Tangential to the diversity in fandom discussion

[feuervogel]

The Greater Internet Debate-slash-Discussion of late has revolved around, among other things, diversity in SF fandom. (The other things are discussed widely in linkspam, if you want to see.)

Con attendance is a bad way to judge diversity of readership, because a small fraction (10%?) attend cons. Book sales is a great way to judge readership, but generally speaking, it's hard to guess the skin tone of people buying books on the internet (or even in stores, since they just collect data on number of books sold, not who's buying them.)

nojojojo made an interesting post recently, and in comments the difference in diversity in con attendance between SF cons and anime cons is discussed, and I think she's got a good point.

So, Animazement was this weekend. I spent most of it sitting in Artists Alley, but probably a decent fraction of the con wandered through. Partly being in North Carolina helps, I think, but there were a lot of non-white faces in there. Black, East Asian, Hispanic, South Asian (a few!), walking around, giggling and buying stuff. Yeah, it was probably still majority white, but it's not the Old White Guys con that SF cons tend to be.

I think flemmings (in comments) has a good thought about the calcification of the genre. OWG don't *want* kids up in their SF, and they want their stuff to stay niche or whatever. And anime isn't SF, they should get out of my con.* So the kids all say "Screw that" and stay in anime fandom or quit entirely as they grow out of it.

Anime fandom is really damn young. There are a lot of folks with braces at Animazement - I kept being surprised to see a good cosplayer start talking to a friend and seeing braces! These kids are half my age! But "old skool" anime fans started in the early 80s or so, and if they were in high school then, they're pushing 40 now, so we don't have a lot of the OWGs floating around (yet.) I've only been a fan since about 1999, and I have "back in my day" stories (mostly involving fansubs and acquisition of merchandise. Both were more difficult then. Uphill, snow, etc.) Also, kids like cartoons, so there are plenty of 6-12-year-olds running around. They also like those video games and po-key-mans, so.

I'm not sure I have an actual *point* to this, but there it is. (It's time for dinner.)

*WTF. I can't say I've heard it stated precisely thus, but I recall a vast flamewar in the LJ Dragon*Con community last year because there's "too much dilution" at the con, with the American TV and Brit TV and animation and ... The whiner was met with a LOT of eyerolling, at least. But the "anime is NOT SF" idea I believe is entirely plausible.

But aside from that, if there's no SF in anime, I think a lot of fans of the following series would be surprised to hear that: Gundam (and its eleventy incarnations), Macross (and its sequels), Tytania, Legend of Galactic Heroes, Crest of the Stars, Code Geass, They Were 11, To Terra, Bubblegum Crisis, ... you get the idea. The UNC anime club tends to be very SF heavy because, uh, those of us who actually make suggestions of shows to watch like SF.

If they said that about *fantasy,* well. There's not much good fantasy anime out there. There's more good fantasy manga and novels (Twelve Kingdoms, for example), but not so many shows.

Comments

[tammylee]

Anime isn't a genre, it's a medium, and that is where the confusion stems from, imo.

BUT I AM PREACHING TO THE CHOIR HERE!
lol

[tammylee]

OH!! And good fantasy anime?
Escaflowne, Slayers, Dragon Half (hahahah), Berserk, Record of the Lodoss Wars, Bastard!! etc.
My knowledge is ooooold tho.
I would even argue that Naruto could be categorized as Fantasy as well as One Piece. Not the traditional D&D European setting fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless.

[feuervogel]

Half of those are Generic D&D Fantasy, and not very good. Berserk is in a class unto itself ;) Dragon Half parodies Slayers (I think?) and D&D and is hilarious! More funny if you've seen more anime, though.

Naruto doesn't map as fantasy to me, more "generic shonen show about ninjas that all the kids love these days," and One Piece similarly, except with pirates. Then there's Annoyingly Stupid Shonen Show about a Girl who's Really a Library, which manages to work in *every* aspect of shonen formula to double the crap. (Hapless hero? Check. Moe-bait/loli-bait female lead? Check. Random violence brought by strangers? Check. Teacher who's attractive and looks 12 and has big boobs? Check. Kill it. With Fire.) It's fantasy inasmuch as there really aren't nuns who memorize grimoires and are hunted by villains who want that knowledge, but Jesus fuck it's stupid. Let me tell you, the wikipedia entry makes it sound interesting. It *could* be interesting if the formula shonen crap didn't get in the way. Even the lure of a surly redhead (rather reminiscent of Sanzou) is not enough to make me care.

Have I mentioned that I hate that show? It's st0000000pid.

[tammylee]

Half of those are Generic D&D Fantasy
As is the majority of fantasy fiction out there. =p And I thought they were all quite good for what they were.

Dragon Half parodies RPG Fantasy games was my impression?

Naruto & One Piece are fantasy to me because they involve magic (Chi & Cursed Fruit) and because when we're trying to map Anime genres to written genres they don't fit into 'boys adventure' written fiction.

Not that I watch anime anymore, I mostly just read manga and even then only a couple of titles.

