Riding the Data Wave

In our last chapter, I covered some of the more popular sub-genres of anime that you're likely to run across in your journey through the world of Japanese Animation. Now that you've got a good idea of what sort of anime you might find interesting, I think that it'll be a good time to take a tour of useful websites for feeding your new hobby. I'll be breaking this chapter into two major sections. The first will be Information Sites, and the second, what I have a feeling a lot of anime Newbs will find interesting, fansubbers. There's a lot of ground to cover in this chapter, so let's get going.

First, a little refresher course, anime style, for using the Internet to look up information. The short version - information is a penny a metric ton on the net, and 99% of it is just parroted repeats of what somebody read somewhere else. The first thing you need to do is check a couple of sources, rather than depending on just one site. I'll make a couple suggestions below, but you'll probably find your own favorite sites too. The second thing you need to do is have a good knowledge of what you want. If you read through the second chapter, then you should have a decent idea of what sort of anime series sounds interesting at this point, so use that as a guideline for your first couple of forays into checking out what's out there. Eventually you'll want to branch into unknown areas, of course, but for now, stick with what you know.

That having been said, one last thing I'd suggest you do, before even looking at the Internet, is to take yourself to your local mall, or Best Buy, video rental store, or even Amazon.com - anything of the sort - and take a look at their anime section. There's nothing like a hands on look at what's available locally. You don't have to buy anything - just read the back of the boxes and jot down the names of series that look interesting. Now that you have some names to work with, you won't have to waste as much time with sifting through the endless junk pages to be found.

Information Super Landfill

Like I mentioned above, information is a penny a ton online. It's easy to find SOMETHING to read about just about anything... the question is if you can find something that's worth actually reading, much less accurate. The Internet functions more like a gigantic garbage dump of information than a superhighway, and anime sites tend to be worse than the average in this regard because it's not a truly mainstream market - instead, it's almost entirely fan-maintained. In some respects, that's a good thing - fans will give you their honest opinion, period, no muss, no fuss - and no spell checking. That's the disadvantage to non-professional information sites - you just never know what you'll get, and unfortunately, the bad always seems to out pace the good when it comes to little things like coherency, readability and the ability to look past bias. That's not to say that they can't be found with a little effort - just that you will need to spend that extra effort if you want to get a real picture of whatever happens to have caught your interest.

Let's start with the basics then - I'll use the Ah! My Goddess! TV series as an example for the rest of this section, but you should feel free to use whatever titles you came up with on your browsing through the store. Whenever I'm looking up information on a new series, my first stop tends to be at the Wikipedia. As you can see from the screen cap, the AMG page is very detailed, and off screen are links to other pages related to AMG. Ah! My Goddess is a very popular series, though, so don't mistake me - some series won't have anywhere near as detailed an entry. Wikipedia is a great first stop, though, as you'll almost always find, at the very least, links to the series's official site, and a basic description. Also, because of the way that Wikipedia works, the information is almost always very coherent and readable.

If I don't go to Wikipedia first, or I don't find enough information, I head for the AnimeDB. As you can see, this site isn't nearly as substantive as Wikipedia can be, but it does cover basic information, as well as show what fansubbing groups are doing the series. That's something important, so remember it - I'll come back to it later on in this chapter. Now, the downside to AnimeDB is that, while it does actually have a better database of anime titles than Wikipedia, it can be a little tough to navigate if you don't know where you're going, and you often need to know the exact title of the series you're looking for - to bring up the page in the screen cap, I had to search for the Japanese spelling of the series name, Aa! Megami-sama!. Because of this, you might find yourself looking for your title manually in the main listing. Also, a user account is required if you're trying to look up information on a hentai series - the same is not true of Wikipedia.

Both of these sites provide excellent sources to get the important information about a series - genre, production studio, cast, related series, and so on. AnimeDB also has a user review system that often sports good, technically detailed reviews, especially for the more popular series. What neither of them do so well is tell you what's coming up (though AnimeDB does have an actively maintained calendar system that shows when episodes are played in Japan.). For news and information on what's around the corner, I look to the Anime News Network. Often an excellent source of news in the world of Japanese Animation, it also has series lists like Wikipedia and AnimeDB, though I've found them to usually be less informative and harder to read through than either of the former. Where ANN excels is in new developments worth being aware of.

There is another type of information site that can be well worth your time to look through - that being forum communities, like the boards here at Dragon's Anime, the ones over at Virtual Infusion, or massively popular sites like MegaTokyo and Something Awful. Be warned now, though - forums don't breed coherency and readability like other sites do. They can be excellent sources of ongoing, up to the minute discussion on what ever happens to be the topic, but there's absolutely no accounting for the users. While it's less of a problem at smaller, more carefully moderated sites like Dragon's anime and Virtual Infusion, the larger sites can be quagmires of 133tsp3ak, posts that are allergic to punctuation, flame wars, and forum trolls who exist purely to misinform and stir up the muck. Don't be afraid to wade in - just remember that you've left the world of factual information and entered that of opinion.

Much easier on the eyes are weblogs, online journals written by everything from professional journalists to Joe anime. While the same warning as forums remains in effect - that you are, indeed, on a site based more on opinions than actual facts - weblogs can be an excellent place to find out what the average anime viewer thought of any given series. Many bloggers are also pretty good about the coherency and readability of their posts, too - many, not all, mind you. Your best bet for looking through weblogs is to start with a site like Technorati.com, which is a search engine catering to bloggers.

