lothar@uga.edu
Anime Fan
Subculture: A Review of the Literature
Introduction
Over the past 20 years, Japanese animation, commonly referred to as anime, has grown in popularity in the United States. However, the number of U.S. fans of anime is much smaller compared to the overall population that enjoys more widespread domestic televised entertainment, such as sports programming and situational comedies. Nevertheless, fans of anime, unlike fans of more mainstream television programming, rely upon organizations of other fans in which to fulfill their anime entertainment needs. These organizations exist both online in the form of online communities and offline in the form of anime clubs.
The last 10 years in the United States have seen an overall diffusion in the way in which media entertainment needs are met. Radio, network and cable television, cinema, and print media that originated from centralized, corporate, and domestic sources were the primary means by which media entertainment was manufactured and distributed. What has changed since is that the primacy of these formats, which have recently been termed “old media”, is being challenged in ways that had not been considered. The rise of online communications via the Internet, as well as the support of universities to extracurricular student clubs, have engendered people with entertainment preferences that had often been ignored by mainstream media to find other like-minded persons who share similar interests. In some cases, a critical mass of such people has enabled the formation of online and real-world communities devoted to these interests. These communities, shut out from meaningful participation in U.S. mainstream media, have instead used their organizational power to both demand media entertainment from non-mainstream sources, as well as to propagate interest in non-mainstream media.
The U.S. anime fan community is a primary example of this phenomenon. Experts largely consider anime to be a niche market in the United States (Napier 2001), yet the members of the market make up in enthusiasm for what they lack in numbers. Though collegiate anime clubs have been a mainstay of U.S. anime fandom since its earliest days, the Internet has emboldened the anime fan community, who use the Internet’s capacities to put otherwise geographically disparate fans into a state of constant connectedness. These factors have contributed to the growth of a phenomenon that subverts the traditional means of entertainment media consumption. Anime fandom has engendered a decentralized, non-commercial anime distribution network that in turn spurs demand for imported entertainment media that is considerably removed from the mainstream in terms of content and corporatized distribution. This phenomenon has implications for academic study of marginalized subcultures in an age of digitized social relations. The Internet allows these subcultures more flexibility to assert autonomy within a media context that would otherwise be more limiting.
The phenomenon of anime fandom in the United State had begun with the release of the first full-length anime series worldwide, Tetsuwan Atomu, or Astro Boy as was known in the U.S. in the mid-1960s (Napier 2001; Patten, Website), and Speed Racer during that same period. Few Americans had known that they originally came in Japan since their U.S. releases were dubbed in English. Series such as Lupin III and Mobile Suit Gundam gained popularity in the U.S. in the 1970s (O’Connell, Website), and by the early 1980s, anime accounted for 56% of all Japanese television exports (Stronach, 1989), most of which had been exported to the United States.
Organized fandom gradually developed in the late 1980s, when the first Usenet newsgroup devoted to anime, rec.arts.anime appeared in 1988 (Google, Website), and when anime fan conventions began appearing in the United States in the late 1980s which were separate from more traditional science fiction conventions.
Academic acknowledgement of anime fandom began in roughly the same period with the first ever conference on Japanese Popular Culture held in 1989 (Napier 2001), and has received steady but little attention by the academy ever since. However, Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, an examination of general U.S. media fandom published in 1992, remains an influential text for scholars who wish to examine anime fan subculture. Nevertheless, the study of anime fan subculture must encompass far more than simply texts about anime or even fan subculture in general, although they would certainly make up a sizable portion of the literature. Rather, a review of the literature on anime must also address two important social trends – Orientalism and online communities. That Orientalism, or the ideology that the West has historically held about Eastern civilizations that was borne out of Nineteenth Century colonialism and continues today, has undoubtedly had an influence upon the way in which Western and specifically U.S. audiences perceive animation from Japan. Further, the impact of the online world on anime fan subculture cannot be diminished in any way since much of the discourse within U.S. anime fandom takes place on websites, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and email list servers that link fans across a campus and across continents. A study of the literature on online communication and a critique of its applicability to the realm of anime fandom is also necessary.
