This afternoon I had a meeting with my group for the presentation on Youth and Popular culture. Our assigned topic is the otaku subculture, so we've been dubbed the "otaku group" by our teacher and class. Well, thanks... =_=;
We got a pretty good setup of our presentation now though, so I'm kinda looking forward to working on it (once I get that stupid Japanese debate out of the way on Friday...). We'll start by explaining what the public image and stereotypes around otaku are, and then we will challenge the assumptions one by one, by raising examples of people being different from the stereotype. (For example, "Otaku are socially isolated and lonely people", all scholars in the 90's used to write, but since the rise of the internet there have been many cases where on the contrary, otaku are /creating/ communities, arranging offline meetings, collaborating to create artworks and publications, organizing events and such, rather than isolating people.) And then in the end we'll have a class discussion about which view everyone agrees with.
We also talked about our fieldwork reports, two people hadn't handed them in yet so they were asking what they should be like. So I showed my Tenimyu one from last time, and then I got like "OMG, DORIRAIII!!!" from one of the Japanese girls. She also loves Tenimyu, but never went to see it live apparently, only watched the dvds. Why are all Japanese Tenimyu fans I meet, like that anyways? They say they love it, but yet they never went to a myu!? I can understand if a foreign fan hasn't been yet because of the language barrier and the difficulty to get tickets, but for Japanese people it shouldn't be that hard, right...? Besides, the price of a ticket is about as much as the price of a DVD anyways, so it doesn't really matter if you go for the live or for the DVD.
Anyways, then we talked about other anime we like, and apparently she watched HxH too! I was really curious to hear Japanese people's opinion on having something like ant arc airing on Sunday morning, and about whether at this point it's still for kids or more for adults. She said that in Japan, the manga and anime is definitely for kids, but they might not be able to understand and appreciate all the difficult parts of the story (like the deep character development and relationships, and the politics stuff) but Japanese kids think that blood spraying around is cool so they watch it anyways. In Japan, censorship of violence in kids anime is not that big of a deal, apparently, so she didn't find it strange at all that it aired in the morning.
But she also said that HxH is a special case amongst boys' manga, because there are many adult women who read it too. So in Japan HxH basically has two demographics, little boys who watch for the cool fights and adventures, and adult women watching for the story and character development and relationships. (And the possibilities for doujinshi-writing, of course... =3= ). However, she thought it'd be pretty weird if an adult male would actually seriously watch it. X'D I thought that was interesting, 'cause the ones I see arguing about stupid details on internet forums all the time, seem to be guys...? I guess that's the one of the difference sbetween the Japanese and western views on anime, with it being a cool and edgy thing in the west (with kids and teens believing they're watching a "hardcore" adult show, just 'cause it has some violence), while it's just a normal kiddy thing in Japan. ^^;;
Eeh... So our group might really be the "otaku group", just because we can get pretty deep into discussions like these.
The presentation itself is on my birthday, which I was pretty annoyed with at first, but it seems like it's going to be a fun one. ^^
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