Japan 2009
It’s a little odd, but I think of going to Japan for the sake of some live performances, shopping and hanging out with friends just like what I do at an anime convention. I might or might not bring my camera; I might or might not go to a maid cafe; I might or might not see cosplayers; I might or might not care about any of that.
However, I will definitely try to eat my way around. I guess that part is something unique to international traveling. Food culture is something integral to the human life experience. It’s diverse, nourishing, and a great way to appreciate culture using most of the sensory perception methods you have. It’s one place where America is on equal grounds with Japan, that both incorporates foreign culinary concepts and spin them into strange, delicious but nonetheless interesting eats. While I can’t really say who does it better, but this is one free market exercise that make us all winners.
Putting 2 and 2 together we get…Japanese food con in America? Seems like a good idea to me! Someone’s done this already, right?
Breaking bread among friends is one of the larger guilty pleasure I share, even if they’re just random guys from the internets! Over Anime Expo this weekend I hope those who are going will take that opportunity as well. People looking to replicate the same thing at Otakon? Looks like the Anime Diet guys are trying to do something. At least one of them anyways.
If there’s a point to this post, it is that if for some reason you read an Evangelion 2.0 review on this blog, you’d know it was because I was somewhere out of town catching a film of said thing. Same with going to a certain concert. Or maybe even this other one… And (more likely?) if you don’t see anything, you know what’s going on.
The Vocal Internet Anime Effect Via Googlefighting
I have done almost no research on this topic, but it’s definitely the case that some loud, vocal minority tend to speak for a quiet but much larger group of people. On the internet, however, is this the case?
In context of, say, “what is a popular anime” question, I think the internet is probably overall a reliable marker. To use a random metric, Google estimated hit counts for example, Naruto and Bleach both are in the tens of millions of results. Given the similarity of their titles and the way they are marketed in English, plus some other factors, it seems like a comparable result. In detail, Naruto has twice as many hits on Google as Bleach on the internet, and that seems to reflect my own experience as exposed to fans and marketing to both shows in terms of how frequent I run into that. However inaccurate googling “bleach” is, sharing a name with a common household chemical.
Googlefighting only goes so far, of course; the complex methodology of search makes it a tricky metric to do serious study. For example, Higashi no Eden gives you a strange set of results; query based on the English title “Eden of the East” will include largely “East of Eden” hits, bumping probably a good half to one and a half million relevant hits to somewhere around 20-30 million. You know this 20-30 mil number is impossible, when a more popular TV show, Gintama, only scores in the 2-3 million range. Gintama also is a simple keyword so you know it probably includes most if not all English language hits. Just for fun, a cursory search of “ippo” yields about 2-3 million hits; Basquash yields just over half a million; Fullmetal Alchemist gives over five, where as Full Metal Alchemist gives over eight big ones, a 3 million increase for inserting a single space. I can’t even really google “K-ON” since that just breaks the search. Let’s not even get me started on having ‘ in the title. (FYI, ハルヒ is over 11 million in comparison to Haruhi’s paltry 4 to 5, but obviously it’s not exactly an unique name.)
How do we determine what is popular on the internet? Oricon daily sales rank for singles? Font size on a tag cloud off anano? Weekly Nicovideo ranking? Or taking a step back, how do we divide up the internet to manage search in a sensible way? Language? Then what’s next?
Is there a point to this exercise? Yeah–internet metrics are tricky. JP is big on regional counts for torrent tracker stats, for example (although that is something you could account for), so that’s one example where some pretty solid indication of popularity can be seriously misinterpreted. But how do we identify the different signals (through a bunch of tubes) on the internet and figure out which group of people is saying what? Perhaps one way is to self-authenticate your own opinions? Identify who you are along with what you want? Seems like a sound technique to get your point across in general.
I wonder if there are other studies like this, no matter how informal. The interplay between the different layers of anime fans and how international voices bleed together, sometimes across language barriers, is pretty complicated but also interesting.
That Blogging Panel
Just some critiques. It’s only fair that I’m as hard/soft on my panel as I am on anything else. Many apologies to SDS, Moy, and Super Rats. [imgsrc]
For background information, please do note that for all four of us, this panel was probably one the firsts live panel we had to run. The convention AnimeNext was kind enough to allow us the opportunity, but they also did a last-minute switcharoo on us so our panel had to move to a different room, and up by half an hour. That would be fine (and almost expected) except that I had to personally talk to the con ops folks (the one helpful lady whose name I forget, thank you!) and gotten it straightened out 2 hours before the original panel time. Two hours before! That’s kind of lame. And we wouldn’t have known better until the helpful RT team pointed it out to us when they saw a sign about our panel is being move to a TBA place, the day before. In retrospect if we knew about this earlier we could have gone and got it fixed on Saturday evening, but by the time we were free to wander about, panel ops had already closed for the night.
