It is hardly a stunning revelation that ease of obtaining digital fan-subs and streaming anime has changed the anime fandom in an irrevocable manner. The good, the bad, the ugly of the major effects are talked about on this blog and countless others for several years now. What has struck me more and more is that the subtler effects are more interesting at this point because they are not the hot button or polarizing topics that effects like piracy and licensing are but they are just a powerful and influential. The topic I have been recently fascinated with is the way we inherently perceive anime has changed. The fact is anime fans anywhere in the world can be part of the fandom almost as if we were Japanese fans. The time between when the Japanese fans get an anime or manga and when many places in the world get a translated copy can be as little as an hour. We the foreign fans are for the first time living at the speed of Japan. And this change as changed the way many people interact with and react to the mediums of anime and manga.

As a bit older fans, we can recall the days before digital fan-subs pretty readily. My friends and I bought out that Best Buy shelf of VHS anime and rented anything we could our hands on at the Blockbuster down the road, usually multiple times over. I can also remember the slow build of elation realizing I could get and watch anime online, sitting there with my 56k dial-up pushing it for all it was worth. And finally transition to bittorrent primarily and more recently streaming for some shows. I can say with clarity that my passion has not diminished, after all I have been watching anime for more than 15 years, but the way I watch it and for certain the way I appreciate it is different.

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