Tag Archives: fansub

Finally (Academically) Published! [Yep, Nerdily For an Anime Website Review]

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See my article here, or read up on my boring story of how I got published below.

Also, yes, I know that the journal’s Style Guide is messed up. “Web site,” with a space, really guys?

Last spring, I sat down one night, shaken by an urge to write furiously. On a random whim, I wrote up a full paper for an academic journal.

Apparently this is what I do for fun in my free time.

The compensation: I’m finally published!

OK, so to put it all simply, I wrote a book review for the Transformative Works and Cultures journal. The TW&C journal is a peer-reviewed, open, online journal. If you hit the link, you can check out the amazing executive board. But in terms of my own publication, a book review is pretty low in the Important Publications hierarchy, but it’s a start, and definitely a good one for graduate students (though of course I haven’t even been accepted to a program yet…).

The interesting part of my book review is that it’s not actually a book review: it’s a website review! On the Online Submissions page, where it explains how and what to submit in the journal’s different sections, the review section states, “Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and web sites.” That last item, websites, stuck out at me, so I flipped through the older four issues of the journal. I found only book reviews.

Idea: do something really new. So I wrote a website review!

The review takes a look at Inside Scanlation, a well-researched fan site that catalogues the short history of English-language manga scanlation. I discovered this website a couple weeks before it launched and eagerly waited for its official publication. I really like Inside Scanlation because it’s a modern equivalent of older anime fansites that probably are only available today via The Wayback Machine.

If you’re interested in reading through my review, you can find it at the Transformative Works and Cultures Journal, volume 5. A direct link to the article is here.

Also, if you’re interested in more anime fandom-related academic articles, Mikhail Koulikov wrote up a paper on fansubbing communities. You can read that essay in the same volume: Fighting the fan sub war: Conflicts between media rights holders and unauthorized creator/distributor networks.

Bowing and Begging: Resisting Anime/Manga Industry Failure Through Fan Loyalty

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Cross-posted from the Convergence Culture Consortium.

The Japanese popular culture industry, especially for anime and manga, is an interesting case study for global fandom, but also for global industry. The comics, television, and film industry for animated popular culture in Japan has its own history, structure, and approaches, but over the past five decades, as it has reached millions of new, international viewers, new industries have risen to cater to these fans. Still, with the rise of the Internet and the economic troubles that most industries have gone through over the past decade, both the domestic and international manga and anime industries have been hurting for money, even with a surfeit of fans.

The anime and manga industry is especially volatile, because its domestic and international audiences have utilized the Internet to spread and consume the media at the expense of industrial and commercial models that cannot keep up with the audiences’ changing tastes, modes of consumption, and cultural behaviors of media consumption (sharing with friends, international online distribution, the culture of collectors versus mere viewers, etc.). The industries, both in Japan and elsewhere, must change: however, the success that anime and manga brought a decade ago have influenced the producers of these media to stick with old models that are no longer fully applicable to the current fan cultures that drive the markets.

Today, I want to discuss two very recent issues of the manga and anime industries — in Japan and in America — publicizing comments to fans in a way that might be seen by many as “giving up”: without adapting to technological, cultural, and commercial changes, the industries representatives have voiced concerns to fans by pleading with them to stop behaving as they current are — mostly by using the Internet to circumvent commercial models for their media consumption — and to think ethically about how these behaviors are affecting the respective industries.

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