ten years before the (increasingly large) screen, or good God I have been in anime fandom since 1997

[rushthatspeaks]

I am still working through the list of things people asked for in my tell-me-what-to-blog about post, and happily one of the requests dovetailed neatly with an entry I've been planning to make for a while, involving the fact that I looked around some months ago and realized that I have been in anime fandom for somewhat more than ten years now.

Now, for some of you sf-nal types, this may not seem like a big deal. As far as anime goes, though? Hi. I'm from the Early Neolithic. I am not a first-wave North American anime fan-- they tend to be a) male, b) currently in their forties, and c) people who had advanced enough tech in the mid-eighties to record and swap things off late-night network television. However, I am fairly early second-wave, and I started in the era when we could still get a library screening room during school hours to watch subtitled shows because anything in a foreign language was automatically educational, a trick you could not pull nowadays.

I am actually unsure when I started reading manga, because it was not differentiated from other comics so much back then. I got into comics through Elfquest at about age twelve, and being the sort of person I am immediately went to a library and started reading all the comics they had (Sandman, Alan Moore, etc.) and then when I ran out to the bookstore to read all the comics they had. The local Borders back then had precisely two shelves (not two bookcases, two shelves) which were not-quite-filled with comics, tucked into a way-back corner between the literary erotica and the horror. I systematically read my way through, and then discovered that they changed stock pretty frequently, so kept on doing it. I have been sad ever since that I had no money at the time, because I have deduced that I read all the early Viz output, including Four Shoujo Stories, at that Borders, and I never bought any of it. But it never occurred to me that manga was a category. It was all on one shelf.

So some years went by, and I was a sophomore in high school. And I had a friend who was heavily into Sailor Moon. Now, everyone had heard of Sailor Moon, because it was a Saturday morning kids' show of absolutely the worst sort. I'd been trapped with it babysitting. It was hell. No one in my circle of friends could figure out what she, an otherwise rational person, saw in it, or why she kept trying to make us all watch it. 'It's different in Japanese,' she'd say, 'it's really smart. They're making it into something it isn't for the U.S. audience. Those two girls aren't cousins, they're dating. It's cute! It's funny! Please won't you just try it!' Nobody would.

So finally she snapped. 'All right,' she said, 'none of you will watch Sailor Moon, fine. But you are all going to sit down with me and watch something by the same director or I am going to have all of you shot.'

There were maybe eight people in the little school library educational-films screening room during seventh-period study hall for the first VHS of Revolutionary Girl Utena, dir. Kunihiko Ikuhara, who did in fact direct one of the Sailor Moon movies when he was young and struggling. I thought the top of my head was going to come off. I had not been raised on television; we didn't get a set till I was in seventh grade. The television I'd seen at other peoples' houses had been stupid and unfunny and sexist and utterly non-compelling. This was TV like a fantasy novel, with worldbuilding and three-dimensional characters and symbolism and allegory and richness and color and depth, TV which didn't explain everything about itself right away, and also an explicitly feminist show with a lot to say about and to adolescent girls. Utena had the first lesbian characters I ever saw in a motion picture of any sort, period-- and they were admirable people. This was, for the first time ever, television for me. I was blindsided.

I had to have my own copy. And I had to see more. The local video store didn't have it, had never even heard of it, said they couldn't order it. What to do? I went to the phone book, and discovered a concept of which I had not been previously aware: the comic book store. There was one, and only one, in my city. It was directly in front of the game store my father went to to play WWII miniature-based games; yes, he would take me.

I walked in not knowing what to expect, but I found out within thirty seconds. Everything you have ever heard about the worst ways comic book stores can treat women was true of this place; also, it was filthy. (They are still there and still the major store in town but they have completely changed management and are not like this anymore.) The man behind the counter asked who I was shopping for, and when I said myself he quite literally burst into derisive laughter. I asked him if they had Revolutionary Girl Utena and he said he'd be with me when he wasn't so busy. There was no one else in the store and when I got there he'd been sitting with his feet on the counter reading a book. When it became obvious I was not going to leave he got out from behind the counter, crossed the store, took a very large cardboard box down from a top shelf, spread its contents all over the counter, and began sorting them. I'd never even heard of tentacle hentai at that point, so it was rather startling. He succeeded admirably at making me feel unclean, uncomfortable, and unnecessary.

