How do you feel about the kind of fans that downtalk general R1 buyers for not supporting the anime industry more through imports?
I think now that access is no longer a barrier of entry, fans who have built a sense of self-worth around being "elite" have to come up with new ways to behave like gatekeepers, and that's one of them.
Everyone has access to everything now and you can't, like, point to your horde of VHS fansubs (that you refuse to share) and proclaim yourself to be the Lord God Otaku anymore. Now it's about reading fan-translated light novels and VNs and telling people that if they're only watching the anime adaptation they're plebeian babies who could never understand the story, or, perhaps more insidiously, that in order to be a "real fan" you have to pay insane Japan prices for import copies of blurays that don't have English-language options.
The idea that supporting the R1 industry doesn't actually help the Japanese companies that produce this stuff is rooted in two things: one, an age-old grudge that the R1 industry "took away" fansub culture and produces an inferior product, and two, a lack of understanding about how the business works. Saying that buying a Sentai Filmworks release doesn't help the anime industry because it's an American company means you're not familiar with what a minimum guarantee is or what royalties are.
I mean, the idea that you'd get so elitist and exclusionary about your fandom that you'd try and chastise people for not contributing to the industry in the "best" way when they're buying legally licensed products approved by the company that produced them after receiving a hefty per-episode sum in exchange for the rights is absurd anyway.
Everyone has access to everything now and you can't, like, point to your horde of VHS fansubs (that you refuse to share) and proclaim yourself to be the Lord God Otaku anymore. Now it's about reading fan-translated light novels and VNs and telling people that if they're only watching the anime adaptation they're plebeian babies who could never understand the story, or, perhaps more insidiously, that in order to be a "real fan" you have to pay insane Japan prices for import copies of blurays that don't have English-language options.
The idea that supporting the R1 industry doesn't actually help the Japanese companies that produce this stuff is rooted in two things: one, an age-old grudge that the R1 industry "took away" fansub culture and produces an inferior product, and two, a lack of understanding about how the business works. Saying that buying a Sentai Filmworks release doesn't help the anime industry because it's an American company means you're not familiar with what a minimum guarantee is or what royalties are.
I mean, the idea that you'd get so elitist and exclusionary about your fandom that you'd try and chastise people for not contributing to the industry in the "best" way when they're buying legally licensed products approved by the company that produced them after receiving a hefty per-episode sum in exchange for the rights is absurd anyway.
