Although I am not a big anime person and don't like about 90% of what is out there for Anime these days, I have friends who are more into it and one of them - a fellow gamer - pointed me to this thread on some anime message board. Don't bother reading the whole thread - it's not important. But what is important and what I'm pointing at, is the block quote in the middle of the first post, which I'll reproduce here:
There is a lot there that can be carried over into the realm of RPGs and the Forum-spheres/Blog-spheres that are out there now. I'm not going to go on a soapbox about what I think of this idea, but I would like to hear any comments other people have with regards to what the author is saying.
Honestly? I don't really feel any sense of overarching community whatsoever, not even at conventions. The notion that "we're all united in our love for Japanese animation" is a colossal lie, and the reasons for this while numerous have a lot to do with the nature of the Internet combined with what Japan has been making for the last several years.
It's the same story whether you're in the US or Japan. In the formulative days of "anime fandom" the anime interest of fans was generally in conjunction with something else: usually SF film or literature on account that anime conventions and gatherings are an offshoot of SF fandom. If you wanted to meet or talk to other anime fans, you had no choice but to interact with the diehards for various other pursuits as well. But now we have our own communities, both online and offline. You can be a fan of just anime--like I largely am--without having to deal with other fandoms. There's no need to have to deal with things unrelated to your sphere of interest.
In and of itself, there's no problem with this; in fact, it's beneficial! But in the realm of anime fandom it's happened so many times that everything's sub-factioned into isolation. Things that were once casual sub-interests under the greater umbrella of "anime fandom"--cosplay, AMVs, fanart, fanfiction, you name it--now have their own dedicated communities where one can choose to reside in all the time exclusively with other people who share your same interests. What was once a side pursuit becomes a primary one. There's nothing necessarily WRONG about this, but it doesn't exactly foster a sense of overarching community. Indeed, there are several entire communities dedicated to single titles and the like such that the statement "I'm an anime fan" no longer implies any sort of common ground whatsoever; it's the equivalent of saying "I watch television" or "I watch movies." You might say this is a sign of anime's growing acceptance as an entertainment medium among English speakers, but I think the effect is more than just that.
In Japan, most of the anime that gets made is targeted towards the otaku market. But since the same thing is happening in Japan and there are so many interests becoming progressively more focused and specific, the otaku-targeted titles being made nowadays must now cater to those ever-narrowing interests, often at the expense of appealing to people without said interest. The most popular shows now have to be carefully constructed in a manner that they appeal to multiple distinct otaku groups at once (as a basic example, giant robot shows that also have fujoshi-targeted character designs...which itself encompasses multiple things of increasing specificity). The end result is that there's little sense of community even among fans who like the exact same show. The only real sense of community to be had is found within one's own Internet faction.
The only shows that don't universally follow this "gotta make sure to have something for everyone to latch onto" approach are the remakes of older titles, the fans of whom are now themselves a splinter faction of the whole. And even some of those have to update themselves in a grab for more viewers. So sure, without the Internet I never would have found thousands of other people that share my admittedly minority interests. But thanks to it, I might also actually be more isolated from other anime fans than ever before.
There is a lot there that can be carried over into the realm of RPGs and the Forum-spheres/Blog-spheres that are out there now. I'm not going to go on a soapbox about what I think of this idea, but I would like to hear any comments other people have with regards to what the author is saying.
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