There was a time when I thought Beneath the Tangles could be everything to everyone, that we would reach out to young, shounen-obsessed anime fans and serious otaku alike. The thing about hubris is that you don’t see it coming, and in the end, I realized that mission was far too ambitious, and when you overstretch yourself, you end up missing your audience entirely sometimes.
Thankfully, in addition to the wonderful writers on staff here, there are others in the blogosphere doing great work which aligns with what we’re doing. As such, we’re happy to announce our shimai (sister) sites, those run independently from the Beneath the Tangles but which share a common mission. We’re excited for the following blogs to be the first to join this group!
Nanaca Sakura
It was with great sadness that Kaze left Beneath the Tangles several months back, but thankfully, he didn’t leave blogging behind. Delving deeply into otaku culture, Kaze continues to examine faith on his new blog, Nanaca Sakura, but with an expertise that comes from someone who lives and breathes Japan. If you enjoyed his excellent posts on this site, I think you’ll love his new one – it’s like an unadulterated Kaze.
Gaming and God
Samuru, who is our Something More columnist and Facebook administrator, has a long-running site specifically about gaming. We touch on gaming here, too, particularly through Josh’s posts, but Samura goes far more in-depth about connections between that topic and Christianity on his site. Go give it a follow!
We also have a couple of others sites that are either on hiatus or “completed” that we count in this initial group. All You Shining Stars was a project I began working on when I left Beneath the Tangles consisting of short devotions for non-Christians or Christians not yet ready for more heady theological stuff, featuring artwork by the amazing Turtlequeen. The final site is Haibane Renmei Study, which was a blog I created while teaching Haibane Renmei at my church, but which remains a good resource for anyone who wants to lead a class or else study solo on the faith implications of that series.
I hope you will consider following these sites! We’ll be adding an article aggregator in the following months to make it easy to track their posts as well. If you’re interested adding your site as one of our shimai sites, shoot me a message. We’ll consider your submission, but be do warned that I’m picky about who we’ll add. 😛
Thanks for the mention!! 🙂
Thanks for joining!