It’s Monday! Yeah, I am not that excited about it either. But, what it does mean is that we get a new general thread where we can talk about the series we have been reading, ask questions, or look for recommendations. So, feel free to dump all your manga-related thoughts into this post through your keyboard.
Like normal, please be careful with spoilers. I wrote a guide about spoilers in case you need a refresher on how to handle them (also linked in the sidebar).
Before getting to the meat of the content, I wanted to bring people’s attention to the newly formed !lightnovels@ani.social community. @NineSwords@ani.social has run this communtiy excellently for a while now over on the ml instance. They are provisionally starting up the community here due to the defederation issues. So, if you want to learn more about where your manga come from, check it out. With that, let’s get to the meat of my post this week…
Similar to my post in the general thread over on !anime@ani.social this week, I wanted to keep people here in the loop with some of my thoughts and ideas about the community here. Nothing here is in a state to be put into action immediately, more just my general thoughts and an opportunity for others to weigh in.
Comment Bot
For many of us, we were (or still are) likely regular users of /r/manga. That subreddit had a bot, /u/Roboragi, that you could use to get a collection of links for a series. So, if you made a comment that contained {Usagi Drop} in it, the bot would respond with a collection of info/links about the series.
Would something like this be useful for or desired by the community? I think it is technically possible from some related work I have been doing for !anime@ani.social, but this community is smaller, so the value proposition might not be there.
Wiki
This idea came to me the other week when @Ashyr@sh.itjust.works wandered into the general thread wanting to dip their toes into the medium (hope you are enjoying Frieren!). When trying to think of a reply, I actually pulled up the /r/manga community on reddit because I figured they probably had a recommendation wiki similar to what exists for the /r/anime community. However, I found that the /r/manga wiki was very out of date. Their recommendation lists were last updated 8 years ago!
So, this leads me to my idea of having a basic wiki for this communtiy where we can have pages for things like user-made recommendation lists and FAQs/guides for people that are new/newer to the hobby and need just a little bit of a helping hand to get into it. I have experience hosting wikis for myself and for D&D groups I am a part of, so the technical side of it isn’t too difficult. Instead, I am wondering if this is something people would be interested in contributing to. Whether that be recommendations or more general faq-style guides like a guide on where to buy/read manga.
If it’s something small / simple, I don’t mind.
I am very much enjoying it, thanks for the recommendation. Though my pace has slowed somewhat.
I love/hate how every story begins with the passage of time. It grounds us in the central thesis for Frieren, how quickly time passes for an elf and the difficulty of befriending humans.
That’s great to hear! Since you started reading it, my wife started reading it as well. She was enjoying the anime enough that she wanted to read ahead.