PRAISE THE FALLEN: lolitron.org

Posted On September 20, 2009

People always say, “Man, wildarms, you’re such a stick-in-the-mud! Why do you hate the anime blogs so much?” And it’s true–I do hate the anime blogs. I will not deny this claim. Anime blogs by and large are awful. However, there are and were some good ones, and it’s those happy few that I’d like to salute in what I hope becomes a series of posts about anime blogs that I like and liked. This is the first in that series.

Today we remember Lolitron.

abq over at Lolitron every now and again rises from his grave to claim that he’s not dead, but in all honesty, the site died near the beginning of 2006. There have been attempts at revival with his kind of yearly Loli Battles and attempts to blog about new series that are relevant to his interests, but it’s clear that these interests have become more mainstream, and you can bet he’s no longer blowing cash on R2 DVDs.

But let’s not focus on what Lolitron is, and more on what it was. I first discovered Lolitron (and a wealth of other blogs which are no longer updated) in highschool–almost four years ago–and it did well to fill those dark days with spots of inspired dirty humour that cheered me up.

At face value, Lolitron may not have seemed like anything special. It looks like just another episodic anime blog with a bunch of screencaps. And that’s what it was, really. But what set it apart was abq’s pedophile shtick. He didn’t summarize episodes. Instead, he gave a couple of dirty one liners paired with links to screencaps taken out of context, and then posted a bunch of other screencaps at the end. Every now and again he would leave a paragraph or so of honest thoughts about the series, but most of the time it was just perverted jokes.

And it was awesome.

While in a perfect world all anime blogs would be well-written reviews and analysis of anime both new and old, this take on the generic anime blog setup was refreshing. Instead of writing a boring summary I don’t care about (because I would have presumably already watched the episode) abq provided a funny commentary that worked along with the episode, instead of simply retelling it. I personally found this to be a nice change of pace, since honestly, most anime bloggers are fucking prudes, and it was nice to see a fellow unashamed pervert out there keeping it real. Aside from his episode posts, every now and then he’d post about his hurting wallet with loot for his readership to salivate over.

abq himself is a mysterious existence. He never really made it clear as to how old he actually was, except for the fact that he had a job and was in school. In fact, according to his Twitter, it seems he’s still in school, so he may well be close to my age, considering how long I’ve been keeping up with him. He never posted any sort of photos of himself, and his about page has been left incomplete since the inception of the blog. I’m pretty sure he’s just a normal guy, but the air of mystery around him is somewhat compelling.

What is also worth noting is how loyal his readership is. Even if the blog was only really actively updated for about a year and a bit, each time he updates–even if it’s just with one image–it draws a lot of response. People clearly want him to get back on the bandwagon, but at this point I think it’s no use.

Even if Lolitron is simply a shell of its former self, it’s still worth saluting for what it was, what it did, and how it really creeped out Fred Gallagher. abq is a cool dude, and even if his life on the internet is more or less gone, I hope he’s still doing well, wherever he is in Sweden.

I certainly hope he isn’t in jail.