Anime as Fan Subculture
Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers does not address anime fandom per se, yet is an important work for any scholar seeking to research those who immerse themselves in media fandom subcultures. Jenkins’ thesis is that fans of shows such as Quantum Leap, Beauty and the Beast, and Star Trek, rather than passively consume these shows, exploit the texts of the series to serve their own interests through fan-created fiction, art, and music based on the series’ that are manufactured by major media companies (1992). In many instances, these fans build communities that carry on relationships with media companies and with each other that are either cooperative or antagonistic, given the circumstances that predominate at the time (Jenkins 1992). Such relationships are dominated by media production companies that exercise social power and cultural dominance through their authorship, as well as by social prerogatives from society to subsume oneself to authorial meaning without imposing one’s own interpretations on a text (Jenkins 1992). Nevertheless, media fans find it within their individual power as writers, artists, and critics, as well as within their collective power as a subculture to resist society’s and the companies’ hegemonic powers to decide both their tastes in and interpretations of, respectively, media (Jenkins 1992).
Annalee Newitz wrote one of the earliest scholarly articles on U.S. anime fandom in 1994. Her research methodology, which consisted of issuing a survey to the local anime club at her University of California at Berkeley and to participants on the Internet newsgroup rec.arts.anime, as well as interviewing UC Berkeley club officers, was barely adequate given the broad and inaccurate generalizations about anime fandom in the U.S that she made. Her main thesis said that anime as a “fantasyscape” colonized the minds of U.S. anime fans through the Japanese ideologies of ethnic, national, and male superiority that the anime expressed. She writes:
I do
not mean that animation is more
ideological than other forms, but simply that it is easier to convey the
possible reality of what we imagine in a form which does not distinguish between
reality and fantasy. If we consider
anime to be part of Japanese national ideologies, then it is no wonder that
American fans have become convinced that Japanese culture is superior to
American culture. Anime promise that
what Americans imagine to be pleasurable can be acted out only with the help of
Japanese intervention (Website).
Her case for the U.S. anime fan as a cultural weakling is expressed in other ways. The networked subculture exists only for distributing anime cassettes, not for sharing intellectual, social or artistic matters. U.S. anime fans “steal” Japanese culture out of revenge for Japanese theft of Hollywood’s creative ideas, rather than appropriate it for creative or socially worthwhile ends. Anime fans (who according to Newitz must be effectively all-male) live in fear of being feminized by their consumption of anime. The willingness of U.S. anime fans to subsume themselves to Japanese culture (strange enough, if Newitz’s other idea that fans fear being “feminized” by anime consumption is valid) parallels, for Newitz, the American business world’s willingness to adopt both Japanese business models as well as Japanese ownership of American companies. Newitz wrote these ideas in 1994 – five years after Japan’s economical “bubble years” had burst in economic turmoil hardly worth emulating, conditions that continue in Japan as of this paper’s writing. Anime fans in the U.S. should rightfully be insulted on two levels – both for being characterized as colonized dupes as well as being expected to believe in these assertions about themselves and a subculture they worked hard to create and maintain for themselves – not because the Japanese told them to do so.
On the heels of Newitz’s work a few years later, Susan Pointon’s contribution to the literature was perhaps one of the most misguided at best, vicious at worst, characterizations of a U.S. anime fandom growing to “epidemic proportions” (1997). In reviewing the international cultural sources and repercussions of the sadistically pornographic anime Urotsukidoji (The Legend of the Overfiend), Pointon points to its reception by U.S. audiences as evidence of the fandom’s outcast status – one that reflects jaded adolescent disillusionment with banal domestic media and youthful sexual anxiety gone horribly wrong. Besides being fans of sexually-depraved misogynistic entertainment, “average American anime fans are no casual consumers but fanatically dedicated devotees who will demonstrate their allegiance by tattooing the names or images of their favorite characters on their bodies, writing their own versions of the texts, or even studying Japanese so that they can watch the videos in their original undubbed form” (1997).
