Why have I written first impressions?

This is how I feel about all of my posts. So basically if you say my posts are horrible, it doesn't matter because I already assume that they are. Sticks and stones can break my bones, and that would probably cause a great deal of pain so that saying is pretty stupid. I mean, what if somebody actually did break your bones?

A post by Sebz that I liked but couldn’t find anything to comment on prompted me to think about why I even care to blog.  The basic idea of Sebz’s post (tl;dr) is: “I suck at blogging but I still love it,” and Sebz goes on to explain why.  I can emphasize with Sebz, because I, too, suck at blogging.  The only difference is that I’ve been sucking for more than two years whereas Sebz has only sucked for two months.

In my two years of aniblogging, I have come up with a variety of ways and excuses to cope with my sucking.  Early on, I used the standard excuse of “I like blogging and sharing my ideas, even if they suck,” like the one Sebz gives:

If writing has never been my forte at all, why the hell am I blogging?

  1. like writing. I have no intention of staying as a novice. I like reading anime blogs, and I want to improve my writing to match their levels.
  2. like anime. As simple as that…or at least, the hobby of watching anime, because there are anime that make it to the trash bin after the first [few] episode/s.
  3. wanted to share what my kind of life was like, having a terrible history with anime. I’ve yet to meet another blogger who started anime and got into very recently. I want to turn that horrible regret of missing out on anime into an X-Factor. Somehow.

But after a few months of this, I realized that none of these three applied to me.  I hated writing so much that I dropped out of AP English in junior year.  That’s like the ultimate, lowest thing to do as an Asian high school student (besides dropping out of AP Calculus, of course).

I also hate anime.  Well, a lot of it.  My “dropped” list on MAL/Anime-Planet is enormous, and when you combine that with all the shitty anime I managed to complete, you end up with a lot more “unliked” anime than “liked” anime.  Thus we can round that up to 100% “unliked” anime, and there you have it – I hate anime.

Finally, I don’t want to share what my kind of life is like.  If I actually shared that, everybody would know that I just sit in front of my computer all day and play games and watch anim- oh shit, look at what you did.  You made me say it.  Oh great.  Damn it.  Now I am so screwed.

Anyway, I moved past that phase and entered the “I’m too good for everybody else” phase.  I saw the episodic posts on Random Curiosity, THAT, every wannabe aniblog, etc. and decided that was too low for me.  Episodics are for noobs who can’t write editorials!  And then I saw the editorials on We Remember Love, Omonomono (which has somehow become a wordpress blog? what the hell is that?), etc. and decided that I could do that.  The thing is, I suck at editorials because I suck at essays which stems from the fact that I sucked at AP English and ended up in a regular English class where all I did was sleep.  Our final was worth 5% of our grade, and I had a 95% at the time.  Therefore I ended up sucking at blogging in general because all I did was post sucky editorials that sucked the living sucks out of the suck.  And since I’m Asian, I blamed the audience for being too low to understand my deep editorials, which were actually just trashy trash that I typed up in thirty minutes without revision.  Actually, that has nothing to do with me being Asian or not.  But the fact still stands.  I’m Asian.

Finally, I arrived at the humor stage.  Because I found tj_han’s posts at RIUVA funny and interesting and Baka-Raptor’s posts entertaining and 0rion/Guff’s posts at Epic Win to be really damn good, I decided to develop a sense of humor.  However, because I had been Asian for so long and knew nothing but how to study effectively (which also ended up failing, since I dropped out of AP English), this was very difficult.  Of course, at the time, I didn’t think so.  So thus began my period of humorous posts that can carried over to today.  Using the three man pillars of comedy, I have eventually managed to form a humor style of my own:

  1. Self-deprecation.  Oh god I suck AP English the horror I suck sucks uskc
  2. Random references.  I used to insert lots of references to memes and other anime because it seemed… funny.  But now I realize that it’s more immature than funny.  Maybe it’s because you see a bunch of people running around screaming “It’s over nine thousand!!!” both in real life and on the internet.  Still, lame jokes like RP’s reference to TTGL sometimes hit home for me.
  3. Irony.  I am such a hipster.

