A Ten Year Review: AUKN Edition

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As I write this on October 23rd 2025, it has been ten years since my first AnimeUKNews review was published. Which I think makes for the perfect opportunity to look back on some of the things I’ve written about and enjoyed the most. But before that, I’m going to take a moment to say I am incredibly grateful to have spent a decade working with such a fantastic team. I love working with our other writers, and I have learnt a hell of a lot from our editing team. I have come a long way because of you, and the words ‘thank you’ don’t even begin to express my gratitude.

2015: Getting Started

Although AUKN is the site I’ve written the longest for, it’s not actually how I got into this whole writing lark. Actually, I started out writing Pokémon news for some fan sites and that gradually grew into writing more broadly about games with some of my friends for our own site: WiiUAndMii (which later rebranded to Tanuki Bridge, but sadly hasn’t lasted the test of time as we all grew older, busier, etc.). I joined the AUKN forums in November 2013, no doubt following in the coattails of my friend Josh, since I wanted somewhere to talk about anime more.  I can’t remember if I was particularly active or not, but I at least kept up with visiting the site enough to see a news post advertising for new writers in September 2015. I wasn’t very optimistic at the time, but I asked a few questions and applied anyway. Somehow, I made it through and got accepted onto the team and since I’d been asking questions about light novels, my first assignment ended up being Attack on Titan: The Harsh Mistress of the City, which had been sitting around unclaimed. Back then, I don’t think any of us could have predicted where that franchise would end up, but even then, I was never a huge fan of the main series. What interested me was the other stories told within the setting, and Harsh Mistress of the City showed me the value in those. For someone who never really liked Attack on Titan, I went on to review related media for it quite a few times. But more on that later.

Unfortunately, AUKN experienced a hacking incident in late 2015-early 2016, and we lost a significant number of reviews during the transition to the current site. Honestly, in this period there wasn’t a huge amount of note that I want to discuss here anyway, apart from my Baccano! anime review. Although I like Durarara!!!, I was unfortunate to find that I didn’t enjoy Baccano! and struggled to review it in a way that conveyed that appropriately. Due to the timeline jumping around so much, it was also hard to keep track of. I remember going back and forth with Sarah (our editor) with it, and looking back, I think it’s still one of the titles I had the most difficulty with – largely due to my own inexperience, to be honest. Nowadays, I am much better at being able to step back and look at a series objectively, understanding why I don’t like it and why someone else could. It’s a much more balanced approach and I like to think I turn out better work because of it (I am sometimes praised for it, so!). I don’t intend to highlight things I disliked in this round-up, but this one felt like an important milestone of sorts.

2016

Highlights of the year:

One of the things I think people are unaware of when it comes to reviewers is the fact that we often take chances on things we might otherwise have had no interest in. In fact, some of my favourite things have come about because the opportunity was presented to me. But at the same time, sometimes we get to talk about things we already love, and that’s a really fortunate thing too. 2016 was a mixture of those things, generally. I’d never watched a live-action Japanese film or TV series before that Attack on Titan movie (the me of then would be shocked by how much of those I do watch now!), and that made for a very different experience when it came to reviewing it. Complex Age is also a manga I’m not sure I’d have read if not for being presented with it too, even though it became a manga I still think fondly of today.

On the other end of the scale, we have Orange, Fullmetal Alchemist and Your Lie in April, which are all series I adore. Writing about the things you love can be surprisingly difficult; it’s so emotionally charged. I think I can be good at that kind of writing, but maybe it comes off as overly positive or fangirly. Actually, with FMA I had bought the super expensive gate edition, but since it was so many episodes, we decided to split the review and tackle it as the two separate CE editions instead.

I’d actually attended the Leeds Film Festival in 2015 as well, but my coverage from that year seems to have been lost to the void. 2016 wasn’t as good a year overall, but it did get me invested in Monogatari. See, I’d previously bounced off of the Bakemonogatari anime hard, but Kizumonogatari’s movies led me to seek out the original light novels and those I adore. I think the Kizu novel had just come out around then, since Kodansha wanted to start there with it being a prequel. I remember picking it up afterwards, whatever the case.

2017

Highlights:

With my newfound interest in Monogatari, 2017 gave me the opportunity to hop on board with reviewing them. Something I followed through with all the way to Zoku Owarimonogatari, which is the last one Kodansha published in English (although it is not the last one to exist in Japan). I spent so many years writing about this franchise in the end, as well as several of NISIOISIN’s other works. I came to really appreciate him as a writer, and now he’s a name I’ll always look out for. DanMachi Season 1 was something I’d talked at length about before (maybe even on this blog…), I think it might even have been one of the work examples I sent in when I applied to the site. So that one will always have a special place in my heart! Hyouka is also just one of those things that I had loved for a long time and was so delighted to talk about at length. Pokémon ended up being interesting since I’ve been a Pokémon fan since I was like 5 years old, but it was a lot of episodes to cover lol. I did go on to cover a lot more Pokémon for AUKN, and I’m always happy to do so when the opportunity arises.