Oh, that is on top of the problem SDS ran into with his panel application becoming missing.
Funny enough, none of that actually bother me much, probably because I’ve seen this happen to others too often. So I am definitely giving props to the guys that were there in audience–Scott, kransom, Hisui & Narutaki, that anigamers guy, and a few stragglers that came in later. A cosy crowd, it was. It isn’t anything we didn’t expect being one of the last panels at the end of the con.
I was definitely talking way too much during the panel, but that is probably the result of several things–slightly unnerved, did not really practice enough as a group, I wrote too much of the presentation, and probably some other minute factors. That said, we expected everyone to say something worthwhile, and we all did. Also I should have taken some time and talked with SDS to see what he really has to say, since he does have a lot to say and I kept cutting him off! Oops.
The questions and answers portion of the panel is probably why we needed so many people on the panel. In retrospect, I should have just go and interview/poll a bunch of bloggers on these questions and get their answers. Might be a good alternative tack to deal with some of these issues I wanted to present if I ever want to run this solo. Still, I’m glad to see Super Rats and Moy occasionally shut me down, because that’s kind of what I wanted to hear, to have some diversity and opposite points of view on all of this.
The overall presentation is probably too unfocused. I need to re-write a lot of the story aspect of the panel to make it just as funny but more relevant. I had pages of stuff that didn’t really have much to do with anything. If you want to see our presentation you’ll have to bribe a panelist or a co-author, I think. It’s kind of lame and I don’t feel confident enough to leave it on the internets just yet. Not to mention that hippy scheme wouldn’t work anymore!
Maybe I should make some cue cards, so I remember what each slide is suppose to talk about.
I do have a recording of the panel. I think I might just transcribe a large portion of it if there’s demand for that. For this post, though, I’m going to just answer a couple questions asked by the audience at the panel in detail and call it a night.
Q2. What are some subject matter or type of blogs (or sites) that you think are missing for anime/manga/etc?
A2. Several–a Momotato blog; a merchandise site that is like MyAnimeList (like Tsuki-Board?); more sites like Canned Dogs (more than just a news site–an educational site that draws from 2ch-style Japanese news blogs); more industry sites that are not for marketing as primary goal (like this); and more anime sites focused on animation and not just from a film studies perspective (I’m tired of blogs looking at anime from the manga/comic perspective, TBH).
Q4. Anime sites turning out like gamer sites?
A4. I answered the question at the panel on the basis of pro versus not-pro, but it’s more than just that. Far most gamer sites people read today are pro. Even Penny Arcade is a business. However this is not the case for anime sites…yet. We might read sites like ANN or AnimeVice for news, but there are a lot of great, informative stuff out there that are either part of some promotional material (like Matt Alt’s site, or Schoolgirl Milky Crisis blog, etc) or purely out of fan interests (Anipages Daily, Canned Dogs). If I were to guess, there is a rift in the development of writing talent that home-grown English language bloggers (or whatever you call people who writes for sites like Kotaku or IGN) just do not have the full context. Not only it takes a wider variety of writers (and probably just…a lot of writers) to cover all your basis, your contributers have to know that gamut of related curiousities that you can report. Furthermore it has to be tailored to the particular audience you write for (Brazilian, French, Canadian, whatever), because there’s a lot of regional differences. And yeah, where’s all the good cosplay blogs at?
If you were there and have some constructive comments, please share. Or if you weren’t there.
Travelers of the East
It’s a nice diversion to read and see the sights, even if sometimes it’s the same tale repeated many times over the years. Beats hearing the same whine and cheese about people’s animu likes and dislikes! These adventures are still ongoing, which marks an interesting compare and contrast with people’s experiences doing either the touristy stuff, the shopping spree stuff, or just hanging out with people, in kind of a real time way. The personal touches adds to each post something amusing, anyways.
Never Ending Comic Party
Reading about doujinshi in the form of Inui’s Comic Party manga is something I should have done years ago, but only because I didn’t opt for either the game(s) or the anime (dropped after 6?). In some sense, Comic Party is a good attempt to map the macrocosm of fandom into the context of something more applicable, something tangible.
