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Nele Noppe

Google Video - 0 views

video.google.com

video fanwork fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
     
    Site waar gebruikers video's kunnen publiceren, en waarop het internet doorzocht kan worden op video's. Bevat veel fanvids.
Nele Noppe

Website Nico Nico Douga goes live ... house | The Japan Times Online - 0 views

search.japantimes.co.jp/...fm20110714a2.html

video nico_nico_douga architecture interactive comments music performance

shared by Nele Noppe on 14 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 14 Jul 11
     
    With the use of AR, the altering of real-world environments on screen by computer-generated imagery, Web surfers watching the action from their laptops will see an altogether different scene than those who are physically present at Nicofarre. Bands will play virtual instruments, J-pop idols will perform with anime characters - they'll even be able to see hearts or lightning-bolts fly out of a soloist's guitar similar to scenes from the film "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World." What makes this venue special however, is the level of interaction between those at the club and the online viewers. Those watching online can type in comments that are then scrolled in real time on the wall-screens of the main hall, which creates an uncanny sense of connection between the two audiences. The fact that comments are displayed live adds a daring element of freedom, as there is no way to control what is written and therefore put up for all to read. Although the venue's concept has virtually unlimited potential, what could hold Nicofarre back is the video quality. Being a large-scale setup, the spaces between the individual bulbs make the images indiscernible when standing too close. And judging from opening-night headliners, K-pop boy band Tohoshinki and local J-pop phenomenon AKB48, it looks like the club is not courting the usual live-house or clubbing crowd. Musical tastes aside though, the venue is undoubtedly at the cutting edge of "live" entertainment in Japan, and is well worth checking out.
Nele Noppe

Glossary | Organization for Transformative Works - 0 views

transformativeworks.org/glossary

fans fanwork

shared by Nele Noppe on 25 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Fanwork The creative work done by fans for fannish purposes.
  • Media fandom ''Media fandom is generally used to refer to fictional, Western fandoms based on movies or television'' (from http://fanlore.org/wiki/Media_fandom). Books, comics, video games, anime/manga, and real people fandoms often intersect with, but also exist in parallel to, media fandom.
  • Remix culture Remix culture is a neologism that describes a culture of creativity based on previous creations. This is in contrast with permission culture, which aims to bind derivative creativity to the permission of the license holders. Both terms are simplified abstractions for current political and legal positions. (adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_culture)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Transformative Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators.
Nele Noppe

Affective Aesthetics « Symposium Blog - 0 views

symposium.transformativeworks.org/...affective-aesthetics

video vidding fans gender

shared by Nele Noppe on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • But then that’s an argument Henry Jenkins has repeatedly made, here, for example, that parody tends to be male- and industry-preferred whereas the more emotional engagement of fanvids is often dismissed out of hand.
  • Vidding thus is an art form that is both too subtly critical (because always inflected with fannish passion) and too polished aesthetically (because the aesthetic dimension does matter above and beyond the critical point being made) to, perhaps, fit into a quick overview of YouTube remixes. Still, as both a vibrant subculture of critical interpretive if not outright political remix culture and an sophisticated artistic subculture with its own aesthetic value system, fan vids certainly deserve to be included in any “Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing.”
  • The academy has often been accused of unrealistic attempts of objectivity in the humanities in particular but even in the sciences. After English departments in the seventies destroyed the idea of an objectively created value system that can separate great from merely mediocre and bad literature, after anthropology departments realized in the eighties that observers cannot ever remain neutral and always bring their own biases to their field research; after queer theory and gender theory and critical race studies have brought the personal into the academic in the nineties; after affect theory has established itself as a field of study since–it amazed me that vidding may indeed have been overlooked in its merging of love and inquiry, affect and analysis, celebration and criticism.
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Chall... - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu/...48.4.lothian.html

