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unjapanologistThe second International Convention on Manga, Animation, Game and Media Art (ICOMAG) will be held in Tokyo this weekend. This year's title is 'Commons of Imagination: What Today’s Society Can Share through Manga and Animation'. The conference aims are described as follows:
I decided to go because the person who told me about the conference said that it probably wouldn't be very interesting for me "because it's not about fan studies". This confused me, especially after I'd read more about the conference's themes. What this gathering is trying to do - like "focus on the possibility of sharing cultural imagination through manga and animation" and "discuss whether manga and animation have the potential to develop as a common language in the global culture of the future" sounds like it has a very, very great deal to do with how audiences for manga and anime decide to deal with those media. And with what millions of manga and anime fans around the world are already doing.
Judging from the texts on the site, the conference could turn out either very interesting or overly focused on what the industry and professional creators "can" or "should" do. I'm not quite sure where they'll try to go with all this, but I'm curious, and some of the speakers sound pretty interesting. Fingers crossed.
In any case, it's a great excuse to go to Tokyo. I've freed up two days to go bury myself in Comiket Service's new second-hand dojinshi shop and in the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library. Yonezawa was one of the great driving forces behind Comiket, and after he passed away a couple of years ago, his massive collection of dojinshi and rare manga-related materials was turned into the cornerstone of a to-be-completed manga library at Meiji University. It doesn't look like I'll be able to access a lot as a one-day member in the library, but the new shop sounds like it couldn't possibly disappoint. The old second-hand dojinshi shop was crammed so full of books when I went there last December that I could literally not even turn around in some places; it had its own kind of charm, for sure, but it was hell to find anything - although I did buy a dojinshi with a very lovey-dovey drawing of Eomer and a horse on the cover that I still haven't dared to read. The new shop sounds most excellent: it focuses on gen and joseimuke ('for girls', which in practice means mostly boys' love) and promises a wide selection from old as well as new genres.
By the way, I love that the Japanese term 'ジャンル' or 'genre' is used to denote a fanwork's source work by dojinshi fans, in the way 'fandom' is used a lot by English-language fans. Wouldn't it be fascinating to consider how fanworks could also be thought of as belonging to 'genres' in the English-language sense of the word? What could be the implications of thinking of 'Harry Potter' or 'Avatar' in the same way we think of more well-known genres like 'horror' or 'action'? Think of the theoretical wrangling. What would be the properties of the genre 'Harry Potter' - those characteristics that make you recognize a work as 'Harry Potter' the second you catch a glimpse of it, the way you can often tell the traditional 'genre' of a movie with one glance at the poster? What would be... No? *cough* Okay.
Japanese Manga and animation are currently enjoying huge popularity all over the world. Manga and animation obviously have a major impact on society, although it has generally been regarded in terms of recreation up to this point. In reality, however, both the content and form of manga and animation touch upon the most profound aspects of how we see life and the world around us. But the mechanisms of such effects remain largely unconscious and are seldom the main focus of discussion. Manga and animation also fulfill a function that has conventionally been played by the arts, namely, serving to build connections among societies and communities with differing historical and linguistic backgrounds. Viewing manga and animation as a kind of cultural commons, this roundtable will aim to discuss what we can share through these genres and will focus on the possibility of sharing cultural imagination through manga and animation.
I decided to go because the person who told me about the conference said that it probably wouldn't be very interesting for me "because it's not about fan studies". This confused me, especially after I'd read more about the conference's themes. What this gathering is trying to do - like "focus on the possibility of sharing cultural imagination through manga and animation" and "discuss whether manga and animation have the potential to develop as a common language in the global culture of the future" sounds like it has a very, very great deal to do with how audiences for manga and anime decide to deal with those media. And with what millions of manga and anime fans around the world are already doing.
Judging from the texts on the site, the conference could turn out either very interesting or overly focused on what the industry and professional creators "can" or "should" do. I'm not quite sure where they'll try to go with all this, but I'm curious, and some of the speakers sound pretty interesting. Fingers crossed.
In any case, it's a great excuse to go to Tokyo. I've freed up two days to go bury myself in Comiket Service's new second-hand dojinshi shop and in the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library. Yonezawa was one of the great driving forces behind Comiket, and after he passed away a couple of years ago, his massive collection of dojinshi and rare manga-related materials was turned into the cornerstone of a to-be-completed manga library at Meiji University. It doesn't look like I'll be able to access a lot as a one-day member in the library, but the new shop sounds like it couldn't possibly disappoint. The old second-hand dojinshi shop was crammed so full of books when I went there last December that I could literally not even turn around in some places; it had its own kind of charm, for sure, but it was hell to find anything - although I did buy a dojinshi with a very lovey-dovey drawing of Eomer and a horse on the cover that I still haven't dared to read. The new shop sounds most excellent: it focuses on gen and joseimuke ('for girls', which in practice means mostly boys' love) and promises a wide selection from old as well as new genres.
By the way, I love that the Japanese term 'ジャンル' or 'genre' is used to denote a fanwork's source work by dojinshi fans, in the way 'fandom' is used a lot by English-language fans. Wouldn't it be fascinating to consider how fanworks could also be thought of as belonging to 'genres' in the English-language sense of the word? What could be the implications of thinking of 'Harry Potter' or 'Avatar' in the same way we think of more well-known genres like 'horror' or 'action'? Think of the theoretical wrangling. What would be the properties of the genre 'Harry Potter' - those characteristics that make you recognize a work as 'Harry Potter' the second you catch a glimpse of it, the way you can often tell the traditional 'genre' of a movie with one glance at the poster? What would be... No? *cough* Okay.
