My Great Collab Idea – What it is, and how YOU can participate! (A WordPress Aniblogger Collaboration!)

I’ll preface this post with a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!

Lately I’ve been mentioning that I have been itching to start a collab with someone, because I have what I believe to be a fun idea for a collaboration. Last post that I mentioned this I got quite a bit of positive responses!

So first, a big thank you to everyone who expressed interest.
There were enough of you that I decided to expand this idea into something that any number of people can participate in – a great WordPress Aniblogger Collaboration!

A tiny bit of background on this idea.
I wanted to start a collaboration where a group of people watch the same anime, same episodes, but all provide wildly different perspectives.

How can we accomplish this? Through themes that we will all choose on a per-episode basis. The idea is that for each individual episode, you will be watching the episode through the lens of your theme. For example, if your theme is “weather“, you are going to be focusing on the weather and how it plays (or doesn’t play) a role in the episode – meanwhile someone else could have a theme of “character emotional responses” and end up with a very different perspective.

Some themes will be broad, others specific. Some will be comedic, others more serious. Going to try and get a wide variety of themes that will provide a wide variety of perspectives. I have some good ones planned.

Essentially, each week, we will all be posting our thoughts on the same episode from the same anime – but we will all likely have very different thoughts and ideas because we are focusing on different aspects of the anime.

I feel like it would be a lot of fun to watch the same anime as all of you, and be able to read everyone’s thoughts on each episode – while also seeing how themes cause different thoughts to form.

Does this sound fun / interesting to you all?

Here is how the rough logistics of the collab would work:

1. I will write a post in the new year to kick off the collab. In this post, I will mention the anime that we will all be watching, and provide a list of themes to choose from for episode 1. I will try to include a mix of themes, from broad to specific, comedic to serious.
2. Participants can then choose a theme that will be their focus for episode 1 (myself included). Can mention in the comments what you are choosing, or just keep it to yourself – up to you.
3. We all watch episode 1, with our chosen themes in mind. The point is to be very focused on aspects of the episode that are related to your theme.
4. We all write a post for episode 1 on our own blogs, noting the theme we chose and our thoughts on the episode with our theme in mind. (How you structure your post is completely up to you. You can write whatever you want, just make sure to also write about your theme and it’s relation to the episode). The more in-depth you can go with your theme-related thoughts, the better, because the point in this collab is to create a wide variety of viewpoints on the same episode.
5. Make sure to tag my post listing episode 1 themes so we can all see each other’s posts! I will also update the post with a list of all the participating posts.
6. A week from the episode 1 themes post, I will create another post for episode 2 with new themes (and maybe keep some old ones as well) and we will do it all again, only this time you would be tagging the episode 2 theme post with your episode 2 post. As the anime progresses I will be able to come up with more specific themes based on details from the anime. Also, I figure keeping all of the tags on episode specific posts for each episode would make it easier to keep track. This will continue until we finish the anime on a weekly basis.
7. After we have finished the anime, I will create a final post with a list of everyone’s posts & the themes they chose for each episode.

Hopefully that’s not too complicated. I wanted to make a collab that would allow everyone to post from their own blogs, allow for a lot of interaction, and create a variety of different perspectives.

Now, the final piece of the puzzle is the anime itself. I’m going to provide my two potential picks for the collab, and I’d like to hear which one you’d all prefer.

1. This Art Club Has a Problem! is my #1 pick for this collab.
2. True Tears is my #2 pick for the collab.

I chose these two because they are both average rated school anime that probably both have their share of enjoyable moments and issues. School anime to me sort of has this “essence” of anime to it – it’s so common that I feel like we all have seen our fair share of school anime. This would probably make it easier for us all to focus on our chosen themes, and would also make it easier for me to come up with potential themes for everyone to use.

Main reason I put This Art Club Has a Problem! over True Tears is because it’s a comedy which I feel like might be better for the collab – more lighthearted content. That being said, there is definitely some merit to the collab using a drama anime, because that may open the doors to more analysis…

Let me know your thoughts on which anime you think would be more fun to use!

So that’s my big collab idea! I wanted to make something that we can all participate in, but in a way that allows us all to provide different viewpoints on the same content – all from the comfort of our own blogs.

Going to tag the folks who expressed some interest in a collab from my last post:

• Aria
• Irina
• Jon Spencer
• Winter Reverie
• WhoAmI?

Also going to tag Average Joe Reviews, Will Sirius,  Jenn, Lynn, and Karandi.

I’d love for all of you to join in on this, if you have the time!
Sorry to hit you with a pingback if you aren’t interested!

And of course, everyone is welcome!
Anyone reading this is welcome to participate!

I’ll gauge interest on this post, and we can go from there.
I’m going to put a tentative date of January 7, 2019 as the kickoff date for the collab.

Please leave a comment if you would be interested in participating, and which anime you’d prefer to watch for the collab. I’ve never seen either of the two, and I’d like for us to watch an anime that most of us have not yet seen.

Also let me know if you have any questions.

I’m also taking suggestions for theme ideas. A few examples of what I have thought of are things like: weather, liquids, glasses-wearing characters, Japanese culture, use of colour (or a specific colour), specific character related themes, etc… I also have some creative theme ideas that I want to keep a surprise.

That’s all for this post!
Looking forward to all of your thoughts – this could be a very fun way to kick off 2019 in the WordPress Aniblogging community!

Thanks for reading!