TRANSFORMATIVE BODIES: ANIME, FANDOM, AND CYBORG SUB-
CULTURES
MADELINE ASHBY
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14-1 Canada ABSTRACT
As anime and manga (Japanese animation and comics) continue to swarm theD twenty-first century media landscape, studies of both the artforms and their • consumers have becoming increasingly common. Previous analyses of anime, manga, • and fandom indicate the interdisciplinarity necessary for thoughtful critique, • with contributions from the areas of film theory, feminist analysis, and AsianD studies being the most prominent. This thesis examines anime and fandom from • the perspective of Donna Haraway's cyborg theory. Each chapter highlights an • anime title which disrupts binarist notions of the body, identity, or nation, • and questions where the activities of online fans fit on the spectrum ofD current cyborg politics. The thesis proposes Haraway's cyborg as a new metaphor • for the online fan in the hope that her vision of a liberated subjectivity whose • focus is on affinity rather than identity will open new interpretive pathways • for fan scholars.
iv DEDICATION
This writing is dedicated to the memory of Emm Townsend.
Everything is clearer now Life is just a dream you know That's never ending I'm ascending -Yoko Kanno, "Blue" ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis would not have been possible without the generous support of the program in Interdisciplinary Studies, the tireless work of Ouma Jaipaul-Gill, and my committee: Jennifer Brayton, Wendy Wong, and Suzie Young. Jennifer especially gave me more than my share of her time, books, conversation and guidance. I would also like to thank Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson and everyone at Transformative Works and Cultures for their efforts and their patience with me as a writer. Robin Anne Reid also helped steer me, and the online communities of both the Anime and Manga Research Circle and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts acted as a group mind when I had seemingly lost my own. Frenchy Lunning encouraged me. So did Brian Ruh. Peter Watts watched Evangelion with me. Karl Schroeder watched Avatar: The Last Airbender with me, and then argued with me about race, forcing me to defend and further articulate my opinions. David Nickle listened every day, and Caitlin Sweet motivated me to finish strong. My husband Robert Ashby did all of these things, and more. His intellect is outmatched only by his (continually surprising) patience with and belief in me.
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction: Girls Who Are Plugged In Some History: Power Lesbians 1 The Vanishing Cyborg: Why Cyborg Theory Remains Relevant in the 21st Century 6 Girls Who Are Plugged In: The Subjects of this Thesis 14 2. The Home Theory Network: A Shopping List of Metaphors 17 A Shopping List of Metaphors 21 The Cyborg in (American) Academic and (Japanese) Popular Culture 26 Conclusion 34
3. Orienting the Otaku: Fandom, Fantasy, and Mash-up Asia 36 The Nation in Translation 37 "This show is not an accurate portrayal...like we care." 42 "Long ago, the Four Nations lived in harmony." 47 Fans Who Go Pro: Cyborgs, Gender-benders, and Cosplayers 53
4. Ownership, Authority, and the Body: Does Anti-Fanfic Sentiment Reflect Post-human Anxiety? 58 The Post-human Body 61 The Post-author Fandom 74 5. Getting Our Bodies Back: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fan Foresight, and Cognitive Narratology 87 My Brother, My Burden: Fullmetal Alchemist and Cyborg Reproduction 89 All Parts in Working Order: Fullmetal Fandom and the Body 100
vii "Be thou for the people": Fan Studies and Other Sciences 107
6. Conclusion: Women on the Integrated Circuit 116 Lost in Yoyogi 116 Surviving the Econopocalypse 121
7. Works Cited 126
viii Introduction: Girls Who Are Plugged In
Some History: Power Lesbians
In explaining a thesis on anime and fandom, I find that I must first explain two concepts which might be foreign to my readers: anime, and fandom. For while many outsiders understand the concepts in the abstract, they have only a postcard snapshot of both ideas. And just as one cannot understand the fascinating history and complexities of either an entire artform or an entire culture based on a single postcard, one cannot grasp what makes both anime (Japanese animation) and its fandom (the group of people who enjoy it) so special based on the nouns alone. The tendency to lump all anime into one category shares an alarming resemblance to
Orientalist thinking in both its lack of subtlety and its assumption that an artform identified with a particular East Asian country (Japan) must therefore indicate the whole of that country's history, culture, and experience. All anime is not the same in the way that all Japanese are the same: Japan is a nation of islands, and anime is a medium of genres. There are anime targeted at women, men, and children of all ages, and there are anime featuring robots, aliens, kittens, high school students, baseball players, doctors, tofu makers, and nuns. Similarly, there is no single face of anime fandom: the old guard who first watched Battleship Yamato at a Los Angeles science
1 fiction convention in 1989 and ushered in the practise of fansubbing is greying, and
the continuing popularity of anime and manga as media has spread as far beyond its roots as a medium for Asian immigrants and white pop cosmopolitans. My students
are perhaps the best indicator of where anime fandom is going: first-year arts majors
who downloaded anime and manga (Japanese comics frequently adapted for use in
anime) straight to their in-class laptops and who were black, Hispanic, Chinese,
Korean, and Muslim.
