2021, a year full of ups, downs, and COVID variants. This year has also been a wild ride with my adventures in blogging, and now that the year comes to an end, let’s look back at the stuff that happened this year.
Chapter I. Chapter II. Chapter III. Chapter IV. Chapter V. Chapter VI. Chapter VII Final Chapter
First, here are some statistics to look at. I have checked all the posts I made in 2021 (as of 12/27/2021) and see how the numbers stack up and here it is.
As you can see, and for some reason that I still can’t believe, is that one post that I made back in January about Jessica Soho, one of the Philippines’ well known journalists, talking about hentai is the one with the most hits for the whole year, let alone the month it was published.
Within the first month the post was on the site alone, this post has hit 209 views. Compare that to 2020’s top 1 post in terms of views: a review of Baby Blue’s Sweet Talking Sugar and the numbers it got. The total number of hits that post got for the duration of 2020 is 204, five views less than what the KMJS hentai episode retrospective in one month.
I think the reason why this retrospective about an episode of Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho (One at Heart, Jessica Soho) from 2007 is a big thing, at least for the Philippine weeaboo community, is that this is a lost episode.
GMA, the network that owns KMJS, never bothered to release episodes of KMJS older than 2010 and the only surviving copy of it on YouTube got copyright stricken worldwide meaning the episode is lost, forever.
That means nobody aside from a few people who either saw it as it aired on television or on YouTube remembered it like my buddy darkdaemonpk2 of My Anime Room here.
In short, archiving is important kids whether be it via analog or digital means because you may never know if the show you’re watching right now might be lost in the dustbin of history forever.
Speaking of archiving things…
In all honesty, I really didn’t care about much about somebody finding a copy of the missing VHS tape until someone named ZeBenko commented on a post that I made in 2019.
Then a series of tweets happened between me, ZeBenko, YouTuber and former Kanzenshuu member FumeiCom, and a Bulma stan who goes under the name Nessie.
It turns out, while Nessie and ZeBenko were trying to buy a CD copy of Songs of a High Spirited Saga from a seller at Carousell (formerly known as OLX, which was then formerly known as sulit.com.ph), the seller also has a listing for a Dragon Ball VHS tape, and lo and behold, that tape is EXACTLY the tape I was talking about two years ago.
So they seized the opportunity of buying the tape and do an audio transfer of the dub into the remastered versions Toei Animation did for Amazon Prime.
You can watch Dragon Ball movies 2 and 3 separately here or the way Creative Products/Regal Home Video intended here as recreated by FumeiCom himself.
The day ZeBenko commented on my post made me felt like I finally contributed something to not just the Dragon Ball community, but to the anime community as a whole. I was able to help people find lost anime media, even though I technically opened the floodgates for it to be found.
Before I start this section, I would like to give a shout-out to the anons at AlogSpace’s /cow/ board because of this and it’s not because of Jim, but because of Gator:
If you’ll notice, they homed in on the line “If Metokur is the embodiment of /pol/, then Gator would be the embodiment of /a/”. Their main point is that Gator and the rest of the Anime Boomers crew haven’t even seen any anime before the year 1996.
I can see their point that you don’t call yourself an “anime boomer” without watching anime from the 1980s but in contrast to their competition (Trash Taste), the Anime Boomer podcast really talks about anime (in the sense of the Western fandom) and knowing that Gator, SpookyWeebTrash, and Cody Baier of Anime Outsiders are 4chan people, I made the notion that Gator is the embodiment of /a/ in terms of anime YouTubers.
Now onto the section itself.
This will be the lllloooonnnggeesssttt section of this Best of 2021 retrospective because I will be talking about a lot of people, and I mean A LOT of people.
Without further ado, let’s start with our favorite hat merchant, James Patrick O’Shaugnassey (if that’s his real name) otherwise known as Mister Metokur.
Yes, Jim still has cancer AIDS (let’s call it that because according to the guy, his disease is still yet unknown), and yes Jim isn’t what he used to be pre-cancer AIDS but it seems that terminal illness won’t stop him from streaming because he did not only one, but three streams in a span of four months.
He also made two new enemies on the way (Mersh and Wayne Lambright) and an old one returns to fight back at him (Kraut).
Oh and by the way, /cow/ is also accusing him of being a Guntguard because as much as his audience wanted him to talk about Ethan Ralph’s shenanigans, he just dismisses it opting to talk more about Joe Biden, the aforementioned enemies Mersh and Lambright, and weeb stuff.