By applicable and tangible, I mean that it really doesn’t mean very much on a practical basis to say you love anime or manga or really want to love Sakura Kinomoto for a long time or you are really gay for Archer. It does, once you act on it by making 18+ pictures of her and posting it on Pixiv or write some super long blog post about what GAR means in your personal context and fandom. It doesn’t mean much if you download anime and watch it, but it does mean a lot more if you download anime, watch it, and then proceed to do something productive. (Coincidentally, buying anime is automatically slightly more productive than getting it for free!)
By macrocosm, I mean that as within any human society, people do things based on varied motivations; and often multiple motivations, at the same time, drive a singular human act. It’s one thing if you draw doujinshi for an audience of one, versus over nine thousand. It’s another to draw as an expressive outlet for pent-up creative energies, versus as a means to hone your skills. These motivations exhibit in different behaviors. What’s more, some of these behaviors can contradict.
I mention this, because the simple and obvious epiphany I had while reading Comipa is that the anime blog scene is slowly transforming into something like a comic market (as parodied in Comipa at least). No longer restrained by space and time, it’s much like an anime convention panel that runs on forever. We are many, we are /a/ and /b/ and more alphabets than the colors of the rainbow. We are twitter’s failwhalers and MAL’s elitists and people who have nothing to do. We make AMVs and write articles for online encyclopedias. We make pointless online polls about moe. We even have pros moving into this space. You get the idea.
I like to quote the author of Japanamerica for saying that American fans party, but don’t pay, and only to follow up and counter that American fans do pay, but just not to Japan. Someone better versed with Japanese fan practices can probably even say that Japan don’t pay either, when they party. Comic Party manga, if it is any indication, suggests as much–you got fans that spend their time and money on making cosplay or doujinshi, but I don’t see them buy DVDs of anime they draw from. If Japan truly pays (or I should say, have a culture of paying for anime they can watch off TV) there’s just no way they can get away with the prices they charge on their home video releases.
But more importantly, from the fan perspective, fandom is merely a platform, a cause for unity, and a stage upon which we express ourselves. The potential problem is that what we do as fans seems to be in disconnect with creators–and this is beyond a physical sense, of money changing hands. For example, writing this blog post probably has no impact with Sekihiko Inui or Leaf. But it’s more than that. A random blogging guy has the freedom to say more or less whatever he wishes, but is it really productive? I think the Comic Party manga addresses this question much better than I can.
There is purity in a union through agreement upon ideals. Ideas that resonate among us act like glue to bring fans to fans, creators to subsequent creators, creations to willing buyers, and so much more. The Comipa manga, perhaps unsurprisingly, focuses on this notion as seen through the protagonist. It even idolizes this honest, pure feeling by making the girls around the protagonist react emotionally positively towards the protagonist because of his feelings about doujinshi. And of course, doujinshi is just one way fans do their things. It could be blogging or fanfiction or whatever (a sizable quantity of doujinshi is just text, after all).
At the end of Comic Party manga we see a transformation of our doujinshi slinger [I suppose this is a spoiler, but it’s a dumb spoiler so you’ll just have to excuse me while I go ahead] from a directionless college bum into a pro. The editor of the publisher coached him to display, through his manga, the same passion that she saw in his doujinshi as an expression of his own emotions. Is this what fans are after? Is this what motivated us to squander our youths in this particular manner? Or make career moves based on pure passion? Perhaps?
And it isn’t to say honesty is the best policy, or the only one you need. The different characters in Comic Party show you different sides and perspectives in which your own goals drive the feeling you want to express. It is only with so much vested human emotions that obstacles like needless drama and people resorting to hateful or dirty acts, driven by hurt feelings, can exist. It’s hard to hate what you don’t really care about, and Comipa deals with this, too. What’s more, this outpouring of honest emotion needs a focus. It might be that you only want to reach out to a narrow segment of like-minded fans. It might be that you only want to draw really hawt p0n0s. It might be that you only want to make a good joke. Who knows? But single-minded, whole-hearted devotion to whatever expressive end bears a fruit like no other. And you don’t even have to go to that extreme to accomplish your goals.
But with all that’s said and done, I hope none of you reading my post get away with the notion that Comic Party is a good manga. It is an honest manga that is sugar-coated with idealism. However I believe it doesn’t really care for those who don’t understand the ideals it expresses, because it isn’t about people off the stage of fandom, but to those who are trying to create something. Those who have tried to create something in response to their inner fan might just agree with something within its pages.