Most important of all to keep in mind, when it comes to looking at sites like these - respect your OWN opinion too. Don't let them be your only deciding factor. Series that some people hate, you might very well love. Always take the opinions found on forums, weblogs, and even information sites with that thought in mind.

I'll be doing a much more detailed article on fansubbing and what it means to the new anime fan, but no discussion on the use of the Internet for anime would be complete without a look at the fansub groups. The list you made earlier is only half the story - actually, that's more like 1/10th the story. Those are just the releases that have been licensed by American companies, translated, dubbed, repackaged, and sent on their merry way to State-side stores. The trickle of anime that makes that leap is nothing compared to the number of titles that appear overseas, though. That's where the fansubbing groups come in.

Fansub groups take anime that somebody in Japan has recorded off TV and imported into a computer file, and painstakingly translate the dialog. Once that's done, they take the translated dialog and use it to subtitle the video file, just like what you see available on most movie releases. After that, they upload the file to the Internet for those of us that can't speak Japanese to enjoy. Now, the key here is that fansub groups (for the most part - there are some exceptions, especially for particularly popular series) do not translate licensed anime series - if they start a series before it gets licensed, they stop translating it. Thus, while technically fansubbing is against copyright laws, it is usually overlooked - and in some cases, actually encouraged - by the Japanese production companies. Since the series are unlicensed, they're not losing any money, and can actually benefit from fansubbing, as often American companies will watch for the very popular fansubbed series and turn around and license them.

What fansubbing means to you, the new anime viewer, is that you get a chance to experience stuff you'd never run across otherwise here in the States. This is where AnimeDB comes in as important. Remember how I mentioned that they list the fansub groups that are doing any particular series, and that they also have an actively maintained calendar of what's showing in Japan? Well, you can use those two to find out what looks interesting on the fansubbing circuit. It's a bit harder to do than looking up series that have been licensed here in America - you have to wade into the forums more often, for instance, as it's a smaller subset of anime fans that truly understand fansubbing. But it can be extremely well worth your time, as dozens of series that would otherwise go unknown can be found.

A few years ago, getting hold of fansubs would have involved hunting down the files across dozens of IRC servers and hundreds of thousands of chat rooms, or else trying to find the needle in the haystack of file sharing programs like WinMX or eMule. Today, though, things have gotten far, far easier with the advent of BitTorrent, which is the format of choice for fansub groups to share the subbed anime episodes. Fast and reliable, torrents are dependent upon the users for their success.

Once you have a BitTorrent client - personally I recommend uTorrent, though there are other options out there - you can start downloading fansubbed anime. Torrents are hosted at sites called 'trackers' - they literally keep track of each and every user on any given torrent. Torrents work by using the users themselves as the source of the file. When you open up a torrent, what you're really doing is connecting to the tracker. Your client tells the tracker what you have of a file, and what you need. The tracker, in turn, either sends bits and pieces of files to you from somebody else that already has them, or has your client send bits and pieces of what you have to somebody that doesn't. Thus, the more people using a torrent, the faster that download goes. I've personally seen seeds as high as 1.5gig/s downstream, on very popular anime episodes. Needless to say, that gets what can be a very large file - some as large as 500 megs, though they average 175 - to you much faster than if you were to try to directly download it from a single user.

It also means that when you just download a file and then disconnect, you hurt other people trying to get the same episode. It's common courtesy to seed - stay connected to the torrent after you've finished downloading the file - until you've shared out at least as much as you downloaded. That's not a limit, mind you - you can seed for as long as you like, and other users of the torrent will benefit from it. It is, however, at the very least expected, and often times enforced. Tracker admins like to ban users that they see leaching - disconnecting before at least one full copy of a torrent has been seeded back out. So you see, it's in your best interests to be generous - you wouldn't want to miss out on that fansubbed anime now, would you?

No Free Lunch

Don't think that just because a fansub group finished a series before it got licensed means that you shouldn't support the artists, voice actors, writers, and staff that produced the series you're watching. As I mentioned above, save for in very rare cases, fansubbers stop subbing, and distributing a licensed anime. Beyond that, though, it's just good practice to go out and buy a series on DVD when it gets licensed and brought over. Not only does it mean supporting the work... it also helps to keep the growth of anime into the mainstream going strong.

As I mentioned above, I'll be doing a more in depth article down the line on popular fansubbers and what they mean to the new anime fan, so for now consider the fansubbing section of this chapter to be a basic overview. I've added links in the box to the right of this paragraph to some of the best general anime torrent sites for you to get started with. My personal recommendation is to start with AnimeSuki. It's not as big as Tokyo Tosho, but it's easier to navigate and deals strictly with fansubbed anime, rather than anime, music, games, cg sets, hentai episodes, etc. Consult AnimeDB too as you're looking at individual series, as their group lists can make finding episodes much easier than they would be otherwise.

In terms of more general information, I can recommend the Anipike as a vast resource of site links, though I caution you that old links are not well maintained, and sifting through the junk can take considerable time. Still, it is hands down the most complete resource of anime links to be found online, and with a little practice can be very useful. Last, but definitely not least, don't forget the old standards like Google and Yahoo. You'll sift through even more junk than Anipike, but thanks to page ranking it's very likely that you'll find information very quickly and easily.