Valentina Moreno Ríos

Valentina Moreno Ríos came to anime through music. She was fourteen when her cousin burned her a CD with *Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad* episodes she had downloaded overnight on a dial-up connection in Bogotá in 2005. The series' portrayal of being young, passionate about music, and completely unsure of your future hit her at exactly the right moment. She played guitar poorly in two bands in college, and considers both experiences essential to her critical perspective.

With 440 completed entries on MyAnimeList, Valentina's specialty is anime that treats music as more than background — series where sound and performance are structurally central. She writes about *Kids on the Slope*, *Carole & Tuesday*, *Your Lie in April*, the Sound! Euphonium franchise, and the rarely-discussed music anime of the 2000s that didn't survive the streaming era. She is also a sharp reader of coming-of-age and school drama anime, and has been developing a long critical project on how Colombian and broader Latin American youth culture maps (or doesn't) onto Japanese high school narratives.

Before Otakiva, Valentina co-hosted *Acordes y Fansubs*, a Bogotá-based anime podcast that ran for four seasons and was nominated for a Colombian podcast award in 2021. She also managed social media for the Bogotá Anime Convention for two years.

Her personal top five: *Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad*, *Kids on the Slope*, *Sound! Euphonium*, *Anohana*, and *Shirobako*.

Based in La Candelaria, Bogotá. Contact: [email protected].