James Potter loves Snape in Japanese fan comics. Any idea why that's so?

[unjapanologist]

My Ph.D research focuses on narrative differences between Japanese fanwork (dojinshi) and English-language fanwork (fanfics). To find out whether there really are significant differences between these two media, content-wise, I did a small-scale test using six fanfics and four dojinshi, all of them James/Snape. I compared only a small number of narrative elements (will be more in the 'real' research) and tried to list them in a nice clean data set. Below I list the narrative elements I looked at, summarize the resulting data, and offer a short first assessment -possible explanations, remarks, and ideas for further inquiry. I'll continue adding to them, and would love to hear any insights or ideas from others. You can view the complete data set in full screen here (please read next paragraph before clicking). If any of this catches your eye, let me know what you think!

Important notes before analyzing fun begins: Please don't link directly to the full-screen version of the data set, as there's no way to include this text there. The summaries of the fanfics and dôjinshi included in the set were written by me for the purpose of contrasting the narratives, and they contain SPOILERS for the stories. The ratings/warnings are the original author's; please pay attention to them before clicking any links, since the stories may contain adult material. If you think I've misrepresented or misinterpreted something, please let me know and I'll correct the information right away. If you're the author of a fanfic/dôjinshi included in the data set and you feel this is cruel and unusual abuse of your work, or you just don't want it mentioned anywhere, drop me a note and I'll remove identifying information from the entry (author name, title, link, summary) or remove the entry altogether.

• Ship (based on anecdotal evidence)
  Data: The ship/kappuringu of James Potter and Severus Snape appears to be relatively common in dôjinshi, while it occurs only very infrequently (a “rarepair”) in fanfic.
  In HP canon, the idea of this pair of characters being in a romantic relationship is unthinkable. Are fanfic writers less inclined than dôjinshika to tackle a kappuringu/ship they know is a flagrant violation of HP canon? Are there more of these “strange” kappuringu/ships in dôjinshi than in fanfic?
• Dominant/submissive partner
  Data: A constant in all fanfics and dôjinshi is that James is the dominant and Snape the submissive partner.i
  In canon, James and his friends bully Snape while they attend school,casting Snape as a victim during his acquaintance with James. However, as an adult Snape becomes a powerful figure of authority and is cast as the dominant partner in many fanfics featuring him in another “ship”. Anecdotal evidence suggest that in dôjinshi, he continues to be cast as the submissive partner as an adult, far more often than in fanfic. Are dominant-submissive roles in dôjinshi really that much stricter than in fanfic (once submissive, always submissive)?
• Narrator
  Data: James is narrator in all dôjinshi, with Snape taking over in only a few scenes. Snape is narrator in all fanfics while James narrates only a handful of times there.
  There is little canon information about James, who died a decade before the chronological starting point of the HP series. Do dôjinshika feel more comfortable than fanfic writers in fleshing out a minor character that is almost a blank sheet? Why do they consistently prefer this narrator over Snape, a character with a distinctive voice in canon?
• Initial relationship
  Data: James and Snape start out from some form of enmity in five out of six fanfics, while all four dôjinshi have them start out on neutral or friendly terms.
  Four out of six fanfics begin with mention of a scene from canon, reminding readers of the bad blood between the characters. None of the dôjinshi start out by referencing a canon element (though one does in the middle of the story). Do dôjinshi use fewer elements from canon such as key incidents or locations in order to situate characters? Why?
• Outcome of relationship
  Data: Three out of four dôjinshi end with Snape and James in a (budding) relationship. A fourth dôjinshi depicts them apart but still acting in a protective manner towards one another. None of the six fanfics have a happy ending. In one fanfic, Snape loves James, but both die; in two fanfics, they terminate a purely sexual relationship; three fanfics end with James forcing Snape into non-consensual sex and thus deepening the hatred between them.
  Only one fanfic even makes mention of “love”, while three out of four dôjinshi do. Are dôjinshi writers more keen to write relationships involving affection, in spite of the fact that such sentiments have no basis whatsoever in canon?
• Presence of canon love interest
  Data: In the dôjinshi examined, the canon girlfriend/later wife of James Potter, Lily, is simply nonexistent while James happily woos Snape. In the fanfics, she plays a significant (off-screen) role in five out of six fanfics, always in a context of James being involved with her or choosing her over Snape.
  Do dôjinshika ignore Lily because they see little value in sticking close to canon, or because women almost never feature in yaoi stories? Most of the characters Snape is paired with in fanwork have canon love interests. Do all of these women simply disappear in dôjinshi?ii
• Sexual acts
  Data: Three out of four dôjinshi feature no more than some kissing and groping, while five out of six fanfics show explicit scenes involving penetration
  These dôjinshi do not confirm the medium's general reputation for sexual explicitness. Other HP dôjinshi I have perused seem, mostly, equally lacking in explicit scenes. Is this characteristic of this particular kappuringu, of HP dôjinshi in general, or of women-authored dôjinshi?
• Consent during sex
  Data: In dôjinshi, the sexual activity between the two main characters is obviously consensual in three out of four cases; only one dôjinshi has the two in a sexual situation that involves a hint of dubious consent. In the fanfics there is clear mutual consent in three cases, one case of extremely dubious consent, and two sexual situations that are clearly non-consensual.
  Are there really comparatively few depictions of non-consensual sex in dôjinshi (made by and for women)? Why? (Note: fanfics tend to make it quite clear whether a sexual encounter is “dub-con” or “non-con”. However, in dôjinshi it is extremely common during sex scenes that “submissive” partners, male or female, utter exclamations such as “stop” or “no” throughout the proceedings, and such lines are not taken to indicate a lack of consent from the submissive partner, making it hard to determine whether a dôjinshi sex scene is “dub-con”.)
• Adherence to canon (based on anecdotal evidence)
  Data: Dôjinshi deviate far more radically from the canon of the source work than fanfics.
  Fanfic writers tend to be praised for adhering closely to canon.iv Concern with adhering to an established factual canon seems much less marked in dôjinshi. What is the relationship between dôjinshika and source work authors in Japan? Do dôjinshika actively dislike adhering to canon?
• Appearance of characters
  Data: In all four dôjinshi, both characters are drawn to appear attractive. Five out of six fanfics make some negatively worded reference to Snape's appearance, while no fanfic describes him as good-looking. James is described as handsome in two fanfics, while four do not mention his appearance.
  In the original HP books, James is said to be a handsome young man while Snape is described as physically unattractive. In dôjinshi, Snape acquires all the hallmarks of a bishônen -the androgynous “beautiful boy” figure that has been a staple of Japanese media throughout centuries. His most conspicuous facial feature in canon, an overlarge hooked nose, is nowhere to be seen in dôjinshi. Why do dôjinshika try so hard to prettify Snape?