fans fanwork vidding law

shared by Nele Noppe on 28 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • In particular, it commemorates the practices of online media fan communities: female-dominated networks that cohere around affective investments in media properties and that produce and share textual, visual, and video art that is based on "their" TV shows or films.
  • "den of thieves,"
  • For most vidders, valid fears of not being recognized as owning the product of their recombinatory labor—often, as in Russo's case studies, perceived as an undifferentiated feature of the online "public" domain—are of more concern than whether their disregard of copyright is likely to usher in new forms of digital ownership. Many valid arguments for the righteousness of Lim's artistic production leave intellectual property laws intact, insisting that the geek girl poses no threat. Putting transformed images to music [End Page 131] in a new order creates a new artwork worthy of recognition, and (as Hellekson outlines and De Kosnik challenges) Lim does not profit from her production. These arguments have been publicized by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit organization of media fans who work for "a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity."4
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I am a member of OTW and support their advocacy unequivocally. But it seems essential to me to recognize that fans' appropriative art is not necessarily complicit with legal and economic structures as they stand. It is worth determining who defines the use as fair, and what it might mean to place a value on unfair uses.
  • What does appropriative art imply if we don't try to justify it within the terms of existing legal systems, but rather use its potential illegality to imaginatively liberate music and images from structures of corporate ownership?
  • den of thieves that nurtures "Us" and other artworks that are based on mainstream media properties for which "copyleft" licensing would be unimaginable.
  • Freedom is a slippery concept, especially when it comes to digital media. When we think about questions of copyright and digital ownership through cultural theft, freedom from domination lines up with freedom from having to pay—at least on the surface. Theft, piracy, and the commons are all concerned with getting things for free, and current configurations of online media and culture are hospitable to their insurrectionary modes of ownership.
  • In recent years, media producers have explicitly sought to solicit fan participation as labor for their profits in the form of user-generated content that helps build their brand. Many fans perceive these developments as a desirable legitimation of fan work, but they can also be understood as an inversion in the direction of fannish theft. Rather than fans stealing commodified culture to make works for their own purposes, capital steals their labor—as, we might consider, it stole ideas from the cultural commons and fenced them off in the first place—to add to its surplus.
  • transformation as an undercommons: an unofficial and transient space in which work simultaneously reproduces and undermines the structures that enable it.13 Fans mobilize for a purpose that is neither radically disruptive of, nor fully incorporated into, the media industry's systems of ownership, but simultaneously supports and undercuts them while producing a collectivity of its own. And that collectivity, while it holds the media properties up, steals from them: abusing the hospitality of those who own the servers, the ISPs, the copyright, and taking its productions more seriously than they intended.
Nele Noppe

Knock it off: Global treaty against media piracy won't work in Asia | Full Page - 0 views

