Let’s Get Together – This Week in Anime

Chris


Well, Coop, in their ongoing demonstration that they’ve got the finger on the pulse of the fandom, Crunchyroll has moved to make their store (the uncanny pod person once known as Right Stuf) into a members-only affair. Because who watches anime on physical media like discs that you could share with people anymore?

Beyond the immediate annoyances, it’s yet another example of walling up access to anime stuff for all but the most premium customers. It begs a question: where are people left to even go to check out anime, pick out some cool stuff, and maybe make a friend or two along the way?

Immediately, this does overlap a bit with the decrease in ease of discovering and checking out anime beyond the big streaming services. I can remember being a teen just out of high school, being able to pile friends into the car and hit up a major convention like Fanime—which was actually affordable on our young budgets at the time!

Not everyone had figured out fansub torrenting at this point, but back in the days when licensing was more…lax at fan-focused shows like this, there were a whole lot of video rooms playing episodes of fresh stuff from recent seasons that we could just wander into and check out. That’s just not possible anymore due to what licensors like Crunchy charge per episode shown at a show, to say nothing of how, as you said, the cons themselves are pricing people out.

You’re right, it’s been a while, and cataloging the changes in those years makes clear what else has been lost. Like if a series caught your interest viewing it at a con, there was an outside chance it might get picked up and released on DVD over here, and you could save up your allowance or part-time job earnings to buy it! In a store! Doing so physically used to be a keystone of the anime fandom experience!

In fact, bygone outlets like Suncoast made carrying extensive anime selections (plus ancillary material like soundtracks and collectibles) part of their appealing identity. These mall shops could make pretty cool places for enterprising teen weebs to hang out in…contrasting with today when curfews and crackdowns on loitering have made it difficult for kids to hang out anywhere. The mall used to be teens’ natural habitat!

Yeah, this goes back to why conventions are their own convenience for…convening, as anime fans. Yes, there’s an entry fee, but once you were in, you could just hang out, sit down for some shows, and even just enjoy looking through all the wares in the dealer’s room without feeling the need to buy anything. Even the arcade games were usually set to free play! Regular-ass retail stores thus aren’t really a substitute for that. A Barnes & Noble is not a library.

Also mentioning the games just made me realize that arcades are all but dead here too, man; all the old hangout spots really are going away! What we’re describing here, by the way, is the idea of “Third Spaces”—places away from home and work/school that people can just, as we’ve described, hang out in. And they’ve been lessening at a steady clip, not just for young anime fans.

It’s not just that libraries are, by their very nature, welcomingly hang-out-able and have manga and anime available that you’re encouraged to check out, no purchase required. Though yes, they’re that, and TWIA has talked about that before.

But also, befitting their role as generational community centers, libraries have continued to pick up the slack as formal gathering spots for budding weebs. Local “library conventions” centered around comics, manga, and anime have become a recurring pop-up these days, generally with free entry and local authors/artists having discussions and signings!

I was at one of these a few months ago, which included an appearance by a sci-fi author known enough that my partner was tasked with picking up a book copy/autograph for an out-of-state friend! Then we and said author had a lovely conversation about Gunbuster, these kinds of gatherings really make it easy to connect with people!

Also, you mentioned the artist alley component, and while that does indeed come with an expectation of spending some money, I’d be much more enthused about buying some prints and stickers from a local creator compared to a more major merch importer from the sprawling sea of a big-con dealer’s hall these days.

This will be a whole subfolder of images for me by the end of the column if this keeps up.

Still, it does allow for more showcasing of how the people themselves can always step up where corpos will inevitably fail us. It’s not just libraries—I’ve got a local tea shop that’s been hosting mini pop-up artist alleys and informal fan gatherings for a while now. You know they’re real ones because of the Chiikawa decs and the cool stickers I can pick up.

This is why people themselves sticking together is so valuable…and why it’s instrumental to finding these sorts of spaces in the first place. Follow some local artists online, and you might see them showcasing at a pop-up like at that cafe…where you’ll meet more local artists, fans, and maybe even find cards and flyers for other sorts of gatherings happening. It’s how I’ve learned about local fighting game gatherings and even upcoming local conventions.

Getting together to game is another reminder that, even as forces are working to criminalize hanging out, other arenas are going against that. Local hobby and game stores, for one, can generally be good for having regular nights dedicated to people gathering for card battles. Magic the Gathering isn’t exactly, weeb-focused, but there’s also Pokémon, One Piece, Gundam, and Cardfight!! Vanguard for weeb-y kindred spirits to throw down on. Maybe even Weiss Schwarz if you’re lucky enough to get some locals going.

Yeah, I want to confirm that even as the money and distance to attend them have increased, conventions can still facilitate these kinds of personal connections we’re espousing here. Maybe it’s harder to steal into a video room to see something, but nothing is stopping us from cramming a bunch of friends into a con-weekend room party to be subjected to Psychic School Wars!

“Thanks,” Megan!

Stuff like this or dramatic readings of Disco Stu poetry or goofy room panels that didn’t quite make the cut for the con itself, these are the kinds of antics that in-person anime fandom is built on. And it’s why having and finding the space for them to happen is so valuable.

We’ll discuss it in more detail there, but anime zeitgeists are shaped by anime culture and its ability to come together…or its difficulties, as we’ve discussed here. A lot of the popular, influential series of the day are ones that people all had in common to talk about when they came together. Some of those even continue to do so to this day, as evidenced by GKIDS bringing the Evangelion movies back for a fresh theatrical run for generations of weebs to come together, watch, and discourse about among each other afterwards.

After they all completely avoid eye contact for that first part of End of Eva, anyway.

Seriously though, the importance of in-person gathering to fandom tastemaking can’t be overstated. In the last ANN Aftershow, Lynzee and James talked with fandom legend Tim Eldred about how making friends and having social skills was important not just to find people with shared interests, but to discover anime at all! I mean, think about tape trading. Just doing that to obtain something like Ranma 1/2 required an interaction with real-life, physical people. No wonder they got to properly convening after not too long.

It’s why, despite big streaming sites and, uh, the law trying to tamp down the options, I hope our readers can see there remain plenty of opportunities to find spaces to gather with others and enjoy those kinds of good times. And if you can’t find any anime events happening in your neck of the woods, maybe it’s up to you to get it started yourself!