Fandom is Dead

Well, first of all, thanks for coming to my page. Why is this page here? It's the page I kinda rant on, put in the personal stuff that doesn't really need to be included with the rest of the report. Now, if you found this page by looking at my source html, you're a cheat and shouldn't be reading this, so just hit the back button and forget you ever saw it. Oh, and for everybody who did find it by chance, don't tell anybody else about it. I do check my logs to see who's coming to which pages, and I'd like to know who manages to find this page. Anyways...

Fandom is dead. If you're wondering how I can say that right after going to a convention, listen to what I have to say. Of course, fandom still exists. Interest in anime, manga, and all the other cool stuff that is associated with it is bigger today than it ever was. But that's part of why I say, "fandom is dead." The fandom I'm talking about is the way fans worked a few years back. Those who are truly old skool fans will really know what I mean. I've been hitting cons since about 1995, and attending regularly since about 1997, and I got a taste of how things used to work. But over the last few years, things have changed very drastically. Most importantly, anime fans are no longer just fans. We're a sub-culture.
What does that mean? It means anime fans are no longer just more-or-less isolated enthusiasts, just a subset of a specific demographic group. Nowadays, everywhere you go, there's one of us around. Could be the guy in the DragonBall Z tee-shirt, or the one over there wearing a tie. Anime has been sorbed into american society, and being a fan just isn't quite as unique anymore. Not even that long ago, it still was. Fans were on the rise, with people bringing their friends into the hobby, clubs attracting more than just the local hardcore fans. But knowing more anime than just Akira and DBZ and Sailor Moon meant something. It meant you were interested enough in the hobby to go out of your way to get into it. Fans used to have to try harder, because there just wasn't as much available. Now, though, anime can be obtained almost anywhere. Any title with a shot of being popular is brought over here and released, often not long after airing in Japan. Anybody can become a fan just by walking into Suncoast and picking up a title that catches their attention, and a lot of people who aren't fans watch a little bit of anime here and there, because it's so widely available. Part of fandom was having that drive, something that is now gone.

Not only has it changed who makes up the fan base, but a lot of the people have changed, too, largely because of the many conventions that we go to. With fans often being isolated, far and few between, meeting another was like some extra candy in your lunch bag. Sometimes I think it's a wonder people can get along at all, since every single one of us is driven by our will, something we can't really control. But what makes it possible for people to get along and be happy and friendly are the common interests. But for anime fans, it wasn't all that easy to find others to share the hobby with. So we go to cons, and meet a whole shitload of people who got that same thing in common, we love our anime. Lots of fans were looking, desperately sometimes, for a peer group. Not just people of the same age, sex, racial background, economical status, and education -- that's at best maybe a demographic group, but not a peer group -- but others one felt on a common level with. It was part of who we were, that searching. I've found that anime fans are in general a whole lot more open-minded and accepting that most other people, and it's probably due to this, at least in part. Now though, anime fans are abundant, so there's probably one at work, at school, or just around the corner in the neighborhood. So, that's another part of how fandom has died.

There's a lot more to the death of fandom, stuff that I won't go into detail, at least not here. Fansubs are all but gone now, replaced by digisubs, something anybody with a decent internet connection can get at no cost. The shelf of tapes with amateur printed labels has been replaced by a binder of CD-Rs, along side a shelf of Region One DVDs of the newest series. Anime is now known to be what fans call Japanese animation, not something people believe is a girl's name; saying "cat-girl" to somebody doesn't get a "The hell is that?" response, but "Oh, one of those wierd Japanimation things." Anime's no longer the equivalent to a secret handshake. In fact, the trademarks of anime have reached into all kinds of places in american culture, from hip-hop music videos to teenie-bopper clothing lines to cultural awareness and education curricula. New studios and companies are poping up to supply the demand for anime and manga in this country; while it used to be news when a new title was acquired or released, it's now hard to keep up with what is available. So many of those things that made up what anime fandom was -- beyond the anime itself -- are gone.

Fandom is fans as a whole. Fan is short for fanatic. Fanatic? Well, we were. We had to be. That has changed now. Fans as they were back then no longer exist. That's why fandom is dead. When did it die? I can't really say when, but I can put a bound on it. It was Sailor Moon and Fushigi Yuugi that opened the door to fandom to a lot of females, and the powerful stories of Escaflowne and Neon Genesis Evangelion that really started to draw in a lot of fans. The introduction of DVDs opened up new possibilities for distributers, and high speed internet and video processing made wide-scale distribution of digisubs possible. All the new cons made it that much easier to meet other fans. Personally, I'd put it somewhere in 2000, just to coincide with the new millenium, but the change has been going on for a long time.
The mid eighties brought the OVA, which meant stories were told in shorter spans. 1991 brought Akira, which put anime on the map. And finally 1995 brought such titles as Gundam Wing and Sailor Moon. The change has been going on for a long time, really. But it's been recently that fandom has exploded past its bounds, and was unable to keep up.

I'd really hate it if somebody left this page thinking I'm trying to be an elite old fart who hates every new fan that comes along. Granted, I'm getting pretty tired of people who think they're true anime fans because they happen to like one or two series. Maybe that would have cut it in the past, but not anymore. Somebody who isn't at least somewhat interested in the hobby as a whole isnt' a true fan for me. This hobby is a big part of what defines who I am, and I'm happy that there are a lot more people now who appreciate what I love, especially since so many of them are friendly and wonderful people to be around.
So many of us looked forward to the day when you could find anime anywhere, go see it in a theater, and know more anime fans than you could shake a stick at. That's how it is now, and it's wonderful. But nature has this thing about equilibrium, and you can't really have the good without the bad. Digisubs are a major concern for the Japanese industry. (Think it's a coincidence HK, Taiwan, and Malasian bootleg DVDs showed up at the same time?) In hopes of greater profit, anime studios are starting to market their titles to american audiences. I'm not quite so cynical to say this is a pollution of the Japanese industry, but I am concerned about the adverse effects the American market is having on the Japanese industry. Some fans, old and new, are getting feelings of superiority and such.

And once again, finally, I'm bringing it back to the fans themselves. Because of cons, I've been able to meet more people than I thought I ever would. I've seen a lot of people change over the years I've known them. With nostalgia, I remember many of the great times in the old fandom. But slowly, people are starting to drop out of cons. People are moving away (ironic that it should matter, seeing how the people I know are spread out over half a continent anyways). People are graduating from High School, College, Professional School. People are going their own ways. I'm no exception. But luckily, for the people that count, we still stay in touch. Or maybe I should take a better look at it and say that we don't need cons or such to stay in touch, just ourselves.
Sometimes I feel stuck in my place while everybody is moving onward, stuck in the fandom now dead. But it'll only be a little more than a year before I, too, graduate college and can move to where I please and do what I want. Maybe I just need a job and a girlfriend. Some people I saw at Katsucon I hadn't seen in over a year. It seemed like so much, even though time seems to fly by these days. People can change over a few minutes, so over a year... And people do change, but we're still the same people, even if we're not the same person as the day -- or year -- before.

Fandom as I knew it is dead, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. We've become a sub-culture, something even greater and deeper. Those of us who had made up fandom have changed, too. Perhaps we're just getting old, growing up, and it's time to pass the torch onto a few generation of fans. But the worst fate is stagnation, a world without change. As a physicist, in simplest terms, it's my job to watch the world and explain it; it's not my job to call something "good" or "bad." Whatever happens, happens. It's what you make out of it that counts. Part of fandom or not, new or old, close or far, we're all still here, somewhere or another. Fandom served its purpose, left its mark, and maybe it's been reborn as something new.