Pointon’s total disregard of most anime fans that do not do those things or other aspects of her shameful display of academic recklessness doesn’t stop there. Using Newitz as a source, Pointon concurs to further her account of the perverse nature of anime fandom in the U.S.:
Noting
that the anime videos often contain derogatory references to American
militarism and the detrimental social effects of American pop culture on modern
Japanese society, [Newitz] suggests that the American fans are willingly
collaborating with the videos’ producers in a critique of their own
culture. Furthermore, in embracing
without qualification the alien mores and traditions of a culture that has up
until this time been characterized by its impenetrable “otherness”, they are
truly fulfilling their destiny as otaku,
a bastardized term that in Japan denotes fanaticism (1997).
Newitz’s own perceptions were at least drawn from albeit sketchy resources – interviewing a handful of fans at her university’s anime club and distributing an online survey to a Usenet newsgroup devoted to anime. As far as can be discerned from her article, Pointon has no basis upon which to make her claims about anime fans in the U.S. apart from the sexually brutal films she used as research evidence – films that make up a tiny percentage of overall anime. If Pointon had even bothered to attend an anime convention, club meeting, or even on online anime message board, she could have easily discerned that even in 1997 when she wrote the article that the fandom was not overwhelmed by obsessive and sexually depraved young men filled with angst and alienation towards their own culture. To say otherwise is to ignore the vast cultural repertoire – let alone the female gender – that many fans possess which make up the subculture that even Susan Napier’s own study of anime fans acknowledges (2001). Compared to most anime fans, the heightened anxiety and obsession with sexualized anime may be in fact her own.
Antonia Levi’s treatment of anime fan subculture is an about-face from Pointon’s fan-bashing, yet it is not without its problems. She manages to distinguish between the casual anime fans and the more obsessive otaku, but rather than chastise the more hard-core fans, Levi celebrates their use of the term otaku as an indication of their growing sense of pride (1996). Far from agreeing with the “transcultural orgasm as apocalypse” metaphor that Pointon abhorrently uses to describe fans in the U.S., Levi sees anime fan subculture as an opportunity for cultural exchange (1996). That Japanese anime has been self-selected by American youth she evidences as proof that multiculturalism is becoming adopted as pattern of thought that American school systems need not impose. “A funny thing happened on the way to the culture wars. We got run over by some cartoons. There we were, happily debating whether to focus on multiculturalism or Western Civilization, and the kids made their own choice with anime and manga [comic books]” (Levi 1996). Though such an assertion is celebratory of anime fans, it is doubtful that this choice is reflective of “the kids” of the U.S. in general, particularly when many anime fans are unmindful of the Japanese roots in anime, a fact that Levi herself acknowledges (1996).
Levi’s
positive portrayal of American otaku
culminates in her appendix “How to Become an Otaku”, which, though inviting to
anime novices, undermines the participatory nature of anime fandom. The steps she lays out to become an otaku are straightforward enough. She encourages fans to go to Japanese
districts in American cities to seek out both anime cassettes and Japanese
ex-patriots who can translate and explain the anime (1996). She also gives otaku in rural areas advice on how to obtain anime through
catalogues as well as college anime clubs and anime conventions (1996). Finally, she tells her readers that the
final stage to becoming a full-fledged otaku
is to go to Japan (to do what exactly she leaves to the reader’s imagination)
(1996). However, each of these steps
encourages anime fans to take a consumerist
role in anime fandom. That is, to
become consumers of anime and Japanese culture up through international
travel. This characterizes the fandom
as passive in nature with no regard to the fans’ participatory roles (Thornton
1997) as fan fiction writers, artists, fan musicians, online forum
commentators, moderators, panel discussion leaders, and even academics. To become an otaku is to assume a social role within the anime fan community as
opposed to engaging in isolated enjoyment of media and Japanese culture, to the
contrary of Levi’s assertions that one can participate in intercultural
exchange through being a couch potato (1996).
