[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by Qilin

There are hardly any opportunities for the two fan bases to interact.

You might be surprised. I recall how some time ago there was a post up on this forum talking about how Japanese anime fans had translated many Anime Suki posts into Japanese in order to talk about what we were saying.

I'm also pretty sure there's some Japanese anime fans on this site who are more or less fluent in both English and Japanese.

Respect? What are you talking about? They don't own the word. Languages adopt words from other languages all the time, then subsequently indigenizing the meaning to fit its culture. Is that wrong too?

It depends on the circumstances. If you're taking a word from a language that's not used a whole lot any more in everyday conversation (Latin, say) and indigenizing its meaning, that's one thing. But if you're taking a word from a language that's still widely in use in certain parts of the world, then how that word is used by speakers of that language is what's most important, imo. That's what I mean by "respecting how they choose to use it".

We English-speakers don't take "déjà vu" from the French and do whatever we want with it. That's because the French language is still alive and well and using "déjà vu" itself. So English-speakers understand "déjà vu" the same way the French do.

And so shounen is a demographic. If we're talking about a type of anime that's more specific than "aimed at teenage boys" then we probably should use a more specific term than shounen.

Based on my observations, it's the ones who insist that "shounen is a demographic" who are the minority in discussions I've witnessed.

You sure about that? Coldlight, Vexx, totoum, Tempester, and I all seem to be disagreeing with you here.

I don't see a lot of people agreeing with you on the idea that we can basically just disregard what the term "shounen" means to the Japanese people themselves.