Unfortunate By-Products of Anime Like fandom. But, more specifically...

Contents click bullets Time Spent Money Wasted "Comic-Book-Guy" Syndrome Culture Stealing Hentai Sub-Genre, Yaoi & Yuri

Anime fans can waste their lives away watching anime. Have you every heard someone say they've seen an entire series? Most series are around thirty episodes long. At half an hour each, that makes 15 hours just watching television. No one can argue that watching TV is time well spent. Unless you're watching A&E.;

Plus, for the more obsessive fan, there's the time spent on the internet, writing/reading fanfics, drawing fanart, etc. It is entirely possible to spend all of your free time on anime-related hobbies. Think of the time I took out of one day to make this site... Now think about it, some people spend that much time EVERY day on anime! Trust me, I've seen it. Without anime, people could do useful things, things which they won't regret wasting their time on when (and if) they finally grow out of their obsessive phase. Along the same lines, anime fans spend tons of time propagating useless skills. Such as drawing manga. It's extremely unrealistic to think that you can become a professional manga artist, unless perhaps you live in Japan where the comic book market is huge and comics are mass-produced. Another useless skill is reading/speaking Japanese. I've definitely seen fans who've learned to read manga in Japanese. These are people who have never, and probably will never, set foot in Japan. Can you imagine, learning an entire language and a new alphabet just to read comics?

People who learn Japanese have, in my opinion, reached an extreme degree of obsession. It's almost as bad as Lord of the Rings fans learning to speak "Elvish." They could have spent that time learning a language they might actually use, such as French in Canada or Spanish in the US. I dunno about the 'States, but in Canada (where I am at least!) a full 40% of the people speak French as their native language. And when I was in Arizona I heard a LOT of people speaking Spanish. Of course, when I went to Mexico, a country that's actually CLOSE to most of you, everyone spoke Spanish. However, I have never EVER heard anyone speak Japanese in North America. The only place I've actually seen a live Japanese speaker is in Beijing, CHINA, but they also spoke perfect English. A lot of people are probably saying right now "I need to speak Japanese because I'm planning on moving to Japan!" Okay, anyone who likes anime so much that they allow it to determine the entire course of their life is pretty darn obsessed. Fortunatly those people are removing themselves from my hemisphere...

Some fans have enormous collections of manga and/or anime. These items are extremely expensive. A paperback, black and white graphic novel costs at least $21 Canadian, the price of two full-colour trade paperbacks (trade paperback = US equivalent to graphic novel). This is a rip-off price. In Hong Kong (closest I've been to Japan), those same graphic novels cost the equivalent of about four dollars cdn each. In any case, fans spend enormous amounts of money on these manga. Even worse are rare, imported, or otherwise "special" manga. Now, anime themselves vary greatly in price. They range are about $12 a tape for popular ones like Pokemon and Dragonball Z. However, obsessive anime fans aren't ever satisfied with the common anime, and go to great lengths to get rarer ones, which can cost up to $50Cdn a tape. Some even buy the more expensive subtitled versions, because they're purists and think the subtitled ones are better. Subtitled anime can cost up to $60Cdn a tape.

Imagine a person with just ONE SHELF full of anime or manga... Though many fans have much, much more than that.

Have you ever watched The Simpsons? Y'know that big fat comic book store owner? Enough said.

The picture says it all...

Plus, the Comic-Book-Guy syndrome can progress into what I like to call the "Luzhin Syndrome." If you haven't seen the movie "The Luzhin Defence," you should. It's excellent. That aside, it's about a guy who's entire life is chess. As Natalia, another character, says, he's a bad conversationalist. He asks no questions, and answers questions with "yes" or "no." That is, until you ask him about chess, where he goes on and on and on... I've met many an anime fan over the internet who's just like Luzhin, aside from the chess-genius part. They seriously only like talking about anime. It's scary, when anime is such an enormous part of someone's life that they hardly think about anything else.It just depresses me to think that somebody's entire life could be focussed around anime. But it happens, and man is it ever sad. The same thing happens with video games, american comics, etc. But at least those are part of our own culture. Which leads me onto my next topic...

This is a bit abstract, so bear with me.

Strong fans of anime spend their time learning about a far-away culture. They essentially worship all things Japanese (it's true, I've been there). They want to know Japanese skills, customs, etc. But what about their own culture? Why do they learn how to be polite in Japan (Do you know the difference between -chan and -san?), when it would be much more beneficial to learn how to be polite in their own country? Why do they learn how to, for instance, draw manga, a skill probably respected in Japan, when they could learn a skill respected in their own country like playing the violin? They appreciate things (art, for example) from Japan, and don't see the beauty of what comes from their own country. In extreme cases, aside from the fact that they're wasting opportunities to improve themselves in the eyes of their OWN countrymen, it becomes almost disrespectful to their culture. It's like being an obnoxiously open Atheist in a strong Christian community, if you know what I mean. Of course, anime fans aren't THAT bad. Some of them are heading there, though.

Hentai Sub-Genre, including Yaoi and Yuri Ewww... Porn based on cartoons. It's no wonder all this gross stuff emerged from anime, since anime is already filled with sexual topics and little girls in skimpy clothes. And branching off of hentai are Yaoi and Yuri... Gay porn. Great, just great... Anime fandom can easily lead to hentai. Obsessive people's total infatuation with anime is reflected in the fact that they like anime porn (as opposed to real human porn, which is also disgusting but not nearly as unhealthy). Anyways, hentai is disgusting, but it becomes popular as anime becomes popular.