Given; my little guy band, male friendship is magic

“melody awakens the mind, the rites perfect through performance, thus music completes experience.” — Lun Yu , Book VIII, Chapter 8

“Death awaits us all, what is one dalliance with perversion?”
— Max von Sydow to Werner Herzog per Twitter

Spoiler warning: Given [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Given_(manga)] anime spoilers to Ep7, manga spoilers to ch 28.

Tabby Praxis

Fetishization as an accusation of bad-faith practice seems to be a new thang in the discourse surrounding mass cultural vernacular narratives. As a practice, (praxis?) the actual mechanisms of fetishisation appear on closer examination to be slippery, diffuse and worse. inexorably bound to the process of simplified storytelling that makes up all that yummy, fast, cheap and ephemeral product that we fans gorge on and geek out over. Marge, You’re soaking in it. Worse, a useful definition and genealogy of the term is difficult to come up with. At least with appropriation of voice you kinda get the idea. Exactly what’s on the label. Fetishization is a whole lot harder to pin down.

Problematic, even…

If it is sexual, why not use the clinical term paraphilia? Or is schmexy-fetishism some kind of paraphilia-light/ not-quite paraphilia? Is it a fetish when you want your beloved to wear a bunny costume but hope to end up in the sack with them, bunny costume more or less removed; whereas with paraphilia, you want to rub the damn costume all over your nekkid body while sweetums is left to do the NYT crossword in the living room?

This is confusing.

A bout of Twitter discourse recently sent me down a bunny-costume-hole chasing current, useful examples. Then when the back and forth grew wearisome, I was tempted to do a stink-eye, declaring “SILLY COMRADES, I MEANT COMMODITY FETISHISATION!” because the internet, and Natalie Wynn’s Tabby

“Cat girls of the world, unite… Violence!” (1)

Be careful of what you poke with a stick. It had been decades since I had to fidget through any introductory Marxism reading lists but I thought a quick refresher at Wikipedia’s “commodity fetishism” page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism] was worth a detour. Holy frick, the gang’s all here, hanging out back in the kitchen; Jameson, JimBo, Debord, Benjamin, Adorno, Lukács… TABBY!

Best I can puzzle out is that “fetishism”, as practice and shade, is kinda like those sci-fi stories where magic is blurred with science-y props and rituals; quantifiable, reproduce-able and easily invoked with a sufficient supply of brass mechanical difference engines.

“Marx said that fetishism is “the religion of sensuous appetites”, and that the fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper. Therefore, the crude appetite of the fetish worshipper smashes the fetish when it ceases to be of service.”
— Ibid wiki per Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, On religion (orig 1842).

Karl and Fred could have given us a little more on this. They elide the mechanistic operational appeal of the magic. Drop the magic pebble into the bucket and the water turns into chocolate pudding (watch your teeth, there’s still a pebble in the pudding) Bad example — the rock had nothing initially chocolate-y or pudding-ish about it. Laws of similarity and contagion violated. Back to beans and beanstalks.

Worse, when you try to tar vernacular narratives and their derivative crap with the fetishisation brush, you run into a bunch of pre-existing, structural conditions that complicate the exercise (or charge).

A myth of originality

Plots, settings, characters – even chara designs get recycled. Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture is a very efficient recycler, whether because of a handicraft view of creative production, the doujinshi/ ani-paro tradition and/or a vigorous culture of interchange between producers and consumers/ fans. Outsiders decry this as “same-face”; pop-culture pundits whomped up elaborate end-of-history-end-of-grand-narratives visions of a “database”, while still others attempted to impose a quasi-linguistic taxonomy approach, (gotta catch em all!) taking street urchin “cliches” and giving them a good scrub, a clean track suit and lodging them in an ongoing repository of “tropes”. Cataloging is fun but the payoff comes with the permission and availability promoted by well-stocked shelves full of variously exaggerated forms. Amateur enthusiasts and underpaid hacks alike can grab armloads of pret-a-porter and keep cranking out product. So, yeah.. we might all look the same…

As well, there’s the schmexy.

We need the schmexy.

Fetishisation sounds like it must have something to do with naughty knickers but if you toss out any trace of the “yummy bits” you end up with Scooby Doo Mysteries. When Dr. Saito Tamaki (renown Japanese clinical psychologist – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamaki_Sait%C5%8D ) took a break from his work on Japanese (mostly guy) social isolates to throw some post-Lacanian theory at male manga/ anime fans and their libido(s), he opened up a giant can of beautiful/ magical fighting girl fantasies. These he pronounced as all good and healthy. Then he noticed all the porny aniparo doujinshi (fanzines) at Comiket. You would think he would ignore these, bhut noooo. All good too! Most excellent survival strategy(!) for young, alienated, isolated guys in a society that was increasingly globalised, unintelligible and overloaded with never ending shit-floods of visual narratives.

Fan-boy gets that strange feeling looking at the powered-up cartoon cutie, wonders if his wiring is off, finds all manner of variants, becomes a connoisseur of the effect and gets to spread the faith and bond with fellow enthusiasts. Hack the spew with cartoon pr0n!!! Your life is no longer endless grey concrete drudgery and kombini take-out meals — your rich fantasy lives have been re-cathected (cf Mary Shelley per Freud ) Then the FATE franchise was born and everyone lived happily ever after.

Lacanian as all…

Anyway, otaku have no problem whatsoever distinguishing fantasy from reality; their sexualities don’t get warped by all them weird cartoons and the majority of them are functioning heterosexual guys who will go on to marry and reproduce. Don’t freak out.

Feeling better? No urge to go hide in your room for 5 years? Good! Get back to work…

Later critics would argue that women fans had their version of this as well but it worked somewhat differently… (2)

Fuck you Muddy-boi, where is my Given review?

Can it! You want the free grub, you gotta sit for the sermon… Ok, whatever!

GIVEN:

Given is a manga and a current season anime about a bunch of guys who get together to practice and hopefully start a band. The story puts their band interaction, taking place in a rented practice space at the center of their personal lives. Home, school, jobs are all places where the band members do time before they can once again get together and jam. The band-verse is the hub of their manosphere — everything radiates out from it. A male homosocial, to use the fancy-shmancy academic term. While contemporary “queer theory” grabbed that term and ran off yelling Squeeeeeeeeee! into the night (in many ways anticipating a variation on the slash/ fujoshi conceit that all guys, male socials and male power structures are and will be up to the same-old-same-old mischief, all the time) it is worth remembering that the concept was born out of sociology/ anthropology and was initially appropriated for use in literary criticism.

However BL guy homosocials are not like the ones that Sedgwick’s Between Men dissects. Buncha guys in BL is a magic.

This fun tradition of the BL genre has been shorthanded as “the fetishisation of male friendship”. The initial appeal of this notion appears to spring from two IRL conditions: 1) Japan does same-sex socials a lot and 2) the genre fandom, the audience for stories riffing off this conceit are notorious for the occult gender exclusivity of their socials. The girls only-club gets to have fun ascribing exaggerated characteristics to hypothetical boy-only clubs. Win!

If I run with my simple metonymic rule for build-a-bear fetishisations;
“Simplify a complex condition, exaggerate one remaining aspect, then ascribe that aspect machine-like magical powers within the story”

… then the simple act of putting some guys together in a band will have magical consequences within the story because while the guy social is a dumb-simple plot machine, it has one inescapable effect:

Guys within get love-stuck and properly paired (one, true-ly) off.

A somewhat similar effect can be ascribed to isolated forest cabins that offer shelter in the midst of snowstorms, when one of our two heroes is sick or wounded and will die unless his rival-companion lavishes care upon him.

“…reminds me of a German guy I knew in Tokyo to whom I lent some Eroica slash stories. Helmut returned them to me in agitation. ‘Don’t these writers realize men can be friends and not want to have sex?!’ Naturally, I said, but the point of the slash exercise is that the guys do have sex. He didn’t see it.”
— Mary Jeanne Johnson/ Aestheticism forum (ca 2000)

I should dial it down a bit; Given — especially the anime version — remains well-behaved, sympathetic and sets up its main characters in a way that maintains a good balance between leaving things unsaid/yet to be revealed and naturally developing the initial dynamics between the four main characters. At the start of the story, only one of the four is acknowledged gay and he’s had a bad time of it. Satō Mafuyu had a fight with his first ever boyfriend and then walked in on the aftermath of Yuki’s suicide. Now with Yuki’s guitar, given to him by the deceased’s mother he walks around in a grieving daze. Uenoyama Ritsuka finds Sato-kun nodding off in his secret high school napping spot and grudgingly re-strings the expensive Gibson hollow body, growing even more annoyed when he realises that its owner has no idea at all about guitars or how to play.