Susan J. Napier’s Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke asserts that Japanese animation, while containing many distinctively Japanese cultural traits (e.g. references to history, social mores, language, etc.), is nonetheless a global medium well-suited to international distribution and enjoyment (2001). Her appendix, which contains a study on the collegiate anime club at the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches, is a major part of her evidence of anime’s appeal in this country. The purpose of her study as a whole is to discredit the notion that U.S. anime fans fit the stereotype of their being “nerdy” or lacking in good, balanced taste in entertainment (2001). This purpose itself lends credence to the idea that anime fan subculture’s worth as being “normal” is derived only from its similarities to mainstream culture, and that anime fans are “normal” (and therefore socially acceptable) consumers of entertainment because their attitudes and lifestyle are closer to the mainstream than widely believed. There is no room for social acceptance of those who actually do fit the otaku stereotype in this study’s ideology. Moreover, the survey portion of her research lacks much in methodological rigor. Her methodology does not take into account analysis of variance or regression analysis, but rather relies upon simple percentages of her respondents’ answers to give the reader an idea of the “typical” U.S. anime fan’s traits.
Anime as Literature
Napier focuses more on anime as a literary art form rather than on the American fandom that appreciates it. She posits that there are three main modes to anime: the apocalyptic (e.g. mecha, action-adventure), the festival (e.g. romantic comedies), and the elegiac (e.g. historical dramas), all three of which arise from both Japanese cultural values and a growing global cultural consciousness (2001). In Napier’s analysis, anime is riddled with tensions between conservative and the subversive literary themes during a time when Japan is undergoing continuing social change and resistance to change (2001).
Brian Ruh’s examination of anime cyberpunk in “Liberating Cels: Forms of the Female in Japanese Cyberpunk Animation” conceptualizes the genre as possessing feminist overtones that are libratory (Website). Females, say Ruh, play an active role as independent heroines in series’ such as Bubblegum Crisis and movies such as Ghost in the Shell. While conforming to male expectations of females in media, such as the fetishization of female characters (e.g. skin-tight battle suits worn by shapely anime women), anime cyberpunk nonetheless allows women to seize power in their own right. This is accomplished through the characters’ telekinetic prowess, technological expertise, and the shows’ privileging of matriarchy over a patriarchal setting (e.g. Serial Experiments Lain, Ghost in the Shell) (Website).
Ruh’s theory that anime exist that are liberating for women is sound, but another part of his essay has problems. He asserts that the science-fiction world in which many anime heroines inhabit is an inherently global one, since the Japanese borrow from Western sci-fi ideas, and the West does likewise from the Japanese (Website). However, this neglects the possibility of selective borrowing by both cultures from one another. Most writers will not borrow from another culture wholesale, but will rather take those elements of the other culture best suited to that writer’s cultural framework. In the case of anti-corporatism in sci-fi anime, Bubblegum Crisis and Ghost in the Shell may be notable cases of shows that express anti-corporate themes. However, the norm in most sci-fi anime is to ignore the problems of corporate power altogether, despite an increasing awareness that corporate influence will continue to dominate the landscape of the future in which most sci-fi is set. This stems from Japan’s cultural tendency of lacking overt anti-corporate sentiments found in U.S. culture, which had undoubtedly influenced American William Gibson’s Neuromancer’s portrayal of corporate power as antagonistic. Neuromancer quickly gained popularity in Japan, and influenced the aforementioned anime titles and others, yet its anti-corporate ethos remains largely absent in sci-fi anime.
Sabdha Charlton’s scholarly review of the anime film Utena: Adolescence Mokushiroku (The Adolescence of Utena) illustrates anime’s capacity for themes of gender liberation outside of the genre of science fiction. Chronicling the arrival of a tomboyish yet attractive student at the Ohtori Academy, Utena, a retelling of the title character’s exploits from a previous anime television series set in an alternative universe, is filled with brilliant imagery and heavy symbolism. One such symbol, a tank-shaped castle suspended above a highway, is positioned as an ever-present reminder of the power that the duelists seek to obtain in a dueling victory. The dueling victor stands to inherit both the Rose Bride Himemiya Anthy, and the “power to revolutionize the world” that she brings. “This castle is significant because it promises eternity and miracles to Utena as the possessor of the Rose Bride, at the price of both their freedoms, and its destruction means simultaneously the gaining of freedom but the loss of eternal life” (Charlton, Website). Indeed, Charlton’s idea that the sought-after revolutionary power is in fact a rebuke of patriarchy and a casting away of proscribed gender roles in flight from Ohtori (Website) is consistent with the emotional, spiritual and sexual relationship between Anthy and Utena that frees both of them from their respective male “princes” that have failed them in death.
