And why we should all be knocked down a peg.
Who here is familiar with anime snobbery? It’s known by a host of other names, including anime elitism, but we’ll stick with snobbery for now. If you are unfamiliar with this facet of anime fandom then you are in a very small and highly envious minority. Chances are, if you have never encountered an anime snob, you do not visit the internet often and only talk to a select group of anime fans. For those of us who are more internet savy, you have at least once encountered an anime snob.
But it is hard to pinpoint a definition for anime snobbery. It seems that every anime centric term is hard to define, including anime itself. There are many different opinions on what constitutes an anime snob but I’ll use three examples that I think define it nicely: 1) Believing yourself to be better than another person because you like something they either don’t like/don’t know about and voicing your superiority to them, 2) beliveing that all anime produced in decade X is better than all anime produced in decade Y, and 3) beliveing that some trend included in anime today is ‘killing the industy.’
I’ll start with example number one, beliveing yourself to be superior to another person because you like something they either don’t like/haven’t heard of (or haven’t watched). This is a feeling that almost every anime fan has felt at some point or another. I feel this way all the time. Just recently, I heard some school mates of mine discussing anime. They were just recently getting into the medium and were discussing what many consider to be ‘gateway series’: Death Note, Full Metal Alchemist, and One Piece. Now, these series all have their merits and are fairly well written and I’ve watched at least parts of all of them. However, if you’ve been watching anime for even a year you can easily tell that these are only the proverbial tip of the anime/manga iceberg. You’ve probably watched a larger variety of anime than someone just getting into the fandom. And it’s universal that all of us have thought ourselves better than these new fans for this reason. Yes, even I felt that way when I heard the new fans conversing.
But that doesn’t mean we are all anime snobs. There’s nothing wrong with feeling superior because it’s basically unavoidable. What crosses the line is voicing these opinions to other people and declaring yourself a better fan than they are. I’ll use my experaince that I mentioned earlier as an example. I felt smug when I heard these new fans talking about anime. That doesn’t cross the line and is a feeling we’ve all had. However, if I had gone over to these people and told them just how much better than them I was because I had watched more series then they had I would have been an anime snob (and a jerk).
I’ve listed two other types of an anime snob and they’re both very similar. First, on fans that believe trend X is killing the industry. I haven’t seen too many of these discussions as of late but they used to be everywhere a few years back. The most (in)famous of these beliefs is that moe (which is another hard to define term but we’ll call it ‘cute girls’ right now) is killing the industry. The general argument, which can basically be used as a Mad Libs, is that trend A is oversaturating the anime market and is preventing the creating of ‘good’ anime series (I have no idea what people refer to when they mean this so read into it as you will). There are many faults in this argument but that should be saved for another time.
Now, the last type of snob I’ve described is someone who believes all anime produced in a certain time period is better than anime produced in another time period. This is mostly between anime produced in the 90s and the 2000s. These finer points of these arguements are a wide variety of very thin points of reasoning that I also won’t get into here lest this devolve into a different post. Just know that these exists. What is important in this post is why these fans exist not what they say.
Why do we feel superior to people? Is it because we are vain beings who like to remind ourselves that we are better than another person because of our own viewing experiance? The most interesting point about snobbery is that it occurs in every medium, every fandom, every hobby. Even if we have not encountered anime snobs we have encountered pretension elsewhere: in sports, books, and movies. Another point to note is that all of the three types of snobbery I have described occur in some part in every hobby. This leads me to believe that they are not related to any specific issue but rather to one superficial belief that we must validate our opinions by proving that they are better than others.
We feel superior because we want to establish ourselves as being better than another person. We say that trend A is killing the industry because we don’t like trend A and want to point to credible reasons that support our dislike beyond ‘I don’t like it.’ We say that 90s anime is better than 2000s anime because we don’t like 2000s anime and want to point to how good the old days were to support our claims. But even though these beliefs are so common in all of us that doesn’t make us all anime snobs.
This may sound hypocritical but the thin line between being an experainced fan (more on that in another post, just roll with me here) and being a snob is thinking and voicing your opinion. Why? Well, unless you have psychic powers (or your name is Kyubey) your thoughts in your head can’t hurt anyone. But voicing these thoughts can affect someone and can negatively affect your image. If you think that all 90s anime is better than 2000s anime that’s fine and no one will attack you. You cross the line when you attack someone for liking moe, or 2000s anime, or Naruto. It is one thing to feel superior but keep your opinions civil. It is another entirely to attack someone else to make you feel superior.
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