Anime - hehehe

[GAAZ]

Sure it can, but nobody IS connecting them. Hence there is no WW2 connection fluency.

[Reverend]

I kinda just did, buy pointing out the connection

[D-Trix]

i, too, get rather upset when a subculture becomes adopted by the masses and is diluted as it is absorbed into the mainstream. especially how those original 'deviants' who created the subculture get rounded up, separated from family members, stripped of all possessions, incarcerated, forced to do hard labor for 14+ hours every day, fed on scraps of bread and gruel, and then once they've been worked to the point of near death providing the productive power that supports further conquest by their oppressors, they get herded into showers, gassed to death, cremated, and their ashes tossed into a mass grave. i assume you can see the obvious parallels to WWII. so all of the people who adopted anime only after it became 'cool' should clearly be forced to apologize and pay billions of dollars in reparations to the descendents of the millions of Jews victimized in this way.

ok, sarcastic/silly moment over.

i said something to this effect in the Outrage thread, but it bears repeating. this time in step-by-step logical form:

1. either something is Good, or it is not, in varying degree.
2. either somehting is Popular, or it is not, in varying degree.
3. the Goodness of any thing is determined by whether or not you, as a strong-willed, intelligent individual, think it's worth your time/money/effort.
4. the Popularity of any thing is determined by the effectiveness of marketing strategies on the gullible, sheep-like minds of the public.
5. you, as a strong-willed and intelligent individual, do not depend upon marketing strategies to determine the Goodness of any thing whatsoever.
-----
CONCLUSION: any one thing can be both Good and Popular at the same time.

if you think that some Good thing is becoming less Good as it becomes more Popular, then clearly the opinions of those gullible, moronic masses are affecting your appraisal of the Goodness in this thing. and you obviously think that the opinions of the masses are uninformed and, as far as judgments on true Goodness goes, totally unreliable - hence the 1-to-1 negative corelation betwen increasing Popularity and decreasing Goodness. "if those stupid, gullible people like this," you seem to be saying, "and those stupid, gullible people are always liking things for the wrong reasons, then they must see in this thing that same false Goodness which makes them like so many other Bad things. that must mean that this thing really has some of the qualities of those Bad things, and therefore must not be as Good as i thought!"

however, that statement is patently false. it gives weight and importance to Popular Opinion, even while claiming that Popular Opinions are based on stupidity and gullibility. almost all of the time, when Popular Opinion moves people to like some thing, they are moved to like it for all of the wrong reaons - because it's the 'in thing,' because they want to look 'cool,' because it will help them get into college, whatever. all of these reasons have to do with values totally separate from the thing itself; none of them make reference to any quality that the thing does have. this is why Popular Opinion is so often in favor of things that you perceive as having qualities of Badness. but Popular Opinion isn't based on the qualities of a thing at all; it is based on qualities outside of and entirely unconnected to that thing. so the Popularity of a thing is no more related to it's Goodness as it is to that thing's Badness.

to link Popularity and Badness is simply a confusion of causation with corelation. being Popular does not make a thing Bad any more than being UN-Popular makes a thing Good (lots of things are unpopular specifically because they are recognized so clearly as Bad). however, it is easier to produce Bad things than it is to produce Good things, which are much harder to come by; therefor it is economical to produce Bad things which can be sold, with effective marketing, as easily as the more costly Good things. this creates a tendency for Bad things to be mass-produced and marketed well, which causes them to become Popular; hence the corelation between Popularity and Badness. the causation, however, occurs only between marketing effectiveness and Popularity.

thus a Good thing can become Popular without depreciating in Goodness. since Popularity stems from Opinion, and Opinion is based on factors totally separate from the thing in question, the status of Popular cannot under any circumstances affect Goodness as perceived in the thing itself.

so quit whining about how all of these uneducated morons are 'taking over' your hobbies and interests and subcultures. you liked Anime because you liked Anime, not because you wanted to be in a subculture (of course, if that is the only reason you liked Anime, you are really just a pawn of the same system that has made it so popular). and now that it's popular, you still like Anime because you like Anime. so what if Fred is into Anime only because it's the cool thing to do? Fred's appreciation is not for Anime itself, but merely for some other value which, he has been falsely convinced, is causally connected to 'liking Anime.' that says nothing whatsoever about Anime itself. to you, Anime is still just as Good as it always has been, right? so what's the problem?

and in closing: in case you don't quite see my point, creating a new word for the 'original' Anime subculture will not solve your problem. it will merely create a new word and a new counter-subculture that the marketing jackals will catch onto in a few years, and then your elitist 'Amine' movement will become a huge fad of it's own and you'll be back to square one. so just ignore the hype, ignore the buzz, and ignore all of the people who claim to like Anime but don't see the value in it that you, as a true connossieur, appreciate. as with all marketing fads, this one will blow over as soon as it stops making money. then, once again, Anime will be the sole province of those who really appreciate it for what it is; all of the stupid, gullible morons will be off enjoying the next herd-mentality activity.

can you tell that i'm a Philosophy major? i should try to work this into one of my classes, save the work of writing a paper on a totally new topic

~Ted

[Reverend]

You've been reading The Deviant's Advantage, haven't you? :p And for those of you who have not heard of it, it's a book by Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews. The Subtitle is "How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets," and the point of the book is what we've been talking about in this thread; the migration of a fringe idea into social convention.