Check out the data here.

Comments

[raisin-gal.livejournal.com]

Found you through seeing yumekutteikt pimp your project on fujoshi. This is a topic that has fascinated me a lot in the recent years, so I'm extremely happy to see someone tackling it!! :)

I'm not very sure if you're ready just yet to start planning a PhD diss. dealing with the yaoi genre, though. Most if not all of your tentative questions listed above strike me as so off base that they don't even seem applicable or comparable to the yaoi sphere. Like, if we wanted to study a tribe in a remote jungle and objectively understand how their value system works, to compare how it's similar to or dissimilar to the value system we're familiar with, it wouldn't be a good idea to start by questioning what their view of Jesus Christ is, you know? That's the way your questions tend to sound to me -- for instance where you talk about pairings and canonicity. (Even though I do feel there might be some difference in the two cultures' attitudes to canonicity.)

What I mean is... Look. In OotP, James jumps on Snape out of nowhere, ganging up on him with another male character, and knocks him over, gags him with soap water, then pins him upside down by his ankles. Exposing his bare thighs and graying underwear, for the clear purpose of public humiliation. Then he proceeds to taunt him about maybe exposing his genitals to "who[ever] wants to see" this happen.

That's classic kichiku (http://bangin.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/the-classification-for-%E6%94%BB%E3%82%81seme-and-%E5%8F%97%E3%81%91uke/) Seme behavior, in mainstream yaoi waters. You don't need to show that scene again, as the whole sequence requires no re-interpretation. It's all there. Much better to spend the time (or pages) exploring what *else* might be going on with these two characters, as suits their canonically shown dynamics.

