According to my memories from my time in college, the Organization Anti-Social Geniuses was born 10 years ago today. This is 99.9% true and .1% false. As in, I discussed this idea of starting a site where we just wrote about whatever we liked about anime and manga with L.C., a friend who was the co-founder, probably a day or two before launching on WordPress.
So yes, it was called Organization Anti-Social Geniuses, not The Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses.
TheOASG wasn’t a thing. If anyone remembers the other abbreviation, I might send you a prize.
I’m letting you know that while we had that plan of just writing about anime and manga, I didn’t foresee us completely being as industry focused as we are today.
But in the end, as this site now reaches Year 10 of existence, that’s about where we swung. Times have changed a lot since then, and I’ll (briefly) go over that here, in this anniversary post of TheOASG.
So to keep it brief, about the time this blog started:
- Borders was still around (and eventually shut down).
- TOKYOPOP I believe was starting to fade around this time (and then had spurts of coming back thanks to print-on-demand, then actually did disappear, and now are back, just with more skepticism on how they’re back and deservedly so).
- What’s a simulpub? It wasn’t a term back then!
- There was a US version of SJ in print form.
Nowadays a lot of this has flipped — well, Borders isn’t back, but other stores, and online retailers, have picked up the manga buying slack. We have more digital manga options than ever before. US Shonen Jump basically comes out before Japan’s edition — which is, if you told me back then this would be a thing, inconceivable. But of course, it’s a digital edition, not in print.
So to sum things up, many changes have occurred to where we now actually have more new publishers emerging, more manga to purchase that likely wouldn’t have gotten published in English, and light novels are now very much a big commitment. Heh, light novels were a thing back then, but were not even close to as successful as they are today.
Anyways, there’s more “what to point out” from 10 years ago today to now, but I’m not interested in making this anniversary post that lengthy. This had to certainly be acknowledged since I for sure didn’t count on still doing this for 10 years, but obviously, 2020 has been an incredibly tough year for everyone. So celebrating even this was very much a must-do for me.
So, I have to thank the team: Kuuki, Helen, Krystallina, Nonon, Alcina, and Rai — the site definitely wouldn’t be able to cover as much as it could without them!
Those who once wrote words throughout this 10-year period on WordPress and Kokidokom and now here: Muse, Sweetpea (Paperchimes), Emily, Kastel, Illogicalzen, Manjiorin, Rachael, Ben, and Curry.
The guests who stopped by and took part in projects on TheOASG: Amanda Haley, Jenny McKeon, Jennifer O’Donnell, Cassiel Merricat, Jake Jung, Emily Balistrieri, Stephen Paul, Carly Smith, Nina Matsumoto, Gladys Angala, Liya, Zack Reese, Aaron Margolin, Anne Lee,
A shoutout to those within the industry and bloggers that took part in a number of projects *eyes the how fans can help the industry series* over the past 10 years, and that interact with the site even now.
And of course, the followers of this site. The Twitter account has grown a bunch over the past two years — that’s a lot of people following us for very specific things! We (and, well, specifically me) see your RTs, tweets, etc, and know that they are all noted for sure. Some I’ve passed on to the team. The site and Facebook has gone up as well (just not as explosively as the Twitter!). But in any case, thank you for all your support, and we’ll continue doing what we can regarding manga and light novel and sometimes anime (and sometimes other things) news.
Not going to try and predict what’s going to be next, but will say we’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing, but try and do so even better, as 2021 approaches.