F.A.Q. (Fairly Aggravating Quandaries)

A: For all professional inquiries, please see my Commissions page.

A: I particularly get this question a lot with regards to Japanese media, so I’d like to explain my logic. First of all, I almost always favor translated names. There are two major justifications for this. One, it’s the most popular language in the world. People are more likely than not able to read, understand, search with, and most importantly memorize an English title. When writing in an unfamiliar language such as Japanese, people are more likely to misspell search queries, which will push my site down in search results.

The other reason is (perceived) artistic intent. When an author writes a title, it is done with the expectation that the title can be understood. I believe this is a justifiable assumption. Titles for works are typically determined by their thematic relevance, evocativeness, and other traits that only exist when the language used can be understood. For a random example, when Satoshi Kon titles his series “Mōsō Dairinin,” it was not done with the expectation that those fluent in Japanese would merely process it phonetically. “Die-ree-rin” on its own is just a series of arbitrary sounds. It’s caveman prattle that has no more or less meaning than the babbling of an infant. For those who do know Japanese, it’s understood to mean something along the lines of the official English translated title, “Paranoia Agent.” Writers like Kon intend for their titles to have meaning; to suggest something to their audience. The significance of a work’s title is not captured in its sounds, but rather the ideas those sounds represent.

Those ideas ought to be understood by as many people as possible, so I choose to represent them in the most common language. I think doing otherwise would be giving undue deference to the original language as something sacred, and as someone with an academic and professional background in communication, I simply do not buy into that concept. I’m going out on a limb here, but I think many of the justifications used by people who insist on only using a work’s original language are post-hoc rationalizations for gatekeeping and manufactured esotericism.

I am aware that there is ambiguity in translation. However, I don’t believe said ambiguity trumps the importance of being immediately comprehensible. Not to mention, ambiguity in language is a phenomenon that exists even among native speakers. Native speakers of a language have different interpretations of text and speech within their own language all the time, but this is never used as a justification to just throw hands up and abandon attempting to understand the meaning of a phrase. I believe the unwillingness some people have to engage with that process is, again, more inspired by gatekeeping. It’s thought-termination.

So, when that ambiguity arises, I have a rough system for how to deal with it. First, I defer to a direct translation of the title. Then, I reference it with official translations, or if that’s unavailable, cultural consensus. If those translations are a reasonable interpretation of the original title, then that’s what I use. There are times where an official title is radically different from the original. The retitling of Gunnm to Battle Angel Alita is a complete rebranding, for instance. For many of these cases, I feel that the change is motivated by marketing factors rather than artistic ones, so I tend to disregard them and default to the original name. Again, it’s ultimately what I perceive to be the artistic intent. I have no idea what “Gunnm” means, but I think that feeling would exist for both English and Japanese audiences.

Lastly, I like to cast a wide net. There are occasions where a title is capable of encompassing multiple translations. Take Hades Project Zeorymer, for example. The addition of “Hades” to the title is entirely a localization decision. However, because the title still contains a faithful translation of the original name, I use the extended localized name. Regardless of whether someone searches the English name or the Japanese name, my page ought to show in the results. When it comes to headings or sub-titles, I will often be all-encompassing to improve search engine results and to keep related works in close proximity on my archive pages (which are set to display alphabetically).

A: Probably. My reviews can be over a decade old, but this site has only been up since 2024. I’ve imported content from across several different websites and platforms. Not all of these sources record(ed) publication dates and/or times. Even then, corroborating dates and times can be a massive undertaking that doesn’t always produce accurate results. For instance, there are times when I have to guess when one review was posted by looking at messages from a different platform that seem to allude to writing the review for the first time. It gets very rough.

I am sometimes forced to make my best guess. If you see discrepancies between my statements and listed dates or times, that’s almost certainly why. I do what I can, as inaccurate information drives me nuts. If you notice anything, please don’t hesitate to contact me so that I can correct the information or provide an explanation.

If I don’t have anything to go off of for minutes and seconds, I try to remember to set WordPress’s publication time to 12:00 AM. This is my way of saying that I don’t have that information. I suppose it’s possible I publish something directly on midnight, but that’s unlikely. If the publication year is unknown to the point I can’t even guess, then I tend to record it as 2023. This is to keep my old reviews out of my “most recent” feed, since my newer reviews are usually much higher quality. This practice extends to month and day. If I have no guess for a month, it’s January. If I have no guess for a day, it’s the 1st. So a post where I’m completely blind as to its publication date would read as having been posted on January 1st, 2023 at 12:00 AM.

Here are my main sources and how they tend to break down in terms of accurate dates and times:

Forums: These are usually the most reliable, as it’s common for forums to record post dates down to the minute or second. The only concern for me here is time zone settings on each forum. I know when I was (much) younger, I often had these set incorrectly. So it’s technically possible I’m transcribing incorrect dates, but I feel like that’s unlikely.

MyAnimeList: Many of my reviews weren’t published on the site proper, but rather corralled into the “comments” metadata field that would only display when viewing my list. Said field does not record dates where it’s modified, so I’m often forced to corroborate times with other sources where I posted the review simultaneously.

RateYourMusic: These dates get really messy and are probably the most unreliable of all. From the time I used it, RYM only recorded one date, which is the date you added media to your collection in any capacity. So if I were to have wishlisted an album in 2012 with the intention of one day listening to it, listened to it in 2015, then reviewed it in 2018, then the review would be listed as having been from that original day, month, and year (2012) that I wishlisted the item. I rarely posted these reviews simultaneously elsewhere, so I usually have nothing to corroborate the dates. Not only that, but RYM seems to have undergone some database restructuring. I’ve noticed some reviews being listed as from 2023 when I know they could not possibly have been written that recently. I suspect those dates represent when the original page for something I reviewed was deleted, and my review was moved to a new page. As such, my music reviews can be years later or even years earlier than when I actually wrote them. I often have to go with my gut. It’s unfortunate. Most of my RYM reviews were probably published anywhere from 2012 to 2020.

Criticker: Criticker remembers when you first rate something, but that’s it. If I rated a movie and returned to review it days later, then going off that date would be inaccurate. However, that’s sometimes all I have—I rarely simultaneously posted my Criticker reviews. In recent times, Criticker has allowed manually entering the date you watched a movie, which for me usually matches the rating date, but that’s still unreliable for the same reasons. Criticker does not record the minutes or seconds post time of any review.