The Old School Otaku Lounge

So, here we are, 20, 30, (40+?) years later. After all this time, just what does Japanese animation mean to you? What is your fandom all about?


For me, fandom comes down to two things: 1) Love of Japanese animation and 2) Friendship.


From the moment it caught my eye, that fateful day many years ago, I've been hooked. Japanese animation is something different, something enchanting, something almost magical... The artwork is amazing, the stories wonderful, the action exciting, and, as a whole, the genre is just something that "clicks" with me. And once you start, you know what happens next -- you'll want to see more, to play the video games, to check out the mags, and... Well, with you all as my audience, I think that this is what you call "preaching to the choir"...


As for friendship: Except perhaps for a relatively brief period of time maybe 15 years ago when I ran public IRC and FTP servers, for most of my time as a fan, I haven't really done anything out in the general public, instead working more personally, one might say. Sometimes this took the form of lending and/or copying anime on tapes (I was not a fansubber/distributor, so this was done on a personal basis). After all, when you've got all this really cool stuff, what in the world would you do with it other than to share it with others? Other times, this simply took the form of getting together, kicking back and watching anime together. I especially liked to watch comedy shows with friends; I tell you, you never laugh as hard when you're watching the same thing alone. This having fun together, this building up of friendship, is a crucial part of my fandom.


This is all still very much true. At the moment, there's still one friend left that I see in "real life" that still likes anime, and I'll occassionally hook up with him and watch together, just like the old days. He is much more mainstream than I am, liking new anime and more or less making a big "no thank you" to the old, so we always watch new stuff when we're together. As you may know, I'm not all that terribly thrilled with new anime, so with this friend is more or less the only time when I watch any of it. However, I tell you, I still never laugh as hard on my own.


For me, the big difference between then and now is that I've extended this goal of friendship into the public arena; one might even call it community building, with "community building" itself at its heart being a kind of melding between the love of anime and the valuing of friendship. Of course, I am referring to this site/forum. I've already spent countless hours on this thing, and no doubt I'll spend another set (or two or three) of countless hours keeping it going. However, when I find myself making such wonderful friends, and when I see others becoming friends, through this forum, then it makes it all worth it. The goal for this forum is friendship, and it happens via the wonderful thing called Japanese animation.


As before, I still love to give things out, although for the most part these days instead of copying tapes and giving those out I give out various merchandise instead (somehow, "Hey! I just copied this tape for you!" doesn't seem to be all that appealing to most people today). I've given things out on this forum before, sometimes publicly sometimes privately, and I'm going to keep doing it, to. I especially like to send things out without contacting the recipient first, making him/her wonder what the heck this box on the front porch is, the feeling of mixed wonder and confusion continuing until the box is opened, at which point it is received with a big smile. Again, love of anime and friendship.


Something I have a big interest in these days is archiving stuff on old tapes. Here, love of anime is obvious, but friendship is here, to, as, in addition to the fun that trading involves, I am able to share the love and give things out to the people who are still interested in old videos, which seems especially to be older fans who want to see something again that they haven't seen for decades. After all, when you've got all this really cool stuff, what in the world would you do with it other than to share it with others? (Of course, these days I have to be more careful about all that blasted litigation...) I've already made a number of people happy by doing this, my fondest memory here being of giving out some old fansub tapes and other sundry bootlegs to another "aging otaku", someone who used to have a lot of stuff but threw it all out sometime in the 2000s: tears were literally coming down his cheeks when he saw what I had for him.


So, that's about me, Daniel, the foolhardy man who had it on his mind to come out of nowhere and create an "Aging Otaku Lounge" as a part of his fandom. What about you?

Friendship is an aspect but it's not primary for me. I burned out on the 'evangelical' phase long, long ago. SRB sep go, throttle up main engines, PTO.

Anime is entertainment. I guess what I get out of it, what with not really knowing that much Japanese even after all these years, is the design aesthetic. The look, the feel. Ofttimes the music. Interesting characters doing interesting things. Sometimes something new, sometimes the 'comfort food' of the familiar.

