As with any fandom, you have to keep bringing in new blood otherwise things get stale. And in the case of talking about particular properties that are long dead, the conversations can get pretty run into the ground after going at it for a couple of years or even decades. Fresh blood is the lifeblood of any type of fandom and we’re seeing some interesting changes in it over the years, especially as fandoms seem to grow but actual purchasable consumerism drops. But that’s for another day. What we want to talk about today is how we educate and introduce the next generation of fans to our favorite things.
Bringing in new fans isn’t always easy, especially when you really do want to start them young. Take the Pokemon phenomena for example. That series, along with Sailor Moon, laid the foundation for a slew of new anime fans for years to come. The explosive growth of interest in shoujo and other female oriented manga and anime in the early to mid 2000’s came from the girls that grew up watching Sailor Moon in the early 90’s and then rediscovering it through various means when they hit high school or college age and found out so much more about it. Pokemon follows a similar route though it tends to be somewhat different as it’s generally a stronger male demographic (but with plenty of girls to be sure, no disservice!) who play the game and get into the mechanics who later on discover more trading card games which invariably brings them either into anime collecting or videogaming in a harder way but with a bent towards the Japanese angle.
Comic books used to be an easy gateway for many kids simply because they were cheap and on the newsstands. Once that went away and it moved to direct market stores only, the whole thing collapsed and has continued to do so for years. Their saving grace may be the digital realm in which they can get lots of free books and cheap books from parents who used to read these things when they were kids themselves. Anime suffered losses in the same way over the years by not having any strong programming on TV to draw in younger audiences and expose them to it for when they were of a buying age and also the fact that the medium lost its “killer app” kind of show. When you lack that kind of thing that crosses boundaries, it’s harder to draw in new audiences.
And that’s where it becomes more about the existing fans and what they can do to bring in new fans. If you’ve got kids of your own, you definitely have options. If you don’t, it’s a bit harder but there are still ways if you have nieces, nephews and younger siblings that you can do things with. For myself, I “lucked” out in that I had two kids, girls no less, and that’s been an interesting prospect in educating them. My eldest daughter, who just turned twelve, grew up on anime since we had so much of it around and it was always on. And always subtitled, so she learned to read quickly and that carried into school, which made her a voracious reader and that definitely endears her to me. She’s dabble in comics over time, watches various superhero cartoons while also enjoying a lot of Disney kid fare and so forth. I’ve also spent a lot of time working through various live action movies and hitting “classic” benchmarks as she gets older with, “Aha, you’re old enough to watch [X] now!” And after years of showing her things she’s loved, she’s very keen on trying new things. Alien was a tough sell though, but it got her to watch Terminator and then to experience Titanic. And in the middle of all that, she’s watching all sorts of anime series, young adult novels and more.
Exposure is the key to be certain, but it’s the right kind of exposure. While my daughter grew up with Pokemon on all the time, she had a lot of other things on that she got attracted to because of the bright, shiny colors. She and her friends are seriously hooked on Fruits Basket. They adore Ouran Host Club. She can’t get enough of Soul Eater. And as she got a bit older, she discovered that she completely is in love with Highschool of the Dead. Yet she’ll finish a new volume of the graphic novel, having finished the TV series, and then switch to reading the latest Chi’s Sweet Home. Or picking up another Hunger Games volume while being excited to see not only Avengers but also Prometheus.
Not every kid is going to be open to these things. But they can be exposed to it and it can help them discover which things they will like, as movies, TV, comics and anime all have a lot to offer. I went down some very specific paths with my kids to expose and educate them to all kinds of entertainment (and believe me, it’s far more than just genre stuff, as we do romantic comedies, musicals, etc) and continue to do so. And just as I expose them to all kinds of things for entertainment, they bring me into things as well. I had missed Invader Zim the first time around but both kids are huge fans from the reruns and gobble up the merchandise. I never saw the show but it’s one that has won me over since, and it was a shared discovery. And shared discoveries are often long lasting ones.
So what about you? What do you do or use to expose the next generation of fans to entertainment that you like and want to share and invite them into?
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