Anime Boston is an anime and Japanese culture convention, but walking through the halls you might not realize that. Anime Boston attendees are cosplaying characters from Avatar, Homestuck, My Little Pony, and even Tommy Wiseau, creator of The Room. Modern anime cons, even ones which explicitly state that they are anime cons, act like a magnet to other fandoms. Why?
Anthropologist Charles Dunbar explains this phenomenon with the open culture of anime conventions. Anime conventions, especially ones on the east coast like Anime Boston, Otakon, and Katsucon, started as a way for fans of anime to spread their fandom. The very essence of the con is inclusive. This open culture draws people, even those who have fairly geeky interests but aren’t anime fans first-and-foremost. You see the results in the hallways of Anime Boston: a con which is a gathering of geeks, not just strict otaku.
The really interesting part is something called convergence theory and how this affects all of us. Conventions result in a flow of content between different audiences in search of entertainment, which leads to new desires. Those desires lead to the creation of content to satisfy those desires or even the movement of fans from consumers to becoming producers. The quantity and variety of entertainment offered to us is changed by the interaction of fandoms here at the con. The reactions to the interaction and that new entertainment then defines the fandoms themselves.
This is just a simple overview of a fairly complicated topic. If you want to know more, I urge you to visit Charles Dunbar’s website Study of Anime where the notes from this panel will be posted shortly and there is a full bibliography of the sources he used for researching this topic.
—Andrew Hoffman, AB Staff Blogger