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Oh and also...
I'd agree with this. I don't like using "fandom" to designate just the people, as it both makes the word less useful and as you say, kind of erases the fans. The only thing that bugs me is here is including the source material in the definition, but it's pretty much done all the time as far as I can tell, as a short cut to saying "the show, it's fandom and it's fans" type of phrase. Which would be the correct way to do it, but as we've established: clunky. So instead we just say "the SPN fandom" to bucket it all together; to be fair, generally most people would understand the implication made and extrapolate it. But as I write this meta, I can't *assume* that, and so things get twisted. Bah.
Re: Oh and also...
Hmm, interesting - I personally don't recognize the word fen as having that sort of connotation. It's flitted across my fannish world only on a couple of occasions, and I always thought it was just a plural of "fan" that never got as popular as "fans". One wonders who exactly ends up "trendsetting" a piece of vocabulary strongly enough that it starts to resonate with some (loose or tightly-knit group of) people while totally rolling off the heads of others. The different spaces that people spend most of their time in seem pretty significant. There was a time not that many years ago ago when I wouldn't even have recognized the word "f-list", because my whole fannish life took place on Yahoo Groups and Livejournal might as well have been The Onion as far as I was aware.
fandom ... lack of definition clarity
There was going to be a big slab of "my opinion is" text here, but now I wonder if this lack of definition clarity shouldn't just be considered inevitable. *points to previous paragraph* We can define until our keyboards start smoking, but it probably won't matter for the very vast number of people in this "fandom" category we're defining; they'll be in their own spaces, having their own experiences, not reading any definition attempts over here, and still tripping over the differences when they read a later post in which you forget to qualify "fen".
Lack of definition clarity is real and does cause some problems. But I wonder, can't we deal with this as a feature rather than a bug? Is there a way -a rhetorical trick, a shift in consciousness, whatever- to write an essay/academic paper/book/anything about "fandom" that will be understandable to everyone without tripping up or angering people whose definitions don't perfectly align with yours?
I haven't thought about this much. It just kind of annoys me that we often seem to get bogged down in arguments about definitions when we really just want to write about a thing. It's bloody 2012, there has to be a way for you to write a post about fandom without having to attach a hundred caveats about definitions and agonizing over them forever.
difference between a fandom community and a fandom culture
As far as I can think of right now:
Community = group of people with a common interest. Possibly more, but after "common interest", I get a bit stuck. Is the way people interact about that common interest also part of it? Are the spoken and unspoken rules necessary to make a group into a community? Are you a member of a community even if you don't recognize you are, or if you claim you aren't?
Fandom culture = 1. If we take "culture" to mean "the social habits and history of a group of people", then fandom culture is the particular history/habits/rules that are understood/experienced to different degrees by members of a fan community. 2. If we take "culture" to mean "the entirety of a group's social habits, history, beliefs, economy, and output", then... well, then fan culture is that whole shebang.
Sounds like we need to define "culture" first. Any takers? :D While defining is fun and necessary in some situation, I kind of want to scrap all of the above because I feel I'm going in circles.
the only thing that bugs me here is including the source material in the definition, but it's pretty much done all the time as far as I can tell, as a short cut to saying "the show, it's fandom and it's fans"
Including the source material in the definition might not be quite that weird, I'm beginning to think. I'm in the middle of this book by Jonathan Gray, and it's about how "paratexts" or ancillary materials shape how people experience and deal with a "main" text - say, the Supernatural episodes that were aired on TV and are generally what people mean when they say "Supernatural". His basic thesis is that it's pretty much impossible to separate the so-called "main" text separately from its paratexts, which range from posters to toys to fic and fannish meta. People tend to think of "Supernatural" as being a series of TV episodes that are at the center of a solar system filled with ancillary "Supernatural" stuff, stuff that circles the source material and exists wholly separately, but that's not a realistic idea at all.
Turning that around, you could also say that it's pretty much impossible to consider the "fandom" of a text without also including the source material. How would the aforementioned solar system look if you ask people to describe how they think about the "fandom" of SPN, rather than how they imagine the show SPN? It probably depends on who you ask: some people's experience might place fic at the center and have everything else -discussions, chats, fan art, the show itself- be secondary to/ancillary material of their fic-based fannish lives. Others might feel that an RPG is at the center of their fannish experiences. Others might put the source material at the center of their fannish experiences. (When we're trying to describe how people think of "fandom", the solar system metaphor doesn't feel nearly as useful as when we're considering how the source materials themselves are viewed.) But I suspect that most people would include the source material in their solar systems. It might be at the center, it might be one of the big planets with the gaudy rings on it, or it might be a comet that only occasionally passes by and becomes relevant, but it will be there. The source material will be part of "fandom" to one degree or another. This is only a problem if people assume that if the source material is part of the solar system, its place is at the center and nowhere else, and everybody's solar system has to be like that. (E.g. people who insist that fic must follow canon to the letter. Or worse, people who try to push not the source material but that material's author into the center of everybody's solar system, and whine when others write fic while the author has said s/he doesn't like fic.)
...I think I'll go do some work now! Not sure where all that came from.