Anime PR
Watching anime has a certain stigma, even among anime fans. It’s embodied in questions like:
- Am I too old to watch anime?
- How do you find out if other people like anime?
- What do I do if someone walks in on me watching anime?
Questions like these get asked all the time, and hardly anyone even bats an eye. The answers given aren’t always unanimous, but it’s pretty rare to have someone say, “Why is this even a question?” The reason for this is that, deep down, most of us have accepted that, no matter how much we love anime, it’s not a socially acceptable hobby.
People will even come up with justifications for this. “Well,” they might say, “I mean, it’s kind of weird for a grown man to be watching a show about high school girls.” They might point out that anime’s a pretty niche hobby. Or they might give the ever popular “blame it on the fan service” response.
It’s time to stop thinking that way.
Let’s change those questions up.
- Am I too old to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer/collect pennies/enjoy Game of Thrones?
- How do you find out if other people like Buffy the Vampire Slayer/collecting pennies/Game of Thrones?
- What do I do if someone walks in on me watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer/collecting pennies/enjoying Game of Thrones?
While Buffy and GoT would probably get you in trouble if you’re, say, still in elementary school, I don’t think any of these are questions you’d expect to hear from someone. And yet, if you haven’t noticed, these roughly satisfy the same conditions as the excuses from earlier.
Buffy is, initially anyway, about high school kids, many of them girls. (And that’s not even including things like Gilmore Girls or Sabrina or whatever other teenage-girl based shows are out there that I didn’t watch.)
Collecting pennies is a hobby, but not one you can generally expect the person next to you to share. You can’t even expect that they’ll have ever met someone else who shares that hobby really.
Unless you’re just watching hentai, GoT is far far far more likely to include naked people (including underage girls), sex, rape, incest, etc than the anime you’re watching.
Yet all three of these are perfectly acceptable. So why is anime getting singled out? It’s not anything more specific than “I like watching American cartoons,” but for some reason it’s got a ridiculously terrible reputation.
(Well, or so I’ve heard. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never experienced anyone other than anime fans applying stigma to watching anime. So I suppose my premise for this entire article is flawed in that I’m assuming other anime fans aren’t crazy and imagining said stigma. But, seeing as I’d like to believe people aren’t crazy, I’m going to continue assuming that said stigma exists. Somewhere.)
So: why would it exist, going with the assumption it does?
Really, because we let it exist.
When I was in middle school, Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Dragonball Z, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Tenchi Muyo were all airing and reasonably popular. An online search shows that there have been totally decent, non-hentai anime airing in America since the 60's. Hentai itself didn’t officially start to gain traction until the 90's. But for some reason, the public image of anime is, reportedly, basically either hentai or “little kid shit.” While I’ll admit that most of the major anime in the West are popular among younger people, how the heck did hentai become the face of anime?
Well, consider the average anime-despising person’s exposure to anime fans. Did they know someone who watched anime and brought it up from time to time in conversation? Or did they come across someone who was ranting and raving about how great anime was, wearing cat ears and a racoon tail (which animal are you supposed to be anyway) to school, and including random Japanese in every other sentence? I’m going to bet it was the latter. But I’m also going to bet that a decent number of people who hate anime because of those fans know at least one anime fan who, because they don’t want to be disliked, has never mentioned their hobby. And they probably think that that person is a totally okay person.
Then there’s anime itself, and what gets out there the most. If you search “anime gif” on google, of the first ten results (at least when I did it), six of them are pretty questionable, especially out of context. Just “anime” as a search gives better results, but a body pillow still shows up pretty early on.
… … … Excuse me. That gif is more distracting than I anticipated.
Anyway, the point is that the most easily accessible parts of anime to the general public are often also the weirdest parts. At least, of the things acknowledged as anime. While, for instance, Pokemon is certainly an anime, it’s so mainstream that it kind of doesn’t count for this discussion. Which in itself is a pretty sad state of things. If one anime can become totally acceptable, why can’t the medium in general do the same?
