Category Archives: Announcements

Writer’s Room? Spring 2020? Bulletoon? Oh My. | State of the Site

Updates! Update! So Many Updates! It Must Be The End Of The Month!

Winter 2020 Anime TKO + Plans for Spring 2020

…Well, that was the most unsurprising conclusion ever. Mind you, I fully understand that had we been covering a couple other shows – Eizouken, for example – it may have gone rather differently. But the shows we picked were the ones we got. And the results were thusly based on those. So congrats, not just to our crowned champ of the Winter 2020 season, but to all the shows we covered! It was a really good season! …mostly. There was… one show that we, uh… yeah, let’s just not talk about that.

As for Spring 2020, we’ve already made this pretty evident, but there won’t be a TKO for that season. In fact, I’m not going to be doing any real seasonal anime coverage for Spring. Aside from the potential for some Bulletoon stuff. But… well… we’ll get to that in a minute.

I’m personally going to be watching stuff purely because I want to, this season. And less out of obligation. I’ve kinda burned myself out, so I could use the semi-break. Plus it yields more time for me to work on the stuff that’s honestly more important to me. Not to worry, though! I still have my personal blog and will be making posts on there about what I’m watching. Aside from playing catchup on things like My Hero Academia and Black Clover, I will be watching a few seasonals. And apparently I’m also watching Parasyte, Psycho-Pass, and Princess Principal. So there’s that. Maybe some rewatches too, just for the lulz. Hyouka maybe? Been a while. You can keep up with what I’m watching on my AniList, if you’re interested. There’s also my personal blog, Anime Voyage, where I’ll talk about what I’m watching or have finished, during my break. Probably not all of it. But you know. It’s content.

On that note, Bob is going to cover some seasonals. But only two or three. Mostly his choice. I might mandate one series based on “hey, it’s popular, right now.” But otherwise it’s all him. None of my super complicated and objectively wrong opinions to ruin his vibe, yo.

March of the Magical Girls + Bulletoon Season 4

This past month has been pretty good for Bulletoon. Our month-long event, March of the Magical Girls saw some good success. Lots of interest especially around the Kill la Kill and Symphogear episodes. And some decent traction on the Yuki Yuna is a Hero episode, as well. Less so for the Cardcaptor Sakura one, but I actually chalk that up to the timing. The episode was heavily delayed due to a scheduling conflict and was released late at night, so it’s expected that that one wasn’t quite so hot. Plus, it was a gag episode, so I’m not really worried about it.

That said, it wasn’t just the Cardcaptor Sakura episode that saw a huge delay. The Symphogear one, while not releasing nearly as late at night, was pushed back by a week, putting it just days ahead of the Yuki Yuna is a Hero episode. This one we can chalk up to COVID-19, better known as The Coronavirus. It led to some delays in us acquiring all the pieces needed to put the episode together in time. And since my own job had me working long hours, I wasn’t able to finish earlier in the week, as I’d have liked. Thankfully, that episode was probably the most successful of the four, so the delay worked out, regardless.

In any case, all four episodes are now in a Playlist, which you can view HERE. I totally recommend you check them out!

But what will Season 4 look like? Well… I don’t know. Season 3 was likewise hit in an unfortunate manner with a (bogus) copyright strike on our second SPY X FAMILY review. More on that in THIS post. So I’m now a bit leery about manga spotlights. If nothing else, the My Dress-Up Darling and Tomo-chan is a Girl! spotlights have been left alone. So we’ll see. But as to the actual plans for the next season, we’re thinking it’ll feature 4 pre-planned episodes and 4 episodes based on things currently airing, at the time. But that isn’t set in stone. It heavily depends on my ability to watch things.

Either way, Season 4 won’t be hitting the web until May as the show will be taking about 4-week hiatus from regular episodes while we prep stuff in advance. We do have a Season 4 announcement coming up, at least, that will touch on what to expect. So you can bet on seeing more details when that comes out.

Stay Toon’d!

Burning Sky: Writer’s Room

Have you guys been enjoying Burning Sky, so far? Hope so! It’s really fun to work on. Even if it is a lot of work. That said, we know that chapters only release every other week. So we’ve decided on something to fill that space with, aside from the occasional short fiction (those will begin to come out after the Prelude is complete, by the way). In the weeks between chapter releases, we’ll be doing a sort of “Writer’s Room.”

