See here.
The reviewing systems I know and love are predicated upon the fetish of perfection. My favourite judgemental authorities (looking beyond anime) have always been the ones who refused to give their perfect scores to more than an elite few, or refused to give it ever. But what I’m interested in here isn’t the attempted objectivity of these reviewers, it’s the personal sense of perfection. The feeling that what you just saw was immaculate.
It’s perhaps because of this that anime forces an awareness of subjectivity upon us. …it’s that we become more aware of our role as viewer in maintaining that feeling of perfection.
As such, I reject any canon which aims to tell me what’s “essential” to my understanding of anime.
It may be somewhat productive to explore anime in its own right – but we make a better fandom, and a better collective idea of “anime” if we insist on ideas of actual quality. A canon based on what’s socially important to us is a dead shark, it’s something which looses its connection to the experience of actually watching. It’s all fan-love and no art-love.
What coburn seems to be touching on is that, while the memetic quality of anime via the internet has a tendency to generate authoritative essentialism, we shouldn’t be limited to finding the memetic quality of anime as essential to viewing within a society, within culture – we shouldn’t be uniform. However, in an attempt to encourage viewing diversity and variations in viewing canons, are we implicitly imposing a greater canon of diversity? – the spectre of heterogeneity? The ideology of perfection keeps us in line with our oh-so-imperfect witnessing of anime, and it’s this very discourse which is indicative of viewing as a social phenomenon. So, again, I’ve run up against the wall. Which takes precedence? Society, or the individual? Which is dominant? – structure, or agency? This seems to be a recurring question.