As a fan of anime, I DESPISE anime fans.
I mean I understand what you mean but it's like saying all Star Wars fans are obsessive misogynists - I'm a "Star Wars fan" and an "anime fan" relative to the average person.
I also get that what you mean is "obsessive anime fan who acts like a jerk about it" but I've recently noticed that some of the worst behaviors among "Star Wars fans" are actually making me stop identifying as one in the casual way I might have before the gender brigading shit.
It was one thing to be a "Star Wars fan" during the objectively (in terms of meta criticism measurables and some of the big unexpected changes to understood lore like Midichlorians etc) disappointing prequels - but in my heart of hearts I remained a Star Wars fan - I just disagreed with another subset about the qualities of three of the movies and still found stuff to love and admire in them.
It's getting a little like that with anime. What I assume is a relatively small fraction of fans going way too far - and frankly any kind of organized attack (or counterfactual defense) brigades on entertainment media or its creators is probably already too far.
But we also shouldn't let small groups of outlier jerks create a poop in the pool situation for the rest of the swimmers. I guess I don't really care about the ability for me to claim "fan" but I also instinctively don't want to cede ground to the worst people in any kind of community.
Eventually it becomes self-fulfilling and circular- you can see it on some forums already with anime avatars- where the noisy loons take up all the attention and paint normal people with their brush.
And they start by thinking they're rallying around a thing they love, but eventually it becomes a rally around their shared feelings of hate. And it's very easy for young men to
find reasons to hate things for group and peer acceptance. Even when their natural inclination might have been the opposite.
Not sure how you take things back from folk like that without engaging them and giving them another source of angry unity. This lawyer simply describing the law is a perfect example of that. He's exposing the underlying emptiness of their belief and they can only treat that as an attack even though he's just telling them how things actually are. They'd rather pretend the version they'd prefer is the real one than accept a reality they probably know deep downā is accurate.
That's a phenomenon that's exposed in our national politics too. The upside is that eventually they give up and silently move on or move the goalposts to a more defensible place - like "Lance Armstrong Never took PEDs "folks. Shifted first to "everyone does it" and then to silence or a change of subject.
Tbh the most surprising thing to me was finding a huge community of foreign film fans who PREFER the dubs although I concede that animation is a completely different thing.
youtu.be
