The Old School Otaku Lounge

I can't really deal with a 'posse' anymore. Anything involving more than 2 fellow fans is just nothing but frustration.

It's a thing, having to balance the egos and demands and all that. I just can't dance on that razor edge anymore. I think Dave groks.

The worst thing in the world is the "Let's go out to eat!" trainwreck. The only way it works is if there's one person making choices, not letting it turn into mob 'democracy' nonsense. It's not SO bad if the choice of restaurant is in walking distance but throw in transportation issues and BOOM.

It's easier to find a couple of friends and just escape to food

I think my limit these days for a big group dinner is 1 per convention, best on Sunday night after the convention is over. During the show I usually have something happening so I can't block off the two or three hours necessary to round everybody up, decide on a place, find transportation, get there, get seated, order, eat, pay the bill, and then get back to the show.

I do find conventions are more fun the more people you know at the convention, but even if you don't know anybody, making new friends is easy. "Hey, great costume" or "hey, where'd you find that great toy" or "hey, you person doing this panel, you don't know what you're talking about!" But usually these days anime cons are swirling groups of friends coming together, going their separate ways, coming back together, in complex motions best described by experimental physics.

Welcome karageko! It's always great to see more fans of older stuff, even greater to see younger fans wanting to expand their knowledge!

Hm. I miss conventions.. or at least being able to go to them. Actually... hm. Much as I do enjoy wandering the dealer room, I like having people that I can talk to about all these things *gestures around*. Then again, I have been to all of one convention in the last ten years, it has been a decade since my RPG/Board gaming group broke up and scattered the country, two decades since I regularly talked to anime people and attended any anime type meetings...

Then again, there is a reason I am here in with the Old School crowd.

Welcome to the forum, karageko! Nice cel collection! I've always wanted to delve into collecting them myself, but not until I've settled somewhere since I would currently have no room for them. It's always nice to hear younger fans who have a deeper appreciation for anime beyond just consuming what's current.

Animusubi wrote:until I've settled somewhere since I would currently have no room for them. It's always nice to hear younger fans who have a deeper appreciation for anime beyond just consuming what's current.

I practice a lot of restraint with regards to purchasing too much physical product in general because I don't want to hate myself whenever I end up moving out of state, which I feel is likely to happen in the not-too-distant future because I've gotten pretty tired of dealing with the east coast weather haha.

I'm really glad you folks broadened the registration requirements to let folks like me in. You've all been quite the friendly bunch . Otherwise I still think I'd be without much of an outlet to talk about the stuff. I watch recent shows much less frequently than older shows these days such that the most I usually know about one of the hot new shows people are talking about is its name and that's it.

It's at the point where if I'm talking to people (in person) around my age, and I don't know them that well, and they reveal they're into anime I usually don't even bring up my anime interest anymore because every time it's almost always gone something like this:

Them: You like anime too?!? Do you know X, Y, and Z?
Me: Yeah I know about them but only by name and that those titles are popular but nothing else.
Them: Oh, what do you like then?
Me: I'm particularly interested in anime from the 80s these days
Them: Oh...
*awkward silence*

No better way to say "I don't give a damn about old stuff" than to be silent I guess huh .

Until I start catching up again with newer shows that I have any interest in talking about I'll likely just hold my breath. Unless I end up talking to older people in person who reveal they're into mysterious Japanese cartoons! Then I'll probably be a lot more excited to engage in a conversation .

Also, I don't know about you guys but even when I do talk to some friends about recent shows I find it's hard to pull out some more interesting observations out of them. It's not that I demand every conversation be extremely deep or turn into humans reciting wikipedia-levels of background information about a show, but some of my friends struggle to even answer what in particular they liked about a show. To be fair sometimes it's just really hard to pin down what makes some anime really fantastic, but after getting "I dunno" immediately as an answer several times I also lost interest in trying to broach that conversation with a lot of them haha. Am I being too hard here? Curious to know if anyone's experienced anything similar.

karageko wrote:
Also, I don't know about you guys but even when I do talk to some friends about recent shows I find it's hard to pull out some more interesting observations out of them. It's not that I demand every conversation be extremely deep or turn into humans reciting wikipedia-levels of background information about a show, but some of my friends struggle to even answer what in particular they liked about a show. To be fair sometimes it's just really hard to pin down what makes some anime really fantastic, but after getting "I dunno" immediately as an answer several times I also lost interest in trying to broach that conversation with a lot of them haha. Am I being too hard here? Curious to know if anyone's experienced anything similar.

