A recent post by Sat­ur­nity and some fol­low up enlight­en­ment by Shance of Rain­bow­sphere made me real­ize just how neg­a­tive much of the anibl­o­gos­phere is to the con­cept of anime/manga clubs and other sim­i­lar orga­ni­za­tions revolv­ing around Japan­ese Mod­ern Visual Cul­ture, to the point of estab­lish­ing that “the first rule of anime club is don’t go to anime club”.

I once thought the same way. For my first two years at col­lege I walked into my anime club only once each year. Then changes took place. Maybe it’s because my think­ing is dif­fer­ent, or my goals have changed. But before I knew it I devel­oped a cer­tain pride to my anime club: CAINE at the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia (the Comics and ANi­ma­tion INtel­lec­tual Explo­ration club). Why? Because we’re not the anime club, we’re not the manga club, we’re Genshiken.

You think those peo­ple are weird? So are you.

Dis­claimer: the fol­low­ing are obvi­ously my per­sonal tastes and I do not intend to insult any animu/mango club out there that runs suc­cess­fully in a dif­fer­ent way: it all depend on the audience.

When most peo­ple think of anime club, they’ll sum­mon the image of a group of peo­ple get­ting together to watch and dis­cuss anime. This image isn’t entirely false, but it’s also not true. There’s a fun­da­men­tal flaw to this expec­ta­tion: within the anime fan­dom there are so many dif­fer­ent gen­res and tastes, how can you pos­si­ble find enough over­lap to select a show that every­one can agree with to watch and dis­cuss? Okay, there might be a few clas­sic titles out there, but before you start brain­storm­ing I’m going to say one thing:

The pur­pose of an anime club is not about watch­ing or dis­cussing anime!

There, I said it, so fix your expec­ta­tions before you even think about going to or cre­at­ing an anime club. Why is this true? Because there’s such a great vari­ety of anime fans out there that you sim­ply can­not have an intel­li­gent, club-wide dis­cus­sion with­out the con­ver­sa­tion being reduced to trolling, flam­ing, or sim­ply ruined by elit­ism and/or gen­eral fag­gotry (I hate that term). The same can be said about dis­cussing manga, or select­ing anime to watch. Com­par­isons applied, you may as well be join­ing a ‘Music Club’ and try­ing to vote upon what con­certs to attend.

So what is the pur­pose of an anime club?

I’m not sure how many peo­ple out there are famil­iar with the anime series Gen­shiken, but if you have any inter­est in anime club­bing (or other Japan­ese Visual Cul­ture sub­jects), this show is some­thing I highly rec­om­mend. In Gen­shiken, the cast’s uni­ver­sity has your generic anime club, full of fan­boys who relent­lessly picker upon which show is bet­ter or worse; it has a manga club with your oblig­a­tory yaoi-loving fujoshi, and I bet there’s naru­tards and other endless-shounen fan­boys aplenty (although the anime doesn’t men­tion much). Lastly, there’s Gen­shiken, the ‘Soci­ety for the Study of Mod­ern Visual Cul­ture’, the group who got fed up with both…

Gen­shiken involves a club whose mem­bers have a wide vari­ety of inter­ests. There’s the anime otaku, the mod­el­ling otaku, the game otaku, the cos­play otaku, the not-even-an-anime-fan ‘mem­ber’. Many of their hyped-up inter­ests and hob­bies never quite inter­sect with each other. How do they func­tion as a club? They respect each oth­ers’ inter­ests and bound­aries. They form coali­tions only when there is a com­mon ambi­tion, and they stay apart and sim­ply enjoy them­selves oth­er­wise. Hence­forth the mem­bers are able to grad­u­ally gain an under­stand­ing of each other, allow­ing them to become friends as well as club­mates, help­ing each other out in times of need even if it’s not in their inter­est (e.g. let­ting the girls take care of H-doujin shop­ping because the guys are volunteering).

Once again, so what is the pur­pose of an ‘anime’ club?

