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No longer a weeb

Background: Even though this might be the last English course I will take in my
lifetime; I am moving forward with a positive attitude I am very grateful to all my English
teachers and professors who have helped me throughout the years. I hope this essay
shows my love for writing that I learned at university. I have been a huge fan of anime
since I was a child. I watched around 10 animes, over 1000 episodes in total. I
experienced deep joy in each of them, and I was curious why people would drop such a
TV show. So, I made a survey and did interviews to see why, and this piece is all about
it.

Introduction: Anime is a popular animation form used in Japanese films and television
series. Most of its plots are filled with action. Anime developed in the early 20th century
where the big three (One Piece, Naruto, Bleach) came into play, and thankfully I had the
opportunity to enjoy these three. When I started to talk to my university colleagues, I was
surprised that few people like Reehan and Bilal started watching anime and stopped. I
was wondering in my head why they did that. Therefore, I conducted a survey for TAMUQ
students, in addition to interviewing my colleague who stopped watching anime after
starting it. This issue is not only about my colleagues who stopped watching but also
about people worldwide. On a few websites, I have seen that a lot of people are doing
this, more than I expected. Also, I was able to see the reasons behind that, which helped
me to create my survey options for my ORQ (original research question), so I could see
how many students from TAMUQ would have the same reasons. My study of this
research aims to see why people choose each of the reasons for the survey question:
Reasons why TAMUQ students dropped anime
Which means the TAMUQ students who answered this survey will be my target audience.

Methodologies: In order to conduct this research, I chose two methods: interviewing

and surveying. Anime lovers are called weebs, so I prepared a survey question for a “no
longer a weeb” TAMUQ students. In addition, I interviewed one of my friends Belal.
Survey:
Using Qualtrics survey software, I created an online survey. Because one of my
classmates had a similar ORQ, we mixed our surveys and we had around 5 questions in
total (as you will see in the appendix section A) and we got 47 responses. This survey
targeted TAMUQ students who don’t watch in addition to TAMUQ students who stopped
watching. My focus was on the one who stopped watching as that was related to my ORQ.
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The survey was super useful in my opinion, as it gave me a good view of what lead to
these TAMUQ students to drop watching anime. It was mistake not making a text box for
“other” reasons. Which made me do an interview to see other possible reasons.

Interview:
I will be honest here. I had difficulty interviewing because of finals, midterms, and worrying
about not getting an A in courses like calculus one and chemistry. I think it was a
challenge for the rest of my classmates as well. Anyways, I managed to record an
interview with my friend Belal. I chose Zoom as I thought it would be the most comfortable
way of interviewing my friend, and the results turned out to be perfect.

Results and discussion:

Survey:
Before I saw the results of the survey, I expected that toxic fandoms would be the reason
for almost all TAMUQ students who chose from the options. Turns out that I was right,
toxic fandoms did have the most
reasons. I expected it because toxic REASONS WHY TAMUQ
fandoms are one of the biggest
STUDENTS DROPPED ANIME
problems in the anime community.
Even though these fans love anime, Toxic fandom
they are also one of the reasons why Time-
people from non-anime backgrounds consuming

dislike it. Here's one example of why

people dislike toxic fandoms: Let's
say two animes are loved by people,
Naruto and Bleach. The disrespectful Got bored
Naruto fans would say that bleach is
a rip-off of Naruto, which angers Alternatives
Predictable Animation
bleach fans and vice versa. The storyline
reason why I still watch anime is
because I ignore these toxic fans. Another major reason is time consuming. Students are
not forced to finish the series in a day or a week, so it really depends on their schedules. Besides
that, I don’t know why students are complaining, some of them watch Netflix which is most of the
time the series have 50 minutes per episode whereas anime is only 20 minutes per episode. Rest
of the reasons were understandable, though I would argue with predictable storyline since most
shows always bring unexpected hype to the series.
Interview:
I interviewed Belal through zoom asking the question: Why did u stop watching anime? was it the
toxic fandom? or animation style? or do u have another reason?
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His answer was that he wasn’t interested in the animation style, and the storyline. His reason are
recorded in a zoom meeting which you will be listening to soon.
Secondy sources:
So, I like I mentioned before I used few websites such as Quora (Has anybody stopped watching
anime? Is there any specific reason?, n.d.) and anime everything (Silvercrowv1, n.d.) to help me
in my research. In order to strengthen my research, I will use one more website which is reddit.
(Anime_historian, 2014), as it has many useful information which I can use for my secondary
research.

References
Anime_historian. (2014). TrueAnime. Retrieved from reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnime/comments/2pec0y/why_do_some_people_hate_anime_
so_much_heres_my/

Has anybody stopped watching anime? Is there any specific reason? (n.d.). Retrieved from Quora:
https://www.quora.com/Has-anybody-stopped-watching-anime-Is-there-any-specific-reason

Silvercrowv1, B. (n.d.). The Most Toxic Fandoms In Anime Community + The Worst Kind of Weebs.
Retrieved from Anime Everything Online: https://animeeverything.online/the-most-toxic-
fandoms-in-anime-community-the-worst-kind-of-weebs/

Appendix A(survey)
Q1 – Gender?
Q2 - Have you ever been/are you a fan of Anime?
Q4 - Is anime getting in the way of your studies?
Q5 - "Anime is for kids, I don't wanna be one of them.(agree to disagree)
Q6 - How would you describe the anime community in one word?
Q7 - Your opinion on the anime community in about one or two sentences.
Q8 - Did you drop anime?
Q9 - What led you to drop Anime?
Appendix B(interview)
Why did u stop watching anime? was it the toxic fandom? or animation style? or do u
have another reason?