Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze (East Asian Popular Culture) 3030180948, 9783030180942

Table of contents :
Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Interrogating the Text from the Wrong Perspective
My Life in Shōjo Manga
A Brief Overview of Shōjo Manga History
From Sailor Moon to Steven Universe
References
Chapter 2: Short Skirts, Superpowers, and the Evolution of the Beautiful Fighting Girl
Consuming Bishōjo, Consuming Narrative
Fighting for Love and Justice: The Female Fans of Sailor Moon
It Can’t End Like This: Breaking the Bishōjo Mold in Magic Knight Rayearth
References
Chapter 3: The Maiden and the Witch: CLAMP’s Subversion of Female Character Tropes
Pure Hearts and Sparkling Eyes: The Rise of the Shōjo
Taking Back the Shōjo: Innocence and Experience in Tsubasa and xxxHolic
Postfeminism and Posthumanity in Chobits
References
Chapter 4: Queering the Media Mix: The Female Gaze in Japanese Fancomics
Shōjo Manga and the Female Gaze
The Uke/Seme Dynamic
Performing Textual Masculinity, Inscribing Textual Femininity
Fujoshi and the Power of Female Fans
References
Chapter 5: Beautiful War Games: Transfiguring Genders in Video Game Fancomics
Big Swords and Sexy Boss Battles: Homosocial Rivalries in Final Fantasy VII
Transcultural Fandom and Video Game Character Designs
“Linkle Is Not Enough”
References
Chapter 6: Link Is Not Silent: Queer Disability Positivity in Fan Readings of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Ability, Disability, and Gaming
Queering the Link to the Player
Links Between Subcultural Narratives
A Link to a Wider World
References
Chapter 7: The Cultural Cross-Pollination of Shōjo Manga
Forging a Female Audience: The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Tokyopop
The Potential of Female Homotextuality
References
Index

Citation preview

EAST ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE

Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze Kathryn Hemmann

East Asian Popular Culture Series Editors Yasue Kuwahara Department of Communication Northern Kentucky University Highland Heights, KY, USA John A. Lent International Journal of Comic Art Drexel Hill, PA, USA

This series focuses on the study of popular culture in East Asia (referring to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) in order to meet a growing interest in the subject among students as well as scholars of various disciplines. The series examines cultural production in East Asian countries, both individually and collectively, as its popularity extends beyond the region. It continues the scholarly discourse on the recent prominence of East Asian popular culture as well as the give and take between Eastern and Western cultures. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14958

Kathryn Hemmann

Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze

Kathryn Hemmann East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA

East Asian Popular Culture ISBN 978-3-030-18094-2    ISBN 978-3-030-18095-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Naomi Skye, Lightsintheskye LLC. Used with permission of artist. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my gratitude to the editors at Palgrave who have shepherded this book to completion. Shaun Vigil was enthusiastic from the beginning, and Camille Davies and Liam McLean have helped guide me through this project. I am also grateful to Cynthia Col for her assistance in copyediting and index preparation. Preparatory research was made possible by the generous assistance of the Japan Foundation, the Cecilia Segawa Seigle Prize Fellowship, and a faculty research grant from the George Mason University Center for Global Studies. It has been a pleasure and an honor to with all of these organizations. This project is an outgrowth of my doctoral dissertation, and I owe an enormous debt to my three advisors, Ayako Kano, Linda Chance, and Susan Napier. I’m truly fortunate to have been able to work with such a superstar team of academic heroes who have encouraged and inspired me. I’m also grateful to Julia Bullock, Cheryl Crowley, and Rebecca Copeland, who introduced me to the joy of scholarship as an undergraduate and have continued to serve as professional role models throughout my career. I want to extend my thanks to my colleagues who have supported me intellectually and emotionally, especially Rachael Hutchinson, Sharalyn Orbaugh, C.J. Suzuki, Alisa Freedman, Doug Slaymaker, James Welker, Jon Abel, Marc Steinberg, Lori Morimoto, and Florence Chee. I also want to thank Marianne Tarcov, Colleen Laird, Lindsay Nelson-Santos, Kate Paige-Lippsmeyer, Tiffany Hong, Andrew Campana, Nele Noppe, and Laura Nuffer for their friendship and encouragement, not to mention the many wonderful conversations we shared as we all embarked on our research projects together. v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I worked on this project, I was fortunate to find an international community of brilliant comic writers and artists. Our social media handles may shift and change, but these creators will always be my friends. I especially want to thank the marvelous Naomi Skye, who created the cover of this book. I would like to express my love and appreciation for my mother, my brother, and my dear friend Amanda Harris, three lawyers who are firmly committed to social justice. Each of them has been consistently supportive for more years than I can count. I would also like to thank my family in Israel, an amazing group of readers and writers who have been nothing but welcoming and kind. This book would not be possible without the support of Ori Tavor, my partner and collaborator. In addition to being the first reader of many of these chapters, Ori has also assisted with editing, indexing, and a myriad of other tasks necessary to help keep this project moving forward. Every day has been an adventure, and the journey has been fantastic.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Interrogating the Text from the Wrong Perspective  1 2 Short  Skirts, Superpowers, and the Evolution of the Beautiful Fighting Girl 17 3 The  Maiden and the Witch: CLAMP’s Subversion of Female Character Tropes 47 4 Queering  the Media Mix: The Female Gaze in Japanese Fancomics 77 5 Beautiful  War Games: Transfiguring Genders in Video Game Fancomics103 6 Link  Is Not Silent: Queer Disability Positivity in Fan Readings of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild125 7 The Cultural Cross-Pollination of Shōjo Manga147 Index171

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3

Princess Emeraude (Magic Knight Rayearth Vol. 1, pp. 6–7) 34 Queen Beryl (Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Vol. 1, p. 79) 36 Princess Emeraude (Magic Knight Rayearth Vol. 3, pp. 164–165) 38 Yūko and Watanuki (xxxHolic Vol. 1, pp. 10–11) 56 Chii (Chobits Vol. 5, p. 77) 68 Front cover of Kuchinashi kaoru sono ude ni86 Watanuki and Dōmeki (Kemuri, p. 4) 91 Front cover of Sweet CS Recipes108 Linkle (Famitsū, November 2015, p. 38) 112 Prince Sidon (Ohoshisama to ōjisama, p. 9) 134 Link (Tumblr post by @SketchWakusei, March 21, 2018) 136 Link and Navi (Tumblr post by @MJoyArt, January 26, 2019) 138 Front cover of Bizenghast Vol. 8 152 Screencap from Steven Universe, “House Guest” (Season 1, Episode 27) 155 Bee’s magical girl transformation (Bee and PuppyCat Issue 6) 157

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Interrogating the Text from the Wrong Perspective

There is a famous bit of fandom lore involving the American writer Anne Rice, who is best known for her 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. In September 2004, Rice’s novel Blood Canticle, the newest book in her Vampire Chronicles series, received a number of extremely critical reader reviews on Amazon. Rice responded to these reviews by using her own account on Amazon to post a long, unpunctuated tirade making unkind claims concerning her readers, whom she accused of making “stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing.”1 One of her comments, “You are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective,” continues to be satirically bandied about on online message boards. An important reason why Rice’s accusations of “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective” struck a dissonant chord within online fan communities is because it amplified strong statements the author had already made concerning fanfiction. For example, in April 2000, Rice had posted the following admonition on her website: I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.2

Rice subsequently took measures to ensure that all fanfiction based on her published work was removed from hosting sites such as FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own. Other American fantasy writers, most notably © The Author(s) 2020 K. Hemmann, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_1

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George R.R. Martin and Diana Gabaldon, followed suit in taking action against the means by which readers shared interpretations of texts that the writers themselves did not consider appropriate. Readers of fantasy literature, who have formed global networks both deep and wide on online message boards and blogging sites such as LiveJournal and Tumblr, considered this attitude of heuristic dogmatism to be hubris of the highest order. Who is a writer, after all, to tell readers how their work must be interpreted? Indeed, what can publishers do, and what can critics do, and what can academics do to force readers into a certain canonical interpretation of a text? The satirical use of the phrase “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective” is therefore used counter attempts to argue for a correct interpretation of a text based on stated authorial intent or simply what is on the page. The expression has thus come to playfully represent a practice that feminist literary critic Judith Fetterley calls “resistant reading,” or interpreting a text in ways that the text itself does not immediately suggest or for which the text does not provide overt evidence.3 Resistant reading, or interpreting the text from the “wrong” perspective, has implications for a gendered reading of texts that extend far beyond any sort of Barthian death of the author. Specifically, looking at texts from a different perspective is a way for female-identified readers to claim agency over stories and discourses that have traditionally excluded them. This book is about what prominent feminist literary critics such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Rita Felski have called “the female voice” or “feminist poetics.”4 I have chosen to call the viewpoint of female writers, artists, and readers “the female gaze” instead of “the female voice” following Laura Mulvey’s definition of the “male gaze” as set forth in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey writes: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female form which is styled accordingly.5

This definition may be inverted in order to understand what it would mean to view the world from a female perspective: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/female and passive/male. The determining female gaze projects its phantasy on to the male form which is styled accordingly.

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I will address the erotic implications of the female gaze in my chapters on fancomics, but at the outset I want to focus on what it means to understand the female as subject. By granting narrative privilege to female characters and thus allowing them to become the heroines of their own stories, writers, artists, and readers recast their roles so that they no longer serve as passive victims or the mere objects of legal and political discourses. Female characters exercising narrative privilege, as well as the writers who write them, the artists who draw them, and the readers who read them, can also turn a female gaze onto male-dominated narratives, thus reconfiguring stories at a contextual and metatextual level.

My Life in Shō jo Manga The seeds of this project were planted in 2008 during the fall of my third year of graduate school, when I was 25 years old and still obsessed with shōjo manga. “I study Japanese comics, but I’m not an anime nerd or anything,” I would laugh nervously when I spoke with other graduate students I met at workshops and conferences. My apartment, where manga overflowed from my cheap bookshelves and spilled into piles on the floor, was my secret shame. I read every manga I could get my hands on, from the charming adventures of lost kittens to surreal sexual psychodramas. What gave me the greatest pleasure, however, were stories of regular girls attending high school and college and finding love and friendship against a backdrop of cute clothes, fast food, and lavishly accessorized cellphones. The year 2008 was a good year to be in love with shō jo manga, as dozens of volumes were released in translation from multiple American publishers every month. Specialty bookstores, such as the branches of Kinokuniya and Book-Off in Manhattan, had fully stocked sections of shō jo manga imported from Japan. Meanwhile, young amateur artists were forming communities online under the auspices of art-focused social media websites like DeviantArt and Pixiv, where they shared their fan art and original character designs inspired by shō jo manga. As much as I was fascinated by shō jo manga, however, the academic discipline of Japanese Studies did not seem to share my enthusiasm. My goal as a PhD student was to one day find a sustainably funded position at a university, and I received multiple assurances that no reputable department would hire someone who is specialized in comics—especially not girls’ comics, which cycled from one trend to another alongside seasonal fashions and were thus ephemeral and ultimately disposable. Kind people

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with good intentions told me that my time on the job market would be much easier if I were to write my dissertation about literary fiction, a topic that would be taken seriously by the members of search committees. I had originally come to graduate school to study the work of contemporary Japanese female writers, so I simply continued along that course. The main focus of academic work on these writers seemed to be women’s suffering, a theme I found unpleasant and, quite frankly, boring. As a young woman myself, I knew all about sexism and misogynistic social pressures, and I was sick of it. I didn’t want to read about women suffering beautifully, or women suffering nobly, or women suffering peevishly, or women suffering in abject horror—I wanted to read about female pleasure and empowerment, and I wanted to read about it from a female perspective. Unfortunately, given the challenges presented by my still-developing Japanese proficiency and the limited range of women’s fiction available in translation at the time, this was easier said than done. My great revelation came when I first read Philip Gabriel’s fantastic translation of Kirino Natsuo’s 2003 novel Real World (Riaru Wārudo), a strange and dark little book narrated by four profoundly disturbed and unlikeable high-school girls, each of whom is characterized by her own set of neuroses. By the end of the novel, this group of friends is shattered by tragedy, but I was thoroughly impressed by incredible adventure of self-­ destruction these girls embarked on over the course of the story. Each of the characters is ferociously articulate about how she hates adults, school, and society in general. After reading so many academic essays (largely written by male scholars) about how schoolgirls served as “empty symbols” open to the attribution of abstract concepts such as innocence and freedom, it was wonderful to see my own complicated experience as a teenage girl captured in a novel written by another woman. As opposed to the male fantasy of innocent girlhood, this was indeed the “real world.” The fact that Kirino is Japanese and significantly older than me was irrelevant— my recognition of myself and my own circle of friends in her writing was instant and profound. As I researched Kirino, I found that, despite the darkness of her fiction, her interviews and essays are characterized by sparkling wit and cutting humor. Kirino has claimed that she does not identify as a feminist, a term that was admittedly a loaded term in Japan (as it still continues to be around the world). In spite of her disavowal of feminism, it was still meaningful to me that her novels and stories never hesitate to demonstrate the full depth of the violence and misery experienced by women while critiquing and openly mocking misogynistic attitudes.

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I continued my work on Kirino for my dissertation, but I could not help but be bothered by the suffering of her characters. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to write about something positive and uplifting for a change? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to write about stories in which female characters do not have to suffer? Wouldn’t it actually be kind of cool to write about shō jo manga? I was born at the tail end of 1983, which puts me squarely in the generation that came of age in tandem with the rising popularity of anime and manga in the United States. When I was a kid, the cable television station Cartoon Network broadcast older anime like Speed Racer (Mahha Gō Gō Gō ) and Battle of the Planets (Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman). By the time I was in middle school, more recent anime like Dragon Ball Z (Doragon Bō ru Zetto) and Sailor Moon (Bishō jo Senshi Sērā Mūn) had started to appear on regular network television. When I was in high school, the Pokémon boom was in full force, and large national “box store” retailers like Media Play and Best Buy had dedicated sections devoted to anime that offered hundreds of titles in VHS and DVD formats. A VHS tape with two episodes of anime could run upward of $30, however, and DVDs were even more expensive. This made anime largely inaccessible to most people my age before online file-sharing services became more commonplace and easier to use. What I could afford were manga, which were often sold alongside anime. Even better than the standard paperback prices of these graphic novels was the fact that many of them catered perfectly to my interests. I found the American superhero comics of the 1990s to be ridiculous and impossible to relate to, and I felt the same way about many of the action-oriented shō nen anime targeted at a male demographic. When I picked up my first volume of shō jo manga, it was like a ray of light had broken through dark clouds. No longer did I have to settle for overgrown boys punching each other! There were artists out there who told stories about girls—and not just girls who suffered from the sidelines as they supported the boys, but girls who spoke and fought for themselves. I had finally found a genre in which young women could be the heroes of their own stories, and in which they looked fabulous doing it. The first shō jo series I fell in love with was Sailor Moon. I had watched several episodes of the anime on broadcast television, and I was delighted to find that there was a comic version available in English. I had never seen anything like the flowing and delicate art style used by Takeuchi Naoko, the creator of Sailor Moon, and it did not take me long to begin tracing

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images of the characters in the spiral-bound notebooks I used for school. When I ventured onto the message boards and image galleries (mainly on the now-defunct web hosting service Geocities) scatted across the fledgling internet, I came to realize that I was not alone in my fascination with the Sailor Moon universe. There were other young women all around the world sharing their love of magical girls. Moreover, the communities they formed betrayed none of the exclusionary attitude dominating other online fandoms, such as those for superhero comics and epic fantasy series like The Lord of the Rings. A great deal of early Sailor Moon fanwork was childish and immature, but that was okay—a lot of us were young, and no one cared. Although the unrelenting academic and social pressures of high school forced me offline for a few years, in college I rediscovered the joy of online communities, where many Sailor Moon fans, now older, explicitly associated the franchise with feminist ideologies and queer rights activism. Furthermore, they were motivated by Sailor Moon to launch their own creative projects, which they posted online as webcomics while they pitched their stories to professional publishers of graphic novels. By this point in my life I had begun to read scholarship on anime and manga, and I was frustrated by the male-centered perspective on shō jo manga and its animated adaptations. Of course, there are people in the world who derive sexual pleasure from images of young women; that goes without saying. It also makes perfect sense that straight cisgender men might attempt to escape the overwhelming expectations of masculinity fostered by late-stage capitalism by seeking a refuge in fantasies involving the presumed carefree innocence of high-school girls. Even as an undergraduate I could understand the appeal of such fantasies, especially toward the end of the month right before rent was due. What I desperately wanted to see, however, were serious scholars talking about people like me— young women who were not sex objects or empty symbols or vanguards of consumer culture or escapist fantasies. I wanted recognition for the experience of real people like me who watched Sailor Moon and saw our own hopes and dreams represented as our fears and frustrations were vanquished in explosions of flowers and sparkles. While writing my senior thesis, I encountered a short essay by Shelagh Young titled “Feminism and the Politics of Power: Whose Gaze Is It Anyway?” in an edited volume called The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. This book, which was published in 1989, was already more than 15 years old, but Young’s response to feminist debates surrounding the music video for the American singer Madonna’s single

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“Material Girl” felt as if it could have been posted on someone’s blog just that morning. Young argues that the insistence on the ideological purity of feminist politics has the unfortunate effect of alienating women who want to enjoy popular culture even as they remain critical of its messages. The idea that there is nothing wrong with enjoying something while you analyze it—problematic aspects and all—struck me with a powerful blow. This was the exact tool I needed to begin dismantling the misogyny implicit in many critical studies of shō jo manga. After all, there are many different ways of looking at popular culture, and stories can be interpreted in radically different ways depending on one’s perspective. Specifically, the notion of a “female gaze” gives agency to female creators and readers instead of relegating them to the position of helpless victims of a patriarchal culture that only serves the needs of straight men. In many stories starring magical girls as their heroines, there is a transformation (henshin) sequence in which a mundane human becomes endowed with special powers and a highly focused sense of purpose. This book, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, is the magical transformation of my doctoral dissertation, and it was inspired by a similar magical transformation in transnational pop culture mediascapes. During the 2010s, shō jo manga became mainstream in the United States and began to influence a generation of female creators who drew directly from its narrative and visual tropes to create their own original stories even as supernatural-­ themed young adult romance targeted at female readers catered to the same demographic that frequented the manga sections of major bookstore chains. Speaking from personal experience, I was able witnessed an incredible sea change between 2008, when fan conventions were dominated by adult men, and 2018, when the winners of major industry awards in comics and animation are young women. How did we get from Sailor Moon as an underground phenomenon in 1998 to Steven Universe as a major driver of cultural change in 2018? This is an ambitious question that must be approached from multiple fields of disciplinary research in order to be fully understood, and in this book I will offer my own contribution to explaining this cultural shift through textual analysis. I will not simply read major licensed popular media texts, however; I will also focus on the creative production of fans, both fans who have become professional artists and fans who choose to remain amateurs. Through my analysis of both traditionally published work and subculturally oriented fanwork, I argue that female-driven fandom cultures have created a feedback loop that has driven cultural production and, with it, the culture of mainstream mediascapes.

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A Brief Overview of Shō jo Manga History

Shō jo manga, or manga for the “shō jo” demographic of preteen girls and young women, stands at the center of a thriving comics publishing industry in both Japan and the United States. In contemporary Japan, there are four major demographic publishing categories. The first is shō nen, or manga for elementary- and middle-school-age boys. Shō nen is the most popular genre both in Japan and abroad, and it includes internationally recognized titles such as Naruto, One Piece, and My Hero Academia. Manga for young men in high school and college, as well as older men, is called seinen manga, and it includes everything from the ultraviolent science fiction of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Attack on Titan to moé stories about cute girls, such as Yotsuba&! and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Manga for women, or josei manga, is stereotyped as featuring primarily love stories that feature both heterosexual couples, as in Natsuyuki Rendezvous and Bunny Drop, and homosexual couples, as in Maria Watches over Us and World’s Greatest First Love. When it comes to popularity and profitability, however, a close second to the genre of shō nen is shō jo, the various subgenres of which are targeted at girls from ages 8 to 18. Notable shō jo series include Vampire Knight, Ouran High School Host Club, Fruits Basket, and, of course, Sailor Moon. Earlier shō jo series from the 1990s, such as Magic Knight Rayearth and Revolutionary Girl Utena, helped to shape the imaginations of a generation of girls in North America, and their influence can be easily detected in American animated television series like The Legend of Korra and Steven Universe. The iconic shō jo manga of the 1970s introduced many fascinating stories of gender bending and gender fluidity, epic historical sages and political romances, and protagonists defying social expectations to forge their own unique identities while following their dreams. Many historians identify the prolific and influential artist Tezuka Osamu as the creator of shō jo manga. Tezuka Osamu is primarily known as the creator of the Astro Boy franchise, but he’s authored dozens of other works, from the coming of age parable Kimba the White Lion to the epic space opera Phoenix to the historical drama Buddha. In the United States, due to a coincidental convergence of interests, comic book fandom in the 1970s was primarily male, so the people who began to import and write about manga during this decade, such as Fred Patten and Frederick

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Schodt, were male. These men tended to be interested in stories written for men, which were written primarily by men. Since Tezuka was quite sociable and also understandably invested in the overseas expansion of his manga empire, he made friends with the early manga and anime fans in America, and his work became relatively well known in the States. This is one of the reasons why, when many Anglophone scholars talk about “the first shō jo manga,” they always mention Tezuka’s Princess Knight. There is more to the story of early shō jo manga, however. The first emergence of a shō jo subculture (shō jo bunka) was at the turn of the twentieth century, when the modern Japanese publishing industry had really started to take off. At this time, printing magazines were targeted at a literate public and distributed on a national scale. To diversify their market while educating young readers in the practice of mass media consumption, publishers put out weekly and monthly periodicals aimed at young men and young women, who were typically educated separately and tended to identify with their own distinct youth cultures. Girls of ages five and up had all manner of magazines to buy and read, and these magazines encouraged them to send in their stories, letters, and drawings. The shō jo style of illustration, which emphasized huge eyes, delicate features, and flowery backgrounds, was used for cover images and color insert pages in periodicals such as Shō jo gahō (Girls’ Journal) and Shō jo no tomo (Girls’ Friend). Prominent artists included Fukiya Kō ji and Nakahara Jun’ichi, both of whom were strongly influenced by Parisian fashion illustration. Even in the postwar period, paper was cheap, and the postwar generation of children became a large consumer demographic. By the 1950s, magazines for children had started to feature illustrated comics, which proved so popular that some magazines began to specialize in manga. Two of the most popular of the many magazines targeted at girls in the 1950s were Shō jo and Nakayoshi, and one of the star artists of these two magazines was Takahashi Makoto. In North America and France, Takahashi is known primarily as an illustrator, and his artwork serves as an icon for international Lolita fashion communities. In Japan, however, he is famously one of the leading shō jo manga artists of the 1950s and 1960s, having pioneered the fluid panel layout and visual devices still associated with shō jo manga today, including full-body portraits of characters overlaying panels. Takahashi’s work as a character-centric illustrator was conveniently merchandisable in the form of tear-out postcards and sheets of stickers. Girls and young women (and many older women) were enticed

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to buy magazines sold along with Takahashi’s fashionable stickers and stationery, but they stayed for his melodrama, which often played out on European stages, with girls pursuing their interests in exotic pastimes such as ballet and tennis. By the late 1960s, however, the women who had read the manga of Takahashi Makoto and Tezuka Osamu as girls had grown up and were ready to start creating manga of their own. Some of the most famous and influential of these artists are collectively known as the Year 24 Group, meaning “born in 1949” (or the 24th year of the reign of the Shō wa Emperor). One of the best and brightest of this group is Hagio Moto. Hagio’s work deals with themes of gender identity, political upheaval, and class issues, themes that she often refracted through the lens of androgynous young men in love with each other. She self-published her own comics in high school, and she began publishing one-shot manga stories in 1969. Hagio’s first major success, however, was a historical epic titled Pō no ichizoku (The Poe Clan), which is about a family of beautiful vampires named after Edgar Allan Poe. Hagio also published science fiction manga throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Titles such as Half-God (Hanshin) and Marginal are more philosophically feminist, presenting the reader with speculative answers to questions such as “What would an all-female society look like?” and “How can our species overcome the challenge of having women bear the burden of childbirth?” Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas (Tō ma no shinzō ), which ran in a magazine called Shō jo Comic from 1974 to 1975, has been widely cited as one of the classics of shō jo manga. The Heart of Thomas is set in an all-male boarding school somewhere in Germany in the early twentieth century. An underclassman named Thomas has committed suicide at the same time a note was delivered to Juli, a popular upperclassman. Thomas had confessed his love in this note, and Juli is torn over what responsibility he may or may not have for Thomas’s death. Shortly thereafter, a student who looks exactly like Thomas transfers into the school and immediately takes a liking to Juli. Juli had loved Thomas but had been sexually abused by an upperclassman; now that Thomas has died, Juli cannot bring himself to accept the younger student’s feelings. As the story expands, what initially seems to be a melodramatic tale of forbidden love reveals itself to be rooted in a deep conflict over economic status. Juli was born out of wedlock and cannot inherit his family’s wealth, while Eric’s widowed mother has remarried for reasons that are primarily financial. The boys gradually begin to reject their gender fluidity and each other’s tenderness, taking on

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more stereotypically masculine roles as a means of confronting the harshness of a world that does not care about them. The implicit allegory for the young women reading this story in the 1970s suggested that traditional gender roles may protect young people when nothing else will and that the process of learning to play these roles is a tragedy in which one’s true identity must be sacrificed. Like much of Hagio’s shō jo manga, The Heart of Thomas reflects the heady cultural atmosphere she worked in at a time when many female artists were challenging the gender binary in progressive and socially informed manga. Hagio’s contemporary Takemiya Keiko is famous as a pioneering artist in the genre of shō nen ai (now generally referred to as BL, or “boys’ love”). She is also known for her sensitive and nuanced portrayals of androgynous characters and fluid sexualities. Takemiya’s dark and explicitly homoerotic manga Kaze to ki no uta (The Song of Wind and Trees) became a major cultural force as it was published in Shō jo Comic magazine from 1976 to 1984. The art historian and manga scholar Masami Toku has identified Wind and Trees as a turning point in shō jo manga, after which the genre began to address issues of gender and sexuality more openly.6 Takemiya expanded her challenges to normative sexuality into broader themes concerning personal identity in To Terra (Terra e), which ran in Monthly Manga Shō nen magazine from 1977 to 1980.7 The hero of To Terra is a willowy young man with large sparkling eyes named Jomy, who seems to be living with a perfect family in a perfect city on a perfect planet. When routine psychological testing reveals him to be abnormal, he is forced to flee from the computer that controls his society and is rescued by a group of space-faring psychics. Jomy leads his band of fellow mutants into the free and open expanse of the galaxy, all the while calling out to other young psychics, telling them to resist the society that calls them monsters and forces them to deny the deepest core of their identity. As is the case with the characters in the X-Men comics and movies, it is not difficult to read the trope of “mutation” as an analogy to any number of traits that do not conform to dominant ideologies. Although Jomy’s source of “otherness” is his psychic ability, his androgyny and intense romantic rivalry with his male foil place him outside the boundaries of heteronormative gender and sexuality. To Terra struck a chord with the zeitgeist of the late 1970s, and it won the Seiun Award for Science Fiction, which had previously only been awarded to prose. While continuing to publish her own stories, Keiko Takemiya has supported and encouraged emerging artists, helping to develop several means

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by which their work may be displayed as fine art in formal gallery shows. Between 2008 and 2013, she was the Dean of the Faculty of Manga at Kyoto Seika University, which oversees the Kyoto International Manga Museum. Because of her influence, shō jo manga has just as prominent a place in the facility as shō nen manga, and the permanent and special exhibitions celebrate artists of all genders and sexualities, as well as artists from around the world, including countries in Europe, South Asia, and Latin America. Shō jo manga has had an especially strong cultural impact on recent generations of fans in the United States and Canada, and fan discussions and fannish artistic production have nourished diverse interests in Japanese cultural products, which are beginning to exert a stronger influence on mainstream geek media. One of the most interesting incarnations of this trend is Cartoon Network’s animated television series Adventure Time, whose producers have actively scouted young talent from places like comic conventions and fannish art sharing websites such as DeviantArt and Tumblr. A number of these artists are women from the generation that grew up reading and watching shō jo series such as Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena, and easily identifiable visual references to these titles occasionally pop up in the show. Rebecca Sugar, a former storyboard artist for Adventure Time, ended up being given a green light by Cartoon Network to create a magical boy show, Steven Universe, a production that features all manner of references to anime, manga, and video game culture. Natasha Allegri, another storyboard writer and character designer for Adventure Time, launched a Kickstarter project backed by Adventure Time’s Studio Frederator for a magical girl animated series called Bee and PuppyCat, which received an overwhelming amount of support from both Adventure Time fans and the enormous shō jo anime and manga fanbase on Tumblr. Seeing better representation of diverse female characters in shō jo manga has encouraged more young women outside of Japan to seek careers in comics and animation. In the future, we may see an even stronger embrace of shō jorelated narrative influences, art styles, and fandom cultures as the members of the Adventure Time and Steven Universe generation start publishing and promoting their own work. It’s an exciting time to be a fan of shō jo manga, which continues to be as vibrant, appealing, and supportive of a diversity of female identities as it was in the 1970s.

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From Sailor Moon to Steven Universe In order to tell the story of how the work of female manga artists and their audiences came to shape transnational mediascapes, I will begin in the 1990s in Japan by discussing Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon (1991–1997, Bishō jo senshi Sērā Mūn), a breakout hit that helped shō jo manga gain traction in the United States. I will contrast the writing of Japanese theorists on narrative production and consumption in popular media before demonstrating how popular female artists such as Takeuchi Naoko and CLAMP encourage their readers to view their stories with a female gaze. I then turn the discussion to Japanese fanworks and explore the ecosystems of creative production within transnational fandom cultures. After this, I chart the trends in how female-oriented Japanese titles and patterns of female-centric Japanese fandoms have influenced both mainstream and grassroots media cultures in North America. I conclude with a projection of how transnational online communities of female and queer fans have shaped and will continue to transform mainstream media on a global level. In Chap. 2, I demonstrate how the application of a female gaze in Japanese graphic novels serves as an alternative to phallocentric theories of narrative consumption and male-dominated discourses concerning women and gender roles in contemporary Japan. I do this by examining two bestselling “magical girl” manga titles, Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon and CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth. Drawing on fan responses such as blog entries and fan art, I also show how the female gaze can be used as a means of resistant reading that defies the dominant understanding of anime and manga fans as passive and antisocial consumers. Chapter 3 focuses on the work of CLAMP, a prolific four-woman team of writers and artists, and examines three of their most popular titles, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, xxxHolic, and Chobits. Each of these three manga belong to the genres of shō nen (for boys) or seinen (for men), demographic publishing categories designed to target a male-gendered audience. I argue that CLAMP employs a female gaze to subvert gendered character tropes and thus provides a viable means of female empowerment while queering the gendered nature of manga genres. This chapter thereby offers an alternative reading of common narrative patterns within contemporary Japanese popular culture by demonstrating the agency of female creators and female readers.

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Although multimedia “media mix” franchises are commonly understood as being controlled by large corporations, the fans of these media properties make significant contributions to the mix, often expanding on the central themes of the source texts and queering them by rendering their subtexts explicit. Chapter 4 focuses on amateur dō jinshi fancomics belonging to a genre commonly referred to as “BL” (“boys’ love”), which is notable for its focus on a romantic and often physical relationship between two male characters. The female gaze implicit in BL has created its own homoerotic interpretations of the relationships between male characters in a way that creatively subverts the male gaze implicit in many popular mainstream narratives intended for a male audience. Chapter 5 offers a close reading of a set of dō jinshi based on Square Enix’s perennially popular roleplaying game Final Fantasy VII, highlighting several common themes and tropes in BL dō jinshi parodies to argue that the female gaze queers not just male characters but masculinist ideologies as well. By analyzing how canonical characterizations and scenarios can yield different meanings than those suggested by the original work when viewed with a female gaze, I demonstrate how Japanese dō jinshi artists are able to queer the source texts using the tropes and conventions of BL manga. I then discuss dō jinshi-style fancomics based on Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda game series, demonstrating how sexist depictions of femininity within video game narratives are routinely disrupted and transformed by young female fans who are fully capable of applying a diverse set of hermeneutic lenses. Chapter 6 uses The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) and the transnational online communities surrounding it as a case study in order to explore the intersections between configurations of queerness and disability as ontological markers of difference in subcultural narratives surrounding video games. Fan artists and writers have created numerous stories of the game’s protagonist, Link, negotiating trauma and disability through his queer relationships and friendships with various characters who offer understanding and support, and broader multinational fan networks have embraced the perception of Link as neurodiverse and differently abled in Breath of the Wild by using fanworks to imagine positive yet nuanced representations of a society in which difference is enthusiastically accepted. Through an analysis of the visual and narrative strategies employed in a selection of fancomics from Japan, France, and the United States, I argue that multilingual fannish conversations on social media are capable of constructing and normalizing progressive frameworks for how difference is portrayed and accommodated within global gaming cultures.

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Chapter 7 argues that shō jo manga (and the animated adaptations of these manga) have had a strong cultural impact on successive generations of pop culture fans in North America. During the past 15 years, fan production has nourished diverse interests in Japanese cultural products, which are in turn beginning to exert a stronger influence on mainstream geek media. Using American artist M. Alice LeGrow’s graphic novel series Bizenghast and Cartoon Network’s animated series Adventure Time and Steven Universe as case studies, I demonstrate how it is not only the visual styles and narrative tropes of shō jo manga that have increasingly begun to influence American media, but the consumption patterns of transnational manga fandom communities as well. I conclude by stating that the greater visibility of fan cultures has coincided with a rise in a greater marketability of diverse stories that would formerly have only found expression through alternative methods of distribution outside of mass media outlets. Transnational communities of manga fans have managed to exert a strong influence on popular narrative media around the world, and the contemporary global mediascape is now more vibrant and accessible to a greater diversity of young creators than it has ever been.

Notes 1. Sarah Lyall, “Fan power takes on a new meaning.” (New York Times, October 14, 2004), https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/arts/fanpower-takes-on-new-meaning.html 2. See http://annerice.com/ReaderInteraction-MessagesToFans.html 3. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 4. Sandra M.  Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 5. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen Vol. 16, No. 3 (1975): 9. 6. Masami Toku, Shojo Manga! Girl Power! Girls’ Comics from Japan (Chico, California: Flume Press at California State University, 2005), 66. 7. Because of its publication venue, To Terra is technically classified as shō nen manga. Its two leads are both male, and the story is a space opera with dramatic and exciting action sequences. Nevertheless, the manga has strong shō jo stylizations, both visually and thematically.

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References Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fetterly, Judith. 1978. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lyall, Sarah. 2004. Fan Power Takes on a New Meaning. New York Times, October 14. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/arts/fan-power-takes-on-newmeaning.html Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Toku, Masami. 2005. Shojo Manga! Girl Power! Girls’ Comics from Japan. Chico: Flume Press at California State University.

CHAPTER 2

Short Skirts, Superpowers, and the Evolution of the Beautiful Fighting Girl

On February 9, 2011, the New York Times published an article titled “In Tokyo, a Crackdown on Sexual Images of Minors.”1 Although the “sexual images” in question were drawn from a variety of media, such as adult films and role-playing video games, the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Minors (Tō kyō -to Seishō nen no Kenzen Na Ikusei ni Kansuru Jō rei) passed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly on December 15, 2010, specifically targets manga featuring young female characters in what are deemed to be sexually compromising poses or situations.2 The journalist who wrote the article, Hiroko Tabuchi, quotes Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintarō as saying of the manga in question that “these are for abnormal people, for perverts.” The article sensationalizes the media that Ishihara hopes to censor as child pornography by emphasizing the youth of its models without differentiating between young women who exist in the real world and those who exist solely within the realm of imagination. It is only in the last line of the article that a 17-year-old male manga reader is quoted as saying, “I don’t even think about how old these girls are. It’s a completely imaginary world, separate from real life.” The style of illustration targeted by the Tokyo Youth Ordinance Act is known as bishō jo-kei, or “bishō jo style.” A bishō jo is a female character in a manga, anime, video game, or light novel that belongs to a genre generally regarded as targeted at a male audience, such as science fiction or epic fantasy. Relatively well-known examples of such characters are Nausicaä © The Author(s) 2020 K. Hemmann, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_2

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from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no Tani no Naushika), Nadia from Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (Fushigi no Umi no Nadia), and Ayanami Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin Seiki Evangerion). Bishō jo are rooted firmly in fantasy, whether that fantasy is a post-­ apocalyptic wasteland or a halcyon senior year of high school. These characters need not be connected to an actual narrative, however. They can be depicted in original stand-alone artistic compositions, such as those printed on the postcards and pin-up posters enclosed in monthly manga magazines. These illustrated girls are often characterized as strong and competent but also somewhat naïve and innocent. They are magical beings enmeshed in fantasy worlds, and they often evoke fantasies about childhood and, more specifically, girlhood. Nevertheless, the fundamental idea behind the manga censorship law seemed to be that adult men were looking at young female characters in a way that is both degrading to women and psychologically unhealthy for the men themselves. A pornographic gaze is encouraged and exploited in many aspects of popular and commercial art in Japan and elsewhere. However, one could also posit the existence of a “fantasy gaze” that is less concerned with the image itself than with the story behind the image. Moreover, the sizable percentage of women creating and consuming bishō jo characters and narratives complicates the idea of an all-powerful male gaze. One might argue that the women who enjoy media supposedly targeted at men have internalized the male gaze and that they therefore identify with male characters and viewers when they look at sexualized images of women.3 As a counterargument to this interpretation, I would like to explore the possibilities of a female gaze implicit in women portraying and looking at other women. By creating and appreciating sexualized images of teenage girls, for example, women can embrace and celebrate a sexuality that lies outside of misogynistic stereotypes regarding femininity. For women, then, the appeal of bishō jo is not merely a fascination with the fantasy world they represent but also the self-reflexive enjoyment of being young, beautiful, magical, and sexually aware. The bishō jo can also serve as an empowering role model for readers, especially when this character is used by female artists as a site of contention concerning discourse on female agency and sexuality. In this chapter, I apply the concept of the female gaze to Takeuchi Naoko’s Sailor Moon (Bishō jo Senshi Sērā Mu ̄n) and CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth (Majikku Naito Reiāsu). I argue that both of these manga recontextualize and reinterpret bishō jo character tropes common to illustrated and animated

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narratives of the 1990s, thus disrupting the cycle of narrative consumption and reproduction that drives mainstream media. The female gaze allows readers to see celebrations of empowered femininity in works that would otherwise be dismissed as misogynistic while also serving as a critical tool for female creators such as Takeuchi and CLAMP, who overturn clichés and narrative patterns as a means of telling stories that will appeal to an audience of girls and women and as a means of feminist critique.