I blame twitter culture for this. Every anime we watch now is just a notch under the belt, something to be consumed and discarded like so much canned soda, existing only for momentary pleasures and then forgotten 30 minutes later. At the same time, there is also a general reluctance for people to, socially, show TOO MUCH enthusiasm for something, at the risk of appearing quote-unquote "awkward." So maybe they do have more astute observations they are holding back in case they appear too "geekish".

On some of the other forums in here, some of us had been talking about the inability of newer shows to gain traction in building long lasting fanbases in the streaming era, as a show's "fans" only stick around long enough to promote the show until it stops airing, before moving onto the new season's batch of shows.

llj wrote:
On some of the other forums in here, some of us had been talking about the inability of newer shows to gain traction in building long lasting fanbases in the streaming era, as a show's "fans" only stick around long enough to promote the show until it stops airing, before moving onto the new season's batch of shows.

Bin-go. You can even take that idea one step further and say that people who are fans of Yuri on Ice might have once been Attack on Titan fans, or the AoT fans died out when the anime was not on tv for a number of years and the new hot thing attracted new people to replace those fans spots at conventions and online discussions. It's like having an unmenionted number of nerds that need to exist in the world, and when a certain number drop off, a certain number will come on to fill that void.

I have my shows and series that I enjoy and will continue to enjoy and be a fan of for as long as I live. I'm the only die hard Intial D fanboy that I know of (or I consider myself one) due to the fact that I own the freaking Version 1 arcade machine in my garage that i've been slowly fixing up for over a year, and if I happen to get merchandise to something Initial D related that peaks my interest i'll get it. The same can be said to my Gundam/Sol Bianca/Kawajiri works/mecha/80's OVA fandom that I've been dedicating time and energy to knowing and understanding everything there is to know and understand about it for over 15 years at this point.

I'm not sure if the rabid "Yuri on Ice" fans fit that mold so much. I've yet to meet any YOI fan who likes the show because of the animation, engaging story, etc. Everyone that I have met likes it because of the boys. Most of these fans are fujoshi and fudanshi. The former is particularly rabid for anything that shows hot men having sexual relationships with each other and will gladly support any show that puts this theme first. Most of these fans are long term though. Despite "Prince of Tennis" not having been the hottest otome property in well over a decade in Japan, every year thousands of chocolate bars are sent to the offices of Shueisha in time for Valentine's Day. While I'm sure that there are AoT fans that solely liked the show for Levi and then switched interests once YOI became as hot as it is now, there are probably way more fans that will stick with this property for years to come.

I have a friend who is very much like this. She's been a dedicated fangirl of "Saiyuki" (because of Sanzo), "Cardcaptor Sakura" (because of Touya & Yukito) and both "Junjo Romantica" & "Sekaiichi Hatsukoi". When YOI came out, she latched on hard. She's preordered pretty much every piece of merchandise that has been made, from the YOI nendoroid figures, to the pillowcases, shirts and even the Makkachin (poodle) tissue box. She has her own Ita bag full of limited edition YOI Animate pins and keychains. Yet, she just bought the new CCS Lottery keychains and is still dropping money on goods from all of these properties. So, for her, as well as many other fujoshi, being a YOI fan is simply just adding another couple boys to the bishounen harem.

I do think that nowadays it's harder for pop culture media in general to create the levels of fan interest that grew around properties like Star Trek, Dr. Who, Star Wars, or anime series like Robotech, Dragonball, Ranma, Evangelion, etc. Part of that is maybe the more fragmented media landscape we live in now, where everything comes at us from six different directions, and part of that is that Star Trek, Dr. Who, Star Wars, Robotech, Dragonball, etc haven't actually gone anywhere and are still around, still taking up a certain percentage of the oxygen.

I will say that me and my pals have had some pretty interesting discussions about newer shows like Attack On Titan, Shirobako, Kill La Kill, and of course series like Yamato 2199/2202. I do see some serious fujoshi action around YOI but I also see it getting some less prurient attention from ice skaters, who are thrilled to have a show that reflects their hobby.

It does look like a lot of fans will get into anime based on one or two shows they like, and when those series end these fans will move on to something else. And that's OK... everybody should be able to enjoy this stuff on their own time and in their own way. To a large extent that's what the medium is built on, a constantly shifting audience. Not everybody shares our level of interest.