Here’s an opportunity to review anime – Secret Santa style!

This comes by way of a tweet from the cool guys over at Tokyo Tower WAWL, who pointed us to a post over at the Reverse Thieves blog with a rather cool and unique idea for a group anime review writing project.  (Sorry if this doesn’t match up to my usually scintillating level of writing prowess, it’s past midnight and we’ve had a long day of sightseeing around the greater Las Vegas Nevada area.  In other words, I’m dead tired.)

Basically the idea is this: get together a whole bunch of anime fans with blogs/websites, have them throw the names of a bunch of anime series into a hat (in this case, the hat is the anime community website MyAnimeList), and have everybody review a random anime series from that hat – Secret Santa style.

Not familiar with this whole Secret Santa thing?  C’mon, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, it’s probably been used as a plot device in at least one or two Christmas-themed anime episodes that you’ve probably seen.  Okay fine, I’ll explain it anyway.  Basically it’s a fairly common custom in Western countries, where a group of friends, family members, coworkers, etc. randomly choose a person from among the group to buy a gift for, and they give that gift to them in secret.  (Starting to sound familiar to you?  Thought so…)

Anyway, here’s the skinny: sign up for a MyAnimeList account (they’re free), and fill it with the anime that you have seen, then email your name, blog/website url, and link to your MyAnimeList page to the folks at Reverse Thieves.  Once all entries are in, they will then randomly pair people together, at which point you get to review one of the animes on their list, and they get to review one of the ones on your list.

Their reasoning behind why they are doing this is threefold: mixing up what you watch and review on your blog, getting other people to watch things you feel deserve more attention, and facilitating a way to interact with other bloggers thus creating possibilities for cross blog readership, also it fosters an environment to try other cross blog experiments.  Also, they hope to encourage reviewers to be more willing to step outside of their “comfort zones” and try out series that they may not normally be into – which is always a good thing if you ask me.

Again, more details can be found on the Reverse Thieves blog post about this project.

Better hurry tho – you only have until November 8th to get your entries in!

Of course, I will be participating, so keep an eye on the Otaku no Podcast site to see which series I end up reviewing.  This should be… interesting!  (And fun!)

J-List is a peaceful island of Japanese pop culture for you