“…To accept him­self for who he is and loses the inhi­bi­tions and guilt he once felt and asso­ci­ated with otaku cul­ture.” — Gen­shiken Wiki Page

In a soci­ety where animu/manga fans, let alone the more extreme sides of mod­ern visual cul­ture like visual novel otakus and dou­jin mani­acs, are mostly treated as out­casts from the com­mon accepted social norm, an anime club is a real-life-place where you can feel com­fort­able being your true self, to asso­ciate with other with­out try­ing to hide the fact that you’re a fan­boy or otaku, where you don’t have to pre­tend that you don’t love yaoi or yuri or hen­tai or 2D girls or what­ever. It’s where you can grad­u­ally release your power lev­els (so you don’t break anyone’s scouter) and find oth­ers with sim­i­lar inter­ests with­out the fear or rub­bing them the com­pletely wrong way. Why? Because chances are in an anime club, every­one has their secrets and guilty plea­sures. Mind, that’s not to say you want to explode into the room wear­ing a shirt about ten­ta­cle rape and ram­bling about Bible Black: some dis­cre­tion and com­mon sense is always required.

An anime club should be an envi­ron­ment, a means to find other like-minded peo­ple like your­self. Warn­ing: you are not guar­an­teed to find those with sim­i­lar inter­ests, but club­bing sure raises the chances of that. Ter­mi­nol­ogy wise, a ‘soci­ety’ may be far more appro­pri­ate than a ‘club’. It is a place where peo­ple can respect the inter­ests (and dis­in­ter­ests) of each other, where cir­cles can form and dis­band based on sea­sonal series or lat­est inter­est, where mem­bers can tra­verse between dif­fer­ent groups of friends with­out feel­ing awk­ward. Per­son­ally I’d com­pare a club to a con­ven­tion, except far smaller, but closer to home and meets a lot more often.

Lastly, if you’re being a club of elit­ist big­ots who can­not accept main­stream­ers, naru­tards, 4channers, new­bies, or gamers just because of their inter­ests, then I have the same bone to pick with you as you do with them. If they’re unwill­ing to look at the rest of Japan­ese Mod­ern Visual Cul­ture past those few things, then that’s another story. Accep­tance is the key to an anime club. I don’t care if you bring brown­ies to the club party or sing Irish music at Karaoke night, as long as you’re not expect­ing the same from others.

From what I know of my friends that go to other uni­ver­si­ties, the most suc­cess­ful anime clubs today share a sim­i­lar live-and-let-live (or like-and-let-like?) pol­icy. Those who hold their views too aggres­sively, no mat­ter how otaku, are likely to have more trou­ble fit­ting in than those who doesn’t know any­thing about anime at all.

So if you’re not watch­ing anime? What do you do at an anime club?

Who said we don’t watch anime? I merely said that’s not the pur­pose of an anime club. There’s noth­ing wrong with show­ing anime at the club. How­ever there are a few things you should keep in mind:

1. Anime show­ings should not be the core activ­ity of a club: keep­ing it sep­a­rate from the meet­ings goes a long way.
2. Offi­cial, cen­tral­ized dis­cus­sion ses­sions on anime is an one-way ticket to dis­ap­point­ment and fail.
3. Don’t expect every­one to par­tic­i­pate in show­ings. Com­ing in late, leav­ing early, doing home­work, or form­ing a mul­ti­player DS party in the cor­ner should all be a-okay. Just don’t dis­rupt the show. Yelling out this shit sucks deserves an instant banhammer.

What else does an anime club do?