Consuming Bishojo ̄ , Consuming Narrative To understand why an acknowledgment of the female gaze in female-­ authored manga and female fandom cultures is so important, it is first necessary to examine the ways in which leading Japanese cultural theorists have understood the narrative patterns and trends in the consumption of entertainment media such as anime, video games, and light novels from the 1980s onward. Awareness of female fans, particularly fans of the homoerotic BL (“boys’ love”) genre, has become more widespread since the mid-2000s. Nevertheless, many scholars and critics have tended to focus exclusively on male fans, whom they refer to as “otaku.”4 Manga and related media such as anime adaptations are typically targeted at a specific demographic based on gender and age. While many bishō jo characters appear in media aimed at adolescent and adult males, shō jo manga as a broad genre focuses on heteronormative romance aimed at elementary school girls and young women in their teens. Despite the reinforcement of such demographic categories by publisher imprints and bookstore layouts, there is a great deal of slippage between genres both in content and in readership. This is especially true with respect to more popular titles and franchises. It is therefore limiting to consider the audience of all media properties with a substantial fanbase, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Sailor Moon, to be a uniform group whose members all share the same gender and sexual orientation. In fact, the female gaze employed by manga artists and readers directly challenges the hegemony of the male otaku fan as a model of narrative production and consumption in contemporary Japan. In 1989, Japanese pop culture ethnographer Ō tsuka Eiji wrote a monograph titled Monogatari Shō hiron: Bikkuriman no Shinwagaku (On Narrative Consumption: The Mythology of Bikkuriman), based on a shorter essay that was translated in 2010 by Marc Steinberg as “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative.” Ō tsuka’s

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essay takes as an illustrative example Bikkuriman Chocolates or, more specifically, the trading cards packaged with the chocolates. It was because of the trading cards that the chocolates were such a phenomenal hit with children around the time that Ō tsuka was writing, even though the superhero character Bikkuriman had no television or manga tie-in products. According to Ō tsuka, the secret to Bikkuriman’s success was that, on the back of each trading card, there was a short paragraph of information about the character depicted on the front. If a child collected enough cards, they would gradually be able to piece together a larger story and gain a broader perspective on the Bikkuriman universe. Out of many small narratives, children were able to create a grand narrative. The point of Ō tsuka’s discussion of Bikkuriman Chocolates is that “child consumers were attracted by this grand narrative, and tried to gain further access to it through the continued purchase of chocolates.”5 In other words, “what is consumed first and foremost, and that which first gives these individual commodities their very value, is the grand narrative or order that they hold in partial form and as their background.”6 Ō tsuka conjectures that, although the children who bought Bikkuriman Chocolates were invested in the collection of physical cards, they were perhaps not as concerned with individual pieces of collectible cardboards as they were with the larger story, mythology, and worldview of the Bikkuriman universe—what Ō tsuka calls the grand narrative. Ō tsuka argues that the consumption of anime functions in much the same way. Each episode of the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam (1979–1980, Kidō senshi Gandamu), for example, is a small narrative. The story of each individual protagonist that plays out across the episodes is a small narrative as well. The diagrams and mechanical data included with the toy models of the robots can also be considered small narratives. As these small narratives are accumulated, however, they begin to form the contours of an entire world. Ō tsuka argues that it is this grand narrative that makes long-running series such as Gundam (and its many sequels, reboots, and auxiliary titles) so popular and marketable. According to Ō tsuka’s model of narrative consumption, small narratives, while pleasing in and of themselves, also function as puzzle pieces that can be put together to form a larger narrative. Ō tsuka argues that, while the general viewing audience will only follow one or two strands of small narratives, what distinguishes male otaku is their interest in the grand narrative. Otaku are characterized by their obsession with gathering bits of information hidden in the background, putting these bits of information

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together, and creating their own small narratives based on their understanding of the grand narrative. Such a model of narrative consumption goes a long way toward explaining fan-made narrative products such as fanfiction and dō jinshi (self-published fan manga), since “if, at the end of the accumulated consumption of small narratives, consumers get their hands on the grand narrative … they will then be able to freely produce their own small narratives with their own hands.”7 Therefore, fans of any given work may become otaku if they become invested in narrative consumption and reproduction at the level of the grand narrative. In Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Azuma Hiroki proposes a different model of narrative consumption. The Japanese title of Azuma’s cultural study, Dō butsuka suru posutomodan: Otaku kara mita Nihon shakai (The animalizing postmodern: Looking at Japanese society through otaku), is revealing. The first word of this title refers to the concept of “animalization” proposed by Alexandre Kojève in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. This animalization involves the degradation of humans, or independent subjects capable of reasoning and compassion, into animals, or mindless consumers who act on instinctual impulses such as hunger and the drive for greater comfort. It is Azuma’s thesis that otaku and, by extension, the society that has spawned them are becoming increasingly animalized. Azuma describes the narrative and cultural consciousness characteristic of otaku through what he calls the “database model of narrative consumption.” This database model stands in direct contrast to the model proposed by Ō tsuka in his 1989 Monogatari shō hiron (On narrative consumption), which in turn deals with concepts relating to grand narratives and their postmodern decline as expressed in Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death. According to Ō tsuka, each small narrative in a particular work functions as a gateway granting access to the grand narrative of that work, with a grand narrative being synonymous with the work’s setting and worldview. The character Ayanami Rei of Neon Genesis Evangelion is an example of how Ō tsuka’s model interprets otaku “narrative consumption.” Ayanami is adored by otaku because, for them, she represents the tragedy, epic scale, and political allusiveness of the entire television series. Ayanami Rei is not just a girl in a battle uniform; she is Neon Genesis Evangelion itself. To “consume” her is to emotionally insert oneself into the apocalyptic, man-versus-god atmosphere of the larger narrative, which only heightens the visual and sexual pleasure she offers the male viewer.8

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Azuma directly contradicts this model of understanding symbols and narrative with his database theory. Ō tsuka argues that the grand narratives of shows like Evangelion are given weight by their relevance to nonfictional grand narratives such as the Pacific War and the postwar history of Japan. In contrast, Azuma believes that otaku narratives are almost completely removed from those of the real world. In the opening chapter of Otaku, he states, “In otaku culture ruled by narrative consumption, products have no independent value; they are judged by the quality of the database in the background.”9 Thus, although an otaku might be familiar with Ayanami Rei’s age and bust size, and be able to quote her dialogue and expound on the quality of various plastic models made in her likeness, he is not invested in any larger worldview or grand narratives that may be encompassed by Neon Genesis Evangelion. Instead, the otaku mines each episode of the television series for information to plug into a mental database that also contains information on similar shows. Because of the absence of the emotional pull of grand narratives, the otaku can substitute one element of his database for another; thus, for instance, the light-blue hair of a young female character such as Hoshino Ruri from the anime Martian Successor Nadesico (1996–1997, Kidō senkan Nadeshiko) or Tsukishima Ruriko from the visual novel Shizuku (1996, Droplet) instantly calls up references to the light-blue hair of Ayanami Rei. Furthermore, any sexual attraction and personal attachment the viewer might have felt for Ayanami Rei is seamlessly transferred to the new character, thus allowing shortcuts in characterization. For otaku, the appeal of any given character lies in the database of associations connected to the character—not in the story that contains the character. Moreover, grand narratives are nothing compared to the “animalistic” appeal of a character’s defining physical characteristics. Tropes can therefore be transferred from one story and character to another, along with an otaku’s emotional investment. Azuma claims that, “Compared with the 1980s otaku [on whom Ō tsuka bases his model of the grand narrative], those of the 1990s generally adhered to the data and facts of the fictional worlds and were altogether unconcerned with a meaning and message that might have been communicated.”10 According to Azuma’s generalizing conjecture, male otaku of the 1990s thus consumed only fragments or small narratives. These fragments, which fit comfortably within the small square boxes of a database, could then be easily cross-referenced with other fragments. Because of the ease of referencing these fragments, distinctions between an original and its copies (either through officially licensed spin-off works

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or through fanworks) disintegrated. According to Azuma, there was no longer any need to connect these fragments back to the grand narratives of either the original work or the real world. An otaku could float unanchored through the database he created via his consumption of undifferentiated narratives. For this generation of otaku, the larger narratives that attracted Ō tsuka’s earlier generation of otaku do not matter; they care only for the excavation and reproduction of details concerning cute female characters. Azuma therefore views the otaku fascination with animated girls as being deeply pathological. Otaku have cut the cord tethering them to reality, thus severing the portion of the narrative feedback loop that connects fictional stories back to the real world. If, for example, the themes of war and masculine infantilization in a series such as Neon Genesis Evangelion are not associated with the historical and emotional weight of conflicts such as the Pacific War, then they become nothing more than a backdrop for the sexual titillation provided by provocatively clad female characters. For Azuma, desire for fictional characters cannot exist on the same psychological plane as an historically grounded awareness of the real world, and the otaku’s preference for historically and politically disembodied bishō jo has caused him to withdraw into his own world of erotic fantasy and the pointless acquisition of useless trivia. Both Ō tsuka and Azuma stress the appeal of the acquisition of narrative trivia and the intense emotional investment in fictional narratives on the part of otaku. Ō tsuka argues that otaku collect the various paraphernalia related to their favorite media properties while reading and rereading the original texts in order to gain a better understanding of the fictional world in which the story takes place. Once in possession of an adequate level of comprehension of this worldview, otaku will then create their own spin-off stories, whether privately in their heads or semi-publicly through online message boards and self-published dō jinshi fancomics. Fictional grand narratives thus render a media franchise more marketable, collectible, and ultimately more profitable. Azuma, in contrast, denies the existence of grand narratives, fictional or otherwise, in the minds of otaku. For otaku, he argues, data collection is not about delving deeper into grand narratives; rather, it revolves around the animalistic pleasure of acquisition, which is rendered all the more pleasurable when combined with the polymorphously perverse element of fictional women, who serve as sources of sexual gratification for the otherwise unfocused libidinal drives of antisocial male viewers and consumers.11 According to both Azuma and Ō tsuka’s

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theories of narrative consumption, the otaku is not capable of independent action; he can only reproduce the narratives he consumes. Even if he is able to select specific elements from his own personal database to combine into new stories, the sum narrative total is still the same. In this way, narrative tropes that have long since become stereotypes are not only accepted by an otaku audience but also welcomed and celebrated. As a result, otaku communities have developed a collective fetish for the bishō jo, a recurring character trope in anime and manga since at least the 1970s.12 In his groundbreaking 2000 study Sentō bishō jo no seishin bunseki (Psychoanalysis of beautiful fighting girl), translated in 2011 by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson as Beautiful Fighting Girl, psychologist and cultural theorist Saitō Tamaki analyzes the figure of the animated and illustrated bishō jo in order to shed light on otaku sexuality. In his preface to this book, Saitō brings up arguments concerning “the Japanese and their so-called Lolita complex”13 and then quickly dismisses such arguments as intellectual laziness along the lines of “the miserable business of repetitive theorizing about the uniqueness of the Japanese.”14 Saitō later lists several common assumptions about otaku, such as the misconception that “otaku are immature human beings who have grown up without being able to let go of infantile transitional objects such as anime and monsters.”15 Rejecting such notions of immaturity and arrested psychological development, Saitō argues that otaku do not privilege fiction over reality but rather possess a unique capacity to accept fictional worlds as a separate but equal form of reality. Otaku, states Saitō , “are uninterested in setting fiction and reality up against each other. If anything they are able to find reality (riariti) equally in both fiction and reality (genjitsu).”16 Saitō thus differentiates between the reality of the phenomenal world and the perceived reality of the fictional narrative by referring to the former by the Japanese word for reality, genjitsu, and to the latter by the English word, riariti (“reality”). For an otaku who lives in both genjitsu and riariti, “real (riaru) fictions do not necessarily require the security of reality (genjitsu). There is absolutely no need in this space for fiction to imitate reality. Fiction is able to clear a space around itself for its own reality (riariti kūkan).”17 The key to making a fictional world “real” is desire. “For the world to be real (riaru),” Saitō explains, “it must be sufficiently electrified by desire. A world not given depth by desire, no matter how exactingly it is drawn, will always be flat and impersonal, like a backdrop in the theater. But once that world takes on a sexual charge, it will attain a level of reality

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(riariti) no matter how shoddily it is drawn.”18 Because the stylization of anime and manga is so adept at creating shared codes of imagery, elements of polymorphous perversity are easily introduced into the two mediums. According to Saitō , such sexual objects began to explode across illustrated and animated narratives beginning in the 1980s. The goal of the otaku creators and consumers was “an autonomous object of desire” that did not belong to any reality outside of anime and manga.19 Therefore, anime characters were never supposed to stand in for real women—for otaku, their appeal is their very fictionality. Saitō ’s ultimate argument is that the attachment of an adult male to the figure of the beautiful fighting girl is in no way psychologically unhealthy and that an immersion in the fictional riatriti of bishō jo narratives is not an escape from the real world. Rather, he asserts that it is a supplement and alternative to conventional sexual expression that can easily exist alongside genjitsu. The primary weakness of Saitō ’s argument is that it fails to take real women into account. Although many bishō jo are drawn and animated by men and situated in stories marketed to appeal to a primarily male audience, they undoubtedly have female fans as well. Moreover, men are not the only people who draw bishō jo characters, and manga for boys and men are not the only narratives in which such characters appear. In fact, the most famous and high-profile bishō jo of the past two decades was created by a woman for an audience of teenage girls. This bishō jo is Sailor Moon, and she is the star of her own manga, Sentō bishō jo (“fighting bishō jo”) Sailor Moon. Despite Saitō ’s insistence that bishō jo exist in their own reality and have nothing to do with real flesh-and-blood women, female fans of the bishō jo heroines of Sailor Moon have claimed that these characters have had an overwhelmingly beneficial influence on their perceptions of other female characters and of themselves as young women.

Fighting for Love and Justice: The Female Fans of Sailor Moon When Kodansha Comics USA announced the re-release of the original Sailor Moon manga in an English translation, many fan blogs celebrated the news. For example, a Tumblr-hosted blog by the name of “Fighting Evil by Moonlight,”20 which specializes in commentary on magical girl (mahō shō jo) anime, began its tribute to the work with these comments on its international reception:

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Sailor Moon is not only the magical girl genre’s most seminal work; its influence reaches to the remotest genres and trends in anime fandom. Anyone involved with anime – hentai-hoarding otaku, overseas translators/marketers, shoujo artists, seinen artists, everyone – has Sailor Moon to thank for the medium being what it is today. It is hard to overstate the way that this one series revolutionized anime and manga.21

Although artist Takeuchi Naoko did not create the “magical girl” genre, the Sailor Moon series (originally collected in 18 volumes over the course of the six-year span between 1991 and 1997 and adapted into five seasons of a television series that ran from 1992 to 1997) was certainly influential ever since it first appeared in print in the proliferation of animated magical girl stories, from Cardcaptor Sakura (1998–2000, Kādokyaputā Sakura) and Pretty Cure (Purikyua, first aired in 2004 and ongoing as of 2018) to Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011, Mahō shō jo Madoka magika). This is in part due to the efforts of its editors at Nakayoshi magazine, a publication aimed at preteen girls, who were the intended primary targets of a multimedia marketing campaign for Sailor Moon that incorporated an animated series and numerous items of accompanying merchandise.22 The true secret to the success of Sailor Moon, however, lay in the strength of its appealing and engaging character designs. As anthropologist Anne Allison has noted,23 the five Sailor Scouts (Sērā Senshi) were designed according to the conventions of the “super fighting squad” (sūpā sentai) genre of live-action children’s television programming, which generally features a five-person team of color-coded warriors, each with their own special power and guardian spirit. Each of the five core Sailor Scouts is similarly associated with her own color and celestial body. Sailor Mars, for example, is clothed in a uniform with red and purple accents and is able to attack using her fire-based magical powers. The personalities of the five girls are similarly encoded. Sailor Mars has a fiery temper to match her pyroclastic fighting style, and, given the association of fire with ritual purification in Japan, she also acts as a miko priestess at the Shinto shrine managed by her family when she is not attending classes or fighting evil. Because the personalities of the Sailor Scouts were designed to be as easily identifiable as their color-coded uniforms, they tend to occupy common narrative tropes. Sailor Mars, for example, though fiery, is a “well brought-up young lady” (ojō san) who is slender, elegant, articulate, and used to getting her way. Sailor Mercury is “the girl with glasses” (meganekko), whose defining characteristics are her gentle speech,

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intelligence, and propensity to respond to situations with slightly off-kilter remarks. Tall, athletic, and earnest, Sailor Jupiter could be the heroine of any number of sports manga for girls, while Sailor Moon herself is the archetypal “average” (futsū) heroine of the genre of shō jo romance that fills the pages of Nakayoshi and its spin-off magazines.24 Although her heart is in the right place, Sailor Moon is scatterbrained and ditzy, often running late to school and forgetting her homework. She would rather play video games than study, and her primary concerns seem to be romance and eating dessert with her friends. Once she transforms into her Sailor Scout alter ego, however, Sailor Moon ceases to be the stereotypical lovelorn heroine of a shō jo romance and instead becomes an iconic embodiment of bishō jo character tropes. Despite being young and naïve, she is physically strong, emotionally competent, and a compelling leader. She sacrifices herself for her team and always achieves strategic insight into the motivations of her enemies. Her magical power and her ability to win every battle stem from her innocent spirit and her purity of heart, which make her heir to the long line of bishō jo characters appearing in narratives targeted at a male audience, such as the eponymous heroine of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.25 Many North American readers26 of the Sailor Moon manga have found the work to contain themes of female empowerment expressed through its cast of female characters, its sympathetic male hero who acknowledges the strength of the female warriors, and its narrative focus on the bonds between women. For example, a blogger on LiveJournal who writes feminist commentary on popular culture under the name “Comic Book Girl” has expressed her admiration of Sailor Moon by stating that not only did the series serve as her induction into the world of manga and comic book fandom, but it also convinced her that, even though she was playing in a cultural realm dominated by men, it was okay to be a girl: [Sailor Moon] is a world where femininity is not something to be ashamed of, it’s the source of POWER. The girls don’t use their pretty clothes and jewels and compacts as playthings to impress men  – these things are all weapons against evil, and powerful ones. They declare themSELVES pretty, needing approval from no one. Our hero possesses all the typical “chick” attributes – emotional, tearful, forgiving, loving, nurturing – and she uses these attributes to triumph and kick ass. She burns monsters alive with the purity of her love, sends out supersonic waves that shake the villains down when she bursts into tears, and her friendship and forgiveness is [sic] the

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most effective superpower one could ask for. The “girly” emotions and affectations are not something to be ashamed of or suppressed, but the source of the power these girls wield. They don’t have to imitate guy heroes at all or act “masculine” to be taken seriously – girliness is just as powerful.27

For a young female reader in the 1990s, Sailor Moon and her fellow Sailor Scouts were positive feminist role models. In a landscape of Disney princesses concerned primarily with the men in their lives, the Sailor Moon manga and anime series were a rare oasis of female characters not defined by their attachment to men or involvement in romance.28 Even after the television series was taken off the air and the out-of-print manga volumes became almost impossible to find, knowledge of the series passed from fan to fan. As the internet became freely accessible to high school and college students, unlicensed fansubs and scanlations29 proliferated, and Sailor Moon achieved an almost mythical quality in the annals of North American and European anime fandom communities. Although the fandom reception of Sailor Moon was generally laudatory,30 North American academic critics found the franchise troubling. Susan Napier, for instance, has observed that the Sailor Scouts are somewhat “lacking in psychological depth” and claims that “to an adult reader/ viewer the girls’ lack of appreciation for their marvelous powers can be frustrating,” which suggests “a loss of interior complexity” on the part of female characters who are otherwise more active and dynamic.31 Napier points out that young female characters representing “wish fulfilling fantasies of empowerment,” such as the female protagonists of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Vampire Princess Miyu (1988–1989, Vanpaia Miyu), either “lack any dark side which might make [their] personalities more interesting to older readers” or are caught in a double bind in which their powers are dangerous to both themselves and others.32 In fact, she finds that female characters who are too powerful or who do possess psychological complexity are often cast as the evil villains whom the shō jo heroines must battle and defeat. Since the magical powers of the bishō jo stem from her innocence, purity, and unwillingness to use her abilities for personal gain, she is thus prevented from entering the realm of adult maturity if she wishes to remain one of the good guys. Based on the anime series she examines, Napier argues that, even if a girl is omnipotent, she must still know her place and behave accordingly. Even in manga and genre fiction written by women and featuring a wider range of female characters, feminist media critic Kotani Mari argues

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that there is still a limiting dichotomy between the roles offered to younger bishō jo and those available to older women. Kotani thus understands the concept of the bishō jo as belonging to “‘the female culture’ imagined by patriarchal society.”33 In her essay “Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction,” she argues that it is difficult to identify feminist ideological agendas in contemporary Japanese science fiction. Male writers often characterize the feminine sphere as an abject “other” by rendering it as either subhuman or uncannily superhuman, while female writers “tend to focus on vivid mother-daughter conflicts,” with the mother being as monstrous as anything appearing in male-authored narratives of combat and violence.34 Although the work of popular female writers such as Hikawa Reiko and Matsuo Yumi35 reflects an expanded range of social roles for women, Kotani still sees an emphasis on the role of woman as mother in the science fiction of female writers in the 1970s and 1980s. For these writers, motherhood provides possibilities for the exploration of shared homosocial experience. In contrast, Kotani contends that, as empowering as female homosociality can be, the focus on motherhood still confines an understanding of femininity within the limits of patriarchal expectations. By the 1990s, shō jo-hood had joined motherhood as a discursive space for exploring female identity, but Kotani finds the shō jo culture represented by female writers and artists such as Arai Mokoto and Hagio Moto as confining as the literary culture of motherhood.36 Further, Kotani reasons that the very concept of shō jo is defined through patriarchal constructs such as female virginity and the inevitability of heterosexual marriage. As a result of these patriarchal origins, the concept of shō jo is often linked, even in the work of female writers, to the trope of the monstrous feminine that is common in male-authored science fiction. In manga especially, Kotani argues, the recurring conflict between older and younger women often renders the older woman, who is sexually experienced but not sexually available, as monstrous. Meanwhile, the younger woman, who is sexually inexperienced, matures from an innocent shō jo who needs to be protected by a father figure into a more mature bishō jo on the cusp of sexual availability. If a bishō jo grows too powerful, however, or if her magical or psychic powers are too obviously “a conduit for anger and oppressed female sexuality,” then she is hunted as a monstrous abnormality.37 Even in the most radical of science fiction narratives in literature and manga, then, the two most dominant roles, the mother and the shō jo, are still governed by their relation to male sexuality.

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Anne Allison views the bishō jo of Sailor Moon as conforming to patriarchal expressions on a visual level as well. Unlike the super sentai teams on which they are based, “who don similar unisex uniforms when morphed [into superheroes, the Sailor Scouts] tend to strip down in the course of empowerment, becoming more, rather than less, identified by their flesh.”38 Allison also references the long legs and miniskirts of the transformed warriors when she mentions that, among certain circles of fandom, Sailor Moon “is also read as a sex symbol – one that feeds and is fed by a general trend in Japan toward the infantilization of sex objects.”39 As Allison suggests, the sailor costumes of the original manga have indeed been transmogrified into fetish fuel for male fans, who have portrayed the Sailor Scouts in every sexual situation imaginable in dō jinshi fancomics and on online image boards.40 Shallow characterization and short skirts alone, however, do not make a work inherently sexist. As demonstrated by Comic Book Girl’s passionate defense of the Sailor Moon manga, female fans of the series have found the costumes of its heroines an appealing and empowering symbol of youthful femininity.41 Furthermore, as both the manga and the anime series progress past the first plot arc, Sailor Moon and her four friends are allowed to develop their individual talents, personalities, and bonds with one another. An openly lesbian couple joins the team in the form of Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus, and a gender-fluid trio of celestial warriors, known as the Sailor Starlights, aid Sailor Moon during the final battles of the series. Nonnormative sexual and gender identities abound in Sailor Moon, as demonstrated by the loving and affectionate gay couple who serve as generals in an army that initially opposes Sailor Moon and her comrades, as well as characters who fall in love across species boundaries. Both the anime and the manga versions of Sailor Moon treat these relationships and the characters involved in them as being perfectly natural and socially acceptable. By devoting ample narrative attention to her diverse cast, Takeuchi Naoko manages to subvert the conventions of the shō jo manga that typically runs in Nakayoshi, which primarily features heteronormative romance, even as she overturns the conventions of male-­ oriented bishō jo fantasy stories, which tend to focus on a single female character with no strong relationships with other women. Sailor Moon, in its ability to promote female fan identification with positive and dynamic representations of relationships between women, thus challenges Azuma’s database model of narrative consumption while

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problematizing Saitō ’s understanding of the appeal of bishō jo characters. Although fans of the series continue to create transformative fanworks and to collect all manner of merchandise, Sailor Moon conforms to the conventions of genre only to later turn them upside down. Moreover, neither the manga nor the anime allows fans to become comfortable in a cocoon spun of recycled narrative and character tropes, as the manga in particular constantly challenges its readers with conflicts that have no easy resolution. Also, although various fanworks have demonstrated that male fans (and more than a few female fans) have been sexually titillated by the long legs and short skirts of the Sailor Scouts, fans of both sexes have engaged with the work and transformed its characters from simple objects of polymorphous perversion on Saitō ’s plane of riariti into role models. As Brigid Alverson, a professional editor of Japanese and American graphic novels, writes on the cultural and artistic influence of the series, “Today, there are more female comics creators, working in more different styles, than ever before, and many of those creators got their start reading manga – and drawing their own. Sailor Moon not only saved the world, it seems, she created a new one.”42 For many Japanese creators, however, the anxiety of influence generated by Sailor Moon was a heavy burden to bear. Although Sailor Moon overturned the tropes of shō jo romance and bishō jo fantasy, it popularized the tropes of the mahō shō jo genre.43 In the wake of Sailor Moon, the effects of Azuma’s database model went into overdrive as artists, editors, and anime studio executives started mixing and matching the elements of Sailor Moon and the various magical girl titles that had preceded it. Derivative manga, such as Yazawa Nao’s Wedding Peach (1994–1996, Ai tenshi densetsu wedingu piichi) and Tanemura Arina’s Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne (1998–2000, Kamikaze kaitō Jannu), sprang up immediately, while popular anime franchises such as Tenchi Muyō ! quickly developed magical girl spin-off series, such as Magical Girl Pretty Sammy (1995–1997, Mahō shō jo Puriti Samı̄). Many of these new magical girl series merely recycled the more easily digestible elements of the Sailor Moon manga and anime in an endlessly looping cycle of character tropes and plot devices. However, Magic Knight Rayearth, one of the few magical girl series from 1990s to enjoy multiple reprints in Japan and North America, effectively broke the cycle of narrative consumption and reproduction, both for its creators and for its audience. Building on the challenge Sailor Moon issued to patriarchal constructions of both shō jo and bishō jo characters and

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fandom cultures, the creators of Magic Knight Rayearth employed a female gaze not only to empower its characters and readers but also to critique the misogynistic tropes common to many science fiction and fantasy narratives centered on shō jo.

It Can’t End Like This: Breaking the Bishojo ̄ Mold in Magic Knight Rayearth The serialized fantasy manga Magic Knight Rayearth ran in Nakakyoshi from November 1993 to February 1995. To capitalize on the success of the magical girl series Sailor Moon, the magazine’s editors hired the all-­ woman creative team CLAMP, whose debut series RG Veda was enjoying a successful run in a monthly Shinshokan publication called Wings that also targeted an audience of teenage girls.44 Like Sailor Moon, Magic Knight Rayearth is a shō jo manga featuring many conventions of the magical girl genre. Its three heroines are garbed in fantastic school uniforms that undergo a series of transformations as the girls become more powerful. Also, like Sailor Moon and her friends, the heroines of Magic Knight Rayearth are able to attack their enemies and heal their own injuries with elemental magic spells. The work exhibits clear influences from other genres as well, such as mecha (giant robot) action and fantasy adventure. Over the course of their adventures in the fantasy world of Cephiro, the three girls must revive three giant robots called mashin, which will aid them in their final battle against their enemies. The sword-and-sorcery elements of the title seem to be borrowed directly from adventure stories such as the manga Saint Seiya (1986–1991, Seinto Seiya) and The Slayers (1989–2000, Sureiyāzu) series of young adult novels. The manner in which the weapons, armor, and magic of the three heroines “level up” (in power) through the accumulation of battle experience is drawn from role-­ playing video game franchises such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Although Magic Knight Rayearth seems to have been shaped from a combination of elements drawn from genres targeted at boys,45 its ornate artistic style and narrative focus on the friendship of three adolescent girls place the work firmly in the realm of shō jo manga. The character tropes represented by the three heroines of the series also resonate with the traditions of shō jo manga. Hikaru, the leader of the team of 14-year-old warriors, is characterized as pure-hearted and innocent. She never hesitates to help her friends despite the danger to herself, and she trusts others implicitly. No matter how perilous the circumstances the girls

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encounter, Hikaru’s hope, trust, and naiveté are unflinchingly portrayed in a positive light—just as similar qualities are portrayed in Sailor Moon. Umi, a long-haired beauty, is an ojō san, or well-bred young lady, from a wealthy family. As such, she is used to getting her way and more willing to question her circumstances and the motivations of others than the girlish Hikaru. Instead of being portrayed as experienced and savvy, however, Umi’s skepticism comes off as foolish and bratty as she occasionally endangers her two friends and must be gently pulled back into line by Hikaru’s emotional generosity. Fū is the meganekko, or “girl with glasses,” of the group. As such, she is demure in her interactions with other characters and speaks in an unusually formal and polite manner. Fū is enrolled in a prestigious middle school in Tokyo, and the other characters comment on how intelligent she is. Although Fū manages to solve many of the riddles the three girls encounter in Cephiro, her deductive acumen is no match for the pure heart and magical intuition of Hikaru. Like Sailor Moon, Magic Knight Rayearth valorizes girlish innocence, trust, and emotional openness. All obstacles can be overcome by the strength of the friendship between a small team of teenage warriors, whose battle prowess derives not from training or innate skill but from the purity of their hearts. Hikari, Umi, and Fū are summoned from Tokyo to the fantasy world of Cephiro by a fellow shō jo, Princess Emeraude. The opening page of the manga presents the reader with a single glowing flower suspended in space. At the heart of this flower is a young girl with long, flowing robes and hair. The following page reveals that she is crying. “Save us” (tasukete) are her first words, and as she summons the Magic Knights, a beam of light emerges from an enormous glowing jewel that ornaments the circlet she wears. In a dramatic two-page spread, the girl looks directly at the reader, still entreating someone to “save us” (Fig. 2.1). This girl is Princess Emeraude, the Pillar of Cephiro, who supports the world with the strength and purity of her prayers. In Cephiro, one is able to magically transform the world according to the power of one’s will. Emeraude, who possesses the strongest will in Cephiro, maintains peace and stability through a daily ritual of virtuous prayers for the continued prosperity of the land. Unfortunately, since she has apparently become the captive of her high priest, an imposing man in black armor named Zagato, Emeraude is no longer able act as the Pillar of Cephiro, and the world is crumbling. She thus summons the three Magic Knights to save her and, by extension, Cephiro.

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Fig. 2.1  Princess Emeraude (Magic Knight Rayearth Vol. 1, pp. 6–7)

Princess Emeraude is a quintessential shō jo. She is delicate, fragile, and beautiful, just like the flower in which she is imprisoned. She is gentle and kind, yet possesses a great strength of will. Her undulating robes and hair associate her with water, and it is suggested that she is imprisoned beneath the sea. Like water, which is often associated with femininity in anime and manga, Emeraude appears outwardly weak in terms of stature and musculature and exerts her will through nonviolent methods. Her wide eyes, which often brim with tears, reflect the open and unguarded state of her interior world, and she innocently trusts the Magic Knights while still attempting to see the goodness within the man who has supposedly imprisoned her. Princess Emeraude is similar in both appearance and disposition to Sailor Moon’s Princess Serenity, who also embodies the shō jo ideals of loving kindness and gentle compassion. Queen Beryl, the childlike Princess Serenity’s arch-nemesis in Sailor Moon, is at the opposite end of the shō jo spectrum. While Princess Serenity rules passively, inspiring her subjects with her friendliness and generosity,

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Queen Beryl is hungry for power and has seized control over Princess Serenity’s Moon Kingdom through political machinations, deceit, and powerful magic. By the opening of Sailor Moon, Beryl has focused her attentions on the neighboring planet of Earth, where she sends her generals to subdue the populace and gather energy that she will use to awake an even greater source of magical power. The first time the reader sees Queen Beryl in the second chapter of the Sailor Moon manga, she is in her audience chamber disciplining the general who had previously been defeated by Sailor Moon (Fig. 2.2). Unlike Sailor Moon, who is later revealed to be a reincarnation of Princess Serenity, Queen Beryl is in no way girlish. She is a mature woman, and her full-bodied figure is wrapped in a seductively alluring dress. In either hand she wields a phallic symbol of power, and her male general bows before her. In direct contrast to the enormous eyes of Sailor Moon and her teammates, Queen Beryl’s eyes are narrow and shaded. Just as much as Queen Beryl’s adult sexuality and aggressive wielding of political and military power mark her as evil, her lack of innocence contributes to her demonization as well. The value systems represented by Queen Beryl and Sailor Moon cannot exist in the same universe, and, in the shō jo fantasy of Sailor Moon, the universe belongs to the woman with unguarded eyes and a pure heart. This portrayal of the female villain as dangerous because of her mature sexuality is intensely problematic from a feminist perspective and recalls the common sci-fi dichotomy between the pure virgin and evil mother alluded to by feminist critics such as Susan Napier and Kotani Mari. In the last chapter of Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saitō Tamaki explains that “subcultural forms … seduce and bewitch us with their uncompromising superficiality. They may not be able to portray ‘complex personalities,’ but they certainly do produce ‘fascinating types.’ The beautiful fighting girl, of course, is none other than one of those types.”46 Another primary type is the demonic older woman, the dark shadow cast by the unrelenting purity of the bishō jo. As a psychoanalyst, Saitō identifies this character type as the phallic mother, an expression “used to describe a woman who behaves authoritatively. The phallic mother symbolizes a kind of omnipotence and perfection.”47 Words like “omnipotence” and “perfection” just as easily describe bishō jo characters such as Sailor Moon; but, in the realm of shō jo manga, these qualities become signifiers of danger and villainy when applied to adult women. The concept of “phallic” is threatening, but so, too, is the concept of “mother.” In her discussion of shō jo horror manga, Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase notes a clear trend concerning

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Fig. 2.2  Queen Beryl (Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Vol. 1, p. 79)

the abjection of the mother, especially through the narrative eyes of daughters, who “have seen the struggle of their mothers and the tragedy that they endured in patriarchal domesticity.”48 For a teenage female

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audience, an adult woman is both a frightening and pathetic creature. Her adult body is useless in the heterosexual economy of desire, her anger and frustration can change nothing, and any power she wields is unreliable and often misdirected. For such a woman, who has lost both her innocence and emotional clarity, “phallic” power is a dangerous thing that dooms her to the almost certain status of villainhood.49 The three heroines of Magic Knight Rayearth must fight two such women in order to save Cephiro. The first of these women, Alcyone, is a twisted perversion of Princess Emeraude. Like Emeraude, Alcyone is associated with water, and the reader first sees her emerging from under a waterfall. Her long hair and cape cascade around her body as Emeraude’s do. Alcyone also has a large circular jewel ornamenting her forehead as Emeraude does and, like Emeraude, she possesses a strong will and is skilled in the use of magic. Unlike Emeraude, however, Alcyone is evil and must be defeated by the Magic Knights. The primary difference between Alcyone and Emeraude is that, whereas Emeraude is portrayed as an innocent child, Alcyone radiates adult sexuality, which is apparent in her revealing costume and condescending flirtation. Alcyone attacks the Magic Knights on the orders of Zagato, and after the Magic Knights vanquish her, they learn that she has done everything from developing her power to aiding the downfall of Cephiro because she is in love with him. Alcyone, a sexually and emotionally mature woman, is thus characterized as evil simply because she is in love with a man despite the fact that she is no longer an innocent and virginal shō jo. The long, jewel-tipped staff that Alcyone carries and the ornamentation on her armor mark the character as a phallic mother, or a powerful woman who is ultimately rendered pathetic because of her inability to successfully wield her power and attract the attention of the man she desires. The second woman the Magic Knights must fight is Emeraude herself. In the final pages of Magic Knight Rayearth, Hikau, Umi, and Fū battle Emeraude, who is also in love with Zagato. Because she has fallen in love, Emeraude’s purity of heart and strength of will are compromised, and she can no longer act as the Pillar of Cephiro. Since no one in Cephiro can kill her, and since she cannot kill herself, she has imprisoned herself and summoned the Magic Knights so that they can save Cephiro by destroying her and thereby releasing her from her responsibilities, for it is only with her death that a new Pillar can support Cephiro. By falling in love with a man, Emeraude has renounced her sexually untainted shō jo status. When the Magic Knights finally find her, the

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princess no longer appears as a child but instead has the body of an adult woman. Emeraude’s adult body represents both her personal selfishness— as expressed by her wish to devote herself just as much to her personal desires as to the welfare of the wider world—and her willingness to use her immense power to achieve her goals. The two-page spread in which the reader first encounters Emeraude as an adult mirrors the scene in which Emeraude first appears as a child. Emeraude still floats in a watery space, and she completes her first phrase, “Please save us” with the target of her plea, “Magic Knights” (Fig. 2.3). Instead of appearing metaphorically as a flower, however, Emeraude’s full body is displayed; moreover, her white robes are encased in black armor. Emeraude has thus been transformed into a phallic mother like Queen Beryl and Alcyone, and the tears in her eyes represent her anger, an impure emotion that is ineffectual against the combined powers of the Magic Knights, who are doomed by the conventions of the genre to succeed in carrying out their mission.

Fig. 2.3  Princess Emeraude (Magic Knight Rayearth Vol. 3, pp. 164–165)

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The demonic phallic mother is thus defeated by the pure-hearted bishō jo, an outcome that would never be in doubt to a genre-savvy reader. In Magic Knight Rayearth, however, a happy ending is not forthcoming. Hikaru, Umi, and Fū are shocked by what they have done, and the manga ends abruptly with their realization that they are murderers. In the closing pages of the story, Princess Emeraude dissolves into light, and the three Magic Knight are suddenly back in Tokyo, crying in each other’s arms. The manga closes with Hikaru screaming, “It can’t end like this!” And yet it does end like this. Youth and innocence have defeated maturity and adult sexuality, as the conventions of shō jo romance and bishō jo fantasy dictate, but no one is happy. In fact, this outcome is quite traumatic both for the victors and for the reader who has witnessed their victory. By upsetting the reader, CLAMP also upsets the narrative cycle in which character tropes and story patterns are endlessly recycled. In its antagonistic and confrontational dynamic between virginal shō jo and sexually mature women, Magic Knight Rayearth mimics the narrative patterns that have preceded it in series such as Sailor Moon. However, by representing this character dynamic as tragic, CLAMP critiques the misogynistic tendency in anime and manga to villainize older women who possess both sexual maturity and political power. Although the older woman must still die, the emotional pain caused by the manga’s refusal to allow closure to the characters or the readers demonstrates the damage caused by this trope from the perspective of a female gaze that sees women as subjects capable of growth and change rather than as mere objects to be discarded once they are past their sexual prime. The final volumes of the Sailor Moon manga involve a similar conflict. At a moment of great crisis, Sailor Moon travels back in time from several centuries in the future to ask her teenage self to abandon a fight whose outcome will have devastating repercussions for the rest of her life. In addition to overcoming the enemy laying siege to the solar system, the teenage Sailor Moon must thus struggle to overcome the despair of her adult self, namely, a woman who has assumed the roles of both mother and political ruler. Sailor Moon does not fight her adult self but rather resolves the conflict by renouncing her innocent and self-sacrificing shō jo status and making the deliberately selfish choice of privileging her own personal desires over the fate of the entirety of the known universe.50 Just as female fans of Sailor Moon are able to find messages of feminist empowerment in the series instead of polymorphously perverse possibilities for sexual titillation, so too are female creators such as CLAMP able to

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stage feminist critiques of real-world sexual economies of desire within their application of gendered narrative tropes. Therefore, when cultural theorists such as Ō tsuka, Azuma, and Saitō discuss otaku immersing themselves in fantasies that have nothing to do with the real world, they acknowledge bishō jo series such as Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth but fail to account for the female viewers, readers, and creators for whom fictional female characters are not removed from social and political realities. Such theorists take the male gaze for granted, and their readings of anime, manga, video games, and light novels, as well as their opinions concerning the communities of fans that consume them, are therefore phallocentric. The ideology supporting the passage of the Tokyo Youth Ordinance Bill discussed at the beginning of this essay also suffers from the same paradigm of “men as consumers, women as consumed” that severely limits the narrative theories of media scholars concerned only with the minds and reactions of male readers and viewers. Within the communities of women who consume and produce popular narratives, however, the female gaze is alive and well. This female gaze not only allows female readers to see celebrations of empowered female identities in works that would otherwise be dismissed as misogynistic, but it also serves as a critical tool for female creators such as Takeuchi Naoko and CLAMP, who seek to overturn clichéd tropes and narrative patterns both as a means of telling stories that will appeal to an audience of women and as a means of feminist critique. Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth demonstrate how female creators are able to rewrite gendered tropes in a manner that overturns sexist notions of femininity while still appealing to a broad and diverse audience. As these two examples demonstrate, gendered tropes can serve as much more than narrative architecture. More importantly, readers of all genders can find appeal in stories that offer a pointed critique of the narrative refusal to see female characters as anything more than the objects of male discourse and desire.

