You know what the whole fuss over very little is really about, though? And I know exactly what it is about because I was sort of like that once... A certain strain of anime fan is actually hoping for a big backlash against anime in general, because there is a certain visceral thrill in liking something that the "squareheads" hate. And if the straight-laced people actually start launching campaigns against anime, or whatever it is you're into, then you can get really full of yourself for completely appreciating something you think the rest of the world outside your little niche just doesn't understand, and then you get smug for being so much smarter than the Philistine book-burners in the rest of America.
Yes, around 1999, I was fully anticipating and sort of looking forward to the big backlash against anime, which, even then, seemed to be right around the corner. But... the backlash never quite arrived... not on a massive organized scale, at least. Sure, there was some fuss over Pok�mon from the usual circles (with my favourite example being this woman, calling in to Bob Larson's old Talkback radio programme, telling Bob about a dream she had where Satan came into the window of her child's bedroom dressed as a thief in the night and put something in her kid's backpack, and then, when she woke up, she went and looked in the backpack, and there were Pok�mon cards) but it never really boiled over into a backlash against anime in general. And there was the occasional semi-informed, semi-sensational article about anime over at Focus on the Family (n.b. most of them were written in the mid-90s... because they constantly re-index every page at that site, the pages have misleading dates on them) and Berit Kjos, the American Family Association's Pok�mon guru-lady to whom many anime fans started sending e-mail either trying to reason with her logically or just plain berating her, so she set up some "Comments" pages dedicated to specific anime and anime in general, but, if you carefully look at her site, she actually has very little to say about anime, she mostly just comments on her reader's comments about anime, pro and con. So, while you get some minor flare-ups here or there regarding anime, it never really coalesced into an orgainized campaign against anime like you used to get against Dungeons & Dragons, Judas Priest and even The Smurfs and you get today, to a lesser degree, against Harry Potter books and Howard Stern, I think showing how much those backlash groups have lost power and influence since the 1980s, but also showing that anime is still really a niche thing, too small for them to get too bothered about. (Don't believe me? Go to the American Family Association site and look up anime and you get zilch, and the AFA is like a clearing house for backlash campaigns.) And not all Christian sites are even against anime... there are a handful of largely positive anime reviews at Christian Spotlight on Entertainment.
So, anyhow, the anime fans waiting for the figurative "rapture" of a backlash against anime lashed out in huge numbers against that one tiny op-ed because they see it as a vanguard of things to come. I think it's just an isolated incident that won't lead to anything larger, since it seems to be only anime fans that even seem to have noticed it. Since the big backlash hasn't happened by now in North America, I honestly don't think it's ever going to happen, so really, the people looking for the backlash are grasping at straws. That's what I think, and that's where I'm coming from, so, if you didn't understand before why I was just brushing that op-ed off and striking out against the fanboy fury, I hope you do now.
posted by Steve Brandon @ 4:50 AM
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