Anime Fans Online

Story

Otaku Unite! looks at anime fandom in the U.S. and examines it’s growth from the earliest imports to the latest conventions. The film makers talked to people in the industry, long time fans and people at anime conventions. A fairly wide range of opinions are covered on several topics of interest to American anime fans, including the term otaku itself.

My Opinion

This is where the documentary breaks down. Switching back and forth between clips of different people giving their opinion on what otaku means causes the film to lose direction. Going from the purist who believes “otaku” means the same thing here that it does in Japan, to those that are embracing the identity and are proud to be part of the otaku culture can get a bit frustrating at times. It’s the same argument that anime fans get into on forums around the net, but without the ability to be a part of the discussion.

Fans who are even marginally active in the fan community will be familiar with a lot of what is presented. People who aren’t anime fans may not have enough familiarity to really understand what’s going on, even more so if they’re not part of any fandom at all. Once again “normal” people have the opportunity to point and laugh at the weirdos dressing up in ridiculous outfits.

Is it worth it?

I can’t really recommend Otaku Unite! because it really missed it’s target, whatever that target could have possibly been. The questions raised don’t matter to mundanes and otaku have covered them repeatedly. Otaku Unite! comes across as more of a home movie than a documentary.

Anime, Conventions, Fandom, Fans, Reviews

Yes it has been a while. If any of the regular readers are still around here’s an explanation of what happened. I feel like I owe it to you to fill you in on what caused Anime Fans Online to be down so often. Even though I’m just a writer, I feel kind of bad about it.

It seems that the old servers used by 451 Press just couldn’t keep up with the work load. A lot of us were pretty much unable to get anything done due to the sick and wheezy performance of the old things. We’d occasionally log in and try to write something only to get a message that the server was under “High Load”, but that was only the beginning. The warnings became more frequent and more frustrating. The head honcho finally had to put ‘em down. It was sad, kind of like Old Yeller.

On the bright side he’s even further in debt now. How’s that a bright side? Well, he’s in debt because he bought us some brand new hardware. From the little bit I’ve heard about our shiny new toys, it sounds like he went for the good stuff. Fast, spacious and with lots and lots of memory. Not only that he upgraded our blogging software, though I suspect that cost substantially less money. It should be a while before we start feeling more growing pains. At least hardware related ones.

Now all I have to do is get back in the groove of writing as much as possible. That is going to be tough to do after going for so long without being able to post.