[Infinite Zenith]

At its apex, Behind The Nihon Review was one of the most well-heeded blogs in the community; the blog's mission had been to provide insightful, fair and comprehensive discussions on anime, and with a large team of authors producing regular content, Behind The Nihon Review rose in prominence, becoming perceived as being comparable to Anime News Network in terms of reputation. However, this was not to last. It began with their 3D tag cloud plugin failing, followed swiftly by a steadily decreasing comment count, and by the mid-2010s, the blog had largely become inactive, posting only about seasonal thoughts semi-annually and "power rankings", a series where a series' performance was compared as a season progressed. These articles were a far cry from the insightful and comprehensive discussions the blog had stated would form the bulk of their discussion. In the quiet of Behind the Nihon Review's own forum, remaining members of Behind The Nihon Review's writing staff lamented this decline, wondering why the admin of the site, Sorrow-kun, couldn't just transfer admin acccess over to someone who was willing to maintain the site. One of the team members suggested that the reason for this decline was because of shifting trends in anime discussion, that fans were increasingly of a "instant gratification" mindset and that the dense analysis at Behind The Nihon Review hadn't kept up with the fact that people's attention spans were supposedly shorter, unwilling to read lengthier, thought-provoking content that challenged their world view (they had experimented with podcasts, but this proved unsuccessful).

These claims are untrue: anime blogging is still very much alive and well: WordPress bloggers are still very much active, and speaking from personal experience, my own blog receives the same traffic that Behind The Nihon Review did at the height of their popularity. Despite the rise of Twitter and Reddit reactions, and YouTube review channels, blogging remains a steady means of publishing one's thoughts and engaging with the community. The problem that Behind The Nihon Review encountered has nothing to do with the format of their content, as their foray into podcasting demonstrates, but everything to do with the manner in which their blog wrote about content. When Sorrow-kun became Behind The Nihon Review's lead writer and admin, he took on the position with the aim of making the blog a starting point for impacting the industry, which Sorrow-kun had felt to be saturated with slice-of-life series. To this end, Sorrow-kun would write constantly of how slice-of-life was degrading studios and the quality of works in a given season, and expected that Behind The Nihon Review's writers would toe the party line. Nowhere is this more visible than through their K-On! reviews. Each of the reviews, two for the television series and one for the film, were written by different authors but utilise the same language, format and come to the same conclusion. Sorrow-kun himself argued that there was a single objective measure for quality in slice-of-life anime and framed it such that under this measure, shows like K-On! were "objectively" poor. Reviews and articles were dotted with reptitive language: over time, "mediocrity" would become the go-to word for dismissing a series, and even in discussions unrelated to slice-of-life, snide remarks were often directed to slice-of-life and their viewers.

Maintaining such a negative tone is unsustainable: readers tired of the lack of variety and constant bashing of a genre (Sorrow-kun could not resist criticising K-On! whenever the opportunity presented itself), while writer turnover was high because being told to conform with the site's branding (of hating slice-of-life) greatly limited the creative freedom writers need to be successful. Unsurprisingly, Sorrow-kun would eventually stop writing for Nihon Review, and in a discussion on their forums, Behind The Nihon Review's staff expressed decreasing morale as a result of the dropping visitor count and engagement (via comments). Decreasing morale resulted in a corresponding drop in motivation to write, and the reduced article count further contributed to the site's eventual inactivity. Comments that this was a consequence of changes in readers' expectations is to blame-shift and deflect responsibility; Behind The Nihon Review's decline was not a consequence of readers demanding new formats like YouTube videos or podcasts, but rather, the fact that Behind The Nihon Review's insistence on hating a genre resulted in repetitive, poor quality content that gave readers little incentive to keep reading and commenting.

Today, Behind The Nihon Review's domain has expired, resulting in their entire legacy being reduced to a mere footnote in the annals of anime blogging. The lesson here is simple enough: a successful blogger builds their branding around positivity and sincerity, as well as promoting discussion and openness towards other perspectives, rather than attempting to control the narrative, lecture readers and otherwise trying to dissuade people from liking things contrary to one's own interests through pseudo-academic means. The results speak for themselves; I've been blogging for as long as Sorrow-kun has, and my blog still maintains its engagement. This is where my question comes in: why was Behind The Nihon Review so widely respected during its run when much of their content ended up being thinly-veiled attempts to tell people what to think?