It's a good book and you should be picking it up. There are also other books by those two authors if you should feel the need to read more by them

[Nacht]

mmmmmmm smart peeeeeeple

[Ming]

I would first like to say that I'm not a big anime fan. I mean, it's cool and all, but I don't really go out of my way to watch it. I've seen a lot of Dragon Ball Z (pretty much the first anime I've watched) and I remember that I used to watch Volton and the Transformers back in the day when I was a wee lad, but that's a different story. Right now, I would like to go and watch the Trigun and Cowboy Bebop series, because they look pretty cool to me.

Anyway, I would like to add my opinions on this matter, and that starts with the fact that I agree totally with AZ. I have pretty much made opinions on similar topics obvious in the Outrage thread, which I started, and a few of you have referred to. What we have in terms of Anime, but also sci-fi, fantasy, etc, is special to us. It is what defines our 'subculture', so to speak. I remember back in 7th grade, I was one of the 'Magic players'. Sure, the "cool" kids made fun of it, but it didn't matter because I loved it enough so that it didn't matter what other people thought. I still love it today! This isn't really a good example, however, because Magic isn't 'cool' like Anime has obviously become, but it's similar.

Like I said before, it is at least one of the aspects that defines us and sets us apart from the 'jocks' or 'popular kids', etc. Now that everyone starts liking it, it makes it less special. No longer does liking 'anime' make us unique, and give us something that no one else really has. This hurts, because everyone wants to put forth their own unique identity and that is essentially being stripped from us. You don't see the 'anime' people going out there and taking what the 'popular' people have. Why can't we just be left alone to enjoy our own thing? Why does society feel the need to take away what little we might already have? This is essentially what pissed me off when I saw LOTR characters on teen magazines. NO! LOTR is OURS, not yours! Don't try to push your way into it and take it over. You don't see us trying to take over your movies (like anything with Freddy Prinze Jr. in it). You have your own movies, why must you take ours?

It really is unfair...

~Ming

[Tobias]

I have to share many of the same views with my counterpart, Ming, and this is one of the things that i definitely share views with.

I also hate when something that i find special to myself becomes a fad, and then it isnt mine anymore. For example, i get into a really good game, then some other person sees it, tells everyone about it, and then it becomes fad in which it losses its specialness to me. This happened with things like pokemon, whereas the original game boy games (the red and the blue ones), where actually pretty good, and had great gameplay. Then they made the show of it, which was alright, but was like a repetitiion of the game, and then came the coup de gras...The card game. That was the worst, and now that they had little kids hooked on it, it was taken over by little kids, whom of which 90 % of which didnt actually know how to play, but still paid their hundreds of dollars of their parents money to get the chase cards. It completely ruined the original game idea of just "catch them all", and an ok story line with fun rpg mechanics.

Another similar scenario in which this kind of relates is when i went to the movies to see Blade2. There where some adults, and then their were actually 3rd graders in their. First off, they shouldnt be allowed to see movies like that, and second off, they kind of ruin the feel that since ur older, u can see cooler movies. U get this feeling because of the fact that their are little kids there, who still havent even reached puberty yet, which makes the movie feel like its just another moneymaking fad that they try to get all audiences to see, despite the gore and violence which could scar the childs mind.

Anyway, with that said, i hope that animes like trigun and Cowboy bebop, and that genre of anime's dont turn into things like DBZ, because those are, quite frankly, the better of the animes, and the animes that are probably most older people's favorites, which we wouldnt want to be seen getting destroyed by the likes of little kiddies.

PS Trigun kicks major @$$. Cal, if u need any part of the trigun series for anything, or want the whole series, i have it, so i'll burn u a copy of the series if u want it. Also, im extending this to everyone in PO that reads this, cause trigun kicks @$$

[Ming]

I already talked about Pokemon and DBZ in the Outrage thread, which I started. So there scrub!

~Ming :p

[Tobias]

Meh, i had to add my two cents u silly brother you

[Therin]

...how can any of us hope to compete with all you college class essay writers!?