What is that? Well, typically it’s a term used for TV. Most shows have more than one or two writers. Often there’ll be a whole room of writers. This holds true for Burning Sky, as the project is a biiig shared universe of stories with (so far) three writers across (again, so far) nine books. Ten, if we count the Prelude. We thought it’d be a cool idea to sort of get into our heads on the creative process of the series, taking the interim weeks for us to provide a little commentary on some aspect of the chapter that’d just released. Certain creative decisions, perhaps things we would have liked to do differently, what inspired certain ideas, things we learned while writing that chapter, even just… our favorite parts to write. Whatever we feel like talking about.

The first of those is coming up soon, featuring sort of a super post that covers the first THREE chapters. So be on the lookout for that! They’re going to be super casual posts. Mostly just us having a conversation. We may even begin holding the discussions of that on our Discord, so you can see/hear the actual conversation using our Patreon rewards which, by the way, we’ll be updating soon. We do have those Discord Chats we’re going to start doing, at some point. Maybe that’s where we’ll start with that?

The Wrap-Up

Okay, folks. That’s everything. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing support! It means a ton! And, without further ado, I bid you adieu! Keep up the Awesome! And, of course, Take Care!

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March of the Magical Girls, SPY X FAMILY, and Season 4 | Bulletoon

Hey there! Figure a bit of transparency is key, here, to make sure the show runs smoothly.

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No Time Like The Present! 4 Year Anniversary Mini Q&A

All right! Let’s answer some questions!

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An Amped Up Anniversary! Celebrating 4 Years of Energetic Entertainment

Phew! It’s been quite a ride, thus far, yeah? And we have zero intention of stopping anytime soon. Indeed, we’re just getting started.

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Burning Sky Character Reveal – The Unstoppable

Bastions of Justice, the Templars are the military might that upholds the Creed of Nemesis. Having long fought to defend the world from supernatural threats, such as the Akuma and the Djinn, they are the world’s protectors. And none are more famous than the legendary hero of the Djinn Uprising – Baldrik Jaeger, better known as “Baldrik the Unstoppable.”

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Burning Sky Character Reveal – The Tag-Along

Meet the latest member of the Burning Sky cast, the kid sister of the illustrious Itou, Iri.

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Burning Sky Character Reveal – The Negotiator

And now it’s time for the next new member of the Burning Sky cast. Meet the savvy negotiator from the rough Nazir underbelly.

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Burning Sky Character Reveal – The Heart

Meet the next member of the Burning Sky cast and learn a little more about the world!

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The Countdown to Burning Sky Begins Now

Hello, Internet! The time is finally upon us. Welcome, one and all. This is the Official Countdown… to Burning Sky.

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Something is Different. But What? | State of the Site

All right. Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty details of what this little “refresh” has meant for us.

Why did you decide to change up the site’s look?

A few reasons that we’ve gone over before. The biggest was that we’re starting to make more and more of a push towards original content. And that means much longer posts with a lot of longer passages. Our old site layout was incredibly narrow, making larger passages seem longer by stretching them down. And it also just wasn’t great aesthetically. Looking at it on longer posts felt strange because of how squeezed all the text felt.

But there were other major reasons. In the old site, there was an annoying white bar that would clip over the bottom of the Featured Images and it was incredibly noticeable… and annoying. A lot of our Feature Image design decisions were specifically implemented to get around that one, small thing. The new layout doesn’t do that. Granted, it doesn’t automatically have the Featured Images at the top of the post either, but that’s easily fixable. We can just plug them into the body of the post, manually.

The last major factor was that the old site was just… dark. But the way it was laid out, it didn’t really look very good lighter. Our whole brand is about being bright and energetic. The darkness just didn’t suit that. This theme is a lot brighter. Brighter, but also a far cry from overly saturated. And we think it looks good like this.


So did you JUST change the site’s look?

Actually, no! There were a lot of other changes that went into this.

The bulk of the work actually had nothing to do with the site’s look. Heck, the site’s look technically still isn’t completely done at the time of writing this. No, most of the work went into organization. If you’ve been following us for a while, you know we like to do… a lot. But as we move towards these other endeavors, we decided we needed to take a step back, look at what we wanted the site to be, and work on properly organizing things. So we got to work streamlining the site’s category hierarchy.

There are now far fewer categories as we got rid of ones we weren’t using and ones we’d no longer be needing. And while this is something you’d really never see, restructuring the internal hierarchy of the categories was something we really, really needed to do. It simplifies the entire process for us and will make everything so much faster and more efficient.