Sato Mafuyu then goes stray-puppy-to-11 and begins to stalk and pester Uenoyama, begging for guitar lessons. Uenoyama-kun is restless and easily annoyed but fundamentally good-natured. He also has a bad case of dogged determination; when young he had pushed himself not just to learn but to master the electric guitar his father gave him. Recently he has felt that his skill has levelled off and guitar is less fun than it used to be. Later we will find that he has little patience for going along with amateurs and has left at least one other band and/ or a school light music club because they were insufficiently “serious”. This won’t stop Sato-kun. Bit by bit, Sato wears him down until Uenoyama agrees to give him a few pointers.

Then Sato sings a melody line and Uenoyama is taken.

Uenoyama is in a band with two other guys, older university students. Nakayama Haruki is basist, band-leader and veteran of a few other bands. Although nominally straight, we soon find that he has somehow developed an undisclosed crush on Kaji Akihiko; drummer, music major, violinist and semi-pro man-whore. Akihiko-san is currently rooming with/ freeloading off his ex-boyfriend, the musical prodigy Murata Ugetsu who destroyed Akihiko’s musical self-confidence and stole his heart. Unfortunately Aki-san has irresponsible parents who travel abroad and neglect to send a regular allowance, so mr blond hunk music student has also found it expedient to cultivate the sponsorship of rich, older, generous girlfriends. The manga does more reveal on this than the anime has currently offered – including genius roomie’s toxic, sadistic nature. Initially, in both the anime and the manga, the two senior band-mates naturally take the role of sempai(s), with one important reservation; both feel that Uenoyama’s “serious” approach to music might be what they need to get a band to “click” and as such defer to Uenoyama’s musical tastes.

It doesn’t take long before Sato is introduced to the sempai, they get to hear him sing la-la-la syllables and encourage him to join as their singer. Uenoyama then has to stalk Sato to convince him to join the band, as Sato lacks confidence.

Sato puts in the effort to learn to play, begins to heal and starts to socialise at school but Uenoyama grows progressively more out-of-sorts. He wonders if he wants the responsibility of teaching Sato. A girl in his class who quite clearly has strong feelings for him takes him aside and blurts out the gossip following Mafuyu Sato: he openly dated a guy in junior high and then the guy committed suicide. “Don’t get involved with him, he is dangerous!” Huh? Involved? Uenoyama has no previous romantic experience, or for that matter unresolved desires — at least any that were not sublimated into obsessive guitar practice. He gets on great with the rest of the guys in his class but is often half-asleep because of band and part-time job (to pay his part of the studio rent) demands on his time and energies. He is not shy or uncomfortable around girls; at home his older sister expertly bosses him around. Why is everything suddenly getting complicated?

One makes allowances for anime and manga stories. We expect details to get brushed over, or rushed past. Still at 7 episodes and/ or 28 chapters in, we only have the vaguest idea of who has what in the way of parents, let alone where they are about or underfoot. Someone besides Mafuyu must be taking care of the dog… Please! Also; the shade of Yuki is an uncomfortable presence in more ways than one. A young lover’s suicide out of the blue, after a teen romantic spat between guys? Somehow his feels callous on the part of the writers.

Then there is the question of sexualities as fixed within the self; as a “born this way” innate characteristic of personal identity. While neither manga or anime has yet to pull the infamous “I’m not gay it’s only you“, it is still a stretch that %100 of the bishie guys in a band end will up paired off with each other. Sure it is possible that they all were so inclined but the happenstance, presented with little concern, foreshadowing or explanation beyond “lightning strikes” is a bit of a stretch. Also what of informal traditions of band exogamy?

Put it down to an aspirational staging rule — turns out all four were predisposed to the idea of loving another guy and the band social provided a safe space where this could happen. Like magic.

As well, the “reasons” for attraction are portrayed as complex, emotional and empathic. At least, Given does not reduce male same-sex desire to “Wow, whatta hunk, nize ass!“

One week before their first show and Uenoyama is screwing up at practice, ostensibly over-worried about Sato’s ability to play and whether Sato will be able to finish the song lyrics on time. Kaji-sempai, talking to him after the rehearsal asks if he is completely out-of-sorts because he has developed a crush on Sato. Uenoyama, in one of the few, minor concessions in the story to notions of fixed sexuality and social conformity goes all “Huh?” Sempai replies “what of it? I’ve gone out with guys too… though it was some time ago.”

Sempai sez no biggie. So much for societal disapproval. Moving right along…

At their first live gig Sato sings a powerful song about his feelings of loss for Yuki and Uenoyama, overcome with the emotion of the moment, hugs and then kisses Sato backstage. Soon after they confess to each other and begin dating.

The BL manosphere/ magic guys club forcefield comes with secondary effects. Women characters vanish into the mist. They become negligible threats to the bonds between the guys or cheerleaders on the sidelines. Jealous girl had already apologised for “he’s dangerous” and although not “out” at high school, Uenoyama and Sato start spending more time together, though Uenoyama reverts to “tough coach” mode when it’s music time. If the two are “exploring” anything it happens off-stage.

The action in the manga then shifts to Nakayama Haruki; flashbacks about his growing attraction to Kaji Akihiko, the latter’s troubling relationships and behavior and finally, from Akihiko’s POV; cutting clean from Ugetsu-san, tracking down the wayward parental units, dunning them for proper support, dropping the host gigs, resuming serious attention to his music degree and otherwise trying to clean up his act, “so as to be worthy” of Haruki-san’s affection.

The left one now, it has bells on it and makes pretty sounds.

So far no 1970’s era bishounen-style, “Even after the flames take my body” vows of eternal and undying monogamous love (OTP! OTP! ) but we still have a few chapters to go. They could tone it down a bit and go for contemporary adult romantic realism “I’m gonna work real hard at this, call me on it if I get out of line — I’ll do the same for you because I’m all in as long as you are” — which would raise the exercise in my eyes and even tone down a lot of my snark. Putting up with anyone, in one’s face all the time, for any promised indefinite period is one of the big questions that drives BL and associated dreaming in queer het-gaze exercises in speculative romantic fiction. We’d like to think –even if only in our fictions — that maybe without all them dysfunctional rules, roles and expectations that someone(s) can come up with a new, workable approach to love.

Relationships are complicated. No shit, Sherlock. Takes work. Also needs agreed upon boundaries. What would be a “code of honor” for an equal, mutually affirming arrangement for two anyones to stay together and not crumple each other?

Audience is restless.

Unfortunately, another magic simplification fetishism trap now lies in wait for us. Part of the appeal of the magic BL guy-group effect is that male friendships appear, to observers to be simple and direct; as simple and direct as guy sexual desire. Indeed, the simple, selfish entitled stupidity of guy sexuality is one of the things that women find troublesome, annoying, threatening, even lethally dangerous about the way guys spark. Male:male desire, as imagined by a significant subset of the BL audience is prone to being simplified to these extremes, even if “only in stories, for fun”. Everyone gets to have their porn and porn needs to move fast and get on with the hot stuff but the simplifications can spread and contaminate even more restrained works. The guys in Given are fastidious, cautious and as empathic as they can manage in getting close and finding out if… but when Akihiko and Ugetsu have a hate-fuck the manga audience gets their satisfying glimpses of the rough “default setting”.

Then the stories overcompensate. If stereotypical guy attraction is short on “see the other person as a person, with unique characteristics, hopes, dreams, likes, dislikes and behavior patterns”, we get the temptation to have the guy-puppets in aspirational romantic same-sex fictions make good the shortage when they turn their attentions on each other. Guys only act “really” romantic with other guys(!) because uh, fetishisation and Tumblr…

SO WHAT?

Too easy to toss water bottles at a nice, simple anime/manga romance. Ease off and enjoy. Part of the appeal of vernacular love stories is that they do one thing in a satisfying way. Close enough for rock and roll. Enjoy the band. Clap a lot and they’ll do an encore.

They will inevitably leave the stage.

Whining about fetishisation in pulp fiction is wasted effort. Only as technique is it worthy of consideration and study.(3)

 

ENDNOTES:

(1) “Tabby; a far-left communist anti-fascist Cat Girl […] is well-meaning but struggles to connect with the common person, coming across as overly intellectual and militant; either lecturing people on dialectical philosophy or threatening to bash their skulls in with her trademark baseball bat.”
— https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/ContraPoints

(2) Dr Tamaki had a go at expanding his theories to include women fans (2006) but came up short, I suspect because the post-Lacanian framework he uses to take apart individual subjectivities gets confused when the subject in question doesn’t have a wee bit of patriarchy in their shorts. Besides, he was too busy having fun repeating “no… is the sexy bits, they are important” at other guy pop-culture experts who would get all worked up by the idea that guys might wank to comic book babe drawings. Dr. Nagaike burned a massive load of theory powder trying to bring the woman reader into this equation (see her doctoral thesis) but her solution remains prone to reductio-ad-shotacon. For now, everyone has settled on “asymmetry” as the compromise solution. Guys reportedly geek out on individual sexy charas while women are supposed to be more interested in character interaction and interpersonal emotional dynamics. Your mileage may vary.