There's not really anything startling going on in Mazinger Z but every episode tends to have SOMETHING to catch the eye, even if it's an absurd use of 'cycle' animation (Sayaka kicked a tank! Oh! She kicked another tank! Boss Borot hit something! And Sayaka is kicking tanks again!).

Watching Yamato 2199 is a good example. I know the story. We all know the story. We know where key plot elements must go. Yet saying that there's a feeling of mystery, a sense of wonder about just what gets changed up THIS episode, where in the overall history of Yamato did they pull THAT story element (they've tapped pretty heavy into Yamato 2 and III here and there), and now, what 'mainstream' movie did they decide to throw a homage to in this episode.

I am also wondering just how much Star Blazers influenced the production. There are story elements that just scream "we like how the Americans adapted this", such as 'soft voice of menace' Dessler.

I am in agony waiting for episodes 19-22 to hit the fansub circuit.

but in the end, anime is just something I like to watch, because it's more entertaining to me than most American TV. It's a good dose of SF action-adventure with killer design and the freedom to let the story go where it wants to go.

Nothing really any more profound than that I suppose.

For me, what I identified primarily with anime at first was with my love of the science fiction genre. Discovering anime opened the door to a whole new world of science fiction, such as Bubblegum Crisis, Gall Force, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, etc. I discovered anime, consciously knowing it was from Japan, about the same time I discovered a fascination with Japan itself. In my freshman year of high school, for my English class I had to read a book translated from a foreign language, then do a book report as well as a report on the country, its history, and culture. The librarian suggested The Samurai by Shusaku Endo, and I was fascinated by it. Then when reading about Nobunaga, I really became fascinated with Japanese history.

So this was about when I was 14 years old, discovering the world for the first time. Not merely just being a science fiction nerd, but discovering interests in foreign cultures, history, and art. So as I discovered more and more anime, I began to appreciate it as a reflection of a foreign culture and language and learning about it. This interest in Japan of course led me to where I am today, as well as my marriage and family.

And of course, there is the artistic aspect of the animation that gives it its unique appeal.

I certainly made friends through anime, especially through the old BBS Anime Archive back in my later high school and college days. I've held onto one dear friend from back then, known as Ganalef here, but unfortunately he is working 14 hour days for the Navy and trying to retire before he goes insane.

Being married to a J-girl, watching anime has been something that we could do together and we've shared a lot of favorite shows. Now, we have a 5 year old daughter who, a couple of years ago, fell in love with the obvious stuff like Totoro and Doraemon, and is now old enough to enjoy stuff like Yatterman and Urusei Yatsura.

First of all, thanks for starting up this site Daniel. I really appreciate it--it's come at exactly the right time, when a clear generational schism is starting to emerge between anime fans who got into the hobby pre-1995 and post-1995. Sometimes, we need to interact with anime fans who are closer to our own age from time to time.

So what does anime mean to me?

I think what it means is freedom of expression. I know this is ironic, since so many anime are subject to corporate meddling, so "freedom" is a relative term here. But every once in a while, something drops which eludes the hands of sponsors, or manages to be unique despite adhering to the marketing criteria set forth by producers/sponsors etc,.

I've always believed that animation is as capable a visual medium as live action. I still think animation today is fighting the stereotype that it needs to be either for kids and families like Pixar or Dreamworks films, or prime time sitcoms like the Simpsons and Family Guy in order for it to be accepted by audiences. Perhaps this is true--audiences for the most part can only accept animation when it fits into their own little box of what animation "should" be.

So that's why I'm glad anime is around to show that animation can be about anything, and do any genre just as well as live action. It can horrific, violent, erotic, existential, ambitious, meditative, inspiring, thought provoking...and many other terms that aren't applied to what is generally accepted as "proper" animation today. One of the things that always frustrates me is when someone looks at, say, Whisper of the Heart or Perfect Blue and asks, "These should have been live action instead." As if animation is only appropriate when it's fantastical or otherworldly.

People who work in animation should have the freedom to be able to tell any kind of story they want, whether it's set on Mars or Middle Earth or in a quiet suburb in Japan, and anime for me is here to remind us about that.

It took me a year to figure this out, since I felt at the time this thread was posted, I felt I was still sort of just getting back into the swing of anime.