Anime Supremacy! stands out to me because it’s the sort of book I would happily engulf now, but back then, I didn’t realise how interested I was in the production side of anime. Plus, this was neither manga nor light novel but a full-blown novel. I loved it at the time and still love it now (I’ve seen the live-action film too, which is also a blast!). It’s definitely one of those reads that helped shape my taste over the years to come.

Throughout my career, I have never felt I was a good feature writer, not because I can’t write them well, but simply because I lack inspiration. I’ve never been an ‘ideas person’, which works out okay with AUKN since we often do group articles instead, like our season previews/overviews, year-end reviews and Scotland Love’s Anime lookbacks. However, though rare, I do sometimes get hit with an idea, and that year it ended up being about Fuuka. Ultimately, Fuuka was a series that was near and dear to my heart since I loved the manga and was unhappy about how the anime changed the ending. It wasn’t even because of what they changed so much as the knock-on effect that it had on the rest of the show.

It’s funny reading my J-Novel Club article, as a lot of the problems that service had are still the same today, largely dominated by isekai and fantasy. But the light novel market is a lot more developed now and I have way more knowledge about the industry, so I understand why it has remained like that.

2018

Highlights:

It’s funny going through my timeline for these reviews and seeing how Attack on Titan so stubbornly followed me. And yet I continued to enjoy it all because it was spin-off media lol. Garrison Girl was particularly interesting since it’s a Western author’s take on the whole thing. Then there’s Kokoro Connect and Girlish Number, which were other examples of series I already loved and wanted to talk about. Girlish Number is about a newbie Seiyu and the difficulties she faces in the field. A lot of people don’t like the MC, but I always quite appreciated her gremlin but heartfelt actions. I guess it’s another example of stories that follow people working in creative industries, which have increasingly become a favourite of mine. Wotakoi was one of those series I randomly chose and then became like a super favourite of mine. I was so happy I read it.

It was also early 2018 when I first started learning Japanese, which has become such a big part of my life now. Or rather, it opened the door to a lot of things that are a big part of my life, perhaps? In the last couple of years, in particular, I’ve thought more about translating and the process that goes into bringing these things to the English market. I may also have more experience with a creator’s other work,s which are usually still unlicensed. That definitely has changed and reshaped how I review, even if only in small ways.

I recall From Truant to Anime Screenwriter was difficult to write about since it’s an autobiography, and it feels like when it’s so personal, you can’t really criticise certain elements of it. Still, it gave me a newfound appreciation for Mari Okada and now she’s one of my favourite writers (perhaps less a director given how some of those have turned out…).

And speaking of directors, 5 Centimetres Per Second is a film I have so many mixed feelings on. I loved it when I was younger, but looking at it as a critic now, it hasn’t stood the test of time well at all. And I’ve had to express this same sentiment a few times since I also reviewed the manga and a related novel later on.

A Sister’s All You Need is another series that I reviewed all the way through to the end, and I am very grateful that I was able to. There’s so much more to that series than you’d ever think based on the synopsis, and it was so satisfying to talk about volume to volume. In fact that might be the series I enjoyed reviewing beginning to end the most.

2019

Highlights:

If I had to sum up 2019 in one word, it would be ‘variety’. I covered a lot of different things, many of which were by creators I loved or came to love thereafter (and look, more stories about the publishing and anime industries!). The Shield Hero article was definitely rage-fueled, but I guess it came out okay despite that. By now I’ve sunk so deeply into the swamp that is weebdom that I’m beginning to recognise a lot of the people involved, a blessing and a curse depending… And it was bad then, but I am 100 times more annoying now as I’ve continued to accumulate that knowledge.

2020

Highlights:

Apart from O Maidens in your Savage Season and A Sister’s All You Need, Sweat and Soap might be the series I most enjoyed reviewing to the end. It’s just such a wholesome adult romance series, and there’s a real shortage of those. That Anonymous Noise review might end up being the only time I get to write about Ryoko Fukuyama because the English publishers seem entirely allergic to licensing anything she’s done since. Likewise, at this rate, I will never get to review Pet Girl of Sakurasou, which is Hajime Kamoshida’s series from before Rascal. 

Rent-A-Girlfriend is almost certainly going to end up the longest manga I review if it keeps this up. I’ve turned in reviews up to volume 27 and have way more of it pending (read but not written about). The crazy thing is that it still ends up being interesting, so rather than following it out of a sense of duty, I find it fun to cover.

