Fan Dance

So I (you may have noticed) spend a bit of time in things relating to fandoms. And the more time I spend with fans, the more I realize I'm not one of them. Maybe I just have my ontological priorities straight, but I can't make a religion of any of the things I'm into. Anyway, these were some thoughts I had about fans, and how much they suck, although a few of them have to do with how people who say they suck often also suck. I am nothing if not evenhanded in my all-consuming misanthropy.

• So there's a sort of prefab thing people say, when they complain about anime fans, especially fangirls, using broken Japanese. I've run across it several places, and it might all be one person but then again it might not. That is, complaining that said fangirls are stupid because "they think 'atashi kawaii' is a real sentence in Japanese". Well, guess what? Let me introduce my friends, Mr. Stative Verb and Mr. Omissable Particle. They're employed by Japanese grammar, and thanks to their fine work, "atashi kawaii" is a perfectly correct, albeit colloquial, Japanese sentence.


• Fans, stop defending the indefensible. Seriously. Kodomo no Jikan (it's about a third-grade teacher whose student is constantly coming onto him) is creepy, stop pretending it's not. Yes, we know, he never has sex with her. That doesn't change the fact every page is dripping with fanservice involving third grade girls, with the same loving detail a non-freak artist would use on actual post-pubescent women.


• That said, there's nothing inherently creepy about moe (I mean if we're talking about normal moe, not stuff like lolicon), as long as the words "izu mai waifu" are never spoken. Do you ever watch a live-action movie because an actress is hot? Well that's not real either. You probably wouldn't like the actress if you met her, and she definitely wouldn't like you.


• Gabe and Tycho have adequately expressed, almost to a fine shade of meaning, my opinions on internet piracy (it's not the end of the world but it shouldn't be encouraged, but companies' reaction to it is often counterproductive) and protecting children from harmful media (the ratings exist for a very good reason and should be used, companies are damn fools to try and circumvent the only alternative to government regulation). I really tire of the myopia fans have on those topics, and their self-righteous tone about their, as Tycho puts it, "tarted up nihilism." It's kinda odd how often I agree with Tycho, considering his worldview and mine are so different. Then again he and Gabe seem to have a relationship very similar to the one I have with my older sister, which is even weirder.


• Hey fansubbers, couple things. What you do is technically not legal, though it's not really much worse than the old tape-trading rings, at least until shows get licensed. But you're not experts. You are, in fact, idiots. Knock off the jokes about the companies that license anime in the US. Knock off the obnoxious fonts and karaoke effects; it's hard to read and it just looks stupid. And for the love of Eight Hundred Myriad Gods, knock off the profanity! There's only one actual cussword in Japanese, and it means "crap"! "Onna" doesn't mean "bitch" ("wench", maybe), still less does "onna no hito" (which is actually fairly polite); "mô, ii" means "enough," not "f*** off". Just stop it. One does not flaunt one's ignorance quite that ostentatiously, in well-bred company.


• Why, why, why do fans insist GitS and Hellsing and all the rest of it is so mature? Also "cerebral"—Firefly gets called that a lot, and you know where I stand on that show. BSG, too. "Thought-provoking, challenging, innovative," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...only it's not. See, for something to be "thought provoking" or "challenging", it can't copy every other work like it. And yet there is not a single real idea in GitS that isn't in every other pretentious cyberpunk series. There's really nothing in Galactica that wasn't in The West Wing or the 814 anti-Iraq War movies nobody saw. You know why critics call them "thought provoking" and "challenging"? Because, and I wish to Christ I was kidding, they're exactly like everything else those critics have been taught to describe that way.


• Finally, liking the "right" fictional works doesn't make you a good person, especially since, if that's your criterion for evaluating it, you're probably ignoring massive flaws in favor of its perceived moral superiority. That's what keeps Christian rock, Objectivist fiction, and preachy Hollywood movies being made: enough people buy them from some warped sense of duty, that they still turn a profit. It's a weird free-market protectionism, with the usual effect of protectionism, domestic production gets shoddy without competition.