Tag Archives: popular culture association

Preparing Thoughts on Evangelion and Media Fandoms

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After spending most of Thanksgiving working on PhD applications (though I still have a couple deadlines left), I’m back to work at the Consortium and ready to blog it up over here at the Department of Alchemy. Alongside all of these applications, it’s time to begin preparing other applications and abstracts for next year’s academic conferences and fan conventions. Last year, I had an excellent time traveling down to New Orleans for the Popular Culture Association national conference, where I spoke about the discourse surrounding otaku identity. This year, the PCA conference is being hosted in St. Louis, MO, but it’s also sandwiched between PAX East and Anime Boston. Regardless of whether or not I can attend in the spring, I submitted the below proposal to the Asian Popular Culture track, which was readily accepted. If I attend in person or if I Skype in to the panel, I’ll be relating most of my secondary research from the Consortium on transmedia and fandom to the Evangelion franchise in Japan and America.

From Narrative to Character: Transmedia, Emotional Economies, and the Success of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Hideaki Anno and Studio Gainax’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” has been heralded as one of the most influential Japanese animations in the history of the medium. Met with wild success among Japanese otaku after its premiere in 1995/96, Evangelion strangely also became a media phenomenon among the general public, particularly following Eiji Otsuka’s criticism of the series in the Mainichi Daily News.

Even after the series ended in 1996, Neon Genesis Evangelion continued to remain a key franchise in the otaku community. Beginning with toys and video games and branching out to pachinko machines and cell phones, Evangelion’s narrative extends well beyond Anno’s original “text.” However, it is in these extensions where Evangelion’s success emerges.

This paper argues that the emotional economies present between fans, narrative, and character drive Neon Genesis Evangelion’s transmedia success. The emotional connection that fans establish between the original story and the stories they create fuel this fan-produced narrative that underlies cosplay, galge (female character-driven video games), and the moé phenomenon.

This paper also explores questions posed by the most recent developments in the Evangelion franchise: the quartet of movies (of which Evangelion 1.0 and 2.0 have already premiered in Japan). Although these movies are clearly an adaptation of the original narrative, they also represent an instance of transmedia storytelling that provides new perspectives to a previously-built world. How does this conflict between adaptation and transmedia storytelling affect the comprehension of the Evangelion narrative for a new generation of fans? Is the emotional economy regenerated or merely prolonged? And how can we better understand the relationship between fans and media by examining the Evangelion franchise as in evolves before our eyes?

To Be Continued

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The faculty over at the Department of Alchemy will be on break for the remainder of the week. We didn’t post anything since the beginning of last week, unfortunately, but we did end up switching domains on top of that, so that counts as an update, right? We’ll be at the Popular Culture Association national conference in New Orleans this week; if you’re around, come hang out or drop by the Japanese Popular Culture panel on Wednesday. It’s about anime, and Alex is demonstrating this fine presentation:

Otaku and the (Un)popular Fandom

Over the course of the past three decades, the term “otaku,” a moniker for fans of Japanese animation and its related passions, has survived a multitude of public and private appraisals. “Otaku” describes the conceptualization of a generation’s adherence to fan values, society’s opprobrium toward a targeted yet indistinct group, and the market’s generalization of an obsessive consumer.

What are the politics surrounding this categorization of loyalists to the anime fandom, in which “otaku” remains a negative classification even in the eyes of contemporary fans? What has caused Toshio Okada, theorist of the otaku culture and self-proclaimed Ota-king, to declare that otaku are dead? And in the cultural translation of the anime fandom from Japan to the United States, how have all things otaku blossomed into a mature consumer culture and an accelerated educational progression in the past decade?

From the beginnings of the “otaku movement” (Thomas Lamarre) established in the pursuits of the founders of Studio Gainax, we will examine the rise of otaku culture in the science fiction conventions of Osaka, its public disapproval stemming from media portrayals of Akihabara and hikkikomori, and the subsequent revitalization of anime fandom in the United States as the socialization of otaku proliferated in conventions, across the Internet, and eventually in local bookstores.

The actual presentation will probably not reflect most of the abstract (it was written back in December), but the paper will be uploaded to the blog come Saturday, so look out for it. Until then!

Cool Japan: A Look Into Exotic Anthropology

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Via Japan Society

A response to coverage of the KRAZY! anime & manga art exhibit at the New York Japan Society and a preview of my lecture/presentation at the Popular Culture Association national conference on Wednesday 8 April.

If geeks had never thought of anime as cool, it would never have become popular in America. This is a basic but true statement, hands down. One intrinsic tenets of being a fan of something is that we want more of it. So when science fiction geeks back in the ’70s noticed this new thing called anime being shipped over to the States, they wanted to get their hands on more. Once they were able to do just that, the opportunity to discover more about Japan became a reality.

I’m not here to say that geeks in America were the first to jump on the “Japan is awesome” bandwagon. In fact, interest in Japan hit another peak of popularity before the ’70s, when ukiyo-e block prints were exported to the States (to end up primarily at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). It’s almost common knowledge nowadays that ukiyo-e were not respected by creators of high art in Japan; the Wikipedia page confirms this, describing the prints as “mainly meant for townsmen, who were generally not wealthy enough to afford an original painting. The original subject of ukiyo-e was city life, in particular activities and scenes from the entertainment district.” But artists — particularly those Impressionist painters in Europe, like Van Gogh, — thought the prints were cool (or at least different), picked them up like a frequent browser in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and brought them home to share with their friends. The story of art and the story of fans.

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