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Tuesday, 29 October 2019

Misty's Blog: The Second Anniversary!

(WARNING: What started as a simple anniversary post turned into a full on discussion on the history of this blog.)

It was on this very day, exactly two years ago that I decided to create this blog. I didn't intend it to be some professional, money making site that would attract millions of viewers. All I wanted was to create a space where I could dump my thoughts. Also, I secretly just wanted to create another website, because making websites is fun. I didn't even intend to make it otome-based, it was just a blog. A very personal blog.

Before this, I had owned about five blogs in the past. One I actually tried to make professional and cool, but I eventually gave up. It's really difficult to become popular using a blog in the age of Instagram and Snapchat. The other four blogs were just random thought dumps and just general space wasters.






When I birthed Misty's Blog, on that fateful Saturday in 2017, I didn't expect it to last long. If you read my early posts, you can certainly tell that. These early posts were very pointless, just saying useless stuff that everybody knows like "It's Halloween, yay!" and other boring nonsense.

It wasn't until that December when the otome started to creep in. The very first otome post was titled "My Opinion on Mystic Messenger So Far", where the contents of it are exactly what the title says. This wasn't actually my first otome game, but the first one where I had actually played more than one route. Looking back on this post is quite funny, because my writing sounds so innocent and safe compared to what I do now.

After that post, most of the contents that came after it were small little updates, saying stuff like "Sorry I haven't updated!" The reason why the blog was a dry wasteland at this point was because it didn't have a proper theme. My other blogs suffered from this problem, too. I also just didn't really have any interesting enough thoughts to write about. 90% of the post titles were so unoriginal and boring, they were all just either "Hello!" or "...".

There were really no more otome posts until the 10th of August, 2018, where the post "Oh no.." made its debut. In this one, I basically just wrote about how I had started playing Mystic Messenger again to save up enough hourglasses to play Ray's route. That whole month was mainly filled with MM and other video game related posts. This was just before I discovered that there was more to otome than just crappy mobile games and Mystic Messenger...

Then September came, and I posted about how I had started to learn Japanese. I didn't really have a reason behind wanting to do it other than because it was cool, but eventually my main motivation for it became otome. Yes, I know that's a really lame reason, but it doesn't really matter.

Then came this very interesting post, called "Falling Down the Otome Rabbit Hole", where I lamented on how most of the good looking otoge were on the PSP and Vita, but the only ones I could play were crappy mobage. Those two games were Midnight Cinderella and Ikemen Sengoku. At the end of the post, I wrote: "I don't actually play otoge for the plot, I just really like "dating" anime boys. I know it's sad." I dunno why, but this line makes me laugh.

Then it started. I started to play console otoge. I finally managed to track down a PSP Memory Stick so that I could play Hakuoki. Yes, I know you're probably asking "Misty, that game came out years ago! Why did you only just play it last year?" Look, I'm just really behind with gaming, OK? The only consoles I had for years were a Wii and DSi XL, and even then I didn't have many games. I actually only got an Xbox 360 in 2016, a decade after it came out! A lot of otome bloggers have been playing these games for over a decade, but unfortunately I've only known about the genre for around three years. Oh well. At least I got to document my otome discoveries using this blog.

My initial Hakuoki posts were pretty rubbish. I don't like looking back on them, because I spell all of the names wrong and it makes me cringe. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I was writing them in public and I was afraid of people looking over my shoulder to find me writing about weird dating games. (One person actually did.) The second reason sort of ties in with the first, but it's that I was a bit uncomfortable still with writing about this stuff, well not really uncomfortable, just a bit shy. That's why I didn't get too deep into the plot and all that. Yes, I know there's no reason to be shy online, but I was still a bit embarrassed. I don't know exactly why, but it's in the past now, so it doesn't matter.

After that, there was a huge drought on console otoge reviews until I got a PS Vita. The first game I played was Code: Realize, and the posts I wrote on that were very similar to the Hakuoki ones. Then I covered my all time favourite otoge, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly.

Most of these posts, and the ones after that, were very much not like reviews at all. It felt like I was writing a little otoge diary. I didn't really write a post every time I finished a route, I just wrote whenever I felt like there was something to discuss. This made it very difficult for me to figure out what to call each post, so a lot of the titles were just "..."  Not very eye-catching for potential readers!

Still, I honestly didn't really care about what they thought. Sorry, but I didn't. I was just doing this for fun, and because I like writing. Sometimes I even forgot that people could read what I wrote! I know a lot of content creators say "I'm not doing this for the fame, honest!" and it sounds super fake, but I'm telling the truth when I say I didn't write any of this to make money. This is all just a hobby really.

This takes us to this year's massive amount of content. I played so many games, and part of the fun of them was writing about them afterwards! The things I had the most fun covering were Collar X Malice, the DiaLovers anime, and Period Cube. Period Cube was where I solidified my review formula. Instead of writing weird diary-like thought dumps, I'd do one review for every route.

I don't know why I just talked about my older posts like they were made ten years ago. But I think that during the course of this blog's lifespan, I've really improved my writing. Well, I mean, I still don't edit stuff and I still use way too many commas, but I've still gotten better. I've certainly begun to be less shy and to just write like I'm having a casual conversation with someone.

I'm very happy that Misty's Blog has survived this long, and I'm very grateful to all of the people who've visited it over the years. It's strange knowing that people I don't even know are reading all of this, but it's also really cool! Hopefully this place will survive for a few more years at least. It would also be great if a hundred years from now, some historian finds an archive of Blogger blogs and discovers this one, and I get put in a museum or a history book or something! OK, that's never going to happen, but it would be funny if it did!

I really should've made a cake or something to celebrate this, but it's going to be Halloween soon so there'll be loads of sweets from that to eat. Actually, I still have chocolate left from Easter in the fridge!

This concludes my very long ramble for today. Thank you very much for visiting this blog. I hope you come back soon, because I have some interesting stuff planned for the future!











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