Notes 1. Hiroko Tabuchi, “In Tokyo, a Crackdown on Sexual Images of Minors” in The New  York Times, February 9, 2011. http://www.nytimes. com/2011/02/10/business/global/10manga.html 2. The Tokyo Youth Ordinance Act cannot be invoked to ban any manga that falls under its jurisdiction. Rather, a manga deemed “obscene” by the law would be removed from general circulation and placed into the adult-­ oriented section of a bookstore or other retail outlet.

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3. The argument that women have internalized the male gaze has been made by Laura Mulvey herself in Roberta Sassatelli, “Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 5 (2011). In an oft-quoted essay on the Salon website titled “The Female Gaze,” American comedian Eileen Kelly describes the process by which women evaluate the appearance of other women; the women exercise the conventions of a borrowed male gaze to gauge the physical, mental, and emotional health of their friends and acquaintances. With the release of the Hollywood films based on Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight series of young adult paranormal romance novels, film critics began to acknowledge a female gaze that sexualizes male bodies. A representative essay is Owen Gleiberman’s “‘Eclipse’: Shrewdly Retro or Just Backward? You Decide!,” in Entertainment Weekly, July 2, 2010. http:// insidemovies.ew.com/2010/07/02/eclipse-retro-or-just-backward/ 4. In common Japanese usage, an otaku is understood to be male. A female fan of male-oriented media may be referred to as an otaku joshi, or “girl otaku,” while BL fans self-identify as fujoshi, or “rotten girls.” In overseas usage, “otaku” is a more general term that can apply to men or women. This is evidenced by the title of the bi-monthly American periodical Otaku USA. 5. Eiji Ō tsuka, “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative,” trans. Marc Steinberg, in Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies, ed. Frenchy Lunning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 106. 6. Ibid., 107. 7. Ibid., 109. 8. In Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Susan Napier makes an original and compelling argument that male viewers identify with bishō jo characters, specifically with the freedom from social constraints and adult responsibilities they represent. Each of the theorists discussed acknowledges that the consumption of young female characters by heterosexual male viewers is multifaceted and not purely a matter of prurient interest. 9. Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 33. 10. Azuma, Otaku, 36. 11. A major element of polymorphous perversity, especially in its Freudian application, is its association with immature sexuality and antisocial behavior. Otaku have been accused of both by cultural theorists and society at large, especially after the infamous “otaku murders” perpetuated by Miyazaki Tsutomu in 1995. 12. The character Mori Yuki, the only female member of the cast of the 1974 animated series Space Battleship Yamato (Uchū senkan Yamato), is often

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cited by Japanese media historians and theorists such as Azuma and Saitō as one of the most popular bishō jo characters, although American manga critics such as Frederick Schodt and Jason Thompson generally consider the prototype of the bishō jo to be the heroine of Tezuka Osamu’s Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi) manga, which completed its original serialization in 1956. 13. The so-called Lolita complex to which Saitō refers is the accusation, often from foreign observers, that Japanese men are unduly attracted to prepubescent girls, as supposedly evidenced by the stylized representations common to many pornographic and semi-pornographic manga, anime, video games, visual novels, and related media. 14. Tamaki Saitō , Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 6–7. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Ibid., 24. 17. Ibid., 156. 18. Ibid., 162. 19. Ibid., 151. 20. The blog title “Fighting Evil by Moonlight” is taken from the opening line of the English-language theme song of the North American release of the first season of the Sailor Moon animated series. 21. Henshins, “I Don’t Write Much about Sailor Moon,” in Fighting Evil by Moonlight, September 13, 2011. Tumblr post, accessed May 25, 2014. http://henshins.tumblr.com/post/10180196614/i-dont-writemuch-about-sailor-moon-1991-for 22. Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 131. 23. Ibid., 128. 24. An example of these spin-off magazines is Run-Run, in which Takeuchi Naoko serialized the manga that would become the prequel to Sailor Moon, namely, Codename Sailor V (1991–1997, Kō do nēmu wa Sērā V). Such spin-­off magazines are used by their parent company, Kodansha, to develop new talent while diversifying and saturating the market for shō jo manga. 25. Saitō lists a number of examples of such bishō jo, including Sailor Moon and Nausicaä, in the fifth chapter of his Beautiful Fighting Girl, titled “A Genealogy of the Beautiful Fighting Girl.” 26. As is often the case with online communities, it is impossible to accurately identify the nationality of participants. Although the writers quoted in this essay self-identify as American or Canadian, the English-speaking Sailor Moon fandom is diverse and spread across a countless number of personal websites, blogs, fanfiction and fan art hosting sites, message boards, and

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social media profile pages. Although many manga artists acknowledge their debt to Sailor Moon in interviews, on their personal blogs, and on Twitter, Japanese websites are much more ephemeral than the majority of English-­ language websites. As such, the fan response to Sailor Moon can be more clearly appreciated by the dō jinshi fancomics that have continued to appear since the manga first began serialization. Many josei-muke (drawn by women for an ostensibly female readership) dō jinshi based on the Sailor Moon manga and anime series have emphasized the friendship and potential romantic relationships between the female characters. 27. Comic Book Girl, “Gushing About the Sailor Moon Manga Rerelease and Feminism” in Adventures of Comic Book Girl, March 22, 2011. LiveJournal post, accessed May 25, 2014. http://nevermore999.livejournal.com/132687.html 28. In her Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), Peggy Orenstein details the sociological implications of the Disney Princess movies and marketing campaigns, which extend far beyond the properties of the Disney Corporation and the play of preteen girls. 29. A fansub is a pirated Japanese-language video subtitled by a non-­ professional volunteer team of translators. Fansubs are distributed through unsearchable online torrenting sites whose addresses are passed from fan to fan at events such as local or university anime club meetings. A scanlation is a scan of a Japanese manga that is translated, edited, and lettered by a group of fans. Before digital manga became widely available on e-readers such as the iPad and the Kindle, scanlations were hosted by publicly searchable sites such as One Manga and Manga Fox. 30. However, Saitō , in the chapter of his Beautiful Fighting Girl detailing responses to his email surveys of Western anime fandom, cites male anime fans as ridiculing Sailor Moon for being childish, formulaic, and boring. 31. Susan Napier, “Vampires, Psychic Girls, Flying Women and Sailor Scouts: Four Faces of the Young Female in Japanese Popular Culture,” in The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by Dolores P. Martinez (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 103, 104. 32. Ibid., 99. 33. Mari Kotani, “Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction,” trans. Miri Nakamura in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 54. 34. Ibid., 48. 35. Hikawa Reiko (b. 1958) made her debut in 1988 and is known for her sword-and-sorcery fantasy series, and Matsuo Yumi (b. 1960) is the author

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of the short story “Murder in Balloon Town” (1992, Barūn Taun no satsujin), which is representative of her fascination with the exploration of off-­kilter social experiments and the psyches of characters who defy mainstream social expectations. 36. Arai Mokoto (b. 1960) is an author of science fiction young adult novels who made her debut in 1978, and Hagio Moto (b. 1949) is a celebrated creator of shō jo manga known especially for her work in the subgenre of shō nen-ai (homoerotic stories of young men). 37. Kotani, “Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies,” 58. 38. Allison, Millennial Monsters, 129. 39. Ibid., 133. 40. A representative example of such image boards is Futaba Channel (http:// www.2chan.net/), an offshoot of the anonymous message board 2channel (http://2ch.net/). This website hosts several themed forums where users can post images and responses anonymously. Like 2channel, Futaba Channel is home to many otaku subcultures, and, due to its nature as a host for image boards, the website is known for its illustrated pornographic content. 41. Not only female fans but more than a few male fans have done so as well. Veteran shō jo manga translator Rachel Thorn calls the Sailor Moon series a “miraculous asset” to the development of a manga readership in North America in her blog post “The TokyoPop Effect.” 42. Brigid Alverson, “Sailor Moon 101: Pretty, Powerful, and Pure of Heart.” MTV Geek!, May 27, 2011, http://geek-news.mtv.com/2011/05/27/ sailor-moon-101-pretty-powerful-and-pure-of-heart/ 43. The mahō shō jo, or “magical girl,” genre was popular long before Sailor Moon, as demonstrated by animated television shows for young girls such as Mahō tsukai Sarı̄ (1966–1968, Sally the Witch), Himitsu no Akko-chan (1969–1970, The Secrets of Akko), Majokko Megu-chan (1974–1975, Meg the Little Witch Girl), and so on. For more information about the development of the mahō shō jo in Japanese media and its relation to changing notions of femininity and female social roles, see Sugawa Akiko’s Shō jo to mahō : Gāru hiirō wa ika ni juyō sareta no ka (Girls and Magic: Representations of Magical Girls and Japanese Female Viewership) (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2013). 44. For information on CLAMP’s debut, see All About CLAMP, 205, 219. Dark Horse Comics editor Carl Horn has written about how CLAMP was scouted by Kodansha editor Irie Yoshio, who also brought Takeuchi Naoko into the pages of Nakayoshi, in a post on the Dark Horse blog titled “Swords and Sorcery – Shojo Style!” on June 23, 2011. http://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/465/swords-and-sorceryshojo-style-carl-horn 45. Before the mid-1990s, such genres tended to be targeted at boys and young men. Due to the widespread popularity of shō jo titles such as Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth among a young female audience, however, these genres came to be marketed to girls as well. This shift in demo-

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graphic targeting can be seen in the pervasiveness of the screentone heavy and large-eyed shō jo art style, the proliferation of attractive male bishō nen characters, and the increase in prominent female characters in the anime, manga, video games, and light novels of the late 1990s. 46. Saitō , Beautiful Fighting Girl, 146. 47. Ibid., 159. 48. Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, “Shō jo Spirits in Horror Manga,” in U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal 38 (2010): 65. 49. An alternate explanation for this narrative tendency is that, as in shō nen series in which the young and inexperienced male heroes must continually face off against older, battle-hardened, and politically astute male opponents, so the opponents of action-oriented shō jo series must be older women with more worldly experience. In other words, if the perfect rival for a male shō nen hero is an older man, then it only stands to reason that the perfect rival for a female shō jo hero is an older woman. From this point of view, younger women fighting older women is not a sexist narrative trope but in fact feminist in its assertion that female characters can fill the narrative roles of both hero and villain. Such an argument is complicated by the obvious sexuality of older female villains, which is common not merely in mahō shō jo stories but also in shō nen action manga and shō jo romance. In fact, Kanako Shiokawa has written that manga readers “know that upon seeing very tall and beautiful women dripping with adult sexuality, one should run like hell because these characters are invariably deadly and evil.” See Shiokawa, “Cute But Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics,” in Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy, ed. John A. Lent (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1999), 119. 50. Since the Sailor Moon manga concluded two years after the immensely popular Magic Knight Rayearth manga, it is possible that the ending of Sailor Moon was conceived as a reaction to the ending of Magic Knight Rayearth or to its much darker sequel, Rayearth II, which was serialized in Nakayoshi from March 1995 to April 1996.

References Allison, Anne. 2006. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alverson, Brigid. 2011. Sailor Moon 101: Pretty, Powerful, and Pure of Heart. MTV Geek! May 27. http://geek-news.mtv.com/2011/05/27/ sailor-moon-101-pretty-powerful-and-pure-of-heart/ Azuma, Hiroki. 2009. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Comic Book Girl. 2011. Gushing About the Sailor Moon Manga Rerelease and Feminism. Adventures of Comic Book Girl, March 22. LiveJournal post. http:// nevermore999.livejournal.com/132687.html. Accessed 25 May 2014. Dollase, Hiromi Tsuchiya. 2010. Shō jo Spirits in Horror Manga. U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal 38: 59–80. Gleiberman, Owen. 2010. ‘Eclipse’: Shrewdly Retro or Just Backward? You Decide! Entertainment Weekly, July 2. http://insidemovies.ew.com/2010/07/02/ eclipse-retro-or-just-backward/ Henshins. 2011. I Don’t Write Much About Sailor Moon. Fighting Evil by Moonlight, September 13. Tumblr post. http://henshins.tumblr.com/ post/10180196614/i-dont-write-much-about-sailor-moon-1991-for. Accessed 25 May 2014. Horn, Carl. 2011. Swords and Sorcery  – Shojo Style! Dark Horse Blog, June 23. http://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/465/swords-and-sorceryshojo-style-carl-horn Kotani, Mari. 2007. Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction. Trans. Miri Nakamura. In Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-­ Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, 47–74. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Napier, Susan. 1998. Vampires, Psychic Girls, Flying Women and Sailor Scouts: Four Faces of the Young Female in Japanese Popular Culture. In The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, ed. Dolores P. Martinez, 91–109. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Orenstein, Peggy. 2011. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. New York: HarperCollins. Ō tsuka, Eiji. 2010. World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative. Trans. Marc Steinberg. In Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies, ed. Frenchy Lunning, 99–116. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Saitō , Tamaki. 2011. Beautiful Fighting Girl. Trans. J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sassatelli, Roberta. 2011. Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (5): 123–143. Shiokawa, Kanako. 1999. Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics. In Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy, ed. John A. Lent, 93–125. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press. Sugawa, Akiko. 2013. Shō jo to mahō : Gāru hiirō wa ika ni juyō sareta no ka [Girls and Magic: Representations of Magical Girls and Japanese Female Viewership]. Tokyo: NTT Shuppan. Tabuchi, Hiroko. 2011. In Tokyo, a Crackdown on Sexual Images of Minors. The New York Times, February 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/business/global/10manga.html

CHAPTER 3

The Maiden and the Witch: CLAMP’s Subversion of Female Character Tropes

The four main publishing genres of manga are defined by the demographics of their readership. The two most popular genres, shō nen and shō jo, are targeted at boys and girls, respectively. Josei manga is for older teenage girls and adult women, while seinen manga is designed to appeal to men. Each broad demographic genre has subcategories further tailored to more specific ages and the interests of its readership, and a certain amount of manga published by both large and small presses falls outside of conventional demographic genres.1 Nevertheless, demographic genre influences everything from advertising to bookstore layout to editorial policy, not to mention narrative pattern, character development, and reliance on gendered genre tropes. Although many manga artists specialize in one particular genre, CLAMP is remarkable in that the group has serialized manga in magazines targeted at all four of the major demographic genres. Regardless of genre, however, their work is characterized by its prominent female characters. Two of their series, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle (2003–2009), a shō nen manga, and xxxHolic (2003–2011), a seinen manga, feature an innocent teenage girl and a jaded adult witch as their respective main characters. These two series, which were serialized simultaneously during the first decade of the twenty-first century, incorporate intersecting plots and numerous crossover elements. The two manga are closely related on a thematic level as well, as the younger woman and the older woman serve as foils to each other not simply through manga’s stories but also through © The Author(s) 2020 K. Hemmann, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_3

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their narrative modes of storytelling. This chapter will examine the character tropes associated with the young girl and the older woman within the two manga through a reading of the stories and images used to portray them. By subverting these tropes, CLAMP transcends misogynistic genre stereotypes in these two series while offering an alternative avenue for female empowerment. In a broader context, the group queers the very notion of demographic genre by casting the representatives of shō nen manga and seinen manga as female characters. In order to provide context for a reading of these manga, it is important to discuss the shō jo traditions regarding female characters that CLAMP incorporates into their shō nen and seinen series, along with the larger narrative patterns from which these gendered tropes originate.

Pure Hearts and Sparkling Eyes: The Rise of the Sho j̄ o

The first wave of shō jo manga was heralded by the emergence of the weekly magazine Margaret in 1963. Although manga featuring prominent female protagonists had appeared before,2 they were largely the province of male artists. The editorial staff of Margaret, however, cultivated the talent of female artists, which resulted in the rise of a generation of talented women such as Ikeda Riyoko, Hagio Moto, and Takemiya Keiko in the early seventies. The manga created by these artists, such as Berusaiyu no bara (The Rose of Versailles), Tō ma no shinzō (The Heart of Thomas), and Kaze to ki no uta (The Song of Wind and Trees), featured willowy and ornately costumed young women (and effeminate young men3) searching for love and purpose. These characters were visually characterized by their round faces and their enormous, sparkling eyes, so much so that Kanako Shiokawa writes, “if one was uncertain as to who the main character was, the ground rule dictated that she was the possessor of the largest and the starriest eyes.”4 In shō jo manga, large eyes are connected to notions of innocence and vulnerability, traits reflected in the dress of these characters, which strategically covered and de-emphasized their breasts and hips.5 The love pursued by these shō jo (and their male counterparts) was “pure” in the sense of not being tainted by overt sexuality or selfish motives such as political or economic gain.6 Since the seventies, the demographic genre of shō jo manga has emerged as a major publishing category, with numerous magazines like Nakayoshi, Ciao, and Ribon continuing to market love stories to an eager audience of teenage (and “tween” age) girls.

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During the late seventies and eighties, male manga artists and animation directors began to incorporate the trope of the pure-hearted and innocent young woman into their own work, and the magical shō jo became a staple of Japanese popular culture in the nineties. Susan Napier cites the perceived liminality of these young female characters as adding to their appeal, part of which is “the fact that many Japanese are able to project issues of identity construction onto the attractive and unthreatening figure of the shō jo.”7 In the unstable social and economic climate of post-bubble Japan, “the iconic figure of a vulnerable young girl, either fighting back or internalizing various dark psychological problems, may have had particular cultural resonance.”8 Napier thus identifies the trope of the innocent shō jo as a central figure in manga and anime, representing freedom, growth, and change in the face of rigid adult masculinity.9 She states that, “in contemporary Japanese society, girls, with their seemingly still-amorphous identities, seem to embody the potential for unfettered change and excitement that is far less available to Japanese males, who are caught in a network of demanding workforce responsibilities.”10 It is therefore not surprising, continues Napier, that writers and animators use this character to represent issues surrounding the construction of personal identity. Although many shō jo heroines find themselves facing seemingly insurmountable conflicts in confusing and unstable worlds, they are always able to find a way to grow, progress, and achieve some sort of victory. Furthermore, many animated heroines, most notably those of director Miyazaki Hayao, possess characteristics commonly associated with masculinity, such as physical strength, a mastery of technology, and astute political acumen. These characteristics allow them to negotiate the boundaries between male and female identities. According to Napier, the fluidity of the adolescent shō jo body is more open to the projection of identity than the perceived rigidity of the male body. Importantly, this lability renders it a more appropriate vehicle for the formation of male subjectivity within contemporary narratives. Sharalyn Orbaugh makes a similar argument in “Busty Battlin’ Babes: The Evolution of the shō jo in 1990s Visual Culture.” Orbaugh states that, although the audience that enjoys the gun-slinging and sword-wielding adult women of many action narratives can be understood to be primarily male, this male audience is encouraged through a subjective narrative viewpoint to enter the bodies and identify with the gendered physical experiences of the female protagonists. Orbaugh cites several Japanese social critics who position the postmodern experience as essentially

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feminine, calling this trend “a cross-gender identification or disguise for the purpose of exemplifying or thinking through a social conundrum.”11 Orbaugh connects this process to Carol Clover’s central thesis in Men, Women, and Chainsaws. According to Clover, horror films “reveal in unmistakable terms that men are quite capable of feeling not only at but also through female figures, the implication being that they have always done so, although the traditional disposition of sex roles on screen has allowed the male spectator simultaneously to steal and deny the theft.”12 Like Clover, Orbaugh concludes that an audience figured as male can only identify with a female character so long as she remains a phallic virgin or a girl still untainted by the physical aspects of heterosexual love and thus still open as an object of male identity projection. According to this line of thinking, the shō jo-ness of shō jo thus presumably serves the interests of male creators and audiences, not actual women. For male creators of anime and manga, especially male directors, shō jo characters tend to operate within a patriarchal frame of reference. As such, this locates them squarely within a feminine realm of “dreams” or “the past” associated with a liminal and virginal identity on the cusp of sexual availability. Thomas Lamarre takes this association one step farther by demonstrating how anime directors such as Miyazaki Hayao associate feminine bodies with the non-Cartesian and pre-technological. In his preface to The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, Lamarre argues that, although the vast majority of anime scholarship in the West has found its purpose in explicating the cultural aspects of Japanese animation, a broader philosophical dimension may be added to the Japanese animation by drawing on the work of cinema theorist Paul Virilio. Virilio sees the ballistic perspective of cinema as representing a view of modern technology that encompasses concepts of dominance, mastery, and destruction. For Virilio, the cinematic camera puts the viewer’s eyes into the speeding train, bullet, or bomb. Doing so forces audiences to adapt a perspective of hyper-speed and hyper-instrumentalization far removed from the human level. Because the cel layers of traditional animation make this sort of viewpoint difficult to express, however, Lamarre posits anime not as “cinematic” but rather as “animetic.” In other words, animation directors can use the animetic interval, or the movement of characters between different surfaces of cel layers (as opposed to movement through depth), to oppose the sort of modernistic cinematism described by Virilio. Even as Disney and other North American and European animation studios have developed techniques such as closed compositing (moving all

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of the layers of an image at the same time), which help to create the illusion of speeding into the depth of an image, Lamarre argues that many Japanese anime directors have resisted them in favor of open compositing, which preserves the animetic interval by not hiding the gap between the different layers and encourages a degree of creative play with the camera in the perspective expressed through the drawings. Lamarre’s description of animation technology circles his central argument: Because anime operates (and thinks) at the level of the moving image, we need to understand how its themes and stories operate from the level of the moving image. It is here that we can begin to understand how anime might enable an animetic critique of the modern technological condition through its negotiations with and struggle against the ballistic logistics of perception (cinematism or hyper-Cartesianism).13

Therefore, by understanding the physical technology of animation and the formal artistic and cinematic devices engendered by this technology, we can understand how animation directors use (or do not use) this technology to stage a philosophical and ideological critique of technology at both a diegetic and an extra-diegetic level. In the work of the directors Lamarre discusses in The Anime Machine, such a critique is often expressed through the treatment of female characters and female bodies. Lamarre tests this argument with a visual reading of the films of Miyazaki Hayao, whom Lamarre quotes as stridently resisting cinematism, which the director associates with war and violence. Although two of Miyazaki’s early films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä, 1984) and Castle in the Sky (Tenkū no shiro Laputa, 1986), feature many scenes of characters flying or falling through the air, Lamarre argues that the viewer never shares their point of view as they zoom in toward a destination; the viewer either glides along beside them or watches them fall or run from a set perspective. Instead of identifying with flying machines, the audience is encouraged to identify with the human beings operating the machines, a perspective that Lamarre views as demonstrating a distinctively humanistic relationship to technology. Miyazaki is not so naïve as to reject technology completely, argues Lamarre, but the director does encourage his audience to view it in a different way through his manipulation of the animatic camera. One of the more interesting aspects of this line of inquiry is Lamarre’s examination of Miyazaki’s use of bodies, especially in their relation to

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technology. Lamarre discusses the use of the technique of rotoscoping (the frame-by-frame tracing of images of live-action actors) in Western animation, as well as the decision of many Japanese directors of animation to instead employ limited animation, which is primarily characterized by a lower frame-per-second rate of movement. Lamarre quotes senior Tō ei animator Ō tsuka Yasuo as expressing how limited animation gives artists more expression over how the body moves, allowing them to exaggerate its lightness or solidness. Although limited animation may risk appearing cartoonish, Lamarre associates full animation with the modernistic evils of cinematism, stating that “full animation promises to fold the animetic interval back on itself, making for a substantial body with a substantial relation to the world.”14 The heavier bodies of characters represented by full animation appear to transcend their world and are able to move easily through it while freely manipulating everything within it. On the other hand, Lamarre believes that the bodies of characters represented by limited animation seem to float weightlessly between the layers of the frame and are therefore more responsive to their environment in a more humanistic relation to their world.15 The relationship between animated body and animated environment is not equal for male and female characters, however. Lamarre references Miyazaki in arguing that, because the desires of male characters are concrete and goal-oriented, they interact with their environment by exerting their bodily strength on physical objects. Male characters therefore act directly, whereas female characters tend to affect their world indirectly, through telepathy or magic. Regardless of whether girls are non-­ technological (through their use of magic) or hyper-technological (through their use of technology that appears to be magical), Lamarre believes that female characters have relationship to technology that contrasts with that of male characters. For female characters, technology is more of a physical condition than it is an ability, as it is for male characters. In other words, this animetic discourse of technology echoes the phallocentric idea the males are physical and rational while females are emotional and mystical. Lamarre concludes that Miyazaki’s emphasis on female characters positions technology outside of the “modern” paradigm of problems and solutions represented by male characters and orients it instead toward an innate condition, which must then be cured by the female: She embodies the technological condition, affords salvation or release, and appears as the new god or new paradigm to give constancy to a new under-

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standing, a new way of living with technology, a new rootedness. This places quite a burden on the young girl, who must become akin to a god or savior of animation technologies.16

Lamarre acknowledges that this gendered arrangement of animated physicality repeats the common duality of female as passive and physical and male as active and intellectual. He maintains, however, that female characters form the center of the delight an audience derives from the movement portrayed in animation. According to Lamarre, this is why shō jo represent the humanistic hope and possibility expressed by animetism and limited animation, which transcend the Cartesian perspectivism inherent in more cinematic visual narratives. Unfortunately, this “hope” is inextricable from sexist notions of femininity. For the many male anime directors whose work is defined by young female protagonists, the visual pleasure of the shō jo is directly connected to her wide-eyed innocence and concomitant lack of social, political, and sexual power and experience.

Taking Back the Shojo ̄ : Innocence and Experience in Tsubasa and xxxHolic Meanwhile, female creators are perfectly capable of employing the shō jo for their own pleasure. CLAMP in particular has penned a number of magical young girls who are not content to chase after love and allow themselves to be enchanted and protected by men; indeed, they instead serve as the active protagonists of their own stories. In Magic Knight Rayearth, three high-school girls embark on a shō nen-style quest in which they fight powerful enemies and find friendship in a parallel world filled with danger. As discussed in the previous chapter, their objective is to save a crumbling nation by rescuing a childlike princess held captive by her dark and handsome chief priest. At the end of the manga, the three shō jo warriors fight the shō jo princess in an epic conflagration of fire and swordplay and giant robots. This female coming-of-age story can be seen as a development of the shō jo character itself, in that it problematizes shō jo stereotypes and character tropes while allowing its three young heroines the type of agency that is typically only available to male shō nen heroes. Lamarre argues that, in many works of Japanese animation, “the girl is associated with a power of great magnitude with potentially world-destructive capacities” and that she, “in all her innocence, is the site for activation of a mystery that can lead to world salvation or annihilation,” especially in the works of male

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authors, artists, and directors.17 In the hands of female manga artists, however, the shō jo learns to wield her power not merely as a “site for activation” but as an agent capable of gaining skill and competence on her own terms. Nevertheless, many of CLAMP’s characters retain qualities generally associated with shō jo tropes, especially wide-eyed innocence and purity of heart. The character Sakura from CLAMP’s Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle is a perfect example of this type of shō jo. Tsubasa’s Sakura is based on the title character of CLAMP’s earlier work Cardcaptor Sakura (1996–2000), which has become a classic of the magical shō jo genre.18 Tsubasa takes the iconic young heroine, whose cheerful motto is “everything is going to be okay” (zettai ni daijō bu desu yo), and places her within an alternate universe and storyline. In Tsubasa, Sakura is the princess of Clow Country, a magical kingdom whose vast deserts hide mysterious ruins. She befriends Syaoran, the adopted son of an archeologist, and the two grow up together as friends, gradually falling in love. On the day of Sakura’s coming-of-age ceremony, she accompanies Syaoran to a newly unearthed excavation site in the desert, where she demonstrates a strange power in a flash of wings and light. The awakening of this power causes her to lose her memories, which are scattered throughout multiple dimensions in the form of feathers. Syaoran therefore sets off on a journey with the all-but-lifeless Sakura in order to recover the princess’s memories. Over the course of this journey, Sakura regains her bright and cheerful disposition and is universally adored by everyone she encounters. Because of her innocent and trusting personality, Sakura can do no wrong. Firmly believing that everything will be okay if only she tries hard enough, she manages to solve problems facing the group of adventurers by virtue of her pure heart and the encouragement she provides to the men who protect her. As a shō jo, Sakura is characterized by enormous eyes that occupy almost a third of her face. Her pupils and irises are represented as one enormous black circle, which suggests friendliness and affability, and the borders of her eyes are not sharply delineated, which suggests openness and vulnerability. Her hair and clothing are flecked with white dots, as if she were sparkling with cleanness and goodness, and her weightless hair always seems to fly around her head, tousled by a magical wind that does not affect the other characters. Despite her girlishness, Sakura possesses great power, although she has no control over it; it merely flows through her, as if she were an empty vessel. When it emerges, her eyes

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become vacant and her facial expression grows slack. The wings that sprout from her back further emphasize her pure and angelic character. After she has lost her memories, she remains emotionally empty for the majority of the opening volumes of the series, doing nothing more than sleeping and apologizing to the male characters when she wakes up for a few moments. In the opening volumes of the manga, the shō jo Sakura is thus identified by her purity and emptiness. Because of the associations that the other characters project onto her, she must be defended and kept safe. During the first half of the story, Sakura almost never appears alone in a panel, constantly accompanied by or held by another character, whose arms and hands seem to shield her from the reader. The shō jo is less of her own being and more of a conduit for magical power and the feelings of the male characters who surround her at all times, holding and transporting her beautiful yet fragile body. The innocence and openness of the shō jo archetype is not limited to girls within the universe of CLAMP, however.19 The teenage male character Watanuki from xxxHolic also has many traits commonly associated with the female shō jo. His eyes can see spirits, a magical power which is associated with his physical body in the same way that Sakura’s power is tied to her corporal form. Spirits can sense Watanuki’s uniqueness and are attracted to him, which has caused him no small amount of trouble. Like Sakura, Watanuki both embodies and is threatened by powers beyond his understanding or ability to control, and, like Sakura, Watanuki has a round, childish face with large eyes and pupils. Unlike Sakura, Watanuki is anything but bright and cheerful. Nevertheless, he is still a decent person who will do anything to help someone who seems to be in distress. Watanuki’s innocence and defenselessness make him an easy target for the spirits that plague him. He is protected by a classmate named Dō meki, who has been trained by his family, which runs a Buddhist temple, to ward off spirits, even though he cannot see them. Dō meki is taller and more masculine than Watanuki, with smaller eyes, shorter hair, and more elongated body proportions. The juxtaposition between the two emphasizes Watanuki’s relative shō jo-ness. The relationship between Watanuki and Dō meki echoes many characteristics of a shō jo romantic relationship, from Dō meki’s constant teasing to Watanuki’s insistence that he does not enjoy his friend’s company.20 Even though Watanuki is male, he possesses the small, frail body, wide eyes, and innocence of a shō jo, as well as a mysterious magical power and the protection of a strong and highly skilled male friend.

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In a moment of intense desire to ride himself of his unwelcome ability, Watanuki stumbles across a strange house overshadowed by three enormous skyscrapers in the middle of Tokyo. He is drawn inside, where he is confronted with an eerie woman named Yūko, who lounges in a state of dishabille, surrounded by clouds of mysterious smoke (Fig. 3.1). Her narrow eyes, with small irises and even smaller pupils, are in direct contrast to Watanuki’s large eyes, making her appear ineffable and somewhat sinister, and her thick black hair is haphazardly spread across her clothing like a spider’s web. The crescent moons that adorn her throne-­ like chair and the choker around her neck associate her with darkness and with magic. In fact, she is the powerful “Dimensional Witch,” capable of granting any wish. Her services must be paid with a price equivalent to the value of the wish (taika), which is often terrible and mercilessly extracted. The price she charges Watanuki is his servitude to her for an indefinite period of time, after which she will grant his wish for eyes that no longer possess the ability to see the supernatural. When she agrees to grant Watanuki’s wish, Yūko is supremely sinister. Her smiling face is full of shadows, and the black of her hair blends into

Fig. 3.1  Yūko and Watanuki (xxxHolic Vol. 1, pp. 10–11)

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the shadows on her body. Her pupils are tiny, suggesting impenetrability. The smoke from her pipe twists across the panel like a snake or a ghost. This water-like smoke is one of Yūko’s primary visual motifs, making her seem dangerous and literally shrouded in mystery. The reader is thus led to believe not only that Yūko is a rather dark and sinister character but also that her wish-granting is not entirely altruistic. Yūko is not entirely sinister, and she often displays a more mischievous side. This aspect of her personality is not innocently playful, often tending toward selfishness and manipulation. Her visual portrayal is far from displeasing, however, and sexiness is a major factor in Yūko’s character design, with her shapely figure, long, slender limbs, heavy eyelashes, and frequently exposed skin and undergarments. This sexiness is not necessarily a positive aspect of her character, as it would be in most seinen manga. Shiokawa writes that, according to the conventions of shō jo manga in particular, readers “know that upon seeing very tall and beautiful women dripping in adult sexuality, one should run like hell because these characters are invariably deadly and evil.”21 The overt sexuality of an adult woman is thus contrasted against the nascent and subtly implied sexuality of a shō jo. Yūko’s adulthood is referenced not only by her sexuality but also by her smoking and drinking habits, as well as her connection to the world of exchange and commerce. She constantly references the concept of “inevitability” (hitsuzen), primarily as an explanation for what other characters see as bad luck. Although this concept often walks hand-in-hand with callousness and even cruelty in its application by Yūko, it also entails adult notions of responsibility. In Yūko’s adult world, nothing is given for free, and every accident and misfortune is tied to an act of unkindness committed in the past. As such, Yūko is the representative of a harsh adult world directly in contrast to the weightless and carefree fantasy of the shō jo, in which “everything is going to be okay.” The character Yūko has numerous precedents in the history of popular culture in Japan. The visual style of xxxHolic is reminiscent of the Art Deco movement popular in Japan in the early Shō wa period, and Yūko parades through its pages like a “modern girl,” the “glittering, decadent, middle-class consumer who, through her clothing, smoking, and drinking, flaunts tradition in the urban playgrounds of the late 1920s.”22 Even earlier were the “poison women” (dokufu), criminal media figures who were “emblematic of the dangers of female freedom, transgression, and sexuality” in the late nineteenth century. The vices and disrespect for convention of these poisonous modern women are clearly echoed in Yūko’s brazen behavior.23

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Yūko is not merely a deviant, however; she is also a spell-casting witch, a trope familiar to readers not only from manga such as Sailor Moon but also from the wide range of fairy tales popularized by Disney movies and children’s books. Psychoanalyst Sheldon Cashdan labels the witch as “a major player in these dramas […] whether she’s a black-hearted queen, and evil sorceress, or a vindictive stepmother, she is easily identified by the lethal threat she poses to the hero or heroine.”24 Although the witch is “black-hearted,” “evil,” “vindictive,” and “a lethal threat,” she is also “the diva of the piece,” and “few figures in a fairy tale are as powerful or commanding as the witch.”25 Cashdan interprets the witch as the figurative embodiment of negative personality traits, such as vanity, jealousy, and greed, that must be overcome by the pure-hearted protagonist of the story. The telling and retelling of fairy tales is thus a symbolic purging of these negative traits and a reassurance that they can, in fact, be overcome. The bad mother is repeatedly defeated by her children, who will ostensibly grow up outside of the shadow of her pernicious psychic influence. Jane Caputi sees the witch in a more positive light, however. The witch is not an abject interloper who must be killed, but instead an emblem of feminist empowerment who should be celebrated and embraced. Caputi states that “the femme fatale, witch, or vamp represents an outlawed form of female divinity, potency, genius, sexual agency, independence, vengeance, and power,” whereas the pure-hearted “niceness” of the young men and women who restore the patriarchal order by killing the witch are “toothless” and “impotent.”26 The witch character is typically represented as insane or evil, and quite often as visually hideous or inhuman, so that the actions of the young men and women who kill her can be easily interpreted as objectively good and desirable. The abjection of the witch also ensures that the feminine power that needs to be vanquished can be easily understood as dangerous and disgusting. Because the death of the witch therefore seems only natural, the innocence of the young men and women who kill her becomes their weakness. Because they are innocent, they cannot question their actions or understand how these actions trap them in a cycle of disenfranchisement and self-loathing. The reader is also complicit in the crime of failing to understand what has been repressed when the mother is killed in order to restore the rule of the father, who continues to justify this murder. Even though CLAMP portrays Yūko as a witch in terms of her appearance and personality, she is also a nurturer, or at least a proponent of tough love. In addition to the shō jo-like Watanuki, Yūko interacts with several young women who bring their problems to her. Yūko is not a fairy

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godmother, however, and she will not grant their wishes without a price. Yūko’s encounters with her clients are often presented as horror stories or morality tales in which the young women who come to Yūko for help end up more miserable than they were before they met her, but a close reading of these incidents reveals that the price Yūko asks the women to pay is often nothing more than self-reflection. Yūko refuses to distinguish between common conceptions of good and evil and right and wrong, and she rarely sees the perceived misfortune of the women who come to her as such. Instead, she forces them to question their behavior and beliefs in an attempt to force them to understand what they are really wishing for. The price these women must pay is painful introspection and the loss of innocence that this self-knowledge entails. In other words, Yūko urges the women to abandon their status as shō jo and enter the adult world of responsibility by paying the price for the power and agency that accompanies maturity and adulthood. Although her methods are indirect and occasionally callous, Yūko is not uncompassionate. When she asks one client to choose between the life she is living and the life that she feels she should be living, Yūko hovers over the woman seductively. The background of the panel depicting the distraught woman’s downcast face is white, whereas the background of the panel containing Yūko and the text bubbles of her probing questions is black. The figure of the young woman is also white, while Yūko’s clothing is primarily black. This sharp contrast suggests the temptation of a good angel by an evil demon. Yūko is far from malicious, however, as she gently guides instead of manipulatively forces the young woman to make a difficult decision. When the woman continues to insist on following the path society has set out for her by prioritizing her husband and child over her own individual identity and desires, Yūko appears briefly saddened but then fulfills the woman’s wish, the unhappy consequences of which she understands only after its realization. In xxxHolic, innocence and pure-­heartedness are not virtues but rather detriments to a clearer awareness of one’s self and one’s surroundings. One particular shō jo-like woman who fails to understand that she lies to herself when she lies to others is depicted as being surrounded by a cloud of oily black smoke. Despite Yūko’s best efforts, this woman is so deluded by the imaginary world she has created for herself that she cannot understand how she has been trapped by her own lies, a situation that is blatantly clear to the reader. The seemingly demonic Yūko is merely trying to protect the young women either from their own innocence or from their lack of insight into the way that the adult world works.

