Priya Sundaram

Priya Sundaram came to anime late and all at once. She was twenty-two, working her first job out of UC Berkeley and burning through shows on a commuter train, when a coworker recommended *Monster* on a Friday afternoon. She watched the first episode that night and didn't stop until the series was over. She called in sick Monday to finish it. That's how she describes her entry point, and she maintains it was the correct decision.

Her specialty is psychological thriller, horror, and mature seinen: anime that deals seriously with violence, trauma, moral ambiguity, and institutional failure. She has 400 entries on MAL and considers narrative structure and character interiority her primary analytical tools. She has a graduate certificate in creative writing from San Francisco State and brings a fiction writer's vocabulary to her criticism — she writes about unreliable narrators, dramatic irony, and the specific ways anime uses non-linear time that novelists have been using for decades. She is particularly interested in Naoki Urasawa adaptations and the challenge of sustaining tension across long-form series.

Before Otakiva, Priya wrote for the genre film site *Bloody Disgusting* covering anime horror, and maintained a Letterboxd-adjacent reviewing practice on a Substack called *The Last Panel* (she reviews anime as if they were films).

Her personal top five: *Monster*, *Berserk* (1997), *Paranoia Agent*, *Vinland Saga*, and *Devilman Crybaby*.

Based in the Mission District, San Francisco. Contact: [email protected].