Different strokes for different folks

By Alice Chen

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Anime Maru site editor in chief Kevin Huang is glad he’s the only one competing in his niche – that niche being satirical takes on anime news.

Huang founded it in 2015 after he grew bored of his anime blog. The website has enjoyed considerable success, accumulating over six million views in the years since.

Satire has previously existed in outlets such as The Onion, but recent events like the election of

United States president Donald Trump have sparked more biting political satire, with websites like The Warblr springing up to fight the perceived threat of the new administration. But why has Huang’s site been such a success? Why are people drawn to satire? And is satire now more relevant than it ever was before?

Huang attributes part of his success to the fact that he’s serving a very specific community with virtually no competition.

“I always thought if you really want to be successful, a way to be successful easier is to do things that other people aren’t doing,” he says.

Huang, who does a majority of the writing on the site, also makes sure to always aim content as his readership, with articles all tying in to anime or “nerd culture.” He even goes as far as to ensure that his stories all fit a similar structure, with one central joke and a strong punchline at the end.

In the beginning, Huang and his staff weren’t too sure of their audience. He describes how they sometimes courted controversy when they made jokes about sensitive current events, like Boko Haram’s terrorism in the Middle East. Since then he’s avoided commenting on such hot topics, but he doesn’t feel like this has restricted Anime Maru.

On the opposite end of the scale is The Flat Earth Times, an American satire website headed by its editor in chief Greg Nasif.

For Nasif, the site is all about producing absurd stories on political news that “would only happen if the earth was flat.”

The writing is a way for him to make sense of a “crazy” world, but Nasif thinks it serves a similarly enlightening purpose for his readers.

“If we show people where things have gotten to extremes in certain areas they might see it and they might walk back to normalcy,” Nasif says. “If we show them the curve.”

Edward Noe, writer at and cofounder of the satirical blog Baby on a Diet, believes that readers are ultimately attracted to each individual’s unique humour and perspective.

“All satire is unique in that there’s so many ways that you can make fun of a news story that you’re not going to see too many satirical articles with the same headline,” Noe says.

And neither Noe nor Nasif worry too much about their articles being misinterpreted as real.

Noe constantly tries to make it apparent that his site is satire, from its unconventional name to the absurd nature of its content.

Even though the articles aren’t 100 percent factual, people still get news from these outlets.

While Noe expects that most of his readers follow more typical organizations, he admits that some of his younger college- and high-school-age readers may be hearing about these things for the first time.

“That’s an interesting development…I think reading it through satire gives you a unique perspective in that you should be skeptical of what’s going on.”

Noe sometimes also finds humor in things that the general public may miss.

“Some of our readers wouldn’t necessarily be reading in-depth on the details of public policy,” he says. “So, if they read us they can get a short blurb.”

Meanwhile, Anime Maru relies on its fans to be familiar with the content it covers.

Huang says they will try to cover the most popular new shows of the season with articles often making references to the anime they’re based on.

This reliance on prior knowledge can sometimes backfire for the niche satire site.

“A lot of our staff have a lot of different interests, but when you write about it that Venn diagram [of readers] is real narrow,” Huang says, describing an article where he compared and contrasted an under-watched sports anime with CrossFit. According to him, there weren’t many people who had watched the show and who were also familiar enough with CrossFit that they could get the jokes.

Topic of focus aside, Nasif argues that like most comedy, satire attracts an audience because it tells the truth. 

“We are an increasingly divided society and comedy is a way of seeing the truth,” Nasif says.

But Huang offers a slightly different viewpoint.

“There is a good feeling you get when you understand what the satirization is and you can see things through humour…it’s like eating candy, it’s just pleasant.”