And kichiku tops tend to be rapists *and* loving; their victims tend to (at least eventually) love them back. Things aren't as black-and-white as consensual vs. non-consensual (or dubious-consent) because in Japanese yaoi, the default is for the bottom to not want to have the sex they're having while loving it at the same time. Think "your mouth says no...," only the whole thing is internalized so that the bottom often sincerely *thinks* "no" while feeling "yes" somewhere deep down all at once. (*)
((*) And yes, I personally find myself deeply disturbed by this whole cultural norm, but just because the RL world should be regulated by strict adherence to the principle of censensuality doesn't mean it's always useful to analyze a fictional culture from the sole value-based viewpoint of whether it agrees or disagrees with our own notion of goodness.)

Which brings us to Snape, whose vehement hatred towards James (both observed through Harry's pensieve POV and referred to by various characters) can be directly interpreted as another yaoi archetype, the Tsundere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundere) (which is usually a girl or an uke). He bares his teeth at you everytime he sees you, but he cares that much only because he actually secretly loves you. He's just extremely shy to the point of violent confrontation. That's a well-ingrained archetype. So you see how I mean you have to immerse yourself in the culture first to even postulate the question about what's going on? When Harry encounters Snape Harry doesn't act particularly Seme-ish (and indeed there's quite a lot of Snape x Harry fics out there), but Snape is still acting extremely Tsundere-ishly. That's a cultural factor that doesn't seem present in the Western slashland.

Obviously these are just my two cents, and I'm far from well-read in all of HP yaoidom (which is pretty huge, and ranges from mangas to textual fanfics) much less in a position to compare it to HP slashdom. If you're thinking seriously about analyzing the yaoi narrative texts I'm sure you're already familiar with several main search engines in Japan, so if I were you I'd browse through several dozen dojinka sites before setting up any analytical framework. And read lots of meta written by culturally-Japanese yaoists.

I wish I could help you more, but this is about all I have energy for at the moment. Wishing you the best of luck in your research!

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

(Part 1)

Hey, thanks for commenting! *goes over to check out comm* I'm not as immersed in the culture as I could be, but not to fear, I'm definitely not completely ignorant ;) I've been reading boy's love manga for about a decade and did a master's thesis on them over three years ago. Of course there's such a huge mass of information now that wasn't available to me back then, and while I'm familiar with yaoi in commercial manga, I really don't know much about the peculiarities of yaoi in dojinshi yet. So while my knowledge of yaoi mechanics and Japanese fandom certainly isn't overly in-depth (not always clear on terminology, for instance, thanks for the link!), I'm familiar with the basics of seme and uke behaviour. Like the non-con/dub-con issue. I'm not being very clear on that in the post -it's part of an unpublished paper that does mention the topic. Sorry about the misunderstanding, I'll edit the post.

The main purpose of the project is to document the contents of dojinshi, something that hasn't been done in (non-Japanese) academia as far as I'm aware. A secondary goal is to raise questions/offer a range of possible explanations about the narrative differences observed between HP fanfic and dojinshi, in a very very open-ended fashion. Like this. Not trying for a 'How the Japanese Mind Works' here. *shivers*

That lack of research on dojinshi is why I'm starting out from a comparison with fanfic. I really know very little about dj (as opposed to commercial manga), and comparing it with something that has been researched far more intensively may help me stay within a sensible theoretical framework and offer me interesting/fun clues about things in dojinshi that warrant more in-depth research. If a question is too fic-centric and won't lead to relevant/interesting speculation about dojinshi, I hope that'll become obvious as I gather and analyze more data and as lovely knowledgeable people like you help me figure it out. Over time, I'll get better at spotting what's relevant and what may not be. It's a long-time project and I'm optimistic ;) Thanks for pointing out oddities, I really appreciate it.

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

(Part 2)

You don't need to show that scene again, as the whole sequence requires no re-interpretation.

I like that take on the underpants scene. Maybe I'd better not go into this before I've looked at more than a few dozen JP/SS dj, but I got the impression that djka made very little mention of the few canon interactions between these two. Is this common in dojinshi? Barely referencing canon scenes at all, or not showing re-interpretations of canon scenes, because it's believed that the canon scene has already established what happened? That could be taken either as "It was perfectly logical seme behaviour so we don't have anything to add to it" or "We're glossing over that bit".

