Here is a dilemma that's common to any modern critic of media, one made all the more complicated by the way media itself has undergone such a grand mutation of form and distribution in the past decade: When, if ever, does it make sense to confine the discussion to titles that are only in print or readily available to a Western audience? It's easy to make a case in favor of confining the discussion only to what's in print when the discussion is meant largely to be about telling people what to buy — but being a critic has taught me, among other things, how just telling people what to buy is only a small part of what the whole act of criticism is actually about.
There are good practical reasons to focus one's critical talk around stuff that's in print and readily available. Most audiences, Western or otherwise, don't have unlimited funds, or use all-you-can-eat services to obtain their media (Netflix, Crunchyroll, etc.). The former means they're typically confined to what's on the mass market and readily in print, lest they pay the exorbitant prices demanded of a collector or a rapacious Amazon or eBay seller. The latter means the exact selection of titles is also limited, and once something vanishes from the lineup, it's often gone for keeps. I suspect the rise of such services means the main mode of consumption for most folks is "watching without keeping" — meaning a streaming service, a disc rental from a by-mail system, or something along those lines. Fewer fans are becoming hardcore owners, but the few that still are, defend to the death the privilege to do so. (I count myself in with that number, but that's another essay.)
Faced with such a picture, it only makes sense to start by confining one's choices to what both you and your readers have ready access to. But I'm becoming convinced that's not the best long-term approach, especially for critics who want to make it their métier to dig deeper and peer further. It's unquestionably riskier and more difficult in the long run to expand the palette and talk about titles that have lapsed in availability or were never in print to begin with. But the mission of any self-described critic need to be bigger than just allowing readers to make an educated buying or viewing decision. It should also be about widening horizons, and sometimes the only way to do that is to evangelize for something that other's can't see. At least, not yet.
Open the door, widen the discussion, save your pennies
There are many practical advantages to keeping the majority of the discussion around whatever's current, in-print, and readily available. Given that most of us do this for little or no money, it helps to be practical. Knowing that your audiences can see the material in question — or might have already seen it — and can speak back to you about it helps keep the discussion active. But kicking off a discussion about something they haven't seen or heard about, and in many cases can't see — how useful is that? I'd argue it has a utility of its own: it provides those who are reading with a sense of how much bigger, more varied, and colorful their field of interest actually is. No pricetag can be put on such things.
Another thing such a widening can trigger off is how it can bring in a different class of audience — people who don't need the discussion to revolve around something they've seen or something they can afford, and can be curious about something on its own abstract merits. The thought-cliché of "if you build it, they will come" is rooted at least partly in the fact that most anything that is put together well and reads persuasively will find an audience in today's world of readerships, provided it gets spread around enough. Plus, such an audience can in turn do some of the legwork that you can't do alone — the work of putting pressure on distributors to perhaps pick up those titles, even if only provisionally. That kind of audience is worth finding and cultivating on its own terms.
Yet another benefit of having such a discussion and building such an audience is an aspect of an issue I've touched on myself in the past: it pushes the discussion beyond merely talking about what's worth owning. I think for a good time now there's been a healthy rise in expressing one's fandom less through ownership of things and more through constructive participation — fanfic, fanart, cosplay, panels, etc. — although I'm still not sure if the move away from buying physical media and towards digital downloads, streaming, and rentals has fueled this or just been coincidental with it. But anything that does nudge the conversation more in that direction stands to be a net benefit: the more we talk about these things as things unto themselves (where the value of the thing comes through our engagement with it) and less as things to be owned (where the value is a mere pricetag or a space on a shelf), the better.
One major downside of seeking out and discussing the rare stuff is that it's costly and difficult, that someone has to assume the cost, and that some things are simply not available no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem. As I write this, I'm in a much better financial position than I was a year ago when I first launched Ganriki.org, but I still have to be cautious; I can't throw $600 at that Gurren Lagann Blu-ray Disc box set just because. That $600 could buy me ten other shows, many of which deserve exposure at least as wide as that one, and which aren't likely to get it on their own. But I also know many people don't even have $60 to throw around, let alone $600, and so it feels ill-spirited to say something like, "If you really cared about this kind of thing, you'd save the money for it, wouldn't you?"
Still, I feel it's worth making a case for this: a critic deserves, whenever possible, to keep a fund specifically for the sake of obtaining out-of-print or hard-to-find items that they know are worth the discussion. It doesn't matter if that funding is spare change in a piggybank, or bonus points accumulated from a credit card (my current chosen tactic); the point is to build up the money and then spend it specifically on things you know you want to bring to a broader audience. If you're diligent, you find the money accumulates faster than you think.
Beyond the language barriers
The most difficult sell, and this I freely admit, is when the discussion turns to titles that aren't available in English at all, a problem peculiar to anime and manga fandom — and, I'd throw in, fans of Japanese literature and live-action cinema too. Here's also where the situation favors critics rather than lay audiences, especially if those critics have bothered to learn Japanese. My own command of Japanese is shaky but workable; I can make sense of things, but I wouldn't be able to provide a professional-quality translation, and I work slowly and require the aid of a dictionary. But the vast, vast majority of the fan audience doesn't do this. To that end, talking about those untranslated titles — if you choose to do so — should be like a travelogue, where you've been to someplace not readily accessible to the audience and relate what you've found there. It's not a substitute for going there; nothing is. But it helps get gears turning.
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One example end of a title I've researched and stumped for even when I know the odds of my readers encountering it are slender to none: Bōtchan. The names involved — prolific anime director Osamu Dezaki, famed character designer Monkey Punch (of Lupin III fame) — ought to grant it a place in any discussion of classic anime. But because it's a title that was produced as a TV special and only had the briefest of press runs on home video — and absolutely nothing since, on either side of the Pacific — it was easy for it to never have a discussion. I felt it was worth making a case for in spite of being almost impossible to find. Not because I seriously expected a reader to spend $250 to track down a copy, but because just getting some discussion started about it in the first place seems like a worth effort for someone who claims to take these things seriously.
Not long ago, in an unrelated discussion, someone mentioned that criticism needs to not be just another branch of PR. Meaning that the point of drawing attention to things is not to draw attention to them uncritically. One's enthusiasm for something should be genuine, but also informed, and skeptical — and should provide, whenever possible, a sense that the world is larger than whatever world-view is being pushed at the current moment in time. This is more than just educating an audience with "roots lessons" of who influenced whom; that stuff is valuable, but I fear it gets looked upon as being little more than fusty, geekish archaeology, and not a living thing. The point should be to make all of these things — obscure, readily available, or what have you — into a living thing that is part of the discussion, and close at hand.
