Down among the anime fans
Oct. 7th, 2004 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI sat in the back of a tea room named The Living Room, sipping a hot blend of black tea and apple juice, quite delicious actually, and watched on an overhead projection four episodes of Naruto. I've never been particularly fond of the show despites its apparent longevity-- it recently passed 100 episodes-- but it is the hottest thing on the fansub circuit: when episode 100 came out, there were 14 seeds (people with complete copies) and 180 downloaders for Uninhabited Planet, but 500 seeds and over 15,000 downloaders for Naruto. You'd think a show this popular would already be available in the U.S., but it's been the subject of such a fierce bidding war that no U.S. distributor has been able to create a controlling legal interest in the show, and so the fansubbing goes on.
I sat and watched all four episodes, and I can see the appeal of the show. I supposed I excessively badmouth a lot of the anime fighting shows, which do put effort into characterization and the like, even if I don't appreciate it. Naruto's problem is that it's obvious how the story will end, although there will be twists and turns along the way; we're not given any such assurance in lots of other series. I really thought that much of Section 9 had bought it in the last episode of season one of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and we still don't know... no, I'm not going to give away spoilers that might reach my daughter's ears. They haven't seen those episodes yet.
I discovered, however, that I have very little in common with the fans I met last night, and I think part of the problem is with the word "anime". Anime is no longer a unifying theme. I don't think of myself as cutting edge, but I was watching shows these people had never heard of. Tsukuyomi Moon Phase? Mai HiME? All of these people had broadband and most of them had memberships on one or more anime formus, but putting together the entire toolchain to download and watch anime was apparently beyond them. They understood that there were "seasons" and "release dates," but didn't have any idea how to figere them out. To them, anime came on DVD or the Cartoon Network. When I asked them if they knew what studios produced their favorite shows, most didn't know.
More to the point, all of them watched different things. A fair analogy would be to have a meetup for fans of Seattle radio. Do the NPR and the KPMG Country fans have anything in common other than knowing where on the dial each other's stations might be found? It made for a curiously frustrating event, to realize we had so little to talk about. Anime is shorthand for "animation from Japan," but that's like saying "television from England"; the watchers of Dr. Who and Absolutely Fabulous probably don't have that much in common, and the Internet has made even the necessity of meeting to solidify contacts and sources of media completely irrelevent.
I left feeling oddly out of joint. Maybe it was the drink I had in hand, a sweet concotion called Leninade with the old Soviet logo and the salesmark "Get Hammered and Sickled!" on the label, which the salesgeek behind the counter assured me was "the official soda pop of Fremont." (I don't know which I felt stronger: amusement that the murderous old bastard was being pimped for commercial effect, or annoyance that he was being pimped at all.) The one part of the evening I did find useful was the one Japanese fellow who told me where to find Korean fansubs and feeds for other Japanese media, like sitcoms and dramas and the like.
Still, it makes me wonder if the notion of an "anime fan" is outdated, or simply doesn't apply to me. It is, thanks to the Internet, no longer exotic or new, it's just more TV. Sure, some of it I like, and as animation goes it's better than a lot of what the U.S. produces, so as a market source it has its value. But as a distinction of character, I don't think it has any validity.
I sat and watched all four episodes, and I can see the appeal of the show. I supposed I excessively badmouth a lot of the anime fighting shows, which do put effort into characterization and the like, even if I don't appreciate it. Naruto's problem is that it's obvious how the story will end, although there will be twists and turns along the way; we're not given any such assurance in lots of other series. I really thought that much of Section 9 had bought it in the last episode of season one of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and we still don't know... no, I'm not going to give away spoilers that might reach my daughter's ears. They haven't seen those episodes yet.
I discovered, however, that I have very little in common with the fans I met last night, and I think part of the problem is with the word "anime". Anime is no longer a unifying theme. I don't think of myself as cutting edge, but I was watching shows these people had never heard of. Tsukuyomi Moon Phase? Mai HiME? All of these people had broadband and most of them had memberships on one or more anime formus, but putting together the entire toolchain to download and watch anime was apparently beyond them. They understood that there were "seasons" and "release dates," but didn't have any idea how to figere them out. To them, anime came on DVD or the Cartoon Network. When I asked them if they knew what studios produced their favorite shows, most didn't know.
More to the point, all of them watched different things. A fair analogy would be to have a meetup for fans of Seattle radio. Do the NPR and the KPMG Country fans have anything in common other than knowing where on the dial each other's stations might be found? It made for a curiously frustrating event, to realize we had so little to talk about. Anime is shorthand for "animation from Japan," but that's like saying "television from England"; the watchers of Dr. Who and Absolutely Fabulous probably don't have that much in common, and the Internet has made even the necessity of meeting to solidify contacts and sources of media completely irrelevent.
I left feeling oddly out of joint. Maybe it was the drink I had in hand, a sweet concotion called Leninade with the old Soviet logo and the salesmark "Get Hammered and Sickled!" on the label, which the salesgeek behind the counter assured me was "the official soda pop of Fremont." (I don't know which I felt stronger: amusement that the murderous old bastard was being pimped for commercial effect, or annoyance that he was being pimped at all.) The one part of the evening I did find useful was the one Japanese fellow who told me where to find Korean fansubs and feeds for other Japanese media, like sitcoms and dramas and the like.
Still, it makes me wonder if the notion of an "anime fan" is outdated, or simply doesn't apply to me. It is, thanks to the Internet, no longer exotic or new, it's just more TV. Sure, some of it I like, and as animation goes it's better than a lot of what the U.S. produces, so as a market source it has its value. But as a distinction of character, I don't think it has any validity.