They did however in a dusty back corner have the first two tapes of Utena. Also the first tape of something in a similar art style I'd never heard of. I scooped up all three, took out a pocket calculator, worked out the tax, got out my money, waved it so as to attract his attention, counted it onto the floor, and ran for the door.

I had more Utena and something called Fushigi Yuugi, and more than that, it felt like a victory, that he couldn't stop me from getting what I wanted. (Eventually it merely became frustrating. This comic book store was my sole retail source for anime until I left for college. The owner would condescend to deal with me enough to order things so I could buy them; all of the clerks resembled the first guy.)

There turned out to be a comic of Fushigi Yuugi, and from this I found out about the concept of manga. I quickly determined that many of the comics I really, really liked were manga. I found out about genres, particular artists, history.

I carried the initial VHS tapes of Utena in my backpack, on my person, for three years.

I was carrying them when I went for a visit to the campus of a college I was beginning to suspect I wanted to go to. The people I was staying with turned out to be the anime club. I had one more tape of Utena than they'd seen. We bonded so thoroughly over that that after a while we sent a runner over to the admissions office to see if I'd gotten into the school, and when it turned out that I had, they threw what is still one of the sweetest parties I have ever been to. I headed by the admissions office the next morning myself. When my parents picked me up, I informed them that I was going to Bryn Mawr. And I did. (No, that wasn't the only reason; I'd been to classes, looked up everything, taken the tour... but that was how I knew it was a place that could be home.)

When the VHS release of Utena stalled, as it did after the first story arc for complex licensing reasons, desperation drove me to the internet. (The release stalled so thoroughly that there was no cassette release of anything after the first story arc. An entire new technology did in fact come in before the rest of the show was legally available.) I'd been borrowing fansubs from the anime club for a while, and I'd discovered fanfiction in high school through Fushigi Yuugi fansites (it was only my second anime, so I fell hard for it too). VHS fansub-swapping was a complex and confusing world of its own. Sei and I used to go to Philadelphia's Chinatown and buy fansubs from people in back rooms, no selection, take it or leave it, things we liked and things we didn't, Aka-chan to Boku, random arcs of Kenshin, Mahou Tsukai Tai!, the Saiyuki anime another drop of pure awesome out of nowhere (for the time, it was actually very well animated...). Writing to perfect strangers to see if they had more Utena. Sometimes they did. Putting blank tapes in the mail to perfect strangers; sometimes they'd come back full. Sometimes with what we wanted. My VHS fansubs of Yami no Matsuei are still the most painstaking labor-of-pure-love release I have ever seen anyone, professional or amateur, do of anything. My last-arc-of-Utena subs were done entirely by one obsessed and driven man whose real name I never learned, who threw a master-quality tape of the movie in as a freebie when he thought it took him too long to subtitle the last few episodes. The whole thing was expensive, time-consuming, fraught, frightening, sometimes sleazy, and full of unexpected little joys.

Kunihiko Ikuhara came to Otakon, and I went to my first anime convention, because I was not going to miss a chance to hear the man if he happened to be on the same continent. It was fascinating. I skipped a year, but went back the next. And the next. And every year since.

Then, just about simultaneously, DVDs and the IRC distribution of fansubs came in, leading to Bittorrent. And the world was totally different.

How is it different now? I think it's all about the availability. The very first North American anime fans were literally a clique. They swapped tapes in person, or through the mail with people their friends knew personally. They either learned some Japanese or learned to appreciate watching things without subtitles. They learned the tech they needed. They were fairly obsessive-- they invented the fansub, after all-- and they invented some other things through parallel evolution. I've met the guy who says he made the first anime music video ever, and as far as anyone can trace his records he is correct-- and when I spoke to him last year at Otakon he had never heard of Kandy Fong or any of the early live-action vidders. (This may be one reason the visual language of anime music videos is perceptibly different from live-action vids. There are different lines of descent, and the early vidders in each fan subset were building and commenting on different vid traditions. Anime vidding also used to be as strongly gendered as a male activity as live-action vid has been female. There's probably a really good dissertation in that for somebody somewhere.) They were also more than a bit of a boys' club.

