Are today's anime fans spoiled?

[kndy]

Fascinating article:

http://kotaku.com/5950077/anime-fans-th ... ed-spoiled

[greg]

They probably whine because the episodes aren't English dubbed. I've seen this on other anime forums. "Oh no! They aren't speaking in terrible English dialogue with lame acting and mispronounced Japanese names! I hate being reminded that anime comes from Japan! I hate reading! Wah!"

I just looked at Crunchyroll for the first time, and apparently most episodes are not available to those of us in Japan. I'd either need a VPN or just go rent the shows at Tsutaya and try my best to understand them. At least I know I can watch Gundam Unicorn on there!

[llj]

I never heard of *a lot* of anime fans preferring english dubs. Maybe casual fans, but I don't count them since they're not really into the hobby enough to talk about it online. If anything, it's more the other way around-- a lot of 2-3 year anime fans tend to put on air of snobbishness and slag dubs whenever they could, even if the dubs were sometimes good.

I would say that today's anime fans are a lot more closed minded about a lot of things. And they do tend to argue about very petty things, and tend to look down on newbies. I'm always annoyed when an anime fan of just 5 years puts on an air of condescension towards people who are just getting into anime. This kind of exclusivity only serves to turn away potential new fans, instead of growing the hobby.

And the ones who watch anime illegally and then turn around and complain about how other fans are ruining the hobby--there are WAY too many of those types online. I have no respect for those fans who talk the talk but don't walk the walk. You can complain about the "moe" fans all you want, but I'll give them this: they actually go out and speak with their wallets. If you want a certain show or shows to be more popular, then obviously you should support these shows financially in some way. You can't complain about something not being more popular when you don't spend a dime on your favourite stuff.

In terms of quality of product, yeah, our standards have increased. But that goes along with everything else out there. It's unacceptable for a company to crap out a shoddy product. Yes, we put up with bad quality in the VHS days because it was an inferior format, but today, when something comes out on BD or DVD, I expect it to be within a reasonable standard of quality equivalent to the average DVD or BD. So if I'm spoiled for expecting anime DVDs and BDs to be produced at a higher standard than a VHS, I think that's completely justifiable.

[davemerrill]

I haven't read the Kotaku article so I'm just going to wing it here. There is a strong attitude among today's anime fans of entitlement; that they should be able to download and watch whatever anime they want, whenever they want it, in their native language, for free. This extends to the manga community as well, with scanlations being defended strongly with varying degrees of logic.

I can't really blame them for this attitude. Today's teenage and 20-something anime fans have never known a time without the internet pretty much delivering everything they want to them at little or no cost. Movies, TV shows, games, music - Japanese cartoons are just one more thing for them to download and share. They've benefited from previous generations of anime fans who believed in non-for-profit translation and fansub distribution - there are vast libraries of translated works available now. Of course when anime fans were fansubbing and translating in the 1980s and 1990s they had no way of knowing that there was ever going to be a method of delivering high quality digital copies around the world in seconds - we could wave away ethical concerns about fansubbing something on VHS because we knew that physically making enough VHS tapes to negatively impact the profits of the legitimate copyright holders was really unlikely, if not impossible.

It's come at a crippling time for the industry, all media industries, they've all been struggling to find new ways to make what they do profitable. The environment we grew up with, three big TV networks and a lot of local UHF stations and movie theaters and home video rental, it's all gone and it will never be coming back.

But yeah, I see a lot of fans who feel everything should be handed to them on a silver platter. Of course I was seeing fans like this ever since I got into fandom - people whose idea of a good time was me hauling two VCRs and all my tapes over to their house so they could make copies of everything I had, people who would send me eight blanks and no return postage, expecting me to spend my time and money on their entertainment. Entire fan clubs full of "anime fans" who couldn't be bothered to help out, pay dues, make suggestions, submit artwork or stories or articles for newsletters, or do anything other than show up once a month for their dose of anime. There was one guy - and this was in 1989 - who called me and a lot of other anime fans COLLECT, asking us to send him video tapes and fanzines for free, not offering return postage or cost of blanks or printing or anything, because I'm Santa Claus. That's a degree of entitlement I haven't seen lately.

However, I also see a lot of really dedicated fans who go above and beyond to make the anime-fan world a better place - volunteers at conventions, panellists going out of their way to highlight their favorite shows, fan artists and cosplayers and AMV creators and just fans in general coming together to do more than just watch. I just got back from AWA and it was a really positive show so that might be influencing my judgement. But there are a lot of givers as well as takers.

[gaijinpunch]

I think Dave's statement is true, although you can replace 'anime' with 'entertainment' in general. The thing about anime is that the fan-subbing scene makes it accessible to those that go looking for it far easier, and is kind of an excuse to go through back channels. However, the statement holds true.

Like everyone here, I got 5th grade VHS tapes in the mail, and was giddy as could be when I tapped into a local source of LD's I could go straight to SVHS with. A few years after I was "out of anime" (and living in Tokyo, ironically) I wound up crossing paths with an old guy in the UT Austin anime club in a (wait for it) IRC chat room. I was still on ISDN dialup (don't get me going), but I knew that the US had enjoyed broadband for a few years, and I noticed on some dodgier web sites that they had videos for download. According to him, "it's a huge warez scene now". Once it gets t o be easily downloadable (IE, you can do it without having to type on a command line) then the sense of entitlement goes haywire.

Now, I'm not 100% innocent. The hobby was a gray area at best, but I think it's safe to say, at least back then, we didn't do a lot of damage to the industry... some could even argue the proliferation of bootleg tapes helped in the long run. Today, as an expat, I am devoid of quality television unless I can get it online. With Bit Torrent, I was watching all the latest and greatest American TV hours after it had aired. Compare this to my first 5 years of living in Japan where I had to get it sent on VHS (yep) from home. So, I always tell the expats now how easy they have it compared to "my day" when you had to rough it with Japanese TV, or just other hobbies altogether.

So yeah, that's basically a long way of saying everyone is a bit spoiled now. Myself included. Although this new copyright infringement law has put the breaks on just about anyone I know using Bit Torrent to download TV that's streamable for free in the US. :-/ I actually think free broadcasts are exempt from the law, but nobody wants to take the chance.

</get off my lawn>