Last week, I had the dubious honor of getting quoted in the same news article as Nazi Richard Spencer. Here’s Why There’s Anime Fan Art Of President Trump All Over Your Facebook is Buzzfeed’s Ryan Broderick’s attempt to make sense of the undeniable ties between anime fandom and the alt right, and figure out why that might be.
As usual, the answer is a lot more complicated than anyone expected. My take boils down to this: long before they were hotbeds of politics, sites like 4chan were initially created for talking about anime. When alt right rhetoric began to pop up on the forums we used to talk about anime, we were already there, hence the cultural intermingling.
Only, I’m not sure that my viewpoint got expressed perfectly in the article:
Lauren Orsini, a journalist who has written for outlets like CNN, Kotaku, and Forbes and specializes in Western anime fandom, told BuzzFeed News anime is just a niche interest that bored young men who feel isolated from society happen to like. They go to places like 2channel and 4chan to socialize over it and get radicalized.
“There’s a massive overlap between anime fans and the kind of people who never leave their computers,” she said. “And there’s an almost as big overlap between anime fans and people who spend a lot of time on online forums.”
While I think the Buzzfeed article tells an important and interesting story, it is still trying to depict a particular narrative, one that isn’t mine. I stand by my quote, but I don’t feel that the lead-in of “bored young men” is accurate for a few reasons. So let’s talk about it.
Who are anime fans?
The alt right is overwhelmingly male, but are anime fans? “I’ve never met a female anime fan in real life,” reads an Anime News Network comment in 2007.
For me, this is a surprising statement, since my anime fan history is overwhelmingly female. In middle school, I watched Revolutionary Girl Utena and Serial Experiments Lain at slumber parties. When I attended the historically all-female University of Mary Washington, our anime club was majority women. My husband, John, became the first male anime club president in school history during our senior year in 2008. So whose experience is closer to reality, that forum commenter’s, or mine?
It’s difficult to find anime fandom demographics, so I had to conduct my own study. In 2015, I requested demographic data from North America’s 10 largest conventions, and six responded. At all of them, women made up about 50% of attendance.
On the other hand, here’s a survey of Reddit’s r/anime community conducted in 2014. Only 7% of anime fans on that forum are female. In other words, what the data I collected really tells us is that when it comes to in-person anime gatherings, women are better represented.
In any case, anime creators seem to be hyper-aware of the idea that many disparate audiences consume anime, and they separate these by demographics. The categories of anime we know best—shounen, shoujo, seinen, josei—all refer to a specific age and gender demographic: boys, girls, men, women. That’s not to say that people only watch anime that matches their demographic, only that this is the initial marketing attempt.
“Bored” or savvy?
In the lead-in to my quote, I take almost as much offense to the precursor “bored” as I do to “young men.” Who doesn’t hang out in online forums because they’re bored? Instead, I think the overlap between the alt right and anime comes from anime fans’ computer literacy.
Forums like 4chan and Reddit have their own rules and idiosyncrasies. They take some experience in order to get up to speed with. You know what else is similar to that, at least until recently? Finding and watching anime.
Today anyone with a credit card can watch anime easily and cheaply on a digital streaming service like Netflix, Crunchyroll, Funimation, or Daisuki. But in the old days, when I was in high school and college, it wasn’t so simple, or above board for that matter. I could either go to places like Sam Goody and pay $30 for three episodes of Evangelion on VHS, or I could start some Limewire downloads before I left for school, and if I was lucky, they’d finish by evening. Piracy was not glamorous! (But now I’m grateful that it was such a slow, irritating slog that didn’t allow me to pirate very much, because I now feel so guilty about it that I’ve legally purchased everything I ever pirated, even if it was kind of crap.)
In other words, watching anime has long required a higher computer literacy than most Internet use requires. And its pirate legacy means the fandom has somewhat seedy origins, too. So I think anime fans are more comfortable than most people about hanging out at forums others might consider an online underbelly. The kind of places that alt right recruiters might go to spread their messages on the down low.
Final caveat
The Buzzfeed article focuses on young radicals who also love anime. That’s one story about an undeniable and fascinating sub-group of the fandom. But of course, most of us anime fans don’t fit into that group. We can like One Piece and not become radical nationalists, too!
My anime fan sub-group is in fact much different than the one in the article. Our politics tend to be liberal and accepting. The anime conventions I attend have things like gender neutral restrooms and introvert quiet areas. I also am part of a group blog called Anime Feminist. And even today, my community consists of mostly female fans, not male.
I don’t think the idea of anime fans as majority alt-right radicals is an accurate one. But my community doesn’t make up the majority either, not even close. There are around 20 million anime fans in America alone, and it’s impossible to discuss such a massive number as one group with common views and beliefs, other than of course “liking anime.”
Anime fandom is made up of many, many smaller groups with many, many disparate views. But it’s much easier to just attribute one set of characteristics to all of us. Ultimately, that’s why I thought it was vital to contribute to the Buzzfeed article. If we ignore the way we’re represented, then somebody else will gain control of the narrative.
Convention attendees at Anime Expo 2014, credit.
15 Comments.
Regarding anime fans being more computer-literate, I think it takes a certain kind of anime fan to attend fan gatherings. If you tend to have traits that are considered introverted, large conventions like AX/Otakon may not be the best for those fans. It takes a certain type of personality to handle specific types of gatherings. I do like large cons myself, but there are times where the amount of people tires me out. I don’t like to socialize that much or maybe I’m just too old to talk to kids sometimes.