What is surprising about Charlton’s review is her leaving out of one of the central characters, Juri, who is a lesbian “prince” in her own right. That she stays in the Ohtori academy, which represents the patriarchic domination that envelops Japanese society, undermines the idea of a “flight” as the only recourse of liberation. Though intent on fleeing herself someday, Juri must nonetheless contend with the academy’s environment as an oppositional figure, at least for a while. That Utena and Anthy left much of the Ohtori campus in ruin after their revolutionary power had been unleashed symbolizes a new order, one given birth by a flight, but also requiring maintenance by those formerly oppressed who have been left behind. Juri and her peer’s presence at Ohtori indicates that active involvement within a society affected by social change, as Japan has undergone with regards to gender roles since the 1960s, is yet another avenue towards a more libratory social order.
Orientalism
Edward Said laid much of the foundations of Orientalist studies in 1978 with his book Orientalism. Though he himself is a secular Arab scholar concerned mostly with the Middle East as the object of Western Orientalist perceptions, he contended that the “Orient” as envisioned by the West included the Arab, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese civilizations (1976). Said’s explanation of Orientalism, which continues to hold sway amongst scholars today, posited it as a doctrinal ideology invented by Western intellectuals during the period of Nineteenth Century colonialism that fixed the West as “rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient [as] aberrant, undeveloped, [and] inferior” (1976). Another doctrine of the time that Said says holds currency today is that the Orient is “eternal, uniform, incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and scientifically ‘objective’” (1976). It is from this intellectual heritage that, despite the best efforts of multiculturalists in education, business, government, and the media, Orientalism persists, Said says, as an inherited set of cultural structures that are secularized and modernized versions of philology, which in turn were modernized substitutes of different forms of Christian supernaturalism (1978) working against the interests of non-Westerners.
Japan is a unique case for the Orientalist mind since most of its economic infrastructure, government, popular culture, and much of the Japanese people’s thinking have been Westernized since the Meiji Restoration era of the 1870s began driving Japan towards modernization to a degree not seen in other “Oriental” countries. It can be pointed to as a success by Orientalists of Western supervision and ideology governing the respective affairs and minds of an “Oriental” people, particularly in reference to its postwar period of democratization and economic growth. This problematizes the study of U.S. anime fan subculture to a great extent, since an awareness of Orientalism triggers questions of what motivates U.S. fans to watch anime. Do they watch it to be exposed to Japan’s “exoticness” and “mysticism” so closely associated with the “Orient” in general? Or do they view anime as a way to continue their consumption of the familiar – to watch the animation of another industrialized and Westernized nation? Will anime reinforce or challenge their Orientalist beliefs about Japan, and perhaps by extension, East Asia in general? Does the act of watching anime itself position anime fans as involved participants in Japanese culture who become reflective thinkers about their own culture, or as privileged and distanced observers of a people who have “culture”, yet never stop to think about themselves possessing a culture that itself can seem “exotic” to an Eastern mind with similar ethnocentric pretensions.
Bryan S. Turner seeks to introduce new ways of conceptualizing the East so that it becomes less distant and more familiar to Western scholars while de-privileging either the perspectives of the West or the East so that neither Orientalism nor Occidentalism obscures scholarship. His proposal hinges upon the acceptance of a global sociological perspective of human beings to replace the nation-state, society-oriented model of sociological inquiry that predominates today. For example, the origins of Japanese capitalism, previously viewed as a wholly Western introduction into a Nipponese economic vacuum by Orientalist scholars, quite probably were associated with earlier Confucian principles. However, the purpose of historical sociology should not be, according to Turner, to center Japanese capitalism as a wholly native phenomenon as a sort of “redemption history”, as earlier anti-Orientalist critical scholars may have done, but rather to rethink capitalism as a system in its own right (1994). Japanese society itself would not be ignored in such an endeavor, but would rather take a place on par with that of the West as part of a global socio-economic system that reflects a new global consciousness on the part of sociologists. This new global consciousness would be fostered by a repudiation of the Orientalist emphasis on cultural difference in favor of a discourse that emphasizes cultural sameness (1994).