Then anime and manga started being commercially available in the U.S., in dribs and drabs, because the first wave did in fact do things like go out and found companies, and because existing companies began to notice that there was a market for this stuff. And then people like me could run across the stuff and then go out and buy it. Even a year before, I would have been unable to buy an anime if someone had shown me a fansub, because it wouldn't have been in the store. I'd never have gotten into anime as seriously as I did if I had had to develop a social relationship with the people who were already obsessed with it first, especially as I was female, young, and socially awkward. As it was, I had to become fairly obsessive to get the things I wanted. It took six years to watch all of Utena and the process of doing so taught me much of what I know about how to find things on the internet. I had to like what was there, or at least support it, if I wanted more of it to become available; I would buy whatever existed on the market, because otherwise there was a real danger that people would stop putting out anime at all. I accepted that there were many titles that were never going to make it to the States, and that might not ever be available even in fansub, because the companies would not be able to sell them and the fansubbers didn't share my interests. I learned to watch untranslated shows. I learned to read untranslated manga. I learned some Japanese. I had the good fortune of having not one but two bastions of single-sex fandom for support, first at high school and then at college, but I'm not sure if I could have stuck with anime had I not attended single-gender schools, because my comic book store was not in any way an exception to the way things were. My internet handles were non-gendered, and that was an intentional defense. There were many more men in my wave of fans than there were women. There were very few shoujo titles. Yaoi was non-existent in translation. Yuri wasn't even a word.

Then, as I said, DVD and Bittorrent. Suddenly, and this really was as abrupt and revolutionary a change as it sounds, everyone had access to infinite anime. Fansub groups could work together entirely over the internet. Fansub distribution went from torturous and expensive to cheap and quick. People could email last week's shows from Tokyo for subbing. The internet at large could stumble on a show; no cliquishness anymore; you never had to interact with anybody if you didn't want to. A show was no longer as much of an investment; you could try episode one and give up without fearing that not buying the rest of it would seriously hurt the company. The audiences grew and grew, and a lot of the shows that had always been intended for teenagers began to find their way to those age groups for the first time. Companies noticed, and began to license and put out the things that teenagers were actually interested in.

Tangent: Nowadays, there's a whole big thing about how fansubs hurt the anime industry and if we watch fansubs we are taking food out of the mouths of the artists and so on. Maybe that is true now. But the American anime industry would not exist if not for fansubs. Internet fansubs made the current audience. The more a U.S. company remembers that, the more likely I think they are to be able to capitalize on it. Crunchyroll has the right idea with their streaming simultaneous-with-Japan subtitled Naruto eps; if they decide to keep each ep up forever so I can watch them anytime I want, I will cheerfully hand over cash for that privilege-- and then I will pay the money again to buy the DVDs. In fact, I buy the DVDs of everything I watch anyway. I'm like that. But in order to make their way in the current market, U.S. anime companies need to be putting out product that is unequivocally better in some way than fansubs, and they're not going to manage it with either the speed they put things out (since fansubs can be literally overnight) or the permanency of the format as the main selling point. If crunchyroll develops a streaming site you can watch on any computer or from an iPhone, just by logging in, so that you neither have to carry discs nor use computer memory, that may do it. There may be other ways to do it. But fansubs are not going anywhere, and the industry needs to realize that. They are still the best way for a show to develop an audience who will actually buy the formal release. /tangent.

So the market exploded. Stuff wound up on television and some of it did pretty well. It was the new big teenage thing, especially when it got tangled up with video game fandom, which did not use to be remotely related. Almost everything in the world got licensed, including many of the things that had been on my Never Ever list; yaoi is a whole huge thing of its own; yuri exists. Otakon's average attendee age dropped almost a decade. In short, we had the boom of the early '00s. I enjoyed it.

