When I started blogging tags were the rage. I would often get more than one in a week and I quickly became unable to keep up with them no matter how much I wanted to. But it was still a lot of fun.
Even when I wasn’t getting personally tagged, I would see them on other people’s blogs. I think I would see at least one every single day (I follow a lot of blogs). But these days, I hardly see any at all. Maybe a little lost one here and there but they add up to a handful a year at most. That’s a huge drop.
For those of you unfamiliar, blog tags were these types of chain posts that had specific content rules. Like you had to answer a series of questions or you had to talk about a specific subject through a specific lens. In practice, these posts pretty much always had some sort of rule that you had to link to the creator of the tag and often you also had to thank and link back to the person who tagged you. So they were in fact an SEO tool in a way. It allowed people to link to a bunch of other blogs and get links back that way.
For the creator, if the tag took off, they would get a massive amount of links and publicity for free. For the people taking part, it was a bit of a community project and a way to get some content for the blog. Fun times all around. But they also quickly get out of hand, when a creator gets greedy and has you tagging like 20 people at the time. Sometimes they would try to make responding more appealing by calling them “awards” complete with a little graphic you could put on your blog. It was cute.
These days, it seems the tag post has fallen out of fashion. For some reason, people just aren’t writing these anymore. Maybe it was a fad, that lasted a few years and went away, as fads do. Maybe it’s just that the blogging space got oversaturated and we needed a break. It could be that the tag post will come back eventually. But I also think that blogging, in general, has somewhat fallen out of fashion, there are a lot fewer blogs these days and the rate at which new ones appear has slowed down a lot. I hope it picks up again. I think blogging is fun and I like to have other people to do it with.
Whatever the reason may be, I just don,t see the same amount of tags as I use to. I think that’s a bit of a shame. Now don’t get me wrong. Tag posts weren’t these wonderful insightful things that you absolutely should read. Some of them got pretty repetitive. At first, it was fun to see how different people would answer the same 7 questions or so, but after a while, you sort of got the idea. Other tags were either confusing, complicated or just not thought out and left a series of barely readable posts in their wake.
However, I genuinely had fun participating in and reading through some of those tags and from time to time, I miss them. So I figured I would tell you about some of my favourites. You’ll see that they all follow a sort of pattern…
Make Everything Anime
I’m pretty sure the anime community co-opted this tag from somewhere and it wasn’t originally specifically about anime but this is the form I know it in and I like it this way. It’s a fairly simple tag. Bloggers simply pick 3 to 5 pieces of media that are not anime or manga but that they think would be fun or interesting to see in anime form and tell us why.
I really liked this tag because it made me discover books, movies, games and even songs and characters I probably would never have heard of otherwise. And some of them were awesome.
It also tapped into one of my personal interests. The mechanics of adaptation. Some bloggers would really go into detail as to why a particular piece of art was suited for anime. Talking about design, pacing and audience appeal. And that was simply fascinating. I would happily have read more of those types of posts. Theoretical speculating on adaptations. I will admit I did sometimes get frustrated that those amazing-sounding adaptations would never get made!
The One Liner Challenge
This was really one of my favourites. In part, because it was quick and easy both to put together and to read, and in part because it often created some really funny posts.
The one-liner challenge, when adapted for the anime community, was simply picking at least 5 of your favourite anime or manga (you can easily do this with any piece of media) and summarizing the entire plot in a single one-line sentence. That’s it.
And it was so much fun. A lot of beloved anime have some pretty convoluted storylines when it gets right down to it. And even when that’s not the case, summarizing anything in a single sentence is a bit of a challenge. So when you put the two together, you got some really interesting results. At one point I ended up summarizing my beloved Shin Sekai Yori with: it was man all along.
The Boring Summary Challenge
This is a bit of an offshoot of the previous tag and it was popular on Twitter for a while. Once again, this tag wants you to summarize a piece of media (in my case of anime) but this time, the idea is to make it sound as boring as possible.
Of course, the fun of it is to pick a show that you either really like personally or that is generally liked by the community and definitely not considered boring, to begin with. Then you have to create a summary that is technically correct. Something that really does describe what happens but presents it in such a way that it sounds like the dullest snoozefest you can come up with.
Maybe it’s because I have a love of Slice of Life anime that are often described as Rita is new at her school and decides to join the sewing club. Like that’s the official description and I’m all whoaaaa that sounds awesome! So for me, making anything come off as genuinely boring and not a show I would look forward to watching was really difficult. But it was fun. And it was also super fun to read others’ posts on that subject. I found it just deeply amusing to go through a paragraph trying and failing to guess what show was being described only to have it revealed at the end and go…oh yeah, that IS exactly what that show is…
The 5 Hot Ones
This one was just silly fun. I believe the tag was originally meant for characters but you can expand it to entire shows or songs or something. Basically, the idea was to pick 5 characters you find sexy and just unapologetically drool over them on your blog. No need for justification or substance. No judgement here.
and well, these were fun to read. You had these straight lace professional blogger types type up these posts full of she’s soooo cute I just wanna ioudnajgaf… Or giddy adorable types that were just exploding with enthusiasm at the chance to share their own passion without shame. It was a fun time. And people got that it was just for fun. That’s what I personally appreciated about it.
I don’t recall ever seeing anyone do this, but now that I think back on it, I bet this would be a really fun post to put together if you were to pick scenes. Like 5 hot scenes in anime or you can spice it up with 5 unintentionally hot scenes or something like that. Hmmm, maybe I’ll try to put a post together at some point. It sounds like fun.
For those of you who still remember blog tags, do you miss them? Did you have ones that you really liked? As for those that haven’t had the chance to take part in one, would you like to?
