fanfic forensics

Comics were once tarred-and-feathered as sub-literate pablum, lacking any artistic or cultural merit, considered childish and lacking any merit. Communities once sponsored bonfires to rid them of the evil of comicbooks, less than a decade after the end of World War II.

a story about queer dudes or ladies can never be defined by its plot or by a single-character story. Slash stories can never be gen.

This is why I am told that the gay children's book I gave my nephew "contains sexuality," but the dozens of children's books that he already has where mommy and daddy love each other do not contain sexuality.

I am so serious about this: het/gen, the slashing of het and gen, het and gen making out with each other, is a system that reinscribes heterosexuality as the norm and as normal, a system that excludes queer sexualities from representation, from general interest.

In other words, being a good academic may be important to other academics but not necessarily to other fans.

We thus face a dilemma: how can we respect and encourage the academic aspects of fan writing while still maintain fan meta as a distinct and separate discourse.

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Hiroyuki also hopes that this environment will foster new talent by having more experienced creators mentor previously unpublished creators "from morning to night" about developing story and characters.

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.

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.

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.

"Our old enemy 'poverty' somehow disappeared, and we can no longer find an enemy to fight against" (Miyazaki, 1988). In other words, after Japan's industrial success since the Meiji restoration in 1890s and recovery from WWII cast out poverty from the nation, people still remain possessed by an illusion of gaining a wealthy everyday life and continue living with a gap between their ideal and real life. As a result, an endless and unsatisfying cycle of production and consumption has begun destroying harmony among family and community (Harootunian, 2000).

Zizek (1989) points out that people of late capitalism are well aware that money is not magical. To obtain it, it has to be replaced through labor, and after you use it, it will just disappear, as will as any other material. Allison (1996) adds to this point: "They know money is no more than an image and yet engage in its economy where use-value has been increasingly replaced and displaced by images (one of the primary definitions of post-modernism) all the same” (p. xvi).

Related to its presentation of the loss of spiritual values, the film elaborates an extensive critique of another contemporary global issue: identity confusion. A symptom of identity loss is seen in the way that cultures today encourage people to constantly refashion their self-image, so that individuals construct their identity based on ideals presented in popular media.

A friend recently commented that she sometimes misses the days when fandom seemed like this shiny, egalitarian place where issues surrounding race (and gender, to a lesser extent) just didn't exist and she didn't realize it was an illusion courtesy of her own privilege, and it struck me how telling a comment that was: For a whole lot of people, the anger that their fandoms are being "polluted" or "ruined" by this kind of discussion stems from a deep-seated conviction that these problems didn't exist in fandom before some troublemakers started talking about them, and they view the people talking about them as the instigators of the problems rather the people who have been hurt by them or seen others hurt by them speaking up to say, "This is wrong, and it's something fandom collectively needs to work on."

clothes are as loaded with meaning as language. Visual semantics matter too.

In Tudor homes, where bedrooms were often pathways to other rooms or shared by several people, where there was no heating except open fires and fuel was scarce, well-to-do people usually dressed for bed in a nightgown, a nightcap and stockings. Even with a fire burning in  the hearth, glass or horn in the windows, and heavy bed-curtains, Tudor bedrooms could be chilly places. The modern viewer doesn’t take all this into account and expects to see near-total nudity in sex scenes.

Calling this historical drama, its clothes historical costumes, is like calling comics made by non-Japanese people in their own countries ‘manga’.