www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi

copyright law asia politics

shared by Nele Noppe on 27 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • That's because in Asia, "intellectual property" as we think of it is an alien concept, recently imported from the West and hastily transplanted with limited success at best. "It's almost like there's an institutional disrespect for copyright in Asia," says Seung Bak, cofounder of the video streaming startup DramaFever, which brings free, English-subtitled Asian television to U.S. audiences. "People feel like, 'If I can't touch it, why should I have to pay for it?'"
  • But Lam points out that things are fundamentally different now. For one, hardware used to be differentiated by where it was manufactured.
  • You have name-brand stuff and knockoff stuff being made side by side, maybe even coming off the same assembly line."
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Indeed, an entire consumer subculture has sprung up around counterfeit goods in China, what Chinese refer to as shanzhai or, literally, "mountain village" products (the name comes from the fact that, in ancient times, bandits would often build their redoubts in high passes, out of reach of the short arm of the law). Though its name suggests something remote and marginal, in reality shanzhai is now a mainstream phenomenon. It's estimated, for instance, that one of every five cellphones produced in China -- some 150 million devices -- are shanzhai.
  • One could argue that, by duplicating existing feature sets while striving to offer more, shanzhai may actually be driving innovation (of sorts), contrary to the argument made by those who suggest that without airtight and infinitely extended IP protection, there's no incentive for the development of groundbreaking new products and technologies. Of course, the truth is somewhere in between. Not all of the "innovations" of shanzhai products are particularly useful (one shanzhai Blackberry Pearl clone offers a built-in electric razor, for instance). But the knockoffs have certainly exerted downward pressure on price, forced major brands to compete on quality and service, as opposed to perceived prestige and appearance, and derailed artificial constraints imposed by manufacturers and governments that are ultimately harmful to consumers.
  • Which explains why, when Apple finally partnered with China Unicom to officially introduce the iPhone to the market earlier this month, the response was tepid at best: The official iPhone was crippled at launch (its WiFi connectivity disabled by government mandate), cost a cool grand and was locked to the Unicom network. "The rumor -- it's all water cooler gossip at this point -- is that they sold around 5,000 units in the first week," says Lam. "That's a shockingly low number. But you have to consider that anyone who's wanted an iPhone in China has been able to get one for years now, unlocked, fully functional, at a cheaper price. The 'official' launch is meaningless -- the unofficial launch happened so long ago that no one even cares." The estimated tally of grey-market iPhones in use in China? More than 1.5 million.
  • in today's frictionless global market it's harder to put barriers between consumers and the stuff they want. If something is available anywhere, people can get it everywhere.
  • Welcome to contemporary Korea, where a titanic digital public works program in the '90s resulted in 85 percent of the population having home broadband access that's faster than anything commercially available in the U.S. "What they think is normal in Seoul is vastly different from what we think is normal here -- the stuff we read about in Popular Science, they take for granted," says DramaFever's Seung Bak. "A show will air on TV, and 10 minutes later it'll be uploaded in HD quality to a sharing site where anyone can download it in about 10 seconds." So Korea can be thought of as something of a laboratory for the future of digital media, because it's just a matter of time before the rest of the world's bandwidth catches up.
  • Call it the can't-beat-'em, might-as-well-join-'em syndrome. Strict enforcement has prompted an endless game of whack-a-mole, with pirates moving on to new platforms as their old ones are shut down. But by giving filesharers and sharing platform operators incentives to offer legal, licensed services -- while ensuring that the user experience their audiences have been drawn to remains the same -- a solution emerges that might just allow everyone to benefit.
  • Two strokes of good fortune helped CrunchyRoll survive, both occurring in the fall of 2008. The first was the cable channel Cartoon Network's surprising decision to cancel its venerable Toonami programming block -- for years one of the most reliable sources of anime on broadcast television. The second was an unique deal the company was able to negotiate with TV Tokyo, the broadcaster that airs more anime than any other Japanese network. "TV Tokyo controls 40 percent of Japan's anime series, and we were able to get them to agree to let us put episodes of their shows up on our site within one hour of broadcast," says Gao. "Not even Hulu can do that. It effectively means that we're the 'first window' for content. And the reason they agreed is that they know we're growing their audience: We're getting them viewers they'd never be able to access on their own."
  • The deal prompted other broadcasters to fall in line. Now, CrunchyRoll simulcasts English-subtitled editions of 20 out of the 40 anime programs currently on the air in Japan. Free programming is bookended with advertising; a premium option costing as little as $5 a month eliminates the ads, provides access to high-definition content and subscriber-only programming, and puts a little premium member badge on a user's profile. "That's more important than you'd think," says Gao. "One of the things we realized early on was that CrunchyRoll isn't just a video sharing site, it's a social network for fans of Japanese animation. The little badge is social proof that you're a real supporter of the site."
  • That partnership between content provider and consumer is exactly what's missing in the Western world's debate over intellectual property, where movie studios and record labels talk about their customers as potential criminals. In Asia, media companies have a much closer and more interactive relationship with fans, treating them as partners in evangelizing their products -- even when that means blurring the lines of copyright restrictions.
  • "They realize these unauthorized spinoffs help to build the fandom, and ultimately drive sales of the original," she says.
  • "Japanese tend to resolve things in extralegal fashion, whereas in the U.S., Disney will send out a whole battalion of lawyers," notes manga historian Fred Schodt. "It's not an exaggeration to say that much of the current state of U.S. copyright law has come about due to Disney's efforts to keep Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain."
Nele Noppe

