by Ryan Mathews

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September 1998

Well, here's an interesting twist. Now you can buy stock in the ubiquitous hosting service. Yes, that's right, GeoCities is now a publicly traded company. Apparently, there's a great deal of money to be made in giving away gobs of disk space to anyone with a keyboard. Makes no sense to me, but their stock did go up on its first day, a day on which most other stocks on the NYSE were going into the toilet.

I can't wait for the day that this column is on AniPike, Inc. Maybe if Jei was making a profit off this venture, I could nag him into giving me a small stipend. Or maybe I could use this column to manipulate the stock price for my own benefit. You know, put out a couple of really crappy columns, drive the price down, then buy all the stock and make a bundle when it rebounds!

What else is new? Oh, yes. Someone decided to throw a childish tantrum because his precious little Escaflowne site wasn't chosen as "Site of the Week" by Jei. "Yes, that's right, the anipike ... is quantity, not quality. Those silly b******s will put up anything." Well, duh. That's been the whole idea since the Anime Web Turnpike was founded. If you want reviewed websites, you can come here to my column, or choose one of the many review sites listed on the 'Pike. What a loser.

Before I move on the web reviews, let me get on the soapbox, as is my habit. (grunt, unff) Made it. I need to lose weight.

The topic of this month's rant is "The Anime Fan Community: Does It Exist Anymore?"

Recently, on the Usenet group rec.arts.anime.fandom, a member of a politically sensitive minority group asked if there was any interest in creating an anime list that was just for members of said politically sensitive minority group. The person in question never posted more than that one message, but it was enough. The flames flew. On one side were those aghast at the idea of creating an anime fan group that chose its members by a criteria other than tastes in animated entertainment. On the other were those defending the right of members of the politically sensitive minority group to "be with their own kind", so to speak. It got pretty ugly before the parties involved remembered how sick they were of politics and dropped the thread mid-flame.

It got me to thinking, though. How much of an anime fan community do we have left, anyway? I got into anime in 1991, "just" seven years ago. I put "just" in quotes because I can't believe how much has changed since then. Back then, we were a much smaller community, and much more tightly knit. To give you an example of just how tightly knit, consider this. When AnimeCon '91 was happening, the #Anime! IRC channel went dead. Everyone was at the convention. Everyone except me, of course, who was a poverty stricken grad student who couldn't afford the trip.

Of course, there were really only two conventions then, A-kon and AnimeCon (which was replaced by Anime Expo the following year). Today, the Turnpike lists pages for 18 anime conventions within the United States, and it seems at least one new one is born every year. Without the need to travel far to congregate with fellow fans, fandom began to divide itself by region, and people now openly talk of the differences between "East Coast fandom" and "West Coast fandom".

It seems much of the early sense of community was driven by needs. Fansubs were few and hard to come by, so it was essential to network with other fans if you wanted copies. Now, there are several links on the Turnpike offering to sell anyone copies of fansubs at non-profit prices (or at least that's the claim). As anime has become more and more available commercially, fans' dependence upon fansubs has been greatly reduced. Where fansubs once knit us together, they now divide us into two camps: those who believe fansubbers provide an invaluable service to a fan community desperate to see titles not released in the U.S., and those who believe fansubbers are dirty little pirates who rob from the creators.

But why stop there, when there's so much more to fight about? We can fight about whether Apollo Smile is a clever self-publicist or a talentless skank. Fans who want everything released on DVD fight those who are holding onto LD by their fingernails. Fan artists dis other fan artists as being more fannish than they are. And those fans who automatically hate every title released by Company X face off against those who automatically love every title released by Company X.

I had used to think that anime fandom had something special. Now I see that I was naive. It was simply the tiny size of fandom that forced everyone to work together towards a common goal. Now that anime fandom is larger, and more secure, the True Face of Fandom is free to emerge: egotistical, intolerant little twerps, eager to carve out a small niche for themselves in which they rule and everyone else in fandom sucks. Community? There used to be one, but we've Balkanized it out of existence.

Now that I've depressed everyone,
let's look at some Sailor Moon sites!