Hayao Miyazaki, Anime’s Master, to Visit San Diego Comic-Con - NYTimes.com
Very good to see the man getting his day in the sun over here. The article also notes, though, that "maybe a third" of the Comic-Con attendees will care about his appearance. Thing is, we've been moving for a long time towards a world where interests are being more polarized and subdivided, not less, so this doesn't entirely surprise me. It may only be a third, but that third makes enough noise to make up for the others.
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That's wonderful--I admire Miyazaki to pieces...
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How do you figure? I've witnessed just the opposite, personally.
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That deserves its own post, but the shorthand version is what someone else once said about literature departments in colleges. You don't study Shakespeare anymore. You study the tragedies. No, the LATE tragedies. The fans, likewise, are becoming hyper-specialized.
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I think that really goes both ways. For one thing, moving to tragedies from Shakespeare is not a narrowing of specialization, it's a shift in focus --- in this case, one that greatly broadens the individual's horizons. Even studying late tragedies is far more broad a topic that studying Shakespeare.
Consider too that you don't see many Star Trek conventions any more; you see science fiction conventions instead. You also see a lot of sci-fi representation at anime conventions, and anime cosplayers at sci-fi conventions. People often tend either to have broad interests or a series of specific interests, neither of which leads to being too terribly specialized overall, though obviously a minority will develop more obsessive focuses.
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Your points are well taken. I think, though, that what happens is that within those broad venues you have people who cultivate extremely fierce and narrow interests, and allow those things to be self-perpetuating. One good recent example: the Browncoats. That's about as narrow as that alley gets without actually ripping off your mirrors.
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Most of the Firefly/Serenity fans I know (some of which have actually hunted down good brown coats) maintain many interests beyond that franchise and well beyond the works of Joss Whedon. There may well be a selection bias in the people I know personally, but I don't personally know anyone who primarily maintains such a narrow interest.
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Perhaps it does come down to who you know, and what grates most on your nerves (and therefore becomes most memorable). I seem to have kept running into "Firefly" fans who didn't want to broker any argument about the uncontestable excellence of their show. That part bothered me more than the basic fandom impulses.
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