Now it's crashing again. I tend to hear this blamed on fansubs and the economy. I think it's due to oversaturation (people licensed and put out a lot of crap in the days of licensing everything) and the fact that currently anime intended for teenagers is being marketed for and to them. Teenagers grow up, and they get sick of the same thing all the time. I remember vividly the painful phase when I realized that I was watching the same damn shoujo and shounen tropes in every single thing that came down the pike, and I went through a while where magical girls made me want to put my eyes out with a spork. I still watch anime because of shows like Monster, Hataraki Man, Baccano!: things for adult audiences, without the same tropes over and over. But Japan has been going through a phase for the last couple of years where ninety percent of what comes out is based on bishoujo games and is basically pastel-colored girls in maid outfits jumping up and down. If this industry wants to survive, both in Japan and over here, make shows for all ages, market to all ages, license things that have an audience waiting, give your audiences more than fansubs can do for them, and try not to license complete crap. Otherwise, it's never going to be like it was before the internet, but I think there's a choice to be made between being a small and stereotyped market and a rather larger permanent set of genres.

Either way, I'll be here. I mean, I found academic fandom, where do you think I'm going? I'm writing a book with Thrud that is basically an excuse to write about Utena, which is still just as awesome as it was the first time I saw it. I may or may not keep on with Otakon, or it may be a year-by-year thing, but the odds are that I'll go. I'm looking forward to the new Miyazaki movie, and to the DVD sets of Baccano!, and to the first volume of 20th Century Boys (not all that long now!). Fandom can't get away with being entirely a boys' club anymore-- and I run the manga section at our local geek store.

So there it is.

P.S. to the person who asked in the blog-by-request post: No, I have not yet finished watching Fullmetal Alchemist; it pinged some of my personal issues and symbols in a way that was uncopable. I am now feeling sufficiently better about some of that that the show has worked back into my to-be-read pile; the manga is also there, actually a little closer to the top, and I expect to watch the new anime as it comes out.

Comments

[zdenka]

Wow. That was fascinating. I mean, I do internally squeal with glee every time I see manga for sale in a mainstream bookstore, but I never knew or thought about anime/manga being so hard to find pre-internet. If you're second-wave, I'm third-wave, I guess?

My second senior year at Bryn Mawr, which was when I really became integrated into the group, there was some anime-watching going on -- I saw some Escaflowne and Evangelion and Slayers, but I could take it or leave it, and I never have gone back to finish those series. I accidentally saw the penultimate five minutes of Utena before I saw the rest of it, but it was so confusing out of context that it was not in fact a spoiler. Other than that, I had no anime/manga experience before I moved into the Congery (which was . . . um . . . summer 2003?). I tried to resist at first, but I eventually became an anime fan out of sheer self-defense, as otherwise the majority of conversations would have been incomprehensible. Then I took the plunge and never looked back.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Third-wave, yes; internet fandom had come in by the time we all left school.

I can imagine showing people like almost entire episodes of Utena out of context and not having that be a spoiler, honestly, if there were sufficient lack of context and if the person hadn't much experience with anime.

Thrud and Sei both insist that they would have gotten into anime without me and it was just a matter of time, to which, honestly, I say, ha. Maybe a few years later and with entirely different shows. Mind you, Thrud didn't go really fannish until she encountered Tezuka.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Wow, thank you.

Utena and Fushigi Yuugi were two of my first as well. It's amusing in retrospect to realize that yes, Utena actually is a very unusual series whether you've seen a lot of anime already or not. I had assumed that most of the weirdness was due to me not knowing the tropes yet.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. I've been meaning to make this post since realizing it was more than ten years.

The long and difficult struggle to teach myself to parse the visual vocabulary of Utena is actually why at this point I can parse most animation very easily when live-action television makes. no. sense. After Utena, many things seemed clear, logical, and linear.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

My internet handles were non-gendered, and that was an intentional defense.

Gosh. Sometimes I don't realize how lucky I am, and then I'm reminded. It's been years since I encountered creepy stuck-up members of the Boys' Club. I remember it, though.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I did have to sit there and make a decision about whether to be openly female on LJ, and it was not an easy decision. But I haven't had any problems so far, and I like not having to self-censor.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I know someone involved with fansubbing who learned the idiosyncrasies of different VCRs. He could look at a tape and tell you it was a third generation SONY by way of Panasonic or something like that. Scary.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Isn't it? I knew a couple people like that. I hope they have managed to successfully tech-upgrade to continue being Insanely Good, as it seemed a point of pride; probably they have.

