CANAAN is CANAAN, all caps, and not Canaan. LUCKY☆STAR has that star in the middle if you can manage to remember the keyboard code for it. Love★Com has a different star, though many will make do with Love*Com. s-CRY-ed is not Scryed. NieA_7 is not anything but. Baccano! has an exclamation mark. L’Arc~en~Ciel is L’Arc~en~Ciel and not L’arc-en-ciel or Larc en ciel. They are tildes, not hyphens, and make sure you capitalize that ‘a’. Dir en grey fans spot the new and the ignorant by chastising those that write Dir en Grey or, heaven forbid, Dir En Grey. Yoshitoshi ABe always has that ‘b’ capitalized; he is never Yoshitoshi Abe. Someone once told me that hyde, the vocalist for L’Arc~en~Ciel, is spelt in unassuming lowercase when associated with that particular band, but spelt as HYDE when associated with his solo work. This doesn’t always seem to be the case, but that’s one hell of a confusing thing to remember, huh?

You're doing it wrong!

Being a grammar nazi and supremely anal retentive in general, of course I always do my best to ensure I’m spelling things the way they were intended to be spelt, but sometimes, it’s just a pain in the ass, and sometimes, it’s just impossible to tell.

The stars in LUCKY☆STAR and Love★Com are are in many Japanese fonts by default, but they’re absent in most English ones, making it particularly annoying to find ways to type them. miyavi has changed his official stage name so many times, you’d have to be well-versed with his history to know which name to refer to him as during which part of his career, and with so many names. He’s been miyabi, 雅, MYV, and 雅-miyavi-, among others. Who wants to do a proper superscript when they write Tommy heavenly⁶? Or look up the not equals symbol every time they want to write cali≠gari? Same with whatever that weird German character is in Weiß Kreuz, though that’s more “it’s a different language” and less “goddammit, why does there need to be a funky symbol there?!” It’s hard fighting with the obsessive need to do things right and the overwhelming practicality in just not caring.

The SEED in Gundam SEED should be capitalized. I know this because Japanese magazines always write the SEED in capitalized roman letters, even when the rest of it is in kana. But many other series have the entire title “officially” in kana, and then it’s more or less up to translators to dictate how they’re romanized and how particular their spellings are. For example, I’ve seen people write both Beck and BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad. The latter is more popular, but the original (ベック) is all katanana with no subtitle, so who knows? Similarly, is プラネテス PLANETES or Planetes? Should SOUL EATER be capitalized? It is in the logo, but it’s also just ソウルイーター.

The fact that there is no real equivalent to capital letters in Japanese pretty much means that they can have a field day with it and do whatever they want. (They kind of do whatever they want with English anyway.) Most likely, they use it just as a means to stand apart. “SOUL EATER” may or may not be more dramatic than “Soul Eater” — do the Japanese percieve the capital letters to be like shouting like we do? Or is it just different, but not necessarily “louder”? It’s not that hard to remember that ELLEGARDEN, RURUTIA, and ONE OK ROCK are capitalized, or that angela and stereophony are lowercase if we don’t think of them as capital or lowercase letters. They’re just symbols representing a subject. A capital letter does not denote a proper noun and lowercase does not denote a common word. Forget all your rules and just recognize them as what they are. And all the other quirks they pull aside from capitalization/lack of, all the weird spacing and symbols — all just ways to stand out. They aren’t “weird” symbols; they’re just part of the name.

But then sometimes I get the distinct feeling that even the namebearers don’t care that much about how their names are spelt. It’s just all the neurotic fans like me making a big deal out of it. For example, Dir en grey. Only the ‘d’ is capitalized, right? That’s how it’s written on magazines and all of their albums until the Marrow of the Bone (2007), at which point it became DIRENGREY, though I’m not sure if that was an “official” name change or just a typographical choice reflecting musical changes. In any case, neither “Dir en grey” nor “DIRENGREY” is what Shinya, their drummer, wrote on the autographed drumpad he threw out into the pit when I saw them last November.

Nope. That says “DIR en Grey.” Kind of weird, yes? Not even “Dir en grey.” Geez, Shinya, learn how to spell your own band’s name! How can you expect self-righteous fans to yell at other, “less knowing” fans if you can’t even get it right? Maybe in the end, it really doesn’t matter at all as long as people know what you’re talking about, but that doesn’t sit well with the obsessive-compulsive. I don’t care if you capitalize things in odd places or don’t capitalize things or put stars in the middle of words that are impossible for Westerners to type. I just want there to be a right way to write things. Is that so much to ask?