Anime to me means a love of animation, and and "being cool just because". Kind of echoing llj, "being cool just because" meaning anime was almost always fantastical. Crazy spiked hair, colorful characters, slapstick comedy, to cool heroes fighting crazy looking villains. It was animation that didn't limit itself to what was real or what had already been done before with cartoons or Disney. That's what draws me to anime, it's has an appeal I don't see anywhere else. It didn't follow the rules of what was cool. Watching Blue Blazes and reading old stories from mangaka and animators prior to 1995, some in 2000, I just see this love of creating really awesome stuff. Just doing what they love to do. It's not always the case, but most of them do get to do whatever the eff they want to and I love that. Seeing emotions in art is a beautiful thing. As times change and we see more realism and CGI, and trends that don't seem to end, older anime, at least, still blows my mind.

I wish friendship was apart of that too, and I do have some friends I enjoy anime with. But I find also that anime can be a solitary thing too, at least for me. I enjoy it most when I don't have to hear what the "internet" thinks, or knowing how bad or good something is. I enjoyed it more way back when I was young and didn't know anyone. The more friends I made the less I liked anime because where I lived, everyone had a suggestion, but refused to watch things I liked. "OMG, you HAVE to watch this!" And I hardly knew anyone who watched things I was already familiar with. And I became more of a consumer of anime than someone who loved it for myself. I don't find that as much anymore, partly because I don't hang out with those kinds of people, but essentially there's an anime for everyone out there somewhere, and I always felt that as long as you yourself enjoy it, that's all that mattered.

I wish I hadn't left here for so long. Hi again.

This has become something of a sore subject for me for quite some time now. The whole core reason and appeal of anime for me has over the course of over 25 years gone from a gateway into an unbelievably fantastic, wide open world of endless possibilities, into an incredibly unfortunate and painful wedge that has thoroughly alienated me from being able to connect with most corners of fandom within the last decade/decade and a half-ish.

Its important to note both when I first became an anime fan, and moreover the context behind what else I was into in other non-animated mediums. I first got into anime at the tail-most end of the 80s/dawn of the 90s. The OAV boom was still in full swing, and there was still an incredibly healthy, thriving market for some pretty dark and wildly experimental material within the anime video market.

Moreover, even as a kid I never really had much of an interest in Disney or children's media. My diet of movies even in my youngest years ranged from avant garde oddities from filmmakers like David Lynch and Shinya Tsukamoto to grungy, filthy grindhouse fare. For some reason I'm still not 100% on, in the 2000s and 2010s I've noticed a lot of people tend to have a rose colored and heavily romanticized outlook on childhood and what kids are like (and what they themselves were like as kids) and moreover what kinds of things kids like in general. There seems to be this strongly held notion that all kids are extremely sensitive and are primarily tuned into bright, cheerful, lightweight material, and that anything the least bit severe they'll find extremely offputting.

SOME kids are certainly like that, sure, but kids at the end of the day are just people. And like people, they come in all varying kinds. Some kids meet the above stereotype, others like myself and pretty much all of my friends growing up were fairly far the opposite and loved and were drawn to the gross, the weird, the surreal, and the just plain disturbing.

My earliest childhood memories date back to the mid 80s, and my memory of animation in the latter half of the 80s is largely dominated by Disney and what was on Saturday morning TV. And frankly, it all largely sucked. I hated it, even back then at the time. I couldn't help but compare it to what I was being exposed to in live action movies (movies not at all of the family friendly variety) and it just wasn't any contest whatsoever. It wasn't even merely the dumb, muscleheaded, hyper violent action and horror movies of the 80s I was comparing them to either, but a wide range of dramas and satire and even abstract non-narrative stuff. I was lucky to have not had sheltering parents so I was shown a lot and really dug deep into a wide range of material, and the Western cartoons of the time period just didn't hold a candle.

