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[PfantzyPantz]

One of my earlier memories was sitting with my dad as he flipped through the channels. He landed on Ninja Scroll and maybe thought it was something I could watch, but then came the licking scene.

To this day I only associate Ninja Scroll with that scene.

 

[Plywood]

Blame Moe.

 

[Strangelove77]

It's called "Japanimation", sheeple. Say it right.

 

[Quasar]

Good god. How many people in this thread were exposed to Ninja Scroll way too early in their lives?

That just reminds me of my early exposure to Urotsukidōji.

But yeah I was exposed to Ninja Scroll early too. That came from being a tabletop gamer and lover of ninja and samurai and stuff. Searching for anime about ninja and things led me to that.

 

[ponpo]

Anime is mainstream normie shit now. Don't professional sports players tweet out photos of their dakimakuras?

 

[Snaku]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mQScjlXbBE

Bam, nailed it.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Opinion of it has always been mixed but it takes time for detailed preconceptions and stereotypes of consumers to build.

Possibly negative views have changed. Weird super deformed characters, terrible quality animation, nonsensical plots with too much violence, tentacles. Then something like Cowboy Bebop comes out. Then somehow anime becomes all love cushion waifus. Adult in jokes based on shows with girls who all look 8 years old. Anime becomes known for being super derivative and stale. Then you get something like Attack on Titan or One Punch Man.

 

[BocoDragon]

In the early-mid-90s in North America, before Pokemon made anime air on TV in droves, and anime fandom was this very known commodified thing, anime was cool.

The stuff we tended to get was only the remarkable stuff: the particularly violent, sexual or cerebral. We discovered it in the same way we discovered porn or weed... Via the underground. Word of mouth.

Of course it was kind of an illusion, tinged with foreign orientalist appeal etc. And as soon as the floodgates opened after 1998, it started merging with the otaku culture of Japan.... And then yeah, it became the nerdy thing it was always destined to be.

 

[Phatmac]

It's strange considering that anime got popular in the US in the late 90's with main stream shows making it acceptable in normal society yet most drop the whole medium a couple of years later. With this thread you have older folks saying its all shit now when they haven't even seen a new show in years. Anime has had a resurgence in this decade with tons of great shows coming out each year so I don't really get why some people have preconceived notions of it being shit when it's not if you know what you want to watch. Anime is probably watched by more people online then ever before.

 

[captainpat]

Unless it's like South Park or the Simpson, animation aiming at anything other than kids has never really been super popular.

 

[WaffleTaco]

If it's not Dragonball Z or Naruto then yeah...it's still considered geeky. It's not like necessary a bad thing though, unless you only watch anime. Everyone has things they like and geek out over. For a majority here it is/was video games. However it's only considered geeky if you have like collectibles and other random stuff that is video game related.

 

[darkside31337]

It's strange considering that anime got popular in the US in the late 90's with main stream shows making it acceptable in normal society yet most drop the whole medium a couple of years later. With this thread you have older folks saying its all shit now when they haven't even seen a new show in years. Anime has had a resurgence in this decade with tons of great shows coming out each year so I don't really get why some people have preconceived notions of it being shit when it's not if you know what you want to watch. Anime is probably watched by more people online then ever before.

Yeah I keep seeing this shit in this thread and I don't get it. Crunchyroll has 700,000+ active paying subscribers with the number going up every month. Its more mainstream now than it ever was outside of that period in the late 90s with Pokemon being a phenomena.

 

[BocoDragon]

I think its cool underground status in the 90s led to a backlash about a decade later. The Ninja Scoll kids had hyped the medium into being this perfect and pure thing at the same time that the medium was clearly just as much typified by moe waifus etc. There was a backlash, some of it by the Akira kids themselves who woke up to the full breadth of anime (or "anime had changed" is how they would likely put it), some of it directed against that generation who had overhyped it to a point of self-parody.