For the record, I did not catch that drumpad (sadly). I just ran into the person who did after the show and got a picture.

1) The hiding of the score breakdown for every review. Previously, every review on MAL showed not only the overall score, but the individual scores for story, character, animation, sound, and enjoyment. Reviews can still fill in the subscores… there’s just no way for readers to see them. (Later, Xinil conceeded and re-added the subscores, though users have to go through an extra click to get to them.)

2) The removal of BBCode support for all reviews. Reviews can no longer contain any kind of BBCode, including basic things like bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough.

3) The relocation of reviews on profile pages. Reviews are now to be accessed at the top of each user’s profile instead of from the side. Users can choose to favorite reviewers so that their newest reviews appear under a tab in their own profile.

A handful of people expressed their disapproval of change #3, but most of the dissenters were more concerned with changes #1 and #2, and I was among those ranks.

Xinil did not really provide an argument in favor of #1, but eventually conceded to user complaint and re-added the subscores. Honestly, in retrospect, I think the main reason I was upset at the removal of the subscores was just that they had always been there before. Updates to a site should not take away features that were there previously, especially if no one had ever had anything bad to say about them. Users didn’t have to use the subscores, but they were there. Despite that Xinil had little to say on the matter though, there was a lot of debate over the feature between both reviewers and readers alike.

A lot of people seemed to believe that numbers were too impartial and that the less numbers a review had, the better. No numbers would encourage readers to actually read through the entire review to get the writer’s opinion rather than only taking a quick glance at the provided numbers (and rating a review “helpful” or “not helpful” based solely on those numbers). Some readers said that they liked the numbers because it allowed them to quickly assess a writer’s opinion — writer’s said that this just made them lazy. Other writers claimed that the numbers encouraged readers to read through the actual review if the numbers intrigued them — for example, if the reviewer scored all aspects of a series high except for animation.

I write reviews. I write a lot of reviews, and I only occasionally read others’ reviews. Still, I argued in favor of the numbers and the subscores. My reasoning was that there are some things that are just easier to emphasize with numbers. For example, I loved the animation and sound in Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, but I abhored the character development and story. I expressed this in words, but it’s probably just as effective for a reader to take a quick glance at my subscores and garner that information for himself: Story — 5, Character — 5, Animation — 10, Sound — 10. I will be the first to admit that I tend to write excruciatingly long reviews. Sure, it’s nice if you actually read the whole thing, but I won’t be offended if you’re just looking for a quick, numerical summary.

A few readers also pointed out that they were afraid that reviews might contain spoilers, and thus it was safer to just glance over the scoring. With my own flaming hatred of spoilers, I make a point to never write spoilers in my reviews for MAL (except in the cases of sequel series, wherein I’ll occasionally have spoilers for the parent series). I think most other reviews do the same, or at the very least, carefully mark where a spoiler might be. Still, it’s not hard to sympathize with the cautious reader; it’s true after all, numbers can’t spoil the story for you, even if they might turn you off from it or get you overexcited.

So yes. I like my numbers, and I’m glad the subscores did eventually make it back. Now that the fight’s over though, I come to realize this: I don’t really use numbers for the reviews I write outside of MAL. For the live action movie and comic reviews that I write for this blog (because MAL is anime and manga only), I provide no numbers, only words. Lots and lots of words. I almost had numbers. I distinctly remember scoring the first NANA movie when I was reviewing it, but I ended up not posting them. I can’t remember why, but because I’m obsessive compulsive and need to keep everything in the same format, every subsequent movie review was missing numbers.

So I guess I don’t think numbers are so essential after all. I only ever assigned those numbers because the option was there. If it had never been there to begin with, it would have never bothered me. Reading a review, you get a pretty decent idea of someone’s opinion, regardless of whether or not numbers are there to accompany the words. Numbers aren’t essential, though they might be a cheating, kind of time saver for some. Besides, everyone’s numbers seem to be different. It isn’t uncommon for reviewers to have a page dedicated to explaining just what their numbers mean, especially in relation to one another. One person’s 10 is not the same as another person’s 10 because one person might give out 10′s more frequently than others, lessening its “value.” Of my reviews on MAL thus far, I’ve only given an overall score of 10 to two series (the Death Note manga and the Gurren Lagann anime). Most other people are less reserved with their praises, but that doesn’t mean they’re any more or less superior as a reviewer. We’re just different people, and we review things differently.

