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To any and all anime fans reading this page: Who am I, and why do I want to do a dissertation on anime fans? In a nutshell, I’m a graduate student majoring in Social Foundations of Education (no, I don’t know what it is either) trying to get a Ph.D. To earn a Ph.D. in the United States, you basically have to take a few years worth of courses and find about 3-5 professors who will agree to serve on your “doctoral committee”. This committee determines whether or not you get the degree. For them, you have to finish a number of exams called “comps” or “quals” (depending on where you go to school), write up and defend a proposal for a book called a “prospectus”, and then write that book called a “dissertation”. So it’s courses, exams, a proposal, and then a book, and boom, you’re Dr. So-and-so. Yay. I’m done with the first three now, so all I have to do is write this book. It will be nowhere near as entertaining as Harry Potter or a Yu Watase or Akira Toriyama manga, depending on your tastes. In fact, it will probably bore you to tears except for the part where I throw up after I watch my roommate play Kingdom Hearts (true). Unless you’ve had college and even graduate-level courses in fields like anthropology, education, media studies, and sociology, a lot of it will go over your head. It’s meant to serve one purpose only – to be read by 3-5 people with Ph.D.’s so they give the writer a Ph.D. after he or she defends it in front of them, usually with high blood pressure and a lot of sweat in their armpits. That’s it. It’s not meant to cure cancer or make it to the New York Times bestseller list. It might, but most don’t. Still, this book is a lot more than that to me. I didn’t want to just swoop down on some group of people I had never met before, take a bunch of notes on them and their friends, write a book, and forget about them. That wouldn’t be very fun, and I would likely make some people angry and get a lot of things wrong. Think about articles you’ve read on video games, anime, and manga in the big newspapers, or shows about them on T.V. Do they usually get them or their fans right? Of course not, because they’re usually journalists and writers on a deadline who know little about what they’re writing, and they have to sell newspapers and airtime for ads meant for other people who also know little about what they’re writing. So what do they concentrate on? The kinky and violent stuff you probably don’t play, watch, or read (or if you do, probably not that much of it), because it sells newspapers and ad time. Before you know it, people think you’re some psychopathic pervert who only watches anime tentacle rape porn, and your parents are scanning every last manga volume you bought at Borders to scold you for looking at bare-breasted drawings of Akane in her bathtub from Ranma ½. Even as a fan myself, I’m going to get it wrong too. I’ve been into anime and have actively been involved in anime fandom for five years now, but compared to a lot of you, I’m still a newbie at it. And like the journalists, I too am writing for a very specific audience who isn’t you, so I’m going to say things that will probably make you shake your head or put down my writing in disgust. “Like what?” you might ask. I don’t know for sure, but I can address one general complaint I have gotten so far. Some fans complain that I’m too quick to categorize them, to put them in little mental boxes and say that they do things or like certain shows because someone else told them to. In other words, I strip fans of their individuality and say, “They act this way because of this or that.” On some level, that’s true, but let me explain. I work within the broader field of social scholarship. Fields like anthropology, education, media studies, and sociology assume that human beings are not totally self-made individuals. You probably didn’t make up whatever language you speak yourself, completely invent your entire belief system out of nothing, totally teach yourself everything you know, or design your own clothes from scratch. At some level, the person you and I are is a product of the society that we were raised in or continue to live in. It doesn’t mean that we’re mind-numbed robots who only do things we’re told to do. It’s just that we’re inclined to believe and act in certain ways at certain times, because we often have few reasons not to. To give ourselves a sense of belonging and understanding the world, we tend to think of a group of similar people as being “like us”, and consequently, we often group people who aren’t “like us” into a mental category called “them”. When people “like us” believe or do certain things, and these things seem to work for them, then we’re likely to believe or do similar things. This gives us a sense of understanding ourselves and our world, and shows to others that we really do belong in the “us” camp in some way. They usually don’t even have to tell us to; we often learn what is “good” and “bad” in the “us” group just by watching and listening to others we think of as being in that group. Anime fans, like everyone else, are also unique and complex people who can and do defy explanations of who they are and why they do the things they do. Anime fans who are involved in the fandom through clubs, conventions, and the Internet are, generally speaking, creative, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable people. This is why I like studying them, and partly the reason why I like to identify with them (my collection of digisubs downloaded off of bittorrent notwithstanding). My work will not be the definitive answer to everything about anime fans. No book can be that. What it hopefully will do is produce a theory that can tell us how people in North America become fans, and what they teach and learn about Japanese culture as fans living in this North American society. That’s still a tall order, and considering that I’m only hanging out with and interviewing a limited number of fans, it’s probably going to be wrong in a lot of places. Still, fear of being wrong sometimes, or even a lot of the time cannot prevent people from doing research. Even in giving wrong answers, we get closer to finding answers that are more right than others. This is part of the huge task of advancing knowledge and trying to build a better world worth living in that scientists and scholars work on every day. And to not make my years of graduate school a waste of time. That would be bad. Very bad. So if you come across something I write about you as a fan that seems overly complicated, silly, condescending, or just plain wrong, please remember that I’m writing for a very specific audience to answer a very specific question in a very specific style of writing. Better yet, email me and tell me where I’m overly complicated, silly, condescending, or just plain wrong; you’re probably right in some way, and can help me improve my thinking and writing. Don’t be intimidated by some guy with a bunch of degrees writing with 50 cent words; I will likely give your comments some serious thought and write back. Then, with a bit of luck, more people will read my work, and less people will think of you as a psychopathic pervert and more as an interesting person with a cool international hobby, so you're helping both of us. In short, I don't want to be a know-it-all, will never know it all, but with some digging and thinking, and with your help, we can all know a little more about ourselves and this mix of players, artists, writers, thinkers, and geeks we call a fandom. I'm part of it, and it has a story that deserves to be told. I want to be one of those tellers. Best to you all,
Brent Allison
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