The Internet is a medium built with the idea of cost-free and limitless sharing of information. The newspaper is a medium with fixed costs which must charge for access in order to continue publishing, and content is limited by profitability and relevance.
Complaining that everyone wants news for free while simultaneously publishing on a medium built for the explicit purpose of the free sharing of information is complaining that the swine did not appreciate the pearls.
If you want to publish on a cost-free platform, don’t expect people to accept having to pay for your content. If you want to make money, you need to offer more than the basic service of transmitting information. You need to have a unique, 5-star experience you can’t get anywhere else on the Internet. Then people who can afford the luxury will pay.
Editorial departments laud the ability for even the most marginalized person to go to the library and access all knowledge and channels of online communication at no personal cost.
Business departments complain about the ability for even the most marginalized person to go to the library and access all knowledge and channels of online communication at no personal cost.
I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words
in my near-twenty-three years.
None of them got as much attention
as one perfectly timed sentence.
First comment!Four minutes after my comment on NPR’s facebook post.Fun times! I have the fourth-place top comment and a good bit of interaction going on.
My friend Katie said the anime community is on the decline. And she is right! The anime community is no longer growing in mainstream popularity.
I am not unfamiliar with the anime fandom or with the convention scene. I served three years as treasurer of my university’s (now defunct) anime fan organization. I have worked four years at Ohayocon and three years at both Glass City Con and TAG Fest. I have been to Animarathon. I will be staffing OMG!con later this year. (I am also entrenched in the hobby gaming convention world, which has overlap with the anime one.)
Attendees mingle at Otakon. Image credit: Popconmania
An acquaintance who directs an anime convention once told me about when he first started getting interested in anime. The only way to access the programs was to purchase them on VHS. And you had to choose between dubbed anime and subbed anime, or buy both VHS tapes. Each tape sold for $50-100 and contained one or two episodes. By comparison, today’s DVDs often contain an entire season for $30.
Tl;dr, watching anime was expensive. You had to have a certain amount of disposable income. This means most anime viewers were white, middle-class men.
By default, someone who wanted to join the anime watchers’ community needed to attend anime conventions and purchase anime there. The informational panels had some real quality to them because they were prime time: there was simply no room for slipshod work. Conventions came around once in a blue moon, so there was only so much time to fit in everything everyone wanted to say about anime.
Anime wasn’t on television then, and there were certainly no streaming services. The only way to find anime, and anime fans, and anime discussions, was to attend a convention. That is no longer true. With the Internet, people across the world can form online groups and enjoy anime culture together. Universities and high schools across the country have anime clubs. But with that ease of access come people who only like anime a little, people who are not diehard fans like those who had to struggle to seek it out.
Today’s anime conventions are becoming less and less about anime. My first Ohayocon, five years ago, was mostly anime, with some video game and non-anime presence. This year’s Ohayocon seemed to be less than half-filled with anime. Most panels were about other aspects of geek culture. Yes, the gaming section was still sequestered far away from the anime section, but the anime section was riddled with Sonic the Hedgehog, My Little Pony, shibari rope bondage (no kidding), and plenty of other topics tangential to the anime subculture.
Congoers have also moved away from anime-exclusive cosplay. Common personas include popular memes like the Companion Cube, video game characters like Link, and Western superheroes like Batman and Spiderman. Every year there are fewer Ichigos, fewer Haruhi Suzumiyas, fewer Kinos. I might have to start cosplaying to make up the difference!
Cosplayers at Kawaii Kon anime con in Hawaii. Image credit: Exploration Hawaii
But even if there’s less and less interest in anime itself, there’s still a culture, right? Still fans of geekdom, right? There’s still an industry here, right? Well, that may be changing, too. There are some major growing pains, and I think they are unavoidable.
The anime community has experienced too many ethical problems. A lot of anime already appeal to the prurient interest. Japanese culture takes a much more liberal stance on sexuality than our Western culture, and that is an outlet for perverts. I hear about it every year: there was an assault in this hotel room, underage sex in that hotel room, immoderate (sometimes underage) drinking in public hallways, sleeping in the convention hall, cramming hotel rooms with 15 people who shouldn’t be spending the money to attend in the first place. (And in Ohayocon’s case, that’s making hotels antsy for a better customer to come along.)
What kind of people are anime conventions attracting? Who comprises the supposed 16,000 attendees? At some point, you have to think about quality over quantity. These types of people are trashing the image of the happy, innocent, family-friendly anime con. Should parents take their 15-year-olds to an anime convention? Absolutely not!
I am not entirely without fault. In my coming-of-age stupor, I let some events happen at BASHCon that I would never let happen now. But there is no excuse for a convention run by “true” adults to allow trashy Vaudeville-esque shows, semen-covered hentai panels, and sweaty, grindy raves. Those have their place, and it is not at an anime con.
People who go to anime cons specifically for anime are slowly being pushed aside. As conventions move toward general geek culture, anime fans have less representation in a saturated geek world that already has big events exclusively for other fandoms. Comic book fans have comic cons, and there’s little to no anime representation there. Gamers have gaming cons, and there’s little to no anime representation there. So why do gamers and Western comic book fans get to encroach upon the anime presence at anime cons? That’s unfair.
I say the solution is to abandon anime cons as we have known them for the last ten years. Let them become mainstream geek cons and let anime fans have their unique events back.
I think this is best accomplished by rebranding the anime event scene. Get rid of the beguiled word, “convention.” It has a negative connotation that only spoils with age. Let’s have anime festivals! Let’s breathe some fresh air into the stale monotony of half-assed panels and money-extorting vendors. Festival directors should curate everything: if it doesn’t align with the new vision, it doesn’t belong. Have events and panels that are either directly run or at least sponsored by the festival. Do away with unchecked attendee panels. That may mean it will be smaller, but festivals will reap the benefits of putting quality before quantity.
Of course, change is hard. Those directors and long-time staff members have followed the current “formula” for over a decade. But they must either join this revolution or watch everything they built crumble before their eyes.
Jarmihi's Blog 
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