Uses and gratifications - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Uses_and_Gratifications_Theory

dojinshi fan_fiction fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 19 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 19 Aug 08
     
    # Diversion - a media text which provides an escape from reality. When a media text temporarily partially covers one's senses. For example playing a video game. # Personal relationships - People create personal relationships with the characters in a media text, they start to feel they know them. This can become dangerous if people start to trust them as well, for example if one trusted a news reporter too much they may take everything they say at face value and not question it, this trust could then be abused. # Personal identity - When a person creates part of their own identity from things they find attractive in people from media texts, for example someone may have a haircut because they liked the look of a similar one in a magazine. This can go a long way in shaping people and people's ideas of values, norms, ideologies and fashions. # Surveillance - the audience gain an understanding of the world around them by consuming a media text, for example print and broadcast news.
Nele Noppe

Of Otakus and Fansubs - 0 views

www.law.ed.ac.uk/...hatcher.asp

academic anime copyright fans fansubbing internet fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Dec 08 - Cached
  • hindrances in a digital world that copyright laws pose for creative works that, while technically infringing, should perhaps be valued and allowed.6 Certain features of digital technologies and the internet,7 according to Lessig, can permit greater restrictions on remix than were allowed in the past.8
  • hindrances in a digital world that copyright laws pose for creative works that, while technically infringing, should perhaps be valued and allowed.6 Certain features of digital technologies and the internet,7 according to Lessig, can permit greater restrictions on remix than were allowed in the past.8
  • Lessig and other legal scholars such as Mehra have pointed to dojinshi in Japan as an example of how permitting more “remix” can contribute to a vibrant cultural industry.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • some artists make a living off producing dojinshi.
  • In the west, fans of anime, the term for Japanese animation, behave much like fans of Star Wars and Star Trek: they “remix” the characters and ideas from the stories they watch.
  • Trekkies or Star Wars fans do the same activities as otaku, but one practice sets anime fans apart from other avid fans: fansubs.
  • Manga also has its own form of fansubs called scanlations
  • Fansubs and scanlations don’t quite match the “traditional” forms of remix that Lessig and others mention. They do not create a “new” work in the same sense as dojinshi, fan films, or AMVs because their aim is to remain faithful to the original work.
  • Fansubs as a cultural product sit at an interesting boundary—between the dojinshi-like fan culture that authors such as Lessig want to encourage and the massive online file trading so vilified by the recording and motion picture industries.
  • examines the anime industry’s unique relationship with fansubbers in the context of the suggestion that it represents a new policy model for online copyright.
  • Section 7 concludes by stating that it is too soon to claim the anime industry as a victory for alternative business models incorporating what most would think of as widespread copyright infringement.
  • Otaku create fansubs because they love anime—in fact, most love all things Japanese.
  • Fansubs predate BitTorrent, broadband, the dotcom boom and bust, and even the World Wide Web.
  • Fansubbers distributed or traded the finished videocassette tapes to others, but because of the time and cost involved of mailing out a physical medium, distribution was limited.
  • At one time fansubs were virtually the only way that fans could watch (and understand) anime.
  • But as with the music industry, the benefits of digital technology and the internet brought problems.46 Fansubbers started to take advantage of faster computers that allowed them to subtitle anime without the need for expensive, specialized equipment.47 This made it easier for more people to fansub because of the lower cost barriers to becoming a fansubber. The internet also meant that fans could meet from around the world, thus making it more likely that fansub groups would form. Today, groups now make digital video files instead of videocassettes.
  • Fansubbed videocassettes offered a poor quality picture and sound that encouraged fans to buy the licensed product when it came out and also limited the number of copies that could be made from a single original cassette (or from 2nd and 3rd generation cassettes).49 Digisubs offer a quality comparable to official (DVD) releases and the ability to make limitless copies.
  • Fansubbers then “release” their fansubs to fans. Distribution happens through all of the regular internet channels, including p2p services (Kazaa, eMule, etc), BitTorrent, IRC, and newsgroups.
  • Lessig essentially asks the question, “Do our laws stifle creativity and sharing to the point where it harms society?”78 Some point to fansubs and anime as part of the answer to this question—when a company allows some illegal activity it actually benefits.
  • Unfortunately for fansubbers, copyright law does not condone their activities.80 International copyright treaties such as the Berne Convention, state that its signatories (such as the United States and Japan) should grant authors the exclusive right to translation.
  • copyright law construes translations as “derivative works”.82 Derivative works are any work “based upon one or more preexisting works.
  • Within Japan, fansubs could potentially be within the law because the Japanese take a more relaxed attitude towards some aspects of copyright law and include private use and non-profit exceptions into their law.
  • The Japanese legal system may also, as a practical matter, discourage litigation towards fansub groups within Japan,
  • For infringements outside of Japan, it is no small wonder that Japanese companies do not bother with the expense of enforcing a right against a group whose infringement affects a distant market with a different legal system.
  • In his article regarding selective copyright enforcement and fansubs, Kirkpatrick argues for a fair use defense under U.S. law for fansub activities based on the cross-cultural value of translations, the non-commercial nature of fansub groups, and the potential market enhancement for the original work.
  • The fact remains that fansubs may create a preferable product for otaku—thus decreasing any market enhancement arguments.
  • One wonders what could be easier than a few clicks of the mouse and a few hours (or less) wait for a file to download, for free. Many video files deliver comparable picture quality and fandubs do exist.
  • Regardless of any potential defense, the law sufficiently tilts towards copyright holders so that they can easily use the threat of suit as enforcement.
  • The sheer cost of defending a copyright suit makes for a powerful incentive for fansubbers to settle, especially since fansubbers make no money from their activities and are unlikely to have any assets.
Nele Noppe

