APADFTMOM Day 31: Thank You, and See You Soon

This feels like kind of a copout in the long haul, doesn’t it? My day 1 post was an introduction and my day 31 post is a conclusion. I doomed myself from the start by not making an actual content post right off the bat so fuck it, we’re capping it off in a similar manner.




Thank you so much for sticking with me through this seemingly impromptu challenge which I recently and half-heartedly titled A Post A Day For The Month Of May. I’ve kept an eye on the statistics of my posts and I’m honored to have gained a consistent reader base. Seeing more than one view - my own - on any post was enough to make me happy but consistently seeing a larger and larger number of people coming back fills me with indescribable joy.




Thank you to everybody who read my posts, thank you to everybody who reached out to me with criticism and words of encouragement, and an extra big thank you to everybody who told me that I made you interested in a manga series. When I first started writing, I had the selfish goal of wanting to finish May with one person telling me that I influenced them to read something. I thought I could consider this all a success if I could persuade just one person to read just one chapter of just one series, and by that metric I can safely call this an incredible success.




Throughout the month I learned quite a few things about my vision and what it just naturally ended up being. I came into this wanting to write simple recommendations with no negativity to encourage you to read and form your own opinion. That was a success, but my writing style took a weird turn right off the bat as we started looking at manga more as works of literature. Personally I’ve grown to love this approach because pointing out special writing styles and how they’re unique helps to paint manga as a medium instead of a genre. I want to continue breaking away from the notion that manga is all battles and harems.




Where do we go from here? It goes without saying but I’m going to continue posting. This month was not a one-time challenge but the kick in the ass I needed to get started. Here’s our general game plan from here on out:

• We’ll be continuing putting out spoiler-free analysis-based recommendations. That’s a given.
• High Priority Reading will remain as a secondary series but will probably undergo a name change. I want to continue growing a smaller personally curated selection both to be able to point to when people ask me for my personal recommendations and also because I’m a raging narcissist.
• We’ll be doing read-alongs. I’ll be starting a new series where I pick a manga and make posts focusing on a handful of chapters at a time that you can read at your leisure before coming back for the discussion post.
• We’ll continue doing first impressions when possible. Samurai 8 dropping in the middle of this challenge was a blessing in disguise for letting me do something new and I had a lot of fun checking that out and talking about why it’s worth following.
• This is a personal one but I want to challenge myself to write about things I don’t like. I want to be able to discuss the merits of things that don’t fit my personal tastes because just because I don’t like them doesn’t mean you won’t.
• Once a month I’m thinking of going over my reading calendar and discussing what I read in the past month and what I’m putting down to read in the next month. It’s another vanity project, kinda, but it may encourage someone to follow that same model of scheduled reading.
• Maybe a Youtube channel but that’s a pipe dream and highly unlikely. I enjoy discussing the written word in the format of the written word.

I’ll be taking a small break but then we’ll be right back at it with the content. These are exciting times and this is only the beginning for us. Reading any of my posts was more than I could ever ask for, but please allow me to make one more selfish request and join me in the future.