And with subscores, the difference is even greater. Some reviewers average their subscores to create the overall score. Other reviewers, like me, assign an overall score independently of the other scores. For some series, I just feel as if some categories carry more weight than others. Sometimes, the enjoyment and charisma of a series just overrides the fact that it had shoddy animation and a cliche storyline. So I guess for readers who read reviews by a wide range of reviewers, numbers can mean very little. If you’re unfamiliar with the particular reviewer, it can be hard to compare their scores with someone else’s. Everyone’s using a different scale, and that can’t be very helpful at all.

In retrospect, I guess #1 wasn’t really that big of a deal. I still like that we were able to compromise, and I still like that I can assign both an overall score and multiple subscores, but it wouldn’t have been all that hard to just add those in myself at the end of every review if I really felt like it. It would have been annoying, but much more workable than #2…

Unfortunately, Xinil was much more adamant about keeping BBCode out of reviews. His position on the issue was:

I’m still set against bringing bbcode back. Newspapers, magazines, news websites…none of them use bold/italics. We don’t need it.

I kind of find this to be bullshit. No one uses bold and italics? Are you serious? Font creation standards all but dictate the inclusion of a bold, italicized, and bold-italicized version of standard fonts. That is an obvious indication of their widespread use. In addition to that, newspapers and magazines have plenty of formatting via headers and margins, as well as images, to help break up the text. The tl;dr syndrome has only gotten worse with the age of the Internet, and thus, there is a need to minimalize giant walls of plaintext. If you want someone to read what you’ve written, you need to make it easy for them. This is why paragraphs were invented.

I’ve never seen anyone on MAL really abuse the use of BBCode in their reviews. Some people get a bit fancy with their tiered, multi-colored, and bullet point reviews, but all of those shenanigans are in an effort to make their opinions easier to understand — organization isn’t a crime. Myself, I like my bold and italics. They do their job: they emphasize things without having to result to CAPSLOCK, which is still “yelling” on the Internet. I’m also fond of the [url] tag because it allows me to link related reviews. It is beneficial to both me and the reader for me to link my review of the Death Note manga from my review of the Death Note anime. Similarly, I link reviews for spin-off series like SEED Supernova to their parent series because some aspects of the series, such as animation and sound, are shared between them. All right, so the linking isn’t really kosher or necessary, but it’s useful. At the very least, basic font formating like bold and italics should be left useable.

In the arguments for BBCode, there arose a discussion about the need to format reviews by blocking off sections for each subcategory. For this, citing professional news and review sources is actually applicable because it’s true — most reviews are just solid essays without any kind of partitions. Generally, for good reviews, all the subcategories would be covered at some point in the text anyway. Still, writing a review in sections appeals greatly to my OCD. If all the information is there regardless, does it really matter? Is there really such a huge difference between transitional phrases like “As for the characters…” and a header that declares “Characters”? The latter is easier to identify and read. Sectioning things off might make it easier for those that only want to know about a certain aspect of something. It also helps keep me, the writer, organized as well. Without those sections, it’d be much, much easier for me to ramble off in an incomprehensible mess… as if my writing wasn’t rambly enough.

So here’s to still wanting that BBCode back, at least in part. Unfortunately, now that the thread seems to be both hidden from the site and unusable anyway, there’s no good platform on which to argue with Xinil. I’m not sure how much good logic would do him anyway; despite having asked for suggestions, he didn’t seem very receptive to them. (Consider also that a majority of the legitimate threads in the Suggestions forum seem to never get a reply from him.) I dunno. Maybe it’s not worth the drama.

For a little while after all the changes were made, I considered no longer using MAL as my review platform if compromises weren’t made. That seemed needlessly dramatic though. I like MAL. I don’t like these changes, but I still like MAL. It would be a lot of trouble for me to mirror all of my existing reviews on this blog too. I started and finished Antique Bakery on a random whim a few weeks ago, and it’s sitting around on my backlog waiting to be reviewed. It’ll be hard trying to find a way to emphasize things in my writing without italics, and I hate that my section headers no longer stand out for lack of bold, but… what can ya do? Oftentimes, I think I fret over this nonsense way, way too much.

