I didn't join anime clubs in my pre-university years. I did strongly suspect the Japanese Culture Society at my high school of being an anime club, though as a result I also felt a slight desire to go to their meetings, except I couldn't justify it to my parents so I never did.
I didn't join an anime club until much later, as a grad student looking to meet people on a campus I was new to and hoping to bond over some shared interests. Ironically, I missed out on my undergraduate university's club, which has an impressive collection of anime and manga, and often held showings in a pretty darn nice lecture hall. But I wasn't into anime back then. I think I visited their manga library like once (and didn't borrow anything).
The club at my first grad school was small, about 15 people max, about the same number of girls and guys, and generally quiet and willing to sit around to watch several episodes of something. They introduced me to some interesting stuff, from FMAB to several movies like the Cowboy Bebop movie and Tokyo Godfathers and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. A handful of us got used to hanging out after club, as we all liked to listen to J-pop/anisong/vocaloid music, and they introduced me to vocaloid music. We'd print out music scores for piano transcriptions of songs, and use the piano nearby to play them. Was a lot of fun, and a very cozy club atmosphere.
The club at my second grad school was quite different. It was larger, around 40 people max, and it also was a combined anime and gaming club, including both videogames and tabletop games, and they tried to do everything in one room, making club meetings very unfortunately noisy (so it was much harder to appreciate sound effects and music in shows). The club members (dominated by guys, incidentally) also tended to prefer watching single episodes of shows they picked out based on a theme, rather than watching several episodes of one show at a time. And people were rowdier -- more prone to cheering, jeering, and even blurting out spoilers. I ended up mainly trying to avoid club, despite knowing people from it, and instead preferring to meet nearby with some other club members and play D&D (in relative quiet compared to the club room). When D&D wasn't on, though, a smaller group of us club members did often hang out and watch our own choices of stuff sometimes.
Lessons learned:
* Small groups are cozier and more fun to hang out with, than large groups
* Chill people are more fun to hang out with than rowdy, hyped people.
* the anime fandom is made up of lots of people with a huge variety of interests and personalities. not everyone will be someone you can bond with over anime. heck, there's a ton of different anime series, even.
* I like watching stuff quietly and with focus and immersion, so there's merit to watching by myself. In fact, there's some merit to watching stuff without talking to people about it (or otherwise having a release), too -- it can keep emotions bottled up longer and maintain their intensity better.
* I also really appreciate the music, so I don't like the practice of shutting off an episode while the OP is still playing.
* It's not always easy to find something everyone in a group is willing to watch. It's even harder to guarantee that people are willing to watch more than one episode of it. |