Welcome to the weekend!
We're finally in the autumn season, the season of change, so let's look back at a past that has long since been left behind.
I apologize for the lack of a post last week. Things merely got out of hand. Hopefully it'll happen less and less as we get out of the warmer season. I can only hope.
Today's subject is particularly niche, so I don't blame you if you find it hard to understand. That said, it is quite an interesting topic to look over, especially with the passage of time.
Anime's explosion in the West was a strange one. First slipping into the fringe underground in the '80s before becoming a part of alternative culture in the '90s, and then finally achieving mainstream recognition in the '00s, it was a bizarre series of events to get it to its current worldwide dominance that would arrive in the decades to come. No one would have imagined its gigantic size way back when passing around old badly subtitled episodes of Dragon Ball Z in class and school clubs. It was a much different world.
Speaking of a much different world, I wanted to highlight exactly one that sprang out of this subculture. During that odd transition between underground alternative culture to mainstream in the '90s and '00s came this odd era of the '00s when young audiences tried their own hand at actually making anime. Yes, we are talking about the strange world of Fanime that you have missed entirely. It was a niche of a niche, so it's very possible you never encountered it.
This short era, in retrospect, is an interesting glimpse into how a niche subculture affects a generation growing up entirely on the internet increasingly separated from the mainstream. At the same time, one can see which tropes, styles, and ideas resonated with younger audiences of the time period. Interestingly enough, most of these projects were made by girls, not guys, giving a very different idea of one might expect from such a thing. Few of them were also ever completed, which, again, in retrospect is not all that surprising for the generation in question.
The kids who grew up in this time related more to this foreign art form than they did anything in their own, and it's obvious why they connected to it more at the same time the artificial Geek Culture was at its cultural high. This stuff was simply more honest. It's also why anime would eventually overtake culture entirely. Everything else at the time was dying.
Looking back on it, where we are today was the obvious endpoint of that time, and those raging against it simply aren't trying to understand how it came about. We can't wish away reality, it simply is what it is. And this is how we got to where we are today.
The above video goes much more in depth showing many of these projects, what happened to them and their creators, and the sorts of things that would come out of it later on. Fanime still exists and still gets made, but the priority of the creators is much different in the scene than it once was. In fact, it wasn't long after the initial growth period that it would change entirely. It is funny however to see this scene contrasted with the fanfiction one from the same era. The Fanime one clearly contained those with more creative drive and potential, yet its the fanfiction one that spilled into the professional writing industry and helped drive it into the current ditch its in.
That aside, the entire subculture is much smaller than it was back in the day, splintering like every subculture has over the last two decades into a niche of a niche, but it's still an interesting subject to look over. It's something that could only have happened at one point in time in one age demographic, and it did. We will never see something similar arise again.
In a sense, Fanime still exists beyond its niche, it has just moved into other spaces. The amount of independent creators who work in other mediums from comics to animation inspired by anime only grows by the day and does not seem to be stopping anytime soon. You can see it everywhere, especially considering how anemic the mainstream western industry became pandering to fangirl shipping and trends from angry urbanites who hate their audiences, the alternative would always be much more appealing.
So take a look for yourself and see just what it was all about, and what this time period was like. Maybe you'll even be a little inspired yourself. Who knows? Things aren't always as simple as we might think they are, and this subject is one such topic.
Inspiration can strike anywhere at anytime, and it ways you might never expect. Let's just hope the next bout lasts a little longer and finally shifts this culture into better directions, and hopefully finally brings us back together again.
The last thing we need is to keep drifting.
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