Adrift history
Mar. 4th, 2007 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootIt seem to be my day for thinking from other posts. Cathexys says some interesting things, while revisiting a post about fandom history, and how there are a lot of distinct fandom histories (media, sci-fi, music, celeb, book, etc.) that have all found their way onto the internet and now clash a lot over whose fandom history we're talking about at any given moment.
And it made me think about![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
p_zeitgeist's Not-capade post about how western anime fandom may accept altered, skewed, denied canon more often than media or book fandoms because western anime fandom is already at one remove from the source. The culture that spawned it was not ours, and the cues and reasons and references probably go straight past most people without registering at all.
And it made me think that maybe US anime fandom is a-historical for the same reason. It's always just invented yesterday, and there are so many different levels of engagement (raw, sub, dub, etc.) that the fandom itself has very little cohesion except in small pockets. History? What history? The one that starts with Sailor Moon? Or the one that starts with Astro Boy? Or the one that's spent all its time studying Akira and Wicked City? The history that starts with Genji Monogatari, or the one that starts with Takahashi Rumiko in Japan, or the one that starts with a translator on the Tokyopop staff who may not even know the gender of all the characters?
Myself, I think this is helped along by the tendency Japan and the US share of freely reinventing their own histories every few decades. But even aside from that predisposition, US anime fandom has little that any large segment can agree on in the way of roots. Rather, it's an aerial--seeds drifting on the wind to lodge on a branch somewhere.
And it made me think about
p_zeitgeist's Not-capade post about how western anime fandom may accept altered, skewed, denied canon more often than media or book fandoms because western anime fandom is already at one remove from the source. The culture that spawned it was not ours, and the cues and reasons and references probably go straight past most people without registering at all.And it made me think that maybe US anime fandom is a-historical for the same reason. It's always just invented yesterday, and there are so many different levels of engagement (raw, sub, dub, etc.) that the fandom itself has very little cohesion except in small pockets. History? What history? The one that starts with Sailor Moon? Or the one that starts with Astro Boy? Or the one that's spent all its time studying Akira and Wicked City? The history that starts with Genji Monogatari, or the one that starts with Takahashi Rumiko in Japan, or the one that starts with a translator on the Tokyopop staff who may not even know the gender of all the characters?
Myself, I think this is helped along by the tendency Japan and the US share of freely reinventing their own histories every few decades. But even aside from that predisposition, US anime fandom has little that any large segment can agree on in the way of roots. Rather, it's an aerial--seeds drifting on the wind to lodge on a branch somewhere.
