Jonathan_Clements

Well, corny and farfetched anime are corny and farfetched, but anime is an entire medium. You might as well ask us what we find so special and entertaining about "books", or "films". Trust me (and trust a whole bunch of angry reviewers), we have plenty of anime we can't stand. We are not apologists for the whole genre by any means. In fact, in the eyes of some of our detractors, we despise almost all of it.

Everybody's taste is different, and I am sure there is an anime for you, mergerr, you just haven't run into it yet. There are thousands of anime, and I bet there is one out there with your name on it.

As for the fetish... even though modern fans have often grown up with anime/games/manga as the norm in their lives, I think there is still a sense of resistance and defiance. Many anime fans are still created out of a sense of pushing back against the Disney machine or similar home-grown modes of storytelling. Sometimes, this means they simply accept the cliches of the Bandai machine instead, or something similar, but nevertheless, I think many anime fans are looking for something different, and certainly find it.

This doesn't mean anyone should watch The Gigalo.

In China, the food, the bookshops, and the fact that I speak enough of the language to communicate on a human level.

In Japan, the civility and the culture. Honestly, I come from a place where people stare at you if you read a book on the train. My first train trip in Japan, when I was just 20 years old, and suddenly everybody else on the carriage had their nose in a book. I knew I’d found my people. Oh, so yes, the bookshops, too. I am sensing a pattern here.

In Finland, the women. You would not believe your eyes.

I think I might disappoint you, makka-kit, when I say that Kill la Kill didn’t make that much of an impression on me. I did notice the fan-service, of course, but it didn’t strike me as any more or less fan-servicey than that in, say, Queen’s Blade. The transformation scenes were plainly a wobblier, bawdier variant on Sailor Moon, itself a homage of sorts to Cutie Honey. I don’t like fan service in general. In fact, I don’t even like the term fan service. It’s not just about the objectification, it’s the implication that if the show sucks, it’s the fans’ fault!

Ha! Are you aware of the misery and pain that goes into choosing the title of an anime magazine? There were weeks and weeks of fighting over Manga Max, and dozens of rejected titles. My advice, which nobody ever heeds, is to do everything you can to keep the words anime or manga out of your magazine title, because they become limiting. If your magazine is called Anime Planet, then people will complain if you cover manga. You’ll be called names if you run an article about a live-action film. I’m getting flashbacks…

The first three genre magazines I think of – Newtype USA, Otaku USA and Neo (in the UK), all avoid using the words anime and manga. But I bet Helen has something to say about this, because she’s the one who came up with Anime UK…

I'm still trying to get my thoughts in order about the Manga-Anime Guardians. At one level, it reminds me of JAILED, which was a similar initiative in the USA about 16 years ago. It came in with a huge fanfare, but suffered a backlash among fans with entitlement issues, and so soon started to operate below the radar.

What I find most amazing about the Manga-Anime Guardians is that they have produced this piece of artwork showing a bunch of anime characters all hanging out together. There's Naruto there, sitting with Luffy from One Piece, and Boy Detective Conan... and I'm thinking to myself, that must have been an utter, utter negotiatory nightmare to get all those creators to sign off on it.

I don't follow the fansubbing world -- one would hope that they are dedicating themselves to all sorts of obscurities now that so many things are being simulcast. Yes, yes, I know, one would hope.

I am equally ignorant about the scanlation world. I know that prices have fallen so far in manga translation that it's very difficult to make a living as a professional at it any more. I haven't translated manga for years, mainly because the last time someone offered me a translation job, they were paying $18 a day.