An Outsider’s Look Into the Finnish Anime Blogging Scene

Lately I’ve affiliated myself a bit more with my fellow countrymen in the anime scene – online of course. I’ve never been especially interested in the local scene and have been observing it only for occasional lulzy nerd wars. It took a lot of boredom in the gray zone somewhere between the weekly episode releases that I finally bothered doing something I should have done long since: Check out the Finnish anime blogging scene.

I got the idea from an IRC-conversation with Tsubasa and some other guys on #desucon. Since the upcoming Desucon, which I anticipate to be one of the most significant of its kind in Finland, is going to feature a panel on anime blogging, I proposed that it might be a good idea to try promoting blogs as a media for the common folk. You know, because an average anime watcher has little idea about why he/she should bother reading blogs instead of just checking out some commercial news sites such as ANN. I thought it would be a good idea to have an aggregator site for Finnish blogs, just like AB.net Antenna and AnimeNano – but it felt like I didn’t manage to convince anyone. So I decided to check out the Finnish anime blogging scene to see the stuff we have.

I knew there were few blogs around, but I didn’t expect it to be as few as around 20 blogs. Out of these, a significant portion seemed to be either very sporadic in posting or completely abandoned. Many appeared to have ceased all activity after the summer, although I did not come across with any clear statements of abandoning the blog. Simply this was enough to make the people’s lack of interest in a Finnish aggregator justified – there just isn’t much content to speak of and the few active blogs around are easy enough to follow without a collective site for them.

Another notable thing was the content. While few in numbers, Finnish blogs demonstrate rather curious trend in themes and topics they mainly post on. For instance, there was no more than two blogs doing episodic posts, which in the international scene are often considered the bread n’ butter of anime blogging. Further chatting with people on #desucon made me realize that not only do Finns tend to think episodic blogging is pointless and dislikeable, there was a clear bias towards English blogs; that entire English blogging scene is composed of nothing but episodic posting. Not that I didn’t understand this attitude, because I harbored similar thoughts during my early exposure to international anime blogging.

The most common topics and themes in Finnish blogging appear to be reviews and critical analysis on whole series of anime and manga, instead of breaking it down to episode-by-episode-style. A few blogs gave me the feeling of being more like review archive sites than weblogs. Some other common themes are overall analysis on anime-related matters and events and discussion of the Finnish hobbyist culture. Almost all blogs focus on matters that are more or less closely related to Finnish anime scene and its interests. Another observation I made was the great variance in different blogging platforms – hell, I saw some I didn’t even know existed.

It is notable that Finnish anime blogging is also quite isolated from the international scene. Of course, language is one issue; in addition to myself I noted only two other bloggers who use English as their writing language (Otaku no Ken and myucon, neither of which have been showing signs of activity lately). However, aside from this I haven’t seen Finnish bloggers affiliating themselves with their international colleagues on IRC or otherwise – to be completely honest and blunt, the Finnish scenes gives me a strong feeling of a very self-satisfied culture. I guess it’s the common Finnish suspicion and hidden envy of outsiders – which is completely unwarranted I assure you! However, I do recognize the great talent of many bloggers, especially Tsubasa and the authors of Sutku and Bubukuuti. Personally I do think Finns are natural writers and our language provides excellent verbal flexibility.

I guess blogging on anime was a short-lived fad of sorts in the Finnish scene – a sudden burst of new blogs which slowly die out after the honeymoon to writing is over. I know the phenomenon and personally I have been fighting it many, many times during the mere 1½ years of Jinx!’s existence, and I dare to say that it’s even worse on those who boldly decide to blog in English. There are several milestones in a blog’s existence as it slowly makes it way from the unknown depths of the internet and achieving each one gives a great deal of satisfaction (congrats on your 100,000 accesses, astro) – as well as a bunch of new challenges and expectations that can slam you back onto the floor as an author. Don’t think the feeling of wanting to quit ever goes away – it surfaces every now and then in different forms. First you’re happy to get 10 views a day. If a post gets 100 views, it feels like a great success. A bit later a mere 100 makes you feel like a failure and the feeling sure is bitter if you really did put a lot of effort into the text. Same goes with comments. I’m sorry because this is a big pile of hypocricy coming from a guy who’s under the description “500 daily hits blog is no more than some miniscule dirt on the Internet“, if you allow me to cite tj_han.

I’d love to see the local blogging flourish, but as it is right now, the Finnish scene is too quiet for its own good. What I think is needed is instruction of to-be bloggers and encourage them to carry on after the first few months or a year, as well as more close affiliation with the international scene – there are a lot of things around to learn from, as well as gain different views on things one had prejudices on. I guess it’s easy for me to talk, since I went straight for the international scen from the start and being the kind of person who has hellish determination whenever he decides to start on something. I guess success in blogging boils down to how much determination and commitment you have – the more you invest, the more you get. In any case, I’ll be looking forward to the blogging panel on Desucon – it’s definitely a step forward.