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Manga Hacks, Japan Shopping Secrets, and More Fandom Culture at Anime India's Specialty Fan Panels

Anime India began its second iteration in Kolkata on Saturday and the highlights of the event were, as usual, their fan panels. Anime India isn't just a convention for the fans, but it brings in some of its most in-depth insights and unique panels with presentations from the fans themselves. The event's specialty "fan panels" pass the mic to the fans as well some industry professionals, micro-influencers, and even media scholars, where they take the stage and talk about topics that are meaningful to the community.

One of the highlights of Saturday's fan panel presentations was Manas Sharma aka Sakaido's "MAL Users Hate Him!!! See How Local Man Finds Manga Tailored to Him with One Simple Trick!" panel. While the "manga's greatest secret" that the former Crunchyroll News writer boasted was knowing how to ascertain the "vibe" of a magazine, the experiment Sharma ran on Anime India's socials proved that he could guess what manga the audience liked based on a single title of their choice.

After proving his credentials, Sharma went over the major publishing companies and the kinds of manga several of their magazines tend to publish. He urged the audience to not go by genres like shonen, shoujo and seinen when selecting manga for their own tastes, and elaborated on the various styles that each magazine adheres to when publishing manga.

He admitted to ending the panel on a pessimistic note, showing the audience statistics on print manga. The statistics illustrated the rise of digital sales while drops in sales of physical publications mostly accounted for manga magazines. Sharma gave away a copy of the limited English edition of Young Magazine (that was only available physically at Anime NYC and at some Kinokuniya locations in the U.S., but was available digitally worldwide) in hopes of encouraging more of an interest in the magazine medium, which incorporates more audience participation and editorial curation than digital. When asked about crowdfunding for more English language releases of magazines such as the Young Magazine edition, he mentioned the success of Galette, stating that crowdfunding might be a great way forward for indie magazine projects to bring more readers to the medium. He also mentioned the now out-of-print VÉRITÉ magazine, which was an anthology featuring several Japanese manga creators and Indian comic book artists, summing up the various trajectories the future of manga magazines can take.

Other notable fan panels included sin3point14 and arkhambat102's "Every 5 yen coin you save helps Yato build his shrine: A beginners guide to getting cheap merch in Japan" and Katie and Ivy's "BL, GL, and Beyond." While the former went over essential shopping spots in all major Japanese cities and towns, a broad spectrum of collectible hobbies, and what popular spots to skip; the latter went over the respective histories of yaoi and yuri, the major titles in the genres, and even "submarines." The latter was the more interactive of the panels where audience members came up to share their favorite titles, ships, and even hot takes.

While day one was packed with fun and informative panels, day two had us looking forward to panels like "All about CLAMP," "Hot Takes in the Animeverse," and "FromSoftware's Secrets of Environmental Storytelling" as well director Susumu Mitsunaka panel on the event's flagship stage.

Source: Anime India