(3) MUCH LATER: An amazing ‘tojisha” discussion of fetishization in BL in this YouTube
interview from “The Yaoi Shelf” podcast with Dr Thomas Baudinette:

 

THE NAMING OF PARTS 1: Too smart by half

On the origins of peculiar terminologies:

WARNING: Multi-part work in progress. Refresh for typos, corrections, revisions. Let me see if I can string all the pieces together over multiple posts in the next few weeks. Feel free to add your 2 yen via the comment section if you have extra material, ideas, whatever. Not much to mull over so far — wait for it. I plan to go full-bore fandom/comiket apocrypha on this one. Mimeograph machines, doujins, Fido BBS’s, 20yr old occult lists of fan terms and too many cached pages on Archive.org. Wheeeeeeee!  

 

“Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.”
— “The Naming of Parts”, Henry Reed

Something feels odd (to me) about the Japanese (and derived) otaku practice of naming character trope types. Something doesn’t fit, or fits too well, gives too much information. I have ideas as to where the larger practice was borrowed from but then I must ask; from where did the previous instance arise? To uncover the roots of the practice will require a highly subjective, speculative romp through the traces of fandoms from 20, 30 even 40 years ago.

I must break this essay up into installments.

If I were to mention that a certain anime or manga (or game, visual novel or doujin) had a noteworthy “Blonde Loli”  character in it, one would not only immediately know what she looks like. Any reasonably experienced fan would have a good idea of how she would act and relate to other characters.

• Female, young, somewhat pre-pubescent and/or appears as such.
• Blonde hair, short of stature, flat-chested (petanko)
• Outlander or hafu background in relation to a Japanese cast.
• Wealthy, of means. Has hidden skills and/ or powers.
• Disruptive, arrogant; does not know or care to follow established social conventions.
• overcompensates for her feelings of social isolation and rootless upbringing.

As well, most of the notable previous examples of the type would color your expectations. Evangeline A K McDowell of Negi and Uq Holder fame; Shinobu Oshino/ Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade from Monogatari; the pale knockoff of the previous two in Vampire Bund; Hayate The Combat Butler‘s Nagi Sanzenin and The Genshiken‘s Sue Hopkins. Recent iterations include Sana (who is a child) in Alice to Zoroku and Erii in Eromanga Sensei. Many more can be found.

Hiroki Azuma’s musings on the database seem to have come true. [1] A database model has advantages. While characters might feel cookie-cutter-ish, a good writer is expected to elaborate sufficiently to add charm to their version. If a notable restatement of the character emerges, these elaborations will fold into larger conventions of the type, as common resource for future story-telling.

Such a practice favors iteration in ephemeral products and production on a large, diffuse scale. She is closer to a piece of metal drywall edging than a craftsman’s creation. You can’t finish office towers and thousands of basement rec-rooms with bespoke techniques. You need cheap, modular, easy-to-use commodified bits and pieces and the simple techniques that employ them.

Our Blonde Loli is not a creature of high literature. She bears very little resemblance to Nabokov’s original, even if part of her type-name originates from his tale. The idea of character types or stereotypes runs in direct opposition to the originality and authenticity of the project of high literature. The character type is a Barbie or a GI Joe doll, or somewhat less, even as they are somewhat more; their range of behavior is more circumscribed even as their use implies a commodified “published” narrative structure.

Their implicit invitation is that of creative seriality; “the differance” of repetition — if you care to wax high-fallutin’s faux-French post-structuralist about it.[2] I digress. The point takes the complaint of early critics of diaspora anime that “all the characters are the same!” and recasts it as a feature, not a bug. Off the shelf means easy to build and easy for everyone to build with. You get far more absolute output that way and you get lots of individual variations/ iterations of the base model. An ecology, complete with evolutionary surges, population explosions, extinctions and mutations nudges aside the privileged solitary, exalted role of the auteur. [3]

Add that this year’s model is a lot less opaque to new readers because of vestigial familiarity. Does what’s on the label. Pick up a six-pack today.

Most of the benefits of this modular approach were mentioned at least in passing by Azuma in his 2002 work. It remains interesting, but its limitations must also be recognised. In many ways, recognition of what he leaves out, glosses over or shades to his purposes makes his work far more valuable than the first reading of the work itself.

The database as strained metaphor. In Japan, before 2002 there was no organised trove of data sitting up on 2chan or some other occult internet-accessible BBS or forum that contained mix-and-match build-a-bear input screens for churning out custom proto-moe-blob femaloid characters. (was it a mere list?) If such existed or exists today, looking like some demented police sketch assistant program, I have yet to see it (Tits or GTFO! Make her breasts bigger, bigger!). Why was he driven to posit one? Fortunately, TV Tropes came along: the entire meta of tropery has caught on and spread like wildfire during the last decade. Early iterations of the site had a strong “I’ve seen it all before” flanneur/ connoisseur weariness to them. The current versions are exuberant.

No sex here. Grazing ungulates, sea creatures drifting in the current. Post- sex to match the end of history and a pile of hooey about the twilight of grand narratives. One word for that: Chlorine. As in water treatment. As in, which is a newer idea; modernist grand narratives or cholera free city drinking water? Maybe it was the latter killed off grand narratives? Are you sure they are dead? Go argue with any number of repressive regime apologists and stop picking on anime babes. Meanie!

No girls allowed/ (aloud). It’s a boy thing, all about pin-ups and scratching boy itches. The company omiai session will eventually, properly mate up sarrarymen and office ladies to produce the next generation of corporate Japan, so sex is barely necessary, almost a distraction. If required for procreation, the newly wed good-wife-wise-mother-to-be will initiate the required mechanics. (parodied in volume extras from Kio Shimoku’s Spotted Flower manga, a somewhat continuation/ decade later reprise of his Genshiken)

Definitely NO NO NO minority sexual and or gender expression. We have rendered all majority expressions obsolete, so variants are superfluous. Cyborg bodies perhaps? Wires? Phone sex? iPhone sex? iSex? Or nothing but that dry theory hump jouissance?

We remember the database. We remember love.

A quick glance back at Database Animals recalls the swirl of pop debate about vernacular culture in Japan in the early noughts, set off by Dr Saito Tamaki’s 2000 publication of Psychology of the Armoured Beautiful Girl, Aka; The Beautiful Fighting Girl.[4] She dripped heroic sex appeal. She inspired onanistic fantasizing. She most definitely had a use. And her use or uses were in the clinical sense of the term, perverse, her range of manifestation on the stage of (mostly) male dreams running from the chaste Miko-type to the scary hermaphroditic creations of the American naive artist Darger. [5]

She caused trauma in a Freudian/ Lacanian sense. That is: “What the heck just happened to my wiring? Did I just pleasure myself by fantasizing about a line drawing!!!! Oh shit! I will never get a girlfriend! I can’t shake this. The path to enlightenment must lie through the doors of excess! Where do I get more of these hawt manga babes? Comiket? Oh Yeah!”

Your mileage may vary.

That was it. That was all. That was enough. The great unsaid thing was said. It had been said before, by cruelly mocking critics. Akio Nakamori’s article in the July 1983 issue of Manga Burriko taunted those he had previously labeled as otaku:

“No, otaku do not love like normal people because they are attracted to fictional girl characters”[6]

Only now a doctor-professor with a big impressive book rather than some rando jerkwad doing a guest column in a sketchy loli magazine had spoken, and the good doctor was not being insulting about it either. The good doctor was even speculating that this approach may be a healthy, adaptive behavior mechanism. The good doctor also had a list of sub-types for his Beautiful Fighting Girl(s)

Hooray: Taxonomy!

Two more interlocutors were involved: The Ota-King [7], who lamented the waning of classic shonen-esque sci-fi battle/ quasi-imperialist stories that involved giant piloted robots/ battle suits and/ or carrier-battleship spaceship fleets. And Ōtsuka Eiji, who could smell fascism under every last one of these rocks [8]. These worthies had some really fine arguments/ debates, which worked to bring them all into public prominence. Dr. Tamaki’s interest in Otaku and their libidinous imaginations was in any case, peripheral to his life work on social isolates/ Hikikomori. Azuma’s Rousseau redux is not that good. What happened to the Ota-king? Who knows?

Who did we miss?

An important clue lies in the curious something “extra” in some of these terms. Something not mirrored in the vulgar. angry way young males filled with braggadocio and a wounded sense of entitlement have been known to classify real-life women: Bitches and hoes. Frigid, tease, stuck-up, slut, whore. Insulting, objectifying, simple-minded. Any “relation” or interaction posited is immediate and transactional. She gives/ does not give that which I demand now. Very little narrative complexity is implied by any of these epithets, beyond the threat of sexual violence.