One of the painfully rare exceptions though was Fantasia. I always had a deep love for that one Disney movie out of the whole lot, because it was gorgeous, surreal, and abstract in a way that the vast majority of other Disney animated feature film fare wasn't. I had an early and visceral disdain for what I'd end up dubbing the “family film formula” which, with few variations, usually goes: bumblingly eccentric, but lovable hero wants to succeed at a certain skill, usually to impress and win over a girl, bad guy rival who excels at said skill gets in the way/bullies hero, hero lucks into some sort of magical “cheat” to become less of a screw up, things go great for a spell, but it eventually backfires and the villain gets the upperhand once more, things look bleak for a second, hero finds inner strength and wins back the crowd/girl of their own accord and beats the bad guy at their own game, learns valuable lesson about “believing in themselves”, happy ending, roll credits, bring out the vomit bucket.

Fantasia lacked any trace of that sort of thing, and it was one of my very, very painfully few early windows into what animation could do when it wasn't encumbered by an ironclad mandate to be safe, whitebread, and middle of the road inoffensive. And beyond Fantasia there wasn't much else: the odd Ralph Bakshi or European art film provided me further tantalizing glimpses at what could be done with the medium and I really dug those a lot, but at the end of the day they were small drops of water in an endless ocean dominated by children's fluff.

Live action, non-family movies to me were just inherently better, more free of possibilities, and vastly more rewarding on just about any and every conceivable level. Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Scorsese's Taxi Driver were just endlessly more rich and emotionally stirring than 101 Dalmations or The Little Mermaid. John Waters' Desperate Living and The Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona were endlessly, endlessly funnier than DuckTales and The Jetsons. And even if I just wanted stupid, brainless action, there's no way in hell G.I. Joe or Transformers were gonna stand toe to toe with any given Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan movie. And even action with a bit more going on under the hood like the original Robocop and Terminator could satisfy both my thirst for wanton violence AND provide a little something extra besides.

Compared to even mediocre live action material, most of the “very best” of what was going on in Western animation in the 80s was a mind and soul deadening experience.

Then I saw Akira for the first time at the tail end of '89, and that just blew the doors off of everything I knew about animation up to that point. That movie was EXACTLY what I wanted and wasn't getting out of animation for a big chunk of my earliest formative years. I walked out of that first screening with my brains thoroughly re-arranged. It was made immediately apparent to me then that there was PLENTY more where that movie came from, and from that moment on I was all in. I was an anime fan for life.

And my timing couldn't have been better, what with the deluge of films and OVAs catering to a market that had infinitely more in common with my exploitationy sensibilities than anything else prior ever could've.

A lot's been written about the “gore and apocalyptic cyberpunk/horror” era of the anime OVA boom of the 80s and 90s, far too much of it negative, but for me THAT stuff was the principal hook and entire reason for jumping aboard and that was because that's largely what I was craving from my non-animated diet of films as well. I wasn't going from Winnie the Pooh and Bugs Bunny to Golgo 13 and Guyver, I was going from John Woo and David Cronenberg to Golgo 13 and Guyver, and I was doing it to get as far the fuck away from Winnie the Pooh and Bugs Bunny as one could get.

And it never really became a problem for me for long many years until roughly around the early/mid-ish 2000s, when anime fandom in the U.S. changed dramatically, and suddenly everything I outlined above regarding the appeal for anime no longer applied and I had to completely re-justify why I was still into this stuff in the first place.

Over the past decade+ there's been a TON of resurgence among adults for “nostalgia” for childhood iconography. “Comfort food” cartoons on channels like Nickelodeon and Fox Kids. Crap that I never had any use for even back in those days when I myself was supposedly the “target audience” for them. It hasn't won me very many friends in the last bunch of years. In recent years, my ADULT years mind you, I've taken a HUGE beating online and in real life for my complete disregard for shows like Rugrats and Pokemon and movies like The Lion King and Toy Story and the like. Far, far infinitely more so than I ever, ever did when I was a kid.

It's lead to me, neck deep into my 20s, to delving back into a whole ton of children's media (both Japanese and Western) that are considered “essential” and re-evaluating them. I've been (non-jokingly) called every name in the book for my lifelong disinterest in them, from “snob” to “asshole” to “heartless bastard” to “dead on the inside” etc. The message that's been sent my way time and again is that there's something fundamentally wrong or broken in me for not getting something I'm supposed to be getting out of Yu Gi Oh or Pokemon or Avatar/Kora or any given Pixar film and the like whether as a kid or as a grown-ass man.

