Recently in episode five of my VOIDGAZERS show, I talked at length about the relationship between my anime fandom and my trans experience, and how my failure to competently identify what I needed from anime had gotten me sort of “lost" in the medium. It is rare that someone feels the strange draw which tells them they need to sample literally every anime ever made, because they are seeking something from it more nuanced and particular than they can identify themselves or consistently locate based on surface storytelling details.
A lot of my favorite anime over the last decade have done well to satisfyingly encapsulate the best things about who I had been up to the time they entered my life. Haruhi encapsulated the philosophical thinking I'd gotten into in my teens for similar reasons to her; K-On! Reflected the best elements of the friendships I'd developed over the years and was very proud of at the time. When Shirobako came out, I was most proud of my work ethic and constant need to produce, and it has helped me to define my personal goals.
Now that I'm on the other side of feeling like I get what I get out of anime, I also feel very little need to identify by way of it. I look at all the copious anime stuff I have and I just see a means of personal dissociation--of attempting to completely dissolve my sense of self through the sensory overload of looking at nothing but anime girls.
I think there are a lot of reasons people fall into the anime trap. The average anime fan isn't around long--maybe they're kind of awkward or spergie or just haven't developed a charisma yet, and anime helps them find it. Or maybe they have deeper psychological hangups about society or sexuality that anime helps them to contextualize. Maybe they are just looking for a sense of community, and in finding it with their friends, anime itself more becomes the means of facilitating their communication than the actual focus of their attention. There are also of course people who are just sincerely passionate about animation as a film medium, but unless those people care about styles beyond those common to anime, or at least get involved in creating anime themselves, then the particularity of that involvement becomes suspect (and in the latter case can also become even more).
One of my longtime fascinations as an anime fan has been with the “otaku room.” They come in various styles, but mostly I'm not talking about the well-manufactured collection, with it's clean shelves of statues of favorite characters and organized bookcases--Im talking about posters on the ceilings, dakimakura hanging from the walls, no white space clusterfucks like what I was known for. This was a pursuit of mine for exactly the reason of dissolution--to go beyond just “this is the stuff I like,” but for the things to overpower me and drown me out.
I recently started watching tiktok, and it hit me like a wave that I feel sad now when I see otaku rooms. Despite how I did mine, I have always been a fan of interior design and actually good-looking spaces--but my mentality was that I didn't know who I'm trying to be or how to reflect that in how I design my place other than anime chaos. Now, there are countless e-girls showing off their adorable room setups that do resonate with me in their tiktok videos--along with otaku showing off their collection rooms.
All of those videos have an odd confusion to them. The tiktoks about itasha cars are always about how proud the person is to be degenerate--which makes sense, as it is the statement made by the car. The otaku room people, though, have no rhyme or reason: just a collection to show you. They are almost never on-screen as a person, because they are not ready to be a person--only a room.
Humans have an innate sense of reciprocity. If they spend a lot of time doing a thing, they feel like it needs to account for something.
There are 5 main ways to interact with media in this way:
1. Talk about them
2. Create them yourself
3. Idolize the creators
4. Idolize the characters
5. Gather related stuff
When it comes to anime:
1 is easy to do through the internet. However, if it goes too far, it isolates the person from people who criticize his interest, making his in group more and more zealous.
2 is hard when it comes to anime. Animation has a high bottom threshold of even seeing ones work work as intended.
It takes a lot of skill and knowledge to get a picture moving. Especially in the anime style, as most of the resources are foreign language.
3 is uncommon, as the creators are mostly inaccesible, leaving the "studio" to be thé face of the creation. Also, they Are Japanese, thus removed from even thoughts about getting access.
4 is simple to do, and they can serve well as role models similar to religious figures (what would Jesus/Twilight/Haruhi do?). But, if talent too far, they can take their fans on a downward spirál of simpage, removing them from society. It is hard to make friends with someone knowing they would always prefer a fictional character over you. People do be proud like that.
5 is the easiest way to reach for reciprocity.
It can start as an aesthetic urge, but it creates a positive feedback loop, as buying stuff becomes an additional way of consumption, building its own feelings of reciprocity and inadequacy. Collections start that way and usually only transform into a particular aesthetic or serious endeavor (collecting a smaller niche of something) after some kind of external reality check.
I've lived around sports fantatics my whole life and am very skeptical about anime being unique in this sense. The merchandising, the meta content, the social aspect. I feel like the physical manifestation to reinforce an assumed fanbased identity is something natural that springs from any media where people are heavily invested emotionally and financially. I sometimes think that 2D imaginary characters materialised in physical goods that may tap into a deeper euphoria, but every time a friend or sibling meets a star in real life I'm convinced back again.