summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2011-09-04 11:15 am
summercomfort) wrote2011-09-04 11:15 am
Evolution of Anime Club
I realized the other day that I've been involved some sort of anime club or another since 1998 (except for 2006-7, when I explored the Stanford anime club and found it lacking, and 2008-2009, after Cat left). That's... a long time.
In the early days anime club at my high school was a place to watch something that I had no access to otherwise. These were the latest VHS fansubs, 3rd generation at best, but we sat through the horrid video quality because anime was telling stories and portraying characters and settings in a way that was different from what we'd see in movie theaters and on TV. Evangelion, Trigun, Utena, Escaflowne, RuroKen were quite different from .... oh gosh, what did I watch on TV back then? Sabrina the teenage witch? In those early days, everything seemed cool.
During college, anime was cool, but by then BitTorrent had shown up, and coupled with the high speed access on college campuses, suddenly anime is not rare and precious anymore. I felt overwhelmed by the number of choices available. I remember coming back to the dorm after classes and discovering that I had downloaded 15 episodes of Wolf's Rain from AnimeSuki, and yet I had only the time and interest to watch about 5 episodes. During this time, Anime Club became a filtering system -- I trusted the club officers and the club members to filter the wide range of anime out there and choose only worthy ones to show. Anime Club as an entity became responsible for the acquiring and curating my anime experience. I appreciated the semi-dictatorial ways of UCJAS anime selection because it guaranteed a high quality and balanced selection.*
As college progressed and I became more jaded about anime's various storytelling tropes, I started valuing anime club as a group of close-knit yet open and accepting compatriots. UCJAS had a great mixture of the academic and the crass, with a slice of pan-geekery on the side. We got along because we all loved anime and yet found it deeply silly and academically intriguing at the same time. Anime club became about the dinners we would have outside of club, the parties and marathons and UChi-Con and Skit -- It worked the best when anime served as the grease of the conversation, but it was no longer about sitting in a dark room watching the newest anime anymore. But even then, I felt the club splintering -- if you could get together and watch anime with pre-existing friends, why go to some club?
Now, in the high school anime club that I run, access and acquisition of anime is a non-issue. Streaming video has made most anime easily accessible. The rise of professional companies such as Funimation coupled with YouTube/Hulu also means that a lot of anime gets subbed, professionally, within a week of its release in Japan. So now anime club is about sharing. Every week, we watch a different anime, mostly suggested by the kids. Whoever enjoyed the anime would go home and watch the rest of the series on their own time. I'm trying to move some of what I enjoyed about UCJAS culture into the realm of the club itself -- time for general geekery, projects to focus on, marathons, etc. More than that, I feel that as we get better at consumption, we need more space to create things of our own. We will definitely be cosplaying again this year. Since discovering that many of the kids wrote fanfiction or made amvs, I've set up a Tumblr with monthly themes to share that work.
So in these last 13 years, my anime club experiences has gone from Access --> Curation --> Compatriots --> Sharing and Creation. What form will the future of anime club take?
------------
* When I was running things, I tried to aim for the old wedding saying -- something old, something new, something borrowed (recommended from club members), something blue (sad)
In the early days anime club at my high school was a place to watch something that I had no access to otherwise. These were the latest VHS fansubs, 3rd generation at best, but we sat through the horrid video quality because anime was telling stories and portraying characters and settings in a way that was different from what we'd see in movie theaters and on TV. Evangelion, Trigun, Utena, Escaflowne, RuroKen were quite different from .... oh gosh, what did I watch on TV back then? Sabrina the teenage witch? In those early days, everything seemed cool.
During college, anime was cool, but by then BitTorrent had shown up, and coupled with the high speed access on college campuses, suddenly anime is not rare and precious anymore. I felt overwhelmed by the number of choices available. I remember coming back to the dorm after classes and discovering that I had downloaded 15 episodes of Wolf's Rain from AnimeSuki, and yet I had only the time and interest to watch about 5 episodes. During this time, Anime Club became a filtering system -- I trusted the club officers and the club members to filter the wide range of anime out there and choose only worthy ones to show. Anime Club as an entity became responsible for the acquiring and curating my anime experience. I appreciated the semi-dictatorial ways of UCJAS anime selection because it guaranteed a high quality and balanced selection.*
As college progressed and I became more jaded about anime's various storytelling tropes, I started valuing anime club as a group of close-knit yet open and accepting compatriots. UCJAS had a great mixture of the academic and the crass, with a slice of pan-geekery on the side. We got along because we all loved anime and yet found it deeply silly and academically intriguing at the same time. Anime club became about the dinners we would have outside of club, the parties and marathons and UChi-Con and Skit -- It worked the best when anime served as the grease of the conversation, but it was no longer about sitting in a dark room watching the newest anime anymore. But even then, I felt the club splintering -- if you could get together and watch anime with pre-existing friends, why go to some club?
Now, in the high school anime club that I run, access and acquisition of anime is a non-issue. Streaming video has made most anime easily accessible. The rise of professional companies such as Funimation coupled with YouTube/Hulu also means that a lot of anime gets subbed, professionally, within a week of its release in Japan. So now anime club is about sharing. Every week, we watch a different anime, mostly suggested by the kids. Whoever enjoyed the anime would go home and watch the rest of the series on their own time. I'm trying to move some of what I enjoyed about UCJAS culture into the realm of the club itself -- time for general geekery, projects to focus on, marathons, etc. More than that, I feel that as we get better at consumption, we need more space to create things of our own. We will definitely be cosplaying again this year. Since discovering that many of the kids wrote fanfiction or made amvs, I've set up a Tumblr with monthly themes to share that work.
So in these last 13 years, my anime club experiences has gone from Access --> Curation --> Compatriots --> Sharing and Creation. What form will the future of anime club take?
------------
* When I was running things, I tried to aim for the old wedding saying -- something old, something new, something borrowed (recommended from club members), something blue (sad)