The Generous Side of Fandom Doesn’t Get Enough Celebration

When I last went to Anime Expo in 2022, the first in-person iteration since the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote about noticing the darker side of the fandom more at the convention. If that was one of my takeaways in 2022, my takeaway in 2024 was the opposite.

This year at Anime Expo, I noticed countless acts of kindness and generosity. Granted, as shounen mainstay My Hero Academia has vividly illustrated, anger and toxicity makes for clickable headlines, posts, and videos. A post espousing that “people are nice, actually” is generally considered less desirable by the media machine as a whole, which is quite dark—and all the more reason that the countless small acts of kindness I saw at Anime Expo 2024 should be celebrated.

Acts of kindness

There was a strong community between the people working the con, specifically the artists. I saw artists and their friends who working the Artist Alley—famous for being hot and crowded—running each other food and beverages. I saw artists handing out free stickers to anyone who was working the con in any capacity as a show of solidarity.

But that generosity extended far beyond a “professional” capacity. When I was at the One Piece Symphony, artist Bianca J handed me a sticker they designed to celebrate the event: an adorable Gear 5 Luffy with “OP Symphony, LA 2024” written on the sides. I was deeply moved by the notion they had created this sticker for this specific event, and specifically to hand out to fellow attendees. It felt driven by wanting to share the mutual love everyone there had for One Piece.

That passion wasn’t limited to the One Piece fandom, either. I cosplayed as Izutsumi from Delicious in Dungeon, and at the cosplay meetup, fellow cosplayers were handing out all kinds of goodies: multiple iterations of free stickers, free treats (thank you, Senshi!), “Treasure Bugs” (coin chocolates) out of a little treasure box, colorful candied sugar made to look like the sorbet the party eats after exorcising spirits.

These little gifts were not only generous, they were creative. The fandom is so passionate that they went the extra mile to find funny ways to share that joy around to their fellow fans.

At the end of one of Trigger’s panels, while in cosplay, I rushed up to someone with an adorable Izutsumi pin on their bag and asked if they’d found it at the Artist Alley. “Oh, I made that!” said her friend. She turned to the person with the bag. “Go ahead and give that pin to her. She’s such a cute Izutsumi.” Feeling exceptionally flattered, I offered to pay for the pin, but she turned payment down as she handed the pin over.

Changing the conversation

My point is not that you should go to Anime Expo to get free goodies. It’s that these goodies now mean more to me than the merch I spent money on. They are sentimental artifacts which prove to me that the anime fandom is, at its heart of hearts, good and kind. And the gestures all the more profound to me because of factors like inflation and a likely strike on the horizon for animation workers amidst widespread layoffs and subsequent rising unemployment.

While those of us who interact with other anime fans in real life can receive these reminders, the sentiment often gets buried in internet discourse, where a small minority of bad actors can dominate headlines and seem bigger than they really are. The day after Anime Expo ended, the mere existence of trolls caused Crunchyroll to shut down their comments section. But even there, the whole reason people are upset at Crunchyroll is because the vast majority of the comments on the platform were passionate, funny, and good-natured.

In June of this year, civilian Ruixian Xu stopped a knife attack on a train in Taiwan, after the attacker injured three people. When asked for the reason he was spurred into action, Xu said, “If Himmel was there, he would’ve done the same thing.” He was referencing, of course, Himmel the Hero from Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.

Listen, the world is dark enough as it is. There’s no doubt that the bad actors I saw in 2022 still exist, but they are a teeny, tiny minority. The real heart of the anime fandom is kind, good people who want to share their passion about their favorite series. And the ways that passion manifests has resulted in some of the most profound small acts of kindnesses from strangers that I encounter nowadays.