Given such lazy, low practice as the default setting, how did male otaku evolve complex trope/ type terms like tsundere or yandere?

Admittedly these do not reference high modernist literature or even Shakespeare plays but at least they imply changing emotional states in the female character over time — if certain conventions of behavior in the main (assumed male) character are followed. Manga, anime and games — specifically get-the-girl games, either galge or eroge may have normalised the expectations behind such complex constructions but where did male otaku first “take permission” and/or find inspiration for reducing these character-behavior-narrative patterns to type-trope shorthand and then elevating them to archetypes?

They are far too complex.

Next up: Fail-through-over-confidence-hero-guy

ENDNOTES:

1) “Dobutsuka-suru Postmodern (Animalizing Postmodernity)” by Hiroki Azuma  (2001) Translated as “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (2009)
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroki_Azuma

2) Tenure GET! No? Perhaps a lecture fee and lunch at the faculty cafeteria. If I wanted reliable income, I would be rebuilding truck and construction equipment starters and alternators.

3) …Then the solitary auteur secretly gorges on the cheap stuff, because they fear picking up some other big’un’s recognisable style and inadvertently committing plagiarism if they read highbrow stuff. Ya can’t plagiarise gruel and even if you do, the gruel-pots can’t mount a serious objection. I understand the tactic of pissing on the carcass you find by the side of the road, but doing it while cosplaying Cirrocco Jones decades ago at book signings… Hmmmph.

4) “Sento bishojo no seishinbunseki” (戦闘美少女の精神分析), Psychoanalysis of Beautiful Fighting Girl by Dr.Saitō Tamaki (2000) . Translated as “Beautiful Fighting Girl” by J. Keith Vincent  and Dawn Lawson (2011) With a foreward by Hiroki Azuma. 

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamaki_Sait%C5%8D

The BFG reviewed: “You Fight like a Girl” by Brian Ruh, Brain Diving column an Anime News Network, (Jul 26th 2011)
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/brain-diving/2011-07-26

5) Darger was by no means unique. Someone should forward a copy of this to Dr Tamaki: “My Dad, the Pornographer” By Chis Offutt The New York Times Magazine (FEB. 5, 2015). TW: descriptions of fantasy violence, rape, squick.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/magazine/my-dad-the-pornographer.html

6)“Otaku Research and Anxiety About Failed Men” by Patrick W. Galbraith
www.academia.edu/12327055/_Otaku_Research_and_Anxiety_About_Failed_Men
See also earlier post: “Kio Shimoku, Madarame & Hato vs Akio Nakamori” https://heartsoffuriousfancies.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/kio-shimoku-madarame-hato-vs-akio-nakamori/

7) Toshio Okada, The ota-King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshio_Okada

See also: THE CONSCIENCE OF THE OTAKING: THE STUDIO GAINAX SAGA IN FOUR PARTS — Interview of former Gainax president Toshio Okada on Gainax’s history, Wings of Honneamise, Aoki Uru, etc. (anime, NGE)
originally in Animerica Magazine Volume 4, Issue 4 – April 1996: ANIMERICA talks with Toshio Okada Interview by Carl Gustav Horn. Text archived on gwern.net blog
https://www.gwern.net/docs/eva/1996-animerica-conscience-otaking

And for a Cliff Notes on Okada Toshio’ s “Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan: Historical Perspectives and New Horizons”, see: “Introduction to Otakuology” on the Fantastic Memes blog
https://frogkun.com/2016/04/15/introduction-to-otakuology/

Context: “An Interview with Patrick W. Galbraith on Otaku Culture – Part Two” by Matthew ALT, May 24, 2012, NEOJAPONISM blog post
http://neojaponisme.com/2012/05/24/an-interview-with-patrick-w-galbraith-on-otaku-culture-part-two/

8) Ōtsuka Eiji: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiji_%C5%8Ctsuka
“In the 1980s, Otsuka was editor-in-chief of Manga Burikko, a leading manga magazine where he pioneered research on otaku sub-cultures in modern Japan. He has published a host of books and articles about the manga industry.”

“Ōtsuka Eiji and Narrative Consumption: An Introduction to ‘World and Variation,’” in Mechademia 5 (2010)
http://www.academia.edu/2093053/_%C5%8Ctsuka_Eiji_and_Narrative_Consumption_An_Introduction_to_World_and_Variation_in_Mechademia_5_2010_

See for example “An Unholy Alliance of Eisenstein and Disney: The Fascist Origins of Otaku Culture” by Ōtsuka Eiji, translated by Thomas Lamarre in Mechademia, Volume 8, 2013 pp. 251-277 [paywalled/ MUSE]

UPDATE: (Early November 2017)  Oh Crap! I had no idea this one was going to be so difficult! I am stuck on part 2, the destinction between simple and complex character types/tropes as used by guys/ male gaze narratives in harem games and stories. Part 3 with mimeographs is pretty well done, Part 4, an excursion into 1980’s and 1990-2005 Japanese on-line fandom is 3/4 written. Part 5, the payload is full of massive weird speculation and might be hard to pull together, but it FEELS right and will, in the end be only an invitation for folks who can get at primary sources to go digging. Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence is as good, or better than a whole lot of other speculation that has become ‘lore’ in the field, so i’m gonna run with it.

When I can get my writing mojo back. Thanks for your patience.

Fanfiction survey secrets revealed !!!

“More than 7,500 fanfiction readers filled out the Fansplaining Fic Preferences Survey. What can we learn from the results?”

Cheesy title aside, the folks at Fansplaining gathered a lot of interesting data from Western fanfic aficionados.

Their article on the results, on Medium:

Five Tropes Fanfic Readers Love (And One They Hate)
https://medium.com/fansplaining/five-tropes-fanfic-readers-love-and-one-they-hate-73843372408c

Discussion on Tumblr:
http://fansplaining.com/post/152424517233/five-tropes-fanfic-readers-love-and-one-they

The only cavil I had with the survey was that it had some in-fandom terms that I had Noooooooooo idea about. So, that “Gen” thing in the above graph concerns “friendship only” fic. or does it?

Gen is a label for a fanwork that contains no romantic or sexual content, either het (heterosexual) or slash (homosexual). The term comes from “general audiences”, the MPAA term for a child-safe film. — Gen –  https://fanlore.org/wiki/Gen

Ok, I learned sumthin’. Then there is the sex-werewolf thang. Nawww, read above if you really need any of that. 

.

GREAT JOB!

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Fansplaining’s fanfiction survey

Fansplaining has a survey that will reveal your most intimate fanfiction desires!

With the winding down of Genshiken Nidaime, this blog can revert to its true form; a series of disjointed tracts from a sketchy fundamentalist cult based on vulgar readings of Dr. Saito Tamaki‘s theories on otaku subjectivity and desire. ‘Round these parts, when we ain’t doing snake-handlin’ and speakin’ in tongues (the way of pastor Hopkins), we perform the rituals of libidinised reading and appropriative secondary production; sometimes tarted up for the university heathens as “Transformative works”.

The most fearsome of these doin’s ‘o secondary production is to go into a trance and readeth, even maketh fic. As the Genshiken and Tamaki-dono hath decreed, so mote it be, even if it is best motied off-stage and out of view.

What amazing varieties and ways there be to partake in these spiritual exercises! Such love! Such devotion!

@fansplaining
Wanna help us do a BIG analysis of fanfiction tropes and themes? Our official survey is live! Please take and share:

The Fansplaining Fic Preferences Survey:
https://t.co/aqh7GJd2LX
or
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdR0NUq8fbz7gsoEmaeLpf54mctcxQg_-YdT5TjDPxe_PkvDg/viewform

The good folks at Fansplaining have been making and posting interesting podcasts on western fan practice (with a strong emphasis on slashy fandoms) for a while now. Notable is their commitment to posting transcripts of these, usually a week or so after the podcast.

see: http://fansplaining.com/ and http://fansplaining.com/about

The Genshiken is all about rude doujin makin. Draw what you know, neh? Kio-gami is a mangaka, not a light novel writer. For those us us who skivved out on drawing classes, scribbling is easier than scratching. Plaisir de texte and all that..

If you have been so bitten by the bug, or are even a bit curious I commend to you the Fansplaining survey; so that you might opine (and gaze in awe!) on their introductory typology of western fic tropes. The survey biases towards slashy narratives, bien sur, because there just ain’t that many dudes writing long grinds about their epic FPS map clearing forays. The absence of sections on machine-generated crapfic and on trollfic are also telling. I am a bit saddened even as the omission is understandable.

That Halo troll-fic machinima ain’t got no schmex might be the most convincing proof of the existence of a merciful deity yet.

