“Well, yeah, but not me.”
Therein lies the rub with the question about blaming the ills of anime, or any medium, on its fans. It also has to do a bit with what kind of fans you tend to keep company with. The Angry Fan is a constant in all our lives and across all kinds of fandoms, hobbies and sports. The outrage of the day is pretty regular in many fandoms and when you’re in a number of them, it can be hard in the morning to choose which one to expend your energies on.
For me, as invested as I am in all of this, I could never really must up the outrage for it. Angry fans get a lot of attentions (and a lot of clicks) and there’s certainly an allure there. Some of them fabricate it, others live it to the fullest, but I can’t bring myself to be it because it’s such a wasted endeavour.
That’s not to say there aren’t things to be angry about. But that usually requires context and nuance, which doesn’t matter when promoting Your Side.
In the end, the squeaky wheel always gets the grease and that’s long been a part of the problem. You can’t minimize the squeaky wheel because often they are presenting a problem that needs to be dealt with. But at the same time, you really don’t want to look like the perception of what The Angry Fan is viewed like. Or at least I don’t. I’ve got better things to expend my time and energy on than hate.
It’s also worth realize that for the vast majority of anime fans, they don’t really run into The Angry Fan other than as a curiosity. A large percentage of people simply buy or read their manga, watch the shows and never touch a forum, a tweet or a YouTube comment that would make them cringe in disgust with what they might see.
Most fans actually enjoy their stuff.
Again, that’s not to say there aren’t things to be criticized and dealt with across fandoms. And The Angry Fan can certainly bring it to light quicker than through a normal, well thought out, presentation. But they are not, by and large, the problem with anime.
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Good point. The angry fans can be somewhat off-putting even for me. I wont lie I will usually totally either ignore or likely feel very confounded by the anger some anime fans can direct toward their passion anime.
Then again it makes me think that is how much they are moved by it. It is certainly a dilemma to be in when it comes to the anime fandom.
Want to significantly challenge the thought about the angry fan. The problem is that the anger is can come through multiple different factions. Some maybe angry because of the handling of their fandom. This makes some sense because sometimes people take the Phantom bar and it becomes the more irritating than enjoyable. These incidences however happens in multiple different mediums regards what.
However, what becomes more irritable and even more dangerous it is a group of bands that have a sense of self entitlement. In this case, they feel that some of the actions whether is pirating, or ignoring certain areas because it doesn’t conform to their old ideas is justifiable enough to get angry enough other people for criticizing them for those actions. In this case the anger and the way in which the handling of the anger really reflects poorly on the fandom. That is what we have to watch out for.