Though this approach would favor a scholarly view of anime as a global entertainment medium borne out of Nippon-American cultural exchange, it would have the contradictory effect of reaffirming the predominance of nation-states since national actors, not subcultures within nations, dictate how global culture will flow across the earth under this model. If the sameness between Japan and the United States is emphasized, where does U.S. anime fan subculture find its voice as an entity voluntarily apart from the U.S. mainstream and at the same time unwillingly apart from Japanese popular culture?
According to Toshiya Ueno, some of the U.S. interest in anime has been peppered with a sort of “techno-orientalism” that positions the Japanese as a technologically advanced yet emotionless people. Invented by information capitalism, the ideology of techno-orientalism allows an anime film such as Ghost in the Shell, where the protagonist is a female android soldier with little emotion in Japan who does her work of killing with extreme efficiency (what Ueno calls the “Japanoid automaton”), to be identified by Western audiences as approximating a film about Japanese identity. The West is seduced and attracted by this model of a technologically advanced future of cybernetic efficiency on one hand, reasons Ueno, while at the same time this model of Japan is looked down upon by the West. “Japanimation, which organizes the image of automatization and animation (giving it a life form), constructs and presents a ‘Japan’ as an ‘automaton culture’ and as the ‘Japanoid’ in ‘Postmodern Times’” (Website).
Ueno’s analysis of Ghost in the Shell, albeit insightful into Western information society’s expectations of Japan’s future manifesting themselves into techno-orientalism, nonetheless grossly overgeneralizes “Japanimation” (a term most U.S. anime fans avoid). Many other very recently anime such as Ayashi no Ceres (c. 2001) and Chobits (c. 2002) actively rebuke a Japanese future of emotionless “Japanoids” under the domination of human desires (perhaps coded as “Western desires” by Ueno). If techno-orientalism was invented by information capitalism, Ueno does not address whether or not information capitalism itself is a Western or non-Western invention. If it is an invention of both the West and the non-West through the process of global information-commercial exchange, then it begs the question of how much the non-West contributed to techno-orientalism’s prevalence, and if it did, then whether or not the contribution was intentional, accidental, or nonetheless inevitable because of the non-West’s (including Japan’s) succumbing to Western cultural hegemony.
Online Communities
As this study will examine the online as well as the offline occurrences of anime fan subculture, a review of the literature on online culture is necessary. Hubert Dreyfus’s On the Internet warns readers about the dangers of nihilism that can develop from immersion into an online lifestyle (2001). Dreyfus traces his argument to the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, who criticized the 19th Century European press for making an amorphous public the centerpiece of public policymaking discourse because their inherent disinterest made the process meaningless (Dreyfus, 2001). The problem Dreyfus sees with the Internet is that it requires no unconditional commitments on the part of individuals, making any sort of meaningful identity or community building unlikely, if not impossible (2001).
James Slevin’s view of the Internet as a tool of discourse in The Internet and Society is more optimistic than Dreyfus’s, but recognizes the dangers that are inherent not in the Internet itself, but rather in the late modernist age in which we live that the Internet can exacerbate (2000). Rather than serve as a tool for avoiding risk as Dreyfus alleges, the Internet can instead help solve the risks of alienation and identity dispersal inherent in an innovative society through responsible public discourse online (Slevin 2000). However, that “individuals, groups, and other forms of social organization will remain endowed with varying capacities and resources on which they may draw” (Slevin 2000) is for Slevin a warning for those who view the Internet as a place to solve problems that affect that public, rather than a neutral or even positive observation about the online world.
