Q&A

No, it’s a pseudonym. An originally comes from a username I had. That got a bit of a weebification into an-tan, after people started calling me An, and that then turned to Anny. I liked it, so I’ve kept it since.

Sometimes, my writing is under the name Anny Borg. It’s something I use when needed, but my legal name is something else. Borg, by the way, is pronounced with the G the same way as the Y in yellow, not G in green. So it’s slightly different from “burg”. (It’s Swedish; just accept the weirdness.)

Likewise, Kitty Castle, which I go by when I write non-canonical stories, is based upon a nickname (Kitty) children gave me while I worked at a preschool, while Castle is just Borg translated from Swedish to English.

In other words, none of it is my real name.

I started my first blog in (late) summer 2006 or so. I started out writing about my life, which was rather common back in the mid-2000s. I then moved onto focusing on hobbies and moved to reviews by around 2010.

I’ve always let it change organically, depending on mood and interest and what I can handle at any given point since I began, because I want it to be my space on the internet. So that means that while it’s mostly book now and with an irregular schedule, at one point, it was extremely heavy on animated shows, with a post every Sunday, and for a while, I wrote mostly about visual novels and otome games, also irregularly.

I would say there are 3 main types of content on The Anny Blog: reviews, stories and WIP posts. I also have a section for art that I will eventually fill with art from very many years.

In more detail, my reviews tend to focus on BL, various straight romances (otome games, gal games, shoujo romance, josei romance), mystery novels, various fantasy genres (often cultivation or isekai, though I prefer supernatural/paranormal stories), and, in general, dark and even messy stories. I usually gravitate toward titles that cause heartbreak or pain, but I’m also a comedy fan.

My stories are often in alignment with what I like reading, so a lot of it is BL or lean low fantasy. While I don’t like epic fiction and often don’t enjoy high fantasy, I do write both of those, in particular as part of my epic fantastical travelogue, When the World Falls, I’ll be Safe from the Wrath of God, Observations Among Thieves and Other Vermin, or The Unfortunate Misadventures of Lord Thadus, or my far more contemporary and urban omegaverse story, I Summoned a Demon, who Made Me Sign a Contract.

My WIP posts are a combination of reports on how my writing is going, what I’m working on for the blog, any recent purchases or upcoming books I’m excited about, and a few anecdotes from my life.

If you count basic spellcheck and grammar check you find in Pages or the very basic option of ProWriting Aid that comes with Dabble, yes, I do. But probably less than I should, because I type a lot and English is my third languages after all.

However, I don’t use generative AI. If you think you see artefacts of this in my writing, I believe you’re likely seeing the markdowns I use to be able to keep formatting I plan out while writing because the formatting gets lost when I open .docx-files in Pages for editing and formatting. .doc and Apple’s standard software aren’t particularly compatible and Dabble uses .docx and others for export. Sometimes the markdown slips past when I copy-paste the story into a post because I forgot to fix the markdown in advance.

I write reviews on books and novels, visual novels, manga and manhua, webcomics, anime and donghua, audio dramas, games, and occasionally streaming services and reading platforms. Although I used to review fan-translated and fan-subtitled content in the past, and some of those can still be found, I have as a rule of thumb to have no paid for the content I review, unless it’s free to begin with.

The reviews range from brief to in-depth and most of the more in-depth content is originally Japanese. Because of the wider availability and less niche nature of much of it, however, I tend to lean towards shorter reviews with a focus on sharing my opinion.

I also write batch posts of opinions, but these are meant to be brief and not proper reviews.

I’ve chosen to go with domestic/original name conventions and I keep this consistent through my stories and reviews.

This means that for Japanese and Chinese names, I will write names in the order of surname first and given name second.

Eg. Fu Shen (Golden Terrace), Luo Binghe (The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System), Kirigaya Kouta (My Special One), Chen Linyu (The Elixir of Life, Original Character), and Momoi Tomoki Beyond the Horizon, Original Character)

In reviews and information pages, Chinese name will be written in full, while in reviews of Japanese content this will depends on context, ranging from full name, surname only, given name only or a nickname, but the name will always be written in full the first time it’s mentioned.

In chapters of original stories, this can vary in stories based on story’s narrative style and name origin. Chen Linyu is always addressed by full name, while Momoi Tomoki is simply written as Tomo, not Tomoki, in Tomoki’s point of view.

For Western names, or Occidental-style names, the order is given name first, surname second.

Eg. Mayna Spring (Of Dragons and Fae), Ari Ahola (The Elixir of Life, Original Character)

These will only list the full name once unless the story’s narrative style writes it differently.

In case there is no surname or there are unusual conventions, it will follow naming conventions, both in review and in stories.

Eg. Answard (singular name), Kári Hjálmar (given name, father’s name), Sólglód Alfljót (chosen name, given/mother’s name) (When the World Falls, I’ll be Safe From the Wrath of God, Original Characters)

If there is a title or honorific involved, it will be used if relevant and frequently used in the story. How it’s written depends on the translation or stylistic choice of author in the copy I’ve read in cases of review, and it varies from story to another in original stories. For story information pages, it will generally be in English for easy understanding.

Eg. Ninth Blood Prince U’il, or Crown Prince (Blood of Destinies Rewritten, Original Characters)

This will vary in the stories themselves, however, depending on situation and what is most suitable for the setting.

Eg. U’il-šanad rather than Prince U’il in the story, but the Crown Prince retains the English title.

The short answer is that I just wanted to, I could, and I’m literate. It’s not more complicated than that.

The longer answer is both complex and simple.

When it comes to authors, I often preorder or buy books early after release. Sometimes I don’t, but I haven’t gotten any information because I’m just one single person and this site is a side project to being a mother and house spouse. My priority is my home and family, second consuming and creating content, and third actually keeping up with news on content I like. This means that unless it’s a mainstream author that my author friends will bring up in writing contexts, I’m probably not going to find out about any problematic behaviour for a while after it comes out. My preferred content isn’t exactly the most mainstream out there, so we’re already stumbling over a problem here.

Additionally, issues usually aren’t that obvious, and can be years after the fact, so I’ll still have the content to consume and will write my opinion on it.

A second point relating to authors is that I sort of live by the philosophy of “Death of the author” and I don’t mean it in the social media popular way. According to this concept, authorship is a joint process; the author on the book cover may have written the story, but the reader interprets it and as such is also a writer of the book they read, because they have their own ideals and experiences. This can be extended further: a translator is an interpreter and the translation is their interpretation, giving the readers a specific lens to look through. The reader thus interpret the interpretation. And if they’ve read a review, they will have the interpretation of another person as well that will affect them. Suddenly, a book with one name on the cover has four authors, because the reader’s experience of the book is unique and these the story they read is unique to them alone, based on all these factors.

So, I don’t think I’m required to turn away from a story just because of an author. I can choose not to support their work by buying a book second-hand and still review it or review something I already have. The work is not the author, even if there will inevitably be parts of an author in every work.

This also brings me to the “problematic content”. This can absolutely be true, but nuance is important in media literacy. If you can understand nuance and the fact that an author is not the narrator and may even disagree with a narrator of the story, you will also understand that fiction is not real life, even if it mirrors real life. It’s a safe space to explore dark and “problematic” content, which can further expand the understanding of nuance. However, if one is not media literate, one will not be able to pick up this nuance of differing fiction from fact and the narrator from the author, as well as missing the point that not liking something doesn’t mean it’s problematic or that liking something doesn’t mean agreeing to dark topics.