Happy Birthday! It has been one year since I made the first general discussion post in this community. Back then, this community newly created with a whole 1 subscriber and active member - me. Since then, we have grown to be the most active general manga community on lemmy. I didn’t do that on my own, so I want to thank everybody that has contributed over the past year to make this community what it has become today.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, you can absolutely use this thread the same way you would use any other general discussion thread. Let us know about things you have read, ask about things you want to read, show off some new volumes you just got, whatever. Go wild! (within the rules)
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).
One year of manga in the books. It has been a trip! Thank you to everybody here for their contributions here. This community has been a joy to be a part of and I don’t remember ever having to step in and swing the moderator hammer around (unlike those naughty anime folks). If you all promise not to tell the anime folks, I have a bit of a confession to make:
Cue the flashback sequence…
When the defederation and blanket content removals happened on the ml instance last year, I was worried that anime/manga content on lemmy was going to be smothered and killed before it ever got a chance to reach enough of a critical mass to maintain its activity. At that time, I was way more into manga than anime and I didn’t want to be forced back onto reddit to talk about it. So, I hatched a plan…
I tried to kickstart the anime community. That might sound strange, but my thinking was that there are way more people out there likely to be watching anime than reading manga. So, if I could get them to consolidate mostly in one place, it would be easier to drag the manga-reading people from that community into the manga-specific community. One thing I find interesting is that the anime and manga communities here on ani.social have roughly the same proportion of active members as the anime and manga subreddits (~3:1 anime:manga). So, there you have it, my main motivation for facilitating anime discussion at the time was to actually talk about manga.
End the flashback sequence…
Thanks for keeping that a secret from all the anime folks! Overall, I think the plan largely worked, but I was also surprised at how many people are active here in the manga community that don’t seem to be active in the anime community. So, thank you to everybody that made the move from the ml community to this one!
There are two other people I want to thank specifically. First is hitagi, who keeps this instance running and has dealt with some serious infrastructure challenges this past year, including an intercontinental migration. The other person I want to thank is the community’s resident villainess, Kadath. She has been gracious enough to bear the dreaded M next to her name and act as a moderator. Thanks to both of you in particular!
There are plenty of other people to thank, especially the “power users” that do most of the actual chapter posting. Thank you all for the contributions you have made to this community. Also, thanks for helping me find some great series to read!
Here is to another year of great manga!
Finally, I will make a similar offer to the anime general thread this week of doing a mini-AMA in this thread for any questions people might have (manga-related or otherwise).
Well I guess if you’re offering… does wjs stand for anything in particular? Or is that too private a question?
The username wjs018 was actually given to me by my undergrad university. When I went to university was the first time I actually had an email address (and the first computer I ever owned), so I just had all my usernames just stick with it ever since then. The letters correspond to my initials and I think the 018 was just a random number used to disambiguate people with the same initials.
Curiosity sated. Thanks!
That’s me, I’m one of those not active on the anime side (even if I tried early on). In my case it comes to two things:
I’m still planning to join in from time to time whenever I have something to talk about and I’d like to suggest/run a rewatch or two in the future but that’ll have to wait for now. Need to sort out the boring IRL stuff first for that.
Anyway, thanks again to both you and @PrincessKadath@ani.social for running the joint as well as admins for giving it a place to thrive in the first place.
I am happy that each of the communities has kind of developed their own vibe, and a big part of that is that there are simply a lot of different people in the two communities. It’s always interesting to hear different perspectives on how they engage with the communities, so thanks for sharing!
As for anime, rewatches are definitely on my to-do list. I was kind of planning to run one starting in January if there is interest. My schedule is pretty busy until then. Then again, maybe I could find time to do a one-off movie rewatch or something like that instead of committing to do a whole series (is there a christmas-themed anime movie?).
Another idea that @NineSwords@ani.social and I have tossed around on discord in the past is doing some kind of coordinated re-read of a manga/light novel series. I guess that would be kind of like a rewatch. I just am not sure what a good candidate series for something like that would be. Also, the pace at which the different medium go through the story are very different. 1 LN volume is not equal to 1 manga volume is not equal to 1 anime season. So…open to ideas on that one.
Conceptionally I’m all for it. There are even series that have LN, Manga and Anime, so we could do a 3 medium thingy in theory. It’s just becoming a huge tie investment at that stage, so maybe keeping the scope small for the first time would be a good idea. Like looking at just a specific high-profile scene from anime, manga and LN.
It’s not a movie exactly, but at only 6 episodes Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket is roughly movie-length. If I remember right it doesn’t require any prior knowledge of Gundam, either. It’s not exactly Christmas themed, but as I recall it takes place in December and there’s Christmas decorations and stuff in the background of some scenes.
A bit of a stretch, I know.
I was going to suggest a certain number of chapters, but it occurs to me that 1 manga chapter is not always equal to 1 manga chapter; manga from monthly magazines tend to have much longer chapters on average. Anyways, I think 1 discussion thread for 1 volume of manga per week is a good pace. Since it’s a smaller community having a lot to talk about at once might help to make the discussion threads more active.
I think a good candidate series would be something short, but with good ratings overall. Most of my favorite manga have at least 10 volumes though so I dunno.
I hope to attempt my rewatch idea sometime in the first half of next year if everything goes right. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for months now but can’t really justify taking enough time to actually work on it. I’ll get there eventually.
As for the the reading one, I think it would be a good idea to start with something generic enough to cast a wide net and on the shorter side, as going in with a series right of the bat could scare off potential participants (especially since they don’t know what to expect engagement/discussion wise yet). I’d say start with a low commitment title to see how things go and then adjust based on that. I’d certainly like to give it a shot at least once if I’m available whenever that happens.
🥰
Got a confession to make myself too: before I started posting here I was actively posting new chapters on the .ml community. Some heavy arguing (I abstained from it, but it was quite unpleasant to be dropped into) later and I went for greener pastures.
While I am probably quite older than the majority here being in my mid-40s, I really enjoy the relaxed environment. There’s no rush to post chapters for some ephemeral ‘karma’, and I can post as many villainess and shōjo as I want without being critized for it.
So, thank you @wsj018@ani.social for this space and let’s go for another 100 years!
I am in my late 30’s, so we aren’t too far off there. I also appreciate how the smaller size means that I don’t need to race to read chapters. I often will read a chapter a couple days after it comes out and then go to the post that somebody else made where we can have a dialog. It’s similar for the anime episodes as well, where I can go back into a thread a couple days later and still have a conversation. The speed at which huge communities like the subreddits move can be too fast for me to keep up with.
Same. Other than those few exceptions where I rush to read new chapters, I usually let some backlog build before I start tearing them down.
Having someone older helps validate that maybe it’s ok to have this as a hobby.
If you enjoy it and it’s not illegal, everything is ok to be a hobby. That’s how I see it.
If there’s 1 criticism I have about that, it’s that I have a lot less time for other manga haha
Good, another one to the dark side!