Quote:
Originally Posted by Vexx
I have to agree, the organization... the only thing that comes to mind that is close is the SCA and that's an *activities* group. Then there's the the gaming community's large amorphous mass of game data, analysis, and strategies.
Nothing I've come across in all my geek hobbies anywhere approaches the "OCD" or wide variety of skills brought to bear on this hobby. It certainly makes for a fun part of my general cultural studies  But no, I"m not sure I have a good handle on what exactly makes it tick so well. |
As far as I can see, there are a few things that
might put anime ahead of other hobbies, in terms of self organisation, and general presence.
1. The primary demographic of anime is adolescent and young adult males. This same demographic was the first to get into computers, and generally the forefront of technology is dominated by this same demographic. So among anime fans, you're more likely to find the people capable of html coding and programming (there's the old russian joke of
"how does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD"). Compare this to Drama, which is far more dominated by younger women, who as a group are not as as "techy" as young men are. You certainly won't find great programming expertise among Twilight fans, which is dominated by young teen girls and their mothers. As a comparison, Gaming also is heavily male, and so also has a large online presence (far larger then Anime). This doesn't explain the poor presence of comics, which is also a "young male" hobby.
2. Internationally spread out: Anime is far more spread out internationally then any of the aforementioned "fandoms" except for gaming, and movies. This gives it a larger talent pool to draw from, and also makes online communication a necessity, as most anime fans will meet very few other anime fans in their local area.
3. Necessity of existence: Little organisation is required to transmit american TV to other english speaking people. By contrast, Anime requires much more effort. Raws are difficult to obtain without cooperation from someone inside Japan, and translations themselves require several people working together for several hours to assemble. This means anime fans need to look to cooperate in such a way that domestic american TV fans don't need to, American TV fans only need one guy somewhere (in their own language zone) to record the show, encode it, and then post it to Bittorrent somewhere. One person can do it in under an hour of personal effort. Many of the websites that first served as hubs for fansubtitlers later went on to be hubs of the community at large (most notably AnimeSuki, and Bakaupdates). This might also explain wy the english community is in some ways better organized then the actual native Japanese anime community. I've never seen a Japanese anime database as classy, comprehensive and well organised as ANN's or MAL's. Likewise, I've heard many Otaku download english fansubs over raws, because Fansubs are easier to find, and are better encoded. (though I'd like to learn more about the native online community).
4. Lack of copyright enforcement, for whatever reason, Japanese anime companies rarely bothered to enforce copyright in the fandoms formative years (and still do so haphazardly). This gave a fandom that's built implicitly around an illegal activity time to germinate. European television owners have generally been much quicker to crush copyright infringement, so communities rarely could set down roots before being crushed. Likewise, because of Anime's format, it's much easier to pirate then say, literature and books, which have to have over 300 pages scanlated with quality word recognition in order to pirate.
5. Age, Anime is by far the oldest large translation based community. It predates the internet, so when the internet first began to take hold, anime was very well placed to use it. Compare this to asian Drama, which is much more recent. Anime has always had a head start over it's younger cousin. In fact, it could be argued, that the Asian drama subbing community is an offshoot of the Anime subbing community. Some Anime subbers started to sub doramas as well, using the skills they learned while subbing anime.
6.Anime had a more favourable genre mix that spurred it's growth. Anime has a wide variety of genres, and most of them have a wide range of popularity, but Anime has always had large numbers of Sci-Fi, Action and Fantasy series. As a whole all 3 of these are not offered to an english language audience through any channel besides books (not even comics, which are almost entirely "super hero" stories and funnies). This made Anime highly appealing compared to other foreign media competitors. This might explain why European translation never took off in the same way, European TV has a similiar mix of genres to American or British shows. This is why Dramas were not the nexus of fan translation, as Dramas (at least the popular ones) are almost entirely soap operas and romcoms, things you can easily find on American TV. Once anime took off among western sci fi and fantasy fans, they became exposed to other anime genres, and so we have the medium we have today.
7 The size of Japan's population, and independent media industry. Japan is a large country (and very large economy) all using the same language. This means that it can defeat it's nearest "foreign medium" competitors in Europe by numbers alone. For instance, the French comics scene is very large, but it's very small compared to Japans, which is likely largely pure;y down to the fact that France is at least half the size of Japan. That's maybe why French people are importing manga, and Japanese people aren't importing BDs (Bande Desinée, french term for Comics).
Taken together, all these factors gave anime (along with gaming) a high likelihood to succeed.
There are a few anomalies though:
1. Why hasn't comics succeeded in establishing an online presence the way Gaming or movies did? Comics as a whole are still very popular. Why isn't information and databases about English language television as organized as movies?
2. Why did Asian Dramas take off while european television and film is obscure by comparison? Likewise, asian pop music dominates Europop in the online space.
3. Why is there so little scanlating of French BDs, when manga scanlating is so popular? French comics contain many of the factors that make manga popular, why are they so unpopular, at least online? Is it down to more comprehensive copyright enforcement?
I'd say that it might be possible to come up with a succinct explanation of why these things are the way they are.