. I had to make massive reviews for the films and it was a lot of work, but well worth the effort.

I started the project on the 1st of January one day when I realised that there was 31 days in January and 31 pieces of Evangelion to watch in total. So I was basically sold.

This was really great for me, I reviewed the show and then the end of Evangelion happened. Which was an amazing film to me. That post on the End of Evangelion film was long enough, and passionate enough that it could have been on this list by itself! I knew I was on to something when I had written like a thousand words about the first five minutes of the film – don’t worry it gets better but that’s just how important it was to me.

3. Berserk (Post series)

I really love the aesthetic of medieval fantasy, dark fantasy, and epic fantasy and berserk fits this perfectly and really captured my heart. It was a show that I had such a huge interest in. Even from chapter one of the manga I was completely hooked, I needed to watch the anime, and I needed to read the manga along side that.

I never actually got around to reviewing it episode by episode (though eventually I plan to) but the amount of stuff I’ve made just talking about Berserk is colossal.

There are lots of different parts of the series that I got fascinated by and would just pick apart. It was such a good show/manga and still remains my favourite today.

2. Harem anime (post series)

Oh yes this series! It’s been with me since the start of my blog, my first blog post was part one of anime harems and the series is still ongoing today. (though very inactive like a lot of my ongoing blog post series)

I basically had (and still do have I guess) a massive problem with harem anime, and in the 11 parts out right now I explain why. It’s just everything I hate about the genre basically.

It’s all so similar to me and I had a really bad problem with it, talking about every single aspect of the genre I could. It’s very thorough and it still has a little ways to go.

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Honourable mentions

Of course there was going to be honorable mentions here. I can’t have a blog post/ blog post series I’m passionate about and not talk about it. I heard somewhere that your favourite blog posts should be 10% of my favourites – which I have roughly – but that’s only if I include these too!

.12 days of anime christmas – I wrote 12 posts about my favourite/most emotional stuff from the anime I saw that year. It was a pretty nice time and it led to a pretty fun Christmas (even though I didn’t even think about that blog post series on the actual day)

.Kings Quest Review – I made a massive 11 part kings quest review criticising the new game (well everything after the first chapter) to explain why it was so annoying and bad for me to play. I was bitter that I lost money buy buying the game however releasing these posts for it might just have been worth it.

.First Impressions count in anime – Essentially this was about what I look for in the first episode of a series and how I judge it a lot. I somehow talked about this for three parts!

.The Anime Database (post series) – This was a series where I reviewed every single anime I had ever completed, threw them together in a blog post database and created a recommendation system for people to find more shows that they liked. The reason why it’s not on this list is that it’s hard to write about anime’s you don’t give a shit about. So a lot of the posts were just awful, which is a shame because the idea was good I just hated it in practice.

.Sports anime’s vs real sports – This was a semi-serious post series where I compared the differences between anime sports and real sports. Sort of explaining how I could enjoy something like a basketball anime yet hate actually watching the sport in real life. It was one of those kinds of things. Now I just sort of think it’s kind of obvious so I don’t like it as much.

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Alright now it’s time for the last post, arguably the best post that I’ve ever made, arguably my favorite as well (even though I’ve got no clue because I love all of them) this is the number one passion project that I’ve made…

1. The Sakamoto Death Theory (Sakamoto Desu Ga?) and Why It’s Wrong 

Of course it was going to be this post, it just had to be. Ignoring the actual quality (which we will move on to) this post single handedly has 4x more views than my home page/archives (which should be the most popular)

Essentially this post went viral. If you looked for anything about the Sakamoto death theory after the post was released you would have found me. It’s sort of my claim to fame, one hit wonder – that sort of thing. Though maybe on a much lower schedule than that!

One day I saw that there was a theory online about the idea that Sakamoto actually died at the end of the anime. Needless to say I was pretty outraged and went to research all of the points in the favour of the argument, systematically destroying all of them.

I didn’t think I would be able to counteract all of the arguments because some of them were really good, however so much of the theory was just made up lies about stuff that didn’t even happen or take place, or was taken so far out of context that it really annoyed me.

The main basis of the theory is this picture for the introduction to the last chapter of the manga  which is supposed to be metaphorical for him leaving people, not to be taken literally. If the chapter slides were supposed to be taken literally then Sakamoto would be far, far different.

Anyway I shouldn’t even be explaining this here, you can read the post for that!

I ended up doing a lot of research about that, looking into songs, Japanese lyrics, NASA statistics and anything I could get my hands on just to show how stupid the theory was and it paid of brilliantly.

I don’t actually have a problem with theories in principle. It’s just that for this theory pretty much everyone on the Reddit agreed with the theory, which is normally fine because people are free to have their own opinion. It was just that I saw tonnes of stuff about people getting really sad that Sakamoto was dead and that post was more directed at them to say “look he’s ok – of course he’s alive! How can anyone who can fly and stuff have a serious illness?” except with a lot more stuff than that to back it up.

Ultimately it was a post I was very proud of and was also very successful.

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Thank you so much for reading this very self indulgent series. It takes a lot to write three top ten posts about yourself but it’s been 700 posts! Common give me a break! If you missed the other two posts you can find them here and here.

Man, thank god that’s out of the way.