This will come as no surprise to anyone who's been following us: we're closing shop here at Anime Dream. I want to personally apologize for stringing along our readers for as long as I have — part of me was reluctant to do this until it became apparent that I have to.

As of today, Anime Dream is officially closed; however, the site will remain live (with ads and forums disabled) until the domain expires. If you run an anime site and would like to feature any of the content currently on AD, contact us and I'll be happy to work with you, assuming I am able to contact the author.

Below you'll find personal statements about our closing from myself, Mike Ferreira, Ben Fennell, and Lionrampant. It's been a privilege to serve you: our readership. Goodbye, and good luck.

I've written enough about my past here at AD — how I stumbled and fell, haplessly, into the role of Editor in Chief after just being that guy that wrote the script for publishing the news. In a lot of ways the site was an experiment to me, one that was destined to fail because so much time went into reinvention and categorization. If blogs have taught us anything, it's that content still has a shelf life even though it's not on a shelf. That the Internet has no past (except when you're searching for information about something new), and it's a waste of time to catalog content for posterity.

I can't emphasize enough how much I'm going to miss this, or miss wanting to do this, as it were. Either way I look at it, it's like losing a part of myself. Eleven years ago, I wouldn't have imagined being here today — if anything, I would've imagined stopping sooner, like at that magic four-year boundary that marks high school and college life. Nobody wants a good thing to end, but it always does, and you can never go back.

In my case, the thing I lost is the desire to watch anime on a regular basis. I could blame the recent content, talk about the degradation of anime values like some curmudgeon, but the truth is I changed. My work is fulfilling where it wasn't before. I have a renewed interest in music and music performance. And there's this small matter about still being alone at my age. (Identifying oneself as an anime fan is not seen as attractive, generally speaking.)

I'm not bowing out of anime writing altogether. I plan to make the occasional contribution to Mike's Anime Herald, and I'm working on an idea for a new publication that will allow me to be a bit more free-range in terms of culture and entertainment commentary. I like writing articles, and probably always will. So farewell, Mr. Bond, but not goodbye.

After ten years of experiences, hundreds of stories, and countless memories, it seems that the dream is finally ending. Matt and I have had numerous conversations in the past few months, and we both agreed that it was time for us at Anime Dream to sign off one last time. We discussed ways of prolonging the experience, but every single conversation seemed to lead to the same conclusion: "the moment is over."

Anime Dream has been a major part of my day-to-day life for ten years now. Through the decade, I've covered the anime boom and bust with reckless abandon, traveled across the east coast to cover the con circuit, and met many genuinely fascinating people. And, most important, I've forged countless friendships, with readers, with industry folks, and with the staff here at AD. I'd be lying if I didn't say that Matt and Ben haven't grown as close as family over these years, and I've treasured every minute I've worked here.

So, as I say farewell to the site that's dominated my life for a third of my life, I want to say "thank you." Thank you, Matt and Ben for being such great friends and colleagues. Thank you readers, for tuning in day after day, even during our dead periods, to read what we have to say. Thank you, everyone in the industry who believed in us, and helped us every step of the way. Without any of you, Anime Dream wouldn't exist (and even if it did, things wouldn't have been so special!). I really mean it when I say that you're all important to me, in some way.

As every dream ends, though, a new one must begin. I'm not quite ready to give things up just yet, and I hope you aren't, either. Going forward, I'll be continuing my work at Anime Herald. While things won't be exactly the same, I hope to retain the very spirit that brought all of us here under such improbable circumstances so many years ago.

Until we meet again, so long, farewell, and thank you, for making this experience so rewarding.

For ten years, it’s been time to make the doughnuts–er, anime reviews. By the scale of Internet time, ten years is pretty much an epoch. The dinosaurs rose, craned their necks toward the sun, then pulled a muscle and went extinct. And what we’re left with is an odd reflection of an industry and subculture that rose, fell, and transformed — in ways both positive and negative — over the course of the past decade. Born of an era where RPGFan still liked Japanese games, high speed Internet was a newfangled thing, and piracy hadn’t popped every bubble it could in the Western anime and manga industry, after my ten long years here, it’s time to draw things to a close at Anime Dream.

My earlier reviews could have been funnier. There could have been more .hack reviews, but let’s just sweep those under the rug. And I’ll always be able to look back and recall just how horrible Ikki Tousen was. In the business of watching and commenting on Japanese animation, there’s always a new regret around the corner, but sometimes fun, too. I’ve made some good friends and got a lot of good writing experience out of my time here. Now, I depart for a new pasture over at Mike’s Anime Herald, where I’ll continue to assure you that your dreams will all someday come true: that daily life in Japan is exactly like in all those anime series you like, 98% of the language is ‘neko kawaii desu,’ that demand is high for aspiring American manga artists, that it’s super cool when fansubs insist on leaving as many Japanese words as possible intact in the subtitles while pretending words like ‘nakama’ don’t have a perfectly sound English word they can be translated to, and you’re totally not wasting your life with your fanfiction. Delusions are great, aren’t they?

So long, AD. It’s been real.

I first discovered Anime Dream while searching the internet for English-language reviews of Anime soundtracks. Very few internet sites ever bothered to cover that side of the market, so finding one that took the music of anime seriously was quite exciting. Granted, way back then I had no way of knowing that I would end up contributing many different reviews to the site as the Music Editor, but looking back now I see that I have been writing for the site for a much longer time than I spent as a reader only. During my years writing for the site I learned a lot, met some cool people, and discovered a lot of great music (both through recommendations from Matt and reviewers before me, and from hunting high and low for new CDs to review for the site). It was a good run, and I feel that all of us who contributed to the Dream can be proud of our work and what we accomplished.