[aethereal-girl.livejournal.com]

In re: your comic book shop experiences, you were still in Columbus then, weren't you? What store was this? My experiences buying comics in Columbus as a teenage and pre-teen girl were entirely different.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The Laughing Ogre c. 1997-9, Friday late afternoon/evenings. I forget the name of the wargames store in the back but my dad still plays there. They were changing for the better even while I was there-- the first clerk I ever dealt with left after about a year, for one thing. I never had anyone with me, and I was often wearing a school uniform (because my school had uniforms) and probably projecting rabbit-in-a-trap terror (which was my high school social default), so especially the first guy may have gotten the idea there wouldn't be any repercussions and it would be safe to hassle me, which was basically true. No one ever pulled anything like the box of hentai when there were other customers in the store, but they did glare.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Also they are so much better now as to be essentially a different store with the same name. I still go there when I'm in the area.

[aethereal-girl.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK. I was in there once or twice, although the only thing I remember about it is blue, black and gray tiles as you go down the stairs -- at least, I think that memory goes with the Laughing Ogre.

My own comics shop was Central City Comics. It probably wouldn't have been suitable to your needs, as it was basically just superheroes. Perfectly nice clerks, though.

[oyceter]

Eeee! I love this post and so identify with it, as I moved to the US around the late stages of second-wave anime fandom, though I knew it from being involved with it online in Taiwan. And oh god, I wish I had had single-sex anime clubs; I was turned off anime and manga for a good five years or so from my US anime/manga experiences (I discovered mecha and RuroKen in Taiwan and then quickly moved to shoujo and was incredibly disappointed and turned off when I found there was zero to no shoujo to be found in the US, outside of very few series).

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It was sheer luck that I had single-sex clubs, because I had single-sex schools; but it was really good luck and I knew it.

I used to be so starved for shoujo! It was so aggravating! I remember that feeling very clearly and totally understand being turned off, especially since you'd had access to more of it before.

Honestly this is why to this day I have an impressive tolerance level for even shoujo I know is really bad and hasn't a brain in its head. I still occasionally just sit there going, I am actually reading shoujo manga. I mean, there are only two titles left on my Never Ever list, as in two that I am absolutely sure will never be licensed, and that is ridiculous! (They are Rose of Versailles, because in Japan that manga is a cultural icon and everyone knows it and so the license is a high-prestige thing and would require a lot of money, but over here I do not think anyone could make back on it the kind of money you would need to buy the license; and the manga of awesomeness whose very long name translates to Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun, on grounds of seventies-ness and obscurity. All the other stuff I want licensed I have some confidence about.)

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

because anything in a foreign language was automatically educational, a trick you could not pull nowadays.

oooh, yeah. good times, good times.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

We did have a librarian come and peek in at Utena once, but apparently whatever she saw was sufficiently confusing for her to decide it was an art film.

... which is fair. I might even honestly argue for Utena as educational. However, some of the other things we watched there, no.

[signy1.livejournal.com]

I am in charge of the geek section of the vintage book part of my shop. I have nothing whatsoever to do with the geek section of the new part of the shop, except for purchasing anything I don't feel like waiting for, but I do observe it fairly minutely. And between the two sections, I've noticed a few reasons that the manga/anime industry is struggling.

Kids read manga, for the most part. Every day there are dozens of kids sitting on the floor reading, and every night there are piles of manga lying abandoned in the comfy-chair alcove. (That isn't a collective pile, either. Each chair has a pile of its own. When you monopolize a comfy chair for six hours or longer-- and teens do-- I guess you can get through a lot of story arcs.) And yet the sales numbers continue to drop.

I've had to impose a ban on buying used manga, too. Superhero comics fly off the shelf; I continually enlarge the section as much as I can and they're one of the most successful parts of the shop. But manga? They get read; they simply don't get bought.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I do a fairly good trade in used manga, actually, but I have had to beat it into everyone's heads that I am the only person allowed to select what used manga we will buy, because otherwise we wind up with a lot of stuff that does just sit there. However, used copies of back volumes of Naruto, Fruits Basket, Bleach, One Piece-- anything that is a) very popular and b) still coming out I can manage to sell. Especially at $3.95 a volume.

Have you suggested that they have a limit on reading time? I spend a lot of time reading in bookstores, and I was always taught that it is rude to be there for more than about two-three hours without buying something, but I think today's teenagers did not get the etiquette lesson. Y'all aren't a library. I think it is probably not a coincidence that my store is doing better than yours with manga when my store is not physically set up such that you can sit there and read for any length of time.

