SubscribeI’ve just read this story at ANN and it really bothered me. Lately we’ve had all this talk about elitism in the anime community, but this one guy is on another level; for those who can’t be arsed to click the link, I’m talking about “Khyron Prime”; some one who, upon deciding that he hated the new Robotech movie (Shadow Cronicles), dragged himself up to the Anime Expo and threw a cream pie in the face of the movie’s director (Tommy Yune). Yune took it all in good humor and even posed for a few impromptu pictures but the obsessed fan was later slapped with a (deserved) life-long ban by the Expo committee. It gets worse when you read “Khyron Prime”’s venom-filled blog entries that detail his adventures at the Expo; it’s fair to say he reads like Travis Bickle’s Robotech-lovin’ younger brother, a real case of social alienation.
We throw around words like elitism quite freely, but this guy is the real deal. Why do (some) anime fans feel like they are entitled to great anime, to the point where they feel personally slighted by something they don’t like?
That would be hell.
Short note of protest: that guy is to elitism as Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are to Islam, so I feel somewhat slighted by your comparison.
That aside, can I say "lol nutjob"? I very well can. I feel that you’re entitled to your own opinion, be it elitism or whatnot, until it infringes on other people’s freedom (in any form). This Khyron Prime loony was doing all well and good till he infringed on Tommy Yune’s freedom to speak at Anime Expo without getting pied.
Of course, this subject of personal liberty is a touchy one indeed — on the internet at any rate — but I let my readers say anything they please, as long as they know I’ve got the freedom to say anything I want back at them. Cue name-calling, but deleting comments or locking a thread just because you don’t want to deal with what people have to say about your opinion is lame. I’d rather make fun of them, or mud-wrestle.
I digress, surely. Your point, that "(some) anime fans feel like they are entitled to great anime, to the point where they feel personally slighted by something they don’t like", has always seemed to me as evidence of improper primary socialisation. Primary socialisation here is a sociological theory explaining how your behavioural patterns are locked in two-fold; primary (parents) and secondary (peers).
The theory certainly explains a lot of why I had moronic, frightening people I had the unfortunate position of being acquainted with, that would get riled if you called them names, disagreed with something they said, or just decided to go against something they stood for (e.g. racism in my case).
One of them I had the further misfortune of knowing since childhood. Now, said person’s father is nice, but has this angry parenting thing and a streak of illogical action in him, from what I’ve noted of his behaviour. Basically, retarded angry dumb parent usually raises retarded, angry, dumb kid, and this is what I saw when I decided to call this guy an idiot for some minor petty incident where he was acting his shoe size.
Wouldn’t those opinion extremists, as I’ll call them, run along the same lines, surely? Those who think that an anime must or should be moulded to their wants, expectations, or appetites are plain irrational, period. Where do they get all manner of nonsense like this from? Surely, it wouldn’t be stretching it to say that it could be explained as the parents of said opinion extremists being failures. At least that’s how I see it.
That doesn’t mean they get off the hook though. I choose to take the re-education stance here; rather than leave those wretched things aside I’d rather beat them cold with a bat of Logic and a stick of Sarcasm until they "got it". But that’s just me.