AnimeHistory Lore Is Starting to Connect to Itself
We added a lot of Lore today. A stupid amount, actually. But the bigger change isn't how many entries were added. It's that the archive is finally starting to behave less like a collection of pages and more like the thing we originally wanted it to become.You can wander through it now.
Open an episode of Naruto and a fight can take you to the technique being used. That technique can take you into a clan or a larger system. Open a Cowboy Bebop session and a reference to the Red Dragon Syndicate can lead into Spike's past, Julia, Vicious, Mars, another session and eventually the finale.
Blood+ got even stranger. A page about how Chevaliers are created can lead into Haji, Riku, the Zoo, Saya and Diva's bloodlines, Red Shield and the episode where one of those rules actually matters.
That's what the little blue Lore links appearing throughout the site are doing. They aren't supposed to be Wikipedia links on every recognizable noun. They're supposed to answer one question:
"There's more to this. Where do I go next?"
We Had the Pages. Now They Know About Each Other.
AnimeHistory Lore has always had multiple ways into the same material.- Characters have bios.
- Episodes have summaries.
- Lore pages explain the stuff that doesn't fit neatly into either one.
- Fansub groups have their own historical records.
Character and episode pages can already surface related Lore directly. Now the Lore itself is being linked internally too. An entry about the Eight Gates doesn't need to re-explain the Reverse Lotus. It can take you there. A Red Shield entry doesn't need three paragraphs explaining Cinq Flèches every time the organization appears. Cowboy Bebop doesn't need to explain what the Bebop means to the crew in every session where somebody leaves it.
We can write the thing we're actually talking about and let the archive carry the background.
Some Series Are Already Too Linked
This is the funny part. For months the problem was: "How do we get enough useful connections into this thing?"We have now encountered the opposite problem. A few entries are starting to look like someone dropped a box of blue hyperlinks on the floor. That's a good problem. It means the underlying Lore has become dense enough that the computer can see legitimate relationships everywhere.
It also means we're going to back some of those links off.
The rule isn't going to be "link everything that can be linked." Sometimes a sentence is better if you just read it. Sometimes an emotionally important scene does not need seven exits embedded inside it. Sometimes a character's name appearing does not mean you need to leave the page and read their entire history.
So there will be some decoupling and cleanup over the next while. Nothing dramatic. Just another editorial pass now that we can finally see what a heavily interconnected AnimeHistory actually feels like.
We would much rather remove a few good links than spend another year wishing the connections existed.
Different Anime Are Producing Completely Different Networks
This has also confirmed something we've been slowly learning while rebuilding Lore:The database structure can be standardized. The Lore itself shouldn't be.
- Naruto naturally connects through techniques, clans, transformations, organizations and fights.
- Cowboy Bebop connects through sessions, locations, bounties, the Bebop crew and all the pieces of everybody's past they keep pretending aren't following them.
- Initial D connects through cars, mountain passes, driving techniques and racing culture.
- Blood+ connects through families, Chevaliers, Red Shield, Cinq Flèches, the Schiff and a century of people discovering that blood can give you rules without necessarily giving you answers.
The links make that difference more obvious because they reveal what each show's actual vocabulary is see Initial D Lore ?
We Even Tried It on a Movie
This was probably overdue.Blood: The Last Vampire now has AnimeHistory Lore.
Movies had been left alone partly because copying our television-series architecture onto a 48-minute movie sounded ridiculous. So we didn't.
Blood's Lore is compact and built around what that movie actually gives you: Saya, the Chiropterans, Yokota in 1966, the organization using her, what the film deliberately refuses to explain, and why the movie looked so strange and new in 2000.
It also became our first attempt at movie fansub and digital-circulation history, which turned up an interesting problem of its own.
Anime-HQ released Blood, but Anime-HQ was primarily a ripping and encoding group. That is still part of fan-distribution history. It just isn't the same thing as somebody translating an unavailable Japanese movie.
So movie histories are going to distinguish between fansubbers, rippers, encoders, archival groups and whatever else the evidence actually gives us. We have a database for these groups for a reason. If we can identify who actually released something, we want that history to follow them from anime to anime.
Blood: The Last Vampire Lore ?
The Screenshot Archive Is Next
There's another piece coming.I've built a command-line scraper specifically to start capturing larger series across the site. For something like Naruto Shippuden, that means you should expect a much more complete screenshot image gallery over the next few days.
Five hundred episodes make manual capture slightly less charming than it sounds.
The goal isn't to dump thousands of meaningless frames onto the site. It is to make the visual archive start catching up with the written one, especially on the series large enough that manually filling the gaps would take forever.
And once those images are in place, the same relationship system we use for characters, episodes and Lore gives us somewhere useful to attach them.
That part is going to take time, but the machinery finally exists.
This Is Starting to Look Like What We Wanted
There is a slightly selfish reason we're doing all of this.AnimeHistory was never supposed to be a database where you search for an anime, read one page and leave. The old anime internet didn't work like that.
You went looking for one thing and discovered five others. Someone mentioned a fansub group you had never heard of. You learned that the weird translation you grew up with came from one specific release. A character led you into a conversation about an episode, which led into another show, which led into somebody explaining why the version you had downloaded three years ago looked completely different.
There was always another door.
We're obviously not rebuilding IRC, fansub distro bots or the shoutbox culture of 2003. But we can build an archive that rewards the same kind of curiosity.
That is what the Lore interlinking is for.
Not SEO. Not keeping you trapped clicking pages. Not turning every noun blue.
Just making sure that when something on AnimeHistory makes you think:
"Wait. What's that?"
There's a decent chance you can click it and keep going. And after today's update, there are a whole lot more doors.
Rebuke the future. Preserve the past.