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The Yūko of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHolic intersect at several points in both manga, with Yūko acting as a distant yet concerned protector of Sakura and her companions. Over the course of her journey to recover her memories, Sakura realizes that the people she trusts are not the people she has been led to believe they are. In addition, there are frightening things in the background of her family that she never could have imagined. The pain resulting from these realizations injures Sakura deeply, and she is forced to abandon the role of the innocent shō jo about halfway through the story. Sakura is paralyzed by her fear, but Yūko helps her to understand that, in order to move forward, she must accept the unpleasant truths about herself, as well as the fact that she can never change what has already happened. The title page of the second volume of xxxHolic displays Sakura and Yūko together, with the older woman hovering protectively over the young girl. The matching patterns on their kimono suggest that they are closely related, perhaps as two halves of the same whole, and, in the background, Yūko’s watery smoke motif is overlaid with Sakura’s cherry blossom motif. Although the two characters may seem diametrically opposed, CLAMP implies that they are in a beneficial relationship, with the older woman guiding the younger through the trails of her coming of age. The shō jo-like Watanuki is also able to grow as a person through his interactions with Yūko. At the end of the series, he ends up taking on her job as a stylish, wish-granting witch like his mentor—thus overcoming the gendered limitations of the role as well. In the fictional world created by CLAMP, the shō jo is not purely good and the witch is not purely evil. The shō jo is not required to fight or defeat the witch, and the witch is not required to pander to unrealistic and debilitating expectations of female purity and innocence. Tsubasa and xxxHolic break down the boundaries of gender and age stereotypes, and they challenge the conventions of demographic publishing genres as well. Tsubasa, serialized in Weekly Shō nen Magazine (Shūkan Shō nen Magajin), is targeted at an audience of older elementary school boys.27 xxxHolic, serialized in Weekly Young Magazine (Shūkan Yangu Magajin), is aimed at an older audience of male readers in high school or college. Both series have a wide range of readers. The lavish publication of xxxHolic in tankō bon book form, as well as the numerous fanworks depicting the romantic relationship between various male characters in Tsubasa, suggests a considerable female audience. The modes of storytelling of the two manga are noticeably different. In Tsubasa emphasis is on action; in

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contrast, in xxxHolic emphasis is on atmosphere. At first glance, Tsubasa seems to be easily identifiable as shō nen manga, while xxxHolic is not out of place in a seinen magazine for older teenage and college-age male readers. In the final chapters of The Anime Machine, Lamarre compares differences in manga paneling to differences in the uses of animation technologies, and he references the layout of manga panels as one of the key factors in determining the genre and overall mood of a particular work. He references the stereotype that, “at moments of great affective importance, some shō jo manga tend to dispense with panels altogether, in favor of sparkling collages and temporal whirlpools, while some shō nen manga draw lines of force and splatter ink across the pages as their combat scenes sprawl over and finally destroy the frames of action.”28 The visual style of Tsubasa tends more toward that of shō nen manga, with its heavy “lines of force” and its “sprawling” combat scenes, buts its narrative emphasis seems to be more on romance and character development than the typical series of battles. Likewise, xxxHolic outwardly seems to fall more into the shō jo category, with its creative use of panels and “temporal whirlpools,” but it features almost no (overt) romance and no conventionally attractive male characters. The genre categories of both manga are thus indeterminate, which is appropriate to the erasure of common gendered stereotypes that occurs in both titles. Both Tsubasa and xxxHolic conform to many of the genre conventions of shō nen and seinen manga aimed at male audiences. Both titles also have male protagonists who serve as the point of view characters for the readers of their respective stories. Nevertheless, the characters adorning the covers of the manga are Sakura and Yūko. These two female characters drive their respective stories forward while possessing a degree of subjectivity, interiority, and agency that is relatively uncommon in the leading female characters in shō nen and seinen manga of the 1990s and early 2000s. Sakura and Yūko are clearly the heroines of their respective stories. Furthermore, by casting these two women into an apprentice/mentor relationship of the kind common in stories targeted at a male audience, CLAMP is also positing Sakura as the shō nen and Yūko as the seinen with whom readers are expected to identify. CLAMP therefore subverts not only the gender roles of its fictional characters but also the gendered nature of an audience presumably determined by gendered publishing categories. Although seemingly monolithic demographic genres exert an enormous degree of influence over the way manga is edited, published, and

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marketed in Japan, CLAMP’s subversion of standard genre-based character dynamics challenges the validity and necessity of these demographic genres. The success of Tsubasa and xxxHolic in Japan and in overseas markets challenges the presumed profitability of these publishing categories as well. CLAMP therefore demonstrates that female creators are able to use gendered tropes in gendered media in a manner that overturns artificial and sexist notions of gender while still appealing to a broad and diverse audience. The claim that media targeted at males has a more general appeal and sells better than media targeted at females is almost a truism in entertainment industries, but the bestselling manga of CLAMP prove that gender tropes can serve as much more than narrative architecture, and that readers of all genders can find a great deal of appeal both in stories that transcend demographic genre categories and in a pointed critique of the limitations placed on stories by the narrative refusal to see female characters as nothing more than the objects of male discourse and desire. This is also the case with CLAMP’s bestselling seinen manga Chobits, in which a gynoid overtly characterized by her sexuality decides the fate of late-­ stage capitalism and, along the way, messily destabilizes the neat categorizations of demographic genres.

Postfeminism and Posthumanity in Chobits CLAMP’s manga Chobits was released in North America by Tokyopop starting in early 2003, right as the wave of mainstream consumer popularity for manga was beginning to swell.29 Chobits was a major bestseller for the publisher, thanks in part to its 26-episode animated adaptation, which was licensed by now-defunct distributer Geneon. The original manga was serialized in Japan between September 2000 and October 2002  in Kodansha’s Weekly Young Magazine, the seinen publication that would later run xxxHolic. At the beginning of the story, Chobits is primarily narrated from the perspective of a young man named Motosuwa Hideki, who has graduated from high school but wasn’t able to pass his college entrance exams. He has therefore moved to Tokyo, where he’s a full-time student at an exam prep school. He lives by himself in a tiny apartment, and he makes ends meet by working as a server at a small izakaya gastropub. Perhaps because Hideki has lived most of his life in rural area, he is somehow unaware that personal computers, or “persocoms,” now mostly take the form of self-reliant android and gynoid companions. Hideki wants his own persocom; as he cannot afford one, his knowledge of them is limited.

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One night after work, Hideki stumbles upon a persocom that seems to have been thrown out with the garbage. He takes her home, turns her on, and names her Chii, which is the only sound she seems capable of making. It turns out that Chii is not only a custom-built persocom, but a very powerful and special one. Hideki learns that she might even be a legendary “Chobit.” Internet rumors claim that a Chobit has true artificial intelligence, that is, they are able to learn and grow without any programming or software. Later in the story, the reader learns that Chii is the second human-shaped persocom made by the inventor of the technology. Moreover, she carries the memories of the emotional pain that can arise in a relationship between a flesh-and-blood human and a synthetic intelligence. Specifically, she fell in love with her creator, who was not able to return her romantic affection. As a result, Chii is a vehicle for a doomsday program that can delete the recognition software of all persocoms in the world, thus rendering them incapable of forming an emotional relationship with any user. Should this program be deployed, the reader is given to understand that there will be a great deal of suffering, as the society and infrastructure of every technologically advanced country in the world will be irreparably shattered. In other words, Chii is an apocalypse machine in the shape of a 16-year-old girl. Chii has become one of the many iconic representations of the attractive young bishō jo characters that have been so prevalent in anime, manga, video games, and other otaku media since the mid-1980s. As discussed in the previous chapter, there is a good deal of crossover appeal between the mahō shō jo (“magical girl”) characters of the 1970s and the bishō jo of the 1980s. However, one of the primary differences between the two is that bishō jo often appear in fantasy and science fiction stories that especially appeal to a seinen demographic. According to psychologist and cultural critic Saitō Tamaki, one of the most prominent examples of a bishō jo character is the flying warrior princess Nausicaä from Miyazaki Hayao’s 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika), “who can be considered of supreme importance for the [formation of the trope of the] beautiful fighting girl.”30 Nausicaä is not only strong and dynamic but also very cute and innocent-looking. Another notable aspect of Nausicaä’s character is that she is closely tied to the end of her world, a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is all but inhabitable to human beings. In the film version, she prevents a war from breaking out, thus forestalling further ecological disaster. Moreover, she is characterized by the film’s story and visual stylizations as the savior of both her people and of

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humankind as a whole. The manga version of the story, which Miyazaki serialized in Animage magazine between 1982 and 1984, is a bit more complicated. At the end of the manga, Nausicaä learns that the people currently occupying the planet are incapable of surviving in an unpolluted atmosphere; if the air and the earth are purified, then they will die. Instead of saving the human race, Nausicaä chooses to ensure the health of the environment, thereby relegating humanity to a darkly uncertain fate. Nevertheless, the manga treats her as no less of a savior for having made this decision, which suggests open-ending possibilities for further biological and societal transformation. Post-apocalyptic scenarios that feature the sudden or gradual extinction of the human species are far from uncommon in otaku media. Some of these scenarios, such as those of the 2006 animated series Ergo Proxy (Erugo purakushı)̄ and the 2009 video game Final Fantasy XIII, feature a dystopia that is largely a result of humanity artificially clinging to life through an authoritarian application of advanced technology. In other scenarios, such as those of the 2013 animated series From the New World (Shinsekai yori) and Humanity Has Declined (Jinrui wa suitai shimashita), extremely low birthrates and sparse population densities have resulted in relatively peaceful agrarian societies in which most humans lead rich and satisfying lives as their numbers thin and their civilization fades away. A common narrative pattern in American popular media features a small band of male friends or a lone male hero who attempt to avert disaster. In contrast, the apocalypse has already happened in many Japanese popular media titles. In such settings, the heroes left to pick up the pieces afterward tend to be attractive young women, or bishō jo. In fact, many of the most iconic characters of contemporary Japanese manga and anime, from Ayanami Rei of Neon Genesis Evangelion to Mikasa Ackerman of Attack on Titan (Shingeki no kyojin, 2013), are bishō jo directly associated with apocalyptic and posthuman themes. Cultural critics such as Susan Napier have highlighted the parallels between attractive young bishō jo characters and themes of freedom, flight, hope, and healing. It is interesting that so many of these characters are also closely related to the end of the world.31 Why would the apocalypse be repeatedly connected to something so desirable? William LaFleur has characterized Buddhist eschatology as it is generally understood in a Japanese context to be cyclical, with one state of being coming into existence as another state of being fades away. The concept of reincarnation illustrates this cyclicality, as a soul is believed to pass in

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between our world and the spirit world over and over again. As LaFleur has argued in Liquid Life, both children and the elderly are considered to be not entirely human because they are in a transitional state between one world and the next.32 The uncertain ontological status of the very young and the very old does not mean that they are somehow less than human; rather, they occupy a different plane of existence and are bound and governed by different principles. In the same way, entire human societies experience both fertile and fallow periods, and decline is just as natural and inevitable as prosperity. In a Buddhist worldview, the only constant is change, and the old must fall away if the new is to be born. Neither death nor the apocalypse is an ending, but rather a beginning. The acceptance of this fact is at the core of the state of emotional placidity called satori, or “enlightenment.” It therefore makes sense to associate the apocalypse with the bishō jo, whose nascent sexuality and regenerative reproductive capacity codes the end of the world as a positive event that offers the possibility of peace and ecological balance. Chii, the gynoid heroine of Chobits, is not a young woman, however, and her physical inability to achieve physical intimacy with a male human being is introduced in the first chapter of the manga. Chii’s “on” switch is between her legs, and, if it is pressed, she will be re-initialized, losing all of her memories and personality traits in the process. In The Anime Machine, Lamarre discusses the anime adaptation of Chobits at length, relating it to other animated stories about bishō jo robot lovers. Lamarre writes that “the gynoid is often associated with what might be called a male-directed mode of address, in which the primary concern is to present women to men, and to figure out what women are or can be for men.”33 He considers the possibility that “an address to girls and women can also be read in the gynoid displacement of male mechaphilia”—that is to say, the replacement of giant robot fighters with cute robot girlfriends—and he quotes Donna Haraway’s famous assertion that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” which has often been interpreted to mean that an absence of gender would be preferable to the strictures of rigid gender roles.34 Lamarre has strong doubts about the potential displacement of “maledirected modes of address associated with the gynoid scenario in manga and anime.” He argues that, in Chobits, “we never really see the underlying mechanisms, only the adorable shō jo surfaces.”35 Furthermore, he identifies the “critical scene and the crucial image” of the series as the moment in which Chii activates after Hideki presses the “on” switch between her legs.

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Lamarre’s reading of the anime adaptation of Chobits raises interesting observations on the gendered nature of the relationship between technology and the presumably male anime viewer, but CLAMP’s original manga is extremely concerned with the interiority and desires of its gynoid heroine even as it posits her as a posthuman subject fully capable of controlling not merely her relationship with one man but the relationship between human beings and advanced technology on a much broader scale. The ultimate moral question posed by Chobits is whether or not restarting the world in this way would in fact be the right thing to do, both for human beings and for the persocoms themselves. At the end of Chobits, the character with the agency to decide the fate of the world is not Hideki, Chii’s ostensible “owner,” but Chii herself. As mentioned earlier, Chii has the potential to trigger a technological blackout that would result in widespread mayhem and destruction while forcing human society to sever its dependence on computers. Toward the end of the manga, Chii does in fact begin to initiate the process, and the simultaneous decommissioning of all persocoms in Tokyo causes the lights to go out and the streets to flood as cars and buildings explode. It’s important to note, however, that Chobits positions this external disaster as completely subordinate to a more quiet and personal disaster, that of the perceived loss of meaningful connections between human beings. Throughout the manga, Chii reads a fictional series of picture books titled The City with No People (Hito ga inai machi). These books, which are written and illustrated by one of Chii’s creators, obliquely suggest that human civilization is crumbling because people no longer wish to spend time with each other; instead they obsess over their persocoms, which are not, after all, people. This abstract observation initially seems to be supported by the personal histories of the people that Chii and Hideki encounter over the course of the story. For example, Hideki’s cram school teacher, Shimizu Takako, is in the process of leaving her husband, who has become so deeply involved with his persocom that he no longer notices whether or not she is at home with him. Hideki’s co-worker, Ō mura Yumi, is in love with a man who was once married to a persocom, and she has given up on their relationship because she knows that, as a human being, she will never be as flawless and selfless as a machine. Hideki himself remarks several times over the course of the manga that it is odd to see so many people walking around Tokyo accompanied not by their friends but by their persocoms.

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Despite making a strong case against an overreliance on technology, Chobits is not content to wallow in conservative discourses that lament the displacement of older forms of communication or that express one-­ dimensional anxiety over the prevalence of relationships that are conducted digitally as opposed to physically. Instead, Chobits offers a more radical take on humanity’s evolving connections with advanced technology by challenging the very concept of humanity. Although the beginning of the manga is narrated from the perspective of a handsome young man who comes into the possession of a beautiful young computer, chapters are increasingly narrated from the perspective of the actual computer herself as the story progresses. What becomes clear early in the manga is that even simple persocoms have agency and interiority, as they are repeatedly depicted talking to each other and having lives outside of their relationships with their owners. One might say that the series thus passes a sort of computer-oriented Bechdel test. Chii quickly begins to move according to her own will, acting outside of the wishes and instructions of Hideki and becoming quite frightening when someone attempts to access her body or her data without her consent (Fig. 3.2). In fact, it is Chii’s very interiority that threatens the safety and smooth functioning of Hideki’s society. It turns out that Chii was one of the original human-shaped persocoms. She had made a deliberate decision to erase her memories of her past life because she was so distraught by the loss of her older “sister” Freya’s love could never be returned; moreover, her pain was so great that she chose to permanently deactivate herself after uploading a portion of her data into her sister Elda, who would later become Chii. The purpose of Chii’s doomsday program is therefore not to punish humans, but rather to ensure that persocoms will not be forced to exist in a constant state of traumatic servitude. The initialization of this program depends on whether Chii can successfully fall in love and form a strong romantic relationship of mutual respect with the person she has chosen as her companion. Quite literally, if the boy she likes does not love her unconditionally, then she will destroy the world. This destruction is not merely a matter of electrical blackouts and crashing airplanes and exploding gas mains; rather, it is an apocalypse of feelings. In the third and final section of The Anime Machine, “Girl Computerized,” Lamarre describes Chii as reminiscent of the main female characters in Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (Fushigi no umi no Nadia, 1992) and Castle in the Sky, as her innocence contains a mysterious power

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Fig. 3.2  Chii (Chobits Vol. 5, p. 77)

of potentially world-destroying proportions. While both Nadia and Sheeta have hyper-technological pendants, however, Chii’s entire body is hyper-­ technological, so she cannot remove herself from the possibility of a mechanized world by simply taking off her necklace as the two human girls can. Lamarre argues that, in gynoid narratives like Chobits, the bishō jo has thus

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gone from controlling great power to becoming a weapon of mass destruction herself. The ostensible responsibility for this power therefore rests in the hands of Hideki, the male protagonist of Chobits, who effectively owns Chii. Lamarre connects this story to a broader pattern of “boy lives with gynoid” narratives,36 which he sees as normalizing solipsistic male mechaphilia through sentimentalism. Referring to Lacanian theories of sexuality, Lamarre reads this scenario as an onanistic perversion of endless substitution for an actual woman. The result of this perversion for Chii, the non-­ woman, is that her reality is entirely male-centered, as various visual devices figure the male as subjective while Chii is figured as an eternal object throughout the anime. Therefore, if subjectivity in the films of Miyazaki is post-Cartesian, then that of Chobits is post-Lacanian, a “perversion of male perversion.”37 Lamarre’s reading highlights the limitations and inconsistencies of female characters, but it fails to consider a female view or feminist interpretation of these characters. Scholars such as Donna Haraway and Livia Monnet have suggested numerous non-phallocentric readings of nonhuman women,38 but Lamarre marginalizes feminist posthumanism, as well as the possibility that a female character might possess her own subjectivity separate from that of any of the male characters. Although Lamarre reads the female protagonist of the anime version of Chobits as being configured as being an inhuman object of male desire, CLAMP’s original manga turns the male protagonist into an object of desire for Chii and, by subjectivizing its gynoid characters, severely problematizes notions the dualistic ontology of human and inhuman. The apocalypse that Chii can choose to initiate would essentially force humans to live without computers while depriving them of the companionship they have come to enjoy with her persocoms. By the end of the manga, the reader has been encouraged to understand that this would not in fact be a good thing, since most of the major tensions in the relationships between human and persocom characters have been successfully resolved. In other words, the end of humanity as expressed in the diegetic picture book The City with No People has already happened, and it was not unpleasant. In fact, the narrative thrust of the story ensures that the reader does not want the end of humanity to be averted or reversed. Theoretical posthumanism centers around the idea that there has never been either a stable human subject or even an inalienable human essence. Furthermore, due to biomedical technology ranging from vaccines to in vitro fertilization, we as a species have not been strictly “human” for

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quite some time. Many of us in the real world directly benefit from such technologies, and most of us would hesitate to return to a pre-­ industrialized world. Yet, the science fiction narratives of many cultures have expressed a deep concern over our increasing detachment from the “natural” world. As literature and media scholar Myra Seaman has written, “As expectations of body change, expectations of selfhood change as well. This is the appeal but also the threat addressed by popular culture engagements with the posthuman.”39 Seaman argues that the most consistent marker of humanity in texts running the gamut from Kazuo Ishiguro’s speculative novel Never Let Me Go to the television series Battlestar Galactica is emotion; more specifically, it is the ability to experience love. Interestingly, instead of demonstrating that a posthuman character like Darth Vadar or Robocop is human after all, Chobits challenges the Cartesian duality between human and inhuman by positioning love as a common language shared between people and synthetic intelligences. Poststructuralist critical theorist Neil Badmington, in an essay titled “Theorizing Posthumanism,” argues that, if the anthropocentric bias—or the illogical tendency to privilege the human—is removed from the discussion of posthumanism, then the end of humanity suddenly becomes less of a distinctive apocalypse and more of a faint hum in the background as the boundaries determining what it means to be human constantly shift.40 This process of destabilization is precisely what drives the story of Chobits, in which human beings and machines come together to form something that is not inhuman or less than human but something entirely different, something more than the sum of its parts. In opposition to Lamarre’s assertion of the importance of the scene in which Hideki activates Chii, I would like to argue that the “critical scene and the crucial image” of the Chobits manga can be found at its climax, in which Chii activates the romantic love between her and Hideki. Certainly, this scene displays the “mechaphilia” of which Lamarre is so intensely distrustful, but it is not the selfish and antisocial withdrawal of a male human being into a fantasy of solipsistic onanism. Rather, it’s the possibility of an evolution of the human species in which the end of “humanity” is not a final end but rather the beginning of a new state of being, one in which the key elements of the past can be translated into the new language of the future. Chii, as a posthuman bishō jo, is a fitting avatar of the apocalyptic process of one world ending so that a new world may come into being. The sexuality of Chii’s female-coded body promises sweetness and fertility and

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suggests a capacity for growth and renewal. That being said, Chobits does not reproduce phallocentric notions of female sexuality as a tool for mankind. Rather, Chii’s purpose is to ensure that the power in the relationship between humans and posthumans is shared evenly and with full consent. One of the central questions of Chobits is whether the world needs to be destroyed in order to be saved, and the apocalypse it envisions, the gradual demise of our current understanding of the human as a state of being opposed to unnatural technology, is something that we should not be afraid of. By casting its representative of such an apocalypse as a bishō jo, the manga encourages to embrace this destiny, causing us not only to feel strong emotions for a posthuman being but also to consider the possibility that such a being would possess strong emotions itself. By framing Chobits as a love story about a computer and her human boyfriend, CLAMP encourages readers to undertake the affective labor of imagining a positive posthuman future in which the gradual shift in our notions of body and selfhood is not seen as an ending, but rather as the beginning of something new and different. Posthumanism, as a philosophical and cultural movement, generally expresses a complicated yet positive attitude concerning the end of humanity. Chobits offers an alternative approach to these issues by shifting the conversation away from the more male-dominated science fiction elements of posthumanism. CLAMP’s manga directs our attention to the more embodied and intimate aspects of the brave new world as it deconstructs gendered tropes relating to innocence and experience in much the same way as Tsubasa and xxxHolic. Since the bishō jo has acted as both an object of desire and an object of discourse in many shō nen and seinen narratives, it is tempting to read female characters and female bodies as eternal objects, but the work of female creators like CLAMP demonstrates that shō jo are perfectly capable of achieving their own subjectivity even within genres often targeted at a male demographic, such as seinen science fiction, as well as male-dominated discursive spaces, such as philosophical posthumanism. It is vitally important, then, not to take a male audience or worldview for granted during conversations about work created by women, for women, and about women. In the next chapter, I will examine how female readers reconfigure mass media texts to better reflect and express their own concerns and interests through transformative fanwork, which in turn informs and empowers new generations of female creators.

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Notes 1. Examples of such manga would be the titles serialized in Kodansha’s Shūkan Morning magazine and Shō gakukan’s Gekkan IKKI magazine, although such series can be considered to be categorized as seinen manga (as stated on their Japanese Wikipedia pages). Another large body of manga that does not fall into the four main demographic genres is children’s (kodomo) manga, which includes titles such as the perennially popular Doraemon. Frederick Schodt’s Dreamland Japan Writings on Modern Manga (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2007) has more information on manga magazines, demographic genres, and publishing categories. 2. One of the most famous of these proto-shō jo manga is Tezuka Osamu’s Ribon no kishi (Princess Knight), which was originally serialized in Kodansha’s Shō jo Club magazine between 1953 and 1956. 3. Such young men are stylized as shō jo-like through artistic conventions common to the visual characterization of shō jo characters, such as large eyes, ornately styled hair, and a more “girlish” face-to-body ratio. Watanuki, the male protagonist of xxxHolic, is a contemporary incarnation of such a character. 4. Shiokawa, “Cute But Deadly,” 101. 5. Frenchy Lunning unpacks the gendered implication of this clothing style in her essay “Under the Ruffles: Shō jo and the Morphology of Power,” in Mechademia: Second Arc 6: User Enhanced (2011): 3–19. She suggests that the emphasis on purity and vulnerability characterizes such outfits as feminine. 6. This literary construct, known as jun ai (pure love), saw a revival with the publication of Katayama Kyō ichi’s 2001 novel Sekai no Chūshin de, Ai o Sakebu (translated into English as Socrates in Love). 7. Susan Napier, Anime, 150. 8. Napier, “Matter out of Place: Carnival, Containment, and Cultural Recovery in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.” Journal of Japanese Studies 32, no.2 (2006): 297. 9. The shō jo is a different character type than the bishō jo discussed in the previous chapter, although there is significant overlap. In terms of visual characterization, a shō jo is more childlike, while a bishō jo is more overtly sexualized. 10. Napier, Anime, 149. 11. Sharalyn Orbaugh, “Busty Battlin’ Babes: The Evolution of the Shō jo in 1990s Visual Culture,” in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, ed. Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 206. 12. Ibid., 235. 13. Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 11.

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14. Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 73. 15. Lamarre uses the character Sheeta from Castle in the Sky to demonstrate how the girl, who has the ability to float weightlessly through the air, provides a juxtaposition against the awkward and bulky airships and war planes piloted by the film’s male characters. 16. Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 84. 17. Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 231. 18. Cardcaptor Sakura was adapted into an anime series (1998–2000), two feature-length films (1999 and 2000), and ten video games (released between 1999 and 2004). Along with Sailor Moon, Sakura was one of the most recognizable magical shō jo characters of the 1990s. 19. Innocence and “girlishness” are not restricted to female characters in the broader genre of shō jo manga. One of the defining works of the genre, Hagio Moto’s Tō ma no shinzō (The Heart of Thomas, 1974–1975), is centered around two young male characters, Thomas and Eric, whose visual and narrative characterization as shō jo seems almost stereotypical to contemporary readers, partially because Hagio’s work was so influential to other shō jo artists. 20. The pseudo-romance between Watanuki and Dō meki, a relationship that is far from unusual in the works of CLAMP, is widely discussed and accepted by Japanese fans of the series. Japanese fans have drawn countless dō jinshi fan manga that imagine this relationship as open and explicit. This aspect of CLAMP’s manga will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. 21. Shiokawa, “Cute but Deadly,” 119. 22. Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 51. 23. Christine Marran, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxiv. 24. Sheldon Cashdan, The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 17. 25. Ibid., 30. 26. Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 328. 27. The magazine’s audience of boys is indicated by its emphasis on action and its furigana reading guide for all of the Chinese characters in the text. 28. Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 289. 29. Casey Brienza, “Did Manga Conquer America?: Implications for the Cultural Policy of ‘Cool Japan,’” International Journal of Cultural Policy 20, no.4 (2014): 383. 30. Saitō , Beautiful Fighting Girl, 111. 31. Napier, Anime, 171, 251. 32. William LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33.

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33. Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 216. 34. Ibid., 217. 35. Ibid., 219. 36. Such narratives include Den’ei shō jo (1992), Bannō bunka nekomusume (1998), Hando meido Mei (2000), and Mahoromachikku (2001–2003). Many of these animated series are based on manga, although a significant number are based on bishō jo games in which the player’s objective is to court one or more of the attractive young women who surround the male protagonist. 37. Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 298. 38. See Donna Jeanne Harraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) and Livia Monnet’s “Invasion of the Woman Snatchers: The Problem of A-Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits within.” In Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), which explore the possibilities of a postgendered world in both fiction and reality. In “Sex and the Single Cyborg,” Sharalyn Orbaugh demonstrates how female cyborg bodies in Japanese animation are positioned to serve the interests of male characters and male viewers, this adding a critical feministic perspective on the tendency of male anime directors to objectify female characters in order to make philosophical statements concerning technology. See Sharalyn Orbaugh. “Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity,” Science Fiction Studies Vol. 29, No. 3 (2002), pp. 436–452. 39. Myra Seaman, “Becoming More (than) Human: Affective Posthumanisms, Past and Future.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 37, no.2 (2007): 249. 40. Neil Badmington, “Theorizing Posthumanism,” Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 11.

References Badmington, Neil. 2003. Theorizing Posthumanism. Cultural Critique 53: 10–27. Brienza, Casey. 2014. Did Manga Conquer America?: Implications for the Cultural Policy of ‘Cool Japan’. International Journal of Cultural Policy 20 (4): 383–398. Caputi, Jane. 2004. Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cashdan, Sheldon. 1999. The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives. New York: Basic Books.

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Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge. LaFleur, William R. 1992. Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lamarre, Thomas. 2009. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lunning, Frenchy. 2011. Under the Ruffles: Shō jo and the Morphology of Power. Mechademia: Second Arc 6: User Enhanced: 3–19. Marran, Christine L. 2007. Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Monnet, Livia. 2007. Invasion of the Woman Snatchers: The Problem of A-Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. In Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, 193–221. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Napier, Susan. 2005. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2006. Matter Out of Place: Carnival, Containment, and Cultural Recovery in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Journal of Japanese Studies 32 (2): 287–310. Orbaugh, Sharalyn. 2002. Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity. Science Fiction Studies 29 (3): 436–452. ———. 2003. Busty Battlin’ Babes: The Evolution of the Shō jo in 1990s Visual Culture. In Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, ed. Joshua S.  Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill, 200–227. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Saitō , Tamaki. 2011. Beautiful Fighting Girl. Trans. J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schodt, Frederick L. 2007. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press. Seaman, Myra J. 2007. Becoming More (than) Human: Affective Posthumanisms, Past and Future. JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 37 (2): 246–275. Shiokawa, Kanako. 1999. Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics. In Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy, ed. John A.  Lent, 93–125. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press. Silverberg, Miriam. 2006. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 4

Queering the Media Mix: The Female Gaze in Japanese Fancomics

Although the concept of the male gaze as expressed in Laura Mulvey’s classic 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has been challenged and updated by critics proposing ideas such as a hermaphroditic gaze and a homosexual gaze, the visual and narrative conventions associated with the heterosexual male gaze are still readily apparent in contemporary media across the globe. The male gaze has been subverted in a galaxy of works spread out across myriad artistic formats, but it remains deeply entrenched in media practices and exerts a hegemonic influence over what is published and released for mainstream audiences. Therefore, while it is important to demonstrate how female creators and consumers operate outside of the realm of the male gaze, it is equally important to examine how they subvert it from within male-dominated media ecosystems. Scholars of comparative literature tend toward a postmodern and poststructuralist understanding of the relationship between writers and readers. Although an individual author may be dead, the corporate author is still enormously powerful, and there is no shortage of ready instances of authorial control in contemporary media. To give an example, the BBC television series Sherlock, which first aired in 2010, has won numerous awards and was one of the most watched and pirated drama series in the world during its first three seasons.1 The show had a large fanbase that was active across multiple social networking platforms, including Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. Although it is difficult to quantify any given group © The Author(s) 2020 K. Hemmann, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_4

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of fans, circumstantial evidence indicates that a sizable percentage of this fanbase is female.2 Despite the fact that Sherlock’s creators are certainly aware of its female fans, they do not always seem to accord them much respect.3 In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, series co-creator Steven Moffat offered the following assessment: The original [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle] stories had a huge female following, which I’d never forgotten, and that’s because the Victorian ladies liked the way Sherlock looked. So I thought, use this massively exciting, rather handsome man who could see right through your heart and have no interest…of course, he’s going to be a sex god! I think we pitched that character right. I think our female fanbase all believe that they’ll be the one to melt that glacier. They’re all wrong, nothing will melt that glacier.4

Apparently female fans do not appreciate the show’s writing, acting, drama, or cinematography; instead, they are only capable of enjoying the physical appearance of the male leads. Furthermore, in response to fans’ delight over the homoerotically charged friendship between Holmes and Watson, various people involved with the show, from Moffat to several of the actors, have vehemently stated that the characters are unquestionably straight,5 thus echoing literary critic Loren Estleman’s assertion that “those who suggest homosexuality…either are ignorant…or stubbornly refuse to accept Holmes’s much-discussed misogyny at face value.”6 Despite the pressure of numerous fan interpretations to the contrary, many of the main players on the stage of the Sherlock television series continue to insist on the canonical intent of the original author. Why bother with the fans at all, then? This is where the “media mix” (media mikkusu) comes into play. As Marc Steinberg explains in Anime’s Media Mix, “Since the 1980s, the term ‘media mix’ has been the most widely used word to describe the phenomenon of transmedia communication, specifically, the development of a particular media franchise across multiple media types, over a particular period of time.”7 Steinberg outlines the company strategy of the Japanese publishing giant Kadokawa Books (Kadokawa Shoten), which launched its own film studio and record label in the 1970s, thereby rendering itself able to create its own anime and anime soundtracks based on its most popular manga titles. The company simultaneously launched several new publishing imprints so its manga could be released as novels and vice versa. Company president Kadokawa Haruki is credited with having

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coined the phrase “media mix” after having studied the American advertising theory of the previous decade. This approach advocated placing ads not only in newspapers but also in magazines and on the radio, not to mention on the emerging medium of television. Kadokawa’s executive decision regarding the intellectual properties of the Kadokawa Corporation was not unprecedented in Japan, however. Tezuka Osamu had pursued a similar strategy by having his own company, Mushi Productions, launch a magazine and several toy lines to promote his new television anime Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu, 1963–1966), which was itself based on a manga that Tezuka serialized in several stages across multiple periodicals. The media mix model proved economically viable, and, as Steinberg demonstrates, “a new, stable regime of media connection emerged.”8 Over the next 50 years, this regime gradually expanded to include the productions of fan communities as well. As this media mix has had several more decades to evolve in Japan than in the United States and Europe, the Japanese understanding of convergence culture is significantly more progressive concerning the user-­ generated portion of the mix. Specifically, Japanese publishers, producers, and entertainment corporations create media properties in such a way as to encourage audience participation through transformative works. The production of such works is taken for granted and directly incorporated into their business strategies and marketing models. Instead of discouraging fanworks such as fanfiction, fan art, and fancomics, Japanese media producers depend on them to ensure a healthy and stable economic ecosystem for their franchise properties. Therefore, in Japan, fans do not exist outside of transmedia communication and corporate convergence cultures; rather, fans are integral to the success of the media mix. Since the Japanese media mix model may serve as an indicator of the future evolution of overseas media cultures, which are increasingly pursuing mutually beneficial relationships with fan cultures, a better understanding of Japanese fanworks and their relationship to mainstream media is useful for understanding the transnational fandom response to popular titles such as Sherlock.9 Japanese fanworks exist in a plethora of media, ranging from fiction to computer games, but this chapter will focus on dō jinshi or self-published fancomics. A dō jinshi is, in essence, a publication by and for fans. A possible translation might be “fanzine.” However, the connotations of this word in North American fan cultures10 fail to capture the professional production values of the vast majority of dō jinshi, which are printed in

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small batches by specialty printing companies and collectively financed by the group of fans (known as a sākuru or “circle”) who contributed to the work. With the advent of artist-friendly social networking sites such as Pixiv, many fans now operate as individuals and refer to themselves as kojin (one-person) circles. In recent years, a collaborative publication between kojin artists has come to be referred to as a gō dō shi (multi-artist fan book). Although dō jinshi primarily featuring fanfiction (known as dō jin noberu or “novels”) are not rare, the contents of dō jinshi can generally be classified as manga. Dō jinshi have a wide range of distribution through online channels and meticulously organized and well-publicized market “events” (ibento), and secondhand copies can be found at specialty chain stores such as Mandarake and K-Books as well. Certain branches of Book-Off, a large national chain specializing in used books, may carry dō jinshi as well, especially those located in or contingent to entertainment districts catering to fannish interests, such as Akihabara in Tokyo and Nanba in Osaka. Thus, although dō jinshi are the products of a subculture, their creators and distributers make no attempt to hide their activities or render the fruits of their labor inaccessible to newcomers. By working outside of conventional publishing channels, dō jinshi creators have little need to conform to the demands of market forces or demographic genre conventions. Their creators are, therefore, freer to challenge or subvert the visual and narrative conventions implicit in the narrative and visual structures catering to a presumed male gaze. As the massive attendance at fan events such as the biannual Comic Market demonstrates, dō jinshi are not representative of an isolated corner of an insular fandom.11 Hundreds of thousands of people buy and sell these fanworks at conventions attended by manga publishers, animation studios, and video game producers. Despite the obvious violation of intellectual property laws, the content industry allows dō jinshi to exist without persecution. This is because the fan cultures surrounding their production and distribution allow the media mix sponsored by the content industry to flourish.12 Dō jinshi exist as part of an acknowledged feedback loop of production and consumption that fuels enthusiasm and ultimately results in the purchase of source texts and officially licensed products.13 Dō jin events also provide tailor-made opportunities to scout talent in a manner that would prove difficult in online distribution channels.14 Furthermore, as dō jin artists are not fringe elements of fandom but primary shapers of

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market opinion, the content industry has kept an eye on fan conventions for decades to ascertain trends that may prove profitable. Far from existing in a black hole of high-density geekiness, Japanese fan activities relating to dō jinshi are capable of changing the manner in which stories are written, edited, and produced for a mainstream audience. Dō jinshi subvert not only normative ideologies of gender. They also subvert phallogocentric notions of text and subtext common in conventional literary studies and media practices in which the creator or distributor controls a singular and immutable set of textual meanings. This chapter examines dō jinshi created by fans who have been inspired by CLAMP’s manga series xxxHolic (2003–2011). By looking at this work, it demonstrates how these fans employ the female gaze to create their own interpretations of stories, characters, and relationships in narratives targeted at a male demographic. At conventions and resale stores, dō jinshi are generally divided into two categories: dansei-muke (“for men”) and josei-muke (“for women”). Dansei-muke dō jinshi tend to feature graphic heterosexual pornography, while a sizable percentage of josei-muke dō jinshi involve heterosexual romance or nonromantic dramatic or comedic stories. Josei-muke dō jinshi are not necessarily modeled on media for female audiences (such as shō jo and josei manga), and they are frequently based on media targeted toward male audiences (such as shō nen and seinen manga). For example, the shō nen titles serialized in Weekly Shō nen Jump (Shu ̄kan shō nen janpu), such as Naruto (1997–2015) and Bleach (Burı ̄chi, 2001–2016), are commonly appropriated as the source texts (gensaku) for josei-muke dō jinshi. Many dō jinshi based on xxxHolic fall into a genre category often referred to as BL, an abbreviation of “boys’ love” (bō izu rabu), which is notable for its focus on a subtly or explicitly homoerotic relationship between two male characters.15 No matter what the source text, the female gaze exercised in BL dō jinshi has created its own queer interpretations of the relationships between male characters in a way that creatively subverts the sexism, gender roles, and narrative phallocentrism implicit in many manga narratives written for a male audience. As the manga industry in Japan is fueled by fan consumption and production, an understanding of the practices and poetics of dō jinshi is necessary to fully appreciate the driving forces of Japanese popular cultures, as well as the global media cultures, that have increasingly begun to mirror the model of the Japanese media mix.16

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Shojo ̄ Manga and the Female Gaze

Tomoko Aoyama, a scholar of shō jo manga, was one of the first to write about BL in English. Aoyama sees one of the roots of contemporary BL fandom in Japan in the shō jo manga of the 1970s written by the 24-Nengumi ([Born in] Shō wa 24 [1949] Group), a cohort of female artists that includes Hagio Moto and Takemiya Keiko. From the overt homosexuality present in Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas (Tō ma no shinzō , 1974–1975) and Pō no ichizoku (1972–1976, The Poe Clan) to the slightly more subtle homoerotic tension in Takemiya’s To Terra (Chikyu ̄ e, 1977–1980), beautiful boys locked in fatalistic embraces with each other are one of the more distinctive traits of the shō jo manga of the period. As in earlier shō jo manga, “beauty and fantasy were emphasized over reality,” states Aoyama, but the artists of the 1970s “sought new modes of romanticism through science fiction, historical sagas, and homosexuality.”17 Artists and readers were “no longer satisfied with the persistent variations on the Cinderella theme,” and homoerotic shō jo manga with male protagonists arose from a “desire to explore masculinity or androgyny as opposed to the worn-out image of femininity.”18 One of the primary motivating factors of the homoeroticism found in classic shō jo manga was a desire to move beyond the restraints placed on women and female characters by a heteronormative society. Sharalyn Orbaugh also draws a connection between classic shō jo manga and dō jinshi parodies, especially as the culture of dō jinshi recreates “long-­ standing tendencies in shō jo literary activity in Japan, including the blurring of boundaries between production vs. consumption, and professional vs. amateur.”19 In contrast to readers who passively submit to the phallogocentric authority of the text, which privileges original production and authorial intent over reader interpretation and reproduction, Orbaugh asserts that dō jinshi imply “multiple readers actively seizing the text and expanding its possibilities in incredibly diverse ways, each basing his/her expanded text on his/her preferred reading of the source.”20 Dō jinshi are therefore transformative readings of the source material, which is to say that they are interpretations and expansions of textual elements with which the reader feels unsatisfied.21 Although writers and artists are free not only to return to the original material but also to create new stories using the same characters and settings, it is worth remarking that many dō jinshi serve to explore, mock, or intensify what is already present in the original

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text. Just as the erotic male gaze of dō jinshi written by and for men22 make explicit that which is already there in popular anime and manga—namely, the elements of fan service that cater to heterosexual male viewers—so too does the erotic female gaze emphasize the established homosocial relationships between male characters, which often take the form of close friendships or bitter rivalries. In particular, BL artists who draw homoerotic love scenes are picking up on the subtext of the strong bonds between men that often form the core of both literary and popular narratives.23 By excavating this subtext, which tends to privilege the subjectivity, agency, and interiority of male characters over those of female characters, female fans are able to subvert the original text by challenging and queering its phallocentric focus on the stories, voices, and viewpoints of men. To demonstrate how this process works, this chapter will examine two dō jinshi based on CLAMP’s popular manga series xxxHolic, which was serialized in Weekly Young Magazine (Shu ̄kan yangu magajin) from 2003 to 2010 and in Bessatsu Shō nen Magazine from 2010 until its conclusion in 2011. Weekly Young Magazine is a seinen publication targeted at an older male audience, as evinced by its portrayal of overtly sexual themes and explicitly violent scenarios. Although inserts and pullout posters depicting teenage gravure idols in bikinis fill the magazine, the manga stories serialized within its pages tend toward the dystopian end of speculative fiction. Bessatsu Shō nen Magazine is a monthly spin-off of Weekly Young Magazine, allowing for each installment to be longer and more intricately plotted. Far from being derivative or less prestigious than its weekly cousin, Bessatsu Shō nen Magazine is home to many of the most popular seinen manga series in Japan, which are often licensed for distribution overseas. Recent notable examples include Isayama Hajime’s Attack on Titan (Shingeki no kyojin, 2009–) and Oikawa Tō ru’s From the New World (Shinsekai yori, 2012–2014), the latter of which is based on an award-winning 2008 novel by the avant-garde horror and mystery writer Kishi Yūsuke. As discussed in the previous chapter, the protagonist of xxxHolic is a high-school student named Watanuki, who is able to perceive yō kai, supernatural creatures that are invisible to normal humans. Yō kai sense that Watanuki can see them and go out of their way to harass him, so he is driven to make a bargain with a wish-granting witch named Yūko, who promises to cure Watanuki of his ability to glimpse beyond the phenomenal world. Until then, he must work in Yūko’s shop as her servant.

