As I have said before I am a fan of Anime and Manga, but more than that I am an Otaku, and I am proud to be one.  While some people might associate the term with negative or derogatory meanings or connotative implications, not to me, it simply means that I am a fan, a fan who has seen the ups and downs and stuck with my passion.  I appreciate that bringing new fans to the table is important, and one of my hope for this humble blog is to be an ambassador to the world of the North American Otaku.

 How did, I, a seemingly normal, rational person become an otaku you ask, easy by accident.  In junior high I happened to see a couple of anime videos that my older brother had rented, while he remains a casual fan I got hooked.  The first two anime that I remember seeing all the way through was a subbed VHS of Plastic Little : The Adventures of Captain Tita and a sub of Royal Space Force : Wings of the Honemiese.  While Plastic Little came as a shock to me for its massive fanservice (I had no idea such things could even be done in animation, I truly was an innocent) Royal Space Force was, and remains one of my favorites with its tremendous storytelling, plot and art, it showed that animation could be so much more than Disney-esque animation or thirty minute toy commercials.

     I find it interesting that I can track my fandom through time by the DVDs and VHS tapes of anime.  I am hardcore enough that when I got a DVD player I also invested in an LD player in case DVD didn't work out.  That was a needless worry thankfully, but I am determined to hold off on either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray untill it becomes clear who is going to win.  I see myself as being a part of the first group of fans that built upon what the earliest fans of the late seventies to mid eighties had begun with Beta fansubs and later small companies like Manga Entertainment and Animego  offering subed and later dubed VHS and tiny niche publishers like Raijin and Darkhorse turning out tiny amounts of translated, flopped and resized manga. 

     Based alomost entirely upon their founders passion they managed to survive, if not thrive and slowly grow a market, turning out what they did they had little reason to believe that they would eventually lead to the birth of a massive and growing sub-culture.  Then came fans like myself, looking for something different in the early to mid nineties we sought out new and different things and what we found was anime in our local video rental stores and manga in our comic shops.  We tried it, and we liked it, and this happened at just the right time, for at the same moment the internet became a phenomenon without paralell and suddenly we were no longer alone, wether we were in big cities or small towns we could find each other, and make our voices, and wallets heard.  Slowly more properties began to be licesenced, and the quality went up, and in some cases LDs of anime began to appear as if manna from heaven. 

     And we were content, but even we were blind sided by the phenomenon that was Pokemon.  Suddenly it became clear that with the right marketing strategy anime could sell in the US, and as a result sell all of the related spin off products, got get them all was perhaps the greatest tagline slash marketing slogan ever invented, it gave Nintendo a licesence to seemingly print money, and when it began to fade Dragonball followed close on its heels.  Suddenly a block of anime apperaed on Cartoon Network as Toonami, and htings looked even brighter.  But there was still more to come, some bright young exec at CN noted that there were people buying tapes and now DVDs of this anime stuff, so they rolled out [adult swim], anchored by shows from both east and west.  By 2001-2002 anime and manga were  common sites in stores, and their presence has continued to grow, and so long as people keep supporting it we can keep enjoying it.

Now here is a little reward for reading all of my semi coherent ramblings.

Posted by: raging tachikoma at 06:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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