What is anime fandom? Many have asked this, many have tried to answer it. On first sight, it seems to be one big sweaty and perverted ball of nerdery. If you look harder, you see circlejerks divided into circlejerks divided into circlejerks. The more you look at it, the more confusing it gets. This post is my mustard on that sausage.
My motivation to write came from this post by Jon. What struck me there was the declaration of 4chan as the heart and soul of the otakusphere. I find it hard to believe that everything revolves around a horde of trolls. The argument there is that everybody uses 4chan terminology and memes. It’s certain that they have a rather big influence on otaku lore. The thing is, the exact author of the lore doesn’t matter, because everybody who participates in it shapes it in some way, i.e. is an author. The creation of a culture is not somebody’s or one certain group’s work, it’s the continuing effort of everybody. It doesn’t matter where the content comes from, all that matters is whether it gets worked into the context or not.
I think looking for a “heart and soul” of the otakusphere is the wrong interpretative strategy. It implies that there is a centre, with layers around it like an onion. This induces a rather questionable and silly hierarchy. Questionable because the inner circles would be more worthy than outer ones and silly because it would lead to fights over who is more worthy rather than sharing the enjoyment of watching anime.
There is certainly a need for other geometries. One approach is a Venn diagram. The outermost circle divides people who have seen anime from those who haven’t. Inside there are many subcircles, for example for those who don’t watch anime anymore, those who like tsunderes, those who like yaoi, etc. The big difference to above is that the circles are not all inside of each other, they overlap everywhere. There are people who like tsunderes and watch yaoi, some who like tsunderes but don’t watch anime anymore, and some for which all three things are true. Even more importantly, these circles can go outside of the circle of anime watchers. There are certainly people who like tsunderes and might even know the terminology, despite never having seen anime. (Helga Pataki from Hey Arnold might be the reason for that.) There is also an overlap between SciFi and anime fans, but those groups are obviously not the same. This overlapping geometry is certainly not restricted to nerdy things, since there are anime fans who eat far too much chocolate and use public transport quite often. The problem is, this extensability is also the flaw of this interpretative strategy: it quickly gets very complicated. It may be good for a rough overwiev or for a careful examination of one small section of the fandom, but it’s not useful for an encompassing and exact description.
A possibly better geometry is developed in this post on Super Fanicom.
I like this approach for representing everybody with the illustration as simple as possible. You know how open-minded you are to things you don’t usually watch, and you know if you rather give positive or negative judgements. With these two simple answers you can find your position ih the graph. Rather than sorting the fans by what they watch, we get sorted by how we watch. However, that is also the limit of this approach: two people might get in exactly the same position on this map, despite having completely different tastes. Especially in the closed-minded half this problem can easily come up. Maybe there are better values to choose for the two axes.
Even with some acceptably good ways to look at anime fandom, I still don’t think they’re good enough. Maybe it’s a futile search for a good geometry. I won’t know until I try.
Inflating the Tokidoki Balloon 