A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu/...48.4.hellekson.html

fans fanwork gender gift_economy

shared by Nele Noppe on 28 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Fan community clearly cannot be constituted by anyone other than the fans themselves. This tenet remains central to the constitution of fan culture, just as it is continually renewed by the exchange of symbolic gifts.
  • they exchange personally charged aspects of themselves in a gift culture whose field of value specifically excludes profit, further separating their community from the larger (male-gendered) community of commerce.
  • To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over there—to become part of a larger metatext, the off-putting jargon and the unspoken rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain. Within this circle of [End Page 113] community—and in media fandom, women overwhelmingly make up this community1—learning how to engage is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • At the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation. The general understanding is that if no money is exchanged, the copyright owners have no reason to sue because they retain exclusive rights to make money from their property
  • The notion of the gift is thus central to fan economy as it currently stands, although, as Abigail De Kosnik argues in her essay in this issue, it may be time for the community to consider creating an alternative model that will permit women to profit.
  • This exchange in the fan community is made up of three elements related to the gift: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.2 The tension and negotiation between the three result in fan creation of social relationships that are constructed voluntarily on the basis of a shared interest—perhaps a media source like a TV show or, perhaps, fandom itself. Fan communities as they are currently comprised, require exchanges of gifts: you do not pay to read fan fiction or watch a fan-made music vid.
  • Fans insist on a gift economy, not a commercial one, but it goes beyond self-protective attempts to fly under the radar of large corporations, their lawyers, and their cease-and-desist letters. Online media fandom is a gift culture in the symbolic realm in which fan gift exchange is performed in complex, even exclusionary symbolic ways that create a stable nexus of giving, receiving, and reciprocity that results in a community occupied with theorizing its own genderedness.
  • But the items exchanged have no value outside their fannish context. In fact, it is likely that they do not literally exist; fandom's move to the Internet means that the items exchanged are hyperreal and capable of being endlessly replicated.
  • Money is presented less as a payment than as a token of enjoyment.
  • The items offered as gifts are not destroyed but are incorporated into a multivocal dialogue that creates a metatext, the continual composition of which creates a community, and the rhetorical stance of that dialogue is to create a gendered space.
  • The gifts have value within the fannish economy in that they are designed to create and cement a social structure, but they themselves are not meaningful outside their context.
  • Each proffered item represents an aspect of the giver: time, talent, love, desire. The result—"personally charged"12 gifts, responses in kind—generates a female-gendered community, but the role of the individual within that community is equally crucial.
  • When the rules of exchange are broken, the punishment is swift. One recent incident that exemplifies this was the attempt of (male) venture capitalists to profit financially from (female-generated) fan fiction.
  • The FanLib debacle illustrates that attempts to encroach on the meaning of the gift and to perform a new kind of (commerce-based) transaction with fan-created items will not be tolerated. Henry Jenkins notes, "They simply hadn't really listened to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction."17 The site attempted to bypass the artwork-generating [End Page 117] fan community altogether—a serious misreading of FanLib's audience. FanLib broke the rules of the community's engagement by misreading "community" as "commodity," and the site failed thanks to intense backlash, an expression of fannish defense of their field of value.
Nele Noppe

