2017 Year in Review

Greetings everyone and Happy Holidays! Well here we are- we are now approaching the end of yet another year. It is also the time for the standard year in review post. I know I had promised a series of posts this week but the holiday craziness along with laziness on my end stopped that from happening. This week kind of encapsulated the year in a nutshell for the blog. I would have something planned, get started on it, and then life would get in the way. I am actually amazed that I was able to write so much for you guys. Of course, I want to extend a large thank you to all of you who have stuck with me despite me going weeks at a time without writing anything. Being part of this community is and always has been an awesome experience and I thank you all for letting me be a part of it. The ability to share thoughts and opinions, debate topics with others, and just share a love for something is a really special thing.

This year was the blog’s most successful to date. This blog has reached plenty of milestones from reaching 150 posts to having all time highs in site visits in views. I have been truly stunned by the reception that the blog has received in the past year. It is nice to see that my content is reaching an increasingly wider audience. I feel like my content has certainly expanded and improved over the past year and I certainly have you all to thank for your support and inspiration.

I also have a thank a year (which while it was a mixed bag for me personally) was an amazing year in the geek world. We had film adaptations of Justice League and a new Star Wars (whether I thought they were good or not is something I won’t discuss here), we saw a resurgence with Nintendo games dominating the gaming world (BOTW for game of the year), and an amazing year for anime & manga. It seemed like we just kept getting more and more amazing anime as each season progressed. This was enhanced by the fact that not only did we get sequels to already amazing shows but we also got many memorable new properties as well.

I certainly had some great and eye opening anime experiences this year. I found my tastes certainly expand this year especially further into slice of life and romance series. Sure prior to this year, there were a few series in this category that I found enjoyable (such as Toradora) but with series such as Gamers!, Recovery of an MMO Junkie, New Game!!, and Sakura Quest I now find myself searching for more of these types of shows because they showed me how good these genres can be. I now find myself watching shows such as Monthly Girls Nozaki-Kun and My Love Story. I am certainly proud of that fact. Yes you heard it, a grown man enjoying rom coms and I don’t care.

Beyond that my numerous wonderful anime experiences stretched from the under appreciated Re:Creators, getting stoked for 2 new Fate franchise installments, experiencing the wonder of your name, laughing out loud to the return of Konosuba and experiencing the awe of the dominance of My hero Academia. Of course these experiences included multiple amazing con experiences this year including getting to meet many of my favorite dub actors over the course of the year and hanging out with many awesome people in the anime community.

So now it is time to turn our attention to 2018 and boy do we have a great year in store for us. We will see the return of One Punch Man, My Hero Academia, and Fairy Tail. We will also get a new Fate installment, the possible return of the A Certain Magical Index franchise, and so many new undiscovered gems. I’m sure that we will have plenty to discuss in the new year.

As for the blog’s future…well I certainly hope to keep the momentum going into 2018. I will have plenty of Weiss Schwarz content to discuss including finishing the SAO set analysis, more Gochiusa and Konosuba, Fate/Apochypha, and possible Saekano and Gurren Laggen. I also do plan on discussing a few new anime movies as the past year had a lot of new entries worth discussing. And of course more anime reviews and commentary about various topics. I have been bouncing around various ideas for more Top 5 posts as well. I am on pace to reach 200 posts sometime in the second half of the year and I’ll likely do another top anime list for that occasion. I also wanted to remind everyone to please take the survey I currently have running for my 2017 anime awards! I will be closing results on Jan 15th so please respond if you already haven’t done so. Here is the link:

https://goo.gl/forms/YkxyJhvBDGRkbA3p1

As is the case every year, I hope to post more consistently. I would like to do one a week and hope to not go weeks between posts next year so we will see how that goes. Anyway, I have high hopes for 2018 in terms of the blog, the anime we will watch, and that 2018 will be a good year for everyone. I hope that everyone has a wonderful New Year and an amazing 2018! I look forward to continuing to interact with all of the amazing folks in this community!

This is railgunfan75 signing off! See you next year!