Ugh, Aja is at it again

[cashew]

So, do any of the old Tenipuri fans remember back in the day when HP BNF bookshop (aka Aja) "discovered" Tenipuri and dragged her not insubstantial followers to the Tenipuri community then flooded it with Echizen/Tezuka fics?

No? Just me?

Well, now she's apparently pushing SDC on Vox. =.=

Uuuugh.

Yeah, I've got nothing. Just general bitching and annoyance.

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(I still remember arguing with an idiot who didn't understand that the Japanese school year doesn't start in the fall and therefore their entire math calculating the character's ages were wrong.)

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Edit to add:

SHE'S A MDZS FAN?! Gah. I guess now I know why that fandom went viral. =.=

Comments

[cashew]

It's less a concern about her ruining things as much as I'm annoyed at seeing Americans acting like they've discovered something new and amazing and just have to share a thing that's...y'know, already known by lots of people. It's more the attitude that rubs me wrong.

It likely would've gone popular in the west at some point, with or without the involvement of any specific BNF.

Yes, as my housemate likes to tell me.

[tanithryudo]

Eh, at least with Chinese stuff, I would put at least half...maybe 1/3...of the blame on the Great Firewall as anything else. Just so much of the Chinese entertainment industry just never makes it out of the country. Then even with the stuff that makes it out, you never know when they'll later disappear because of censorship or because some actor/ess made it onto the government's sh*t list.

[cashew]

I blame the great firewall for the shittiness of the entertainment in China, but it hardly prevents outsiders from looking in. The only thing the censorship does is block Chinese citizen's access to the outside, not the other way around. The IP region locked stuff is everywhere, e.g. Netflix, hardly unique to China.

Most of the stuff that does reach the West for whatever reason hardly goes away, like ever. That has nothing to do with the Chinese government and everything to do with YouTube having a braindead copyright policy.

[tanithryudo]

Eh, but IMO sharing culture and entertainment, even outwards, still is hampered if there's no two way communication. It's not easy for outsiders to look inside, to navigate the chinese sites and find the stuff, and they generally have to rely on official publishers to translate and publish the stuff, or for the some fan or fangroup to share the interest and do the translation work. But by and large, the majority fandoms inside China don't have the access to share their interests outwards.

[cashew]

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

If you're talking about different language fan circles interacting, that's immaterial to spreading interesting. For example, the anime industry has plenty of outside interest without the non-Japanese fan groups getting involved with the Japanese fan circle. Anime/manga entering the Western consciousness was the result of individual people being interested, starting translation groups, and getting the Japanese material out to the Western audience. As long as outsiders can see the material, fan group crossovers don't matter much. That's why fan subs/scanlations have a reputation of being terrible, since fan translators are often self-taught in Japanese, which can lead to incorrect translations of the language.

Seeing as the firewall blocks Chinese access to non-Chinese sites and doesn't block Western audiences from seeing Chinese material, I'm not sure how the firewall is relevant to your point.

If you're talking about commercial collaboration across borders, the firewall only mildly hampers things, but that's on the corporate level and doesn't really have anything to do with BNFs "discovering" a fandom/show/whatever and promoting it to their followers.

[tanithryudo]

Really? I've always thought the spread of anime started from shows like Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Power Rangers, etc. during afterschool broadcast TV. And games too, I suppose. I admit I haven't done a in depth study to see if there was already a widespread fanbase due to fan groups.

[cashew]

Depending on the franchise, the fanbase growth are different.

For example, Akira was already circulating in western circles before the start of corporate dubs. The Akira fansubs circulated in underground fan groups, which is what caught the attention of corporations that decided to bring it over.

Of course, anime has been imported into the US since as early as the 60's (and lots of US animation outsourced their art to Japanese animation studios, like a huge chunk of WB afternoon cartoons and the majority of Disney Afternoon stuff). But a lot of shoujo (sans Sailor Moon), seinen, and even more niche shounen material mostly starts off as fansub/scanlations. When the fanbase gets big enough, corporate jumps on the title and brings it over officially. The anime/manga industry leans pretty heavily on fansub/scanlations to check for which titles will go hot in the States before bringing the material over.

As for something like Pokemon, that's because of Nintendo's marketing, which doesn't really have to do with the fan driven import. Videogame marketing is a different kettle of fish and not really representative of the majority of the anime/manga import process.

Going back to MDZS, it doesn't seem that the franchise has any overseas marketing in the early adaptations (aka: no official English publication of the novel or English subs/dub for the cartoon). The TV show grew out of the previous two fandoms, and it seems like at that point MDZS grew big in the West, so they made an effort to capitalize on the existing fanbase. So yeah, there's multiple vectors of introduction for MDZS, but the initial foothold was the result of fans translating the original material.