Pokémon and international politics? - 0 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...mon-and-international-politics

fansubbing pokemon video fanwork fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • She identifies Pokémon as a media form that has defined the current framework, laying the groundwork for peer-to-peer communication and creation of media. While the current generation has outgrown Pokémon, the game franchise shaped how global youth think about culture and gaming. It linked analog and digital media, she proposes, by creating an electronic game that later manifested as a collectible card game, manga, anime, toys and other media. It put portability at the center of the media mix, and helped establish Japanese media content as a transnational source of cultural capital
  • She sees a generation of kids engaging in a set of cultural practices - cutting, pasting, linking and forwarding in spaces like MySpace
  • Individual identity is no longer consumer or producer - there’s a middle ground that includes connoisseur and amateur.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Networks are no longer mass media or purely personal communication - there are community networks that allow communication about niche interests to a large population
  • The work done by the fan community is of impressively high quality and speed - fan substitles are usually distributed to new episodes within 24 hours of their release,
  • Media companies aren’t unaware of this obsessive fandom - their release cycles and their localization of content into different languages often reflects producers watching fan behavior.
  • The Matrix itself is something of a remix, an American film that borrows heavily from the cliches of Japanese and Chinese action films
  • Mimi sees three trends taking place: - a ping-pong back and forth between US and Japanese culture, informing the mass communication aesthetic - a mainstreaming of the otaku aesthetic, a fondness for arcane, complex, richly detailed worlds (think of the popularity of the absurdly detailed universe of Harry Potter, for instance) - remix as a method of localizing and “talking back” to mainstream media.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      a fondness for arcane, complex, richly detailed worlds -love this line!!
  • So here’s a question - does participation in these international joint projects turn into a more generalized form of xenophilia? Do American fans of anime develop a generalized fascination with Japan, which somehow expands from watching Naruto to watching global politics?
Nele Noppe

YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com

video fanwork fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
     
    Site waar gebruikers hun eigen video's kunnen uploaden. Bevat veel fanvids.
Nele Noppe