Caroline Bassett’s perspective on Internet discourse analyzes micro-level observations of daily online life that construct gender through discourse. Rather than rely on observations more distanced and theoretical to critique the online world as Dreyfus and Slevin do, Bassett uses a theory that is more useful to conduct research on gender identity in online chat rooms. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity contends that gender is neither prefabricated in culture or biology, but rather is built through reiterative discourse (Bassett 1995). That is, through the ritual patterns of language, one adopts a gendered personality. This especially holds true in the online community of LambdaMOO that Bassett studies, where online genders can be easily adopted, transformed, and discarded in ways not possible in life away from the computer, such as identifying oneself as a “neutral” gender (1995), but rather are literally established through speech. The particular speech used in this environment tends to be far more expressive and intent on gaining attention through a series of rituals such as dramatic entrances, emoting publicly, and even “play killing” other people who have offended someone else in some way at various levels (Bassett 1995). One of the more socially intriguing ways in which these highly noticeable rituals manifest themselves is through gender. Though other genders besides the binary male/female are possible, ranging from “neuter, either, Spivak (described as ‘an indeterminate gender’), splat, plural, egotistical, royal or 2nd” (Bassett 1995), participants on LambdaMOO rarely deviated from real life genders. Instead, even if they were a male adopting a female gender, their genders would be archetypes of ideal gender-assigned beauty, rather than a deviation from it. The “women” (male or female in real life) would often describe themselves as having long flowing hair and ample breasts while “men” would be tall with piercing eyes, with both genders describing themselves as young and overwhelmingly white (Bassett 1995).
Considering that this study was conducted in 1995, when the Internet was even much more dominated by white users than it is today, the overwhelming number of people describing themselves as white is no surprising. However, that the stress on an attention-getting discourse in this environment compels people to adopt these attributes that conform to rather than reject dominant gendered stereotypes merits careful consideration of how online communities facilitate or inhibit social change. This is especially in regards to gender roles in this case. In an environment such as online anime fandom, where role-playing is considered a staple of fan discourse, an awareness of how the discourse shapes common expectations of how one is to appear, what is significant to discuss, and how collective action is organized or never even considered is vital to conducting any online research.
Conclusion
With the exception of Henry Jenkins and Antonia Levi, the topic of anime and, albeit television fandom in general has directly and indirectly been treated at best by academics as something worthwhile to be studied rather than as a topic in its own right whose study would be taken for granted. At worst, and unfortunately all too common, the treatment of anime fandom has marginalized the subculture as over-dependent on Japanese culture for personal fulfillment, harboring misguided and patronizing attitudes towards Japan, being drawn to anime for prurient interests in animated sex and violence, or perhaps all of these things at the same time.
Anime and anime fandom have, up to this point been addressed from specific fields of study (e.g. literature, culture studies, sociology). However, because anime fandom in the U.S. as a research topic encompasses so many fields of academic study, a comprehensive approach to its study should be interdisciplinary in nature. Furthermore, other fields such as education and, surprisingly, media studies have barely taken a scholarly look at anime fandom, if at all. Fields such as these should begin investigating this topic given their own unique theoretical perspectives and methodologies that can inform an interdisciplinary approach to this inquiry as well.
No reasonable approach to the study of anime fan subculture can ignore the reasons for why it is a subculture in the first place. That anime fans gather in clubs in viewing rooms and on the Internet to watch anime is not enough of a differentiation. The social nature of anime fandom – the costume playing at conventions, the hours spent subtitling an episode for distribution, the publishing of fan fiction on the Internet – constitutes venues through which anime fans enter into a discourse that establishes their identities as fans. These identities are at least partly distanced from a mainstream society unconscious of its cultural power that pushes away fans who feel the need to detach themselves from that power at the same time. Unfortunately, studies have either dismissed anime fans as constituting a subculture, or if their subculture is acknowledged, it is only as a collection of culturally deficient individuals. Virtually no mention has been made of the subculture’s members’ varied relationships to mainstream culture. It ranges from light participation in the subculture hidden from non-fan friends and colleagues, to total lifestyle absorption with little or no contact with others to, more commonly, easy occupation in and transition between both spheres of living.
The increasing acceptance of global media in the U.S. and the increasing fragmentation of U.S. society into subcultural entities are being facilitated by online communication networks. A study of anime fan subculture must acknowledge these processes as integral factors in the subculture’s existence and growth. At the same time, it must recognize the historical roots of Orientalist thinking that have undoubtedly affected the subculture’s capacities in the U.S. to construct a view of the very nation that provides the raw materials for its discourse.
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