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Watanuki is typically accompanied by his classmate Dō meki when Yūko dispatches him on errands. Dō meki cannot see yō kai; but, as the heir to a Buddhist temple, he has a mystical ability to dispel them. Watanuki has a crush on a female classmate named Himawari. Convinced that his friend is competing for her affections, Watanuki maintains an antagonistic attitude toward Dō meki. Although Watanuki repeatedly attests that he does not desire Dō meki’s companionship, particularly when the two are in the company of Himawari, Dō meki always seems to appear whenever Watanuki is in need of help. On the surface, xxxHolic conforms to many of the narrative conventions and character tropes common to manga aimed at a male audience. The protagonist of the story, Watanuki, and his foil, Dō meki, are both male. The two main female characters of the story, Yūko and Himawari, have a more passive narrative role. Himawari’s purpose is to provide an opportunity for the creation of a stronger bond between the two male characters, while Yūko serves as the otherworldly and somewhat villainous adult woman against which the idealistic heroism of the two male characters may be defined.24 Neither Yūko nor Himawari is granted the same degree of screen time or narrative interiority as that afforded to Watanuki and Dō meki, and therefore a generalization may be offered that xxxHolic, as a manga aimed at a seinen (teenage to college-age male) audience, posits men as subjects and women as objects. The role of Himawari in particular calls to mind Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of homosociality in Between Men, in which the female character at the point of a love triangle acts as a bonding agent for the two men who compete for her affections. One of Sedgwick’s main arguments in Between Men is that the intense relationships of the men involved in the creation and administration of the British empire were characterized by homosocial desire, a “pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, [and] rivalry.”25 According to Sedgwick, homosociality is not synonymous with homosexuality; similarly, CLAMP never openly states that its male characters are in any way romantically interested in one another. Because CLAMP’s shō nen and seinen titles are serialized in magazines targeted at the corresponding demographics— boys and young men—most male characters in these titles are coded as straight through their attraction to their designated female love interests.26 For readers looking for homoerotic undertones, however, the subtext of xxxHolic is clear.

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The Uke/Seme Dynamic BL dō jinshi based on xxxHolic are able to bring its homoerotic subtext closer to the surface and adventurously delve into the explicit implications of this subtext. For example, artist Kuroimisa’s 2006 dō jinshi titled Kuchinashi kaoru sono ude ni (In the Arms of a Fragrant Gardenia) is loosely based on an episode in the tenth volume of xxxHolic in which Watanuki is trapped underground by the spirit of a hydrangea plant and must be rescued by Dō meki. Such a scenario is not uncommon in xxxHolic because Watanuki’s supernatural sight makes him vulnerable to all manner of malicious yō kai. Female readers have seen in this character dynamic not only the possibility for romance—why does Dō meki care so much about Watanuki?—but also fodder for the hurt/comfort scenario that Sharalyn Orbaugh (2010) has identified as one of the most common narrative patterns in male/male fanfiction and dō jinshi.27 In the case of xxxHolic, after Watanuki is harassed or threatened by yō kai, he can then be comforted by Dō meki in an emotional exchange that strengthens the bond between the two. In Kuchinashi kaoru, the artist imagines that Watanuki is sexually violated by a gardenia plant. When Watanuki finds refuge in the arms of Dō meki, Dō meki urges him to ejaculate, since that seems to be what the plant wants. Dō meki then holds Watanuki as Watanuki suffers the attention of the plant’s tendrils. After the ordeal is over, Dō meki explains that the gardenia plant had somehow merged with the recently deceased spirit of a woman who had been traumatized by a miscarriage. The woman’s husband was cheating on her, and she had hoped that a baby would repair their relationship. This woman was run down by a car as she rushed out into the street in pursuit of her husband; her dying wish for a baby was absorbed by one of the gardenia plants lining the road. Dō meki’s explanation of the event is delivered in a style that perfectly mirrors the exposition concerning similar phenomena in the original manga. Furthermore, the manner in which Watanuki and Dō meki speak to each other in the dō jinshi is faithful to their characterization in the manga. The art style and panel layout are also fairly consistent with those of the original text. The only added element is the explicit sexuality. The device of “tentacle rape” (or “tendril rape,” as the case may be) has a long and colorful history in Japanese illustrated and animated pornography, but these tentacles are usually applied to solitary girls and women who are openly exposed to the gaze of the reader, not to men who are

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shielded from the reader’s gaze by the arms of another man. On the cover of Kuchinashi kaoru, Dō meki is shown as supporting the incapacitated Watanuki (Fig. 4.1). Watanuki is posed in such a way as to suggest vulnerability, but Dō meki hovers protectively over him. Watanuki’s line of sight is directed not toward the reader or coyly away from the reader, but rather at Dō meki.

Fig. 4.1  Front cover of Kuchinashi kaoru sono ude ni

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The reader is certainly witness to Watanuki’s violation, but many of the visual devices that allow the reader to project themselves onto the page in more conventionally illustrated pornography, such as a faceless or invisible sexual partner, are absent in Kuchinashi kaoru. Dō meki appears in all but two of the eight pages depicting Watanuki’s tangles with the lustful gardenia, and his purpose is to alleviate Watanuki’s humiliation, not to exacerbate it. The erotic female gaze guiding the narrative flow and visual layout of Kuchinashi kaoru thus displays several deviations from conventions designed to appeal to an erotic male gaze. For example, comfort is emphasized over humiliation, and partnership is privileged over anonymous rape. Although the graphic depiction of sex is often a major component of the BL dō jinshi that feature it, the focus of the female gaze is not necessarily on the physical exchanges between two men but rather on the exploration of a facet of the relationship between two characters that is only hinted at in the source text. In this dō jinshi, the sexual aggressor, the gardenia, is female, as the plant acts under the influence of a recently deceased woman. According to Dō meki, this woman’s final thoughts melded with “the vegetable instinct [shokubutsu honnō ] of the gardenia,” thus creating a strange hybrid of reproductive lust in a flowering plant that is not just female by poetic association but also female by spiritual possession. On one hand, this creature is pathetic, as its actions are mindless and catalyzed by the tragic death of a woman obsessed with a man. On the other hand, in contrast to the passivity of both of its component parts, the woman/gardenia is able to accost a passing stranger and take what it desires from him, despite his protests. The vines prying apart the male principal’s limbs and exposing his body to the reader are female, which suggests a connection between the female sexual aggressor in the dō jinshi and the presumably female reader of the dō jinshi. A criticism of BL manga commonly found on English-language online forums is that the tropes of the genre reproduce heteronormative gender roles while simultaneously shutting out actual women from the story.28 One of the best-known BL tropes is the dichotomy between seme and uke, or between the “active” sexual partner (who penetrates) and the “passive” sexual partner (who is penetrated). The seme is typically older and taller than the uke, with larger hands and a more angular face. The seme will also generally be in a position of power relative to the uke. For example, if the uke is a student, the seme will be an upperclassman or a teacher. Besides being physically larger than the uke, the seme will perform masculinity by

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actively demonstrating his social dominance over the uke or by concealing his feelings behind a facade of taciturn reticence. There are variations on this dynamic, such as the tsundere uke, who disguises his affection for the seme by scolding him and bossing him around, but such variations are appealing precisely because they deviate from the usual character dynamic in easily recognizable ways.29 Therefore, in BL manga, the active seme partner is coded as masculine, while the passive uke character is coded as feminine. If the relationship between two men is essentially that between a strong masculine partner and a weak feminine partner, this reasoning follows, then BL manga merely exploits a harmless fantasy of homosexuality in order to appeal to the heteronormative desire of (presumably) heterosexual female readers. The fact remains, however, that such constructions of masculinity and femininity are being performed by male characters. In BL narratives, a character is not passive because the character is biologically female; rather, the character is passive because that is how his personality fits into a specific relationship. Although the masculine sex of the uke may merely be an attractive window dressing on a character coded as female, the inscription of a stereotypically feminine role onto a male character is still subversive in its denial of biological determinism. In fact, the more passive the uke, the more the association of femininity with romantic and sexual passivity is called into question. The presumption that characters who appear in BL narratives are gendered according to the conventions of normative heterosexuality is founded on the supposition that there is by default a passive partner in a relationship. It is presumed that this passive partner should always be depicted and read as female. In order to discredit this bias, it is necessary to understand how femininity is coded in BL dō jinshi. In many BL dō jinshi based on shō nen or seinen manga, the character traits that distinguish a certain character as masculine in the original work are often retained in fanworks that depict the character as an uke, thus queering common tropes used in manga to code characters as masculine.

Performing Textual Masculinity, Inscribing Textual Femininity As femininity is often defined by its deviations from masculinity, it is difficult to discuss the coding of femininity in male/male partnerships without relying on stereotypes. In her 2009 monograph Yokubō no kō do: Manga ni miru sekushuariti no danjosa (Codes of desire: Differences

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between male and female sexuality in manga), Hori Akiko argues that, when discussing gender coding in BL manga, it is useful to compare the genre to shō jo manga. Whereas the covers of manga anthology magazines and stand-alone manga softcover editions (tankō bon) for both gay and straight men commonly feature a full-body photograph or illustration of a single figure, the covers of BL magazines and paperback manga, like the covers of shō jo manga, tend to feature a couple posed in manner that illustrates their relationship. Hori provides tables of information on 80 contemporary mass market magazines, including the number of characters on the covers, the sight lines of these characters (whether they are looking at the reader or at each other, for instance), and the clothing that the characters model. Hori’s study demonstrates a correlation between the covers of pornographic magazines for men and manga magazines for men. There is also a clear correlation between the covers of magazines for women, shō jo manga magazines, and BL manga magazines.30 The connection between shō jo and BL manga extends beyond the bodies exposed to the reader’s gaze. There is also a similarity in the characters through whom the reader experiences the story. In shō jo manga, events are presented from the narrative perspective of the female protagonist. In BL manga, the point-of-view character is often the uke, who supposedly occupies a feminine position in relation to the seme. When analyzing the femininity of the uke in BL manga, the construction of femininity in shō jo manga may thus serve as a convenient comparison.31 There is an extraordinary range of shō jo manga in existence. Even stereotypical portraits of passive femininity may be subverted within a shō jo title, as the character development that is a defining quality of the genre ensures that any given character’s personality will not necessarily remain consistent from one installment of a series to the next. Nevertheless, the female protagonists of a number of popular titles, such as Sand Chronicles (Sunadoki, 2003–2006) and We Were There (Bokura ga ita, 2002–2012), all begin their respective stories with similar character traits.32 A representative example of these traits can be found in Kuronuma Sawako, the protagonist of Shiina Karuho’s hit series Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You (Kimi ni todoke, 2005–2017), which was adapted into a light novel series in 2007, a television anime in 2009, and a live-action film in 2010. Because of her resemblance to the vengeful ghost from the Ringu horror franchise, Sawako is nicknamed “Sadako” and ostracized by her classmates despite her best efforts to be friendly. Sawako has therefore become a shy and selfdeprecating young woman by the time she enters high school. She admires

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Kazehaya Shō ta, an outgoing boy in her class who is always surrounded by his friends. Over the course of the manga, Kazehaya helps Sawako to come out of her shell and gradually form friendships with other students in their class. Sawako appreciates Kazehaya’s kindness but is unable to understand how he could be attracted to her. According to the character type modeled so aptly by Sawako, the personality traits associated with the shō jo heroine of a romantic comedy are a lack of self-confidence, a cheerful willingness to help and forgive others, and a charming ignorance regarding romantic matters. The heroine channels the reader’s wish to be emotionally nourished and protected by an attractive and fiercely monogamous partner who loves her unconditionally despite her flaws (which are minor and only serve to make her more desirable), as well as the wish for this relationship to be acknowledged and respected by her female peers. The romantic shō jo heroine will gradually develop into a more assertive and emotionally independent character over the course of the story. However, the catalyst for this development is more often than not her interaction with her primary male love interest. The narrative tendency of character development through romance applies to BL narratives as well. The 2010 dō jinshi Kemuri (Smoke), written and drawn by the artist Kō of the circle Kia, explores how the relationship between Watanuki and Dō meki changes as xxxHolic nears its conclusion. By this point in the story, Watanuki has inherited the absent Yūko’s role as a wish-granting witch inhabiting a mysterious shop. Since the fragile dimension that houses Yūko’s shop would disappear if Watanuki were to physically leave it, he vows to remain there, never leaving and thus never aging. Dō meki graduates from high school and enters college, yet he continues to visit Watanuki. Since the original manga does not offer many details concerning how these plot developments affect the relationship between Watanuki and Dō meki, Kemuri picks up the pieces and fills in the gaps left open by the source text. Kemuri chronicles one of Dō meki’s visits to Watanuki after Watanuki has inherited Yūko’s shop. In this dō jinshi, Watanuki has also inherited the wispy strands of smoke that are one of the primary visual motifs associated with Yūko in the xxxHolic manga (Fig. 4.2). Similar to the manner in which the smoke motif suggests that Yūko is veiled in mystery in the original manga, the author of Kemuri uses this device as a metaphor for Watanuki’s veiled intentions regarding Dō meki. In Kemuri, Watanuki surreptitiously gives Dō meki an aphrodisiac and then

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Fig. 4.2  Watanuki and Dō meki (Kemuri, p. 4)

initiates a sexual encounter when his friend stays the night at the shop. Watanuki’s conversation with his magical companion Mokona after this encounter suggests that he has seduced Dō meki to create an emotional obligation engendered by physical desire that will give Dō meki a stronger incentive to continue visiting him. “We like to tease each other, but I really

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am nasty to him,” Watanuki muses. “I wonder how long he’ll continue to be my friend.” Watanuki later confesses and apologizes to Dō meki, but Dō meki brushes off Watanuki’s apology and suggests that he understood Watanuki’s intentions all along. The dō jinshi ends with the pair embracing. Watanuki continues to antagonize Dō meki verbally but is obviously happy, and the strand of smoke on the right panel divides what Watanuki says, “Let me go,” from his true feelings, “Hold me just a little longer.” At the end of xxxHolic, Watanuki takes over Yūko’s position in the shop by helping the people and spirits who enter hoping to have their wishes granted, and his main concern seems to be accepting Yūko’s departure while waiting for a sign that she will return. He is no longer as intensely involved with the people with whom he had previously enjoyed strong friendships, such as Himawari; he merely watches their lives from afar with benevolent disinterest. As Watanuki matures, the tension drains from his relationship with Dō meki. Like Yūko, who wore kimono and surrounded herself with objects of traditional Japanese craftsmanship, Watanuki has removed himself from the present and the real world, not only physically but emotionally as well. Since the flow of time accelerates in the closing chapters of the manga, the shift in Watanuki’s personality feels abrupt and leaves the reader with several unanswered questions. For instance, how does Watanuki feel about the sacrifices he has made in order to inherit Yūko’s shop? Neither xxxHolic nor the various animated and live-action adaptations of the manga answer these questions. Thus, the dō jin artist who created Kemuri attempts to address them through a sexual encounter between Watanuki and Dō meki that forces Watanuki’s hidden feelings to the surface for the benefit of both Dō meki and the reader. In Kemuri, as in shō jo manga, character development takes precedence over physically oriented action, and the romance between two characters provides the stage on which this character development unfolds. As the interior monologue of Kemuri suggests, Watanuki is the point-of-view character. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily the case that he is feminized in exactly the same manner as the heroine of a shō jo romance. Some of the traits associated with Sawako, the heroine of Kimi ni Todoke, also apply to Watanuki as characterized in Kemuri. For example, although he is no longer insecure about his role as the master of the small world created by Yūko, Watanuki is nervous about his relationship with Dō meki and does not seem to understand why his friend continues to visit him. The overtly sexual elements of the dō jinshi do not resonate with the tonal gestalt of shō jo romance, however. Moreover, Watanuki’s calculated use of sex as a

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means to emotionally manipulate Dō meki decisively separates him from the pure-heartedness of a shō jo heroine. Moreover, Watanuki maintains the ill temper and surliness that mark him as masculine (as opposed to a friendly shō jo character like Himawari) in the original manga. Thus, even though Watanuki is the point-of-view character and the uke of the dō jinshi, he is not coded as feminine in the same way that a shō jo heroine would be. The fact that Watanuki attempts to sexually assault Dō meki in Kemuri is another twist in the uke/seme dynamic. As in Kuchinashi kaoru, the uke often finds himself in a position of sexual vulnerability vis-à-vis the seme. Even though the uke is not necessarily feminine, the dynamic of a more aggressive partner taking advantage of a more passive partner has caused some members of BL fandoms to decry the uke/seme method of pairing as not only heteronormative but also misogynistic in its recapitulation of rape culture.33 In Kemuri, however, Watanuki is not an innocent virgin who is forcefully inducted into sexual maturity by an uncontrollably virile partner, and it is not immediately clear who is taking advantage of whom in Watanuki’s coupling with Dō meki. If anyone is taking advantage of these two young men, it is the (ostensibly) female reader who uses these fictional constructs for her own enjoyment, whether this enjoyment is erotic, emotional, or subversive. At its core, the debate over heteronormativity, misogyny, and problematic tropes in BL narratives is not about fictional men; rather, it is about the agency of the women who read and write them.34

Fujoshi and the Power of Female Fans In Otaku joshi kenkyu ̄: Fujoshi shisō taikei (A study of female otaku: Essays on fujoshi), journalist Sugiura Yumiko repeatedly assures her readers that fujoshi, the “rotten girls” who create and consume BL manga, are not poorly groomed antisocial misfits.35 “The majority of fujoshi,” Sugiura writes, “are adult women. They live in the real world, where things like ‘true love’ don’t exist. These women fall in love and get married in the real world, where society necessitates compromise. When they get tired, they take a break in a fantasy world, and then they go back to reality.”36 According to Sugiura, although fujoshi occasionally immerse themselves in fantasy, or delusion (mō sō ), they are far from delusional (mō sō teki); for them, the world of BL is a break from reality (genjitsu), not the sort of separate reality (riariti) that attractive shō jo characters provide for male fans of the anime and manga media mix. Sugiura’s assessment of fujoshi is therefore largely positive. It is precisely because these women have a firm

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grasp on reality, she argues, that they are able to enjoy the fantasy of BL, which functions as a safe haven from the pressures of the real world. Sugiura’s assessment is positive in the sense that she asserts that fujoshi are not social miscreants but fully functioning adults. Nevertheless, such a statement runs the risk of reinforcing heteronormativity in its positioning of queerness as an escape from the inequalities implicit in heterosexual romance in a patriarchal society. The relationship between the lived experience of queerness and symbolic representations of queerness is fraught with complications and contradictions, but I would argue that the fantasy of openly accepted and uncontested queerness implied by many (but far from all) BL manga and dō jinshi can also serve as an analgesic against the harshness of real-world queer identity, in which automatic happy endings are not necessarily forthcoming at the end of every story. According to Sugiura’s interpretation, however, fujoshi are women who, while not completely passive, make little effort to actively engage with or change the media they consume. Even when Sugiura discusses the women who read newspapers on their way to work in order to gather more fodder for scenarios revolving around forbidden relationships between male political figures, she does not attempt to argue that they have any real interest in politics outside of BL fantasies. Sugiura even suggests that fujoshi have been largely ignored by the Japanese media because they are remarkably adept at hiding their fannish interests and because they do not seem to be particularly unhappy or maladjusted. In other words, they do not challenge the status quo. As the subcultures associated with dō jinshi demonstrate, however, many fujoshi are not merely consumers; these women are quite active as producers as well. If fujoshi are unsatisfied with the phallocentrism and heteronormativity they see in the media mix, they create their own versions of official narratives in the form of dō jinshi fancomics, which may depict the homosexual escapades of male leads or go into more detail regarding the background and perspective of a female character who is shortchanged in favor of male characters in the original work. When female fans find themselves excluded from male-­ centered stories and discourse, they simply create their own. As the interpretations of the xxxHolic as expressed by Kuchinashi kaoru and Kemuri suggest, female readers are perfectly capable of translating homosociality into queerness and homoeroticism, and they are able to refigure the elements on the printed page into a narrative that suits their own interests and responds to issues not addressed by the original text. Fujoshi and other readers creating fanworks in a global context are thereby

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able to apply different hermeneutic lenses to male-dominated narratives, as the female gaze actively exposes the contradictions and possibilities embedded in phallocentric homosociality. As they exercise a female erotic gaze, readers who participate in BL and slash fan cultures subvert the concept of a masculinity that must continually assert its heterosexuality in order to maintain its dominance in gender-based power dynamics. By conducting these activities as members of a fandom community, whether that community is an online forum hosting fanfiction or a circle that publishes dō jinshi and distributes them at conventions, female readers are playing subversive games with corporate-owned texts that allow them to establish their own authority. Even though intellectual property still legally belongs to its author or producers, and even though the vast majority of the highest-­grossing creators in transnational entertainment industries are still male, there are large and active subcultures of people to whom phallocentric power structures of exclusive ownership and authorized interpretations do not matter in the slightest. The integration of fanworks into the Japanese media mix renders it particularly open to the influence of queer and female voices. It remains to be seen whether a critical mass of such fannish contributions will carve out a broader space for more inclusive representation or whether dō jinshi will simply follow a parallel path alongside mainstream entertainment. This chapter will investigate the concrete influence of fandom communities on transnational popular culture in the 2010s.

Notes 1. Paul Jones, “Sherlock Is Most Watched BBC Drama Series for Over a Decade,” RadioTimes, January 22, 2014. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-01-22/sherlock-is-most-watched-bbcdrama-series-for-over-a-decade/ 2. As mentioned above, the Sherlock fanbase is quite large and thus difficult to survey. The circumstantial evidence mentioned here includes not only essays and critiques from female-identified bloggers, such as those at Jezebel and the Mary Sue, but also fanworks considered to be generally (but not exclusively) female-oriented, specifically slash art and fanfiction. For example, the “Sherlock Holmes/John Watson” tag on the fanfiction hosting site Archive of Our Own has more than 89,000 works within the “Sherlock (TV)” ­fandom as of November 2018, making it one of the more popular relationships on the site.

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3. The first episode of Season 3 of Sherlock, “Many Happy Returns,” features a meeting of a Sherlock fan club in which one female member posits that Moriarty did not attempt to kill Sherlock; instead, he spirited him away for an intense one-on-one romantic encounter, an imagined scenario highly characteristic of slash fanfiction. As of this writing, the show has included spoken lines teasing various characters (most notably John Watson) about possible homoerotic interest. However, the production has not vindicated such potential with action or acknowledgment. This has led to many critics accusing the show of queerbaiting, in which queer representation is hinted at but never achieves canonical status. For a summary of this discussion in the wider context of television history, see Rose Bridges’s 2013 essay “How Do We Solve a Problem Like ‘Queerbaiting’?” on Autostraddle, June 26, 2013, https://www.autostraddle.com/how-do-we-solve-a-problem-likequeerbaiting-on-tvs-not-so-subtle-gay-subtext-182718/ 4. Philiana Ng, “‘Sherlock’ Boss on ‘Moving’ Holmes/Watson Reunion,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 1, 2014. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/sherlock-season-3-preview-steven-667990 5. Laurie Penny, “Laurie Penny on Sherlock: The Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase,” New Statesman America, January 12, 2014. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/01/sherlock-andadventure-overzealous-fanbase 6. Loren Estleman, “On the Significance of Boswells,” in Introduction to Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, by Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: Bantam, 1986), xii. 7. Marc Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 135. 8. Ibid., 169. 9. Interestingly enough, Kadokawa has applied its media mix strategy to the Sherlock television series, serializing a manga adaptation of several of the show’s more self-contained episodes in its monthly seinen magazine Young Ace, which also runs installments of a CLAMP manga titled Drug & Drop. Like Sherlock, Drug & Drop is a mystery series centered around the adventures of two attractive men with a close yet complicated relationship. By outwardly catering to a male demographic while subtly appealing to female BL fans, Young Ace is able to maintain a large readership as one of Kadokawa’s flagship manga publications. 10. These connotations stem from the fanzines distributed at science fiction and fantasy conventions during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Such fanzines could vary greatly in quality. A typical example might be c­ omposed of mimeographed or photocopied pages stapled together and filled with margin-to-margin handwritten or typewritten text and low-resolution images, although a select number of fanzines were expertly format-

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ted and beautifully published. As Japanese dō jinshi have become more widely accessible in North America and Europe, however, the fanzines sold in the Artist Alley sections of the main exhibition areas of fan conventions have gradually come to reflect the high print quality and stylistic conventions of dō jinshi. 11. Fan-yi Lam, “Comic Market: How the World’s Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped Japanese Dō jinshi Culture.” Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies (2010): 232–248. 12. Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). 13. Ō tsuka, “World and Variation.” 14. These channels include personal webpages and accounts on sites such as Pixiv and Twitter. Fan artists operating online often do not provide contact information, although they may advertise their appearance at fan events. It is possible for the work of extraordinarily popular artists to be highlighted in publications such as Quarterly Pixiv (a magazine distributed by the manga publisher Enterbrain), but publication opportunities stemming from online activity are exceptions. Himaruya Hidekazu’s historical gag manga Hetalia: Axis Powers (Akushisu Pawāzu Hetaria, 2006–2013), which was hosted on its author’s personal webpage, is one such exception. 15. Mark McLelland and James Welker, “An Introduction to ‘Boys’ Love’ in Japan,” in Boys’ Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, ed. Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker (Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2015). 16. Henry Jenkins makes a similar argument in the context of American media in his monograph Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2008). However, as practices concerning fair use and copyright violations related to popular entertainment media are different in Japan, a separate but related examination of how fan production increasingly drives the creation of popular culture is necessary in a Japanese context. 17. Tomoko Aoyama, “Male Homosexuality as Treated by Japanese Women Writers,” in The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond, ed. Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 188. 18. Ibid., 194. 19. Sharalyn Orbaugh, “Girls Reading Harry Potter, Girls Writing Desire: Amateur Manga and Shō jo Reading Practices,” in Girl Reading Girl in Japan, edited by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (New York: Routledge, 2010), 176. 20. Ibid.

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21. In his 2007 blog post “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” Henry Jenkins has also emphasized the appeal of filling in the textual gaps of popular entertainment media, and he argues that media producers are increasingly structuring stories in such a way as to emphasize these gaps in order to create properties that are able to sustain a large and dedicated fanbase. Confessions of an Aca-­Fan, March 22, 2007. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/ transmedia_storytelling_101.html 22. It should be noted that men are not the sole producers and consumers of pornographic dansei-muke dō jinshi, as women are often members of the circles who sell such dō jinshi at fan events. Self-identified female otaku, such as the lesbian manga essayist Takeuchi Sachiko, readily admit to enjoying dō jinshi catering to a male erotic gaze. 23. In his monograph Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishō nen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), poet and literary scholar Jeffrey Angles discusses these homosocial bonds as they appear in the modernist fiction of writers such as Edogawa Ranpo and Murayama Kaita. In his conclusion, Angles demonstrates how contemporary dō jinshi artists have translated the homosociality and covert homoeroticism of twentieth-century literature into open and explicit relationships. 24. As discussed in the previous chapter, the character Sakura in xxxHolic’s companion manga, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle (2003–2009), serves a similar purpose in that she acts as an object through which the male characters can indirectly form bonds with one another. Later in the manga, as a morally ambiguous character against which the male protagonists can define their own character development. 25. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1. 26. Several male and female characters in the CLAMP universe are canonically gay (in the sense of being in easily discernible romantic relationships with members of the same sex or being clearly romantically interested in members of the same sex), but these characters generally appear in CLAMP’s sho ̄jo and josei manga. 27. See also Sheenagh Pugh’s chapter “Male Sorting” in her monograph The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 2005). 28. One such forum is the community Fandom Secrets (http://fandomsecrets.dreamwidth.org/, formerly http://fandomsecrets.livejournal. com/), on which members of multiple fandoms post anonymous observations and opinions. Each secret has its own chain of comments, wherein the issue at hand is discussed by both anonymous and named users. Sexuality, especially as it is expressed in fan art and fanfiction, is a common

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topic on the forum. This forum passed its peak of popularity during the early 2010s, but conversations about BL and slash are still commonly found in fannish communities on Tumblr and Reddit. 29. The word tsundere is a portmanteau of tsun-tsun, which expresses disgust, and dere-dere, which expresses adoration. The tsundere character type is borrowed from moe fandoms, whose constituents are generally assumed to be male. The relationship between male and female fandom cultures in Japan is complicated and requires further study, but BL and moe fan cultures are fully aware of each other and borrow character tropes and narrative patterns from each other even as they poke fun at these tropes and patterns. 30. It should be noted, however, that not all sho ̄jo and BL manga covers, and indeed not all sho ̄jo and BL manga, feature a romantically intertwined couple. Although romance is a major thematic focus of both genres, many titles focus on friendship, competition, drama, or artistic esthetic. Others are more focused on the conventions of narrative genres such as fantasy, mystery, and science fiction. 31. Again, although this comparison is useful, it is important to remember that correlation does not equal causation. Shō jo manga and BL manga are in fact marketed to two separate demographics, with BL being a subcategory of the larger demographic genre of josei manga, which is targeted toward women of college age or older. Like its male demographic equivalent, seinen manga, josei manga encompasses a broad range of subgenres, from mother-­in-­law horror stories to workplace dramas to science fiction to abstract artistic pieces. This breadth of genre makes comparing BL manga to other josei manga difficult. 32. This trend is partially a result of the effort of publishers to brand manga magazines and tankō bon publishing labels through similar art styles and familiar narrative conventions. Although there will naturally be a diversity of styles and stories represented by the different artists managed by a publisher, the editors assigned to these artists contribute greatly to the finished product. Nevertheless, artists (especially high-profile artists like CLAMP), still have a great deal of creative freedom. 33. An insightful blog post critically discussing these tropes in relation to the anime series Sekai-ichi hatsukoi (2011, World’s Greatest First Love) is “World’s Worst First Love” on the fan blog GAR GAR Stegosaurus, which critiques the show’s “creepy sexual harassment factor” and “the truly disgusting way in which we are supposed to regard this sexual harassment,” May 1, 2001. https://gargarstegosaurus.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/ worlds-worst-first-love/

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34. For an academic treatment of one such debate, see Keith Vincent’s article “A Japanese Electra and Her Queer Progeny” Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire (2007): 64–79. 35. The expression fujoshi, which might be translated as “rotten girl” or “fan trash,” is a pun on fujoshi, a somewhat antiquated word for “wife” that is pronounced the same but written with different Chinese characters. 36. Sugiura, Otaku joshi kenkyu ̄, 42.

References Angles, Jeffrey. 2011. Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishō nen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aoyama, Tomoko. 1988. Male Homosexuality as Treated by Japanese Women Writers. In The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond, ed. Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto, 186–204. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Bridges, Rose. 2013. How Do We Solve a Problem Like ‘Queerbaiting’?: On TV’s Not-So-Subtle Gay Subtext. Autostraddle, June 26. https://www.autostraddle.com/how-do-we-solve-a-problem-like-queerbaiting-on-tvs-not-so-subtlegay-subtext-182718/ Estleman, Loren D. 1986. On the Significance of Boswells. In Introduction to Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, ed. Arthur Conan Doyle, vii–xvi. New York: Bantam. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Transmedia Storytelling 101. Confessions of an AcaFan, March 22. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html ———. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jones, Paul. 2014. Sherlock Is Most Watched BBC Drama Series for Over a Decade. RadioTimes, January 22. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-01-22/ sherlock-is-most-watched-bbc-drama-series-for-over-a-decade/ Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lam, Fan-Yi. 2010. Comic Market: How the World’s Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped Japanese Dō jinshi Culture. Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies: 232–248. McLelland, Mark, and James Welker. 2015. An Introduction to ‘Boys Love’ in Japan. In Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, ed. Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, 3–20. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Ng, Philiana. 2014. ‘Sherlock’ Boss on ‘Moving’ Holmes/Watson Reunion and ‘Funnier’ Season 3 (Q&A). The Hollywood Reporter, January 1. https://www. hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/sherlock-season-3-preview-steven-667990

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Orbaugh, Sharalyn. 2010. Girls Reading Harry Potter, Girls Writing Desire: Amateur Manga and Shō jo Reading Practices. In Girl Reading Girl in Japan, ed. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley, 174–186. New York: Routledge. Ō tsuka, Eiji. 2010. World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative. Trans. Marc Steinberg. Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies: 99–116. Penny, Laurie. 2014. Laurie Penny on Sherlock: The Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase. New Statesman America, January 12. https://www.newstatesman. com/culture/2014/01/sherlock-and-adventure-overzealous-fanbase Pugh, Sheenagh. 2005. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Steinberg, Marc. 2012. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sugiura, Yumiko. 2006. Otaku Joshi Kenkyu ̄: Fujoshi Shisō Taikei. Tō kyō : Hara Shobō . Vincent, Keith. 2007. A Japanese Electra and Her Queer Progeny. Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire: 64–79.

CHAPTER 5

Beautiful War Games: Transfiguring Genders in Video Game Fancomics

I was originally drawn to fancomics by more of a personal interest than a research interest. I’ve always loved video games; but, until social media reshaped the digital landscape in the mid-2010s, I was dismayed by how much of the industry and fannish conversations surrounding gaming in both Japanese and Anglophone communities seemed to be dominated by men. When I discovered Japanese dō jinshi based on my favorite games, it was like a godsend. I felt that I was finally able to read stories that interested me. These stories were not about getting stronger and saving the world but about interpersonal relationships and the emotional consequences of the severe trauma often experienced by characters in video games. I therefore developed a strong personal investment in how fannish cultures and practices—especially those of female fans—are perceived and interpreted by outside observers. The close examination of Japanese dō jinshi fancomics in the previous chapter began as a response to problematic strands of discourse that has persisted in academic writing on female fans, which tends to focus on homoerotic BL (boys’ love) manga. An assumption made by many scholars and journalists is that fannish engagement with mainstream entertainment media properties is shallow, escapist, and indicative of various psychological and personality defects. Another assumption that is often parroted and echoed within fan communities is that female fans, specifically those interested in homoerotic BL parodies, are operating under the influence of internalized misogyny and homophobia.1 As a close reading of BL dō jinshi suggests, both of these © The Author(s) 2020 K. Hemmann, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_5

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assumptions are incorrect. Even short stories focused on a single erotic encounter reveal a wealth of nuance regarding gender, sexuality, narrative reinterpretation, and even social commentary. To give a concrete example of the dismissive attitude regarding fan cultures, I will refer to a literal textbook definition drawn from the third edition of Yoshio Sugimoto’s An Introduction to Japanese Sociology, which was published in 2010. In his chapter on “Geographical and Generation Variations,” Sugimoto writes that Japan’s “youngest age group” (which includes people born in the 1960s and 1970s) is characterized by a void created by a lack of “a coherent and dominant narrative that governs their values.”2 Therefore, he says, “to fill the void, the global generation increasingly lives in the virtual world where the line between fiction and reality is blurred.”3 As a result, Sugimoto argues that, “with the emergence of the prosperity and global generations came the advent of what a perceptive observer has termed the ‘neglect of the public and indulgence of the self.’”4 Although Sugimoto cites the conservative economist Hidaka Rokurō , his negative assessment of otaku subcultures is mirrored in the work of highly respected cultural critics such as Azuma Hiroki, who understands patterns of fan consumption and production as a manifestation of Jean Baudrillard’s proposal of an “animalized” society as set forth in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation. As recently as the 2014 Anime and Manga Studies Symposium in Los Angeles, Ō tsuka Eiji delivered a lecture titled “The Rebirth of the Saga and the Fabrication of History,” in which he decried the popularity of fantasy and sci-fi anime franchises such as Attack on Titan (Shingeki no kyojin) as being indicative of a widespread and deep-seated desire to escape the unpleasant reality of the contemporary political milieu by fleeing into the comforting narratives of revisionist history.5 Anyone familiar with the work of science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Takemiya Keiko would surely disagree. These readers are well aware that genre fiction is not merely escapist and reactionary but can serve as a vehicle for cogent social critique. Similarly, BL parodies, as a broadly construed genre of fanworks, are capable of challenging masculinist and misogynistic social norms, as well as the hermeneutic norms of scholarship and critique focusing on female-centric fandom cultures. In order to understand how BL dō jinshi engage with mainstream ideologies, it is first necessary to read these texts rather than simply making broad assumptions about their creators. Nevertheless, many frequently cited essays on BL subcultures casually attribute female fans with

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homophobia and misogyny. Wim Lunsing, for example, strongly hints that BL fans are suffering from a misdirected heterosexuality that fetishizes gay men.6 Taking this argument one step further, Keith Vincent agrees with the openly gay Japanese critic Satō Masaki that BL narratives are an unwelcome appropriation of gay male sexuality.7 Midori Matsui, in her discussion of the work of Moto Hagio and Takemiya Keiko, psychoanalyzes early shō nen-ai manga and comes to the conclusion that its readers are suffering from a list of ailments ranging from Kristevian self-abjection to Freudian penis envy.8 Shō jo manga scholar Tomoko Aoyama suggests that, by removing femininity and female characters from their work, BL artists are distrustful of their own femininity.9 Meanwhile, the Japanese journalist Sugiura Yumiko, who has written two books about fujoshi, or female fans of BL, is at pains to demonstrate how normal and self-aware these women are, especially in comparison to delusional male otaku. This sort of sexist and heteronormative pathologizing on the part of Western scholars, as well as Sugiura’s reification of pathology by denial, is critically indefensible, as the people who create and consume BL narratives are not a homogenous group and actively resist classification. Therefore, in order to better understand BL narratives, it is necessary to read the narratives themselves instead of attempting to extrapolate generalizations concerning their authors and audience. By analyzing how canonical characterizations and scenarios can yield different meanings than those suggested by the original works when viewed with a female gaze, I argue that dō jinshi artists are able to queer the source texts using the tropes and conventions of BL manga. Although such narrative devices may superficially conform to heteronormative stereotypes of representation, they actually function as part of a larger system of creative tools used to challenge and reconfigure both sexual normativity and sexist hierarchies of societal power. Through the homoerotic parodies of mainstream media properties presented in BL dō jinshi fancomics, stereotypes of masculinity and masculinist ideological systems are routinely disrupted and transformed by the application of a diverse set of hermeneutic lenses. In this chapter, I will outline several common themes and tropes in BL dō jinshi parodies of the Final Fantasy VII multimedia franchise. I will reference these to argue that the female gaze queers not just male characters but masculinist ideologies as well. I will also highlight the influence of fan communities on mainstream conversations relating to video games, which have emerged as perhaps the most popular and contentious storytelling medium in the twenty-first century.

