What I watched – Autumn 2022 – and an announcement

2022 has come and gone, ending with one of the most dynamic anime seasons ever. I watched a lot more than I typically follow in a season and therefore this post is gonna be long, so I ‘ll try to be brief with each. But before I get into it, I have an announcement to make.

2022 will be Moeronpan’s final year. (The anime, that is, since I’m still talking about it in 2023, and we still obviously have the 2022 awards post to do!) This is something that I decided roughly halfway through last year after giving it a lot of thought, and something that I have been continually considering for the past 3-4 years.

I enjoy reviewing anime, and my cowriters do too. We enjoy getting to talk about the good stuff, we enjoy discovering things we wouldn’t have otherwise, we even often do get a genuine kick out of the bile fascination of absolutely dogshit anime too. But it’s been a very long time, and I think that the stellar year of 2022’s anime is a good place to leave it. We have been writing about anime on here since 2008. That’s about fifteen years of reviewing! I think fifteen years is a good amount of time to keep at something, especially given that the average life span of an anime blog is (allegedly?) 2-5 years.

While I definitely had fun, the last thing I ever wanted was this blog to turn into a chore, for me or my cowriters, and unfortunately it often can be. Especially as none of us are being paid, but all of us are very busy with the things we are paid for. And writing about anime is a fun hobby, but I do have a lot of other hobbies too, and I realised over the years how often they have to take a back seat every time a new season rolls around. Watching something for enjoyment and watching something with the intention of reviewing it are completely different head-spaces, and it can lead to burnout. I felt this with this season in particular – there was an immense pressure to actually finish them before the end of the year rather than just watch them at my leisure, and as a result I had to drop a few shows solely due to literally not having time to watch them. I had been wondering for a long time after deciding this about half a year ago if it was the right decision, and it truly hit me that it was when I was looking at the Winter 2023 anime season chart and realizing how relieved I felt that I wouldn’t have to write about anything there.

Anyway, after our 2022 awards post I am really interested in writing another final farewell post as a kind of retrospective on the 15 years of memories I have running this blog. I hope you’ll look forward to it!

Thank you to everyone who has read my our content, whether your a recent reader or someone who has been here since the early days. And with that out of the way, on to my last Autumn Season roundup post.

What I Watched – Spring 2022

What I Watched – Spring 2021

Sorry for the big wait on this, Spring had a whole lot of shows I was following and my internet has been pretty crap recently, so I only got around to finishing up some of them recently. There’s a few other shows that I only got to see halfway that I didn’t include – when I finish those I’ll stick them in my next roundup post.

What I watched – Winter 2020

Hey again everyone, I hope you’re managing to stay safe in this very bizarre current time. To tell the truth, with everything that was going on I was considering putting the blog on indefinite hiatus, but I still want to try out a new review method for the just-started Spring season. This time it will be just me and Junko, and luckily theres a much lower number of shows after cutting out all the sequels, prequels and stuff we just don’t want to bother with so things seem doable. My first post for the first batch of new shows I watch will be up in a few more days.

In the mean-time, here’s what I was watching these last three months.

accurate portrayal of me and my family looking at news websites this past month.

What I Watched – Spring 2019

Since I was pretty busy these past few months, other than blogging Sarazanmai there were only three other shows I was following, but I may as well talk about them before we start the next round of First Impressions.

Actually, I didn’t even have time to keep up with them so I binged the rest of these three shows today.

What I watched – Summer Season 2018

Hey, it’s time for me to come out of hibernation again!
I thought this post would be a good excuse to talk a little about my absence from the blog. I haven’t reviewed an entire series since Houseki no Kuni and that was autumn season last year. There’s a lot of reasons for this – part of it is how busy I was, part of it was a lack of anime that I wanted to blog, but one of the main reasons is that, sadly, the whole episode reviewing thing just became a chore to me. Eventually I realized it was time to think about the future of this blog.
Next year, Moeronpan will turn 10 whole years old. That’s a pretty impressive life-span for an anime review blog – apparently it gets said that most only last two years. Even if we aren’t the most active blog, I’m kind of, just a little tiny bit proud that it still exists, and that you will soon be able to see a decades worth of anime reviews on it. And while looking back at our early years stuff its hard not to cringe at our writing (or even our taste in anime, its funny to think how many shows what have very different ratings if we’d blogged them now), it’s also cool to see how much we’ve grown.

Basically, as it stands right now, I still really like doing First Impression reviews, and I still really like doing the Awards posts at the end of each year. Even if I decide to give up on individual reviews, I’d like to keep doing those, and roundup posts like this one – it’s more a question of whether its worth keeping the blog running just for those. (Not to mention the site is in desperate need of an overhaul in terms of banner/layout, and it would be pointless to do so if I didn’t plan to continue)

Anyway, I haven’t made a concrete decision yet. I will do this seasons First Impressions, and the 2018 awards post, as normal, and hopefully by January I’ll have a better idea of how motivated I am to continue Moeronpan-ing.

With that all out of the way, here’s a quick wrap-up of the few shows I managed to watch this past season.

What I Watched – Winter 2017

Alright, an explanation. I originally made this ‘what I watched’ post not too far into the new season, slightly delayeddue to being busy and Dragon Maid not finishing before the new season started. However after posting it I realized I’d somehow forgotten Rakugo Shinjuu (SOMEHOW) and so took the post down so it could be edited before going back up. With a bunch of things going on like Skins and then Junko visiting, this kept getting more and more delayed, and then I suddenly realized it was June 1st and there were literally 4 more weeks until the next anime season.
So uh…sorry for the delay! Here’s that post again.

What I watched (Summer 2015)

Hey, I’m still here! I wasn’t able to do anything for the anime season that just ended due to working overseas for two months but I did actually catch up on some stuff when I got back. Since there were a few shows that never got First Impressions from this season due to the other reviewers not having time to do them, I thought I’d make this post to evaluate them now that I’ve finished them up.
While these are obviously not First Impressions by any stretch, I’m still going to put it in that category…mainly so that the post can actually be categorized and found again later. And speaking of First Impressions – I’ll be on board when the new season starts, however I have to give a heads up that I’ll probably be just a little late with some of my shows because I’m getting a kitten who is going to demand most of my free time.

Be warned that some of these reviews may contain spoilers.