Behind my flippant tone is of course a small dumpster full of shame — hey, it’s a guy thing. But the fun of reading or trying one’s own hand at a short “what-if” with your fave charas is more than just a diversion. Nothing short of scanlation encourages such close reading as trying to jam your headcanon onto an existing property. You really, really begin to obsess over minutiae. Even a trash ship (one of those can’t exactly define it but you’ll know it when it sneaks up and bites you on the leg things) demands a serious and very detailed consideration of the original materials. The only risk is having your mind gripped by the unshakeable conviction that the author pulled their lame compromise resolution out of -ahem- the air and that the only possible way it could have gone (if the editors hadn’t spiked it) would have been a beach-front marriage in Hawaii.

Followed by a Saturday afternoon spent shopping for curtains.

Or

113 pages of wooden dialogue between two very hungover idiots trying to wrap their aching heads around their predicament.

Or…

Oh my! So many possibilities. This woobie thing; maybe that’s a bit too squick?

Go forth and completeth the survey, and remember:

FOR SCIENCE!

Absent thee from…

I have too many responsibilities suddenly and the higher powers are getting rather tense. Not much time for posts…

But lookie what I found on Tumblr!

Longtime tumblr-blogging Genshiken fan Wildgoosery had taken a hiatus after the harem train wreck ending. Now they are back with a long, multi-part, illustrated summation of the entire HatoMadaHato thang. Nine Eleven NINETEEN posts and counting!

It is EPIC! Thank You Wildgoosery!

For Great Justice Go Read It Naow.  

Start here:
http://wildgoosery.tumblr.com/post/146945645973/the-hatomada-project-part-1

Another survey, whottheheck

There’s another academic research survey on fandom out and about.
Why not help add to the lore?

https://sites.google.com/site/animeresearch/

It would be unfair to blather too much about it, survey bias and all that, but it looks like it is aimed at North American anime fans and covers a range of themes from a few different researchers.

So it is a pooled effort.

 

There is a comment section at the end, if you think they need a bit of help and/or want to testify.

They also throw in a little “incentive”; an Amazon gift card draw for thems that complete the beast.

“If you are interested in viewing the results of this survey, they will be posted on the International Anime Research Project’s website: https://sites.google.com/site/animeresearch/     “

Be gentle with them.

And remember: FOR SCIENCE!

LATER: More about the team behind the survey, past efforts and links can be found here: https://animemangastudies.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/intl-anime-research-project-2016/

 

Aye, and Gomorrah

On rude doujinshi.

“Poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man’s own loss and another’s gain — these things we shall forbid them to utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.”  (1)

From the looks of Genshiken’s chapter 123, Kio Shimoku is doing his best to have the club-as-fujoshi-social re-assemble after the great harem crash and get back to being productive. Unfortunately, Kio Shimoku has very little idea what actually goes on within fujoshi socials, so he’s going to have to wing it a bit.

One distraction can be had in Kuchiki attempting to pillage the sacred Genshiken doujin collection; note that Ogiue takes her responsibilities serious enough, at least against Kuchiki, to complain about him raiding the male-gaze Kujibiki Unbalance stash. Why she should even care is beyond me. Perhaps they are in trust from past members, like Sasahara or are considered to be liquidate-able collectors works that might fund future group excursions. No more box ’em, trash ’em and then (ooops!) torch ’em when the ciggie butt goes awry, (pace Saki).

The other doujinshi-ish note, according to the preview at Ogiue Maniax [https://ogiuemaniax.wordpress.com/2016/05/01/reading-is-fundamental-genshiken-ii-chapter-123/] is Hato’s now revised first effort. Apparently it is hardcore yaoi and raw enough to give even Yoshitake pause. Whether it is an original character story or a parody of an existing property is yet unknown. If one wanted to read too much into this, one could speculate that the Hato continuum has been levelled up from “in denial” and “fantasy is fantasy” to “oh yes, can I have another?” (2)

Hato-as-chan is still aiming for %100 rotten-girl fujoshi status and identity within the club-verse but the base unit is now a “would consider IRL male:male desire” fudanshi, even if a discriminating “it’s only him” one. The Hato continuum can be fully ascribed as “queer” rather than “just visiting”, if there was any room for deniability before. (3)

Making lewd BL doujinshi is now the primary task of the fujoshi Genshiken – even if they lean on the talents of a trans-fujoshi to crank up their power level. While this might leave them open to the charge that their fandom is far more monolithic and limited than the male-interest fanning of the earlier guy-Genshiken, it must be noted that rude doujin over-production was and remains the most outwardly visible power of Japanese female fans.

No women fans, no Comiket.

Run the numbers, check the historical attendance and participation figures. You might turn up your nose at the product, but you would need MKULTRA level brainwashing to scrub out the historical fact of their presence and influence within the larger Japanese fandom over the last 20+ years. While Maiden Road might not yet be as big as Akiba, it is still one heck of a valuable commercial market. The women don’t make a lot of fuss, they just do the work, show up and vote with their wallets and their enthusiasms.

Yet the female fandom remains opaque to snoopy guys (and uninitiated women); at least those of us who stop short of Hato’s commitment to embedded reporting. At the risk of committing gender essentialism, a clueless guy might listen to western slash-y fen podcasts on any number of shippable fandoms to get some feel for the social vibe. Be warned; the learning curve is steep and the terminology is maddeningly contextual, serving as both shared affective exchange and shibboleth to the uninitiated. Do Japanese fujoshi post fannish podcasts? If they do, Kio Shimoku should get out the headphones, steel himself for hours of shipping/ pairing-talk and keep the notebook handy. The alternative is to simply recycle five or six existing thin manga/ anime portrayals of fujoshi clubs in perpetuity. And one study by Galbraith.

Fujoshi Rumi, 801-chan, Princess Jellyfish, the rotten girl arc in Girl Saurus X, and one or two others. Two or three young women in a casual fannish friendship doesn’t cut it. We need pure examples of fictional yaoi enthusiast girls’ clubs and there are not that many of them out there. If you have any other candidates, please leave a note in the comment section, I’ve been having very little luck finding a good sampling of examples and it has stalled a major essay on this issue.

Back at the Genshiken, it is going to be all yaoi doujin time all the time, again. True to the theory-moe roots of the Genshiken as a special club for extreme enthusiasms, the interest remains “libidinized” and highly committed to “secondary production” and/or the appropriation of commercial content by the fans and the work of transforming it by adding the missing secret ingredient: SCHMEXY!

The manken and anime clubs do not (overtly) do this. If individual members are too public in their ecchi or even hentai enthusiasms, past practice at fictional-Tama-Art-University was to ease them out and point them toward the pit of pervy-ness that lay beyond the Genshiken club room door. The propensity of otaku and rotten-girl fans to start monologuing about lewd cartoons was always one of the main reasons why otaku and fujoshi were considered distasteful to proper Japanese society. Amateur pr0n enthusiasts who had nothing but their weird fetish stories to talk about.

The Genshiken was and remains a light fictionalised restatement of Dr. Saito Tamaki‘s views on otaku fandom: libidinized enjoyment and appropriative secondary production being the two most accessible components of his schema. In many ways, the current Genshiken also suffers from a shared original sin with Dr. Tamaki’s analysis, in that it gets mighty thin when it turns to female libidinised fannish enthusiasm.

All that Dr. Tamaki could venture was a vague asymmetry of interest in the thematics of the raunchy materials – the girls to be more interested in something involving inter-character dynamics, while the guys to be more interested in T&A and quick nasty sex. There was also his diversion into shota and robo-shota, following on his fascination with the outsider artist Darger which later post-lacanian essayists, especially female ones, conflated into crossdressing and otokonoko genres.

Finding Tamaki-sensei’s seal imprint on the poured cement foundations of the Genshiken does not dismiss the enterprise. If anything, it raises the stakes to a level of theoretical discourse that might even threaten the happy unfolding of a nice sweet tale of fan-hijinks, friendship and romance. Kio Shimoku must be praised for keeping the god on the wires hidden up in the rafters. (even if Hato remains the virtual-lesbian fujoshi and Risa the shotacon threatens to drop in) The audacity of his project remains: Tamaki’s introduction of This is what I fap to shocked the critical discourse surrounding otaku studies for almost a decade. Azuma’s database remains an attempt to de-sexualize the sex-laden praxis of fandom. The complaints of the Ota-king echo a lament for the eclipse of red-blooded shonen action-adventure (no sex, no relationship garbage) primacy. Only Eji, with his relentless critique of the mechanics of the genre’s accommodation to statist and capitalist power escapes Tamaki’s geas.

