New Years Special: Reflecting on a Year of Your Blogs Part 4

Everyone has their favorite New Year’s traditions. For some, these are consumable, such as breaking into Osechi Ryouri in Japan (the feature image of this post). For others, these traditions may be activities such as writing about all of the anime a person’s watched for the year. I’ve always enjoyed reflecting on the year while rolling into a new one.

Welcome to a special week-long New Year’s celebration celebrating YOU! This week, I’m sharing a year of my favorite blog posts written by the WordPress community in order to recognize your contributions to the wonderful blogosphere that we are all part of. If you missed Day 1, be sure to check it out (Day 1 contains a more thorough explanation of this festive special)! You can also check out days 2 and 3 for more of these amazing blog posts.

Today, we’re taking a look at blogs from June and July. Keep an eye out for more posts throughout the week. I hope that you enjoy reading these as much as I did!

 

June

Just like May, June proved to be quite a challenge due to the large volume of great blogs published that month!

 

1. Sharing writing is one way that people try and share positive feelings with others. Another way is by cooking. Cartoon Cravings combines both mediums to discuss favorite pop culture moments through the food that they feature. In Sailor Moon Super S: The Movie, author Cartooncravings compares personal baking experiences with experiences shared by the characters from the movie Sailor Moon Super S before recreating the cute bunny-shaped cookies that make an appearance in the beginning of the film. I did cheat a little to feature this one, because it is actually a June 2016 post, but I loved it so much that I didn’t want to leave it out. (And if you like seeing cartoon food made in the real world, check out Cartoon Cravings’  Gravity Falls and Charlotte’s Web posts)

 

2. As I’ve already mentioned once in this 2017 throwback special series, I love reading posts that take pop culture topics and apply critical lenses to them. A wonderful example of this from 2017 is The Sketchy Feminist‘s Consent and Steven Universe. The post analyzes different ways that consent appears in Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe,  from Pearl tricking Garnet into fusing with her to issues between Steven and Lars (contains major spoilers!).

 

3. Media influences how people perceive or think about a particular subject, making certain perceptions more present in people’s minds when the topic comes up. Because of this, problematic portrayals prevalent in certain types of media or genres can be a problem. Remy Fool over at The Lily Garden discusses this concept by talking about the evolution of the yuri genre in Thoughts on Yuri Anime – The Issues and Influences of Class S (And if you’re a fan of yuri, genre exploration, or feminist critique of pop culture, be sure to check out The Lilly Garden‘s My Thoughts on Yuri Anime – Fanservice  and Ballroom e Youkoso and the Portrayal of Female Characters Within the Shounen Narrative)

 

July

Summer must have been an ideal time for many of you bloggers, because July was just as difficult to choose from as the previous two months. Truely, for these three months, I had to use a bit of random selection to remove a few in order to narrow down the list.

 

1. One of my favorite game reviews of 2017 is Never Alone reviewed by The Midnight Mystic Mage. This Mage does a great job with this review, talking about different gaming mechanics that made the game fun to play, as well as talking about the culture and Kunuuksaayuka folklore that the game is about.

 

2. The ins and outs of translating a narrative from one language to another has always fascinated me, especially when it comes to anime. In college, part of why I studied Japanese was that I wanted to better be able to see the translation decisions made in anime and manga. Froggykun explores an aspect of this in Translating the Kyoto Dialect in Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga, which talks about translation trouble when it comes to bringing over anime featuring characters who speak in the Kyoto dialect.

 

3. Dogs are an amazing species. It is no surprise that we employ them as service animals to aid people dealing with many different kinds of impediments in order to make life run smoothly. My favorite post from AmeliaOphelia over at The Musings of a Strange Poet is Service Dog, a post where AmeliaOphelia shares stories about how her four-legged buddy helps with anxiety so that walking around in the world isn’t as daunting.

 

With July, I also followed and participated in my first blogging event, hosted by the amazingly talented The Well-Red Mage: The 31 Day Elemental Challenge. For every day of July, the Mages challenged gamers to share their favorite title from a specific genre such as Rogue-like or racing. This challenge was a great deal of fun, and put my casual gammer knowledge to the test! It was also fun reading about the games that other bloggers shared for each day of the challenge.

 

 

Do you have a favorite blog that you’ve written or read from June or July? I invite you to share it in the comments! I’m always excited to read new posts.

And as always, if you have a literary device you want to know more about, or a game, comic, show, or movie that you want to see make an appearance on the blog, leave a shout-out in the comments!

 

*Featured Image retrieved from http://dietmotivation.net/osechi_calory