So electronic musican Porter Robinson got anime studio A-1 Pictures to collaborate on an anime music video for his latest song, it got posted to /r/Anime, the moderators removed it and a flamewar broke out over whether it was really anime or not before death threats forced them to allow it — just Reddit being Reddit. The mods argued that their initial banning was correct because Shelter didn’t adhere to their definition of anime: “An animated series, produced and aired in Japan, intended for a Japanese audience”.
They should’ve gone with Damon Knight’s old idea on how to define science fiction: “science fiction is what we point to when we say it”. By which he meant that it’s the whole community of readers, fans, writers, editors, publishers and so on who collectively determine what is and isn’t science fiction by what they talk about as science fiction. Individual opinions on the definition and what does and does not belong to science fiction may differ but a rough consensus emergences nonetheless. Definion as a process, rather than a rule set, witht he understanding that there never can be a complete agreement.
Had the /r/Anime moderators been less rigid with their definition and more willing to follow Knight’s lead, they could’ve saved themselves the death threats, as in that case it would’ve been obvious that Shelter is anime. Though the creative lead, Porter Robinson, might’ve been an American, A-1 Pictures is of course a Japanese studio employing Japanese (and Korean) creators, while Crunchyroll, involved witht he financing and distribution of the project is probably the world largest anime streaming site. They think of it as anime, as obviously did the /r/reddit readership. That alone should’ve been enough for the mods to have allowed it.
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