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rushthatspeaksI 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.
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.