Moe and the Potential of Fantasy in Post-Millenial Japan - 0 views

www.japanesestudies.org.uk/...Bryce.html

academic manga anime moe fans characters romance sexuality games kawaii zoomorphism affect emotion visual_language boys_love dojinshi phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • If kawaii, or the aesthetic of cute, is the longing for the freedom and innocence of youth, manifesting in the junior and high school girl in uniform (Kinsella 1995), then moe is the longing for the purity of characters pre-person, manifesting in androgynous semi and demi human forms. This is called 'jingai,' or outside human, and examples include robots, aliens, dolls and anthropomorphized animals, all stock characters in the moe pantheon. A specific example would be nekomimi, or cat-eared characters. More generally, in order to achieve the desired affect, moe characters are reduced to tiny deformed 'little girl' images with emotive, pupil-less animal eyes
  • I argue fantasy characters offer virtual possibilities and affect
  • Moe is also used by fujoshi, zealous female fans of yaoi, a genre of manga featuring male homosexual romance. However, the word moe indicates a response to fantasy characters, not a specific style, character type or relational pattern. While some things are more likely than others to inspire moe, this paper will focus mainly on the response itself rather than the forms that inspire it.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • Both otaku and fujoshi
  • The moe character is a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and the response to its virtual potentials is affect.
  • Massumi argues affect is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential (Massumi 2002). The experience, what he calls an 'intensity,' is outside of logical language and conscious control. Moe provides a word to express affect, or to identify a form that resonates and can trigger an intensity.
  • It is for this reason that moe is consistently misunderstood as first and foremost images of young girls instead of a response to virtual potentials
  • In the field interacting with otaku and fujoshi, I was constantly confronted by the concept of moe, and found it necessary to engage it.
  • These are both men and their discourse centers on male otaku, but I will argue from them a more general theory, applied later in the paper to fujoshi structures of desire.
  • Honda, a youth-oriented novelist and self-styled moe critic, defines moe as 'imaginary love'
  • the salient point is his judgment that a relationship with a mediated character or material representations of it is preferable to an interpersonal relationship.
  • the moe man is feminized
  • While recognizing the conservative nature of otaku sexuality, Azuma attempts to account for the schizophrenic presence of perversion in the moe image. For Azuma, otaku are postmodern subjects with multiple personalities engendered by their environment and enthusiastic media consumption
  • To feel moe for all characters in all situations, the narrative connecting characters or moments in time is de-emphasized.
  • cat ears,
  • response is unconnected with 'reality' and thus offers new potentials to construct and express affects.
  • Separating their desire from reality allowed for a new form of affect called moe.
  • Simply stated, moe is about unbounded potential.
  • Moe is affect in response to fantasy forms that emerged from information-consumer culture in Japan in the late stages of capitalism.
  • conditioning of young girls into 'pure consumers'
  • Such a space is disconnected from social and political concerns, and exists for the preservation of the individual.
  • the media and consumption feeding into moe is a specific sort centered on affect.
  • Manga scholar Itou Gou argues that since the end of the 1980s characters in anime, manga and videogames became so appealing that fans desired them even without stories (Itou 2005). Ito dubs such character types 'kyara,' distinct from characters (kyarakutaa) embedded in narratives.
  • Proof of this can be found in the rise of 'parody' doujinshi,
  • The doll-like and semi-human Ayanami became the single most popular and influential character in the history of otaku anime; fans still isolate parts of the character to amplify and rearticulate in fan-produced works to inspire moe.
  • In works featuring these characters, the original work functions as a starting point, and the extended process of producing and consuming moe takes place among fans in online discussions and videos, fan-produced comics (doujinshi), costume roleplay (cosplay) and figures.
  • virtual potentiality
  • That the moe form, the body without organs, is outside personal and social frames is precisely why it triggers affect.
  • 'moe otaku' a superficial fixation on surfaces and accelerated consumption of disposable moe kyara, impetus for him to declare this younger generation culturally 'dead'
