Crunch Time | Busy with Quizzies

hELLo yes I am still alive, I’ve just been swamped with the everything again and can’t manage to get my feet under me for 5 seconds without the next fire springing to life and demanding my attention. I’ve also had some more health concerns, which have included and ER visit and a referral to a cardiologist, but you know, hanging in there as a best I can.

How are you all? Here’s a cup of my current favorite cup of tea (currently a nice blackberry sage black tea) as an apology. Link and I have both missed you very much. I hope you’ve been treating yourself with as much kindness and understanding as you do me. Y’all deserve it, really.

Some of the things I’ve been busy with have been my personal projects: the time I used to put into the blog has really been going into my Twitch streams. Part of the things I’ve been busy with have been my articles for Crunchy.

You can check out all of my writing for Crunchyroll here! Or you can read on below.

Confession: I’ve never written a quiz before writing for Crunchy – not seriously, and certainly not professionally. I know basically nothing about what makes a good, entertaining and thoughtful quiz. But the great thing about writing for The Big Guys is that they know. I don’t have to know, and I don’t have to get everything right the first try. That’s not something I gleaned at Crunchyroll, but something I’ve learned and relearned over many jobs and gigs throughout my life. I don’t have to be perfect at something to give it a try. I can falter and trip and scrape my knees and get stronger – as many times as it takes until I get it right. And then I can try again and again and again and eventually, it’s second nature. Or first nature. Or z e r o n a t u r e .

Sorry. I digress.

My first quiz was shit. I don’t think I’m mincing my words there. I felt like it took me a long time to figure out how to even organize my questions, much less how they related to the answers. And this is coming from someone who has an MA in writing.

The second quiz was pretty bad, too. Not as rough, certainly. My answers were pretty set in stone from the beginning, but fleshing out characters that I didn’t know much about proved to be the real challenge for me. How much, if anything, was I allowed to give away about the manga, or use it as reference?

Working with the team at CR really helped bring everything together, and helped my piece become stronger as a whole. Overall, my view on my own writing will always be hyper self-critical, but my point is that I wasn’t alone, and I ended up learning a lot an growing while working with the editorial team, eventually leading to pieces that were ready to publish.

Perhaps in part from wanting to write about other series, I decided to keep going with the quizzes. They also received a lot more engagement than anything I had written before, and it was fun to see what people received, and their reactions to what I had come up with. The third and fourth quizzes I pitched myself, and to be honest, I had grown a bit more comfortable with personality quizzes and how I wanted to approach them. More than anything, I wanted to make a quiz that I wanted to take – one that I was excited to see the result for, one that I wanted to share with others.

For me, that quiz was my Quintessential Quintuplets quiz. To my surprise, I really enjoyed the series. I say surprise because I rarely like harem shows. But this one somehow felt different: it wasn’t aggravating, and I genuinely was taken in by many of the characters. Granted, all 5 quintuplets having a crush on the same dude is a bit much, but I guess that’s part of the silliness of the series. In the end, I wanted to write about it; I wanted to create something for it; I wanted people to enjoy what I created, and share it with others.

Spoiler alert: they did. This quiz ended up being among the top ten features post of the spring quarter! It reminds me of why I was able to land this job in the first place. I wrote about the breakup between Crunchyroll and Funimation, trying to offer my marketing perspective. If there is a moral to the story, if there’s any advice to be gleamed here, I suppose it’s the cliche saying of write what you love. Or maybe, write something you want to read. Or whatever. I dunno, I’m not a sage. My point is that sometimes you’re asked to do a thing, or you have to do a thing, and it leads you somewhere you don’t expect, or enables you to do things you otherwise didn’t think were possible, or gives you the confidence to take on something you really want.

I want that for all of you. Whatever it is, I hope you’re able to grow and discover like I did.

Watch on, Anniemeniacs!

Annie