Delving back through those things in my adult years trying for all I'm worth to glean some shred of feeling out of them has felt like the artistic equivalent of bashing my head against a rock repeatedly. I haven't gained any ounce of further understanding about what I'm supposed to get out of these things and all its done is waste my time and cause me needless frustration.

Its made being an anime fan that much more of a painful experience in the last ten+ years because thanks largely to things like Cartoon Network and Kids WB and so forth, the core definition of anime fandom in the U.S. has vastly re-shifted itself. For a long, long time in Japan anime was everything to all kinds of people: they had the same child-aimed nonsense we had here, sure, but there was so. Much. Infinitely. More besides. As with live action, if you didn't want to stay chained to crap that sold toys and merch to kids, you didn't HAVE to as there was animation of all genres for all ages and sensibilities. Even for people like me, with a somewhat off-kilter sense of fun (generally involving a dismemberment or thirty).

In U.S. anime fandom back in the olden days, it wasn't really defined so much by the stuff made for kids in Japan. The reasoning was pretty simple: here in America we already had ENDLESS amounts of cartoons and animation for children dating back decades ago. Animation across such a broad spectrum for adults was something we DIDN'T have a whole lot much of at all. It was unique and it was a void waiting to be filled. It stood out. Glaringly. This was the era that birthed and nurtured my interest in anime.

With the “shonen boom” of the late 90s/early 2000s however, that paradigm shifted dramatically, and combined with the general increased interest in kiddie media among adults throughout the millennium, I would say that anime fandom in the U.S. is largely defined as an interest in similar kinds of children's cartoons we have always had here already, but with a slightly exotic tinge to them. That could not be further the extreme opposite for why I came to care about anime.

Like I said though, it's burned a TON of bridges among potential friends I either could've made or only briefly made in the modern anime landscape. Its all but impossible for me to make many friends through anime anymore. But I'd rather stick to what I really care about and what really stirs me in anime, because the alternative is me essentially lying and “posing” as a shonen dork. I VERY briefly did a stint of that way back when, and it was an awful, awful experience that I'd never even dream of wanting to repeat ever again.

But it comes back around to the central question, what defines anime for me? Anime for me was once defined as “the freedom for animation to do things not necessarily chained to being child-safe”. The freedom for animation to be weird, to be cerebral, to be disgusting, to be harsh, to be pitch darkly humorous, to be truly transgressive.

It mattered little to me that it was Japanese: not that getting a little taste of and knowledge dropped on me about another culture was a bad thing by any stretch, I loved that aspect of it as well for sure; but that was a fringe bonus. What I wanted was animation that could do anything and everything unbound and unfettered from needing to be chained to the “all ages” banner. That the Japanese were the primary movers and shakers in making this happen for such a long time was just the way it was: if it was the Italians or the Danish or whoever else who were doing it, then that's where I'd have been sniffing around for my animation fix.

I don't now, nor have I ever wanted Japanese Disney. I never wanted Japanese Saturday morning action “pew pew!” I never wanted Japanese shows or films I can watch with my neighbors kids. What I wanted and what I STILL want is animation that can move me to feel and think in places that artists and filmmakers like Jodorowsky and Kubrick can. I wanted and still want animation that can be not only that high minded and arty, but as low brow and grand guignol schlocky as Herschel Gordon Lewis and Tom Savini. I wanted/want animation that can do BOTH of those at the same time like Clive Barker, Paul Verhoeven, and David Cronenberg.

What I DON'T want is comfort food. What I don't want is to be coddled. What I don't want is warm fuzzies. What I don't want is mindless escapism and nostalgia. What I don't want is animation as a surrogate time-machine transporting me back into the metaphorical womb of childhood ignorance. And what I DAMN sure don't want is crap whose sole existence is to satisfy some bizarre sexual fetishes stemming from severe, crippling shyness and repression. I didn't want those things as a small child, I don't want them now as a grown adult.

