The Limits of North American Fan Discussion of Anime

First taking an interest in anime a long time ago I noticed that while it seemed that anime is very, very widely watched in North America the discourse about it has lacked the "breadth and depth" you find in discussions of the more comparable Hollywood stuff, for example. The kind of review that doesn't just give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" but really gives you the reasons why, and maybe teaches you about the artist, the art form, even the world in the process; the thoughtful essay that gives you a grasp of a trend or a tradition, a career or an era, and maybe even what it all meant; were much rarer here than, for example, such material about a Star Wars film or the adventures of some DC or Marvel comic book superhero.

It was pretty obviously relevant that we in North America tend to have a lot less background regarding anime than we do regarding homegrown stuff. For example, anyone growing up in North America in a certain period who was at all attracted to science fiction, without having to go far out of their way--just watching the movies that came out, watching what they happened upon on TV, etc.--was fairly likely to have got to know Star Trek and Star Wars, the major superheroes and their more significant media incarnations, perhaps even authors like Asimov and Clarke, and a good deal else that one might think of as comprising the genre's "canon." Of course, for all that the knowledge of said canon is uneven across the group (few have seen every last bit of it, the fandom the points of reference will differ somewhat with generation, "subculture," etc.), but there was still a sufficiently large number of people sharing a sufficiently large frame of reference regarding "North American sci-fi" for a meaningful number of them to be able to speak and write with some sophistication about the form or content of some work--because they can reach for suitable points of comparison, relate one work to another or to the broader cultural milieu from which it emerged (it is, after all, their milieu), etc. in trying to understand how such a work is put together and "works," for an interested audience able to understand them when they do so. This produced a virtuous cycle in which people do write about it, others read it, and they write in their turn, producing a fan literature that helped to pave the way for a more academic literature which, for all its imperfections, gives the interested that much more opportunity for a "big picture" view of the field's development. And indeed the relative vibrancy of the discussion of such material reflects that.

The situation among North American anime fans is very different. They are more remote from the genre's development, which went on literally an ocean away in Japan, so that their contact with that development was much more fragmentary--a movie here, a series there, just the bits that some distributor thought worth releasing in this market, with these often localized, the more in as North Americans are not great readers of subtitles. (Consider, for example, the fan who enjoyed Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy. If they want to see the original Kinnikuman series, regarded as a classic in Japan, they are out of luck because it was simply never released in North America in any form, and I do not expect that to change any time very soon.) It is also the case that this is all coming from a cultural context they do not know. (Even if they did see the old Kinnikuman series, how deeply could they analyze it without knowing the source material of the manga too? Without a broader knowledge of the sports anime/manga genre, and Japanese sports culture more generally? Without being able to appreciate the not infrequently untranslatable humor in comedies like these?) Rather than a picture in which there are gaps there is basically a giant "gap" with a very few pieces of picture, filling which would likely require fluent Japanese and a long stay in Japan itself. It makes a "big picture view" of the genre and its history--a sense of classics and canon and of the careers of particular artists, an awareness of how the form developed narratively and aesthetically (and the business commercially)--much harder to come by. That discourages attempts at such, which means that attempts to say much about it are few, with the paucity not doing much to encourage other attempts--with this reflected in the comparatively limited quantity of English-language works offering a serious history of anime (or for that matter, the history of anything Japanese, as you find if you actually try to read up about any such subject in a serious way).

The result is that few can say anything about it all going much beyond the expression of like and dislike--while even if they can they cannot expect much of an audience which will be able to appreciate it. This is not to say there is nothing for the interested--but the web sites attentive to the genre are that much less likely to offer what they do for homegrown science fiction, as those looking for anything meatier, if able to find it at all, are likely to do so only in a scattered way, on, for example, out-of-the-way blogs. And indeed I suspect the situation has got worse rather than better this way--certainly to go by how one anime news web site I looked at regularly for years has inclined away from the bit of retrospective and cultural background and deeper commentary it previously offered to simply pushing the latest material (indeed, often to clickbaity gossip about industry personnel). Meanwhile it has only got tougher and tougher for the bloggers and other small-timers out there as no matter what they put up the search (and answer) engines ignore them in favor of the higher-profile outlets that beneath the polish not only have less and less to say, but so often give the impression that those running them aren't even interested in saying anything at all.