Meanwhile it was mainstreamed after Pokemon, hit a peak of DVD sales in the early 2000s, and then settled into being just another normal element of the pop culture landscape as we moved into the streaming generation....

I think it's neither cool nor hopelessly geeky now. It is, however, highly unremarkable at this point.

 

[FriedConsole]

From the late 90s to the early 2000s anime was kinda considered mainstream. But today, yeah it has a limited niche audience.

Yeah back then if you liked anime you just liked anime. Now there is the whole anime culture. I think less people want to get into anime because they don't want to be part of that culture. I actually agree anime is becoming less mainstream to like.

 

[MrCunningham]

I still remember when '80's cartoons was really just Japanimation in disguise with western created character designs and storyboards. Like 90% of Western animation use to be outsourced to Japanese studios until they started asking for too much money and everything made the shift to South Korean animation. Though the first Japanese anime that I was ever exposed to was the Canadian dub of the 1980's Astroboy and the original Speed Racer. Though at the time I had no idea these cartoons were from Japan, but I do remember thinking about how weird they looked in comparison to everything else, and the credits were full of names that I just couldn't pronounce. I do remember anime picking up in popularity in the mid '90's on Canadian TV, with shows like Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Sailor Moon, and the specialty channels were more open to airing Anime movies.

I think some of those were considered to be kind of geeky.

 

[A Link to the Past]

Isn't anime more mainstream than it ever was? I'm talking as someone who doesn't really watch anime myself. :v

 

[Cilla]

Mainly to people who can't differentiate between cartoons and anime I think.

No one judges me for liking anime. Only for being obsessed with a character to the point of having a legit crush. That's bad.

 

[spekkeh]

Well, I was super into Fist of the North Star, Akira, Gunnm, etc. I also played Dungeons and Dragons. Nobody else really was around me (on both cases).

I think if anything it was more geeky back then. Like the internet and pop culture has now made geeky okay, that wasn't really true back in the day.

 

[Arcayne]

Not imo. Anime is either cool or creepy; "ultra geeky" is like star wars or something.

 

[Cilla]

Not imo. Anime is either cool or creepy; "ultra geeky" is like star wars or something.

Star Wars is pretty mainstream. I wouldn't call it ultra geeky.

 

[Arcayne]

It's place in popular culture is mainstream, absolutely. But the movies themselves, followed by the fan fanaticism, is fairly geeky.

 

[rpmurphy]

Star Wars is pretty mainstream. I wouldn't call it ultra geeky.

Star Wars still got that geek factor to it as far as its fandom goes (Harrison Ford on Conan bit the other day). Mainstream geek, more like.

Just geeky is Star Trek.

 

[Phatmac]

Yeah I keep seeing this shit in this thread and I don't get it. Crunchyroll has 700,000+ active paying subscribers with the number going up every month. Its more mainstream now than it ever was outside of that period in the late 90s with Pokemon being a phenomena.

That too plus most anime fans probably watch it illegally considering lots of shows arent licensed in any major streaming service. It's big but like most media isn't talked about as much since getting a big cultural hit is rare since people watch tv less.

 

[Lafiel]

Does it really matter if it's considered a ultra-geeky hobby? I mean you are posting at NeoGAF so by most definitions you are already pretty far on the "geek" scale to begin with. Although I have found among a lot of the people I know that anime is more socially acceptable than you'd think.

 

[Rebel Leader]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mQScjlXbBE

I know the 2 characters in the beginning from some animes... I just can't place it

 

[rpmurphy]

I know the 2 characters in the beginning from some animes... I just can't place it

FLCL?

 

[Nottle]

Anime had its mainstream moments with DBZ, Naruto, and AoT, but when the most popular anime in Japan are blatantly driven by over-seualizing characters because fans eat that shit up, anyone coming into the genre is bound to have their "this is messed up moment" between 3000 year old dragons, schoolgirls fighting in string bikinis, and jiggling boobs.

