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Answerman - At What Point Are You No Longer A Fan?

I really think that saturation is a large part of the problem. I'm old; my first encounters with anime were as a preteen in '62-63 (Magic Boy in the theaters, and then Astro Boy on TV).

Are they actually that into anime as in the shows themselves?

People who consume vastly less but by virtue of being more discerning are the real "otaku" if you want to use that term.

It's that there are some truly, genuinely amazing anime out there. Really appreciating those gems makes you way more of a serious, committed fan than this kind of surface level mass consumption ever could.

They watch 20 shows a season but consequently they actually remember few to none of them. It all just becomes a sea of cheap, disposable entertainment.

Hey now, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a solidly written show. But yeah, I don't see why people go so nuts over it, or at least more so than The Simpsons during its heyday (which has far greater cultural impact).

I know the 'queer' thing has become an umbrella term for people who don't fit into traditional heterosexuality, but I still find it insulting. Maybe I was raised to think that way, who knows. It denotes strangeness or oddness when to me at this point in my life homosexuality is just as natural and normal as heterosexuality is to straight people.

I don't want to be a snob but if we're really gonna get into a silly "who is a bigger fan" question here I'll go ahead and say this: I think less is quite often more when it comes to being an anime fan or a fan of anything for that matter. I mean you see these fans who live and breathe anime, right? They watch like twenty shows a season or something (usually because anime is all they watch). They go to all the cons they can. They're completely obsessed. They're also usually teenagers who've just gotten into anime in the last couple years. And honestly, they're mostly tourists. A few years down the road, 95% of those people will completely lose interest and move on to some new temporary obsession. Because that's really what it is. It's a very transient infatuation that only scratches the surface. I mean, Justin sorta alluded to this but they're super into anime because it is this new and exciting thing for them. I'll go a step further though and say they're more into the idea of anime than the actual content in itself. It also has a lot to do with the simple community aspect of being an anime fan. Are they actually that into anime as in the shows themselves? Eh...not that much.

I don't think it's a bad show, it's just not the sort of thing you'd expect the boisterous masculinity brigade to latch onto. It seemed like they wanted to use it as an opportunity to like something feminine for a change, but they never really accepted it for what it was (well-written and progressive but still primarily intended for little girls) and just sort of re-interpreted it to be less "girly," so it didn't change their mindset that much.

Most American anime fans seem to follow a pattern of: show reaches critical mass of popularity, usually because it has cool gimmicks and badassery and/or blatant fanservice -> become simultaneously overenthusiastic about and irreverent towards said show -> show ends, popularity quickly dies if it hasn't already and they look for their next target. Attack on Titan and Kill la Kill were the major ones of the past couple years, but there's minor mobbings in between; right now I guess it's Monster Musume and Food Wars. Maybe School-Live because of the subversiveness and, more importantly, spoiler[the zombies]. I think this part of the fandom is mainly in it for the social aspect, not the anime itself, because their reaction to any given show is always essentially the same, seemingly so they'll have inevitable camaraderie with the tons of other people in the group.

Newsflash: it is possible to watch ninety-plus shows a year and to appreciate the good stuff. In fact, it is finding those gems that make being a fan worth it.

What the blazes are you talking about? Of course they are into anime when it comes to the shows. Certainly more than someone who only watches one show a year.

I knew someone who was like this. One month, he was into studying time travel. The next, he was into competitive yo-yoing (but was never any good at it). The moment he changed hobbies, he dismissed the previous one as shameful and embarrassing. But really, he was just always looking for something he'd never experienced before. He was also astonished that I could be into the same thing for years at a time, as he considered his fleeting interest as normal.