It hadn't occurred to me to interpret the canon scene as just a seme being nasty, but it really is reminiscent of some of the more spectacularly vicious stunts some seme pull on their poor uke. Damn, I've been reading too much fic and not enough manga these last few years. (On an irrational level, I do hate James rather much like I've disliked a whole host of cold-blooded seme over the years ;) My first yaoi series was Zetsuai, and I've never despised any character as much as Koji.) The only problem I can see with it is that in most dojinshi, James doesn't act cold towards Snape at all, but rather like the 'wanko-zeme' as described in the link. But maybe being a kichiku-zeme in the original doesn't mean he can't be reincarnated quite smoothly as a different kind of seme in a dj.

mithen mentioned the possibility that since acting like a bully in school isn't considered quite that aberrant in Japan, James' actions might not have seemed that horrible/unforgivable. A combination of this sentiment and the kichiku-zeme trope, and voilà, instant James-doesn't-really-hate-Snape?

Dojinshi aren't a reflection of the real world in any way, of course, and neither are fics, but I really do get the idea (in this very limited test) that fic writers were interpreting the scene in way that's far more 'realistic' -trying to fit it into the 'real world' of canon and the real-life concept of bullying- while djka felt more comfortable drifting away from the vaguely realistic interpersonal relationships in canon. Stripping someone naked in front of the whole school in real life wouldn't be interpreted as a legitimate way to express romantic interest anywhere. Whatever the reason why, djka do seem inclined to divorce their universe from reality in a far more drastic fashion than fic writers. (But now I'm dabbling in that lovely question of 'how realistic is the canon', so I'll back off and go to bed before my head explodes.)

(By the way, I'm going to be looking at text-only Japanese fanwork as well later, but not as in-depth as dojinshi -more to check whether these fic narratives are significantly different from dj narratives. I might change my mind about that as I learn more about Japanese fics.)

I wish I could help you more, but this is about all I have energy for at the moment. Wishing you the best of luck in your research!

Tired too, I do hope I made some sense here :) Thank you very, very much! (Your journal looks interesting, by the way. May I friend?)

[raisin-gal.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. ::Does the dogeza bow::

You know what, you're way more of an insider of the culture than me then. Probably to the point where your intuition is much sharper than mine (at least definitely about BL, of which I know next to nothing, and maybe even about dojins too). I'm really sorry for the patronizing tone I took with you! I kind of tend to knee-jerk about these things and... Yeah. Not going to make excuses, but I'm very sorry, and want to thank you for your lighthearted response.

Re: the canon scene thing, I've been thinking, and one thing that's more relevant might be the medium. With manga, fannish originality is harder to maintain, because in fic a quote is a quote and that's obvious, but with manga-style dojin work that's not based in a visual-medium canon(*), it's hard to try not to duplicate other people's idea, composition, frame angle, etc., of a popular scene by accident. ((*) Movie-based dojins seem a slightly different matter, and there we do get people depicting the same prominent scene over and over -- e.g. I've seen lots of PoA-related Snarry dojins that depict the map confiscation scene in the corridor, either the way it was or, more frequently, in parody form.)

Or so I think. I'm not really sure as I don't draw at all... But I do see a lot of artists worrying about their ideas not being original enough to make theirs a unique picture.

Or maybe, another relevant thing is that the dojins you have tend to be less "canonically" (?) kichiku-ish. I can't really tell because I also tend to gravitate away from kichiku-zemes...

Anyway, now I'm really intrigued with your research. Please let me know of your publications when you make them, if that's all right! And sure, friend away (though I'll warn you my LJ usually consists of examining HP canon in an extremely harsh light) and you might like to join fujoshi, too, if you want to meet more fen in Japanese-speaking waters. There's quite a few HP people I think, although I don't know if any of them go for James/Snape.

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

*bows back* No, that's okay. I'm really not an insider when it comes to dojinshi, I've only researched commercial boys' love manga and I've never studied or been actively involved in Japanese fandom. And in the unlikely event that I am more of an insider than you (whatever it is we mean by 'insider'), that really doesn't matter a thing. With most of the people I've talked with online, I have no clue whether they've been studying fandom for three decades or just heard of dojinshi last week, and it doesn't matter, because it certainly doesn't seem to make their observations any less or more valid or interesting. While insiders may be better at making educated guesses, they can lack information, misinterpret it, or just plain screw up. They do so all the bloody time. 'Outsiders' are just as capable of finding holes in arguments as 'insiders', maybe better at spotting promising connections or possibilities from left field, and know if not more, then certainly different things about the topic at hand. And I'm not an insider as far as dojinshi go, though aiming to rectify that, of course.