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Big Swords and Sexy Boss Battles: Homosocial Rivalries in Final Fantasy VII Final Fantasy VII was originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1997 but has since seen a series of sequels and spin-offs across multiple media platforms. For the purpose of this project, I read 50 dō jinshi focusing on an implied pairing between Cloud and Sephiroth, the primary protagonist and antagonist of the game. These 50 dō jinshi were the work of 21 dō jin circles and individual artists and published between 2005 and 2017, with the majority published between 2008 and 2013. Although many of the dō jin authors and circles maintain personal websites and pages on the amateur artistic social networking site Pixiv, my discussion is limited to the text and images contained within the printed dō jinshi I read, which I acquired at fan events in Tokyo and Osaka, secondhand retail shops such as Mandarake and K-Books, and the online dō jinshi retailer Alice Books. By reading these dō jinshi, I was able to determine three main narrative patterns. Final Fantasy VII is notorious for having a complicated plot, which has in fact become something of a joke in online gaming communities, so I will simplify things greatly for the purpose of this discussion. When he was a teenager, Cloud Strife, the main protagonist of the game, left his hometown of Nibelheim to join the private army of the Shinra Electric Power Company. This company was aggressively expanding its worldwide customer base through military action. Cloud wanted to become a soldier like Sephiroth, the hero of a recent colonialist campaign. Because he was young and relatively weak, Cloud failed to rise above the rank of private. Nevertheless, he was still dispatched on a mission along with Sephiroth to Nibelheim because it was his hometown. During the mission, Sephiroth gained access to classified Shinra documents and learned that his birth was the result of an experiment involving cells taken from the preserved corpse of an alien being. Sephiroth became enraged and set fire to the Shinra-­ owned buildings in Nibelheim, striking down everyone who tried to stop him. Upon seeing this carnage, Cloud pursued Sephiroth but was gravely injured in the process. While he was unconscious, Cloud’s body was recovered by Shinra operatives and injected with the same cells used to create Sephiroth. When he wakes up, Cloud finds himself with major gaps in his memory. He becomes involved with a terrorist organization fighting Shinra, and, over the course of his engagement with this group, he realizes that Sephiroth is not dead. It becomes his mission not only to defeat

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Sephiroth once and for all but also to regain the sense of self that he has lost to Sephiroth, who has been able to control him magically by means of the alien cells they share. As stated above, I identified three main narrative patterns that I found in the selection of dō jinshi based on the canonical relationship and interactions between Cloud and Sephiroth. The first pattern is to set the story during Cloud and Sephiroth’s first visit to Cloud’s hometown in Nibelheim, which ends up being a lover’s vacation instead of a murderous bloodbath. The second pattern shifts the focus of the events of the game to the psychic and emotional connection between Cloud and Sephiroth. This connection ultimately allows them to make love instead of war. The third pattern reverses Sephiroth’s death at the end of the game. This involves Cloud mourning Sephiroth’s passing only to discover that he has not been fully defeated. This happy revelation results in a honeymoon instead of a rematch (Fig. 5.1). Final Fantasy VII has no shortage of female characters, and many dō jinshi place narrative emphasis on these women’s perspectives. Given that this game is so doggedly focused on its male characters, it is refreshing to see female-centric interpretations that transfer agency and interiority to characters whom the canonical narrative defines by their relationships to Cloud. Other dō jinshi focus on canonical or fan-favorite male/female pairings, while many have no implied romantic pairing at all and emphasize friendship and humor. In addition, a small percentage dō jinshi contain explicit pornography for a presumably male readership. My discussion in this chapter focuses on Cloud/Sephiroth dō jinshi not because the genre of BL informs the majority of dō jinshi based on any given source text. Rather, I wish to expand on the previous chapter’s argument that BL fanworks queer the genders and relationships of individual characters by demonstrating how these interpretations are able to challenge to broader masculinist social ideologies as well. In Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva argue that modernist and contemporary neoliberal ideologies align with common Western configurations of masculinity in their injunctions to be stronger, to work harder, and to forcibly shape the environment according to one’s will.10 In his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard has called these masculinist ideologies the “grand narratives of modernity,” especially as they intersect with ideas relating to national identity, military strength, and technological progress. As the feminist sociologist Ueno Chizuko has illustrated in monographs such as The Modern Family in

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Fig. 5.1  Front cover of Sweet CS Recipes

Japan and Gender and Nationalism, the weight of such monolithic grand narratives not only suppresses individual civil rights and freedoms but also overwhelms the countless number of individual narratives that, when

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revealed, clearly demonstrate the violence and failures of grand narratives. Just as transnational configurations of normative masculinity are influenced and reinforced by grand narratives, a meaningful feminist response is to shift the focus of analysis to an emphasis on small narratives. This is especially true for those associated with women, minorities, and other people whose stories exist on the margins of historical accounts authorized and transmitted by the state. Each of the three narrative patterns I identified in BL dō jinshi based on Final Fantasy VII subverts the grand narratives of the source text in order to focus on the small narratives of the individual characters. In other words, instead of casting Cloud and Sephiroth as “Good” and “Evil” in an allegory with many possible allusions to contemporary geopolitics at the turn of the millennium,11 BL dō jinshi treat both characters as individuals whose rejection of their roles in a grand masculinist drama paves the way for a peaceful resolution of conflict. Fan artists and readers are not deliberately engaging in feminist activism, as it can be difficult for active self-­identified feminists to maneuver within the authoritarian political structures Ayako Kano has termed the “state feminism” of twenty-first-­century Japan.12 Nevertheless, the creators and consumers of BL dō jinshi are engaging in a practice that Judith Fetterly identified as “resistant reading.”13 Literature and entertainment media are inherently political in their reflection and formation of social norms. The discovery and amplification of voices and stories suppressed by masculinist ideologies is a profoundly political act that has the potential to enact the change necessary for the achievement of cultural and political change. Due to the prominence of social media in cultural conversations, it is now easier to observe the influence of fan communities.

Transcultural Fandom and Video Game Character Designs Linkle is a minor character in Hyrule Warriors Legends (Zeruda musō : Hairaru ō ru sutāzu), a video game released on the handheld Nintendo 3DS console in January 2016  in Japan and in March 2016  in all other global territories. Considering that Linkle has a relatively limited presence in this game, her inclusion generated a surprising amount of online discussion during the months preceding its release. The tone of the conversation was drastically different in English and in Japanese. The English-language fandom was infuriated by Linkle’s character design; in contrast, people writing in Japanese simply thought that she was cute. These conversations

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were different because their cultural contexts were different, and this is partially a result of the activities of fan communities and dō jin artists. When they critiqued Linkle’s character design, what fans writing in English were concerned with was positive representation within an industry that seemed openly misogynistic and hostile to greater inclusivity. In Japan, however, representation was not perceived as a critical concern, since many female developers with high-profile public personas work at even the largest and most respected gaming companies. In other words, Japanese gamers were not overly concerned with Linkle, as this minor female character was not expected to carry the full weight of representation for female-­ gendered fans and creators. Because of the transnational aspects of social media and online fandom, Nintendo and other Japanese game companies have demonstrated a keen awareness of the conversations happening in English. However, cultural sensitivity at the corporate level does not necessarily trickle down into fandom communities. Even though online fan cultures surrounding Japanese media thrive on transnational interactions, there are a number of barriers preventing smooth and frictionless exchange between people engaged in radically different conversations concerning gender, social justice, and representation. I will contextualize these conversations within the contentious landscape of social media in the mid-2010s. At the same time, I will relate them to broader discussions of fans and fandom cultures in North America and Japan. Doing so will allow me to demonstrate how dō jinshi serve as a forum for female fans to express their options and frustrations regarding mainstream entertainment media. Linkle is a female version of Link, the iconic green-clad hero of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda (Zeruda no densetsu) video game franchise. As of July 2018, the various games in the franchise, beginning with original 1986 game The Legend of Zelda, have collectively sold more than 92.7 million units, thus placing The Legend of Zelda into the top 20 best-­selling video game franchises worldwide.14 Because the franchise is targeted at a teen-to-adult audience, Link does not have the cultural cachet of Mario or Pikachu, but the character is still widely recognized by media fans around the world, even among people who have never played a game in the Zelda series. The Zelda of the franchise title is the princess whom Link is tasked with saving from evil in almost every one of the games. Meanwhile, Link is the character that the player controls, and he was reportedly given his name because he serves as the player’s “link” to the world contained within the games, a vaguely Tolkienian fantasy kingdom called Hyrule.15

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Unlike the Super Mario and Pokémon franchises, the Zelda series does not have many auxiliary (or “spin-off”) titles in which its branded characters appear in a game that bears little relation to the gameplay of the high-­profile and big budget “main” games in the franchise. Although one may find Mario and his friends playing tennis or racing go-karts or participating in the Olympics, the same cannot be said of Link and Princess Zelda.16 One of the only exceptions is the 2014 Wii U title Hyrule Warriors (Zeruda musō ), an action game developed by Koei Tecmo in collaboration with Nintendo. Hyrule Warriors is a Zelda-branded variation on Koei Tecmo’s popular Dynasty Warriors (Sangoku musō ) formula of hack-and-­slash action in which a lone warrior cuts their way through a battlefield filled with enemies. Unlike the main-series Zelda games, in which the player can only control Link, Hyrule Warriors offers the option to play as a range of Zelda characters, from the princess who is usually kidnapped to the villain who usually kidnaps her. The emphasis of Hyrule Warriors is on its gameplay instead of its plot, and it does not occur within the canonical Legend of Zelda universe, whose appeal lies in the more than 30 years of complex world-building that has gone into its creation. Instead, the ludic pleasure of Hyrule Warriors involves using the flashy attacks of a favorite character to mow down large numbers of advancing enemies with a minimum of narrative context. Although Linkle was formulated for possible inclusion in Hyrule Warriors, she did not make the final cut. The character design published in the official art book for the game proved so popular with Japanese fans on social media websites17; however, it was announced in a Nintendo Direct video message broadcast on YouTube in November 2015 that Linkle would be a playable character in Hyrule Warriors Legends, an updated port of the Wii U game for the Nintendo 3DS handheld console.18 This announcement created an explosion of online activity, both within the Zelda fandom and in broader gaming communities. Some fans went wild with glee, happy that there was finally a playable female version of Link, while others became consumed with righteous feminist anger. The main point of contention was an element of character design known in both Japanese and English-language fandom communities as the zettai ryō iki, or “absolute territory,” which designates an exposed area of skin between the top of a female character’s stockings and the hem of her skirt.19 Japanese fans were, for the most part, delighted by what they saw as a cute and trendy design, while fans writing in English were appalled by the way Linkle appealed to what they assumed was a straight male gaze that demanded the unnecessary sexualization of a young female character (Fig. 5.2).

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Fig. 5.2  Linkle (Famitsū, November 2015, p. 38)

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Linkle wears a hip-length red tunic dress under a green jacket with a hood and mantle. This outfit is accompanied by brown leather gloves and long leather boots that extend beyond her knees. The player can see a hint of Linkle’s black shorts under the hem of her dress, and there is a zettai ryō iki area of exposed skin on her upper thighs between her shorts and her boots. This element of character design is usually associated with cute teenage characters (usually female but occasionally male or genderfluid), and it is an easily recognizable visual element of the anime-inspired moe esthetic, which emphasizes youth, innocence, and vulnerability.20 Linkle’s exact age is unclear, but her childish personality fits neatly into tropes associated with moe, including optimistic enthusiasm and physical clumsiness. In a brief cutscene introducing her character, Linkle is humorously portrayed as being clueless when it comes to spatial navigation, repeatedly missing signs to her destination as she heads in the opposite direction. This aspect of her character is ironically emphasized by the large blue compass she wears as a necklace, a family heirloom that she erroneously believes proves her identity as the destined hero of Hyrule. Her concept design was initially created with the idea that she would be “like a little sister” (imō to-­ teki), but she is not related to Link.21 Linkle’s prowess in combat is not due to any divine destiny; rather, it is a result of her self-directed training and enthusiasm. In the sense that she wants to become the newest hero of Hyrule, Linkle is a Legend of Zelda fan just like the player, and, like many players, she has an unfortunate tendency to lose her way. Linkle’s inability to complete seemingly simple tasks, when combined with her boundless self-confidence and bubbly personality, is presumably intended to highlight her youthful innocence and thus render her even more adorable in the eyes of the player.22 Although a certain audience will undeniably find an element of sexual titillation in the moe elements of Linkle’s clothing and character traits, her performance of cuteness is similar to the fantasy of adorable femininity constructed and promoted in female-authored shō jo manga,23 as well as fashion-focused mobile games developed for a young female audience.24 The paradox at play in the reception of Linkle’s design is thus a matter of whose gaze is presumed to be focused on the character. Is she a virginal and easily dominated object of a sexual attraction for straight men, or is she a cute and relatable character for female fans of shō jo-styled anime and manga? Moreover, is she capable of being read as something else entirely by other groups seeking positive representation?

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“Linkle Is Not Enough” On November 18, 2015, the feminist pop culture criticism website The Mary Sue published an editorial by gaming journalist Maddy Meyers titled “I Love Linkle. But Linkle Is Not Enough.” Meyers writes: We know almost nothing about Linkle – except that she’s NOT Link. She might even be his kid sister […]. We don’t even know yet. This whole Linkle thing seems more like a novelty act for Nintendo – a joke. A one-off. They want to try to sell more copies of their Hyrule Warriors 3DS port, in which Linkle appears among many other characters. It’s not like this is a new Zelda game featuring a woman in the lead. Noooope.25

Meyers frames her disappointment in terms of her desire to see better female representation in a long-running gaming franchise that has had an unfortunate history of relegating its female characters to the roles of passive love interests and damsels to be saved by male heroes. Although Meyers admits that she loves the games and their female characters, “Personally,” she writes, “I’d rather see a completely different story get told.” The zettai ryō iki of Linkle’s character design rubbed salt into the wound of this desire for equity in representation. As many people pointed out on the fannish microblogging platform Tumblr, it was not Linkle’s design itself that was necessarily problematic, but rather the context of this design. As feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian has painstakingly documented in her online video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, female characters in games tend to be sexualized for the purpose of appealing to a straight male gaze, and it seemed that Linkle was no exception.26 As fanfiction author Betterbemeta wrote in response to a criticism of the Linkle design printed in the North American Hyrule Warriors strategy guide that had been scanned and posted on Tumblr, I think that the problem is not how [Linkle’s design is] “ridiculously” sexualized, but that like… they would never make these decisions to do this to a male character. It’s not like these designs are cheesecake, or beach volleyball bikinis, BUT it’s also clear that she didn’t ‘choose’ them for herself, that they were designed for straight dudes and not for anybody else.27

In other words, Linkle’s character design was disappointing because it was nothing more than business as usual, and many Zelda fans writing in English assumed that this business model profited from appealing to a

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straight male audience. Of all the potential decisions that could have been made regarding this character, the designers chose to pander to what female fans on Tumblr and Twitter perceived as the most boring and creatively bankrupt set of anime girl stereotypes. Feminist media fans pointing out the tediousness of the male gaze is nothing new, but what makes the conversation surrounding Linkle noteworthy is the cultural moment in which it occurred. Carolyn Petit, a professional gaming journalist who formerly worked for the website Gamespot and now writes for Feminist Frequency (an independent online magazine founded by Anita Sarkeesian that publishes articles, podcasts, and videos about gender and popular culture), responded to the announcement of Linkle as a playable character in a lengthy essay on her personal Tumblr blog. In this essay, titled “The Legend of F.  Scott: A Response to the Response to the Response to Linkle,” Petit ironically imagines an alternate reality in which the playable protagonists of video games are overwhelmingly female. She flips the genders of the debate around Linkle in order to disrupt the notion, primarily expressed by male-identified Twitter users, of the normativity of our current reality, in which about 80% of the playable characters of the games released in any given year are gendered as male.28 Petit writes: Link has always been something of a blank slate character, one that players are meant to project themselves onto, and by making this archetypal hero male for once, the game could be a small but meaningful step toward demolishing the cultural perception of female as default […]. Some gamers saw potential in the idea of a male Link, while others adopted a hostile attitude to the notion, insisting that Link was female and that was that.29

In her construction of a fantasy in which the male gender is a marginal position, Petit highlights the artificiality and absurdity of the insistence of male fans on social media that, essentially, the normativity of a male protagonist is the way things are and always have been in the Zelda series. The pushback against the feminist concerns facing Linkle was immediate and intense, and the flames of this conversation were fueled by the ongoing campaign of harassment against female game developers and gaming journalists under the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate, a reference to the internal corruption of the Watergate political scandal as applied to what was seen as the unfair promotion of diversity for the sake of diversity within the inner circles of high-profile gaming journalists. The rhetorical

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violence of #GamerGate resulted in an FBI investigation into the harassment of female game developers such as Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu,30 as well as a highly public effort on the part of Twitter to reduce the spread of bigotry on the platform.31 This online stream of invective has been attributed with creating a space for the spread of ultranationalist discourse on social media platforms, which in turn influenced the 2016 US presidential election.32 In other words, the debate over the feminist ramifications of a minor character in a 2015 handheld re-release of a spin-off game in the Legend of Zelda franchise was connected to a much larger conversation about gender, culture, and society. On the other side of the Pacific, however, it seemed that no one particularly cared about Linkle. Cute fan art of the character appeared on the Japanese amateur artistic social networking site Pixiv, and there was a bit of chatter concerning the gameplay aspects of her crossbow-based fighting style on the Japanese hashtag for the character on Twitter; but Linkle was, after all, a minor character, and her zettai ryō iki element was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, one of Hyrule Warriors’ main protagonists, the mighty Princess Zelda herself, was given a zettai ryō iki of her own, and no one so much as batted an eye. The easy acceptance of this admittedly sexualized element of character design can also be seen in dō jinshi fancomics featuring the game’s ostensible villain, Cia. In Pik-ya’s 2015 dō jinshi Ō bāran reddo, for example, Cia is a comic heroine whom the artist humorously suggests simply wants Link to have a good time fighting and playing mini-games. Similarly, in the 2015 dō jinshi Horā Hausu e yō koso! the artist Cherry Can even pokes a bit of fun at the sexualized elements of Cia’s design before getting on with the story, in which Cia performs all manner of ridiculous antics in order to break up the budding romance between Link and Zelda. Based on the hashtag for Hyrule Warriors on social networks hosting the conversations and fanworks of Japanese gamers, many Japanese fans who draw fan art and published fancomics “for women” (josei-muke dō jinshi) seem to have had no problem with the sexualized female character designs in Hyrule Warriors, including the zettai ryō iki of Linkle and Princess Zelda or the full frontal cleavage of Cia. Although it would be grossly inaccurate to say that there is complete gender equality within the world of Japanese game development, which still seems to be largely dominated by men, Nintendo promotes the work and public personas of a number of its high-ranking female staff members, such as Kataoka Manaka, who composed the critically celebrated musical score for the most recent Legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, and

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Kyō goku Aya, the co-producer of the immensely popular Animal Crossing series. In her panel at the 2014 Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, Kyō goku stated, “In my years at Nintendo, I have come to discover that when there are women in a variety of roles on the project, you get a wider range of ideas,” and she added that Nintendo has expressed and demonstrated a firm commitment to inclusionary gaming at its highest corporate levels.33 Female programmers, designers, writers, and artists also work for other major Japanese game development studios such as Square Enix and Konami, and freelance and amateur female creators produce countless independent games, from traditional platformers to dating sims. Outside of Japan, a number of professional and aspiring game designers communicate through online gatherings called “game jams,” many of which are organized around a common theme. One of the most outspoken and prolific advocates of game jams, Anna Anthropy, has compiled a guide titled Rise of the Videogame Zinesters that encourages amateurs to make their own games. She writes, “Every game that you and I make right now – every five-minute story, every weird experiment, every dinky little game about the experience of putting down your dog – makes the boundaries of our art form (and it is ours) larger. Every new game is a voice in the darkness.”34 As Anthropy demonstrates with numerous examples, feminist critique through media development is far from uncommon in the international gaming community. Recently, in response to the Legend of Zelda series director Eiji Aonuma’s comment that the protagonist of the game then in development for the Nintendo Switch console, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), is definitely not female, 20 enthusiastic contributions were made to the 2015 Female Link Jam. According to the game jam organizer, “Female Link is something fans have always had floating amongst their collective super-brain,” and the development of Linkle for Hyrule Warriors only encouraged artists and game developers to imagine what a Zelda game would look like with a female protagonist.35 To make a broad generalization, many feminist media critics writing in English have expressed intense displeasure regarding the sexualization of young female characters in video games, while media critics writing in Japanese tend not to be bothered by this to such a large degree. I believe that this is because many Japanese fans see no reason to take a straight male gaze for granted in their reading and reception of any given text. After all, the writers and artists of many of these texts are female, and the editors and producers are often female as well.36 Moreover, the Japanese “content

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industry” of media production is structurally organized according to the assumption that any given title will have a sizeable female audience.37 Of course there will be always adult men (and more than a few adult women) who draw, write, and consume pornography featuring their favorite female characters from anime, manga, and video games, but it is generally understood that the male gaze and the female gaze can coexist without conflict, often within the same text. Even though large video game development studios such as Square Enix and Nintendo tend to be conservative in the way they handle their intellectual property, fans are more than capable of putting forth interesting and viable alternatives to dominant video game narratives that marginalize both fictional women and female-gendered gamers. The writers and artists creating dō jinshi fancomics and amateur games have demonstrated an understanding of digital texts as open-access narrative platforms to be challenged, and these fans have shown themselves more than capable of deconstructing and reconfiguring the dominant masculinist narratives of video games to better reflect social and political concerns and their own personal identities. Not all of these fan creators are content to remain amateurs, however. In the following two chapters, I will continue discussing the powerful impact that fan cultures have had on mainstream media as the fans of anime, manga, and video games have become successful professional creators in their own right.

Notes 1. Free To Fanfic, “I Also Am Really Bothered by the Way English Fandom Has Adopted Genre Words from Japan.” Tumblr post, November 4, 2017. https://freedom-of-fanfic.tumblr.com/post/167135388789/ im-curious-for-your-thoughts-on-this-subject-i 2. Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78. 3. Ibid., 79. 4. Ibid., 81. The “perceptive observer” Sugimoto cites is Rokurō Hidaka, the author of The Price of Affluence: Dilemma of Contemporary Japan (London: Penguin, 1985). 5. Interpretations of Attack on Titan, a franchise stemming from a manga by Isayama Hajime that began serialization in 2009, have been varied. The creator assiduously maintains his privacy and the story has not yet reached its conclusion. See Joy Hui Lin, “Taking Solace in ‘Attack on Titan’,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 4, 2017. https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/taking-solace-in-attack-on-titan/

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6. Wim Lunsing, “Yaoi Ronsō : Discussing Depictions of Male Homosexuality in Japanese Girls’ Comics and Gay Pornography” in Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 12 (2006). Accessed October 15, 2014. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/lunsing.html 7. Vincent, “A Japanese Electra and Her Queer Progeny.” 8. Matsui Midori, “Little Girls Were Little Boy: Displaced Feminity in the Representation of Homosexuality in Japanese Girls’ Comics” in Feminism and the Politics of Difference, ed. Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993). 9. Aoyama, “Male Homosexuality as Treated by Japanese Women Writers.” See also Akatsuka, “Uttering the Absurd, Revaluing the Abject: Femininity and the Disavowal of Homosexuality in Transnational Boys’ Love Manga.” 10. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993). 11. Rachael Hutchinson, “Nuclear Discourse in Final Fantasy VII: Embodied Experience and Social Critique.” In Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade (New York: Routledge, 2018). 12. Ayako Kano, “Backlash, Fight Back, and Back-Pedaling: Responses to State Feminism in Contemporary Japan,” International Journal of Asian Studies 8 (2011). 13. Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 14. Wikipedia, “List of Best-Selling Video Game Franchises.” 15. Audureau, “Miyamoto, la Wii U et le secret de la Triforce.” 16. Other than Hyrule Warriors, there are a small number of auxiliary Zelda titles, including three games released on the disastrously unsuccessful Philips CD-i console in the early 1990s, three games starring the minor supporting character Tingle released on the handheld Nintendo DS console in the late 2000s, and a sports game titled Rinku no bō gan torēningu (Link’s Crossbow Training), which was given a Japan-only release on Nintendo’s Wii home console in November 2007. 17. Zeruda musō Kō shiki, “Settei shiryō shū neta kyara datta no ni ‘Rinkuru (kari)’ o sasagete itadaku kata, ō i desu ne… Honshū de saiyō shita hō ga yokatta no kashira” Tweet, August 28, 2014. https://twitter.com/zelda_ musou/status/504953276807122944 18. Nintendo, “Nintendo Direct Presentation – Mario, Zelda, Pokemon & More|Game Overviews (11/12/15).” YouTube video, November 12, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF3AnGHbG6s 19. TV Tropes, “Zettai Ryouiki,” last modified July 31, 2018. https:// tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ZettaiRyouiki 20. Azuma, Otaku, 48.

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21. Brian Ashcraft, “There’s A Female Link, and Her Name Is Linkle” in Kotaku, August 13, 2014. https://kotaku.com/ theres-a-female-link-and-her-name-is-linkle-1620664557 22. Christine Yano, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), 56. 23. Jennifer Prough, Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shō jo Manga (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 114. 24. There is a surprising dearth of writing on Japanese mobile games targeted at a female demographic, many of which fall into the “raising sim” (kyō iku shimyurēshon) genre of grooming a young man or woman to become an entertainment industry professional. For more on fashion simulation games, see Shira Chess, Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designated Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 25. Maddy Meyers, “I Love Linkle. But Linkle Is Not Enough,” The Mary Sue, November 18, 2015. https://www.themarysue.com/ the-linkle-backlash/ 26. Anita Sarkeesian, “Lingerie Is Not Armor,” Feminist Frequency, June 6, 2016. https://feministfrequency.com/video/lingerie-is-not-armor 27. Betterbemeta, “I Think That the Problem Is Not How ‘Ridiculously’ Sexualized.” 28. Michele Zorilla, “Gender Representation in Video Games,” blog post on Video Games and Gender, June 2011. http://www.radford. edu/~mzorrilla2/thesis/gamerepresentation.html 29. Carolyn Petit, “The Legend of F. Scott: A Response to the Response to the Response to Linkle,” Tumblr post, November 17, 2015. http:// carolynpetit.tumblr.com/post/133430748625/the-legend-of-f-scott-aresponse-to-the-response 30. Adi Robertson, “The FBI Has Released Its Gamergate Investigation Records,” The Verge, January 27, 2014. https://www.theverge. com/2017/1/27/14412594/fbi-gamergate-harassment-threatinvestigation-records-release 31. Women, Action, & the Media. “Harassment of Women on Twitter?” press release, November 6, 2014. http://womenactionmedia. org/2014/11/06/harassment-of-women-on-twitter-were-on-it/ 32. Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us About the ‘Alt-­ Right’.” The Guardian, December 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump 33. Michael McWhertor, “Animal Crossing: New Leaf Director Says Team Diversity, Communication Core to Its Success.” Polygon, March 19, 2014. https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/19/5526678/animal-crossingnew-leaf-diversity-aya-kyogoku

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34. Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 160. 35. Kyle Hilliard, “Link Is Not a Woman in Zelda on Wii U.” Game Informer, June 12, 2014. http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/ archive/2014/06/12/is-link-a-girl-in-zelda-on-wii-u.aspx 36. Prough, Straight from the Heart. 37. Ian Condry, The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013).

References Akatsuka, Neal K. 2010. Uttering the Absurd, Revaluing the Abject: Femininity and the Disavowal of Homosexuality in Transnational Boys’ Love Manga. In Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, ed. Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, 159–176. Jefferson: McFarland. Anthropy, Anna. 2012. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York: Seven Stories Press. Aoyama, Tomoko. 1988. Male Homosexuality as Treated by Japanese Women Writers. In The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond, ed. Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto, 186–204. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Ashcraft, Brian. 2014. There’s a Female Link, and Her Name Is Linkle. Kotaku, August 13. https://kotaku.com/theres-a-female-link-and-hername-is-linkle-1620664557 Audureau, William. 2012. Miyamoto, la Wii U et le secret de la Triforce. Gamekult, November 1. https://www.gamekult.com/actualite/miyamoto-la-wii-u-et-lesecret-de-la-triforce-105550.html Azuma, Hiroki. 2009. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Betterbemeta. 2015. I Think That the Problem Is Not How ‘Ridiculously’ Sexualized, But That Like… They Would Never Make These Decisions to Do This to a Male Character. Tumblr Post, October 10. http://betterbemeta. tumblr.com/post/99643964277/problemspoof-betterbemeta-glutularspirits Chess, Shira. 2017. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designated Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Condry, Ian. 2013. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story. Durham: Duke University Press. Fetterly, Judith. 1978. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Free To Fanfic. 2017. I Also Am Really Bothered by the Way English Fandom Has Adopted Genre Words from Japan to Mean ‘the Worst Version of [x]/fans of [x]’. Tumblr Post, November 4. https://freedom-of-fanfic.tumblr.com/ post/167135388789/im-curious-for-your-thoughts-on-this-subject-i Hidaka, Rokurō . 1985. The Price of Affluence: Dilemma of Contemporary Japan. London: Penguin. Hilliard, Kyle. 2014. Link Is Not a Woman in Zelda On Wii U. Game Informer, June 12. http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2014/06/12/islink-a-girl-in-zelda-on-wii-u.aspx Hutchinson, Rachael. 2018. Nuclear Discourse in Final Fantasy VII: Embodied Experience and Social Critique. In Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade, 71–80. New York: Routledge. Kano, Ayako. 2011. Backlash, Fight Back, and Back-Pedaling: Responses to State Feminism in Contemporary Japan. International Journal of Asian Studies 8: 41–62. Lees, Matt. 2016. What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us About the ‘Alt-­ Right’. The Guardian, December 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump Lin, Joy Hui. 2017. Taking Solace in ‘Attack on Titan.’ Los Angeles Review of Books, August 4. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/taking-solace-inattack-on-titan/ Lunsing, Wim. 2006. Yaoi Ronsō : Discussing Depictions of Male Homosexuality in Japanese Girls’ Comics, Gay Comics and Gay Pornography. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 12. http://intersections.anu. edu.au/issue12/lunsing.html. Accessed 15 Oct 2014. Matsui, Midori. 1993. Little Girls Were Little Boys: Displaced Feminity in the Representation of Homosexuality in Japanese Girls’ Comics. In Feminism and the Politics of Difference, ed. Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman, 177–196. Boulder: Westview Press. McWhertor, Michael. 2014. Animal Crossing: New Leaf Director Says Team Diversity, Communication Core to Its Success. Polygon, March 19. https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/19/5526678/animal-crossingnew-leaf-diversity-aya-kyogoku Meyers, Maddy. 2015. I Love Linkle. But Linkle Is Not Enough. The Mary Sue, November 18. https://www.themarysue.com/the-linkle-backlash/ Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. 1993. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. Nintendo. 2015. Nintendo Direct Presentation – Mario, Zelda, Pokemon & More|Game Overviews (11/12/15). YouTube video, November 12. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF3AnGHbG6s Petit, Carolyn. 2015. The Legend of F. Scott: A Response to the Response to the Response to Linkle. Tumblr Post, November 17. http://carolynpetit.tumblr. com/post/133430748625/the-legend-of-f-scott-a-response-to-the-response

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Prough, Jennifer S. 2010. Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shō jo Manga. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Robertson, Adi. 2014. The FBI Has Released Its Gamergate Investigation Records. The Verge, January 27. https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/27/14412594/ fbi-gamergate-harassment-threat-investigation-records-release Sarkeesian, Anita. 2016. Lingerie Is Not Armor. Feminist Frequency, June 6. https://feministfrequency.com/video/lingerie-is-not-armor/ Sugimoto, Yoshio. 2010. An Introduction to Japanese Society. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. TV Tropes. 2018. Zettai Ryouiki. Last Modified July 31, 2018. https://tvtropes. org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ZettaiRyouiki Vincent, Keith. 2007. A Japanese Electra and Her Queer Progeny. Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire: 64–79. Wikipedia. 2018. List of Best-Selling Video Game Franchises. Last Modified August 14, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_ video_game_franchises Women, Action, & the Media. 2014. Harassment of Women on Twitter? We’re ON IT.  Press Release, November 6. http://womenactionmedia. org/2014/11/06/harassment-of-women-on-twitter-were-on-it/ Yano, Christine R. 2013. Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific. Durham: Duke University Press. Zorilla, Michele. 2011. Gender Representation in Video Games. Blog Post on Video Games and Gender, June. http://www.radford.edu/~mzorrilla2/thesis/ gamerepresentation.html

CHAPTER 6

Link Is Not Silent: Queer Disability Positivity in Fan Readings of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was given a global release on the Nintendo Switch console to overwhelming acclaim on March 3, 2017. In the tradition of the Legend of Zelda series, the player controls a silent protagonist named Link. Because Link’s speaking voice is never heard, fans of the game have speculated on how he is able to have conversations with other characters. One of the dominant interpretations of the “silent protagonist” gameplay mechanic in Breath of the Wild is that Link is hard of hearing or speech-impaired and therefore communicates by using a sign language that everyone in the world of the game is able to understand. This reading of the character is used to compliment and to complicate the canonical diegetic explanation for Link’s silence, which is that he suffers from severe social anxiety. Multilingual fan networks have embraced the perception of Link as neurodiverse and differently abled in Breath of the Wild by using fanworks to imagine positive yet nuanced representations of a society in which difference is enthusiastically accepted. Many Breath of the Wild fanworks posted on social media also portray Link’s gender and sexuality as queer, thus transferring the positive affect of his imagined romantic relationships to other non-normative aspects of his identity and thereby queering the conventional video game narrative that celebrates the exploits of an able-bodied male protagonist for the sake of a damsel in distress. This chapter uses Breath of the Wild and the transnational online community surrounding it as a case study in order to explore the intersections © The Author(s) 2020 K. Hemmann, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_6

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between configurations of queerness and disability as ontological markers of difference in subcultural narratives surrounding video games. As such, the goals and methodology of this study are intersectional and interdisciplinary. One of the primary purposes of the interlinked disciplines of Queer Studies and Disability Studies is to illuminate aspects of culture and society that are often overlooked and left unquestioned due to historical prejudice or unintentional ignorance. It is important for academic writing to discuss critical issues relating to representation in the stories that circulate by means of popular entertainment media, and it is equally worthwhile to address the same issues in subcultural responses to these stories. The purpose of this chapter, however, is to explore queerness beyond representation, or how the particular forms of media used to share stories have the potential to enable heterogenous readings and interpretations. Because the medium requires active participation, video games serve as an especially productive field of inquiry regarding audience engagement, as does social media, which facilitates communication between diverse groups of people. The online fan cultures surrounding video games are worthy of attention not only because they are so large, multinational, and visible on social media but also because the size and visibility of gaming cultures allows them to influence with other realms of discourse, some of which are more overtly tied to national and international politics and social movements. Breath of the Wild is of particular interest because it was released in the aftermath of widespread public acknowledgment of the existence and influence of alt-right movements in North America, Europe, and Asia. Members of younger generations of gamers—many of whom experience games through lively communities surrounding online streams and “let’s play” videos—responded to the game in a manner that reflects this cultural moment. Even if the artists, writers, and other creators who have made fanwork based on Breath of the Wild do not consider themselves to be staging an intervention, their widely circulated creative pursuits nevertheless push the culture forward by imagining more supportive spaces to explore representation while serving as models for queer engagement with popular entertainment media.

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Ability, Disability, and Gaming The challenge to mainstream narrative patterns and movement toward the acceptance of difference is especially critical given that many video games are inherently ableist not only in their insistence on a narrow range of skills that are believed to constitute “competence” but also in the assumptions underlying their stories. In “Ability, Disability and Dead Space,” Diane Carr summarizes the fear of difference implicit in any number of horror and science fiction games that ask the player to destroy zombies, mutants, and survivors of unethical medical and scientific experimentation. For example, the 2008 survival horror game Dead Space “features bodies that are marked as monstrous, distorted, incapable, and imperiled” in order to “generate generically appropriate sensations of fear and dread.”1 Carr demonstrates how the game’s enemies, genetically modified humanoids called “Necromorphs,” are endowed with abject qualities in order to inspire revulsion and the anxiety of body horror. The disability of these targets of violence, like many enemy characters in a broad range of video games, serves to highlight the ability of the player-character, who attacks them in order to eliminate the perceived vulnerability and threat of contamination represented by the status of being differently abled. Game Studies scholars such as Shira Chess and Christopher Paul have argued that the ludic structures of many games emphasize neoliberal capitalist ideologies that privilege success and ableism. In her study of resource management games such as those in the Diner Dash and FarmVille series, Chess illustrates how “casual” games marketed toward a female demographic reflect real-life expectations for adult women, in which “play always and necessarily resembles work activities,” especially activities involving emotional labor and the pleasing presentation of an attractive appearance.2 In addition, Chess demonstrates how advertising in women’s magazines such as O: The Oprah Magazine and Martha Stewart Living presented the Nintendo DS and the Wii consoles as means of maximizing productivity through activities such as “brain training” in the waiting room of a doctor’s office or effectively connecting with the hobbies of their children. The underlying message of casual games for a female audience seems to be that women are not allowed to relax but must be constantly productive, even during their leisure time. Chess clarifies that these games “are effective not because they are convincing women to play into an entirely new identity, but because they remap old identities onto new spaces.”3

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Video games are therefore capable of reifying systems of inequality, and Christopher Paul argues that “meritocratic game narratives partner perfectly with elements of meritocratic game design to make video games one of the purest spaces of meritocratic rhetoric.”4 Paul demonstrates that, as a result, “video games are predicted on inequality, on the perception that some people are better than others and that when one is victorious it is precisely because of that player’s actions, that player’s timely interventions and button presses.”5 In her monograph Playing with Feelings, Aubrey Anable describes multiple examples of how developers can challenge the meritocratic and ableist ideologies inherent in many games through creative design and gameplay; but, as with any medium, there will always be barriers to accessibility. As Anable argues, “The particular worlds, characters, and stories of video games cannot be meaningfully separated from what games ask us to do as players or from the less visible actions of their programming.”6 On the other hand, research has demonstrated that video games can serve therapeutic functions in addition to providing nuanced representations of disability and neurodiversity. In “Disability, Neurodiversity, and Inclusive Play,” Sarah Gibbons discusses the 2013 simulation game Auti-­ Sim and the 2011 role-playing game To the Moon as examples of such representation. Gibbons finds that, in both of these games, “progress toward the end goal […] does not need to be progress toward overcoming or curing disability.”7 This is in line with one of the main goals of neurological diversity advocacy, which “is to critique efforts to cure autism, efforts that are often driven by fear.”8 Although both Auti-Sim and To the Moon are independently published games with a relatively limited circulation, video games as a medium are capable of having an extraordinary cultural impact on a global scale. Public conversations concerning representation in games and gaming cultures have become more visible during the past decade, especially in the wake of the 2014 GamerGate controversy concerning the role of representation and social justice in gaming.9 The distinctive ability of games to inspire empathy by encouraging the player to become emotionally invested in the safety, growth, and success of the main player-character has found creative expression in the online fan communities that sprang up around Breath of the Wild in 2017 and 2018, a cultural moment I will examine after briefly providing the context for the stories that these communities have created.

