The thrills of meeting

IRL

Can you tell us a little bit about you and the general idea of the Dutch Anime community?

My name is Hugo and when I first joined this community I used to be a member just like everybody else.
Back then, it was called Anime Fans Netherlands. For the same reason,
I am still doing what I do. Although it is not only me, it is more of a team effort. We divided the ownership among three people and we have an amazing Mod team and people that help on it. So, I wouldn’t call it ‘my’ server, it is more of ‘our’ server as a whole. The reason why I joined at first was because when I was in my internship, so I wasn’t really in contact with any classmates. In my study, gaming and anime were more of a normal topic. In my middle school, anime and gaming were instead a nerd thing, not many people really watched anime and the people who played games were called nerds.
So, during my internship, I was looking for a Dutch server
because I realized that I was active on some American servers but I didn’t like the fact that I wouldn’t have any chance to see someone in real life.
I joined a League of Legends Dutch server as I played that game a lot,
but they talked about. League only and I just wanted to chat about anything, about my day, about jokes. Eventually, I met someone on that server and he invited me to the Anime Fans Netherlands and I joined there in 2019. I had a blast, made a lot of friends, and met a lot of people in real life. Eventually, the old owner retired and he carried it over to me and the other two.

We are the three owners. Cor, Rik
and I. We just keep doing what we always did, growing bigger. We were invited to some conventions by connections, so now we are even at Dutch Comic Con and FACTS in Belgium. Dutch Comic Con is the biggest Anime convention in the Netherlands and FACTS is the biggest one in Belgium. So that is pretty cool! We get invited there as a mega community, so we have a stand and people just get together and play some card games. Sometimes we have a little tourney where you can play Mario Maker. It’s all about having fun! That is kind of our goal,
bringing people together. For me,
it’s especially that people can also meet in real life but that is not everyone’s ultimate goal, I just really like that idea of it. That was what got me there in the first place and what keeps me there after all.

"Cosplay truly became mainstream"

How did Anime Fans

Netherlands come to be?

That goes way back. There has been a server before this, with the same name, which I think was a smaller server. The original owner was Bubabent, he retired a while ago because he wanted to focus on his studies and did not have time anymore. And he said that his mission was to bring the Dutch and the Belgium anime communities together. It is kind of still the same thing that we are under. People meet each other and make friends here, talking about their hobbies etc. He had a mission to make it to Belgium, even though
I don’t recall seeing much of that happening. It's still more active in The Netherlands, still had ‘Netherlands’ in the name. It might be a question of how far he took that mission,
but that's what he used to say.

Is the community about

one anime specifically?

It is anything you like, to put it very bluntly. ‘Anime’ is more of a collection name, to get people with the same interest in here. There are a lot of active people, the core members of the community who watch anime. It is more that people who like anime are more internet culture-based. You can join here without even having watched a single one. You can join just to play League with people,
you can join just to talk about your day, but you can also join if you are the biggest anime fan ever and you really want to show off your manga collection. So, everyone is welcome.
It is a culture in general. We have a lot of subchannels for different game genres. Not of a single game,
but more like gacha games,
mobile games, FPS games, stuff like that. So anyone could be like: “Hey,
I play Siege so I want to join ….”.
The main channel is ‘General Chat’ and it is only people talking about their day, what they are doing now etc. It is never really anime talk in the ‘General Chat’ itself, it is only in the ‘Anime Chat’.

"Everyone is welcome. It is an Internet culture"

Can anyone join or

only Dutch people?

If they can speak Dutch, then yes.
In the lobby, you will have to say that you took at least the age role because Discord is 13+. There were people we had to ban after being a month active because we found out they were younger. That was kind of a pain.
So we said that you have to pick an age role. Then you will say in Dutch that you have read the rules, which you can only do if you are Dutch,
so it’s fair enough. When you have said that you have read it, in Dutch, someone will let you in. There is no country restriction.

How do you keep a

healthy environment?

We have two main ways. Cor, Rik and I, as the owners, we use the technology from the Japanese Mafia, just for laughs. The head of the Mafia, that’s the three owners. Then we have the Yakuza, those are the Mods.
Then you have the stand team,
they help at conventions. Some of the social media managers and editors help out. And then trial Yakuza, that is a trial mod. Most people that become a mod have been active in the community or are still active.
They mostly like to chat in general as well, that is how they keep an eye out. We are not asking people to have Discord open on a second screen to play police, but normally the mods are pretty active so the chat gets managed. We have some automation deletes, there is a bot that checks for a couple of words. Like, people can not say the N-word, the Dutch also like to swear with illnesses so ‘cancer’ is not allowed. Pretty much stuff like that.

“The head of the mafia”

What is your vision
for the Dutch Anime community server?

What I know for sure is that we will keep going to conventions, because that’s way too fun! For now, the goal is to keep things steady as they are. Organize meetings, and have events for the people on our server to join. There is going to be a big server event sometime in the future, due to corona we could not have done it for the last two years. Personally, and also some of the mods I know as well, really like bringing people together in real life. We have a channel that is called ‘Mini Meets’. Everyone can request access to it, by a mod. Locations will be shared and people that just joined the server have no business with reading locations of where people are going. In ‘Mini Meets’, members can make their own mini meet and the moderator will ping the role. Let’s say that you want to hang out with some people in Utrecht city next week. You use the command and the bot will generate a meeting for you where people can go to. Those are usually pretty full,
pretty fun. The last couple of times, ten to twenty people showed up, depending on what the plan is and how long it was planned. They are not server official but made by members. will soon be time for big server meetings again. We want to grow so more people can get together. I like it when our voice channels are full because then you know that people are interacting. Mostly, the chat can be a bit bland, people will say three words and then leave again. But in voice chat, you know that they are having a good time. They are filling their evening with something social. Recently, the voice channels were filled to the brim, which is always nice to see. I like the channel and the way the bot works within it.

We want to keep growing to let more people get together so that there will be more meetings
and more people will make friends. We like to also get to some more conventions, but they are from different organizations. Dutch Comic Con and FACTS are from the same household, we are working together with them so that is why we won’t

go to others. There is Made in Asia, which is a bit smaller but also from the same parent company. We are focusing on our socials a bit, to be a little more professional on all fronts. It used to be just Discord,
but Instagram is also having some posts now and we have a site that is pretty old by now but we want to update it!