I said that meet­ings should not revolve around show­ing or dis­cussing anime, but other activ­i­ties and events. What activities/events these are really depend on the audi­ence. Here are a few exam­ples from my ‘anime’ club, filled with peo­ple rang­ing from diehard visual novel and touhou fans, to old school gun­dam nuts, to a res­i­dent gai­jin (who annoys me to no end), to a vice pres­i­dent who doesn’t even watch anime or read manga:

• Pre­sen­ta­tions on the more hard­core parts of Japan­ese Visual Cul­ture for the less edu­cated: singers and com­posers, stu­dios and com­pa­nies, the his­tory of anime/manga, AMVs, seiyuus, etc. You want to present not dis­cuss, so keep the facts apart from opin­ions, and make sure you have peo­ple who know what they’re talk­ing about.
• Semes­ter pre­views: noth­ing wrong with show­ing trail­ers or short clips from upcom­ing series of the sea­son. Not only are you intro­duced to series you might not have oth­er­wise picked up, you also fig­ure out who else in the club is pick­ing up said series.
• Karaoke night: It doesn’t mat­ter if the music you like isn’t Japan­ese. It doesn’t mat­ter if your singing is off. What is impor­tant is for every­one to enjoy the atmos­phere and have fun. I doubt every­one who goes to Karaoke bars in Japan are nec­es­sar­ily good singers.
• Death­match night: Putting up a ran­dom mix­ture of main char­ac­ters from popular/recent/club shows and have peo­ple fight it out on who is bet­ter within a lim­ited times­pan. This is an opp­por­tu­nity to bring out your inner troll and flame each other while keep­ing it friendly.
• Con­ven­tion trip plan­ning: I don’t need to state why.
• Ran­dom games nights: I have no clue what we’re play­ing. The point is for peo­ple to get together and min­gle. I do not take part in such activ­i­ties myself, but once again I accept their inter­ests and they accept my lack thereof.
• Theme nights at show­ings: Show­ing where peo­ple sub­mit sin­gle episodes based on a com­mon theme. We’ve had waifu night, per­sona night (char­ac­ter most sim­i­lar to you or whom you wish to be), and I believe Direc­tor Honya is plan­ning an under­rated night. It’s an excel­lent oppor­tu­nity to get to try out some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent or get to know oth­ers’ inter­ests. Once again, no one will be offended if you take out a PSP.

Activ­ity wise, there isn’t a guide on exactly what you should do. It takes years of suc­cess­ful trial and error to com­pose a list of activ­i­ties that is liked by much of the club, and as mem­ber­ship change over the years so do some of the pref­er­ences. Just as a blog­ger gather sta­tis­tics on what posts he make are liked by oth­ers, club direc­tors (and mem­bers) should keep track of how well per­ceived their events are.

Think your anime club sucks?

Well, have you tried talk­ing to the direc­tors or voic­ing your opin­ions? Have you tried point­ing out or speak­ing to those prob­lem­atic indi­vid­u­als? It’s a lot eas­ier and far more irre­spon­si­ble to sim­ply claim this club sucks because of this, this, and this. If every­one did that, we’d still be stuck in the stone age and mur­der­ing one another to set­tle disputes.

Keep a like-and-let-like pol­icy in mind, and you just might find (or rev­o­lu­tion­ize) an anime club to some­thing worth­while: an envi­ron­ment that makes bond­ing between dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple eas­ier; a medium to find those with close inter­ests or those you sim­ply get alone well with. Unlike cir­cles of friends with com­mon inter­ests, the fact you may not get along with an individual’s other friends doesn’t mat­ter because once again, you’re not lim­ited to that one cir­cle: you’re free to walk between dif­fer­ent groups within the club.

The result of all that: we have a club where not every­one hangs out with each other, but just by being together bonds of cama­raderie are bound to form, allow­ing the group to pull sup­port together to help some­one when they need it, just like a group of friends do. This can be as sim­ple as find­ing out who has [enter-name-here] series, or as seri­ous as find­ing a place to stay overnight when visiting.

Anime Club: It’s all about being accepted and low­er­ing degrees of sep­a­ra­tion.

Nice job read­ing it all, now here’s a funny (albeit hor­ri­ble) gif to cool you off:

#endrant, back to being not distracted

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 16:24 and is filed under Crossvision, Fandom General, Life-filled Pie, Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.