Dead Chat Is Ded*: The Rise and Dissolution of Chat Communities Attached to Bootleg Anime Streaming Sites

O capacious room,Give me your tongues.

I’m done with being self-Possessed. Take hold, turn

The river in me. I’m freedUp to be anybody else . . .

—From Go-go Ode by Taylor Johnson

Having regularly heard Legend of Galactic Heroes (1988–97) name-dropped between tipsy cultural studies writers since the late 1990s, I had an interest in seeing what spawned such clandestine obsession. But as my sole reason for watching it was from social curiosity, I never set myself the nigh-impossible task of finding all twenty-five-plus tapes of fansubs. Most anime fans of past generations had one of these white (sharpie-labeled) whales; elusive shows they relentlessly pursued with hopes of sharing with their friends in a late–night binge in their living rooms, Macross figurines inevitably adorning the entertainment center, like mecha Greek theater masks. By early 2015, the streaming revolution was growing, and almost everything was available somewhere. So, one night, on a whim, I simply muddled some words into Google: “Legend of Galactic Heroes Streaming Subtitled Full.” No legal link showed up on the first page of search results, so I figured the show still was not licensed. I clicked the first link and, indeed, a site called Dubbedepisodes.com had a reliable stream.¹

There were no friends next to me at my computer desk at 1 a.m., no litany of fansubbers to wrangle, but as I committed myself to its 110 footnote-and-adjective-inducing episodes of epic anime political space opera, dubbedepisodes.com appended a virtual living room of people watching gray-market anime: a built-in Chatango (a messenger application that allows you to find and talk to new people with similar interests) chat room in the right side-bar.² Anime Place was its name, and everyone who was watching anime on dubbedepisodes.com was automatically logged into the chat, reaching toward three thousand simultaneous users on a binge-y night. Other than when the video was in full screen mode, this public chat would scroll on, appending the “I just googled an anime I wanted to see and clicked the first result” viewer, whether they wanted it or not, into the memes, arguments, abuse, evolving slang, in-jokes, political extremism, moderator intervention, trolling, IRL meetup plans, and lingering Web 1.0 anti-design, fermenting into boisterous (sometimes belligerently hostile) periphery community.

In this brief introductory essay to the accompanying visual essay, I want to provide a basic foundation for both the artworks and also for future researchers interested in the brief gray-market period of anime streaming platforms, and their attendant communities. This includes both the abstract data, as well as a lightly anthropological account of my personal narrative and emotional reactions as a casual user of Anime Place. To properly reconstruct the basic economic and market narrative of anime streaming platforms, it is valuable to use contemporary entertainment publications and industry reports, a method suggested by Mikhail Kulikov to produce a stronger contextuality in the study of media texts and their distribution platforms.³

Ruminating on the work of Stuart Hall, artist and scholar Todd Gray writes: “I realized that normativity is how we are controlled. What is the expectation [for how a citizen or artist acts] and where does this expectation come from? Where do I get these ideas?”⁴ My cursory Google search for Legend of Galactic Heroes turned up dozens, maybe hundreds of these sorts of bootleg streaming sites—and adjacent communities—that were crucibles for producing American fandom’s normativity in the decade or so following Crunchyroll’s launch in 2006.⁵ The story of Dubbedepisodes.com and Anime Place, a community so intimately grafted into a bootleg streaming site, becomes an example to tease out the vernacular of self-determining, abusive, and just plain weird norms that evolved during the interim period between atomized fansub media (VHS/downloaded files) and the omnipresence of legal anime streaming. A decade’s worth of norms from what John Kelsey calls the “anti-community of networked souls” were...