NotPop

Here, have some coffee. And a new WataMote chapter.

Protecting the mojo from the elements.

The latest is eight pages long, and has posted today on Tomoko’s home page at GanGan Online. Check with World Three on Twitter to find out when the English version is posted.

Posted by the ever-prolific Noe on Twitter, 2016 June 15, and as usual right ahead of the latest official WataMote update! This may also be the first fan art I’ve seen featuring Kiyota.

Hold on a minute. When I first heard about this, I assumed it was an honest coincidence. The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder.

Your manga has been around since 2013. It's got a relatively short title. It's so short that the English version is only four syllables long, One-two-three-four. Its Japanese title has ten syllables, but that's not bad for a Japanese title. Dragon Ball Z in its Japanese form is seven syllables, compared to its four in English. And when the English version gets shortened to DBZ, that is at least, you know, actually shorter.

Since 2013, nobody's had to use a shortened/alternative name for your short-titled manga. It just never needed it. But in 2016, your manga gets an anime, and SUDDENLY somebody somewhere, probably somebody in the anime production or publicity department, decides to start planting the idea that One-two-three-four should be nicknamed WataMote, accidentally (?) co-opting an already existing short name from another manga/anime that has four syllables.

The reason this is a problem is because fans internationally have used WataMote to tag everything connected to Tomoko Kuroki's story for years. I'm just now starting to see the results in Google searches of this deliberate confusion; it's already boning the results. In a few months, WataMote will be completely useless for finding material connected to Kuroki. At some point, the WataMote page on Wikipedia will become a disambiguation. We can go back to the long form, but nobody can retroactively retag years of WataMote posts, when people were in the habit of using just WataMote.

This morning I started posting fan art as text posts instead of art posts. Call me a Tumblr idiot, I didn't know you could just drag and drop art into the body of a post. The text post is better for the fan art, I think, because then I can put the artist's name up in big letters, while the art post has no header section. Now I wish I could go back and redo all the others I've posted so far. Oh, well.

It's not like I want to post mountains of fan art -- I mean, that's not why I'm running the fanblog, to post endless batches of fan art, but one thing I want to show is that there is a lot of fandom going on out there, all the time. For some reason, it seems WataMote fans are more prone to be heckled by trolls who insist that "everybody" hates WataMote. It doesn't help that the official sales stats for the initial disc sales were so low. But there's an awful lot of fan activity for something that "everybody" hates. And no matter how they may act sometimes, /a/ will always love Tomoko.

If you've posted some fan art and I don't repost it here, don't feel slighted. There really is almost too much to keep up with, and I don't see everything. Also, I do admit that sometimes I pick and choose a bit, because there's no way I can post everything. And though not meaning to make an iron clad rule, I try to stick to newish stuff, things that have been posted within the last few months, if not today.