Then I agree with this 100%.
I wonder how much of your description relates to simulacra and simulation. Instead of my long-winded diatribes, I’ll cut right to the mustard:
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The first order would be actually being part of the scene. Going to lives in Japan, meeting band members, learning proper live etiquette, connecting with other Japanese fans, etc. This is the original and there is no copy. Along with this physical aspect of the scene is the mental aspect of the scene: what is visual kei, what the definitions are, and how someone is impacted and shaped by the art they consume.
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The second order would be footage of lives circulated on DVD. The nature of the content has been preserved, because we’re still dealing with elements of the scene of some sort, but they’ve been put to work. This step has to do with how we use the content from the first stage, what we make out of it, and most importantly how people interact with it. Naturally, those in Japan will take a different experience away from those in the international scene. From a geographical and mental aspect, international fans are largely distanced from the actual performance. You might be able to watch the DVD, but you can’t transport yourself to that location, you don’t know what being part of the local scene is like, and your brain has to do work to fill in the rest. This is a distorted view of reality.
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The third stage has to imply the massive circulation of the content from stage one. Think of GIFs created from their music videos or live recordings, or select pictures from a promotional set. These images are widely used, they don’t have an original, but we can recognize the visual kei in it. We might even be able to recognize the exact performance the DVD stems from! But at this point, we are several layers removed from the original, and instead of witnessing a distorted reality, reality is just gone. In other words, we are not watching an entire performance and picking up cues from it. We are watching a GIF and constructing our own reality to tie together what’s missing in a way that is satisfactory to us, with no need to cross-reference with each other or even reality!
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This is where the big shift happens. At the final stage, we’re watching an anime based on the struggles of a fictional visual kei band. It’s an anime, something that only tangentially touches upon the scene. It has nothing to do with the scene from the beginning, even though we recognize it. The idea of visual kei is important for the anime to work and it’s accomplished through the use of conventions and patterns important to the scene, but that’s it. But in order to get to this point, we have to know so many things about visual kei - how the scene works, how fashion works, how it’s structured - that this is the point where signs reflect other signs.
I believe a lot of people drift between two and four, completely untethered from reality, not realizing that the scene they idolize exists mostly in their mind. And I’ve witnessed this kind of thing for so long, that I don’t think there’s any reaching them. Let them live in their delusion, I guess.
A part I also wanna point out is that all of us are stuck at two by default, since we’re not in Japan. I guess that’s where a lot of elitism about experiencing the real thing comes from.
Here’s a meme if you didn’t understand what I wrote.
