Bringing this back to my own first comment in this thread: This is precisely why out of all the forms of independent animation out there, I love fanime specifically so much. A work like Tokyo Crystal Mew is particularly illustrative and interesting to look at from this perspective: the way it was never finished, but later videos by the creator indicate that a lot more of the series was planned/made than was released; the way that the first two episodes were remade as the artist honed her skills; the way the visuals go from storyboards to very rough MS Paint drawings to very well-done black and white line animation to very well-done full-color animation, often in the same episode; and the knowledge in the back of your mind that the creator started the series I believe as a preteen and posted the last episode in her late teens, and you can see this in how the quality of the whole show tends to improve as it goes on. Something like Tokyo Crystal Mew is basically a celebration of imperfection and incompleteness, of creativity for creativity's sake; and it basically challenges anyone who sees it to try making their own animation, even if it looks rough, or the writing isn't all there, or you never finish it, making something is still better than nothing. You know?

I dunno if this makes sense, but it's like fanime is Kamina telling you the viewer/Simon to believe in the Kamina that believes in you, to do the impossible see the invisible, row row fight the power. And that's what I like about it: the unbridled human creativity, the unabashed reflections of pedestrian subjectivities.

This made me think about the repeated notion that old European capitals are “Disneyland for adults”, how while there is a kernel of insightful criticism, it betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the speaker; because, having lived in a very adult, very serious, very sober world of capitalist America, where the urban districts are built for the exclusive satisfaction of capital and the rejection of human residents — this person already cannot imagine a city that is designed for the pleasure of its residents, designed for use-value instead of exchange-value, except to the extent that pleasure is transactional as in an amusement park.