Do Media Consumers Actually Engage With Media?

God forbid we try out new things.

Lately, I‘ve been looking at anime fandom on twitter and the overall movie watchers community only to realize how absolutely estranged I am from both of these groups that couldn‘t be any more different if they tried despite some niche overlap but ultimately have one thing in common, namely that they‘re relatively easy to categorize as monolithic entities I don‘t belong to and from which I find it hard to discern individuals with any sort of… personality or preferences that stand out, for lack of a better description. This is something I‘ve always been aware of to some extent with anime fandom at least, after all, it feels like there‘s a strong group selection bias with inseparable walls between the shounen screechers, the fanservice freaks and the pretentious pseuds but just how bad it is is something I‘ve come to notice upon spreading my feelers elsewhere with movies only to find a similiar kind of situation there.

First of all, it‘s important to understand of course that if you take any of this stuff passionately, you will not connect with most of the people who also watch some of these things. Most people do not care about the media or art but are just consumers. If anything, the recent onslaught of AI controversies has drawn this to the forefront. 99% of people who watch things don‘t look at the OpenAI Sora reveal thinking about the loss of art and craftsmanship but react in ways similar to “A cool new toy! Will I be able to remake Game of Thrones S8 with this?!“ And I feel like a lot of the people who actually identify with anime or movies as a hobby don‘t realize that they‘re in the niche here. Sorry to say, pal, but you‘re still the nerds stuck in your bubble you can no longer perceive as such due to these fields growing in popularity while your circles remain relatively the same or shrink even.

Speaking of nerds, anime is mainstream now, what joy! Except you‘re still just the exception to the rule and foreign element for not watching the same few things over and over again. You see, when I was a child, I had a cool moment of connecting when I saw a kid at my school read manga. “You read manga? Me too! Awesome! Let‘s be friends!“ This doesn‘t happen anymore because you cannot connect with most of an anime fandom that just routinely watches a few things within a very narrow frame of interest and has no passion for interacting with the medium any further.

The true long-standing otaku type barely exists anymore. And I don‘t mean the moe kawaii uguu pantsu type (also a dying breed) but the one who sticks with the medium. Anime is more popular than ever and has a higher turnover rate than ever before. It‘s become a consumption good to use and toss away not just in terms of the individual works but also of a medium as a whole. 14 year olds get into anime, watch their fair share of isekais, shounen and Bocchis and by age 17, get out of the medium. It‘s a revolving door. Anime is an intermediate process. In that way, anime is a temporarily pump and dump consumption good with a longevity of a few years. Anime is the new gacha. This is precisely why there is so much isekai stuff – anime doesn‘t need to renew when the audience does all the time. Who am I supposed to connect with here? I‘ve seen so many people jump out of anime and straight up deleting their online presences after just a few years. And I‘m not getting any younger either.

This is an overall problem with a certain pattern I’ve come to notice: Not to put myself on a pedestal but it‘s really hard to find like-minded people. I‘ll talk about arthouse movies in one tweet and fetishes in the next. I engage with different kind of media and none of them gets a pass or an outright condemnation. I‘ve never cared about engaging with just one genre or kind of show and am in the minority for that. Unless it‘s video games, which are more akin to sports in terms of preference selection I believe. But the guy who has Yu-Gi-Oh! and Texhnolyze in his 3×3? How many are there? The absolute effort I have to undertake to get someone to watch something that is not on the list of the canon of good works. Tatakau Shisho is a good example of a work that doesn‘t have a reknown director or writer and that‘s the end of the story. Shigofumi is among the anime with the best directing I‘ve seen, no success either. Getting people within the higher tiers of media to engage with MahoIku is an impossible task as well, what‘s it with the Madoka knockoff branding. People have become so indistinctive in their preference profiling it‘s become boring and tedious to recommend things to them because they‘d either watch them anyway or, if it‘s outside their field of interest, not ever to begin with. That‘s surprisingly rare.

To put it better into words: who else can watch both Eternity And A Day and MahoAko? Most folks only engage with media narrowly. People shoehorn themselves into high art and low art categories too much and base their entire personalities around them. The high art crowd especially loves to do this and gives everything with artistic ambitions an immediate pass. It reeks so much of peer-approval seeking. They want to stand out by imitating their fellows, thus not standing out. Some American Psycho kind of stuff that is.

It feels like there‘s a canon of an approved opinion corridor. While I‘ve always disliked the following image for how dishonest and anti-intellectual it is, it does showcase one issue namely that there‘s no personality in most of these 3x3s.

I understand that there are certain tendencies but good grief, just give me one guy who‘s into these kinds of anime who will let out a statement like “Akame ga Kill! is more interesting than Utena.“ The most demonstrative cases of peer approval pressure are when people start posting their hot takes and none of their hot takes are hot or controversial or spicy within their sphere. I‘m sorry, but some anime elitists saying that SAO is bad and immediately getting everyone to nod in agreement is not hot. It‘s not even lukewarm. It‘s just conformist and all you‘ve done is to prove that you‘re more of the same. If I can tell what your opinions about individual anime are based solely on only your 3×3 as a point of reference, you‘re boring.

On a random sidenote, every now and then the community collectively comes together to laugh at someone with exactly that kind of 3×3 and attitude and I can‘t help but sympathize with that poor sap since a lot of the people laughing at him have exactly that kind of 3×3. What makes you think you‘re so different for having Haibane Renmai instead of Tatami Galaxy and Princess Tutu instead of Mushishi on there? We should play 3×3 memory and see if we could still attribute these blindly to their owners. I’d argue they all blend together. Everyone is just careful to not ever make one wrong step or else they will be seen as a Deeply Unserious Person. Unless they‘re playing that part already comically to hide themselves within layers of irony, which is also an Internet thing.

