What Use are Critics, Anyway?

I’ve been very lucky in life to have been surrounded by acquaintances and friends whose intelligence and wisdom has served as an inspiration for me. Being an ani-blogger has turned out to be no different, as I’ve had the chance to read some interesting and insightful commentary from other bloggers on a fairly regular basis. Because of that I’ve been given the opportunity on many occasions to examine my own opinions in various ways.

Lita Kino at Lita Kino’s Anime Corner posed an interesting question in a recent post in regards to the responsibility that more experienced fans have towards welcoming new fans into the fold. To paraphrase her question, she asks whether certain types of anime criticism, which can occasionally be laser-focused in on very minute or one-off issues in a series or on trying to extrapolate author viewpoint or intent from limited evidence, deny newer fans the experience of enjoying and engaging with anime on their own terms. As someone whose goal has always been to make anime and anime fandom approachable for many different people, the question definitely struck a chord.

All anime fans have to start somewhere, and long ago I was a little tiny anime fan looking for some direction. I’ve mentioned previously that, while I knew about anime as a teen and watched what I could on my own (mostly limited to television broadcasts and random rental store finds), the real root of my passion for anime was as a college student in my University’s anime club. This was the early 2000’s, when anime was slowly starting to come into its first “boom” period, and being around other fans my own age with different and more extensive access to it helped me to really become involved in the fandom in ways I didn’t have the opportunity to before. I loved watching just about anything the club showed at viewings (luckily, looking back, a lot of it is still stuff I consider good!), because it was all anime that I got to experience with a large group of people, and that was exciting enough on its own. It was especially fulfilling once I started to make more friends with whom I could bond over my favorite series outside of the club setting.

I knew a guy at the time who I eventually found out was sort of a back-end resource for the group. He knew about anime fansubs, had done some manga scanlations in the past, and was as up-to-date as one could be in those days of much more limited online resources. I really looked up to him because he was the type of person to whom I could throw out any title I was curious about and he’d be able to tell me more about it. I trusted him quite a bit and modeled a lot of my anime viewing after him.

Each semester the club members would vote on what anime to watch next; individuals would submit series and we’d often watch some clips of each before voting. Someone offered the series Midori Days which was new at the time. If you’re not familiar, it’s an anime in which a teenage boy’s right hand turns into the girl who has a crush on him; hilarity then quickly ensues, as you can imagine. The clip of the series seemed really funny to me, my anime-loving mentor seemed to enjoy it, and so I voted for it. It didn’t end up getting voted in, but I did without any reservation decide to watch it on my own later on.

There’s a scene in the second episode where Seiji, the main character whose hand has been replaced by Midori, goes to see the real Midori, whose actual body is comatose and incapacitated (it’s definitely a convoluted situation). Seiji draws back the covers from sleeping-Midori’s naked body, hand-Midori is upset and embarrassed, and Seiji mashes hand-Midori into sleeping-Midori’s uncovered breast in a bid to cover her body back up without looking at it again. Seiji then gets “caught in the act” and booted from the premises. Without getting into an analytical argument about what’s actually happening to whom in this scene, it reads quite a bit as non-consensual fondling of an incapacitated person that skates by on a technicality, and as a young fan with some prior unfortunate life experiences I found this really upsetting. I didn’t end up watching any more of the series after that.

Flash-forward many years to 2017, when I attended a panel discussion at a local media convention. The topic of the panel was related to diversity and representation in media, and the conversation drifted toward some of the recent (at that time) casting missteps and examples of whitewashing that were fresh in people’s minds; Ghost in the Shell, The Last Airbender, and even the Netflix Death Note film, which all cast White actors as originally Asian characters. The discussion got heated when the topic turned to whether these pieces of media ought to be judged on their full merit as films rather than passed-over due to their obvious (and, in my opinion, egregious) surface-level errors. My personal conclusion was and still is that knowing beforehand that a piece of media’s production commits such huge, obvious errors means that, for me, it’s not worth experiencing. I don’t want to give it my money, and I don’t want to give it my time, if I know ahead of time that it will be insulting, degrading, or upsetting to me. If the only valid way to say that something is not worth my time or money is to experience it in full by sacrificing those things, there’s a problem. Following that, one then has to ask, “what use are critics, anyway?”

Thinking back to my anime club dilemma, I realized that what I could have really used as a young fan was someone looking out for me, whose opinions more reflected what I knew to be true about myself and my beliefs. I don’t think that any part of the situation was my mentor’s fault; his general awareness was just focused much differently than mine was. However, the experience showed me the value of having someone to look up to who was more than just factually knowledgeable and enthusiastic. There weren’t many critics and reviewers in those days, and there certainly weren’t the smorgasbord of anime blogs there are today, so my resources were limited to friends and hearsay and that left me with a lot of gaps to fill in on my own. Sometimes filling these gaps was unexpectedly painful and left me feeling as though some anime’s content (and by proximity, some of its creators) was specifically hostile toward myself and others with certain issues and concerns. I now know that this isn’t entirely true, but when faced with a huge, new, and intimidating body of work to explore, it can be difficult to separate the traumatic from the transcendent on one’s own.

I’ve noticed that uttering the phrase “trigger warning” leaves some folks with heartburn, the thought being that taking people’s sensitivities into account and warning them of potential traumatic content ahead of time is meant to be a direct affront to fans who don’t need to “proceed with caution.” This push-back isn’t limited to anime fans; I once had a college professor get up in arms because a friend of mine suggested she provide a content warning about a film we were about to watch in class. Rather, I see these notifications as a way I can say to others, “hey, I’m looking out for you, and this is an aspect of this anime you might want to be aware of before you decide to watch.” If we’re concerned about gate-keeping practices turning away new viewers and potential fans, I think we ought to be more concerned about the attitude which demands that people disavow their soft hearts and their personal anguish in order to engage “properly” with the fandom discourse, rather than the action of some critics pointing out and discussing certain content. For some, it could be the unknown nature of that content that’s keeping them from engaging with anime and its fandom in the first place.

I consider myself a writer and a critic, but I’m also just another human being with a lifetime of experiences, both good and bad. I know full well that to some, an anime containing sexual wish-fulfillment or heavy violence is cathartic and entertaining; to others it might be unsettling or traumatic. No matter what one’s feelings are, a good reviewer (and I follow many of them) is able to provide valuable information to readers about a piece of media before they make the choice of whether to engage with it or not. Being critical to me isn’t about “trash-talking,” nit-picking, or gate-keeping; the last thing I want to do is tell people they should feel bad about the things that they enjoy when our opinions don’t align (and I certainly don’t seek out or enjoy the negative attention that comes along when people misinterpret me in that way). Instead, criticism and analysis for me is more about reaching out to fans, old and new, and providing one of many ways to engage with a fandom I really love.

Not every anime viewer is concerned about the same things, and not everyone is in anime fandom to take it seriously. For me, though, all art is “political” (including anime) and in various ways reflects the attitudes and values of the people who create it – whether intentional or not. This is a viewpoint of mine that’s grown and expanded over the many years I’ve had the pleasure to be an anime fan. It’s that ability of storytelling to speak to matters of meat space existence that gets my analytical pulse thumping and my typing fingers tapping. I hope to be able to keep reaching out to readers who share some of my views, and to show them that there can be a safe place for them in anime fandom, too.