What I want is something that's some combination of challenging, dangerous, and thoroughly bent in the brainpan. Something that's too edgy and weird for and frightens off the same people who mainly love stuff like The Iron Giant or Haruhi Suzumiya.

I want something that the Japanese USED to sell regularly, but aren't as much anymore. Something that too many people in anime fandom today are WAY too goddamn uptight and conservative for.

Wow, it's good to see you again, BT! I enjoy reading your rants. While I couldn't lump Winnie the Pooh with Bugs Bunny (the latter is fabulous humor, while the former is just a dumb facsimile of the original Pooh storybooks that are hilarious and witty), and while I really can't dismiss the likes of Iron Giant, I do feel a lot of the same emotions as you. For me, it's science fiction in general. That's always been my passion, and to a lesser extent, the fantasy genre. That is what drew me into anime over 25 years ago, and it's what holds my interest most of all. I completely agree with you on the "dumb sexual fantasy for shut-ins" anime. It's getting real old, real fast. I hope the pendulum will swing the other way again and break the barriers. Even people in Japan were painting the brilliant Miyazaki into the kiddie corner, and didn't care for Kaze Tachinu because they were expecting another Ponyo.

I think one of the people who worked on Wings of Honneamise said recently that a film like that could not be made anymore, especially in today's industry. It's difficult to get ambitious or "dangerous" projects greenlit unless there is a guarantee of some of kind of built-in audience. Which is kind of sad. Of course, that's not saying there aren't some oddballs that sneak through, or producers and studios who are adventurous/have some balls, but it's more and more difficult today to find non-comfort food anime. I guess The Tale of Princess Kaguya kind of counts as pretty darned bold, especially from a visual standpoint. Of course, it's also one of the least profitable Ghiblis ever, both in Japan AND North America. It won't even hit a million dollars in the U.S. at the current rate it's going. (That's why I'm kind of rooting for it to fluke out and win an Oscar...it sure could use any attention it can find)

greg wrote:While I couldn't lump Winnie the Pooh with Bugs Bunny (the latter is fabulous humor, while the former is just a dumb facsimile of the original Pooh storybooks that are hilarious and witty), and while I really can't dismiss the likes of Iron Giant, I do feel a lot of the same emotions as you.

I probably could've/should've picked a better example than Bugs, since a lot of the older Warner Bros. shorts I've never had much of a problem with really. I was just going to "childhood iconography" cartoon characters, and didn't want to just default to Mickey because I thought I did enough thrashing of Disney. You get the idea of what I meant though.

As for Iron Giant... I know its considered a beloved classic, but so are a ton of other godawful kids films. I sort of get why people still put it on a pedestal above even a lot of those (there's this HUGE fetishistic hard-on among a lot of people for early 20th century pulp adventure stuff that I'm nowhere remotely near as fond of), but I can't really get behind it: the movie contains a lot of the exact right combinations of factors that pushes my "this makes me want to put my fist through something" buttons, not the least of which is nostalgia for the 50s and the core "little kid makes an unusual friend who's misunderstood by the adults" stock plot, which to me is just as bad as the more generic "family film formula" I outlined earlier.

I have a very, VERY excruciatingly low tolerance for gushy sentiment.

greg wrote:For me, it's science fiction in general. That's always been my passion, and to a lesser extent, the fantasy genre. That is what drew me into anime over 25 years ago, and it's what holds my interest most of all.

For me its always been horror. Horror and grimy sleaze. If you were to pin a "mascot character" for someone's principal geeky interests (like maybe an alien or robot for sci fi, or an elf for fantasy, or a mummy or Frankenstein for more "traditional" horror) mine would be a hulking brute in a hockey mask holding a viscera-drenched chainsaw. Though I also do love a lot of sci fi as well, my sci fi leanings swing heavily towards Gibson-esque dystopic cyberpunk. Which, again, anime used to traffick in in spades once upon a time. If there's a general vibe or emotion I respond best to in most things, its probably "harshness". I find a certain kind of mean-spirited nastiness in a given work to be genuinely fun and endearing. I'm the type of sicko who while watching Midori/Shojo Tsubaki will spend the majority of it with a huge, stupid grin on my face.

Also thanks for the welcome.