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Queering the Link to the Player In Breath of the Wild, as in other games in the Legend of Zelda series, the player-character is a young man named Link who is tasked with rescuing a princess named Zelda and protecting the high fantasy kingdom of Hyrule from an evil entity called Ganon. Link has already failed to protect Zelda in Breath of the Wild, and he is critically injured during Ganon’s initial assault on Hyrule. His body is placed in a hidden stasis chamber while Zelda goes to Hyrule Castle to confront Ganon on her own. One hundred years later, Link wakes up with no clothing, no weapons, and no memories, and Hyrule is nothing more than a vast and sparsely populated landscape filled with ruins. The player’s job is to travel through the wilderness with Link as he learns more about himself and finds the means to enter Hyrule Castle in order to aid Zelda in her battle against Ganon. Link travels alone, and his journey is, for the most part, solitary. In addition, Breath of the Wild offers the player relatively little in the way of guidance or a recommended sequence of objectives. If a player follows the path most clearly suggested by the story clues and the natural landscape, however, Link will arrive in a small village called Kakariko within the first few hours of the game, and a quest-giver figure will instruct him to visit him to visit four other settlements, each of which serves as the home of one of the main peoples of Hyrule. The most geographically proximate of these settlements is Zora’s Domain, where a group of humanoid fish people called the Zora live. As Link approaches Zora’s Domain, he is repeatedly hailed by the Zora prince, Sidon. Sidon offers encouragement to Link and, by extension, the player, and the warmth of his confident and charismatic personality is a welcome juxtaposition against the loneliness of Link’s solitary trek through the open landscape. Because most first-time players will encounter Sidon before any of the other major characters, it is understandable that numerous fans of the game have formed a strong emotional attachment to him. On a metadiegetic level, many people in the young adult demographic targeted by Breath of the Wild experienced anxiety and depression in the wake of the 2016 American presidential election, and game critics in the United States and abroad have noted how Sidon’s resilience and positivity in the face of disaster was a welcome change of attitude from the general atmosphere of malaise that haunted social media circles at the time the game was released in March 2017.10 It is perhaps for these reasons that Sidon quickly became popular with players. The critical and commercial success of Breath of the Wild,

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combined with a healthy grassroots promotional buzz, propelled the game to the status of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful title of 2017.11 This resulted in an additional surge in popularity on social media, where many fans cheerfully admitted to having a crush on the handsome Zora prince. Within several months of the game’s release, fan art depicting Sidon and Link in a romantic relationship had become common within international fandom communities that used the social media sites Tumblr and Twitter as a hub, while stories about Link and Sidon serialized on the fanfiction hosting site Archive of Our Own attracted large and devoted followings.12 As an expansive open-world game, Breath of the Wild reveals its story only as a reward for careful exploration, but players quickly discovered Link’s backstory as contained within a series of entries in Princess Zelda’s diary, an easily overlooked object in an out-of-­ the-way room in Hyrule Castle, a dangerous area that serves as the final dungeon of the game. According to Zelda’s observations, Link almost never spoke during his service as a royal guard. Drawing on her own experience with depression, Zelda surmised that Link did not speak because he was too burdened by social expectations and was therefore silenced by his anxiety.13 This aspect of Link’s character resonated with many players who created transformative fanworks based on the game’s story, many of which were also informed by the fan theory that Link is speech-impaired or hard of hearing. Nevertheless, Link needed to be able to communicate if a relationship with Sidon—or any other character—were to develop. Therefore, in many transformative fanworks based on Breath of the Wild, Link is shown speaking by means of American Sign Language, which most of his interlocutors are able to understand perfectly. This portrayal of Link as neurodivergent and differently abled in the context of a homosexual interspecies relationship effectively serves to queer the ableist and heteronormative ideologies that inform the narrative of Breath of the Wild. “Queering” a text is the process of reconfiguring its narrative in order to emphasize the latent elements that contradict the assumptions of the normative ideologies that inform it. These latent elements, which may include political feminist leanings and homosexual attraction, are often buried due to an initial process of “straightening” or ensuring that a given narrative does not deviate too far from mainstream standards of acceptability according to a normative cultural status quo. In Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan, Ayako Kano demonstrates how Japanese theater was “straightened into an apparatus that builds a community made up of national subjects” during the nineteenth century.14

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This involved, for instance, creating a more “rational” and “natural” alternative to the populist kabuki theater, which was queer “not only in its association with norm-breaking behavior and anti-establishment attitudes; it was also queer in its association with homosexual practices.”15 Straightening discourses are thus active performances meant to bring disparate elements of an audience or population into the fold of a dominant ideology. To give another example, Jennifer Robertson discusses how the all-female Takarazuka Revue theater was purposefully designed as a vehicle of state propaganda during the early twentieth century. One facet of its “straightness” involved using actresses playing male roles to soften the masculinity of non-Japanese people in East Asia and thereby reduce anxiety regarding the aggression of Japan’s colonial campaigns.16 As Kano and Robertson argue, even seemingly queer elements of performance, such as female actresses playing male roles, can be straightened so that they better conform to social and political normativity. Like straightening, queering is also an active performance that demands an audience. As Henry Jenkins demonstrates in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” video games are a medium that encourages players to construct their own stories through gameplay.17 Games can thus serve as an especially fertile ground for heterogenous readings. An able-bodied straight male character serves as the player’s avatar in an overwhelming percentage of both big-budget titles and games produced by smaller independent studios.18 However, even if a player is asked to control an able-­ bodied straight male character, their main object of identification may very well be elsewhere. In Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Bonnie Ruberg draws on a wealth of examples to argue that, through the process of queer play, “even those games whose assumed, established meanings seem time-tested and incontrovertible can be reinterpreted through a queer lens and made new.”19 Queer play can also be a personal and private practice resulting in an individual “headcanon,” a term drawn from North American television fandom that refers to an interpretation of a story, characters, or gameplay that exists as canonical truth within a fan’s own head. Social media allows fans to share their personal styles of play and headcanons with one another, and fannish conversations are capable of constructing and normalizing progressive frameworks for how difference is portrayed and accommodated within gaming cultures. Following Alexander Cho and Bruce Renninger,20 who have studied how Tumblr functions as a counterpublic space for queer communities, Natalie Chew

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describes how the social media platform has acted as a backstage area for public demonstrations and fan campaigns. While a comparatively mainstream venue like Twitter can be used to engage with showrunners, studios, distributers, and retailers, Tumblr provides a space for subcultures to form based on affective attachments to media properties, “which often paves the way for more political/social activism and is important in its own right because it illustrates contemporary struggles between fans and producers over social power and the meanings and value of texts.”21 Chew explores the inner workings of social media campaigns focused on convincing networks to renew a fan-favorite animated shows for another season, but such activism has broader implications in its ability to shape the interests, perspectives, and artistic production of creative communities that share their work online. Fan Studies scholar Paul Booth describes contemporary fan communities on social media spaces as “playscapes” that are “dependent on a culture of ludism: Today’s media field is fun, playful, and exuberant.”22 Like video games, then, social media acts as a space where people can actively explore different stories, subjectivities, and identities.

Links Between Subcultural Narratives Romantic pairings between characters in popular media often serve as a catalyst for the formation of online fan communities, and the collaborative storytelling practiced by these communities can function as a way for fans to experiment with various perspectives. In many cases, the perspective of a fictional character may not directly align with that of the artist or writer, and issues relating to narration and representation can be complicated and meaningful in different ways to different communities.23 As we have seen in earlier chapters, in Japanese BL doj̄ inshi, or “boys’ love” fanzines with a focus on a male/male pairing, the reader’s perspective tends to align with that of the character who is associated with traits socially coded as “feminine.” It is therefore interesting that the overtly masculine-coded shark prince Sidon became an object of identification for many fans of Breath of the Wild who were active on Twitter immediately after the game’s release. For instance, in a 2018 doj̄ in anthology titled Karera ni kisu wa muzukashii? [Is it difficult for them to kiss?] edited by an artist called Tsugumi (@tsugumi_pp on Twitter), the primary point-of-view character is Sidon in several of the 14 fancomics and fanfiction stories collected in the printed tankob̄ on book. While Link journeys across Hyrule, Sidon must remain in

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Zora’s Domain and wait for his partner to return, and the reader is encouraged to sympathize with Sidon’s frustration regarding his passive role. In many other Japanese doj̄ inshi based on the games in the Legend of Zelda series, this narrative role is occupied by Princess Zelda, and it is perhaps because her presence is relatively small at the beginning of Breath of the Wild that Sidon becomes the “waiting princess”—or waiting prince— instead. A number of the artists and fan writers who participated in the Karera ni kisu wa muzukashii? anthology project therefore do not seem to identify with Link, but rather with Sidon, who is physically marked by his difference from the default represented by Link by virtue of being a large fish person modeled on a hammerhead shark. In the first story in this anthology, Ohoshisama to oj̄ isama (The star and the prince), an artist called Zakuro (@zkr_108 on Twitter) envisions Link catching sight of a falling star while visiting Zora’s Domain. In the diegetic playscape of Breath of the Wild, a shooting star indicates that a rare and valuable crafting material called a “star fragment” can be found if the player is able to pinpoint the location of the fallen star before the sun rises, a challenge that requires quick and decisive action. In Ohoshisama to oj̄ isama, Link prepares to warp to the star’s location just as Sidon catches sight of him. Link vanishes before Sidon can reach him, so Sidon remains seated in front of the Zora’s Domain warp point, waiting for Link to return (Fig. 6.1). When Link does return, he is surprised to find Sidon still awaiting his arrival, and Sidon expresses concern that Link appears to have injured himself during his adventure. The reader is thus expected to identify with the loneliness of the secondary character Sidon instead of Link, the protagonist who serves as the player’s “link” to the world of the game. This shift in identification may be a result of many fan creators experiencing Breath of the Wild primarily through “let’s play” videos narrated by YouTube personalities, as well as other fanworks. Nevertheless, exploring difference is a major theme is every prose story and short comic in the anthology, just as it is in many works shared across national and linguistic borders in the broader fandom surrounding Breath of the Wild. Outside of Japan, many artists writing in English have imbued Link with a sense of “difference” by means of his use of American Sign Language (ASL). It is likely that this trend is connected to the interest in ASL within the broader community of writers and artists on Twitter. ASL is one of the most commonly studied languages in the United States,24 and mainstream American publishers have begun to represent artists and writers who

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Fig. 6.1  Prince Sidon (Ohoshisama to oj̄ isama, p. 9)

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create comics featuring speech-impaired and hard-of-hearing characters. Alex Trujillo’s 2018 high-school sports drama Dodge City provides many excellent examples of how ASL can be effectively conveyed through the medium of sequential art, as well as how the identity of being differently abled may be welcomed and embraced by other communities marginalized by their difference, such as LGBTQ+ communities and communities of young people growing up in multilingual households. This is a departure from earlier mass-market and independent graphic narratives, which tended to focus on the pathology and inconveniences of difference and disability. Even in sympathetic narratives, disability has often been presented as a problem to be fixed instead of a normal part of daily life. Such a presentation of disability usually incorporates a formal medical diagnosis as a major turning point in the story, thus privileging an outside perspective over an individual’s own experience and knowledge of their body. Using Canadian artist Georgia Webber’s Dumb series of zines as a case study,25 Jay Dolmage and Dale Jacobs have criticized the “diagnosis model” of comics about disability, arguing that “this model offers very little space for living with disability, for understanding the role of culture and society in dictating the terms of disability; this model funnels narratives of disability toward either kill or cure.”26 As in portrayals of other types of difference, including differences in race, religion, and sexual orientation, the normalizing ideology that informs the narrative drive to “kill or cure” can be alienating in its insistence on pathologizing anyone who deviates from an imagined ideal of perfect health, appearance, or morality. The rhetorical violence of this narrative drive is especially apparent in video games, as the player is often asked to perform the action of “killing or curing” with their own hands in the process of becoming stronger and more able. In fancomics based on Breath of the Wild, however, Link’s silence is not pathologized or fetishized as “different” but treated as entirely natural, as are the queer elements of his gender and sexuality. For instance, the humor of the short comics of French artist Stéphanie Hu (@_Erasable on Twitter) typically comes from poking fun at Link for the intensity of his teenage crush on Sidon, not his use of sign language or his homosexual attraction to a member of a different species. In a comic posted to both Twitter and Tumblr on March 21, 2018, Hu shows Link using ASL to speak with a Goddess Statue, a gameplay device the player uses to exchange collectible objects for upgrades to health and stamina (Fig. 6.2).27

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Fig. 6.2  Link (Tumblr post by @SketchWakusei, March 21, 2018)

The Goddess Statue, which is believed to channel the will of Princess Zelda’s ancestor, the mythical goddess Hylia, begins its standard set of lines when Link approaches it, but Link interrupts it to request life advice instead of a power upgrade. “Actually,” he signs, “I’m worried. They’re a fish man, you know.” This dialog is spread across three panels to demonstrate the variable speed of Link’s hands and his shifting facial expression, and it is only when he begins to enter risqué territory that the Goddess Statue stops him. Within the larger context of the ship fandom, the “you know” almost certainly refers to Link’s worries concerning sexual compatibility, and the Goddess Statue’s eyes grow comedically wide in response to this veiled reference to Sidon’s genitalia. Link’s preferred method of communication, his sexual orientation, and his interest in “a fish man” are all taken for granted, and the joke is that he treats a mechanical object as a romantic confidant and then becomes dejected at the unwillingness of this substitute authority figure to give advice regarding sexual intimacy. Neither Link’s queerness nor disability informs the humor of the comic, which instead offers a gentle reflection on the awkwardness of being a teenager. In another comic posted on March 11, 2018, Hu shows Link cross-­ dressing as a woman in order to cross through the guarded gate of the all-female Gerudo Town while accompanied by Princess Zelda.28 Link’s costume change from his standard clothing into an outfit that will be accepted as female-presenting is accepted as completely natural, and, once

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Link has entered Gerudo Town, a Gerudo woman he speaks with accepts his gender presentation without comment and seems to understand his signing perfectly.29 The comedic conflict of the comic comes from Zelda, who is somewhat taken aback by the ease with which Link switches his gender presentation in order to be accepted into a homosocial female space. “Oh right,” she thinks. “He kinda enjoys this.” It is therefore Zelda’s attitude that is inappropriate to the situation, not Link’s cross-­ dressing. Link’s gender fluidity is normalized, and it is instead Zelda’s embarrassment at having made an incorrect assumption that becomes the target of good-natured humor. Princess Zelda is characterized by her excessive formality and her complicated relationship to tradition in Breath of the Wild, so Hu’s short comic is not merely comedic but also cathartic in its portrayal of Zelda’s exposure to a more open and inclusive approach to the role of gender in social interactions. In other words, the narrative and comedic focus is on a small moment in Zelda’s personal growth, while Link’s fluidity of gender presentation and use of ASL are treated as entirely natural. Many fancomics do contain moments addressing Link’s status of being differently abled, however, and these acknowledgments tend to be awkward yet sympathetic. A number of examples can be found in the loosely connected stories of the American artist Meghan Joy (@mjoyart on Twitter). For example, in a four-page comic posted to Tumblr and Twitter on January 26, 2019, Link uses ASL to explain that he is hard of hearing, but his interlocutor does not immediately understand.30 Link is attempting to communicate with a small fairy named Navi, who is the player’s companion in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998). Navi has come upon Link as he weeps during a moment of reflection on what he lost during the 100 years he slept. She attempts to comfort him, but her assurance that “everything is going to be okay” is met with a blank stare. Link signs that he cannot understand her, but she is too small to follow the movement of his hands. In frustration, Link points to his ears and then crosses his arms in front of his chest, signaling that he cannot hear her voice. “Well, that’s fine,” Navi assures him on the final page of the comic. “People say that I talk too much anyway (Fig. 6.3).” This line is a joke referring to a common complaint about Ocarina of Time, in which Navi functions as a second set of eyes for players who, when the game was first released, may not have been familiar with how to navigate a three-dimensional playspace and were thus guided by Navi’s frequent calls to “Listen!” as she directed the player’s attention. Navi does

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Fig. 6.3  Link and Navi (Tumblr post by @MJoyArt, January 26, 2019)

not appear in Breath of the Wild, in which Link does not travel with a companion. The artist’s inclusion of Navi in this comic is a device for allowing Link to acknowledge the sadness, trauma, and anxiety that are canonically present but never directly addressed in the game itself, but it is also a

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subtle commentary on a transition to more contemporary understanding of how the playspaces within games can be made accessible to a broader range of players. Navi may have been a useful tool for making Ocarina of Time accessible to gamers in 1998; but now, more than 20 years later, concerns over accessibility have developed beyond the purely mechanical aspects of video games. Thankfully, the Navi in Joy’s comic is able to make this adjustment, which suggests a hope that the Legend of Zelda series will be able to evolve as well. As soon as Link communicates the parameters of his disability, Navi reacts with kindness and understanding, and the brief awkwardness of the situation is dispelled. Joy depicts Link’s social anxiety with sensitivity as well, as other characters in her comics are aware and accommodating of Link’s need to occasionally distance himself from the company of other people, as well as his occasional lack of social grace. As is the case in Hu’s Breath of the Wild comics, Joy ties the acceptance of Link’s use of ASL together with a broader acceptance of difference. In turn, Link reflects this kindness back into his world, treating characters that the game has designated as “enemies” with respect and compassion. Joy has posted comics depicting other episodes in Link’s adventure that show him helping a baby Bokoblin, one of the common enemies the player faces in the game, and defending Ganondorf, the main antagonist of the Legend of Zelda series, from unwarranted prejudice. In the imagined world that Joy has created based on Breath of the Wild, sensitivity regarding difference therefore transcends markers of sexuality, race, and disability and extends to deeper configurations of belonging and exclusion, thereby opening a window to an almost utopian reality in which there are no categories of people perceived as so “other” that they become “enemies” as a matter of course.

A Link to a Wider World I have used work from Hu and Joy as representative examples because their comics are relatively self-contained and easy to understand without detailed knowledge of the source text, but they are only two of the dozens of popular artists and writers—as well as countless number of less visible fans—who have created stories about Link, his friends, and their world since Breath of the Wild was released in March 2017. The fan creators working primarily English, as well as the Japanese fan creators who have inspired them and collaborated with them by means of various interactions on Twitter and Tumblr, have collectively engaged in a process of queering

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a mainstream digital text by emphasizing and celebrating its latent themes of diversity and difference. This is important precisely because such themes are present but underdeveloped in the original text. Queering was a necessary process because Breath of the Wild was deliberately “straightened” in the sense that its heterogenous elements were erased or eliminated in order to accommodate the perceived interests of a large international audience. As demonstrated by the necessity of cross-dressing to enter Gerudo Town, Breath of the Wild allows Link to be mildly genderqueer, for instance, but it does so for the purpose of emphasizing a dual-gender binary. In a similar fashion, the game hints that Link is differently abled only to emphasize a narrative of personal growth in which disability is an obstacle to be overcome through effort and perseverance. By queering Breath of the Wild through independent transformative works, fan creators have not merely disregarded the straightness of the text but also invalidated the exclusionary ideologies that inform it. In the process, they have challenged the assumption that the normative “default” avatar that will most readily be accepted by players is male, straight, neurotypical, and able-bodied. Fan spaces are not without friction, of course, and there has been disagreement over the exact nature of Link’s gender, sexuality, and disability. Nevertheless, I believe that the widespread popularity of disability positivity and the celebration of difference within supportive communities of young professional creatives aiming for careers in the entertainment industry may have a profound cultural impact outside online circles of video game fans. Fan creators imagine progressive alternatives to mainstream narratives not because they’re uninterested in offering interventionist critiques of the canonical text as it exists; rather, as creators themselves, they choose to build on the work of the writers, artists, and programmers whose positions they may one day occupy. As Alison Piepmeier says of intersectional feminist zine authors, who have operated within a similarly liminal discursive area between mainstream and subculture, “they don’t necessarily stay in that space of critique, choosing, rather, to generate alternative subject positions and to tap into the pleasures of creation and cultural intervention.”31 The transformative works of fan communities thus generate and celebrate a type of queerness beyond diegetic representation, and the global and collaborative nature of social media platforms has the potential to facilitate the spread of acceptance and positivity not just across borders of difference in personal identity but across national and linguistic borders as well.

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Notes 1. Diane Carr, “Ability, Disability and Dead Space,” The International Journal of Computer Game Research Vol. 4, No. 2 (2014). http:// gamestudies.org/1402/articles/carr 2. Shira Chess, Ready Player Two, p. 84. 3. Ibid., 176. 4. Christopher A. Paul, The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), p. 10. 5. Ibid., 138. 6. Aubrey Anable, Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), p. 131. 7. Sarah Gibbons, “Disability, Neurodiversity, and Inclusive Play: An Examination of the Social and Political Aspects of the Relationship Between Disability and Games,” Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association Vol. 9, No. 14 (2015), p. 35. 8. Ibid., 29. 9. See Jesse Singal, “Why the Video-Game Culture Wars Won’t Die.” New York Magazine, September 30, 2016. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/why-the-video-game-culture-wars-wont-die-two-yearslater.html; Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us About the ‘Alt-Right.’” 10. See Ib. Hunktears, “A Love Letter to Breath of the Wild’s Prince Sidon.” Fanbyte, February 20, 2019. https://www.fanbyte.com/features/a-loveletter-to-breath-of-the-wilds-prince-sidon/; Gita Jackson, “Breath of the Wild’s Shark Prince Is Getting A Lot of Love from Thirsty Zelda Fans.” Kotaku, March 13, 2017. https://kotaku.com/breath-of-the-wilds-sharkprince-is-getting-a-lot-of-lo-1793214067 11. According to the review aggregator Metacritic, Breath of the Wild tied with Super Mario Odyssey as having the highest average rating of all video games released in 2017. According to Nintendo’s March 2019 financial report, Breath of the Wild sold roughly 12.77 million units, spurring demand for the Nintendo Switch console for which it was a launch title. See Metacritic, “Best Video Games for 2017.” Accessed July 1, 2019. https://www.metacritic. com/browse/games/score/metascore/year/all/filtered?sort=desc&year_ selected=2017; Game Pressure, “Nintendo Reveals Impressive Sales of Switch and Zelda.” Posted April 25, 2019. https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/nintendo-reveals-impressive-sales-of-switch-and-zelda/zba73 12. As of June 1, 2019, there were 861 works tagged with “Link/Prince Sidon” on the fanfiction hosting site Archive of Our Own. The top 100

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works as sorted by hit count received well over 10,000 views and hundreds (and often thousands) of “kudos,” an indicator of positive audience engagement and feedback. 13. The complete text is transcribed in the “Zelda’s Diary” entry on the Zeldapedia fandom wiki. The relevant section reads as follows: “A feeling I know all too well… For him, it has caused him to stop outwardly expressing his thoughts and feelings. I always believed him to be simply a gifted person who had never faced a day of hardship. How wrong I was… Everyone has struggles that go unseen by the world.” See Zeldapedia, “Zelda’s Diary.” Accessed July 1, 2019. https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/ Zelda%27s_Diary 14. Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 58. 15. Ibid., 59. 16. Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 101. 17. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, eds. Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), pp. 118–130. 18. Sarkeesian measures the percentage of games featured at the largest North American video game industry trade convention, Electronic Entertainment Expo (often abbreviated as “E3”), and finds that protagonists clearly indicated as human appeared in less than 10% of these games. In: Anita Sarkeesian, “Gender Breakdown of Games Showcased at E3 2015,” Feminist Frequency, June 22, 2015. https://feministfrequency.com/2015/06/22/ gender-breakdown-of-games-showcased-at-e3-2015/. See also Colin Campbell, “The Number of Women Protagonists in E3 Games Still in Single Digits.” The Verge, June 22, 2018. https://www.polygon.com/ e3/2018/6/14/17465102/women-protagonists-video-games-e3 19. Bonnie Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), p. 209. 20. Alexander Cho, “Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time.” In Networked Affect, eds. Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015), pp. 43–57; Bruce J. Renninger, “‘Where I Can Be Myself, Where I Can Speak My Mind’: Networked Counterpublics in a Polymedia Environment,” New Media and Society Vol. 17 (2014), pp. 1513–29. 21. Natalie Chew, “Tumblr as a Counterpublic Space for Fan Mobilization,” Transformative Works and Cultures Vol. 27 (2018). 22. Paul Booth, Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), p. 8.

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23. Mark McLelland and James Welker, “An Introduction to ‘Boys Love’ in Japan.” 24. David Goldberg, Dennis Looney, and Natalia Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2013.” Modern Language Association of America (2015). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED569204.pdf 25. This series of zines was later collected into the graphic memoir Dumb: Living Without a Voice and published by Fantagraphics Books in August 2018. 26. Jay Dolmage and Dale Jacobs, “Mutable Articulations: Disability Rhetorics and the Comics Medium.” In Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, eds. Chris Foss, Jonathan W.  Gray, and Zach Whalen (New York: Palgrave, 2016), p. 18. 27. This comic can be accessed on Tumblr at https://blackeraser.tumblr.com/ post/172100299363/goddess-statue-why-always-him-dont-u-want-a 28. This comic can be accessed on Tumblr at https://blackeraser.tumblr.com/ post/171757715658/eeeh-i-forget-to-post-here-o-im-more-active-on 29. Following the official English translation of the text in Breath of the Wild, I use masculine pronouns for Link in this sentence even though it described him presenting as female. It should be noted, however, that many fans view Link as gender fluid and use “they/them” pronouns to refer to the character. Other fans view Link as transgender or genderqueer and use appropriate pronouns. Because Link does not address the issue in the game either through direct speech or in the notes he records in his Sheikah Slate, a plausible argument can be made for all of these interpretations of Link’s gender, and it is not the purpose of this essay to advocate for or argue against any given interpretation. 30. This comic can be accessed on Tumblr at https://mjoyart.tumblr.com/ post/182314972102 31. Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (New York: NYU Press, 2009), p. 112.

References Anable, Aubrey. 2018. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Booth, Paul. 2017. Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Campbell, Colin. 2018. The Number of Women Protagonists in E3 Games Still in Single Digits. The Verge, June 22. https://www.polygon.com/e3/2018/6/14/ 17465102/women-protagonists-video-games-e3 Carr, Diane. 2014. Ability, Disability and Dead Space. The International Journal of Computer Game Research 14 (2). http://gamestudies.org/1402/articles/carr

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Chess, Shira. 2017. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designated Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chew, Natalie. 2018. Tumblr as a Counterpublic Space for Fan Mobilization. Transformative Works and Cultures 27. Cho, Alexander. 2015. Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time. In Networked Affect, ed. Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit, 43–57. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dolmage, Jay, and Dale Jacobs. 2016. Mutable Articulations: Disability Rhetorics and the Comics Medium. In Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, ed. Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen, 14–28. New York: Palgrave. Game Pressure. 2019. Nintendo Reveals Impressive Sales of Switch and Zelda. Posted April 25, 2019. https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/nintendo-reveals-impressive-sales-of-switch-and-zelda/zba73 Gibbons, Sarah. 2015. Disability, Neurodiversity, and Inclusive Play: An Examination of the Social and Political Aspects of the Relationship Between Disability and Games. Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association 9 (14): 25–39. Goldberg, David, Dennis Looney, and Natalia Lusin. 2015. Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2013. Modern Language Association of America. https://files. eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED569204.pdf Hunktears, Ib. 2019. A Love Letter to Breath of the Wild’s Prince Sidon. Fanbyte, February 20. https://www.fanbyte.com/features/a-love-letter-to-breath-ofthe-wilds-prince-sidon/ Jackson, Gita. 2017. Breath of the Wild’s Shark Prince Is Getting a Lot of Love from Thirsty Zelda Fans. Kotaku, March 13. https://kotaku.com/breathof-the-wilds-shark-prince-is-getting-a-lot-of-lo-1793214067 Jenkins, Henry. 2004. Game Design as Narrative Architecture. In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–130. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kano, Ayako. 2001. Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism. New York: Palgrave. McLelland, Mark, and James Welker. 2015. An Introduction to ‘Boys Love’ in Japan. In Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, ed. Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, 3–20. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Metacritic. Best Video Games for 2017. https://www.metacritic.com/browse/ games/score/metascore/year/all/filtered?sort=desc&year_selected=2017. Accessed 1 July 2019. Paul, Christopher A. 2018. The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Piepmeier, Alison. 2009. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: New York University Press. Renninger, Bruce J. 2014. ‘Where I Can Be Myself, Where I Can Speak My Mind’: Networked Counterpublics in a Polymedia Environment. New Media and Society 17: 1513–1529. Robertson, Jennifer. 1998. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ruberg, Bonnie. 2019. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sarkeesian, Anita. 2015. Gender Breakdown of Games Showcased at E3 2015. Feminist Frequency, June 22. https://feministfrequency.com/2015/06/22/ gender-breakdown-of-games-showcased-at-e3-2015/ Singal, Jesse. 2016. Why the Video-Game Culture Wars Won’t Die. New York Magazine, September 30. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/whythe-video-game-culture-wars-wont-die-two-years-later.html Zeldapedia. Zelda’s Diary. https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Zelda%27s_Diary. Accessed 1 July 2019.

CHAPTER 7

The Cultural Cross-Pollination of Shoj̄ o Manga

On January 18, 2015, Ed Chavez, the Marketing Director at American manga publisher Vertical, replied to a Twitter user’s question on the website Ask.fm regarding whether manga is becoming a niche entertainment industry outside of Japan.1 Chavez’s response was a definite “maybe.” After stating that shon ̄ en manga, an extremely popular genre of sports and action manga for boys, is selling just as well—if not better—than it always has, Chavez added the caveat that, “Unlike the 00’s, where a shoj̄ o boom introduced a whole new demographic to manga, there hasn’t been a culture shifting movement recently.” Johanna Draper Carlson, one of the most well-respected and prolific manga critics writing in English, responded to Chavez’s assessment on her blog Manga Worth Reading.2 She agreed with him, adding, “I find myself working harder to find series I want to follow. Many new releases seem to fall into pre-existing categories that have already demonstrated success: vampire romance, harem fantasy, adventure quests, and so on. It’s harder to find the kind of female-oriented story that [has always appealed] to me.” Meanwhile, the manga that stood at the top of the New York Times’s “Best Sellers” list for manga that week was the seventh volume of a series called Finder, a homoerotic BL (boys’ love) story targeted at a mature female audience. Chavez’s reference to a former boom in shoj̄ o manga sales and evidence that even a title from a niche category for women can sell just as well as the latest volume of the shon ̄ en juggernaut One Piece3 indicate that girls and women in North America care about manga and comics, and the members © The Author(s) 2020 K. Hemmann, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_7

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of this audience are active participants in fandom cultures surrounding manga and comics. The popularity of The Avengers and other films set in the Marvel cinematic universe has resulted in an upsurge of interest in comic books in the United States. This interest has led to female comics fans clamoring to be heard by producers and marketing executives.4 In Japan, where the postwar development of manga was tied to children’s magazines targeting gendered demographics,5 comics for a female audience are already big business. Shoj̄ o manga, or manga marketed toward shoj̄ o (younger female) consumers, is currently serialized in dozens of specialty magazines in Japan, and fans of popular shoj̄ o titles are spoiled for choice when it comes to merchandise and animated adaptations. One of the most popular shoj̄ o titles of the past two decades is Naoko Takeuchi’s 18-volume manga Sailor Moon. It ran in print from 1991 to 1997 and was adapted into several seasons of an animated television series, three feature-­ length films, a live-action series, and even a stage musical—not to mention a recent anime reboot based more closely on the original manga. So ubiquitous was the Sailor Moon franchise in its native Japan that it was an obvious licensing choice for Tokyopop. Based in Los Angeles, this fledgling manga publisher hoped to break into the American comics market by providing content for its most underserved sector—tween and teenage girls. Partially because of a number of clever choices regarding localization, and partially because of the eye-catching novelty of the Sailor Moon anime series licensed by DiC, a production company that handled other animated television shows such as Rainbow Brite and The Real Ghostbusters, the Sailor Moon manga was a big hit. Following up on this success, Tokyopop, continued to release more shoj̄ o manga, such as the fantasy and sci-fi adventure stories of the best-selling all-female artistic collective CLAMP6 and a supernatural romantic comedy that turned out to be one of the company’s biggest hits, Fruits Basket.7 By the time the Pokémon anime hit North America in 1999, the market had been primed to embrace Japanese cartoons, and it helped that both girls and boys jumped onto the property with enthusiasm. The Sailor Moon generation has since grown up and started creating its own work, and allusions to the narrative and visual tropes of shō jo manga, as well as the animation based on that manga, are visible in mainstream American animated television shows such as Adventure Time, in which princesses fight to save their kingdoms, and the eyes of male characters can sparkle just as brightly as those of the heroine of any shoj̄ o manga. Rebecca Sugar, a writer and storyboard artist for Adventure Time, is also the

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creator of Steven Universe, which premiered on Cartoon Network in 2013. Like Sailor Moon, Steven Universe is a story populated by a cast of magical girls, but its eponymous protagonist is a magical boy. This magical boy reads manga, plays video games on his Nintendo GameCube, and defends the people he loves with a rose-pink shield. Just as in the shoj̄ o manga and anime from which the show references iconic scenes and imagery, Steven Universe challenges normative gender roles and configurations of sexuality as they are often constructed in television programming geared toward children.8 Both Adventure Time and Steven Universe are widely broadcast on Japanese television (as they are in many other global territories), making it likely that episodes will appear alongside the same styles of Japanese animation that influenced their creators. This chapter provides background on how female readers were courted by Tokyopop and other transnational manga publishers before demonstrating how shoj̄ o manga has influenced the women who grew up with it to reshape North American comics and animation with a shoj̄ o flair, a cultural trend that has had a major impact on mainstream entertainment media around the world.

Forging a Female Audience: The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Tokyopop In the mid-1990s, a suburban chain store called Media Play had an entire section devoted to manga and Japanese popular culture magazines. One of these magazines was fledgling publisher Tokyopop’s manga anthology MixxZine, which began serialization in 1997 and ran chapters of the manga version of Sailor Moon as well as the all-female artistic collective CLAMP’s fantasy shoj̄ o series Magic Knight Rayearth and Card Captor Sakura.9 In 1999, the magazine changed its name to Tokyopop and began to target a male audience by dropping its shoj̄ o manga and focusing on shon ̄ en titles instead. Tokyopop the magazine folded in 2000 but was survived by a publication called Smile, which was a bulky, 160-page monthly magazine that serialized only shoj̄ o manga. In 2001, Media Play’s parent company was bought out by Best Buy. When Media Play stores were closed, Tokyopop lost a major venue for its magazines, and Smile folded in 2002. Now that it had already established a large fanbase, however, Tokyopop was able to launch a promotional campaign it called “Global Manga.” It was kicked off by the 2002 “Rising Stars of Manga” talent competition.

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The winning entries were published in a volume of the same size and length of the publisher’s Japanese manga titles. Eventually, there were eight American volumes and three British volumes of The Rising Stars of Manga, with the last appearing in the summer of 2008. During this time, winners were encouraged to submit pitches to Tokyopop, which published their work as OEL (“original English language”) manga. Many of Tokyopop’s OEL manga were styled as shō jo series. Examples include Peach Fuzz, Shutter Box, Fool’s Gold, and Sorcerers & Secretaries. Tokyopop promoted these titles with free “sampler” publications distributed by mail and at comic conventions, which were exploding in number and attendance in the United States and Canada during the 2000s. Although users of animerelated message boards and fannish social media sites debated the company’s use of the term “manga” to describe these graphic novels, Tokyopop was able to attract well-known American entertainment franchises to the medium, including Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Warcraft. Most of these adaptations of American fantasy and science fiction mainstays were styled as shon ̄ en manga, but Tokyopop also published a successful fourvolume adaptation of Jim Henson’s 1986 film Labyrinth, featuring David Bowie’s villainous yet handsome Goblin King in all his spandex-clad glory. Tokyopop promoted its titled and scouted new talent at various anime conventions. These are structured gatherings organized by fans of Japanese animation, graphic novels, young adult fiction, video games, music, fashion, and various other media enjoyed by geek subcultures. Anime conventions have been exploding in number and attendance during the past decade. Over the course of 2014, there were almost 300 anime conventions in the Unites States alone, with at least one event scheduled every weekend.10 There are also many large conventions held outside the United States every year, such as Salón del Manga in Barcelona, Anime Friends in Brazil, Anime North in Canada, Japan Expo in France, Comic Fiesta in Malaysia, and Anime Festival Asia in Singapore (not to mention the hundreds of events that take place in Japan itself). The first convention devoted to anime in the United States, Yamatocon, was held in Dallas in 1983.11 Before that, however, anime fans had been meeting at science fiction and fantasy conventions, which have had a much longer history. The World Science Fiction Convention (now Worldcon) was first staged in New York City in 1939, and conventions devoted to more specific aspects of fandom, such as the Star Trek franchise, became more widespread in the 1970s. For example, 1970 saw the first San Diego Comic-Con, which has served as both a model and a birthplace for many anime conventions.

