supernicolasman said:Hi,
I was just wondering when you stop being considered a newbie in the medium of anime?
I also wanted to know if anyone knew the different stages/levels of anime fandom and what they represent.
Thank you for your response. I'd say it's really dependent on you feeling like you're actually able to talk to someone about anime.
And this in turn depends on who you want to talk to, and what you want to talk about.
"Anime" isn't one monolithic solid thing. It's actually a bunch of different genres, each of which has a bunch of shows, each of which has a little fandom, but these fandoms are united mainly by convenience because everyone to varying extents likes some Japanese pop culture and it's mutually beneficial to share info on it.
If you do hang around anime news sources for a while you will pick up on industry trends, which in turn can tell you about the industry and perhaps the fandom as a whole, but that's not necessarily going to tell you much about individual franchises and genres, which fans are generally more concerned with.
Similarly, if you watch a franchises or genre for long enough you'll become quite familiar with that.
You really shouldn't concern yourself too much with this question of whether you're a "newbie". Because it doesn't matter all that much, unless you plan on wading your way into internet arguments where people would try to press each other to prove that they're not "newbies"...which is a bad idea because getting involved in arguments on the internet is a bad idea anyway. Otherwise, there's generally no need to present yourself as an "experienced anime fan" (or whatever the antonym of newbie is) -- just talk about the anime itself, rather than using it as your token for social posturing.
As for "stages", there's at least one youtube video about this -- Gigguk's "Life Cycle of an Anime Fan", which someone else already posted -- but it's a very satirical video and not really representative of everyone's path through the fandom, but just people who interact/socialize with it in a specific way.
I'd say it's more like this:
1. Most people start off liking one or a handful of specific shows.
2. Then they talk to other people about those shows, and find out about more shows like those.
3. Assuming they keep going and end up watching all those shows, they'll gradually build up a list of assorted shows they've watched, and also find themselves talking with people about the broader topic of anime more often.
4. If you're talking about "anime fan" as a whole rather than just a specific series fan, then there's some point at which the person starts recognizing that they basically have too many different shows they've seen that they can't keep track of them in their head, and if they care enough, then they'll start doing things to help jog their memory...such as making a list of what they've seen. This is risky, because it can make individual series start to feel like "one of many" rather than "a special thing to me", but this point is also arguably the point at which a person starts seeing the entire anime medium as a thing that they think about categorically, rather than just about individual series. |