As well, few feminist theorists of CJVC escape the questions that he tentatively posed; if anything they have spent the better part of the last decade and a half mapping the nature of the asymmetric interest that female fans have in their supported and self-created libidinised content. Tamaki-sensei wisely admitted that he had very little idea about the details; his venturing was tentative and incomplete, even as it was subject to the conceptual flaws in Freudian-Lacanian schemas surrounding the formation of female subjectivity. What Tamaki-sensei never followed up, what still is glossed over with simplistic notions of “avoiding masculinity‘ and “herbivore men” is how supposedly asymmetric interests spilled over into not only queer camps, but into the shadow-queer of straight readers’ imaginations.

Even if only to recoil from them and so re-affirm our norms, we straight boys (and girls) share in the odd habit of considering and/or making up reflections and shadows of the “queer”. At very least we are surprisingly prone to doing a bit of tourism when they show up in odd little comics that pander to our imaginations. Yo! My brothers (and sisters), these queer don’t exist, except as fictions that play out behind our eyeballs and between our ears. If anything that looks like them does, it is because some of us went off the reservation and re-created them. Google the weird whole-body costumed cross-players called “dollers“. All of these odd little “queer” are as ‘real’ as vampire-aspiring goths. This just cranks the rage factor among their detractors. Dammit you perverts aren’t even real perverts! You are fake-poser pervert perverts! (pervert!). The Japanese meanwhile will call it “asobi” and remain as indifferent to it as to sail-boarding maniacs, as long as you don’t disturb your neighbours.

It’s a hobby. (…did I mention pervert?)

Meanwhile, back at the clubroom, the Genshiken fujoshi are tasked with the project of illuminating the variety and depth of fujoshi interest in devising fake -ahem-, fictional, repurposed, shadows and reflections of male same-sex desire, so that the general readership can peek in and determine if this is fun or wrong or comprehensible or whatever. We even get an undercover guide; too bad that Hato also gets used as a smoke-screen when the background material runs a bit thin. We still need the Hatos though, unless we will settle for Joshiraku and endless chapters of cute girls doing cute (boring!) things.

Hooray! She brought cakee!

We still need a bit more than one jointly drawn Ogiue-Hato smut doujin.

Some token cosplay might later round out the media mix. If Risa Yoshitake pops up, we will get a highlighted schism between shota-interested fujoshi and shota-eschewing fujoshi. Missing will be plastic models, Visual Novels, Otome games, character goods, voice actor fixations and radio show/ drama CD bonus content, autograph-hunting, mangaka signings, vidding/ niconico mashups, blogging, forum posting, reviewing, criticism or pirating.

Later, a digression: Since the earliest days of Western Star Trek K/S Slash, the fen have practiced the secret, occult rituals of vidding. To be honest, I never really sought any out. Then lookie what falls into my clutches. Sure it looks like an AMV (fan-created Anime Music Video) Yup; a harmless, humorous juxtaposition of music and video clip. Pay it no mind. And I am positive that Japanese fujoshi would never never do anything like this:

This is fannish secondary production: this is your mind on fannish secondary production.

Perhaps there will at least be some token, good-example over-spending on approved and licensed fan products.

No yuri though! (or full-page floral background portraits!) (4)

It still remains a serious charge that Kio Shimoku’s young fujoshi do less serious obsessive fan-age than their male precessors, or even Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dō Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui(!)‘s anti-social (anti-) heroine Tomoko Kuroki. She is so far gone that she will cluelessly play with an electric “magic wand” massager while fanning out alone in her room. Try to imagine any of the Genshiken rotten girls dropped into a Kuroki doujin-reading or otome-game-consuming mis-en-scene. You have to admit that Kuroki’s despair-laden fan-power level is far above any of the Genshiken fujoshi. And what’s with the drama CDs that supposedly have bishie guy voice actors yelling insults at the listener? (?!?) They sell those?

“Who am I to disagree…”

If the Genshiken is to be, at least in the near future all about lewd BL doujins, we should return to the question of secondary production/ appropriative parody/ transformative work that is derived from the Genshiken franchise, both manga and anime. Kio Shimoku made a point of showing Ogiue transfixed with Hato’s take on her published characters. Added to his secondary output; Kujibiki Unbalance, Pretty Ramen Angel, the Project G (5) curated pseudo-doujin, the anime’s second season episode 5 yoai howler and his not-a-sequel Spotted Flower and it becomes glaringly obvious that Kio Shimoku values, if not solicits fannish takes on his oeuvre. The only problem is that he makes so much of it himself as to over-awe would-be parodists with his output!

However, if he has been holding off adding synthetic fan-production to Nidaime, in hopes of a flood of authentic independent production, he has waited far too long. The original Genshiken was loaded with chapter extra glimpses at Unbalance and the conjured-up club-works surrounding it. These lent a look and feel to his introduction to the fandom. Time to get editor-san at Afternoon Magazine to hire a yaoi/ otokonoko genre veteran like Suemitsu Dicca (find your own samples (6) ) and start dropping in some examples of synthetic Hato-drawn filth.

A few years ago, Genshiken-themed doujins were in short supply – at least to us thieving, leeching outlanders. Say what you will about the long Madarame harem arc; it at least seems to have spurred some renewed interest in secondary production surrounding the Genshiken and the scanlation and dissemination of such products around the world. These are not to be found on the usual grey aggregator sites. No Manga-[insert random animal name] here; if you want pr0nish Genshiken wares, be prepared to harden your browser and anti-virus software and prepare your heart.

Opera Developer Edition comes with a built-in VPN and adblocker. Adblock Plus and incognito mode won’t hurt either. A bit of Google-fu with the terms Genshiken, hentai and doujin should reward the curious with an impressive pile of dubious tributes to Kio Shimoku’s creation. It is worth noting that similar searches done even two years ago yielded up far less in the way of results and involved a lot more obscure nonsense to get at them.

Rejoice! There is no longer any shortage of amateur Genshiken pr0ny cartoons on the interwebz.

What they concern themselves with is in some ways even more fascinating than the naughty pictures.

At this point this essay breaks down.

The proper way to approach this would be to pick the biggest site, whomp up a spreadsheet and plow through every single instance of the 211 smutty doujins listed. Many are duplicates and/or scanlations into different languages. Many are identified by the Comiket number at which they were released, so these could be ordered by proper release dates. Done that way, I could at least offer percentages and sample sizes about all manner of pairings, sexualities imputed thereby, diffusion through different language markets, yadda yadda yadda.

Maybe later…

In the meantime, it must be noted that there appears to be no sudden spike in source output from 2012 to 2016. Genshiken is well-known, but has never been a barn-burner parody property. Only one or two titles per year seem to make it to a table at Comiket. Winter 2015’s Comiket catalog listed one work; with Hato as an Adult Video star but it was only on sale for one day. Anyone going to Tokyo can spend hours in Mandrake trying to find it (or reg up with Comiket, use the online catalog if it is still up, search out the listing, follow the link to the blog page of the circle and send off some horribly machine-translated email. Good Luck Mr Phelps.)

Or we could try to find some online Japanese sales:

げんしけん (Genshiken)

同人誌 or 同人 (doujinshi or doujin)

パロディー (parody)

Searching   げんしけん 同人 パロディー

…yields up such wonders as http://doujin-labo.com/げんしけん/
“free erotic doujins for your smartphone reading!”

Another site:
http://d-upp.com/%E3%81%92%E3%82%93%E3%81%97%E3%81%91%E3%82%93/

…yields a few older already extant titles. The machine-translated reviews are opaque:

“I only Deremashimashi soup duct images produced in Tochigi fleshy grade best Ribusaimega prime My Girlfriend’s a Geek to place your Chatcha system ice milk of Harigane banana at the top and bottom and the back of the mouth ($ 0.00 Smile) of Dakudaku please !! “

That sounds dirty. Best to save this for advanced research.

Yet without any systematic approach, how can anyone make sense of all this, beyond noting that we have a fine pile of smut available?

Here are a few superficial observations; based on a scattered sampling of the material and referencing an earlier survey of the material some two years prior; this is what Genshiken fans who have sufficient drawing chops to make a doujin wanted to see their fave characters do.

The Madarame harem arc has had a noticeable effect on the subject matter if not the available volume of material. Newer efforts consider the notion of Madarame finding hot love with Angela, Sue and of course, Hato. First generation efforts were limited to Saki or all the girls if a rapey orgy was set up.

Keiko is glaringly absent; she just doesn’t make for good fantasy scenarios. Newer efforts are also Kuchiki-free. One back-cover illustration even highlights this with a grumpy “Hey what about me?” cameo.

The Harem effect is contagious. One of the funnier efforts have Yoshitake, Yajima and younger sister Risa sneaking into Hato’s apartment and jumping him when he returns. Rika even does a Lupin III clothes-off-dive at Hato.

