fanfic forensics

And therein lies the rub. The image of girls getting out of hand is hard for some to swallow.

Experts predict that Japan’s population will shrink to 108 million by 2030, and critics of the otaku phenomenon blame men and women who can now live meaningful lives without human companionship. One analyst says that the rampant creativity of otaku is rivaled only by their stunted emotional growth. Journalist Yumiko Sugiura, who literally wrote the book on fujoshi (2006’s The Fujoshi-izing World: The Female Otaku of East Ikebukuro), says women who indulge fantasies of queer love rather than finding boyfriends face an even greater backlash than their male counterparts. She believes that, via yaoi, fujoshi demonstrate dissatisfaction with traditional Japanese expectations of what a woman’s life should be.

Media treatment of the fujoshi concept has always been problematic.

As a result, when media attention eventually turned to actual fujoshi, the elevator pitch — “They’re otaku, except girls!” — was more or less accurate (granting a broad reading of “otaku”), but the implications were misunderstood. If fujoshi were girl otaku, they must be the girls usually appearing alongside otaku in those TV specials and magazine articles, right? You know — the maids. But no.

As helpful as labels and categories can be, I kind of wish we had better ones. The pairing label is often overly simplistic, it gets slapped on things that don't really deserve it, or need it, and it creates expectations that may not always be in the writer's best interest (or the reader's). And the gen label carries such a huffy, prudish connotation that it might as well be a warning.

However, Hiroyuki is vowing that all the manga creators in Comic Gear will be working together in the same studio everyday. Hiroyuki hopes that this work environment will encourage more collaboration between fellow manga creators so they can trade tips on techniques and share their knowledge. Hiroyuki also hopes that this environment will foster new talent by having more experienced creators mentor previously unpublished creators "from morning to night" about developing story and characters.

i said in my comment to cimorene that it kind of boggles my mind to think that in fifty or a hundred years we could actually have a genre movie where the studly captain and his stalwart first officer would be each other's love interests-- that some day we could have movies about two guys or two girls falling in love while also being chased by zombies or flying through space or having duels with magic. that maybe some day we'll have books, movies, tv shows and comics where "omfg, i'm gay!" isn't the issue that takes over the entire story.

which brings me to the point, what i love about trek fandom. every fic i've read so far has played right into this amazing assumption, which i haven't seen discussed anywhere but which seems to be one of those understated understood fandom constructs-- that in two hundred years there won't be much to fuss about for gay relationships or same-sex attraction.

Is it any more "subversive" to conjecture that a fictional character from CSI or Dollhouse or Star Trek is gay than to conjecture that I am straight, as no doubt happens every time I step out in public? Some percentage - and it's hard to calculate in reality, but definitely higher than 2 - of people are gay; if the show doesn't show us who they are, well, what if it were these two? What if they weren't evil? What if they weren't dead? What if they were the protagonist, instead of just a sidekick?

And that's why slash goggles are necessary, why by-us-for-us isn't enough, and why slash can be so much more satisfying than simply consuming a rare text that already acknowledged our existence in the first place: it's the media world that, dammit, we live in too, and we just want to take a piece of it back.

The defining characteristic of boys’ love, I’d argue, is that it is a narrative about the romantic or erotic relationship between two or more male characters that has been created with the intention of appealing to a female audience.

This broad definition of boys’ love has the advantage, to academics, of expanding it beyond its traditional application to Japanese or other Asian media (usually manga and anime) to encompass non-Asian genres such as slash and to permit the analysis of books about male/male relationships written by women that have otherwise been left out of such categorization

Subgenres within boys’ love, then, would include those various categories based on setting, source material, age of characters, status of presentation, plot type, and the like.

Informed consent is a big one: does the polled group understand that you may quote them? How ought the researcher mask respondent identity when she reports her results? Related to this is the age of the respondents: in the United States, underage people can’t provide informed consent, and it seems unlikely that, at least in an online environment, their parents or guardians will grant permission in some verifiable way. A 16-year-old’s responses in your LiveJournal poll may actually be a huge problem.

In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate.

There was once a conjurer who boasted that he had become god-like. One god happened to overhear, and challenged him to a contest. “Can you do this?” the god asked, scooping up a handful of dirt and making it into a bird. They watched the bird fly away. “Sure,” said the conjure-man, and reached down for a handful of raw material. “Hey,” said god. “Use your own dirt.”