  • One man I spoke with said, 'Moe is a wish for compassionate human interaction. Moe is a reaction to characters that are more sincere and pure than human beings are today.' Similarly, another man described moe as 'the ultimate expression of male platonic love.' This, he said, was far more stable and rewarding than 'real' love could ever be. Manga artist Akamatsu Ken stresses that moe is the 'maternal love' (boseiai) latent in men,[xxi] and a 'pure love' (junsui na ai) unrelated to sex, the desire to be calmed when looking at a female infant (biyoujo wo mite nagomitai) (Akamatsu 2005). 'The moe target is dependent on us for security (a child, etc.) or won't betray us (a maid, etc.). Or we are raising it (like a pet)' (Akamatsu 2005). This desire to 'nurture' (ikusei) characters is extremely common among fans. Further, moe is about the moment of affect and resists changes ('betrayal') in the future, or what Akamatsu refers to as a 'moratorium' (moratoriamu). Moe media is approached as something of a sanctuary from society (Okada 2008), and as such is couched in a discourse of purity.
  • I will now demonstrate how it is further possible to reduce people to characters, or to reduce reality to fantasy in pursuit of moe.
  • Association with the two-dimensional world, and lack of depth or access in the three-dimensional world, makes a maid moe.[
  • The appeal of the maid cannot purely be sexual: As many as 35 per cent of customers are women
  • this arose in Japan in the late stages of capitalism as a result of shifts in consumer-information society
  • bias towards male fans of anim
  • aoi erases the female presence because fans say female-male or even female-female couples[xxxvi] are too 'raw' (namanamashii). Put another way, the reality of relationships is removed from yaoi to make the moe response possible.
  • the ambiguous yaoi 'male' is quite literally a body without organs
  • Many other fujoshi I spoke with dated men even as they imagined possibilities of coupling them as characters with other men.[xl] As Saitou points out, the reality of heterosexual relationships and virtual possibilities of homosexual couplings are separate and coexistent (Saitou 2007). Journalist Sugiura Yumiko explains this as the crucial difference between fujoshi and otaku, who approach fantasy as an alternative for things that they actually want but cannot realize in this world (Sugiura 2006).[xli] A fujoshi, for example, would not 'marry' a two-dimensional character the way some otaku advocate;
  • Sugiura is importantly highlighting that fantasy and reality are separate and coexistent, but this is widespread in moe culture and not solely a female quality.[xlii] As much as male otaku boast of their two-dimensional wives, they often do so with levity as a self-conscious performance
  • While it is true that men tend to feel moe for single characters that they can possess while women feel moe for relationships or character couplings, this broad difference is fast disappearing. In truth, the media popular among so-called 'moe otaku' in recent years has come to resemble yaoi aesthetics: multiple girls in a nostalgic or fantastic world with minimal male presence and heightened emphasis on relationships and emotions
  • In all cases, the database (Azuma 2009) is present. The elements that constitute and indicate a certain type of top or bottom, for example glasses or hairstyle or height, are predetermined; any given top or bottom is a construct of defined character traits and behavior.
  • One of the most recognizable features of the moe phenomenon is the anthropomorphization of objects into objects of desire. Otaku turn cats, war machines, household appliances and even men of historical significance into beautiful little girls to trigger moe. Reality is flattened, and from it emerge polymorphous forms of stimulation. Similarly, fujoshi can rearticulate anything into beautiful boys and sexualized yaoi relations. Moe characters can be based on a written description or drawn image, a physical person or even anthropomorphized animals, plants and objects.
  • The erotic fantasy effectively re-mystified their world, adding a layer of potential to the mundane (the very ground under their feet!) and making the familiar queer and exciting. Latent potential so unlocked, the three friends replayed the moe relationship across other potential players such as shampoo and conditioner, knife and spoon, salt and pepper.
  • More startling and subversive is 'moe politics' (seiji moe), where national histories, international relations and imposing world leaders are reduced to moe characters across which yaoi romance can be read.
  • It should be noted that Hetaria was written by a man, and these sorts of stories are becoming increasingly popular among young men known as 'fudanshi' (rotten boys).
  • it precisely because it is pure that it can give birth to such perverse and polymorphous possibilities.
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