People who follow me on Twitter are already aware of this but I thought that those who follow the site through WordPress or whatever might not know: camonte is no more. Running a site of this scope for fun worked when I had plenty of free time & was super enthusiastic about sakuga stuff, but now that I’m busier and don’t care as much about anime running camonte isn’t an appealing task. Even though writing an individual camonte entry takes barely any time there’s other things I’d rather focus on right now and keeping this site up-to-date would be a full time job.

I’ve noticed that some readers were taking everything on here as gospel (or assumed I was presenting it as such) when this site was just an expression of my personal interest in animation. Though there’s several individual anime that are worthy of study from a world animation perspective, in the end the only reason I started this blog was for fun. Some have also tried to read my motives as trying to inject a phony pretentiousness into these weird Japanese cartoons (the original title of the site, “Anime Auteurs”, may have contributed to that misconception) but honestly all I wanted was to show other people the cool obscure shit I was discovering and this format proved conducive to that. My goal was to provide an easy to access resource to those who might be interested in these things and in its own small way I think the format proved a success. It’s strange how certain anime fans who live and breath weeb junk 24/7 would shun attempts to broaden the appeal of the things they spend a significant percentage of their life consuming. You can’t reduce the number of terrible thinkpieces about the industry or ignorant broadsides at anime fans on forums by holing up in /a/. And if you want to convince people that something is cool, you gotta appeal to the center, not the already-convinced. If I could wring some overarching message out of this entire exercise it would be that you should try and avoid the negative stereotypes of anime fans. Rather than jumping on n00bs for using the word “budget” or not knowing the intricacies of publishing LNs, why not show them some Ohira MADs and explain how he was able to pull that off? Because if you’re a jackass about anime minutia then you really have no right to get angry whenever someone says all anime fans are losers. And if all anime fans are losers, less people are going to take the time and appreciate a master animator like Ohira.

(Granted there is a limit. Get too flowery in your prose and the results might backfire. K-On is great, but it’s still K-On. As with everything else it’s worth it to have real world perspective and to avoid tunnel vision.)

I still rarely (very rarely) write about anime here and I’ve since started a weekly film journal thing here. You can also hit me up on twitter at @tamerlane420. If someone else wants to steal the idea of this site and do their own spinoff, you have my permission. I recommend getting a second writer though.