Re: Awwwww, dammit...

"8-Bit Star" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "Lord Craxton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> > The purists are breeding again. >_< A bunch of them are trying to
attract
> > mates by squawking over the fast-forward in DBGT, and another bunch are
> > disparging Armitage III as a "dub-title". There also seem to be a group
of
> > disenfranchused Omega males squawking over CCS. Hadn't we had enough of
this
> > BS the last time? And the time before that? And the time before that?
None
> > of these retards ever get any respect, you'd think they'd have gotten
the
> > point by now...
> >
> > Hmm. Okay, decision time... do we just go on vacation until they quiet
down,
> > or grab our shotguns and our silly vest/hat combos and go huntin'? ^_^
> >
> >                                             -Lord Craxton
>
> I'd rather hear why you seem to despise those damn purists so much.  I
mean,
> there ARE times where they have a legitimate point (any criticism directed
> at 4Kids Entertainment, for example).
>
> What, did a purist dingo eat your baby?

Kinda. I guess this is as good a place as any to tell the story...

Some years ago, back when Sailor Moon was just starting to get big on CN, I
was in to it. And as such, and being a reasonably internet-saavy type, I
hung out on alt.fan.sailor-moon. At the time anime in general was pretty new
to me, and hadn't quite entered the american mainstream. We still got our
anime on VHS, and dub/sub wars were fairly common. They continued to be
until DVD made it mostly a moot point. As regards Sailor Moon, it was
particularly bad, as the show got pretty heavily edited in transition across
oceans. For a time, I was on the purist side, touting a chaos theory
approach to the issue. (Later on I would realise how unreasonable this was.)
But it wasn't long before I came to dislike their attitude, so I went pretty
much neutral, taking the position that I was just going to enjoy the series
and the fandom and not worry about trivialities.

That didn't last.

For a while it was no big deal. But the situation got worse and worse. The
purists got rowdier and louder, and their complaints became more and more
anti-DiC (and later, Anti-CWI) then pro... Well, they were never really
"pro" anything... they had a stated desire- a dub they approved of- but that
was more a list of stuff they *didn't* want. But the point is, the focus of
the newsgroup shifted from loving Sailor Moon to hating DiC. The yelling
grew louder and louder. People who disagreed had to speak out just as loud,
saying not necessarily that they disagreed, but that things were getting out
of hand. They were shouted down by sheer numbers, and friends, people who's
company I enjoyed, gave up and left, or just faded away into lurkdom.

And at some point I had an epiphany. Here I was, a fan of a series- a story-
whose guiding principles were what? Love, forgiveness, joy, friendship. Then
I looked at the newsgroup, and what did I see there? Anger, hatred, vicious
jerimiads, relentless feuding. And I thought to myself, "If these people
value this story so much, why do they not honor it's principles? And if the
principles are not important, what are they fighting over?" I turned it over
and over in my mind, and there was no resolution, no way the weave together
these two dissociated ideas within a consistent worldview. It didn't make
sense.

Of course it did make sense, and I figured it out eventually. *They didn't
care about the series*. The editing, however detrimental to the story it may
or may not have been, was just an excuse to make stratas out of the fandom-
making sure that the purists were in the top strata. For years anime had
been underground, and it's followers had cultivated a sense of personal
pride about their knowledge of something so beautiful that the common man
knew nothing about. But now the secret was out, and these people were no
longer special. They no longer could claim to be the "elite", the
"hardcore". What good is knowing something secret if any fool with an
internet connection and a desire to learn can find it out? So they tried to
reclaim their lost glory by inventing new kinds of eliteness. If the story
was private, there was no problem. But if the story became public, they
could no longer glorify themselves with their knowledge. They needed to find
a "better", a more "complete" version of the story to exalt themselves with.

I realised that this was a poor reason to spread hatred around an entire
newsgroup. But by that point, and probably from the beginning, I was but a
breeze against the maelstrom. The newsgroup was a firetrap- day and night,
threads raged, spewing hatred about DiC, about dubs, about dubbers, about
dubbies. Newbies came, and most of them knew only the dub. They were marked
as dubbies, and were flamed, and they either conformed and joined the
purists, or got tired of the rage and quickly left. Eventually, I left too.

I wound up here. And little by little, I see the same thing happening again-
with YuGiOh, with Armitage, and with Dragonball. Can you understand why I'm
so much against it? Why I don't want what happened in AFSM to happen again?
This isn't merely some fiction of my imagination- you can go to AFSM today
and see for yourself what unrestrained purism has wrought. Before you
condemn me for expressing my distaste, ask yourself: do you want RAAM to
become the same?

                                        -Lord Craxton