I’ve been wanting to write about Anime Youtube for quite a long time now. Anitube has been one of the few constants in my experience with the medium as a whole, in fact, they are one of the biggest reasons I got interested in the medium in the first place and for a long time were my primary influence on how I would engage with it. If it weren’t for Arkada, Gigguk and the early likes, my experience with anime as a whole would likely not be nearly the same as it is now so it should be relatively obvious that Anitube as a whole is quite close to my heart, despite a lot of the rather questionable content that gets put out.

Just a bit more than a year ago one of the most prolific Youtubers of the Anime Community in Digibro released a video titled the “Top 10 Youtube Analysis Videos of 2015” which marked the first time I had ever seen the idea of Youtube videos as an actual art form, something I hadn’t even considered before. Of course, criticism of Anime Youtubers and Analysis videos, in general, had already existed before that, but mainly in what turned out to be relatively stupid drama. There was the “Educate Anime” movement a few years back which tried to push for better content, but did so in exactly the way no one wanted to see, there somehow was an argument at some point about whether or not Arkada was somehow making videos the wrong way and through these kinds of incidents the idea of criticizing Youtube to me and likely many others ended up being equivalent to Drama. Of course, that’s far from the case and that’s the exact thing that Digibro’s video, at last, made me think about.

In the age of the Nerdwriter, Every Frame a Painting, the PBS Idea Channel and many many other absolutely gigantic youtube Channels focused on Analysis this may be something that seems like a relatively obvious train of thought but when first thinking watching Digibro’s video it was an absolutely novel idea to me and it’s only grown ever since.

Now the reason I write all of this isn’t to just put out my life story out there, but I believe that a lot of what comes from looking at Anime Youtube as an art form is too often ignored almost completely. There’s been a real surge of criticism in the Anitube community after Digibro’s recent disaster of a video of him shit-talking other people and there’s been a lot more talking about the medium as a whole thanks to it and that is something that I’m more than thankful (although I do wish it would’ve happened in a different context), but this is also where the idea of Anitube as an art form has to come into play.

Of course, some of the basic ideas of art can easily be applied to what Anime Youtube has to offer and have been for the past years. That the medium is subjective is far from something new to the community (if you ignore people like TAS that is anyway). At the same time however, there seem to be aspects of this discussion that are often rather conveniently ignored. For the past few months, I’ve been wondering what exactly it is that I want out of Anitube and the conclusion is that it really doesn’t differ at all from Anime. What I want out of the medium is a mixture of entertainment and being presented with interesting ideas and most importantly, a mixture of the two.

To clear up, this doesn’t mean the two are mutually exclusive, more the opposite rather, the two to me personally almost belong together, much like they do within Anime itself. An Anime can be as interesting as it wants to be, I need to be in some way engaged in it in order to ever take away anything from it at all. An Anime can be as enjoyable as it wants to be, often enough it needs to in some way bring up ideas in my head or tackle themes in order for me to take something away from it. I think the same holds true with Anime Youtube.

Much like in Anime itself, enjoyment on Anitube can come from a lot of places, be it the delivery of lines that the Nerdwriter, for example, has absolutely mastered, be it the integration of quotes and editing as a whole that Oscillot or MrAJCosplay likely do the best out of anyone in the community, or the incredibly dense scripts of people like Pause & Select. Ideas in Art are important and may seem like what things should be focused on, but much like a house without a basis will break eventually, a message without foundation to be delivered in crumbles easily. Art needs to engage in order to get across its messages and this specific medium does so through the script, editing, line delivery and more so why not talk about all of these things some more?

We talk about Anime Youtube in the most basic of senses, we talk about who made a video and whether or not we enjoyed videos or agree with what they said, but there’s a lot more behind the medium that justifies being attentive to and I think that’s something most people miss out on. Just as we pay attention to Anime and try to figure out our feelings on it, I think Anime Youtube deserves the same.

PS: The Canipa Effect is good too I guess