It looks that produced some fruitful blog discourse as watchers grapple with the concepts. I was behind on the series, and I regret that I haven't read it before, because of concern for spoilers. Some of it is spoilerific indeed, but I see now that ef is strong enough to weather them, so it's all good (as an aside, it's a mark of all strong shows: we all know that Nia dies, right? but doesn't hurt watching).

First, apparently, was Anime Diet.

One pleasing thing to me too as a wannabe writer myself is how much of the show is about artists.

Hah. In my book that actually comes very close to meta, like blogging about bloggers, and thus is a black mark. Fortunately, ef is not some kind of abnoxious artistic wankery at its core, like Adaptation, so I can watch it. Chihiro banzai.

Next came Owen with a typically longish piece. He refined my understanding of b/w shots used for Hiro and made a few other useful comments.

Finally, Impz chimed in. He didn't attempt to manufacture any "insights", but he probably has done a lot to spread the appreciation of ef.

I saw quite a bit of scattered bloggage floating around as well. IIRC Omo wrote something unusually episodic at some point, and there was a number of screenshot heavy episodic summaries, but of course nobody beats Random Curiosity for this sort of thing. I won't even try.