And I wonder about the gaming community too, because sometimes, they get portrayed as alt-right because of the majority of members being young males who “love” violence. Yet more women are playing games, even if the percentages aren’t as high as female anime fans (35% vs 50%). I’ve hung around the Final Fantasy speedrunning communities and they are quite a mixed bag of folks.
Of course, I worry about encouraging the “Oh, we’re just awkward” narrative because there are nerds that are outgoing (which then leads into another conflicting narrative that nerds are supposed to be shy). Blargh, it never ends.
Agreed. I like to think that the misogynistic, racist, etc gamers out there are more the minority, they just happen to be very loud and vile thus their impact is far greater than their actual numbers.
I’ve heard figures that women are now 50% of gamers, though many of the jerks in the gaming community claim that they are mostly ones who play Facebook games or silly phone games.
@zoeliddel:disqus just wanna say PHONE GAMES ARE AWESOME. I’m all about Pokemon Go.
Naturally those are the same guys who will normally scream that a game isn’t a “real” game. Like a video game that goes into a social issue, or goodness forbid(!) a social justice issue, “That’s NOT a real game!!!”
Same with any games that are “artsy.”
There is a game I loved that I see reviews screaming it isn’t a real game.
The game is “Beyond Eyes.” You take on the role of a little girl who is blind. She’d befriended a cat and it was the only friend she had. The cat stops coming around so you, as her, cautiously go out beyond the world that is known to you (your yard,) to look for your friend. Naturally in the game you have to move slowly as you are using your other senses to interpret the environment around you, for some that is a problem. Anyway, it’s just a beautiful game with the water colors type graphics and how sound helps you “paint” in an area. It’s probably about as close as you can come to knowing what it might be like, at least a bit, to be blind.
Here’s the funny thing though – some (most?) of those who play FB/phone games don’t like to be classified along those who play console/PC games. They will be like “Ugggh, I’m not one of those CoD/GTA people. I’m different!”
I think there might actually have been a better spread on IRC based groups. I know I sat in a few chatrooms that had at least a few women participating that I knew, everyone else I didn’t quite ask. Then again, one of those channels was Shoujomagic.
@AsteriskCGY:disqus I think real anime fandom is around 50-50, but we definitely get these pockets where it’s majority men or majority women.
Oh sure, that has to be the case. And anyone can cut the group up to fit a specific subgroup, but in general it’s as fair as anything else should be.
[…] Who are anime fans, really? Our ties to the alt-right (Otaku Journalist) Our own Lauren Orsini responds to Buzzfeed’s article “Here’s Why There’s Anime Fan Art Of President Trump All Over Your Facebook” in which she was quoted, with a more nuanced look at how anime fandom and white nationalist politics came to (in places) intertwine. […]
From the data I’ve read between 50 and 75% of manga buyers are female. Anime and manga fandom overlaps significantly in the west so that’s a sign that women make up a fairly large segment of Anime fandom.
Great article. I do stories for the anime right news site. come check us out
#AnimeRight represent
[…] are we, really? Lauren at Otaku Journalist published an insightful look into anime fandom, both as a community and a population. From the media’s alt-right ties, to […]
im poppy
There’s a significant internet subculture that uses anime as part of something like a memetic alphabet, and when issues are discussed (or parodied) in that culture, normies stumble across it and draw the most idiotic conclusions they can, because that’s what normies do for kicks.
I really don’t like the term “alt-right” at all because of articles like the one you’re referring to. I think the term has become nothing more than a divisive tool that’s being used by the radical left in order to try and demonize everyone more than a centimeter to the right of Marx. If you’re a crazed racist swinging an axe around in a KKK robe with swastikas on it then you’re alt-right, but if you think there are systemic problems with the implementation of welfare which lead people to get trapped below the poverty line with no clear route for escape then you’re… Alt-right.
That’s not good.
This seems to be tied in with the same strategy that’s exploiting the chans in order to pretend that they’re some kind of high-tech groups of advanced social saboteurs on the radicalized right, while in reality the chans are mostly filled with neckbeard hikkikomori who are screaming into the wind precisely because they have no social influence. There’s evidence to suggest that old chan culture, such as chanology, has rolled itself into the antifa movement, which is a bunch of decidedly violent, authoritarian far-leftists.
Ultimately I think what’s effectively happened is that the chans have managed to troll all of society to the point of continual insanity, and now everyone is just seeing how far they can push everything until it breaks. It reminds me of the South Park episode, “Sarcastaball”, where everyone gets fed up and starts being sarcastic about everything and it just grows and grows until… Well…
In any case, there may be an evolutionary component to this. There’s an idea that societies that become too imbalanced in certain ways collapse under their own weight, as if all of their members have a subconscious urge to wipe the board clean and start over. Economic imbalance is the reason that’s usually focused on, but I think that our fundamental lack of purpose and respect for one another is really a far more serious issue in modern western culture.
Honestly, I’m torn about whether society is worth saving at this point. My real concern is what will replace it. I have a feeling that it won’t be anything good. All things said, we got a lot of things right in the west, and it really bothers me that there are so many people who are willing to rabidly bite the hand that’s fed them. When I see people attacking society itself over racism, sexism, gender issues, etc… The irony is sincerely painful. This is the very society that told us that we should stop treating one another like garbage over these kinds of things.
What are we turning in to?
Anyway, there’s my wall of text. This kind of stuff has been bothering me for a while now.
Thanks for your article, and for being a sane person in an insane world.