Forum - View topicAnswerman - What's A "Mainstream" Anime Fan?
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16963 |
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I'll second that. Trying to find old vhs tapes when it was first coming over was akin to trying to get the one ring into Mordor. Plus now a days there is literally something for everyone. It is virtually impossible now to not find at least a few series that catch your eye. Last edited by Redbeard 101 on Mon Apr 02, 2018 12:52 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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R. Kasahara
 Posts: 708 |
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Thirded. It's a great time to be an anime and/or manga fan, no matter how much of the stuff one consumes. |
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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I'd say it's whether you engage with/think about the anime media landscape, or the "metagame" if you follow certain youtube personalities. This massively effects show choice, as quite a bit of anime is at least reliant on a familiarity with conventions and trends even if it doesn't engage in meta-commentary.
This is true of most media sectors, really, with the only exception I can think of being music, is which the big thing people dive into is history. |
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xchampion
 Posts: 370 Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho |
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I think many still struggle with identifying with what type of anime fan they are. I think it's very hard to quantify since many will have different benchmarks in their eyes. I do think anime is as mainstream as it's ever been. With celebrities and professional athletes being more out spoken about it. Some even have custom shoes like the Nike Dragon Ball shoes in the thumbnail. It's a great time to be an anime fan.
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H. Guderian
Posts: 1255 |
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The difference between a Normie/Casual and a fan, of anything, is how much of a priority in your life it is. I'm an anime fan because i want them to make a good anime of a game. If I had to be cut off from all other media but one, I'll take anime. If anime is your top priority of media types, then you're of the hardcore set.
I play many games, but I would not go after the gamer label. The only problems is when Casuals pretend they're hardcore, or when the hardcore people are outright hostile to newbies. A little bit of responsible gatekeeping allows everyone in that genre/media to develop a common language in which to engage in. There are certainly hostile gatekeepers that just move the goal posts to keep people out, but they're almost always online. There's also no reason Casuals and the hardcore can't get along. A little bit of friendly jousting over the labels amongst friends/peers is fine. So yeah, the main point, mainstream people might like anime, they would choose other things to do instead. Hardcore, if they had to pick between a rock concert or the premiere of a plain B-grade anime, they'll take the anime. |
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Otaku-sempai
 Posts: 129 Location: Lackawanna, NY |
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I don't think there was much (if anything) in the way of an organized anime fandom until about the time I was in my mid-teens. In the 1960s I had some vague awareness that some of the shows I was watching (Marine Boy, Speed Racer, Ultraman, Astro Boy, Prince Planet, etc.) were made in Japan, but it wasn't until the super robot shows of the 1970s and the airing of Star Blazers and Battle of the Planets that there was any real fandom of which I was aware. And that was a very distant awareness in the small town of Albion, NY, almost an hour away by car from anything approaching a large city.
I had no personal knowledge of anime fandom until I was in the Air Force, stationed in San Antonio, TX in the mid-1980s, much less any experience with anything outside of what might have been thought of as mainstream. It was all Japanimation to us. The only fan clubs I had much knowledge of consisted of the Earth Defense Force (EDC) and the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization (C/FO) of which the latter I became a member. I'm not sure if it would be more correct to say that all of the early anime was mainstream, or that there was no such thing as mainstream anime at that time. Last edited by Otaku-sempai on Mon Apr 02, 2018 1:22 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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It's not like there is no data on Netflix shows. Devilman crybaby ranks 487th in overall popularity at MAL with 161,561 members carrying it on their lists. Just under 90,000 of them gave it a score. That's about half the number of viewers who list Violet Evergarden, another Netflix show. It ranks 204th with nearly 300,000 viewers. Violet is not yet available legally in the US, so these scores are coming from people in other countries and those watching it illegally. Kuromukuro (73,000) has a viewership more like Devilman crybaby's, but Ajin has figures (270,000) like Violet Evergarden.
Both those figures are considerably higher than the 89,000 people (rank 961) with Sora Yori mo Tooi Basho, a highly-touted program from the past season which is available legally on CR. Apparently the availability of a legal US stream is not a very important criterion. I'm the sort of person who watched both this and Violet Evergarden. It looks like I'm in the minority. Even the infamous "double paywall" at the now-defunct Amazon Strike did little to keep people from viewing Re:Creators (205,000) or Shingeki no Bahamut Genesis (228,000). Whatever audience watched those shows, or Violet Evergarden, legally, it must be considerably smaller than the audience watching illegally. If the content or hype is compelling enough, people will watch a program regardless of where it is carried. I'll also say I strongly dislike the tendency of some people to try and put anime viewers into little boxes like "mainstream" or "otaku." It just generates unnecessary conflict within the fanbase, much like the "subs vs. dubs" issue has done. |
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AnimeLordLuis
 Posts: 1626 Location: The Borderlands of Pandora |
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In my personal opinion the difference between the casual fan and the hardcore Otaku’s is still pretty damn wide because what normie spends all of their hard earned cash on expensive figures, Gunpla, hug pillows and other exclusive and insanely expensive merchandise. Not to mention the fact that the Otaku’s knowledge on everything Anime and Manga related is vastly superior to that of the norms.
