You may know tons about anime fandom, but did you know that anime academics are a thing? The number of ethnographic books and anthropologists studying our community is astounding.
There’s even an annual research project that catalogs thousands of responses from international anime fans and crunches the numbers. It’s administered by Dr. Stephen Reysen, an Assistant Professor and his team at Texas A&M University-Commerce and there’s a lot of great findings.
My favorite question from the survey: “Being a member of the anime community provides me a way to make and maintain friendships.” This is pretty obvious to us — attendees tell us that our events are really chill and friendly (because our members are so rad!)