On top of that, there are a lot more non-anime TV shows and movies out there than there are anime shows and movies. If you look for popular shows and movies, there might be one or two anime in the list before you get bored and stop looking. On the other hand, if you’re looking for good porn, you’ll probably get a decent amount of anime in the top videos, largely because there are a lot of things possible in anime that aren’t possible in live action (live action tentacles are terrible, as it happens).
So most likely, your average person will encounter anime either in a pornographic context, their child watching something context, or at least a decidedly weird context. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
Stop worrying about “what will so-and-so think if they find out I watch anime” and just go about things in a normal manner! I’m not saying you should grab the nearest person’s shoulders and exclaim, “I like anime!!!” (please, don’t), but if you’re talking to someone about shows you like, it’s completely unreasonable to leave out, say, Little Witch Academia because it’s an anime. If more people who watch anime start admitting that they watch it, more people who don’t watch anime will start to acclimate to the idea that it’s is a totally okay thing to enjoy.
Imagine the following discussion between random guy John and anime fan Mary.
Mary: So what do you do in your free time?
John: I dunno. I’m pretty into soccer, and I like Call of Duty and whatnot. You?
Mary: I’m not really into sports, but I like video games and anime. More RPGs than FPS though.
John: Anime… Is that like Naruto and Pokemon and shit?
Mary: Yeah, but there’s also a lot of other things. I like shows that take place in fantasy worlds, but there’s all kinds of stuff out there..
John: Huh.
Is John likely to go watch anime? No, not even the soccer ones. But he also isn’t coming away from this encounter going “holy crap, that Mary girl is super weird.” They’ll probably continue to have conversations and, if it’s relevant, she might bring up other anime she’s watching. Maybe one day he’ll be interested in one she brought up, maybe not.
The point is, that as long as you go about your conversation in a relatively normal manner, most people aren’t going to be freaked out by your hobby. There are, of course, probably some people who’ve already made their decision about anime and won’t change their minds no matter how reasonable you are. But frankly, those probably aren’t people you should be interacting with socially anyway.
Now, granted, a lot of us are a bit awkward in social situations. Either we spent the time normally used to learn normal social interactions watching anime or we watched anime because we failed to learn normal social interactions. I’m no different. For the record, I’m an ego-centric chuuni who loses interest in a conversation the second it ceases to be directly relevant to me. And really, I don’t care a bit about making friends, and I do less than the bare minimum for keeping up what friendships I seem to have magically obtained. My daily social interactions can be summed up as two conversations with my husband, one of which he tuned out, and a few comments on /r/anime. So those of you who want to go lie in bed under the covers for a few hours anytime you’ve had to deal with people for more than five minutes? I totally understand. I’m right there with you.
But honestly, for the most part, people want to think that you’re interested in them. So, even if you aren’t, if you want to talk about anime with a non-anime fan, you just have to find a way that it applies to them. They like The Walking Dead? Cool. Gakkou Gurashi, High School of the Dead, and Tokyo Ghoul have that covered. They like competitive gaming? They’ll probably get a bit of a laugh out of Quan Zhi Gao Shou (which is good, but much better in web novel form), but they might like NetoGe or other gaming-related shows. I’m not trying to say that you’re going to convert your classmates or coworkers using these strategies, because you probably won’t. But you will get it out there that a) you like anime and b) there’s nothing weird about that.
So stop letting anime be some sort of shameful secret. If you want to make friends, real friends who know your interests even if they don’t necessarily share them, start sharing. It’s not horribly difficult, and unless you live in a very weirdly prejudiced part of the country, there won’t be any awful downsides to trying. (And if you do live in such an area, go ahead and inform them that they’re very weirdly prejudiced. Watch them try to deny it. And then get out of there as quickly as possible because it can’t possibly be a healthy environment for anyone to grow up in, let alone an anime fan.)
And now I will go hide under the covers. Because darn it, this has been far too close to socializing for comfort.
