Anime Tourism

thewiru said:
On the Tourist Question

I have am ambivalent relationship with the term "Tourist".
In one hand it has become a buzzword to mostly RW culture warriors (Some who are likely tourists themselves) as a form of Neo-McCarthyism, which in turn make a lot of discussions very hard to have lest you wanna get accused of being one...
...and in the other hand, it's such an useful term that describes a certain phenomena that I always end up "deriving it" by accident.

For those out of the loop, "tourist" means the same as "poser", but with some extra nuance. It comes from an analogy with certain types of gentrification: Just like literal tourists expressing their complaints about the places they're visiting and demanding changes, even though they've mostly only experienced a small and very shallow part of that place, and wouldn't be negatively affected by such changes, compared to the native people's of that land.

A small problem with that analogy is that it leads some (Specifically some of the aforementioned culture warriors) to take it a bit literally and say that certain (Usually pretty dumb) criticisms are "attacks on Japanese culture".
I think it's very important for me to clarify here: "Otaku culture" isn't the same thing as "Japanese culture". Otaku culture is a sub-culture which you could say, at many times, was at odds with Japanese culture. You may take this as a "negative" (I personally take it as a positive), but my point is that the "nationalistic" approach to this is wrong: Tezuka didn't support counter-cultural movements to oppose the US government, but to oppose the Japanese one. Likewise, it wasn't American PTA's Nagai Go was fighting against, but Japanese ones.

But why did it come to popularity in the later years? I feel that to explain that one must first talk about the western community in the late-90's and early 2000's:
You could say that anime was "mainstream" back there, with people watching on TV, though many not even knowing it was anime. There would also be other community, those who would rent/buy OVA's that would come with the option of watching it with the original audio, and later people who would just straight up pirate anime on the internet.
By doing so, not only they would HAVE to watch anime subbed, but they would be exposed to watch the Japanese fan community was actually liking and watching, instead of only what was filtered to the western market.
Such "filter removal" had it's consequences: You had the "manime vs moe" wars, which the former side was apparently surprised that what was on Toonami wasn't representative of what Japanese otaku liked, and eventually lost.
You also had the popular in the popular at the time discourse of "Anime used to be better", which was usually them comparing cherrypicked anime from a 10 year period and comparing to the unfiltered list of the current year anime.

The point is: Those communities became divides, having no contact with one another, and with time the "TV community" died in terms of relevance.
I won't say that the age which preceded this was perfect, but if to say "I am A" is the same as saying "I am not not-A", you could say that the community developed a certain identity around the denial of certain groups and types of people that they disliked, behaviors they disliked, and would find in anime and it's community a "natural fortress" that "filtered people in" and "would make certain people not want to get in". Hence why to this day you see the prevalence of the term "gatekeeping", even though it doesn't mean anything other than a buzzword nowadays.

As I wrote in Is "being an otaku" more about the mentality, watching a lot of anime rather coming as a consequence of that?, there was a certain process of "assimilation" in there: You would get into the community, would find certain things "weird" at first, but with time would see that those "are actually pretty fine".
I don't know why that happened, just that it happened, like someone who does something without knowing the science behind it... which makes it very hard to "replicate at will" when you need it, and that became part of the problem:
The fact of of whether or not you had normalized certain things (The most used examples usually being being OK with anime having incest, loli, shota, fanservice, etc) as an in-group/out-group signaler. The so-called "gatekeeping" would work in the ways of essentially saying "Hey, that's what this community is, so you're either OK with it, or you go make your on", and it just so happened that people who didn't want to make an effort of being a bit more open-minded and/or sincere wouldn't want to make the bigger effort of building their own communities.

This started to change with what people called "the COVID era" (Though realistically it had already started a couple years prior) where people WOULD create those communities, not out of effort, but out of sheer numbers.
Anime stopped being something "you would have to travel to the mountains to learn with the monks living there" and became "extensions of what people were already doing": You wouldn't have people going to anime groups and then making a MAL account, you would have people who already watched TV/Streaming series and had an IMDB account simply use that same account for the anime they watched Dubbed on Netflix.

People essentially felt that their "handcrafted communities" were being diluted in a sea of "superficiality": You wouldn't have those people eventually going deeper into the medium, they lacked the curiosity. They would usually watch certain popular, usually battle-shounen anime for maybe 1-2 years and then dip to another trend.
It was a sort of recreation of that 90's/2000's period, but worse, for while in that first one you would have people with no relation to anime and
hardcore fans, you now had a strange, third group. For that group, anime was "a trend", "an aesthetic", not something they really consumed or got deeper into. It's the "90's filter" TikTok that doesn't look like any 90's anime, it was a dollhouse for some people, with dolls for you to play however you wanted, and if the origin and/or message of those dolls conflicted your play, then you complained.
It wasn't that "the anime community expanded", but rather that other communities started to adopt certain surface aesthetics of anime as their own, and with that merged those with their own previous problems. For them, it didn't matter that a large part of anime and otaku culture came from fetishistic pornography, counter-cultural movement and weirdos with niche interests: If such things put their "social status" in danger, then it should be cut, not caring for the people who built such community over years and that would still be there after they dipped out after two years.

This mostly talked about the more normie and certain left-ish tourism. There's also the right-wing one... which is again an example of "other communities started to adopt certain surface aesthetics of anime as their own, and with that merged those with their own previous problems": Mostly people who already made similar culture war content for movies, series and video-games, a lot of those who """got into anime""" through (Mostly chinese or korean) mobile gacha games and absolutely atrocious posts about Sousou no Frieren.
I don't have much to talk about them, because very few actually get relevant in it for the reason that anime channels in general don't get very big, so it makes way more sense to just have a culture war channel that sometimes posts some anime-adjacent-related culture war stuff.
Usually the ones who get more relevancy were the ones who were previously anime-focused channels which over time pivoted more and more to culture war content: It usually gives more views, so even if they don't consciously notice, they're conditioned into wanting to make more of that and less of simply anime. It's easier to make, and culture war gives a bigger "emotional high". Though for this later group I don't think it would make sense to call them "tourists", as much as I'm not the biggest fan of them.

There's not much to be made about the tourism problem, but there are certain things: Make yourself present, make yourself shine, make yourself be heard.
Just go to places where a lot of tourists are and start sharing higher-level content, start demanding a higher-level there: Post about anime that normies usually don't talk about, post about older ones, not trying to "boast", but acting like it's most normal thing in the world (Because in a good anime community, it should be) in a way that will peer pressure some into wanting to go deeper. Correct people when they're wrong, post exclusively about subs, seiyuu, post fanservice, post loli, post shota, post incest, post eroge, but NOT in a "performative way", not in a "Reddit way", and not "because I ask you to": Do it naturally, do it because you like those things, show the love of an otaku for what they love. Do it side-by-side with other anime posts, because it's all part of the same big thing.

thewiru said:
I wrote a blogpost