Nakama Britannica

Albeit that when I had the epiphany, I didn’t actually intend it to be in anyway sequential, I realise now that one of the notes I most wanted to convey in my last article (that anime characters are strangely diverse, likeable and unique), must inevitably occupy the same territory as those at the heart of this one.

I’ve often worried, especially while watching one of my friends get overly excited about anime conventions and cosplaying Naruto characters, whether the people who passionately and proudly bring characters to life today - creating AMVs, drawing fanart and generally giving their favourites creative treatment - might not be doing the same for another series in a few years time. Essentially, whether my friend might be garbed in the clothes of the next big shounen series, and forget all about Naruto, or at least the emotional fancies that she currently lives jubilantly in.

I’m an emotional person as well, so I tend to immortalise or exalt to apotheosis the beauty and virtue of characters I love, and find the idea of moving to new fandoms every now and then - if they were to replace old ones which weren’t emotionally dated - quite sickly, or unappealing and stilted. What I’ve been wanting to do, for some time, is face the mortality of our fandom, and weigh the hope that like great, and even lesser poets, in our society of ever larger volumes of recorded information, these characters, their lives and feelings, might achieve some measure of immortality through form or fond memory, as artists have frequently attempted themselves.

I was wondering what made the reader feel - if they ever have at all - that they adore a particular character, and want to keep not only a memory of them, but of the feelings surrounding the character, and who that character was, or what they are like? I don’t see why anyone couldn’t believe that an anime character might affect them in this way, in the same fashion that some carry far more arbitrary and prosaic descriptions or characters from literature with them through their lives. It might be another simple distinction between the arts, and conceptions of their individual worth, or it might be that in the same way music guides our feelings, often more than it gives rise to them (an effect feared by some in the past), literature leaves a more elemental stamp on the way we think - indeed, giving us the very terms with which we can and do, through language, which has distinct and arbitrary impression on developing minds. But even though I’d agree with both of those points - and add that many literary types are prosaic dullards - it still strikes me that such a creative and emotional community as ours (qualities which always produce an affinity with the imaginary) might not itself treat its treasures with the same timelessness (I know some people do, but how many, how consciously, to what extent, and how satisfactorily?). What makes you like particular characters? Or is there anything that would make you love them enough to be with you for the rest of your life, recalled again and again, always with some new silent wish for their well-being? Or scorned by someone else with the same interest, what would make you compulsively leap to their defence?

I was searching a particularly famous website that I’d rather not endorse, when it started to seem that fandom itself was enough reason to watch a series. Granted, those people download everything while its still new and don’t have to spend over a hundred pounds on every series they watch, but if they did they might still feel largely the same, even if the margins of good and bad, or worthwhile and a waste of time, would have to be renegotiated. To take those points, however, if we do watch some series largely to enjoy the play of the community surrounding them (and this reason can’t be disavowed too strongly, when one of the major attractions of anime itself is the lively community or fandom), and if fandom is an ever-changing play on what’s new, which can broadly be evidenced by the industriousness of each series fans on websites like Deviantart and Youtube, then our fandoms look endlessly contemporary.

I don’t have many problems with the modern fandom fashion industry, but my essential questions were, and still remain - how shortlived are our fandoms, are any worth immortalising, and would these things change anything? Although largely a term for what is intellectually fashionable at any one time, Northrop Frye’s concept of the ‘history of taste’ must inevitably produce a history in which certain values and ideas are always rocks peaking out of, and which must be passed by the moving stream, which aren’t themselves ever-changing, and contrast with the river, which is never the same twice.