Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ fanfic forensics
Rss Feed
Sort By: Most Recent | Popular Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Nele Noppe

How doujinshi will take over the world (or not) - 0 views

www.icaruscomics.com/wp_web

dojinshi fan_fiction fanart fans fanwork manga_industry non-academic united_states fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • First, doujinshi are not commercial products, and this is one of the most important distinctions that allows its very existence. 
  • Many doujinshi conventions (Comiket included) require doujin circles to provide print run information, and enforces a cap.  Quite simply, there aren’t enough books to export en mass. 
  • This is also why doujinshi has continued to grow while other media like manga, anime, and music have suffered with the advent of peer to peer trading on the internet…the doujinshi market is a collector’s market, where the physical book itself is highly valued
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • that’s not to say that doujinshi isn’t profitable…a few artists never “go pro” because they make quite a healthy living on their doujinshi,
  • The much better road for the American manga industry and fans to take is not to import doujinshi, but to import the doujinshi ideal and ethics, and foster a domestic doujinshi community of our own.  This road is beset by its own share of hurdles, though, and they have very deep roots.
  • While fanzines and fanfiction have been around in the U.S., we have nothing even close to the doujinshi scene in Japan, because of American corporate mentality which values “perpetual properties” instead of new creations, and these properties are guarded visciously.
  • in America properties are created and owned by the corporation.
  • They simply have no reason to support budding artists in such a way, when their raison detre are still characters created decades ago.  Fan comics are not seen as extending the life of a property, but as competition. 
  • The truth is a significant portion of Japanese doujinshi are erotic works, many based on children’s shows.  It isn’t hard to imagine the kind of moral outrage most doujinshi would illicit. 
  • American manga companies need to take a hard look at doujinshi in Japan and understand its benefits, and readers and artists should take a stand because this is an opportunity for the status of the creator to take precedence over the corporation.
Nele Noppe

Aestheticism Articles: HP doujinshi - 0 views

www.aestheticism.com/...index.htm

dojinshi fan_fiction fans fanwork harry_potter non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Japanese doujinshika---at least at this sort of amateur level---are often very leery of publicity. This might be a reaction to the arrests of several doujinshika in apparently random, token copyright enforcement cases in recent years (such as the infamous Pokemon doujinshika incident), or it might simply be a sign of how negatively "fringe" behavior is viewed in Japanese society
  • Snape is gorgeous---or at least that's what the djka at this show seemed to believe.
  • Doujinshika are infamous for "prettifying" real-life (or real-text) actors/characters, and who can blame them?
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • it's how Snape is depicted emotionally that's most telling on a cross-cultural level.
  • None of the doujinshi that I saw on the Snape side of the event depicted Angsty!Snape. Or Traumatized!Snape, or for that matter Unhappy!Snape. Instead, almost all of the books showed variations on the same thing: Cranky!Snape.
  • I've been told repeatedly that Japan just doesn't do psychology---certainly not to the same dogged degree as the West.
  • Western Fanfic Snape is physically attractive but brooding, miserable, and emotionally damaged. Japanese Doujinshi Snape is physically attractive and cranky because he's surrounded by horny goofballs.
  • Still, it was interesting to see so many similarities of concept and characterization between Japanese writers and Westerners Sirius/Remus 'shippers.
  • The only real difference I can see between the Japanese depictions and the Western is that sense of ominousness I mentioned. The majority of Western Sirius/Remus 'fics I've read have been hopeful/positive in tone.
Nele Noppe