[zdenka]

Ooh, Pandemonium sells used manga now? I should check it out. I haven't been there since they moved to a less convenient location -- *stops, blinks* -- which, since I have moved, is now easy walking distance from where I live. I am Very Smart.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. Lots of it, at $3.95/vol. I try to aim for having stuff that at least kind of fits the store's rubric (sf/fantasy/horror), so we have a fair stock of the classics and some random weirdness that happens to turn up. (I have almost managed to explain to everyone that we do not buy primarily fanservice-oriented titles, especially not in shrinkwrap, because the manga section is opposite YA and draws a large teenage audience. Almost.)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

What a great post. Thank you.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!

[kate_nepveu]

I love your college visit story.

I was really fortunate, I guess, getting into online fandom in 1994-ish under my real name via rec.arts.sf.*, because I never had any trouble being obviously female.

And I look forward to hearing what you think of _FMA_, which was *my* first anime and ate my brain very thoroughly indeed.

Lovely post all around, thanks.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have never had any of the problems with online comics and manga fandom that I've had IRL, mostly because of the increased ability to select the people I interact with. I've also never had any problems in SF fandom either on or offline, but I think there may be an element of having been so inured to for example the way that comic book store treated me that for a couple of years being treated with politeness at all was a delightful and unexpected shock. Which is to say that I know people do have problems; I'm still uncertain I would manage to register any problems I might have as anything other than 'not as bad as that one time at Otakon'.

I intend to write on FMA after I finish it, but I'm not sure how long it's going to take me.

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

Neil Gaiman agrees with you re: that kind of comic book store (see Adventures in the Dream Trade, which I was just reading the other week),

[foleyartist1.livejournal.com]

Actually I've never met anyone within the industry in any kind of position of knowledge who blames its downturn exclusively on fansubs and the economy. Nobody honestly thinks that's all of it, and everyone who's been in the business for a good length of time knows that the industry wouldn't have gotten off the ground without fansubs--what you say is quite true, and we do know it.

I think one issue from This Side of the Fence, and I talked with some of the Congeryfolk about this at Anime Boston and wished you were there, is that the majority of fans who quite correctly point out that fansubs are (1) not nearly the entirety of the problem and (2) not entirely disadvantageous also tend to incorrectly state at the same time that they are not a significant problem for the industry whatsoever. And that's just not true. And so you find yourself having to keep mentioning fansubs, not because they're the only thing to talk about, but because people keep making nonsensical or even delusional categorical statements about them. (To clarify, I am emphatically not accusing you of making any such thing here.)

Another issue is that there is a certain population of fans which cheerfully evangelizes watching fansubs without buying the legal release because they feel the fansubs are somehow "better quality" than the legal release, or that evangelizing fansubs makes them some type of freedom fighter or something--and probably due in part to poor social skills, these people tend to come up to, say, me, at conventions and give me speeches about how fansubs are better quality than anything I can produce, and/or they feel no need to purchase shows they watch fansubbed for xyz reason even though they know I'm one of "those people" whose income relies on the legal releases. And this is really freaking insulting. (Especially when they deliver this speech to me while I am working at a booth selling official DVDs.) This insult does not make fansubs more harmful in and of itself, but it does tend to make one angry, and it tends to happen at cons, and if you're a panelist at a con being asked what problems are facing the industry and some guy has just told you to your face 30 seconds ago that you don't deserve to have any income because as a person and as a professional you can't hold a candle to people who illegally distribute things for free... well, you would have to be almost superhuman not to rant about fansubs at least a little.

Neither of those things, of course, is the largest part of why you don't hear public discussion of certain industry problems very often--though such discussion does happen, I've seen it--they're just things that I think sane fans like yourself may not regularly consider about the industry's experience of fans, and as such might bear mention.

The bigger thing to keep in mind if you're really hearing about nothing but fansubs and the economy from people you can reasonably be expect to be "in the know" about the true circumstances of the industry is, there's things you can talk about and there's things you can't, and in the anime industry more than most, the latter category eclipses the former in size. But nobody likes to ask "What's causing these problems?" and get an answer of "I can't tell you." So instead of saying nothing, they talk about two legitimate contributing factors (fansubs and the economy, which are both real problems, though maybe not for the usually-accepted reasons).

