anime club

[Robojack]

Sorry for posting so late into this thread, but it's gotten to the point where I feel I need to give my opinion on this matter.

I am an executive of my university's anime club. I both help with events, aid in decision-making, as well as recruit new members whenever possible, but this does not make me any less normal than any other student on the campus involved in a club. My personal hygiene is where it should be (shower at least once a day, change clothes everyday, brush three times a day, shave once a day, etc.), and I'm as dedicated to school as any other student.

I guess you can call me the de-sensitized anime fan, in the sense that few things in anime these days either surprise me or make me go 'Holy crap!" anymore. This is what happens after watching anime regularly for over 16 years. I still enjoy anime immensely, just not enough to go foaming at the mouth or start screaming like a banshee. Like most people, cosplay usually turns me off, unless the person wearing the costume is super-hot. However, it's always interesting to see the reactions of others when they watch anime, which is likely why I am involved in this club.

And it's funny how you guys mention personal hygiene, since just yesterday, some guy came up to our booth to sign up, and I could've sworn that B.O. was his middle initials. The guy was nearly impossible to talk to, mostly because of his odor, which was making me choke up everytime I took a breath. He ended up buying a membership, but we rushed him into it and got him to leave ASAP. It's not everyday that I come across someone who's this bad, but I'm sure it's not just anime otakus who have this problem (or should I say, habit).

More to come later.

[Vicious]

Anime conventions always sounded stupid to me. It's not like a star trek convention where everyone there is centering around a specific series or a political convention where they center around a specific ideology. It's a convention where the only similarity between all the participants is that they watch a specific type of cartoon. When it comes right down to anime, I like specific types and hate other types, just like any other media, like movies, books and TV shows. In the end, I'm not going to be interested in a convention whose central base is something as broad as animation. Just like I'm not going to go to a convention about books or movies in general.

"I like movies"
"me too! we should go to that movie convention where we can find other people that like movies too!"

sounds rather ridiculous when you replace anime with movies, eh?

Well, I mainly go because of the VA's and the studio panels. If it wasn't for them, I probably wouldn't go. The Va's are extremely entertaining and very cool people. The studio panels are informative sometimes and you cna snag some decent freebies. And you also get to watch some anime for free at all the screenings and see if it's worth buying.

[Zagatto]

"I like movies"
"me too! we should go to that movie convention where we can find other people that like movies too!"
sounds rather ridiculous when you replace anime with movies, eh?

Actually... when you mention it like that I think of Cannes or the Toronto Film Festival or Sundance or any of the other HUGE international film festivals out there. They manage to have WEEKS of nothing but movie premiers, parties, and gatherings of panels talking about movies. Every type of movie you can imagine is premiered at these festivals from short films to documentaries to anime to B flicks to art films to Hollywood blockbusters (although this last type is the least common for a film festival).

The film festivals are covered by global media and attended by famous people who fly in to either promote their new movies or just to catch up on what's happening in the industry.

It would be great to see if anime conventions could reach the sort of levels of success that movie conventions end up reaching.

I also agree that some of the cosplay can be a lot of fun to watch. There are some scary people who dress up but the majority are tastefully done and some are of the super hot variety that make my nose bleed (a la Golden Boy).

[kakomu]

sorry, forgot about the cannes and indie film fests. However, I don't like them either. Not because they're inhabited by rabid fanboys, but because of their eliticism and asshatery.

[Homeless Joe]

have you ever been to one before?

[Zagatto]

I've been to the Toronto Film Festival a few times now and a number of smaller ones back when I was studying film production and had a great time at all of them. I know there are events for the elite but for the most part it's a bunch of movie fan boys who pick apart a movie down to the smallest detail over a case of beer after they've seen it. The funny thing is how many faults we could find in even our favourite movies. It didn't mean we enjoyed them any less... just that we saw where small improvements could have been made here and there.

The point is that there are conventions for people of all sorts of hobbies. You can see sports conventions that cover everything from hunters to football players and you can go to boating conventions and motorcycle conventions and book conventions... all of these are available for very broad audiences that get segregated by individual tastes once in the actual convention. For the bikers you might have a Harley section in one corner, a custom bike section in another corner, English bikes somewhere else and rice rockets taking over the remaining space.
I agree that "anime" is a HUGE blanket to throw around but it does give a great place for people to get together and find out about other sub categories within a genre. It was at an anime convention that I first found out about Cowboy Bebop... it was amazing to be packed into a room with all those people gasping and laughing at the same time. Many of them I didn't want to get to close to but there was still a feeling of us being a group and being priveledged enough to be some of the first people to experience a show like that.