That “puts two and two together” and made /cow/ think that Jim really has Internet friends, something that flies in the face of what he used to say about making friends on the internet and one of those internet friends is, you guessed it, Ethan Oliver Ralph.
I won’t delve further into this side of YouTube because there’s /cow/, KiwiFarms, and Encyclopedia Dramatica for that and I’ll just be rehashing the same sequence of events and just change the name from Metokur to either Ralph, Warski, Randbot, Flamenco or anything in between.
Now onto another YouTuber by the name of Kenny Lauderdale. Kenny had a rollercoaster of a year and it all started with two words: Chargeman. Ken.
He already made a video about that, you say. I’ll give you two more words: copyright strike.
Not sure why ICHI Corporation, formerly known as Studio Knack, decided to do a copyright strike a year after Kenny posted the video on YouTube. Good thing he was able to get his channel remonetized.
He also made a follow-up for people who wanted to know if Masked Warrior Lavithunder exists. It doesn’t. It turns out that Lavithunder was propped to be like a Kickstarter project: the song and the commercial was created first to gauge the interest of anime fans for the series and if it’s successful, then the anime will be created. I already gave a spoiler alert as to what happened.
Then as recently as this month, he had to do a restructuring because more copyright strikes came and this time, it’s from Bandai for his Giant Gorg review. Most of the reviews remain on his main channel but some reviews now go into his Kenny’s Shadow Realm channel and all of the shorts now go into his Kenny’s Discount VHS World channel.
Next on the list, the girls of KoMETA Virtual Live. For a fledgling VTuber company, and based here in the Philippines no less, Miria, Virgil, and Elaine were well received by the Filipino Vtuber community and its fans that at their debut streams, fan art and clips were already made.
Out of all the three, Virgil became the standout performer not only because of her cute design or as kids would say “UUUOOOHHH!!!”, but also because of her propensity to do stuff that only people like either Kson, Finana Ryugu, or Houshou Marine would do.
The drunk karaoke stream is living proof of that.
From a fledgling company to a giant institution, specifically Toei Co. Ltd. and its animation wing. On December 7th, a Dragon Ball YouTuber by the name of Totally Not Mark over 150 of his video taken down by Toei, so basically what happened to Kenny but on a much grander scale only to discover that it’s not Toei who filed those copyright strikes, but it’s YouTube’s automated bots.
By now, I know a lot of YouTubers who are using Toei produced works like UTOI Anime Reviews, ZeBenko and others and this is really quite alarming because if this is how Susan Wojcicki runs YouTube, and believe you me she already does a shit job at doing so, how much more unnecessary damage can such actions cause?
This also hampers archiving old material that animation studios, TV stations, and the like throw into dustbins thereby making preservation impossible.
Sure there is archive.org or sites like Bitchute but if they wanted exposure, YouTube is the best place to be and if that’s taken away, then less people will know that such thing exists.
Okay, with copyright strikes, guntguarding, lost anime, and drunken Vtuber streams out of the way, I would like to end this section with the one that I saw the most growth in their YouTube career. Yes, I am talking about June Lovejoy.
From what I’ve seen with June’s content, they really upped the ante when it comes to diversity of content. They went from vegan waffles from the six-hour stream to not one, but three Gunpla building streams and even a full ASMR stream.
They also recently released one of the most heart tingling ASMR videos yet and this my friends, is why I call a June Lovejoy video “Junekino” on Twitter because like every Metokur kino, you will never know what happens in a Junekino.
As far as audience interaction goes, June really does interact with their audience whether you use regular chat or you gave them a superchat and it’s really obvious that they really love YouTubing and they love their fans.
They may not be as big as our good ‘ol hat merchant right now in terms of numbers but June Lovejoy is already one of those YouTubers that caught my attention and already one of my favorites alongside Jim and Dame Pesos (may he rest in peace).
Just a bit of advice if you’re planning to partake in Junekino, their content is not for everybody in case you’re sensitive to some “adult” topics.
Aidorus, aidorus, aidorus. What can we do without them? Let’s revisit what happened to the idolsphere this 2021.
- MNL48
Yeah, I’ll save most of their stuff for the threequel to Idol Group Development Hell but 2021 is the year of drought for this group.