I seem to have this big issue with swapping tenses in my reviews. I’m never sure whether I should be writing them in past or present tense, so I inadvertently end up jumping around a lot, which is really annoying. (I’m sure most people don’t notice anyway, but I do when I go back to read them sometimes…) History papers are in past tense because we’re talking about the past. English papers are in the present because the book is fictional and we’re discussing it in the actual present. As far as I know, you should still use present tense even if its historic fiction. I suppose according to that reasoning, reviews should also be in present tense because we’re discussing it in the present and they’re fictional works… I just need to remember this next time I write. It’s way too much trouble to go back and fix everything I’ve written now… Bugger.

What people probably deem as objectivity is just a reviewer’s ability to explain and justify his assertions. Or, it could just be that the way some people write make it exceedingly obvious when they’re emotionally invested in a work and those are easier to pick from the crowd. This is especially true for anime and manga reviews because fandom is so prevalent in our subculture. It’s really hard to write with an objective tone for a series you really, really like, especially if you’ve just seen it and are cruising along on that fandom high. But I wonder, is that really so bad? Clearly if you like the series that much, you’re going to write a positive review regardless, but should your apparent enthusiasm take away from your analysis if you’re still able to provide reasons for why you liked it so much?

The same might be true for series you really disliked, though I think it’s to a lesser extent. It’s easier to explain why you dislike something than why you like something because complaints seem to come more naturally than praise. But yeah, the point is, if your words seem emotionally charged, your review is taken less seriously because oh, gasp, you’re biased. Well, of course you’re biased! Who isn’t biased? It’s a review! It’s your opinion! You’re gonna be biased! Maybe it should be taken as part of the review — how much did this series rile up this person? In a good or bad way? Will I be similarly affected by this series? Emotion reveals pieces of a reviewer’s background and history as well — what is it? Is this person similar to myself? If so, should I take it that I may share similar views of this series? If not, should I be taking every word with a grain of salt (or well, more grains of salt than usual)?

Or does the emotion really not contribute much in the end? Would an objective-sounding review convey just as much information in a more accepted way? Certainly it’s possible to say you like something without fanboying over it (or even to fanboy over it in a better articulated and formal fashion?), but can you really still convey the degree of awesome something is without using terms like “super special awesome epic amazing”? Honestly, I’m split on the subject. I love writing in a ridiculous formal tone because it’s fun and makes you sound more authoritative (like your opinion really matters, lol). But fangasming is fun too, just, I guess the question is whether a review is the best place for it.

A quick glance over my reviews on MAL says that my two most controversial reviews are my Code Geass review and my Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann review. The latter is rather fantardy, I admit, but the former isn’t as bad, I don’t think. But I was wondering, is my TTGL review controversial because A) the way I wrote it wasn’t “objective” enough, B) the merits of the series itself are controversial, or C) both? …Both is the easy answer, and it’s one of the reasons I wish MAL enabled comments on reviews in addition to anonymous feedback. It’s widely believed that the “helpful” ratings on every review are dependent more on whether or not the reader agrees with you rather than whether they actually thought it was helpful. Some of my other reviews seem to disagree with the idea of A though — my Gravitation EX review is very emotional, but it hasn’t seen any negative feedback (okay, so three feedbacks isn’t exactly a wide sample, and I did get some negative feedback when I posted it on TOKYOPOP, but that person more disagreed with my opinions than anything else) — is that because I admitted my obvious bias upfront? But for the Death Note anime, I also admitted by bias upfront and people still trashed it. :P Then again, I felt like my Death Note manga review was fairly objective-sounding, and they trashed that too. XD

Readers are a fickle breed, I suppose. But yes, direct feedback would be nice. This “helpful/unhelpful” nonsense is decidedly not helpful at all. I think I’ll migrate towards the accepted norm though and try to make my reviews sound more objective even when all reviews are inherently subjective. I think our society just values people that sound like they know what they’re talking about and present their opinions as facts when they really aren’t giving any more or less information than someone with a more emotional response. Or something. In the end though, regardless of style, the best reviews are simply those that are able to back up all their claims with reasonable logic, yeah?

Anyway, I finished my Loveless review today, but even though I just said I’m going to try and sound more professional… I don’t think this review is a great example of that, lol. I hated it so much, I couldn’t help but be a bit snarky. And besides, too much professionalism is boring as hell. It’s why no one likes reading art criticism.