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Anime Expo, which is held every year over the 4th of July weekend in Los Angeles, is by far the largest anime convention in North America. The first Anime Expo took place in San Jose and had an attendance of approximately 1750 people; the 2016 Anime Expo brought over 100,000 people to the Los Angeles Convention Center.12 This convention typically boasts a long list of directors, producers, artists, musicians, and designers from Japan, along with dozens of non-Japanese voice actors, animation artists, and other industry professionals from North America, Europe, and Asia. In addition, representatives from media and licensing companies such as Tokyopop, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Yen Press (an imprint of Hachette Book Group specializing in manga and light novels) speak directly to fans in panels that have attendance in the hundreds. This enormous four-day event, which is staffed by more than a thousand volunteers, is organized by the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation (SPJA), a non-profit organization that “works to promote Japanese culture and the arts that are related to Japanese animation.”13 In its mission statement, the SPJA mentions that education is one of its primary goals. However, the Anime Expo is primarily a place for like-minded fans to come together and enjoy themselves as they dress up, go shopping, play games, sing karaoke, dance at concerts and masquerades, and watch both classic and soon-to-be-released anime. In his 2002 monograph Recentering Globalization, Koichi Iwabuchi discusses how the “cultural odor” of Japan’s popular entertainment may or may not mark it as Japanese, but I would argue that anime conventions such as the Anime Expo are indicative of a more global culture in which concerns regarding national provenance are secondary to participation in international fandoms. One of Tokyopop’s most popular OEL manga titles was M.  Alice LeGrow’s eight-volume series Bizenghast, which directly benefited from the sort of international fandom cultures fostered by anime conventions. Like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, Bizenghast is a shoj̄ o story with an overarching character-driven plot structured according to episodic “monster of the week” stories with a few action-oriented shon ̄ en elements. Bizenghast takes the adorable mascot creatures, campy monsters, cute costumes, beautiful young men, and powerful female villains of Japanese manga for girls and transplants them to the small Massachusetts community of Bizenghast, which becomes an Edgar Allan Poe-style wonderland after dark. The Gothicinspired art style combines the huge eyes and wide panels of fan-favorite shoj̄ o manga with steampunk Art Deco motifs and line etchings reminiscent of the popular American horror illustrator Edward Gorey (Fig. 7.1).

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Fig. 7.1  Front cover of Bizenghast Vol. 8

The artistic and narrative conventions of manga and the stylizations of Western fantasy are so delicately blended and intermixed that it would be difficult to say whether Bizenghast is a manga with American influences or a graphic novel with Japanese influences. The Bizenghast series began in 2005 and finished in 2012. The Tokyopop publications of each volume

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included a section at the end for fan art and cosplay photos celebrating the story and its characters. Including this section encouraged and legitimized reader participation in the way that shoj̄ o magazines have done since the early twentieth century in Japan. Instead of eschewing or actively opposing fandom involvement, a policy infamously enforced by American media corporations such as Disney and TimeWarner, Tokyopop pursued this fan involvement. This allowed LeGrow to maintain her presence on the fannish artistic networking site DeviantArt, where she was able to interact with her fans directly.14 Due to the non-localized nature of the internet, LeGrow was able to build a fanbase that stretched around the globe. The international popularity of the artist mirrored Tokyopop’s expansion outside the United States, and Bizenghast was published in translation in Germany, Finland, Russia, and Hungary, as well as in several countries of the British Commonwealth, including Australia and New Zealand. In addition to assigning Bizenghast its own dedicated website, Tokyopop released a novel adaptation, an art book, and even a coloring book based on the world of the manga. Although Tokyopop shut down its publishing operations in May 2011, it continued to offer certain titles through a print-on-demand service managed by the online anime retailer The Right Stuf. The initial line-up of these titles included the fan-favorite manga Hetalia Axis Powers and the eighth and concluding volume of Bizenghast. In its publication and promotion of Bizenghast as an OEL shoj̄ o manga product, Tokyopop actively promoted the sort of interactive fan consumption utilized by Japanese shoj̄ o manga publishers, and this encouragement paid off in market growth facilitated by digital grassroots advertising. Manga sales in the United States reached their highest point in the mid-­ to-­late 2000s.15 Even though Tokyopop ceased its manga magazines earlier in the decade, Viz Media stepped in with an English-language version of Shonen Jump, which was paired with a monthly sister magazine, Shojo Beat. Shojo Beat, which ran from June 2005 until July 2009, styled itself as a lifestyle magazine, running articles about clothing, makeup, and real-life romantic concerns. Although Shojo Beat did not include OEL manga, manga publisher Yen Press’s publication Yen Plus did. From its launch in July 2008, the editors of Yen Plus solicited reader contributions, which resulted in both one-shot and continuing OEL manga appearing within the pages of the magazine. In addition, Yen Press’s parent company Hachette began releasing manga adaptations of some of its biggest young adult properties, including Gossip Girl, Gail Carriger’s The Parasol

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Protectorate series, and Stephanie Meyer’s breakout hit Twilight. These manga adaptations all had a strong shoj̄ o feel, as did other franchise manga revisionings created by long-standing American comics publishers such as Marvel and Vertigo, who adapted X-Men and The Sandman into stand-­ alone high-school romance stories. What these publishers seemed to be jumping on was the idea that manga could reach an audience of young women (and young-at-heart women) who may have felt excluded from traditionally male-centered genres like action comics and science fiction. These female readers increasingly came equipped with access to online and in-person fandom networks, which could help ensure the longevity and profitability of any given franchise, as was famously the case with Harry Potter. The creation and growth of an audience for shoj̄ o manga began in the 1990s and has extended throughout the past two decades, and this cultural trend has resulted in a definite shoj̄ o influence on mainstream entertainment media in North America. One of the most interesting incarnations of this trend is Cartoon Network’s animated television series Adventure Time, whose producers have actively scouted young talent from places like the artist alleys of comic conventions and fannish art sharing websites such as DeviantArt and Tumblr.16 A number of these artists are women from the generation that grew up reading and watching shoj̄ o series such as Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena, and easily identifiable references to these shoj̄ o titles occasionally pop up in the show. For example, the character Fionna, who is a gender-swapped version of the protagonist Finn, is shown wearing Princess Serenity’s dress from Sailor Moon in the episode “The Prince Who Wanted Everything,” and Princess Bubblegum wears a version of Utena’s outfit from the manga adaptation of Revolutionary Girl Utena in the title card for the episode “Lady & Peebles.” The magical girl shoj̄ o stylings of Rebecca Sugar, one of the storyboard artists for Adventure Time (and the lead artist and director of “Lady & Peebles”), ended up being so popular with fans that the young artist was given a green light by Cartoon Network to create a magical boy show, Steven Universe. It, too, contains numerous references to anime, manga, and video games, including Sailor Moon (Fig. 7.2). The first episode of Steven Universe aired in November 2013, and it has a hundred episodes, dozens of adaptations into other entertainment media, and two Emmy award nominations to its credit. The show has received enthusiastic praise not only from geek media outlets like Wired magazine and the geeky pop culture website i09 but also from more

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Fig. 7.2  Screencap from Steven Universe, “House Guest” (Season 1, Episode 27)

traditional venues such as The New  Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and NPR’s Monkey See blog. Despite being one of the most pirated television shows in the world, it has seen consistently strong sales in both physical and digital formats. When a new episode is released, social media websites such as Twitter and Tumblr are flooded with fan discussion and other outpourings of love in the form of fan art, fanfiction, and humorous memes. The quality of the art direction and animation of the show are consistently high and have improved over time. However, what has been proved so engaging to fans of all genders from their teens to their thirties has been the way Steven Universe reflects conversations about personal identity that were first sparked by discussions of the shoj̄ o manga series that inspired Steven Universe in the first place. For example, is a specific character a boy or a girl, or something more fluid? Is a character gay or straight, or does it matter? Is a character disabled, and how can that disability be presented in a more sympathetic light? How do we handle difference as individuals, and how should we view difference as a broader society? These themes of shoj̄ o manga found their way into online message boards and comment sections, and they exerted just as much of an influence on the dominant conversations of fandom cultures as they did on visual motifs and stylizations.

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As demonstrated by Steven Universe, the creators who were inspired by shoj̄ o manga have begun to create work in a more mainstream context, and they have brought their interests, tastes, and concerns with them. To give another example, Natasha Allegri, another storyboard writer and character designer for Adventure Time, launched a 2013 Kickstarter project associated with Adventure Time’s Studio Frederator for a shoj̄ o-themed animated YouTube series called Bee and PuppyCat, which received an overwhelming amount of support from both Adventure Time fans and the enormous shoj̄ o manga fanbase on Twitter and Tumblr, where significant grassroots outreach efforts took place with no involvement from corporate sponsors. The Kickstarter campaign, which aimed to raise $600,000, reached $872,133  in 30 days. This was a remarkable sum in 2013, before well-­ known filmmakers and game designers launched campaigns that raised millions of dollars. The success of Bee and PuppyCat’s Kickstarter campaign, as well the loyalty of its fanbase as it airs a second season in 2019, serves as a demonstration of the increasing cultural power that female-­ centric fandom cultures surrounding shoj̄ o manga and shoj̄ o-inspired media have come to wield. In addition, Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Bee and PuppyCat all have comic book spin-off series published by Boom! Studios; each monthly issue features short bonus stories and variant covers by young and upcoming artists. The comic book version of Bee and PuppyCat is especially notable in that almost all of its contributing artists are female, and many of them display obvious stylistic and topical references to elements of Japanese popular culture such as references to Studio Ghibli character designs, magical girl transformation sequences, and role-playing video games (Fig. 7.3). Although both Rebecca Sugar and Natasha Allegri have stated that they are fans of shoj̄ o manga such as Sailor Moon and Takahashi Rumiko’s supernatural romance InuYasha, and even though the influence of these titles is clear in their work, Steven Universe and Bee and PuppyCat have not been promoted as a type of OEL American anime but rather as more cool new additions to the Cartoon Network and Studio Frederator lineups. In other words, the strong shoj̄ o elements of these shows and their comic book adaptation are presented as natural and naturalized to a North American audience. The iconography of shoj̄ o manga has begun to enter mainstream American popular culture, and it is likely the case that seeing better representation of diverse female characters in shoj̄ o manga has encouraged more young women outside of Japan to seek careers in comics and animation.

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Fig. 7.3  Bee’s magical girl transformation (Bee and PuppyCat Issue 6)

The careers of these women have been encouraged by the active promotion of online fan cultures, and the “reader participation” model employed by Japanese shoj̄ o publishers has been financially successful in the United States.

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The Potential of Female Homotextuality “What happens when fans grow up?” asks Elizabeth Minkel in an article in the New Statesmen that discusses how fans of Harry Potter have come of age alongside internet-based fandom cultures.17 “For an entire generation,” Minkel writes, “Harry Potter is a core text; for many, it’s the core text, formative not only because of its content, but because of the collective experience of reading it.” This collective experience encompasses the whole of fandom, from midnight release parties to dorm room speculation to sharing transformative stories such as The Shoebox Project18 online. At GeekyCon 2015, held in July in Orlando, there was a programming track that Minkel describes as dedicated to becoming a full-time geek: “Some of the guests were so obsessed with something – Harry Potter or otherwise – that they made it a career; others used their experience obsessing over something to parlay the skills they developed in fandom into a career.”19 Transforming one’s passions into a career is a time-honored tradition in the American entertainment industry. Hollywood is filled with directors, screenwriters, set and prop designers, wardrobe specialists, and other professionals who are there because of their devotion to a movie or television series they fell in love with as children or teenagers. The comics industry operates in much the same way. DC and Marvel fans submit their portfolios for evaluation at comics conventions with hopes of eventually being hired to work for the studios they have admired for years. Even independent or “internet famous” comic writers and artists, such as Jeffrey Brown (Darth Vader and Son) and Ryan North (Adventure Time), have been signed to work with established franchises, while other creators, such as Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik (Penny Arcade) and Andrew Hussie (Homestuck), are so successful at online self-publishing that they have managed to become self-employed owners and managers of their own franchises. A similar system exists in Japan, where the established path to becoming a professional manga artist involves drawing self-published fan manga called doj̄ inshi. Like the fanfiction posted to sites such as Archive of Our Own and the ubiquitous fan art on social media sites such as Twitter and Tumblr, doj̄ inshi feature original interpretations of established intellectual properties. They are physically printed by small specialty companies and sold at special “fan events” (doj̄ in ibento). The largest is the biannual Comic Market, which draws close to half a million tabling artists and attendees. Although such conventions are still representative of a subculture within the Japanese entertainment and publishing industries, fans make only perfunctory attempts to conceal their activities, as the doj̄ inshi

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they produce are of immense interest to publishers and producers. What better place to monitor market trends and scout new talent? American corporations such as Disney and HBO are well known for issuing cease and desist orders to fan creators whose reworkings of licensed intellectual properties have become too successful. In contrast, many Japanese corporations instead choose to co-opt fan talent. For instance, the Kadokawa Corporation, which began as a publisher of printed material and has gradually expanded into movies, music, television, animation, and video games, has licensed the BBC’s Sherlock miniseries, for which it has licensed a manga adaptation that it serializes in one of its flagship manga magazines. Because of the popularity of both the miniseries and its comic adaptation in Japan, Sherlock has become the source material of many doj̄ inshi, such as the ones created by the artist that Kadokawa hired to draw the official Sherlock manga. There is an anmoku no ryok̄ ai, or “implicit understanding,” between Kadokawa and the fans of its properties that the corporation will tolerate the creation, sale, and distribution of transformative works as long as they remain primarily within the subcultural realm of fan events and internet-based forums. Since an artist currently drawing amateur doj̄ inshi based on a hot new media property may well become the artist who draws the next official adaptation, Japanese media companies consider it to be in their best interests to allow fan communities to thrive and prosper unimpeded by threats of legal action. In English-language fandom cultures, the microblogging platform Tumblr has served much the same purpose. After a crackdown on “not safe for work” images on Tumblr in December 2018, many fans began migrating to Twitter as well.20 Together, Tumblr and Twitter have made fandom more accessible to a wider range of people. In the process, they have transformed media fandom from a niche subculture to mainstream culture. I would like to discuss one specific aspect of this transition—its commercialization. This aspect was spurred in North America by the business strategies of licensing companies like Tokyopop, which depended on grassroots word-of-internet promotion by fans. Platforms like Tumblr and Twitter have greatly facilitated fan communication. Partially due to this widespread influence, transnational media cultures have changed rapidly in the twenty-first century. As a conclusion to this study of the creative production of fan cultures, I therefore think it is worth challenging the assumption that there is a clear and definite line between professional and commercial media production and amateur and noncommercial, or “fannish,” media production.

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It is important to have this conversation in order to destabilize and hopefully re-center our understanding of how media production works. I think it is also important because, during the course of my research, I have personally witnessed many fan creators experiencing anxiety over whether their work has any legitimate cultural value or will provide them with a livable income. The anxieties point to the fact that drawing a line between “legitimate” professional media production and “garbage” fan production disempowers creators who overwhelmingly occupy minority positionalities. The effect is to make them feel not only that their stories are “trash” but also that their entire mode of storytelling is without value.21 In Japan, however, the line between “professional” and “fan” in Japan has already become increasingly vague. Moreover, some of the more visible trends in contemporary Japanese media production can provide an alternative model for the way we think about fans and other creators working on the margins of various entertainment industries. Examining Japanese models alongside North American models can help us make better sense of how the world of media production and consumption is so different now than it was a decade ago, as well as how it will continue to change as popular culture continues to be created and spread across languages, worldviews, and national borders. As demonstrated by numerous high-profile transnational media properties such as Avatar: The Last Airbender and Steven Universe, the visual and narrative stylizations of Japanese popular culture have exerted a huge influence on global media. In their 2017 study of the transnational animation industry, The Anime Boom in the United States, media scholars Michal Daliot-Bul and Nissim Otmazgin have even posited that anime has been so influential over such a long period of time that “it is, therefore, quite impossible to extricate and evaluate the impact of anime as a separate medium with its own distinct spheres of influence.”22 During these decades of cross-cultural influence, what has become known as the “media content industry” (kontentsu kigyo)̄ within Japan has been driven by the activities of amateur and independent fan creators. Fannish production has always been tacitly encouraged by Japanese publishing and media companies. However, it was typically understood as the realm of students and other young writers and artists; furthermore, the expectation was that these creators would eventually graduate into salaried and contracted positions within established development studios. Recently, however, independent creators have achieved enormous success outside of formally sanctioned channels. The industry has shifted accordingly, with social media

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popularity beginning to supersede the tastes of industry gatekeepers. The diminishing influence of career industry professionals has coincided with a rise in the greater marketability of diverse stories that would have formerly found expression only through alternative methods of distribution outside of mass media outlets. Essentially, stories that represent and explore minority identities were once relegated to the margins of media production. Along with fandom culture itself, these have started to become mainstream. Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, which has been in operation since 2009, have been instrumental in empowering individual writers and artists. Kickstarter, which is based in Brooklyn, is primarily used by North American creators. That being said, it has showcased the potential to bring niche cultural products to potentially international audiences. Indeed, a number of Japanese creators have used the platform to launch successful campaigns for original animation and anime-style narrative games called “visual novels.” One of the most high-profile of these crowdfunding projects was the short film Under the Dog, which raised $878,028 on Kickstarter in 2014 after promotional videos were premiered at Anime Expo, an annual fan convention in Los Angeles with an attendance regularly exceeding 80,000 people. The animators who created Under the Dog were all industry professionals eager to work outside the studio system in Japan. Many inside observers consider the Japanese studio system to be in a state of crisis because of low wages, impossibly demanding work schedules, and poorly managed international outsourcing.23 Because of their credentials, the creatives working on Under the Dog were able to promote their work in the United States, but younger artists and animators—including many women—are more comfortable with homegrown Japanese crowdsourcing platforms. The largest of these platforms is Campfire, which is based in Tokyo and was started in 2011. Campfire has a distinct category for “Anime and Manga.” The more popular of the campaigns in this category can easily bring in millions of yen or tens of thousands of dollars. Other projects, especially publishing projects, are funded on monthly donation sites analogous to Patreon, which allows creators to host paid subscription services. The two most common Japanese sites for projects associated with anime and manga are Fantia and Enty. Sometimes creators use both of these sites simultaneously. Some of the more interesting categories of projects to come out of Enty and Fantia are regularly released manga magazines. There are hundreds of weekly, monthly, and quarterly manga magazines physically published in Japan

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every year. Some of the more popular titles, such as Weekly Shon ̄ en Jump, sell more than 1.5 million copies of each issue.24 With the support of donors, independent editors and creators are able to publish physical copies of their own magazines. These independently produced magazines are often sold at the same retailers that stock the magazines of established publishers, such as Animate, a nationwide chain. Although many of these independent publications are explicitly pornographic, there is also a market for magazines that seek to provide an outlet for stories not commonly shown in mainstream manga, such as the experiences of mixed-race people in Japan, pregnant women, and people in the LGBTQ+ community. One such crowdfunded manga magazine is Galette, which bills itself as a yuri, or lesbian-centric, publication. Galette is different from many mainstream yuri manga in that its stories are written by self-identified queer women rather than by men seeking sexual stimulation from adolescent female homoeroticism. Galette is also unique in that its editors use donations from Enty and Fantia to travel abroad to fan conventions in other countries in East Asia to promote their work and their message of queer female empowerment and self-expression. As is the case with Kickstarter and Patreon, there are many creators seeking attention and support on Japanese crowdfunding sites, so writers, editors, and artists must rely on their social networks for promotion and publicity. Pixiv is one of the largest Japanese social networking sites focused on visual art. Founded in 2007, it currently hosts the work of tens of millions of users. Pixiv is roughly analogous to DeviantArt, a largely English-­ language artistic social networking site whose peak of popularity predated Tumblr. Whereas many professional artists once posted original work on DeviantArt, the moderators and userbase of Pixiv are adamant in their emphasis on the use of the site by amateur artists, especially fan artists. A Pixiv user is free to promote their fanzines and other self-published work. However, once an artist goes pro, they are expected to move their activities to Twitter or to their own website.25 Like Tumblr, Pixiv is highly collaborative and based on the sharing and circulation of user-created content, and its tagging system operates according to the tags added by people who bookmark a piece of art, not by the original creator.26 Therefore, it is possible for the work of an artist to travel far outside their circle of acquaintances. What this means in practice is that an artist can be adopted by a community whose existence the artist may not have been aware of. This was the case with Kabi Nagata, a moderately successful artist specialized in drawing homoerotic BL fan art. Nagata published a handful of

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one-shot original BL stories in manga magazines as well, but it was when she started posting short sketchy autobiographical comics that her work exploded in popularity. The LGBTQ+ community on Pixiv embraced Nagata’s heartfelt portrayal of her mental illness and her struggle to come to terms with her sexuality. Nagata wrote that “transmitting my signal, having people receive it, [and] being recognized by people” gave her the courage to become a professional manga artist, and her autobiographical comics were collected and published under the title “My Private Report on Going to a Lesbian Escort Service Because I Was Super Lonely” (Sabishisugite rezu fuzoku ni ikimashita repo).27 Although Pixiv has its own tide of ebbing and flowing viral content, Nagata was able to ride the wave of the increasing number of manga artists working in niche genres who are scouted directly from Pixiv by professional editors working at well-­ established publishers. Many of these Pixiv artists specialize in perennially popular manga genres such as romance and science fiction. Importantly, it is not the perceived marketability of their work in the mainstream market that has allowed them to make the transition to professional publishing; rather, it is due to the popularity they have already achieved within socially networked circles of fans. As such, the taste of the fandom community dictates what gets published for a wider audience. This is true even if it is only a particular community—for example, a community of self-identified queer fans or a community of fans who openly discuss topics related to mental illness. Previously, such communities may have been considered too niche of an audience to make mainstream publication and distribution viable. Partially because of the activities of amateur translators who comb Pixiv for content to repost on their Tumblr blogs, Nagata’s comics created a stir in English-language circles as well, and it received an official North American release in June 2017 under the title My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness. This release has been celebrated on countless blogs, thanks in no small part to the efforts of its translator, Jocelyne Allen, who maintains a lively online presence and has about 5000 followers on Twitter as @brainvsbook. In the world of Japanese manga publishing, Twitter has become a major driver of sales, and many of the large Japanese presses have one or more special imprints for fiction, essays, and comics from popular creators who post their work on Twitter.28 During the past year, it has become increasingly common to see obi, or promotional bands, proclaiming that a book’s author has several hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. This is the case, for example, with Avogado6, whose surreal short story

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collection about dealing with depression, Karappo no yatsu de ippai (Full of Empty People), is marketed as moving the hearts of more than 570,000 Twitter followers—not to mention the pop musician Keina Suda, who is famous on YouTube under the username Balloon. It may seem as if I am simply suggesting that work that becomes popular on social media is able to reach a wider audience, which seems self-­ explanatory. This is, in fact, what I have argued, but the model illustrated by these examples is the inverse of our general understanding of how social networks abet the spread of stories and art. Social media is undeniably commercialized. Transnational media corporations invest large amounts of capital into encouraging their intellectual property to go viral. In Japan, however, the artistic and narrative content that goes viral often has its origins in grassroots subcultures. This has, in turn, resulted in the creation of a more visible stage for creators from minority positionalities to launch public conversations about topics such as race, gender, sexuality, aging, economic precariousness, homelessness, and mental illness. Formerly, such topics could be discussed only through the opaque lens of fantasy and allegory—especially in popular mass media like manga. It is important for Media Studies scholars to take note of this model because it provides an alternative perspective on the activities of online communities of the fans of narrative media such as movies, television shows, and video games. Many Fan Studies scholars writing in English, such as Matt Hills and Paul Booth, have convincingly constructed a model of online fandom as “a culture of ludism.” According to these scholars, contemporary mediascapes have become the playgrounds of young people who operate outside of corporate control.29 Although this resistance against neoliberal market capitalism and the creation of popular narratives by committee is utopian, it is predicated on the notion that the voices and stories of fans exist outside the broad discursive space of mainstream media. Fans may create closure and more meaningful narratives, but only for themselves. Fans may queer a text, but the queerness of that text will never reach a larger audience. While the line between amateur and professional media production has been growing more nebulous as showrunners make themselves available to fans on social media, the continued existence of this line creates anxiety within communities of fans who feel distressed that their creative work has no commercial or cultural value within society. No matter how many hits a story may get on the fanfic hosting site Archive of Our Own, and no matter how many likes and reblogs a meta essay may get on Tumblr, it will never be able to pay the rent or find its way onto the

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New York Times bestseller list. In her introduction to the Spring 2015 issue of Cinema Journal published by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Fan Studies scholar Kristina Busse aptly observes that there is a gendered component to the line separating professional and amateur labor within fandom. Moreover, she asserts that people telling stories from marginalized positionalities tend to remain in the margins.30 This division, both real and discursive, is supported by an understanding of fans as pseudonymous amateurs who are primarily consumers. However, it is far more accurate to think of fans as producers of content— not merely as consumers. This understanding of fans is something I have learned the years I have spent researching female-authored comics and manga and watching the Japanese content industry transform itself into a more creator-centered media economy. Many Media Studies scholars working within Japan have arrived at the same conclusion. Moreover, I believe the resulting model of fan-driven professional media production is applicable to media cultures outside of but inextricably linked to Japan. These media cultures become more transnational every time a writer or artist joins Twitter. While it is certainly true that fandom is a digi-gratis space where people can play; nevertheless, it is also very serious business both for creative industries and for the individual creators around the world who are constantly in the process of building new platforms for their work and finding new forms of expression for their voices and visions.

Notes 1. Ed Chavez, “Do You Think Anime/Manga Entertainment Is Getting Ever More Niche as Time Passes in the West?” Ask.fm post, January 18, 2015. https://ask.fm/VerticalComics_Ed/answers/123069851704 2. Johanna Carlson, “Has Manga Become a Niche Category?” in Comics Worth Reading, January 23, 2015. https://comicsworthreading. com/2015/01/23/has-manga-become-a-niche-category/ 3. Mikikazu Komatsu, “Japan’s 2014 Manga Sales Up 1% from the Previous Year.” Crunchyroll, January 27, 2015. https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2015/01/26-1/japans-2014-manga-sales-up1-from-the-previous-year 4. Annie N.  Mouse, “Invisible Women: Why Marvel’s Gamora & Black Widow Were Missing from Merchandise, and What We Can Do about It.” The Mary Sue, April 7, 2015. https://www.themarysue.com/ invisible-women/

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5. Deborah Shamoon, Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetic of Girls’ Culture in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012), 82. 6. Horn, “Clamp: Swords and Sorcery – Shojo Style!” 7. ICv2, “Two Million ‘Fruits Baskets’: Tokyopop’s All-Time Best-Seller,” ICv2, December 6, 2006. https://icv2.com/articles/comics/view/9724/ two-million-fruits-baskets 8. Nia Howe-Smith, “‘Steven Universe’ Creator on Growing Up, Gender Politics, Her Brother.” Entertainment Weekly, June 15, 2015. https:// ew.com/ar ticle/2015/06/15/steven-universe-creator-growinggender-politics-her-brother/ 9. Adam Arnold, “Full Circle: The Unofficial History of MixxZine,” Animefringe Online Magazine, June 2000. http://www.animefringe. com/magazine/00.06/feature/1/index.php3 10. The website Animecons.com hosts a constantly updated list of all anime conventions held in the United States. The archived page for 2014 can be found at: https://animecons.com/events/schedule.php?loc=us&year=2014 11. Animecons.com also hosts a list of all fan conventions related to anime and manga held anywhere in the world, beginning in 1975. The first listings for conventions in North America are on the “1983” page, which can be found at https://animecons.com/events/schedule.php?year=1983 12. Amo, “Anime Expo 2016 Shatters Record with Over 100,000  in Attendance.” 13. This description was taken from the “About Us” page on the organization’s website, which can be found here: https://www.spja.org/AboutUs 14. Although LeGrow no longer updates her account on DeviantArt, it exists as an archive, which can be found at http://sadwonderland.deviantart.com 15. Casey Brienza, Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 62. 16. Chris McDonnell, Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo (New York: Abrams, 2014). 17. Elizabeth Minkel, “Harry Potter Isn’t Over, But What Happens When a Fandom Grows Up?” in New Statesman, August 21, 2015. https:// www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/08/harry-potter-isn-t-overwhat-happens-when-fandom-grows 18. John Jurgensen, “Rewriting the Rules of Fiction.” The Shoebox Project is archived at: http://shoebox.lomara.org/ 19. Minkel, “Harry Potter Isn’t Over.” 20. Kaitlyn Tiffany, “When Tumblr Bans Porn, Who Loses?” in Vox, December 4, 2018. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/ tumblr-porn-ban-verizon-ad-goals-sex-work-fandom 21. Lillian Min, “The Strange Story of How Internet Superfans Reclaimed the Insult ‘Trash’,” Splinter, May 19, 2016. https://splinternews.com/ the-strange-story-of-how-internet-superfans-reclaimed-t-1793856895

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22. Michal Daliot-Bul and Nissim Otmazgin, The Anime Boom in the United States: Lessons for Global Creative Industries (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017), 21. 23. Martin, “Future of ‘Anime’ Industry in Doubt.” 24. Yusuke Kato, “Weekly Shonen Jump: In Grip of Midlife Crisis, or Still a Big Draw?” in The Asahi Shimbun, August 15, 2018. http://www.asahi. com/ajw/articles/AJ201808150008.html 25. Kohki Watabe and Yasuhito Abe, “Pixiv as a Contested Online Artistic Space In-between Gift and Commercial Economies in an Age of Participatory Culture.” ejcjs: Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 16, no. 3 (2016). http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/ vol16/iss3/watabe.html 26. Nele Noppe, “Social Networking Services as Platforms for Transcultural Fannish Interactions: deviantART and Pixiv,” in Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, ed. Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (New York: Routledge, 2013). 27. Kabi Nagata, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, trans. Jocelyne Allen (Los Angeles: Seven Seas Entertainment, 2017), 127. 28. These imprints include Frontier Works’s Liluct Comics imprint and Tokuma Shoten’s Zenon Webcomics imprint. Other established manga publishers, such as Kodansha and Kadokawa, do not have separate imprints but use the same 5 × 8 cm format for comics originally posted on Twitter. 29. Paul Booth, Digital Fandom, 8. 30. Kristina Busse, “Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love,” SCMS Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (2015): 111.

References Amo, Meg. 2016. Anime Expo 2016 Shatters Record with Over 100,000  in Attendance. Anime Expo Website, July 11. http://www.anime-expo. org/2016/07/11/anime-expo-2016-shatters-record-100000-attendance/ Arnold, Adam. 2000. Full Circle: The Unofficial History of MixxZine. Animefringe Online Magazine, June. http://www.animefringe.com/magazine/00.06/feature/1/index.php3 Booth, Paul. 2017. Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Brienza, Casey. 2016. Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics. New York: Bloomsbury. Busse, Kristina. 2015. Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love. SCMS Cinema Journal 54 (3): 110–115. Carlson, Johanna Draper. 2015. Has Manga Become a Niche Category? Comics Worth Reading, January 23. https://comicsworthreading.com/2015/01/23/ has-manga-become-a-niche-category/

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Chavez, Ed. 2015. Do You Think Anime/Manga Entertainment Is Getting Ever More Niche as Time Passes in the West? Ask.fm post, January 18. https://ask. fm/VerticalComics_Ed/answers/123069851704 Daliot-Bul, Michal, and Nissim Otmazgin. 2017. The Anime Boom in the United States: Lessons for Global Creative Industries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Horn, Carl. 2011. Swords and Sorcery  – Shojo Style! Dark Horse Blog, June 23. http://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/465/swords-and-sorceryshojo-style-carl-horn Howe-Smith, Nia. 2015. ‘Steven Universe’ Creator on Growing Up, Gender Politics, Her Brother. Entertainment Weekly, June 15. https://ew.com/ article/2015/06/15/steven-universe-creator-growing-gender-politicsher-brother/ ICv2. 2006. Two Million ‘Fruits Baskets’: Tokyopop’s All-Time Best-Seller. ICv2, December 6. https://icv2.com/articles/comics/view/9724/ two-million-fruits-baskets Jurgensen, John. 2006. Rewriting the Rules of Fiction. The Wall Street Journal, September 16. https://web.archive.org/web/20070705224847/http:// online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115836001321164886-GZsZGW_ ngbeAjqwMADJDX2w0frg_20070916.html Kato, Yusuke. 2018. Weekly Shonen Jump: In Grip of Midlife Crisis, Or Still a Big Draw? The Asahi Shimbun, August 15. http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/ AJ201808150008.html Komatsu, Mikikazu. 2015. Japan’s 2014 Manga Sales Up 1% from the Previous Year. Crunchyroll, January 27. https://www.crunchyroll.com/animenews/2015/01/26-1/japans-2014-manga-sales-up-1-from-the-previous-year Martin, Alex. 2009. Future of ‘Anime’ Industry in Doubt. The Japan Times, March 4. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/03/04/national/ future-of-anime-industry-in-doubt/#.XEYW1817k2w McDonnell, Chris. 2014. Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo. New York: Abrams. Min, Lilian. 2016. The Strange Story of How Internet Superfans Reclaimed the Insult ‘Trash’. Splinter, May 19. https://splinternews.com/ the-strange-story-of-how-internet-superfans-reclaimed-t-1793856895 Minkel, Elizabeth. 2015. Harry Potter Isn’t Over, But What Happens When a Fandom Grows Up? New Statesman, August 21. https://www.newstatesman.com/ culture/2015/08/harry-potter-isn-t-over-what-happens-when-fandom-grows Mouse, Annie N. 2015. Invisible Women: Why Marvel’s Gamora & Black Widow Were Missing from Merchandise, and What We Can Do About It. The Mary Sue, April 7. https://www.themarysue.com/invisible-women/ Nagata, Kabi. 2017. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness. Trans. Jocelyne Allen. Los Angeles: Seven Seas Entertainment.

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Noppe, Nele. 2013. Social Networking Services as Platforms for Transcultural Fannish Interactions: deviantART and Pixiv. In Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, ed. Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, 141–157. New York: Routledge. Shamoon, Deborah. 2012. Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetic of Girls’ Culture in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Tiffany, Kaitlyn. 2018. When Tumblr Bans Porn, Who Loses? Vox, December 4. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn-banverizon-ad-goals-sex-work-fandom Watabe, Kohki and Yasuhito Abe. 2016. Pixiv as a Contested Online Artistic Space in-between Gift and Commercial Economies in an Age of Participatory Culture. ejcjs: Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 16 (3). http://www. japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol16/iss3/watabe.htm

Index1

A Adventure Time, 12, 15, 148, 149, 154, 156, 158, 166n16 Anime Expo, 151, 161, 166n12 American Sign Language (ASL), 133, 135, 137, 139 Aoyama, Tomoko, 82, 97n17, 97n19, 105, 119n9 Azuma, Hiroki, 21–23, 30, 31, 40, 41n9, 41n10, 42n12, 104, 119n20 B Bikkuriman, 19 Bizenghast, 15, 151, 153 Boys’ Love (BL) manga, 11, 14, 19, 81, 103, 132, 147

C Chobits, 13, 62–71 CLAMP, 13, 18, 32, 39, 40, 44n44, 47–71, 73n20, 81, 83, 84, 96n9, 98n26, 99n32, 148, 149 D Dansei-muke (“for men”), 81, 98n22 DeviantArt, 3, 12, 153, 154, 162, 166n14 Disability, 14, 126–128, 135, 136, 139, 140, 155 Dō jinshi, 14, 21, 23, 30, 43n26, 73n20, 79–83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92–95, 97n10, 98n22, 98n23, 103–107, 109, 110, 116, 118, 132, 133, 158, 159

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s) 2020 K. Hemmann, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9

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INDEX

F Female Gaze, 6, 7, 41n3, 77–95 Final Fantasy VII, 14, 105–109, 119n11 Fujoshi (“rotten girls”), 41n4, 93, 94, 100n35, 105 G Gamergate, 120n30, 120n32, 141n9 H Hagio, Moto, 10, 11, 29, 44n36, 48, 73n19, 82, 105 Hyrule Warriors, 109, 111, 114, 116, 117, 119n16 J Jenkins, Henry, 97n16, 98n21, 131, 142n17 Josei-muke (“for women”), 43n26, 81, 116 K Kano, Ayako, 109, 119n12, 130, 131, 142n14 Kemuri, 90, 92–94 Kickstarter, 12, 156, 161, 162 Kirino, Natsuo, 4, 5 Kotani, Mari, 28, 29, 35, 43n33, 44n37 L Lamarre, Thomas, 50–53, 61, 65–70, 72n13, 73n14, 73n15, 73n16, 73n17, 73n28, 74n33, 74n37

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, 14, 116, 117, 125–140, 141n10, 141n11, 143n29 Link, 14, 110, 111, 113–117, 119n16, 120n21, 121n35, 125–140, 141n12, 143n29 Linkle, 109–111, 113–118, 120n21, 120n25, 120n29 M Magical girl, 12, 13, 25, 26, 31, 32, 44n43, 63, 154, 156 Magic Knight Rayearth, 8, 13, 18, 31–40, 44n45, 45n50, 53, 149 Media Mix, 14, 78–81, 93–95, 96n9 Miyazaki, Hayao, 41n11, 49–52, 63, 64, 69, 72n8 Mulvey, Laura, 2, 15n5, 41n3, 77 N Nagata, Kabi, 162, 163, 167n27 Napier, Susan, 28, 35, 41n8, 43n31, 49, 64, 72n7, 72n8, 72n10, 73n31 Neon Genesis Evangelion, 18, 21–23, 64 Neurodiversity, 128 Nintendo, 14, 109–111, 114, 116–118, 119n16, 119n18, 125, 127, 141n11, 149 O Orbaugh, Sharalyn, 49, 50, 72n11, 74n38, 82, 85, 97n19 Otaku, 19–26, 40, 41n4, 41n11, 44n40, 63, 64, 93, 98n22, 104, 105

 INDEX 

Ō tsuka, Eiji, 19–23, 40, 41n5, 52, 97n13, 104 P Pixiv, 3, 80, 97n14, 106, 116, 162, 163, 167n25, 167n26 Posthumanism, 69–71 R Revolutionary Girl Utena, 8, 12, 154 S Sailor Moon, 5–8, 12–15, 18, 19, 25–35, 39, 40, 42n20, 42n21, 42n24, 42n25, 42n26, 43n27, 43n30, 44n41, 44n42, 44n43, 44n45, 45n50, 58, 73n18, 148, 149, 151, 154, 156 Saitō , Tamaki, 24, 25, 31, 35, 40, 42n12, 42n13, 42n14, 42n25, 43n30, 45n46, 63, 73n30 Sedgwick, Eve, 84, 98n25 Seinen, 8, 13, 26, 47, 48, 57, 61–63, 71, 72n1, 81, 83, 84, 88, 96n9, 99n31 Sherlock, 77–79, 95n1, 95n2, 96n3, 96n4, 96n5, 96n6, 96n9, 159 Shō jo, 3, 5–13, 15, 15n7, 19, 25–35, 37, 39, 42n24, 44n36, 44n41, 44n43, 44–45n45, 45n49, 47–50, 53–55, 57–61, 63, 65, 71, 72n2, 72n3, 72n9, 73n18, 73n19, 74n36, 81, 82, 89, 90, 92, 93, 98n26, 99n30, 113, 147–151, 153–157

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Shō nen, 5, 8, 11–13, 15n7, 44n36, 45n49, 47, 48, 53, 61, 71, 81, 84, 88, 105, 147, 149–151 Steinberg, Marc, 19, 41n5, 78, 79, 96n7 Steven Universe, 7, 8, 12–15, 149, 154, 156, 160, 166n8 Sugimoto, Yoshio, 97n17, 104, 118n2, 118n4 Sugiura, Yumiko, 93, 94, 100n36, 105 T Takemiya, Keiko, 11, 48, 82, 104, 105 Takeuchi, Naoko, 5, 13, 18, 19, 26, 30, 40, 42n24, 44n44, 98n22, 148 Tezuka, Osamu, 8–10, 42n12, 72n2, 79 Tokyopop, 62, 148–157, 166n7 Tsubasa, 13, 47, 53–62, 71, 98n24 Tumblr, 2, 12, 25, 42n21, 77, 99n28, 114, 115, 118n1, 120n29, 130, 131, 135, 137, 139, 142n20, 142n21, 143n27, 143n28, 143n30, 154–156, 158, 159, 162–164, 166n20 X xxxHolic, 13, 47, 53–62, 71, 72n3, 81, 83–85, 90, 92, 94, 98n24 Z Zettai ryōiki, 111, 113, 114, 116