Howdy doody cool kids. This is Chris checking in, one of the clubs more "colorful" members as Gerardo has called me (an apt description). At our big open house meeting last week, Gerardo was kind enough to let me present to the club an autobiographical/editorial speech that I thought would set a good tone for the semester, and from my understanding, it generally went over pretty well. Its a bit ironic that I'm putting this online considering some of the things I say in it, but I think its only fair to give people who couldn't make it to the big meeting a chance to read the piece.
My Anime Apostasy
I have a reputation among my long time friends. It’s a peculiar sort of reputation, the kind that has two sides to it that don’t seem to gel together in a way that makes sense. On one level, I have a reputation as being the “anime guy” in our social circle, and by “the anime guy” it is meant that I don’t really watch much of any American TV, mainstream or otherwise; I watch anime, and not much else. At the same time, however, I also have a reputation as being someone who hates a LOT of anime, and a lot of what anime fans do to express their love of anime. There is certainly some truth in both of these perceptions, but in spite of them, I think there’s more to my story than just “He’s a man without a country, and that’s that.” I think my history, how I fell in love with anime, how I fell out of love with the fan culture, and why I’m still involved with both says something meaningful and relevant to any one who is, or has ever been, a self-described “anime fan”.
If you were to ask me “Why did you become interested in anime?”, I would have to answer that being a child of the 90’s as being the most important cause. In the 1980s, due to changes in national communications law, it became far more legal to sell merchandise based off of children’s television, and thus merchandise driven cartoons, such as He-man, Transformers, and Thundercats, became a cornerstone of kid culture, and this shift only escalated in 1990s. The point of all this is that I and many others in my generation, grew up feeling the media that we consumed and how it resonated with us was a much more important aspect of our developing identities than it had been for previous generations. As my childhood ended and adolescence began, the general social cue from my peer group at large, however, was to drop the cartoons and toys like a hot rock under pain of the social death sentence of looking immature. The prospect of being forced to completely reject one of the greatest sources of joy in my life, caused a significant personal crisis; there was a gap in my identity which mainstream American teen culture wasn’t filling. Enter anime.
In my home town of Novato, California, there was a local mom-n-pop video store called Bradley Video. I don’t remember exactly how or when I became aware of the medium of Japanese animation, but Bradley Video stocked an impressive collection of anime VHS tapes, and once I became consistently cognizant of anime, they were my life line. My greatest fortune came from the fact that Bradley’s selection of Mobile Suit Gundam anime which, coupled with the then growing popularity of Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network’s Toonami programming block, gave me an inimitable opportunity to at once, explore more mature animated television series unlike anything I had seen before, as well as rekindle my childhood love of giant robots, originating, appropriately, from Transformers. I cannot overstate how personally important this revelation was to me; that animation, as a medium, was in no way inherently consigned to immature entertainment. I was grabbed by this notion. It dominated my adolescence and propelled my interest in anime further, leading me to become, like many others, just as interested in Japanese culture beyond anime alone. I became an avid reader of the magazine Animerica, and while I never thought of myself as a strong participant in the anime fan culture, I drew solace in the fact that it existed, and that I was not alone. Unfortunately, as the 90s ended and the 2000’s began, a paradigm shift in the anime fan culture was on the horizon that would drastically change my opinion of the fan culture in both polarity, and intensity.
With the advent of exponentially more powerful computer hardware in the first years of the new millennium, online fansub production groups flourished and started a chain reaction that resulted in the anime fan culture becoming a community in which the vast majority of its social interaction is conducted online. It is a strong personal conviction of mine that any subculture that does this can and will become self-defeating in some capacity simply by virtue of the over-convenience of communicating online as well as the inability of purely text-based communication to reproduce the social cues and intensity present in real life. If this were the only issue then the current situation would not be as problematic as it is, and anime clubs like this one would be of only a moderate social importance. Unfortunately the anime fan culture’s mass presence online has revealed much more about it that is problematic and self-defeating that is causally independent of the internet.
As anime culture moved online, I, coincidentally, found myself continuing to grow up, and as my perspective broadened, I came to realize how much of the medium and the fan culture plateaued in sophistication at adolescence and progressed no further. I began to feel disenfranchised as that foreignness of anime as a product of Japanese pop culture that intrigued and enamored me became less and less appealing as I became aware of the disparity between the tacit cultural values at work in so much anime that flew in the face of what I, as an American, value. Furthermore, as I became more interested in broadening my social horizons, I dismayed at the insular, homogeneous, and defensive nature of the online fan community. Having moved on to the internet and out of the physical world, save for conventions and clubs, there is no longer any use seen in championing what might be called “entry level” anime; shows and films that can appeal to both those who do and do not actively define themselves as “anime fans”. The opposite has, instead, occurred; The industry and the culture have become recursive, and with each recursion, the titillation and pandering becomes more transparent and the distance in tastes and proclivities from the broad norm of American culture becomes greater. The industry has become, a snake eating its own tail.
This issue is compounded the fan culture’s almost wholesale embrace of mediocrity and naked commercialism. Yet another sign of frustrating immaturity, anime fans in general do not seem to be interested in finding the few exceptional shows that come out every few years, the diamonds in the rough, and approaching them as media that can and should be assessed, analyzed, critiqued and evaluated on substantive criteria. Rather, the primary concern appears to be amassing a tremendous library, regardless of quality, which serves as a foundation for the consumer to imagine a, to use the vernacular, “fanon” out of. This fanon, essentially, consisting of a set of personal wish fulfillment scenarios, which often form the basis for fanfiction. Ultimately, however, this creative process is superceded by the consumptive process of anime as a commercial product.
To paraphrase Jeremy Parish, anime culture is about buying stuff. To be fair this is a criticism that can be leveled at nearly any other fandom (only the smallest of conventions do not have a dealers room) but what is so particularly problematic about the commercial nature of the anime culture is that we are, by participating willfully beholden to the dysfunctional proclivities of its primary domestic audience, Japanese otaku, and by doing so we tacitly accept and support an industry designed to fleece a demographic desperate for female companionship and affection and romanticize a retrograde, infantilizing attitude towards not just women, but human relationships and sexuality. In my personal opinion, this is the most problematic of the self-defeating behaviors of the anime fandom. It makes us a magnet for ridicule, derision, and criticism that we have no good reason to bring upon ourselves.
One might want to say the anime fandom is at a crossroads, but I cannot, in good conscience, claim that to be the case. Barring some great catastrophe, anime fan culture is going to stay online, keep fantasizing itself into irrelevance, and keep buying itself into oblivion. Yet, in spite of all my criticism, I am here. In the face of a culture that has and continues to go in a direction that I refuse and reject, I am here. I am here because, for a time, I swore off any participation in the fan culture, but when I came to SF State and first learned about Anime FX, I had to come to grips with the fact the only means to improve a culture is to participate in it, and that the only way to really participate in a culture, is in the real world where we can treat each other like people, and not like boxes with text in them. The fact that this club exists makes me feel like I’m not wasting my time with anime, or with other people who like it, and in the status quo of the fan culture, that is a triumph beyond measure. To each and every one of you I say that I’m not guaranteeing we’ll be the best of friends, but I will give all of you a fair chance.