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katscradle
Posts: 469 |
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I suppose this is an interesting question though, the type of fan you are shouldn't really matter. Now thinking back when I was first getting into anime I guess you had to be pretty dedicated and people had many of the same gateway examples or current interests.
I’ve thought of myself as a casual fan for awhile. Simply because I don’t have the time for a lot of recreational pursuits like anime as I did when I was younger. I’m lucky if I watch an episode a week. So as a personal answer I’m just a busy person. My tastes in genre are also eclectic. Shows I’m trying to watch streaming right now: Ancient Magus Bride Detective Conan Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card Kitaro (just debuted this season so I plan to watch it) Legend of the Galactic Heroes (will check out the new series this season too) Discs sitting around: Black Butler Season 3 Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine Sailor Moon Crystal Season 3 |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1796 Location: South America |
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Indeed. Stereotyping is an issue everywhere and we should always resist it. Individuals are individuals and each person is an individual person that is different from other individuals and cannot and should not be dehumanized and categorized. And the degree in which an individual is a fan also varies a lot over time: I am much more "hardcore" over the past 16 months than before because I decided to learn Japanese and so I restrict myself to only watch TV and movies in Japanese. |
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Rokk3000
Posts: 52 |
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I don't do any anime streaming or even any streaming at all myself. As a Canadian, many US sites are blocked and I can't be bothered to use ip spoofers. Netflix Canada is more limited in content than Netflix US and is really awkward and inconsistent for doing any searching. So I check through the list of new anime on ANN, pick sequels of things I like plus any new anime that sounds interesting, and download them via torrents. Anything I like, I end up buying on bluray, or on dvd if that's the only option - PROVIDED the price is reasonable. Aniplex isn't, so even they I love Sword Art Online and Asterisk War, I won't be buying those unless a reasonable priced full set becomes available (or at least full season sets).
Even though I have a fixed income I still spend over $1000 US a year on anime because I believe in supporting the industry. As someone with impaired hearing and vision, I get annoyed that most releases don't allow English subtitles with English audio, I want the English audio so I don't have to read subs all the time, but when I can't hear something I want to be able to read the subs to get an idea of what was said. I'm happy with true subs, not dubtitles. I was pleased when I recently got the Eureka Seven bluray set and found out that it allows subs with English audio. That means I can get rid of my old dvd sets. The blurays have better video quality, even though my bd player upscales dvds too. My retail anime collection takes up 9 bookcase shelves, each with two rows. Many of the bulky sets have been rehoused in 6 disc thin bluray cases to save space. I guess that puts me closer to a hardcore fan than a casual or mainstream fan. I buy a lot of anime that is subbed-only, and I keep downloaded copies of a lot of things that are never licensed here, like Dog Days and Prism Ark. I have about 300 dvds and 80 blurays (some dual layer) of data anime videos, plus another hundred or so dvds and 20 or so blurays of retail videos (some fansubbed Japanese, some North American I can't get/can't afford, including Overman King Gainer Volume 6). Any company that gets ticked with my downloading is welcome to take a shot if they think they can convince a jury I'm bad. I can point out dozens of sets I've bought from any one of them, versus one or two low to medium quality fansub series.that have been licensed. I've got a list of series I'd love to buy if the prices in Canada were more reasonable. I find many series are cheaper on amazon.com than amazon.ca when the exchange is included. Only the fact that amazon.com charges shipping to Canada makes the US site more expensive, and sometimes not even then,. I bought half of the Ranma bluray sets from amazon.com because they were cheapest there. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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I can't believe that anyone considers that site's numbers as representative of anything other than "what people who care what strangers think about their taste in anime say they've watched". I'm really supposed to believe that hundreds of thousands more people have seen an episode of Toradora than Dragonball Z? That more western anime viewers - by any metric - have seen Your Lie in April than Cowboy Bebop? Ridiculous. |
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Shaterri
Posts: 173 |
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I don't by any means think that this was deliberate, but I think the fact that the article's list of 'mainstream' / 'gateway' anime includes e.g. One Punch Man but not Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura speaks to a subtly pervasive gender bias (and one that can easily metastasize into gatekeeping) in fandom perceptions among even the most generally well-rounded folks.
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BodaciousSpacePirate
Subscriber Posts: 3019 |
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Maybe, although the last time I brought up Sailor Moon with a bunch of non-anime fans, I didn't get a single reaction that wasn't a variation of "when I was in college, all the pervy guys in my dorm were obsessed with that show"... it made me wonder what anime the American public considers explicitly girl-coded. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13621 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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While I am not a mainstream fan in the sense of buying a lot of merch and boxsets (I'm more of a streaming fan), the amount of Eng. dubs I have seen in the last 3.5 years is arguably mainstream level (consumption wise). Counting simuldubs and watching anime on pirate sites, I have seen over 280 Eng. dub titles in that time.
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