Behind the Scenes: The Media Create Articles

Dates: 11/4/2016 - 2/25/2018 

Author: Samantha Ferreira

This is a behind-the-scenes piece that I've been wanting to write for a while. The Media Create articles are, well… they’re an interesting part of my own history, to be honest.

When Media Create analyses first hit Anime Herald, though, they were met with... hrm, is "confusion" a kind enough word? Yeah, let’s go with that.

People weren’t sure where they came from, or why this anime industry watcher was suddenly writing up 2500-word overviews of the Japanese gaming industry. And, in retrospect, it really didn’t fit the overall theme of Anime Herald, as a whole.

These were weird, and not in that good “Studio Trigger” way, either. I’ll never deny that, and I’m happy to really chalk this up as kind of a failure on our part to venture into new frontiers.

That said, the Media Create stories didn’t quite begin in 2016. That’s just when they started appearing on Reddit. I actually started writing these up in 2015 for fun, on the WiiU Subreddit. No, really.

At the time, Nintendo’s quirky console was on its final downswing, and I was working in the data mines as a DBA. As I mentioned in a previous article, you end up with a lot of free time while you’re waiting for validation scripts to run. And, well, when you’re trying to tune out some genuinely oppressive emotions, you start looking for anything to fill that space.

It was about that time that I stumbled upon the Media Create threads in a board that would later migrate to ResetEra for reasons I won’t disclose in this piece. Let’s just say that heinous stuff happened at the old site and everyone left en masse in protest.

Anyway! Reading through the threads, I found that I genuinely enjoyed seeing how data would suss out from week to week. I downloaded the Media Create DB, spun up a MySQL database, and started cataloging figures as they arrived.

From there, I started writing up small analyses. I’d post up little bits and pieces in r/WiiU’s weekly threads, and it kind of grew from there. After a couple of months, the articles went from 2-paragraph write-ups to full New York Times sized articles that would take days to produce. And, by that point, I was having fun with the community, and just kept posting. At the urging of more than a few members of the community, I started posting them in other subreddits - r/Nintendo, r/PS4, r/Vita, and so on.

In November 2016, I started publishing to the Herald, as well. I’d clean up the formatting and spelling, add images, and what have you, but the content was a minimal lift to port over.

I figured that, so long as I was having fun, I’d keep writing, and it’d just be a fun way to kill a few hours a week.

Life isn’t always so friendly, though.

By mid-2017, I started receiving some genuinely troubling responses to the pieces on Reddit: accusations of advertising at the mildest, and some out-there claims of heinous actions in the most extreme. They began as comments, so I brushed them off, and just conversed with people like nothing was wrong.

By mid-2017, though, my inbox was being flooded with some genuinely troubling things. I mean “people posting my full name, occupation, and workplace along with racist slurs” troubling. I ended up calling the police, who took everything down, and retrieved records before giving me information to contact with further details.

I was asked to hold all records for four years, just in case evidence was needed - I still have these communications to this day.

I received one more message from a user that day, saying “if you know what’s good for you and [my brother’s name] you will not post a fucking word today.”

That was it. I deleted my account at that point, and never really returned to Reddit in any real capacity. It wasn’t worth it.

Still, I didn’t want to really give up the articles entirely, so I started making them a regular column on Anime Herald. Every week, I'd post the piece on the same schedule that I had maintained for more than two years previously.

Sadly, these weren’t to be. Half the fun of writing the Media Create stories was talking with people and just grokking the finer points of the numbers and the greater gaming markets. By the end of the year, they just felt like a chore.  

At the same time, overall traffic on the pieces was dismally small - fewer than 100 read most installments week-to-week. With this in mind, I quietly retired the columns at the end of February, deciding instead to focus energy on the coming Anime Boston, as well as my transition, which would start to really kick into high gear in March, when I told the world that I was trans.

I do feel bad for dropping the columns so unceremoniously, and I have to admit that I miss being able to just kick loose and discuss the finer things of, say, the recent Pokémon launch. But they were a crutch, and a relic of a different time. Given the chance today, I don’t think I’d pour that same energy and hundreds of hours into getting everything perfectly again.