Reflecting these changes, the top menu has been updated. You’ll notice that several of our traditional series are gone. And there’s a reason for that. Going forward, we’re going to put a hard focus on Anime, with some light touches on gaming, every once in a while. So review series not related to those two things have been canceled. And as it pertains to the anime coverage, our anime commentary will now be saved for one of three ongoing series – Anime Burst, Anime TKO, and Flash Anime-tion.

As a refresher, Anime Burst is our newest series, utilizing a format I introduced last year with Soul Eater Summer. They’re basically what the title suggests. Burst reviews that provide really quick thoughts on the episode, then the Favorite Scene/Sequence, Favorite Line, and MVP. Also, to be introduced next season, if an episode leaves a bad impression, then those categories can be swapped out for Least Favorite Scene/Sequence, Least Favorite Line, and WPP (Worst Performing Player).

Anime TKO is a seasonal anime… well… TKO. TKO stands for technical (or sometimes total) knockout. It’s something we do to cover a ton of shows in a season, then cull them down. This particular season we’ll be handling it Battle Royale style, using a scoring method that pits my more technical score up against EvilBob’s more objective, entertainment value score. More details available in our post revealing the official watchlist for the season.

And, as I’m sure you’re familiar, Flash Anime-tion is just my more in-depth review series that takes a look at either an entire show (assuming it’s a maximum of two cours, at the time that I decide to cover it, with a few exceptions) or just one season at a time. It’s essentially a light analysis, but mostly about praising the things that a particular series does well.

For this season, there won’t be any Anime Burst or Flash Anime-tion content because we’re going to be incredibly busy with other things. The official release of Burning Sky is looming over us and we’ve got to be as ready as we possibly can. So the entirety of our commentary for this season is going to be in Anime TKO. This means you shouldn’t expect more than one anime commentary post a week, unless we’re really on a roll on a particular day.

And on the subject of Burning Sky, no, we are not ready with any of those major announcements we promised yet. As I said, it’ll be at least a week before we’re ready to talk about that. Bear with us!


So are there any other announcements?

As a matter of fact, yes. There are. And one of them is vaguely related to our lack of ability to do a lot, this season. Alas, we’ll save that for last.

The first thing to get out of the way is a social media thing. We’ve given in to the peer pressure and created an instagram account! (this is entirely because I discovered a way to cheese the system and post from my desktop so HA. Eat it, mobile development). Technically we already had it but weren’t using it. Don’t expect to ever see me or any of our real selves on there. As far as the internet need be concerned, we’re a bunch of disembodied voices… that really like anime and can use a keyboard somehow. In any case, I’m not overly certain what we’d wind up posting there aside from the thumbnails of our reviews, videos, etc. And, of course, the occasional haul… whenever any of us have money to get a haul. Any other ideas are welcome. You can access the account through THIS link or from the Connect! tab in the top menu.

Next, there’s a new thing I want to bring everyone’s attention to, and that’s the Archive! I already basically said as much, and anyone minding our Twitter will probably already be aware of this. But I spent basically the last two days archiving a bunch of our older posts. The archive can be found in the Top Menu. We essentially archived a few posts from 2019 and all but a few posts from before 2019, saving only the ones we really liked. You can access every post in the archive or search specifically for them in the sidebar.

And now for the kinda big thing. As I’ve stated, we’re not going to have the time to pump out a ton of posts, ourselves. For the next few months, we’re likely only going to average one anime commentary post a week with maybe the occasional side thing. That’s where this last announcement comes into play. For the first time, we’d like to open the doors for guest posts on the blog! We haven’t ironed out all of the details just yet. So we’ll definitely make another post about it shortly after a little more discussion amongst ourselves. But let us know if you’d be at all interested in making a guest post, any time throughout the Winter season. Doesn’t even have to be a review or about any current anime. Nor are we expecting it to be a regular thing. It could even be a one-off, easy. Sound off in the comments or message me through our contact page or Discord (Voyager#7586) if you’d be interested in doing that!


What else?

Nothing else! That’s everything! A surprising amount, honestly. I thought this post would be short. Oh well. So are you excited for anything to come? Do you like these changes? Let me know, down below. As always, thanks for reading, guys! It actually means a lot that anyone cares about the words I make. And it’s nice going into a new year, knowing I’m slowly getting more and more integrated into this little community as an individual, rather than just an entity. Managing all of this is tough and I’m only human. So I appreciate it. Aaaanyway, you know the spiel by now!

Keep up the Awesome!
Voyager