One artist spends a lot of time and effort answering the question “How would Madarame and Hato even have sex?”. Thirty some pages are devoted to Madarame and Hato-with-wig-on going mechanically through the process of inserting Mada into Hato-chan. Then the entire sequence is repeated for 30 more pages with Madarame and Hato-without-wig. There is no extreme fetish-play, both puppets are respectfully enthusiastic about the other and the entire romp is only a bit naughtier than Keith Harring wallpaper.

The impulse seems to be somewhat along the lines of “You couldn’t imagine those two doing it? Here’s what it would look like!” I suspect the artist is informed by gay male light erotica. Just so you don’t miss the point, important phases of the procedure are given near-duplicate panels (which later repeat minus wig) so that all curiosity is sated. This reminds one of the pose-books sold to aspiring artists; perhaps it is intended as a fanfic writers’ reference?

Ok, that’s what it could look like. (Btw; an image search plugin will do wonders if you feel compelled to hunt this crap down. Go nutz!)

There are also two other more conventional Mada x Hato-as-chan works available if a too clinical approach is not enough. Ratings: enthusiastic prosaic male:male. With all the steam, one would think there would be much more MadaHato and/or HatoMada but I can find only three examples and the last of these occurs as part of a “try every route” (except Keiko) effort.

This is surprising. One would think the HatoMadaHato pairing would spur the legions of creative fujoshi to fill in what “should have happened”. Perhaps the aggregator sites don’t bother hunting these down. At this point, one could easily scour Tumblr space and put together more pages of cutesy, mawkish Mada & Hato making longing glances at each other than contained in the extant doujins on the subject. Get someone who knows Japanese to make a cover “Western rotten fans love Hato and Mada picture book” and bemuse the Japanese fandom at the next comiket.

Plot is never a big component of pr0n. When the plots are not burlesque or tender, they go off into fetishized violence and rapey manipulation. A first-generation trilogy has Saki blackmailed by an appropriately disgusting Haraguchi into degrading sex, which he videos for the enjoyment of the First President. The video gets loose onto the net and Kousaka and then Saki go psycho with big kitchen knives and kill both miscreants and then their friends before finally killing each other over a three-volume release.

In a lighter story, the “Angela misses her plane so she heads to Madarame’s apartment” doujin is sweet, even as she enthusiastically takes him. The finger sucking foreplay is inventively depicted and a nice touch. Angela is of course drawn as athletic and voluptuous, even as the whole romp is rendered in messy “na-me” quality sketching.

The previously noted Ogiue-got-uked doujin has a follow-up. How many times can Sas peg her? The buildup is well done and Sas even brings over cakee before they retreat to the bedroom. Public health protocols are followed. The circle appears to have given it a rest after this encore.

One Mada x Sue effort has Sue showing up soaking wet in a rainstorm at Mada’s door. Sue changes into a big Mada dress shirt. Hato knocks on the door so Mada hides Sue by spooning with her under a blanket and pretending to be asleep. Hato lets himself in but then leaves. Excited Mada and Sue go at it. Hato-chan returns.

From the earlier days of the Genshiken, a few SasMada efforts survive, They follow-up on Ogiue’s original speculations in the manga and avoid the scenario in the anime fantasy sequence.

Then there is Ohno. Lots of Ohno. Ohno and Tanaka. Ohno pr0ny girl on girl action, Ohno cosplay fucking, Ohno getting gangbanged, Ohno with mammalian over-expansion, Ohno leading Ogiue, Saki and even an early Keiko into a degrading life of sluttery and probably much more and much worse but I gave up at this point because the stuff is too nasty and mean-spirited.

So far nothing has made it over to these heathen shores that might pass as a really feelthy example of how Hato would draw a HatoMada bondage fest. The few available attempts are vanilla and light-hearted. Both parties’ guy bits are invariably ghosted-out. Both Hato’s and Mada’s junk spend most of their time phasing into an alternate space-time continuum.

This brings up an odd characteristic of doujins in general. The boy-girl stuff revels in big manly-man meat displays, with only the slimmest, token pixelation, black bars or other concessions to censorship. There is probably more cartoon sausage in straight pr0ny doujins than in BL or even hard gay pr0n – another reason why I favor yuri.

I find the entire “I am supposed to identify with the symbolic disembodied junk” thing just too weird a vibe to indulge in. It has a creepy high school coach feeling. For me, there are only two reasons why anyone would need a big cartoon veinous member in their smut. Neither are applicable for me. Consider this one more plug for sensitive wimmen-authored yuri.

Similarly, I am disappointed with the cut-to-the-chase emphasis during most of the sex scenes. While doujin sex allows the artist to devote pages and pages and pages to intimate acrobatics, most of these involve ramming character A’s cawk (and/ or sex toys) into character B while character B makes odd expressions and thrashes about on the sheets, table, couch, toilet, shower floor, etc., etc., etc..

Earth to doujin artists: More foreplay, please. Foreplay that does not involve orifice-ramming would be even better. Again, sensitive yuri pr0n does a much better job with this kind of stuff. Unfortunately the Genshiken girl-on-girl doujins are pretty well old-school nasty and fail by this measure as well.

Back to our in-club Ogiue. Are “our” characters “making love”? Some of the time, Yes. Some of the time they are just “making out” and too much of the time they are just being deployed as inelegant sex-puppets.

I’m running out of funny pix, have something random

One correspondent brought up the shock that a guy fan might face when confronted by a fujoshi friend with a BL doujin pairing that violated his core sense of order within the mythical imagination; a jarring trespass, one that perhaps the guy never even knew he cared deeply about until he saw it despoiled by the depredations of the rotten tribes.

Once again, we are deep into Dr. Tamaki’s post-Lacanian thicket. The lacanian “trauma’ of imagining a cartoon character in an eroticised setting is not just that one may suddenly feel aroused by the scene but that a sense of the sacred had been rendered in a profoundly profane manner. It is as bad as walking into your washroom and finding your fave deity taking a dump, smoking a joint and grinning.

Creative blasphemy has its own thrill. If the shock is great enough, one is tempted to speculate as to why we were so affected and offended. Then one wonders if one could re-create the effect… (7)

All this leads as well to the differing potentialities of lewd doujins and text fanfiction. Both are secondary productions/ transformative works but the obvious visual bias of the doujin form inexorably leads in the direction of direct representation of all that schmex that was inexplicably left off-screen. With the “this is what it would look like” bias, there is less room for elaborate what-if plotting. A doujin is not a derivative erotic manga. Few attempt the leap. There appears, at least for this limited sampling, a pronounced lack of more elaborated story-telling, as one would find in such typical fanfiction exercises as, say the “curtain-fic”. We have no Mada and Hato out shopping for furniture then coming home and making out. No Mada and Saki looking for curtains for their new apartment either.

I am probably doing this wrong in any case. The idea behind the classic slash curtain-fic is to have two unlikely action-adventure-ish male characters act all newlywed-domestic towards each other. The women find this funny and tender. Genshiken critters are all too domestic already. Maybe Keiko advising Yajima and Rika on the proper manners and movements required for the tea ceremony would be jarring enough?

While we are at it, why no “losers club” Kuchiki-Keiko romps?
There could be all kinds of high regret vs romance material to exploit here. It is a wonder that Kio himself has not Spotted Flower-ed both of them yet.

Even if circles sell out a publication run, no one can expect to get rich drawing Genshiken doujins. The economics of convention sales are brutal, (cf Noppe) almost as brutal as the wages and work conditions for a journeymen mangaka. Far better to apprentice to a master plumber. No matter how vile the doujin, the poor idiots who made it spent innumerable hours drawing it and selling it could have chosen any other more popular series to waste their time on. Something about the Genshiken called out to them, fitted them with magic shoes and danced them to exhaustion.

While both lewd doujins and lewd fanfics are transgressive, despoiling acts, both are also extreme examples of tribute; acts of “love”, or at least of “affect”. And just in case you missed the set-up, consider Hato’s unfolding desires: not towards Madarame but towards mastering the art of creating a tight, readable narrative to go with all his naughty drawings. The portrait of the artist as a young male crossdressing fudanshi fujoshi BL mangaka must proceed and graduate through the successful mastery of the same acts of secondary appropriative production as the doujins that feature him and her, as well as their fellow fanning characters as fantasies pitched at we the readers’ desires.

Perhaps what we outlanders miss in all of this “production” is a curious side-effect of the historically high rates of literacy and engagement with popular fictions within Japanese society. Even the smallest town will have at least one giant slab of stone with the name of some long-dead poet or author carved deep into it, commemorating that worthy’s struggle to preserve and expand the realm of Japanese culture. Japan venerates its auteurs. While not all writers, film-makers, mangakas or even smut-drawers are judged to be worthy of the laurels, all are at least afforded the honorific of sensei within the small circles of their enthusiasms. They might toil away in poverty or end up clerking at a municipal government office, but their wager with memory, history and culture remains on the table.