[feuervogel]

"Good for what they were"! Compared to, say, Sorcerous Stabber Orphen (god god god it's AWFUL, GOD!), Slayers is fine, but it's pretty generic. I watched about half of Escaflowne, maybe all of it... must not have made a big impression (other than good grief, their NOSES!) Berserk is more my speed, I guess, though it's full of tropes. I guess I cared about the plot of that more than of the others.

Hmm, maybe. I don't know if I want to map anime to written genres, though. Genre lines are both rigid and becoming blurry (depending on whom you ask, apparently). I think both of those would fit nicely into the (boys') YA section, though, because there's so much fantastical stuff there *anyway.* Like Artemis Fowl and His Dark Materials. Hmm, fantastical vs fantasy-per-se. I may have to ponder more about that distinction.

I mostly only watch what we show at the anime club, though I make a point of downloading things I have to see, like Gundam and Macross. (Because I'm extremely predictable, and I like my political mecha space shows.) You should watch Library Wars! It's a show about librarians with guns fighting the censors of the government in a semi-dystopic Japan. (There's also some romance between the main character and one of the guys in the Library Task Force.) Librarian militias! Protecting freedom of access to books! What a great concept; I wish I'd thought of it first ;)

[tammylee]

The library anime reminds me of Rex Libris!

I don't like most anime these days; so many are so predictable and generic.

Dude, I can't even believe you didn't care for Escaflowne! It's been my standard against which I compare all other anime for the past decade! =ppp Gorgeous animation, tight story, award-winning music, and only a moderately cracked out ending. XD

The reason I was mapping was because you had mentioned SF peeps not wanting Anime in their SF; just pointing out that Anime has genres it isn't a genre unto itself.

[feuervogel]

Finding anime that isn't predictable is hard, because it's less popular, y'know? All the Narutos and Bleaches and Gravitation clones that have eleventy million cosplayers, AMV, web hits, etc. So the more obscure but still awesome stuff is buried under them. Like Victorian Romance Emma (Just like it says on the tin), Princess Tutu, Library Wars (which is tropey and somewhat predictable, like you know Female Lead is probably going to end up with Male Lead, but the characters are fun and the setting is pretty unique), uh, what else good have I seen recently?

I watch Gundam series, which are rather predictable if you've seen *other* Gundam series, but that's what I want when I watch something labeled Gundam. Giant robots in outer space, political machinations, double-, triple-, and quadruple-crosses, and giant robot battles in outer space. Ditto Macross, which is all about pop music saving humanity from aliens - and also transforming giant robot battles in outer space, with occasional political machinations, but usually just a bunch of bubblegum pop music. And a love triangle.

Rex Libris looks fun! I'll check it out.

I know, everyone else loves Escaflowne. I just ... I don't know. I thought it was OK, but not very special. The basic premise (that's a two-worlds one, isn't it?) isn't something that generally piques my interest.

Oh. Well, yeah, there are so many different genres in the medium of anime, like in the medium of "books" or "TV." I'm just not sure it's possible to overlay the genres represented in anime onto American print media, or even onto TV. When's the last time we had an American TV show that was fantasy? Heroes is sort of SF, though more closely related to the superhero comics genre.

I wonder if saying to someone who's like "I don't like anime, it's stupid/for kids/porn" "well, I don't like movies/TV/books, because they're stupid" would get the point across. I mean, if you can't stand the art style, fine; that's personal preference. There are shows I haven't watched because the art style makes me twitchy (Kemonozume). But to write off an entire *medium* because you saw 5 minutes of Akira/an episode of Pokemon/Perfect Blue/Urotsukidouji is :headdesk:-worthy.

/rant and back to writing MaiKo fic. (ZOMG HET WUT.)

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

Tell you one thing -- she's dead right on the reason manga and anime appealed to this "PoC" at the tender age of eleven -- I became obsessed with Japan precisely because it was NOT full of that Western "black vs white and NOTHING ELSE" dichotomy that was over here, especially in the 80s. (All the pop songs were "black or white, rich or poor, it doesn't matter who you are" -- because that is all there is obviously.)

And actually, Robotech DID have a pretty black girl in it. :-D

Okay, that and anime let characters die. So I was a bit macabre...


(Also her post scares me because the story I'm working on is so 100% black that the people in the tale don't even have a word for "black" because nothing else has ever occured to them. Ursula Le Guin gets away with it. =/)

[feuervogel]

Yeah, I can't speak to other people's reasons for liking Japanese cartoons. For me, they tell stories I want to hear in a medium I find visually appealing. Other than that, I don't think much of it.

The pretty black lady in Macross had a (OMG) white boyfriend! And she had a 'fro, even, not straightened hair.

Japan has some seriously skeevy race issues, not to mention the gender nonsense, but every now and then they get something OK. Though it's possible they were just Trek fans and were like "OK, we need an Uhura."

(Tangent: We got the liner notes of AnimEigo's Macross box signed by Akira Kamiya.)