Basically, after the RIVER single, nothing of note happened for most of the year until the mini handshake event and then days later, the teaser for NO WAY MAN was released to the general audience. The ones who stayed in both parts of the mini HSE got to see the teaser first.
- R RULES (formerly known as JAPH Dolls)
From one that’s managed by a Japanese person to one that consist of four half-Japanese people.
R RULES is a rebranded JAPH Dolls under new management. It seems that the girls and their former label, VIVA Records, have a bit of disagreement with each other on how things were ran so the four Rs bolted out and signed with MCA Universal under the name R RULES.
To coincide with the change in both management and name, they released their first single as R RULES, Don’t Need ‘Ya or (DNY).
I haven’t reviewed the song yet so I might have to put it as a 2021 leftover together with BABY BLUE’s Head Up review.
- The PastelMix – ASFIRE Alliance
Something never heard of in the idol industry here in the Philippines but it’s nothing new because µ’s and 765PRO ALL ST@RS already did it in 2015 in an event that was dubbed “WORLD PEACE” by fans of both LoveLive! and IDOLM@STER.
This time though, it’s more of a partnership/training program for Ambox to have Pastel Mix to better their craft and same goes to ASFIRE. They also do streams together via Kumu.
Now for a countdown, here are the top 10 posts of 2021 as most viewed by you, the visitors!
| Title | No. of views |
| That Time Jessica Soho Talked About “Off-Brand Anime”. | 426 |
| YouTuber Spotlight 1.0: You Can (Not) Abort The Sweetie Squad With Love and Joy | 243 |
| Hello! Zaido: A Retrospective of Sorts | 190 |
| YouTuber Spotlight 3.0: The (Twisted) World of Internet Bloodsports – A Fad That Spawned Out of Gamergate | 93 |
| Alex The Ghost Fighter: A Review of Netflix’s Adaptation of Trese | 91 |
| Polar Dragon Balls: A Review and An Update | 80 |
| Dragon Ball (Philippine Dub) Densetsu | 80 |
| MNL48 Mini Handshake Event 2021: A Field Report | 80 |
| High Tension!! The Road To MNL48 Third General Election | 79 |
| The 18-Hour Livestream Extravaganza | 79 |
This section is dedicated to the blog posts that I personally find having the most fun in writing during the whole year. Think of it as one of those art portfolios for the year that artists post, this is the blogger version of it.
Note, some months might have more than one entries because it’s either part of one major topic or both posts appeared on the same month.
| Month | Post Title |
| January | That Time Jessica Soho Talked About “Off-Brand Anime”. |
| February | High Tension!! The Road To MNL48 Third General Election |
| March | Hello! Zaido: A Retrospective of Sorts |
| April | Stuck On You: The Review |
| May | Maysquerade – A Two-Part FanFes 2021 Online Recap |
| June | Revisiting the Philippine Idolsphere |
| July | Otakuzine: The 21st Century Anime Magazine |
| July | Crayon Shin-chan: A Review In Multiple Episodes |
| August | Polar Dragon Balls: A Review and An Update |
| August | Dragon Ball (Philippine Dub) Densetsu |
| September | YouTuber Spotlight 1.0: You Can (Not) Abort The Sweetie Squad With Love and Joy |
| October | Serial Experiments Lain: A Monke Brained Individual’s Big Brained Anime Review for Spooktober |
| November | YouTuber Spotlight 3.0: The (Twisted) World of Internet Bloodsports – A Fad That Spawned Out of Gamergate |
| December | YouTuber Spotlight IV: Virtual (YouTuber) Insanity |
Aside from the plans that I mentioned on the last News post, I have plans to draw more comics and more illustrations for the following year, and I also have some sort of a plan to do more video game reviews, something that I haven’t done in a while.
Some ideas that I haven’t done this year might appear here on the site early next year called 2021 leftovers. I might also do more HalloHallo Café and MNL48 iSchool reviews once January is done because next month would be a world full of workload for me, even if it’s my birth month.
Such is life…
Even if I just spent most of my time cooped inside this house that I live in, 2021 is, so far, the most eventful year for this site and I hope more opportunities come in this site’s way this 2022.
I would like to thank my Facebook, Twitter, and Discord friends for making this possible. You guys know who you are.
Until then, happy new year!
Rayas-WEB 
Wow, I got mentioned. I’m honored :3
Happy new year and I hope we will all be ready we enter 2022 with optimism and readiness for any challenge it may bring.
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Same to you my friend. Same to you.
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