Recent Rise in the Popularity of Anime
Growing up, there were always a few kids in school who seemed to be obsessed with this “weird” kind of T.V. called anime. I regularly saw memes about anime fans and general thought of them as strange kids. In recent years, I began exploring with the popular show Attack on Titan. I was totally gripped and have since watched and loved several shows like Naruto, that I used to look down upon. With so many amazing shows with immense variety, why did this genre carry such a negative connotation when I had never bothered to watch it?
An article by Julianne Sun on northbynorthwestern.com discusses what many people are experiencing as they test the waters in this new type of entertainment. Julianne states that in the first 9 months of 2020, there was a 50% increase in households that had watched at least one anime. She also cites that this change may be attributed to an increase in western style animes that better appeal to audiences in Europe and the US. Could there be another explanation?
Everybody has different tastes, and there sure are some strange animes out there. However, that can be said about any form of television. One possible explanation is a massive information cascade.
Say one person is pressured into watching an anime by another friend. They happen to think it is super weird and tell other people their opinion on the genre. Someone else, who may be curious, hears this opinion and has to consider two things, their signal and the choice of the first person. If the second person chooses to ignore their signal, or hasn’t received a good signal, they arrive at the same conclusion and will pass on this opinion to others. Once enough people have this experience, an information cascade could begin. People who may be interested in an anime show might see that everyone else chooses to dislike it. This leads them to ignore their signal and follow the crowd. Once the crowd has made a collective choice, it is difficult to break that stigma.
During the covid shutdowns, people may have begun to feel isolated, but also more safe with their own opinions. This may have been a catalyst to breaking the negative information cascade about this broad genre of television. With this cascade breaking, more people are able to listen to their own signals, creating a less polarized range of opinions on the subject.
Article: https://northbynorthwestern.com/anime-might-not-be-cool-but-its-definitely-getting-popular/