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Sigh. I always manage to forget how insane some portions of fandom can be. I run into that evangelizing portion of the fanbase every so often myself, and it's amazing how they always go on the defensive when asked very simple basic questions like 'how do you expect the people who make your favorite shows to make a living so they can keep doing this?' And then they run into the evangelizing portion of the other side of the argument, who can be just as irrational-- I once had somebody at Otakon tell me in all seriousness that Otakon ought to have somebody at the doors not allowing people in who were wearing costumes from unlicensed series, because wearing the costume was evidence of a crime, and I was like, you and what army and I mean that literally because the logistics would require one-- and the entire thing goes pear-shaped really fast.

I keep wishing there were some way to teach fannish etiquette on a widespread level nowadays. When I came into anime fandom, Everyone Knew that you buy anything you have fansubbed as soon as it becomes available, and there was a social checks-and-balances system about that. Nowadays there are many people out there who I don't think have ever even been exposed to the idea, and no social system that adequately maintains the etiquette.

I've always thought the industry was in a bit of a rock and a hard place position as far as what people can and can't talk about. Again, if I had some way of spreading fannish etiquette, I'd try to promulgate the principal that getting a reply of 'I can't tell you' does not mean the person who said it is being impolite.

You have my sympathy for having to deal with some of these people, especially when having to stay in one place behind a booth. Given that I have been known to literally run away sometimes, I can't imagine how much it must sometimes suck not to be able to do that.

[foleyartist1.livejournal.com]

O_O Okay, Mr. Nobody Can Cosplay a Character from an Unreleased Show stuns me on levels perhaps previously unreached.

Yeah, I think that's a big part of many problems with the industry, is the lack of etiquette--and how some people have never heard of it, some people have decided it's not important, and some people who still have it don't realize that for many it's not there anymore. The days when Everyone Knew are definitely gone. I think they were more or less still here even as recently as when you and I were in college, and now it's like we're artifacts of a bygone time. I've come to suspect that it's not a problem that's limited to the anime industry, but a more universal one that probably strikes any niche industry that (in some sense) goes mainstream. Maybe the less one's interest community is a small, niche community, the less one feels the need to "protect" it, and maybe a lot of people's fan etiquette originally sprung from a desire to protect. Which is a noble thing, definitely, but perhaps not the precise motivation that one wants for this kind of thing. For example, a firm conviction that all artists deserve to be supported in their creation of art will probably be more consistent and unwavering in the face of a changing world than an instinct to protect one's niche. I don't think that's the only motivation that is valid or effective, of course.

And then, as you say, there are the legions of teenagers... and that certainly can't help with etiquette, unless they happen to encounter elders in their lives that talk them through things. The internet makes it too easy for them to never have to think about things, to never be exposed to many ideas of ethics, responsibility, or even legality the way we once were. (Seriously, even legality. I had a Japanese student once say to me with all earnestness that he thought digital piracy and bootlegging were not illegal if a show hadn't been licensed. On the one hand, I was impressed that he was heading in a thoughtful direction distinguishing between licensed and unlicensed shows, but on the other hand, I was shocked that he thought "legality" was some sort of amorphous concept that changed according to convenience or one's own personal morals.)

I've always thought the industry was in a bit of a rock and a hard place position as far as what people can and can't talk about.

*sigh* You are so right. I want to live in a world that lets you promulgate your etiquette! It's so hard to convince people that it's not about secrecy or "hiding things"; it's about business deals, NDAs, intercultural issues, and all this other stuff. I really don't think the intercultural aspect can be underestimated. There are some things that if we were an industry wholly contained within the US, we could say, but our interactions with the Japanese culture make that impossible. And on the flipside, there are things that the business culture in Japan might wholeheartedly support us saying which we cannot because of the way the US cultural side of things works. And we can explain this to some people and get a sympathetic nod, while others think we're being evasive out of sheer perversity.

I think everyone, fans and industry alike, would be so much happier if we could all agree that "I can't tell you everything--BUT I'll tell you a little" was actually a best-case answer. Then we could actually give a little (which we should!), and fans could get something of what they want (which they should!).

Okay, enough with preaching to the choir...