2021

Highlights:

Not really sure why I couldn’t find more for 2021 that I wanted to feature. I think a lot was just ongoing coverage, and less of interest was happening outside of that. We weren’t being offered as much anime either. Not that it would have helped, I guess since I tend not to cover anime as much generally.

2022

Highlights:

Well, 2022 certainly started with what is increasingly becoming an even bigger problem with this industry: companies cheaping out on translation. It wasn’t AI, but it wasn’t good. I put my Japanese skills to work with this one, lacking though they were. Increasingly, my features look like they only came to me when I was angry about something? Devil Ecstasy was my first chance to write about Shuzo Oshimi, a mangaka I was already fond of and who I’ve gone on to review everything that’s come out since of. At this point, I think I have genuinely read all of his work, some one-shots notwithstanding, which makes for some good reviews when I can take such a broad look at his work and experience.

I’ve popped Tokyo Aliens in here due to it being one of my current favourites still, and I have no idea how it possibly started in 2022 because it still feels relatively new! And In/Spectre is a series that no one ever liked as much as I did… Also, Usotoki Rhetoric is in her,e both for being a series I really like, but also because it was, I think, my first experience of buying a series in an entirely different language, only for it to then get licensed. Which I thought seemed unlikely due to the genre and how long it had been finished for. My lack of bookshelf space can’t handle these things…

2023

Highlights:

I think 2023 was a year of good reviews, difficult subject matter. Run Away With me, Girl , and A Girl on the Shore are definitely not works I could have done justice to without so much prior experience under my belt. It’s hard to write about such sensitive topics otherwise, right? I feel like you need to be well-read and be able to gauge what’s handling the topic well and what isn’t, which alone is sometimes hard to nail down. Also Daemons of the Shadow Realm is just an exercise in trying to talk about it, but not talking about the massive spoiler that happens. That’s also hard!

2024

Highlights:

The dreaded 5 Centimetres crossed my desk yet again! Although I do, by and large, like the manga best of all the different adaptations, so it can have a pass. Mostly a collection of ‘favourite’ things here, but I do want to highlight Schoolgirl for being a novel I found fascinating and really enjoyed reviewing last year. The My Dress-Up Darling fanbook wa a lot easier to write about than I’d expected to. I usually shy away from art books and the like since I find them difficult, but this had just enough to sink my teeth into.

We don’t often review games at AUKN unless they tie into an existing IP, but with Hiro Mashima working on the character designs for Farmagia, we had an in. I hadn’t written about a game in a long while at this point, since AUKN wasn’t the right avenue, and I hadn’t yet joined Anime Atelier, where I do have the option for more games coverage now. I still very much enjoyed the process, but I keenly felt how my passion does not sit within that space anymore on a day-to-day basis.

2025 and onwards

Highlights:

Honestly, looking back at the current year is difficult since it hasn’t been long enough for me to really appreciate this year’s work compared to those past. These three stand out for being excellent releases more than anything, but I guess Apothecary Diaries was my first proper artbook review, so there’s that.

I’ve written so much for this blog. Looking back over these ten years, the things that stand out to me are still that I am absolutely terrible at coming up with features and that I prefer reviewing literature to anime/games. That’s really no surprise tho, I love anime and gaming and invest great sums of time into both, but with games I love a subset of genres rather than the industry universally. And with anime, I am more often than not put off by adaptation choices and the fact that the industry is on fire at any given moment. Not that I’m happy with the direction of the publishing industry either, but that is an entirely different thing…

I think looking back, with the help of my editor and experience, I’ve become a better writer, but I don’t think my interests have greatly changed. Maybe that’s reassuring, I’m not sure. The me of ten years ago was 20, now I’m 30, and I can see the throughline for everything I’ve done. They say knowledge is power, and more than anything, it looks like I spent the last ten years gaining that, only to no doubt spend another ten doing the exact same thing. I don’t mean that negatively, I mean looking back, that is clearly my trajectory in general. I love manga, I love light novels (and the associated media), and I want to share that with others in a way that’s easily understood. Maybe even learning Japanese has been a byproduct of wanting to do that (and also my stubbornness and desire to read things no one licenses).

I only really talked about the things I enjoyed doing, but of course, being a reviewer isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Just like with Baccano, which I mentioned at the start, there have been things I hated or found so dull and still had to write about. That’s not easy; it takes a long time to cultivate the ability to do that constructively. But I think it also speaks to how much I enjoy working in this field, I guess.

I’ll close out this incredibly long ramble by saying thank you to the AUKN team, to the people who actively read my reviews and the few who didn’t close out this tab and actually made it to the bottom. XD I don’t know if I’ll write another one of these in another 10 years (this was a lot of work…), but maybe I will. At the very least, it seems likely I will be here still doing the same thing.

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