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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2621 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So where do people place the bar for being a fan of a genre? The content quality for every genre typically follows a power law distribution. If I only like the top 5% of anime, am I really an anime fan?

I would say someone is an anime fan if they a) watch anime; b) are interested in anime as a genre, looking out there for new works etc. rather than just being fans of specific works.

I like the video game sub-question, since there's a well-known phenomenon of casual gaming (3 in a row and other phone timekillers, primarily) not being considered "real gaming". I'd reckon the primary drive for this, rather than disdain towards the casual gamer demographics, is the lack of any perceivable community around casual games.

I’m gonna take the cowardly way out and reduce everything to language games. More specifically: for the term “anime fan” to be useful, it should tell you a lot about the kind of person whom that term describes, people who refer to themselves as “anime fans” should be able to have qualitatively different conversations among themselves than people who don’t, etc.

For some concrete scenarios:

  • Alice has only watched Cowboy Bebop and Dragon Ball Z. She says “I don’t watch that icky stuff for weebs; I just like good stories.” Alice is probably not an anime fan.
  • Bob watches every series that comes out each season, even if most of it is garbage. He discusses them online (even if most of that “discussion” consists of sharing screenshots of the girls in each series), rates them, etc. Bob is probably an anime fan.
  • Carl is into film and television, and this interest in moving pictures extends to some anime. He knows about certain famous auteur directors (e.g. Yuasa, Satoshi Kon) and is able to talk deeply about the technical and artistic merits of Perfect Blue. But he doesn’t necessarily partake in the broader subculture as an activity distinct from how he’d discuss French New Wave films. Carl might not be an anime fan, although it’s harder to say, and it certainly does seem that he has a greater “appreciation for the medium” than Bob.
  • Dennis doesn’t watch any anime. He doesn’t read manga either. He does watch YouTube videos posted by e-celebs summarizing or reacting to the latest flavor of the month series, he scrolls through /r/animememes, and he likes erotic fanart of anime characters on Twitter. Yet somehow, this almost makes me inclined to call him an anime fan, since even though he doesn’t actually watch any anime, he does partake in the culture surrounding it. (The word Ive seen people use to describe people like Bob is “secondaries”, that is, secondary fans.)

The common thread here is that at the end of the day, deciding to call yourself or someone else an “anime fan” is inherently a social act. If other people weren’t involved, then there would be no need to raise this question of identity: you could just watch some amount of anime on your own, in addition to whatever else you do during your time, without attaching a label to it. What this means is that if you are going to go to the trouble of applying the term “anime fan”, then the criteria for application should necessarily have to do with how to categorize groups of people.

  • There is a list of anime shows, numbered n from 0 to nshows − 1.

  • The list is organized in descending order of quality q, from 1 to 0.

  • You like all shows from 0 to nyou − 1. (nDradisPing ≈ nshows × 5 %.)

  • If ∑0nyou − 1(q) ÷ ∑0nshows − 1(q) > 0.5—that is, if you like more than half of all anime shows on a quality-weighted basis (or if you estimate that you would like them if you were to watch all anime shows and could judge all their quality)—then you are a fan of anime.

(epistemic status: probably only 25 percent a joke)

I definitely like the mathematical approach here, but wonder if it survives contact with subcategories and niches in broader genres. For instance, I would definitely consider myself a fan of videogames but... there's a LOT of different types of videogames and I only like some of them.

Let's suppose as a simplified example that there are 20 categories of video game, Puzzle games, RPGs, Roguelites, MOBAs etc..........

And suppose in our imaginary example that all of them have an equal number of games, and all of the same distribution of games by objective quality. But I only like 9 of the categories. Suppose I like every single game in my 9 favorite categories, but no games in the other 11 categories. Then my score would sum to 0.45 < 0.5.

Is it fair to say that I am not a fan of videogames in general and should only describe myself as a fan of those 9 categories? If it was only one category: suppose I only liked Puzzle Games, then I would agree that I should be called a fan of "puzzle games" and not a fan of video games in general. But if it's 9 different categories across the spectrum that differ wildly from each other then it seems hard to describe my preferences as anything other than a "fan of videogames".

Is it fair to say that I am not a fan of videogames in general and should only describe myself as a fan of those 9 categories?

IMO, yes.

I can think of another standard that addresses your complaint, but it's even less workable than the first one.

  • There is a list of all non-video-game creative works, numbered n from 0 to nworks − 1.

  • The list is organized in ascending order of quality q, from 0 to 1.

  • There is also a list of what those non-video-game works would look like if they were video games, numbered n from 0 to nworks − 1.

  • For each work, the imagined video-game quality q′ presumably will not be the same as the actual non-video-game quality q.

  • If ∑0nworks − 1(q′) > ∑0nworks − 1(q)—that is, if you think that, on average, the overall quality of a non-video-game creative work would be improved if it were turned into a video game—then you are a fan of video games.

This only measures the difference in video-game fan-ness in comparison to creative works fan-ness. So would give a false positive for someone who hates all creative works but hates video games slightly less. I suppose you could further modify it by hacking the two measures together, perhaps take this and add a minimum amount of video games liked from the previous rating. But that ends up a lot less elegant.

Maybe the issue here is just the strict cutoff threshold. Ie maybe you take the first score and instead of saying someone > 0.5 is a fan and someone less than 0.5 is not a fan, you say that someone's fan-ness is a sliding scale from 0 to 1. Ie, someone who likes all video games ever is more of a fan than someone who only likes half, who is more of a fan than someone who only likes 0.1 (while still keeping the quality weighting so someone with horrible taste who likes the worst games is less of a real fan than someone who likes good ones).

Yeah, that doesn't really click with me. Many non-video game works wouldn't work as video games, but that's not because I don't like video games - it's because video games are best when designed as a game from ground up.

I think there are a lot of visual-novel fans who would disagree with you.

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