So thanks again for commenting. When people say they smell stupid, there usually is some actual stupid somewhere, in the content or the presentation or both. I am tackling this too much from the fanfic perspective and not considering yaoi-based possible explanations enough. I've read way more fic than yaoi manga/dojinshi during the last couple of years, and my yaoi intuition -such as it is- obviously isn't as keen as it used to be. The nasty seme thing just didn't jump to mind at all, and it should've. *headdesk* I'm going to re-read all those things about yaoi that I thought I knew by now, and then add some more questions/speculation.

Re: the canon scene thing, I've been thinking, and one thing that's more relevant might be the medium. With manga, fannish originality is harder to maintain, because in fic a quote is a quote and that's obvious, but with manga-style dojin work that's not based in a visual-medium canon(*), it's hard to try not to duplicate other people's idea, composition, frame angle, etc., of a popular scene by accident.

That sounds like a likely explanation. So maybe it's all right to draw a scene that was in the movies pretty much the way it looked on screen, because it's obvious where the 'quote'/inspiration came from, but drawing something that's overly reminiscent of another fan's work isn't nearly as acceptable. It's ever so much easier to spot resemblances between two pictures than two texts. (I don't draw much, but I do have to make a conscious effort to let other pics inspire me but still make my version of the characters different. Wouldn't want to be accused of copying someone else's Snape or Harry. It never occurred to me before now, but I never had this problem of actively having to avoid copying back when I still wrote fic.) A shame the underpants scene was so different in the movie, that rather complicates judging fans' interpretation of it. English-language fanwork seems to be uniformly ignoring the movie as far as that scene is concerned, but maybe that's different with djs. I'm going to look for djs that do reference it.

I've been wondering how to distinguish between movieverse and bookverse fanwork. It seems like a very significant distinction to make, particularly for dojinshi, but I'm not sure if it would be practically doable. Unless the djka actually says somewhere that it's bookverse or movieverse (some do and some don't, it seems), I doubt I'd ever be one hundred percent sure one way or another. Oh well. Trying to figure it out won't hurt.

Or maybe, another relevant thing is that the dojins you have tend to be less "canonically" (?) kichiku-ish.

Sorry, could you maybe phrase that differently? I'm not sure I follow :)

Also, very sorry for the late reply. Innate slowness and evil translation deadlines. I'm definitely joining fujoshi, though I'll lurk for a while first. It's tempting to jump in now, but I'm going to do that yaoi refresher course first.

[raisin-gal.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And sorry, by that line I just meant, if your collection happens to consist mainly of non-kichiku!James stories, it's understandable why that kichiku-ish scene wouldn't be depicted in them. True, in English-speaking fanfic waters the challenge tends to lie exactly in explaining those pivotal canon scenes away... but then, not necessarily so, when you think of certain circles of ficcers. (There are specific shippers, for instance, who prefer to ignore certain canon pairings rather than explain them away every time they start a new story.)

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. I choose those four djs out of a pool of approximately twenty JP/SS djs I had at my disposal, and which I'd pulled off a shelf in a dj store completely at random (this was before I'd even thought of making them into a research project) without looking at the contents first. One of the four has kichiku!James, and I wondered whether or not to include that one because the very large majority of stories in those twenty -more than three fourths- had him being really lovey-dovey. Twenty is no statistically relevant sample by any definition, but I've got a shipment of a couple of hundred Snape djs coming in (yay). I'll definitely let you know what sort of James pops up the most.

Maybe it's just the very popular ships in which canon pairings are often just ignored instead of explained away? If a story is advertised as Snarry, we all know that 95% of the time, the story is going to end with Snape and Harry either shagging or more or less happily in love, and Ginny out of the picture. Nobody is going to blame the author if she decides to skip the removing-Ginny part. Everyone and their mum has already written a story explaining the myriad ways in which Ginny might be moved aside to make room for Snarry. But if we read a story in which, say, Lily leaves James for Sirius, we want some sort of justification with that because Lily-leaving-James isn't a concept we're very familiar with. And 'familiar with' equals 'more accepting of', I think, in the case of shipping. (I haven't read many Lily-and-Sirius stories, at least not stories that involved a longtime relationship rather than a one-off. Sorry if they're out there, I missed them, and this is a bad example. There was some Lily-leaving-James-for-Snape revisionism after DH, though, I suspect because canon had given us a very obvious rival for James and a lot of people like Snape ever so much more than James anyway.)