Which sucks, because Paprika was supposed to show the world the impossible possibilities anime could visually portray. Paprika is unfilmable for that very reason; its whole plot depends on what is wholly unique to the medium of animation. Anime could have been a host to a new wave of creativity and techniques, but it was more profitable to pander than to create cool new worlds. Don't get me wrong, I know the counter-examples to this but when something like "Monster Musume" becomes popular over a glorious piece of weirdness and creativity like "Nichijou", it shows where the priorities are at.

I sort of feel like this is a problem every medium runs into now days. Think about video games or Hollywood movies. We have so many people talking about how big video games are moving towards this genre of shooter mixed with light rpg skill systems and lots of violence. It's what sells. Same with Hollywood, studios want to be part of the trend, Harry Potter and Twilight were popular, better adapt more young adult fiction to movies.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I know the 2 characters in the beginning from some animes... I just can't place it

They are called anime boy and anime girl from the show anime.

 

[Rebel Leader]

FLCL?

Yea you're right after googling

 

[John Kowalski]

FLCL?

pretty funny that fuki kuri is the "normal" anime

 

[MogCakes]

ITT ultra-geeks ponder what the term "ultra-geek" means to normal people.

 

[RedSwirl]

I'm surprised not too many responses in this thread have brought up how the market in Japan itself and macroeconomic factors affected anime and its perception abroad. I'm not gonna post that neojapanese article again though.

Short answer to the OP's question: Anime is "ultra-geeky" today because anime studios right now are forced to target the ultra-geek audience.

When you think about it, back in the 80's which people call the "bubble economy era" concerning Japan's economy, Japan was the rising industrial country of the day -- the place where labor was in high demand (the US was in sort of the same state in the 50's and 60's). For some reason someone who's done more research has probably already figured out, that has some kind of affect on a country's artistic output. The labor situation is probably why so much western animation from that era was actually Japanese. People in this thread have already talked about the cool cult stuff that would filter across the Pacific in those days, but in Japan itself I think there was also more money going around to pump into high-quality movies and OVAs and things like that. There was more money available to put into artistically-risky ideas. It's how shows like Legend of the Galactic Heroes were possible. Today the countries occupying that economic status are places like China, South Korea, and Indonesia. You could argue a similar effect occurred in South Korean film a few years ago or with how big K-pop and K-drama have gotten today. Hell, maybe even Poland's video game industry is another example of rising artistic output from a rising industrial power.

The reason anime started to feel mainstream from the late 90's to around 2007 is because the western anime distribution market was pretty much a bubble during that time period. If you find articles about and interviews with people who worked in companies like Funimation or Geneon you'll see that most of them were flinging out any anime license they could get from Japanese IP holders. The Japanese IP holders often bundled licenses together too -- you couldn't get this one potentially great show without also licensing like five other shows that had no chance of mainstream appeal outside Japan. Then in 2007 and 2008 the bubble popped only to be followed by the global economic panic which I understand hit Japan pretty hard.

According to that neojapanese article (which I'm surprised no one has linked yet) mainstream consumers in Japan basically stopped spending money on entertainment after that. Because of that anime studios and other entertainment companies had to focus much harder on the otaku niche. It's a reliable fan base, but anything targeted to that niche to the exclusion of everybody else is gonna be a hard sell in western countries.

 

[MissDeviling]

On another note its totally different in China than in the West.

Somehow in the west you have the "weeaboos", that revolve their life around anime, waifus whatever. but in China Anime/Manga are actually an accepted medium.
I actually havent encountered one of those obnoxious fans here. Quite contrary I know a lot of people who like anime (especially One Piece is extremely popular here and Fate/Stay Night besides 80s anime) and you would never notice that these people like anime, build Gunplas etc.
Even at conventions they actually act like decent human beings, not what I encountered at german anime conventions.

Of the Chinese people I know who are into anime, I've never felt embarrassed to be with them and talk to them about anime. They talk about them like normal shows. Non-Chinese fans I know and some I've seen at Canadian conventions vary wildly, some being really loud and embarrassingly awkward.