Doujin's Commercial Evolution - 1 views

heiseidemocracy.com/...k-doujins-commercial-evolution

anime dojinshi fans fanwork games manga manga_industry non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Over the first years of the new millennium these trends continued, with a robust market emerging that combined improved distribution with wider interest to generate revenue for some circles that could no longer be termed “amateur” in any meaningful sense.
  • The doujinshi market grew steadily via promulgation through the internet and pop culture media. This resulted in the viability of the doujin as a means of part time and increasingly full time employment. “Kojin circles” emerged, consisting of a sole creator (kojin) who handled all aspects of production and received all the benefits of income from publications. Larger circles formed semi-professional units to produce doujin software that would compete with professional releases. Otaku goods shops expanded their scope as doujin vendors, acting as proxy sellers for hundreds of circles both via brick and mortar outlets and via online mail order. Online-only doujin shops such as DLsite emerged, selling digital copies of doujinshi via download. Advances in printing technology and cheap, high quality labor (mostly Chinese) allowed for the proliferation of doujin items to media beyond the traditional books (and less tradtional CD-Rs), including towels, pillowcases, fans, cups, trinkets, and figures.
  • new class of semi-pro and professional creators
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • an increasingly large class of professional creators uses doujin sales as a substantial segment of their income, acting as freelance illustrators, mangaka, and designers when they’re not doing doujin work (and vice versa).
  • Perhaps the biggest issue raised by the emergence of this group of professional and semi-pro doujinka is that of intellectual property rights and copyright infringement.
  • in many instances the people producing the doujinshi are the same as those producing the original works being parodied. The doujin scene is so interbred with that of professional anime, manga, and game creators that it would be impractical for all but the largest IP holders to crack down on the parody doujin scene.
  • soft circles
  • Lilith’s business model is the culmination of doujinshi as commerce - small, versatile, ubiquitous, and high quality.
  • The doujin world now spans works from the rank amateur to the polished professional and everything in between,
Nele Noppe

'Boys love' a vicarious escape for girls -Yomiuri - 0 views

www.yomiuri.co.jp/...20080201TDY13104.htm

boys_love fans film fujoshi gender manga non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • However, her words convey a profound truth--a yearning for relationships with interchangeable roles that are free from fixed ideas about gender.
Nele Noppe

Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex - 0 views

www.wired.com/...ff_manga

anime dojinshi fans fanwork manga manga_industry fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years.
  • Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests. One British publisher, in an effort to hippify a national franchise, has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare's plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that reimagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.
  • Circulation of the country's weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      malaise in commerciële industrie
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Fans and critics complain that manga — which emerged in the years after World War II as an edgy, uniquely Japanese art form — has become as homogenized and risk-averse as the limpest Hollywood blockbuster.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      belang zelfexpressie, vrijheid in dojinshi
  • The place is pulsing with possibility, full of inspired creators, ravenous fans, and wads of yen changing hands. It represents a dynamic force
  • future business model of music, movies, and media of every kind.
  • Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga.
  • Comics occupy the center, feeding the rest of the media system.
  • About 90 percent of the material for sale — how to put this — borrows liberally from existing works.
  • Japanese copyright law is just as restrictive as its American cousin, if not more so.
  • known as "circles" even if they have only one member
  • by day's end, some 300,000 books sold in cash transactions totaling more than $1 million
  • "This is something that satisfies the fans," Ichikawa said. "The publishers understand that this does not diminish the sales of the original product but may increase them.
  • the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.
  • "unspoken, implicit agreement."
  • "The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work," he said. Then, gesturing to the convention floor, he added, "This is where we're finding the next generation of authors.
  • They tacitly agree not to go too far — to produce work only in limited editions and to avoid selling so many copies that they risk cannibalizing the market for original works.
  • It's also a business model
  • He opened Mandarake 27 years ago, well before the dojinshi markets began growing more popular — in part to provide another sales channel for the work coming out of them. At first, publishers were none too pleased with his new venture. "You think I didn't hear from them?" he tells me in a company conference room. But in the past five years, he says, as the scale and reach of the markets has expanded, the publishers' attitude "has changed 180 degrees." It's all a matter of business, he says.
  • triangle. "You have the authors up there at this tiny little tip at the top. And at the bottom," he says, drawing a line just above the widening base of the triangle, "you have the readers. The dojin artists are the ones connecting them in the middle."
  • The dojinshi devotees are manga's fiercest fans.
  • provides publishers with extremely cheap market research
  • As recently as a decade ago, he told me, creators of popular commercial works sometimes cracked down on their dojinshi counterparts at Super Comic City. "But these days," he said, "you don't really hear about that many publishers stopping them."
  • Intellectual property laws were crafted for a read-only culture.
  • the copyright winds in the US have been blowing in the opposite direction — toward longer and stricter protections. It is hard to imagine Hollywood, Nashville, and New York agreeing to scale back legal protection in order to release the creative impulses of super-empowered fans, when the gains from doing so are for now only theoretical.
  • mutually assured destruction. What that accommodation lacks in legal clarity, it makes up for in commercial pragmatism.
Nele Noppe