We never really did this. Perhaps that is our loss and why their efforts carry with them, no matter how lewd and puerile at first glance, a whiff of the dust of the grave.

Ars longa, vita brevis

ENDNOTES:

(1) Yes, I just prefixed an essay about amateur pr0n with a quote from Plato’s Republic. It’s all downhill from here.

(2) Someone or some ones sanitized the Uncyclopedia Making Up Oscar Wilde Quotes page. Great sadness!

(3) Previously I have expressed extreme discomfort and distaste at the habit of some activist writers, especially academic essayists throwing “queer” and “queering” around. It seemed to be a strategic, almost fashionable move that described non-normative or fluid ideas and practices in sexual and gender identity in such a way that only a hypothetical biblical patriarch could serve as the heteronormative baseline. Then I ran into a ridiculous twitter-bot, an expansion on the theme of self-care reminders; take a drink of water, take a deep breath. This one defiantly adds a little extra: “Take a drink of water. That water is now queer!” “Take a deep breath, breathe out. That air is now queer!”  Point made.  It ain’t “queering” that should be feared, it is “curmudgeonization“. The latter creeps up on you and the next thing you know, you are screaming “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!”

(4) Another thing that really, really needs to be done is a scrape of extant online manga about doujin-drawing to build up a gallery of bad drawing. Hato’s “where should I go” panel and Yajima’s sketch efforts must hold pride of place but there is so much more of it out there. Only an authoritative collection can soothe the broken hearted longing I feel now that I know that Kio-sensei will never do a shoujo-style full page floral background portrait of any of the Genshiken critters.

(5) And you wondered when the heck Kumeta Koji of SZS fame drew a scene for the Genshiken? (above, first illustration) The quasi-doujin bonus Project G can be found on a few of the pr0n aggregator sites, even though it is work-safe. Some versions have been scanlated. Why it never appears on conventional aggregator sites lends insight into what everyone expects from doujinshi.

(6) Earlier posted link redacted. I should look closer at the stuff I link to. YIKES!

(7) I tried this as a thought experiment. Anyone can do it if they care to try: It can only work as PorcoCurtis. Curtis is a such a Uke-Hime. And now I have despoiled something precious to my heart. I blame the Genshiken.

Somewhere between cosplay and requiring an exorcism

Wherein fannish practice slips its leash and goes for a romp.

It is hard enough for middle-aged Amish types like me to keep up with all the new-fangled stuff on the intertubes, fend off the chain letters on my favourite usenet groups and figure out how to get Netscape to stop web page banners from blinking. Then along comes this Twitter thing to chew up more of my time and make my trusty Motorola StarTac mobile phone beep every 15 minutes.

Worse, I now understand that many of the posts on the Twitter channel are the work of robots. I have nothing against robots, and with 140 characters (based on the length of a phone text message) it is fun to try to figure out who is meat and who is a folder full of cobol.

Now things have become stranger. I thought it would never amount to much, but now I fear it might be a thing. A while back, I attended an academic conference highlighting fan practices and listened as one fan detailed how she had decided to adopt the twitter identity of a character from one of the Star Trek series. She “became” the character on twitter, in effect cosplaying/ textplaying/ role-playing  her favourite character. Crossplaying, actually as she became a male character. She had a large, loyal following.

Here is some academic powder burnt on the practice:
https://www.academia.edu/19075490/Playing_with_Identity_Fan_Role_Playing_on_Twitter

At the time, I thanked what residual deities I still mumbled to that no one in the Genshiken fandom was doing this and promised myself that I would never waste a moment of my life following the tweets of anyone who had the temerity to “become” Hato or Madarame or Ogiue or whoever. And that went twice for any of the Monogatari or Zetsubo Sensei  characters. As well, I suspected that if the practice caught on, it would soon be sucked into a crass vortex of cross-platform marketing bullshit and would die miserably while trying to sell me sex pills and Pop Tarts.

Meanwhile, something was quietly gathering strength in the darkness, waiting for its time to come round at last.

Aside from an interest in Japanese popular culture, I used to be quite a political junkie, especially when it came to American politics. Astute readers may have spotted a few Thompson references. With the primary season upon us and with all the interesting chaos in the Republican pathology party, it is once again a fine spectator sport.

Imagine my surprise when I started seeing tweets by what I thought was a clever Twitter ‘bot assuming the guise of president Richard M. Nixon.

Whoooo Hahhh!

This was more fun than that  Futurama episode.

For those of you who missed him due to accident of age, the 37th President of the United States of America was an interesting political figure to watch (and watch out for). Among other things, he was known for a ruthless, pragmatic brand of politics and a conservatism that while considered hardline in its day, appears moderate and curiously old-fashioned in light of the current scorched ideological landscapes of the American right. Also something of a football fan.

It only took a little time for me to clue in that Twitter’s Richard M.Nixon was not a ‘bot but rather a convincing case of roleplay/ RPF (real person fanfiction), with his presence and political acumen channelled by a producer/ playwright/ political junkie. Soon enough, President Nixon also began writing columns on the primaries for Mashable.

And here is a chance for some interesting trivia about the difference in allowable parody and appropriation under the laws and practices of the United States, Canada, Common Europe and Japan.  In the United States, parody of public figures is fair use and free speech, though trademark law might trip you up if you are swiping rather than commenting. Canada pretty well follows this, but has weaker fair use customs and potentially more expensive private defamation tort law precedents. Common Europe likes political satire, but protects personal privacy.

Japan is very big on protecting the feelings and the privacy of the politically powerful, enforcing copyright and trademark rights and just plain looking the other way when right-wing patriotic societies wreak mayhem on anyone who offends the well-connected.

Fan culture, especially dojin and cosplay “parody”/ transformative/ secondary production practices are very big on not poking this anthill. Centuries before, Edo had a great pr0n-ish publishing culture until some jerks started making fun of the powerful with rude shunga pictures. Wham! Instant crackdown, publishing bans, a few executions, many bonfires and everyone had to lie low for years until the naughty little pictures gradually came off double-secret ultra probation and went back to providing evening laughs and rudimentary sex education for the upper classes. There have been periodic moral panics and censorship sweeps ever since.

None other than the great Yukio Mishima got his stupid ham hocks caught in one of these during the sixties. The end result was more oppressive case-law; yeah, the big dummy lost his case and was hit with a judgement for “invading the privacy” of a sleazebag politician.

“The novel was inspired by the real-life affair between politician Hachiro Arita and a nightclub hostess — Mishima hated hypocrisy and Arita’s story may have pushed him in a new artistic direction. Arita successfully sued Mishima for invasion of privacy and the famous case has meant writers, filmmakers and TV producers since have shied away from the dramatic potential in the lives of celebrities and politicians. In part, this thin novel is effectively responsible for the dearth of satire in Japan today.”
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2016/02/13/books/book-reviews/after-the-banquet/

There is also the matter of “criminal libel”, though it appears that enforcement favours the powerful, rather than noisy activist types. And collecting judgements from the owner of 2chan (and now 4chan) remains a game of whack-a-mole.

All this means that fandom in Japan holds to 3 powerful rules for secondary production practices: No RPF on the powerful. No hardcore kiddie porn at Comiket. No fucking with Disney properties. (1)

I know of only three cases where folks tried and got away with testing the limits of the first of these rules.

A manga that features an ex Prime Minister as a super Mah-jong player
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudazumo_Naki_Kaikaku

Independent low-budget film-maker Minoru Kawasaki’s “The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack the G8 Summit” which you should hunt down, like most of his oddball films, it is a hoot – btw the Nech Koma joke involves a then-popular comedy routine about a young Russian Olympic gymnast’s tight outfit.

and

The manga pamphlet Monkey business (An idiot’s guide to Tokyo’s harmful books regulation) which viciously lampooned the then Tokyo Governor, Ishihara Shintarô’s “Nonexistent Crimes Bill”

“The bill regulates the sale and renting of “harmful publications” to Japanese youth: material that is “sexually stimulating, encourages cruelty, and/or may compel suicide or criminal behavior” in people under the age of 18″

See Even a monkey can understand fan activism: Political speech, artistic expression, and a public for the Japanese dôjin community by Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/321/311

Whatever…

So, If you ever wondered about all those quaint O  and X  mungings of names and brands in manga and anime, that’s why. What a lost chance for product placement and cross-marketing!

And if you are on the twitter thing, you could do worse to make sense of the state-side political fun by following the shade of the tricky one. Now that he has his elder statesman reputation to uphold, he is restrained, quite astute and often dead nuts on.

Don’t know about Kasich’s chances though

 

(1) Mentioning flat-out that a certain women’s musical theatre ensemble might harbour any connection whatsoever to lesbianism is close to, but not quite as powerful as the Disney effect. It is a matter of legal budgets.