The Japanese Animation Network / Animation News Service

The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
davemerrill
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Anime Fan Since: 1984
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Re: The Japanese Animation Network / Animation News Service

Post by davemerrill »

mbanu wrote:
From the perspective of someone who never experienced it, one of the most wonderful things about Old School fandom is that it is distinctly regional; clubs had characters of their own built on where they were located, and the resources available in that particular area.

For fans who grew up in the twilight days of anime clubs or after most of them had died, I think fandom is more like /r/anime on Reddit; a poster emerges from the primordial ooze and posts a picture of Lum dressed like Captain Harlock, no source. Is it original content? A repost? Was the poster a real person or an automated bot? It gets 5000 upvotes from other people, bots, or maybe the original poster using duplicate accounts... whatever the source, there is a number and it is going up not down, a number that means that it has attracted the interest of the semi-sentient thing that fandom has become, a mass of interests that exists outside of any Real World place.

Compared to that, seeing fans whose fandom is a product of the place they live, like an anime fandom terroir, is absolutely fascinating, so I can understand the temptation to want to keep location info in, although I agree that it is a privacy problem.

My only hope is that they don't end up being thrown out. (^_^;)
Unsure how the regional aspect of fandom comes into play here: APAs were not at all limited to any particular region. I was in APAs with people from all over the United States and Canada, with a smattering of fans in places like Japan and Mexico.

APAs were similar to fanzines in that they were non-professional and printed in small press runs, but there the similarity ends - fanzines were intended to be sold to a general audience of anyone willing to buy a copy, while APAs were strictly for the members of the association. If an APA had fifteen members, there would be fifteen copies of any particular issue. Every member of the APA was responsible for printing their own submissions, so Bob would print fifteen copies of his contribution, and mail the copies to the central collator. The central collator would collate one copy of everyone's submissions into one combination package, and mail them back out to the members. Bob would get an issue of the APA with his contribution and the 14 other contributions from the 14 other members, which would include art, articles, conversations going back and forth between members about previous submissions, upcoming projects, items of interest, and what have you, all intended specifically for those fifteen or however many members of the APA.
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