I look at anitwitter and it‘s like half of the people I see do nothing but post epic shounen flamewars, lewd tweets or they are so high-struck they pretend sexual thoughts don‘t even exist. Unless it‘s Bakemonogatari, which has the critical thinker‘s license to a “tastefully expressed genre of eroticism for the thinking man“. It‘s fine, you can say “megane oppai“ and “loli pantsu“ just like the rest.

My favorite visual novel, Sekien no Inganock, I got recommended from a guy whose taste was garbage and who hated me and I hated him. And he was like “You know what, I like this and this is your kind of stuff.“ This guy and I were never on the same wavelength but in that one very valuable instance, we were, for the very reason that I knew who he was and that he knew who I was and man, does that not happen anymore. Meanwhile, in my 15 years of shilling, I have never gotten anyone to read Inganock. And recommending things outside of the general zone of interest is always more interesting to me than getting someone to watch Casshern Sins or Hajime no Ippo, which, yes, while good anime, most people will recommend in general and know in general and like in general.

Once again, I understand that there are certain tendencies in public perception and that‘s okay. More people will like Frieren than Undead Girl Murder Farce. But I sometimes feel so utterly contrarian with how much some of my opinions stand out with no intention on my part. Yes, I do believe that Paranoia Agent is Satoshi Kon‘s best work and I do believe that Dark Souls 2 is the most interesting in the trilogy despite or rather because of Miyazaki‘s non-involvement.

I‘m sorry but if you give every single Bergman movie a 5/5, I‘m starting to question if you have actual media opinions and don‘t just want to associate yourself with a brand. You‘re allowed to say some of these are boring. I, for one, watch movies, not filmmakers. “Auteur“ is just a term, not a binding rule of law. I‘ve seen people get into entire profiling sessions over what others like or don‘t and what they themselves like or don‘t. Excuse me, what the fuck is this armchair psychology nonsense? This entire grouping attitude reminds me more of people into astrology.

A lot of online reviews of businesses and such tend to be more on the negative side of things since why would you rate your local bakery well for doing what it‘s supposed to do yet when I google for people‘s movie impressions, it‘s the exact opposite, at least with the arthouse type. Nobody wants to shit in that reddit thread by complaining about how he thought there was too little substance to that really long-winded arthouse movie and that its minute-long landscape panning scenes should have been cut down and I can understand why not. But there is an inherent value in it for other people such as myself when there‘s someone who is a similar kind of person like me and remarks he didn‘t find this particularly interesting. That might resonate with me more than the samey mush of people agreeing with each other. At least that kind of person stands out. So many online comments on reddit, letterboxd and whatnot all read the same.

I feel like like there are two ways in which students emerge from literature classes at school – they either turn into the “Hehe, my teachers thought the curtains being blue meant anything other than the curtains being blue“ dumbasses or the “What the curtains being blue means? I don‘t know! It could mean anything! Anyone can interpret anything into this, that’s how deep a masterpiece goes! Let‘s not get lost in the details and just gaze in awe at the artwork in front of my mirror!“ pseuds. At least your teacher had the decency to talk about the curtains and explain them. One side ignores them entirely and the other uses them as a prop, thus also ignoring them entirely.

You look at the movie reviews on letterboxd and it‘s really quite terrible. No, not the wacky one-liners generated to garner likes. Those are terrible too. The utterly pretentious ones I mean. Written by Thesaurus teenagers. After watching a movie with themes and nebulous plot elements, I usually look up others‘ reactions for clarity. But what I find is just circlejerking. People will do anything to attribute pretty adjectives to their intellectual media because they‘re attributing these nice words to themselves through implication that you are what you watch. It‘s some kind of indirect mastery wherein you watching smart movies means you‘re smart. As such, they never try to dissect the entertainment.

What actually happens in Persona? What does some of the symbolism in Landscape in the Mist signify? Every movie gets labelled as a deep, stunning masterpiece that changed their outlook on life but once you ask the very simple questions of “Hey, what did A part in scene Y actually mean? What was that about?“ they dodge any concrete questions through vague answers. Answer the question. What are you, politicians? I‘m not voting for you. The reason for this is that if they had to interact with these movies in a concrete manner and use their own intellect instead of the filmmaker‘s as a proxy, their entire pretention would crumble immediately, for everyone to see. They would become laid bare, stripped of the cloth that is the movie that they use to dress themselves. And we can’t have that. They claim to be media literate but they don‘t actually interact with the media and just use it as a fashion tool. It is, by definition, thus not media literacy but media illiteracy that they are flaunting. They don‘t analyze, they just feel. Not the individual movie but the pleasure of conformity. And then you have several of these people in the same room, talking about the same movie, except they‘re not actually talking about the movie but all somehow monologiung the same sentiments. You don‘t connect with the movies and you don‘t connect with other moviewatchers.

I look at people‘s individual media takes and all I see are caricatures and groups.

Upon retrospection, I’ve wondered why I brought my twitter fetish ramblings up at the start of the article. The point is, I believe, that I am expressing myself through my interests. This is why I like reading MahoIku so much because there are plenty of one-liners that help me interpret the author and make think “He gets it!“. And isn’t that such a nice thought, to share a niche with someone? Doesn’t matter whether that involves posting some obscure OST from the first Boktai game, write an ode to tights or retweet a scene from Landscape in the Mist. The point of communication is wanting to be understood.

Likewise, it doesn‘t really matter whether I look at letterboxd reviews with a lot to talk and nothing to say or twitter‘s absence of character, all I want is a human moment. And for the most part, I‘m not getting it.