Usually when one of my posts gets more than one comment, I feel as though my witty, high-brow humor has gone across to the masses.  If it gets less than one comment (that really just means “no comments,” but this sounds a little better), then I feel that my witty humor is simply too witty for my audience.  Take this post, for instance.  It’s going to have 0 comments because the humor here is just too high-brow for you guys.  You know why I can even say that here?  Because I know that nobody will be reading this paragraph.  It’s past all of that shit above, and nobody’s going to read through my entire aniblogging autobiography to see this paragraph.  So basically I can say whatever I want here, and nobody will care because nobody will ever read it.  That’s the sad, harsh truth of my aniblogging experience.  N-Nobody ever r-reads my posts…

If I were an anime character, I’d be Nagi Sanzenin from Hayate no Gotoku.  Not only am I a cute, tsundere, blond rich girl voiced by (ugh) Rie Kugimiya, but I also work on stuff that is ultimately useless.  Nagi has her manga and I have my blog.  Come to think of it, she’s doing quite a bit better than me.  At least her manga is helping her draw better.  My aniblogging doesn’t really do much, since I gave up on editorials because my writing sucks.  But if I don’t write editorials, my writing won’t ever get better!  It’s a cycle of sucky writing, that’s for sure.

tl;dr my life sucks, but this post is pretty good.  I even inserted lists at random points to make it seem less like a block of text.


16 Comments on “Why have I written first impressions?”

  1. Kitsune says:

    This is not true what you said in that paragraph – I read this entire post! People read your posts, but they just might not be compelled to comment for whatever reason. Often it happens that the posts that you really enjoyed writing get very few views and comments.

    Why not focus on what you really like, the form you would enjoy the most, and blog this way instead? It might so happen that most anime you watch does not appeal to you. That’s fine – you can write about older anime, something else, or just don’t write at all – it is not a job, you know.

    • fangzhao says:

      Haha, I know, I know. I often read posts without commenting on them. Hell, this entire post was made because I read a post but couldn’t find anything to comment on.

      For me, I’ve found that I need a balance of blogging-for-myself and blogging-for-readers to keep on… blogging. If what I write isn’t really interesting to me, I don’t write it. If what I write isn’t really interesting to readers, I also don’t write it. This seems limiting, but most of the time, what I think is interesting is the same thing as what I think others think is interesting, so it works out. Usually.

      Confusing sentences for the win!

  2. mefloraine says:

    We know that you know we’re reading your posts. >:T

  3. Sebz says:

    this could have been your comment. LOL. all the same, thanks for the pingback

    • fangzhao says:

      Isn’t it called a trackback? Maybe I’m confusing something with something else. Anyway, you’re welcome…?

      • Sebz says:

        comment said “pingback” though.

        Also. one way is to say that I “suck” at blogging; not much different from when I say that I “started” blogging (which is actually the case), hence the “sucking” applies. Difference in wording, but you’re not wrong.
        Will note that in the part 2 post.

        to declare that your life sucks though…I empathize.

      • fangzhao says:

        Pingback, trackback, I never understood the difference. I’ll look it up later.

        Doesn’t that mean I’ve indirectly insulted you, saying that you’ve sucked from the get-go?

      • Sebz says:

        i don’t personally address it as an insult, because it was my mistake for not clarifying well enough that you had misunderstood.

  4. RP says:

    Wait a second. Did I just dream the existence of fangzhao.com or did it really exist at one point?

    • fangzhao says:

      What? You must be mistaken! I never owned a fangzhao.com!

      …fangzhao.net, however… that was a dark, dark chapter in my aniblogging career. So dark that I didn’t want to shell out $60 for such darkness.

  5. Justin says:

    *reads up above* Fangzhao.net…

    Anyways, I think this is the first post I’ve read where suck was used in succession and used a lot. Wait, what?

  6. Are you the Unlimited Blog Works guy?

    There’s no stopping to it!

  7. kawaiisweetbunny says:

    Holy crap an asian failing a class!? I have never heard of such a thing!
    Well, I do live in a honkey town….the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an asian is a mexican…. and
    Im mexican!


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