The Road to Comiket - 0 views

heiseidemocracy.com/...the-road-to-comiket

comiket_ibento dojinshi fans fanwork non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • held twice a year in August and December at the Tokyo Big Sight in Tokyo, Japan, and attracts over 450,000 participants over its three day run.
  • primary focus of the event is the buying and selling of doujinshi
  • Comiket is also known colloquially as the birthplace of cosplay and thousands of visitors come dressed as their favorite anime, manga and game characters as well.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • establishment of an official industry presence in the form of an industry booth dealers’ section
  • alternate media such as software, music, and character goods.
  • doujin circle (同人サークル). A doujin circle is an individual or group of creators who collaborate as a discreet entity to produce doujin items for sale;
  • Recently the so-called “kojin circle” (個人サークル, personal circle) composed of a single member has been increasing, as individuals take on all aspects of doujin production from the application process, illustration, post-production, printing, and staffing of the table space allotted at the event.
  • Step 1 Purchase an application packet.
  • Step 2 File the application correctly and on time.
  • Comiket is an all genre event, meaning literally anything goes
  • Step 3 Wait for the election results.
  • Step 4 Produce a doujin.
  • Also, copyright considerations that apply to other events such as Wonder Festival are in effect here when it comes to certain types of character goods (no unauthorized figures), and while most IP is considered fair game for parody in the doujin community, a few exceptions such as Disney stand out as taboo.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      This is interesting- dojinshi using copyrighted characters may be sold, but no unauthorized figures of said characters? Is this because figures cost just a little too much for copyright holders to be comfortable with letting fans produce them? I'm not surprised about the Disney exception, non-Japanese companies with little experience with the dojin economy are probably a lot more likely to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone selling things based on their copyrighted characters.
  • Step 5 Coordinate replication.
  • Step 6 Make final preparations.
  • This broadening of distribution means that it’s no longer necessary to attend events in person to obtain many professionally produced books at a reasonable price. While they’re still cheaper at Comiket, many circles have recognized the need to provide something more to encourage fans to attend (or just to show gratitude to those who do show up), and that’s where the copy book comes in.
  • Step 7 Show up and sell!
  • At some point before 9:30 an event staff member will visit you at your table where your participation will be officially registered. You must provide both a sworn statement that you’re not selling anything illegal and copies of the books you’ll be releasing that day to the staff, and then you’re clear to go.
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
       
      I wonder if the staff sometimes takes away merchandise or closes entire boots at the last minute because they've found something objectionable in the advance copies provided to them (apparently only hours or minutes before the opening of the event)?
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

The Visual Linguist: Indexing Events with Panels - 0 views

www.emaki.net/...dexing-events-with-panels.html

semiotics comics visual_language fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 04 Apr 09 - Cached
  • More interestingly, she claims that the "still-images of actions" are also indexical, because they only show a part of a broader temporal whole action.
  • First of all, in the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, indexicality is a means through which reference is garnered via causation or indication. For example, an index finger that points to something doesn't mean that thing, it indicates the thing has meaning. The finger is just saying "for the real meaning look over there." Also, if I saw a footprint in the sand, it indexes the person who once walked there, because of the causation stepping there created.
  • in How to Draw..., Lee and Buscema's advice is to use the maximally intense points of that sequence — the ends and beginnings of the action marked "best" or "not bad." These sections of the action seem more representative of the action than the medial parts. In semiotic terms, they would index the overall action better than the parts in the middle, which are less representative of the overall action. Research seems to have borne out their intuition.
« First ‹ Previous 541 - 560 of 746 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page