Nor are my experiences with anime and fandom either full or complete. I
came to the party late, years after the first fansubs were so painstakingly made with
VHS tapes and careful editing. I attend few fan conventions. I have never worked as a
"scanlator" (one who translates unreleased manga into English, then scans it and
makes it available for download) or "fansubber" (one who translates unreleased
episodes of anime, then re-encodes the file and releases it online for download, often
as part of a transnational team of translators and encoders providing the files via
torrent services). I have not seen every anime title in existence, nor do I ever wish to.
Researching this thesis has led me to chapters of the fandom's history that I never
knew existed. In many ways, I am still a student, still a cultural immigrant to a
community whose lexicon and textual canon continues to evolve and likely always
will.
My introduction to anime and anime fandom happened, like that of many
other fans, in high school. While fulfilling a graduation requirement, I acted as a
teacher's assistant. During class, I found myself partnered with another young woman
2 with whom I had never taken classes before. She was the exact opposite of both my peers and my school's ruling social elite: she wore her hair short and un-styled, dressed in giant t-shirts, men's jeans, and hiking boots every day of the year. She was completely unapologetic about her appearance, at a time when most everyone else
(including myself) sought to fit a mould and assume a brand identity. But beneath this exterior was a girl who desperately loved shoujo (girls') anime, who read 'shipper
(romantic) fanfiction from a massive binder towed everywhere in her backpack, and who spent her free time during class periods carefully shading in the Sailor Moon colouring books she had scoured local toy stores and thrift shops to find.
Over our ten-week period together, she introduced me not only to anime, but to fanfiction and fanart. She taught me the Japanese vocabulary words essential to anime fandom: otaku, manga, shoujo, shounen, yaoi, yuri, onii-san. She introduced me to her favourite fan sites and communities, and told me how to read the shorthand included in disclaimers positioned above fanfiction stories: M/M, F/F, lemon, WAFF, fluff, songfic, etc. She taught me not only how to speak "fangirl Japanese," but how to speak fan.
Down the rabbit hole I tumbled. Soon I was watching my first fansubs. They were VHS tapes sold for the cost of postage alone, which my new acquaintance explained to me was the rationale for selling already copyrighted material. "No one makes any money," she said. "And these are the real thing, unedited, not like that dubbed crap they show on TV."
3 These two positions are key to understanding the phenomena of anime
fandom, especially creative fandom involving fansubbing and craft work like fiction,
art, or music video editing ("vidding"). The first is a refusal to demand or accept payment, which stands in direct opposition to the contemporary global culture of
consumption and which many fans believe legitimizes their practises despite
copyright holders' claims to the contrary. The second is that fansubbed anime, or
even anime-related crafts, are somehow more genuine than that which is broadcast on
cable television. Fansubbers leave in sex, violence, and curse words, and they also translate the texts that English-language broadcasters will never import, especially those that explicitly depict gay sex. Similarly, fan crafts often bring to light the
subtexts inherent in a text that cannot be explored thanks to the principles espoused by network and advertising executives.
Fans trade frequently in emotional subtext and its exposure: they see lingering glances as an indication of romantic tension, or passionate arguments as evidence of underlying sexual attraction, and write fiction or draw art or perform skits which further explore those relationships. But sometimes the process of exposing subtext can be less creative. My classmate explained to me that she was a fan of "the
Uranus/Neptune 'ship," which was heavily edited for American TV for its lesbian content. On the American cable channel Cartoon Network, she said, Haruka and
Michiru (dubbed Alex and Michelle in English, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, respectively) were no longer lovers but cousins. This was the English translators' feeble attempt to rationalize why the two women lived together, bought each other
4 flowers, and travelled together. But in truth ("in Japanese," she said) the two girls had an openly sexual relationship and raised a child together. The fansubs she shared with me had maintained this relationship, providing a translation that was more faithful to the source text.
What I failed to understand immediately was that my new acquaintance was using Uranus and Neptune to explain her own sexuality. A year later I was wandering through a dollar store near my summer job, and I found her behind the counter. When
I asked her how she was doing, she smiled brightly and said: "I'm really excited for my girlfriend's prom." This was the first moment I understood how important anime could be: not only could it generate communities where there were none before, not only could it encourage creativity on the part of fan writers and artists and web builders, but it could provide metaphors for identity that were unavailable in mainstream culture. And while the positioning of lesbians within North American popular culture may have improved since 2001,1 would argue that mass media still lacks the nuanced portrayal of alternative sexuality that an otherwise fluffy series like
Sailor Moon provided: confident, talented young women who lived independently, enjoyed interesting hobbies, remained faithful to each other, and who just happened to be superheroes. Before my generation understood "power lesbians," some of us grew up watching super-powered lesbians.
Throughout high school and university, my anime fandom grew. I watched more fansubs, attended my first conventions, made friends of cosplayers, became the vice president of my university's anime club, and rejoiced when Cartoon Network
5 brought more anime into their lineup. While I also watched mainstream and live- action film and television, I regularly returned to anime as my medium of choice, and to fandom as my community. It is by no accident that I met my husband through anime fandom, and while on a train into New York City from our first apartment together, I made the decision to write about anime critically and academically. My first publication was in the New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David
Hartwell, who is also the editor-in-chief of Tor Books, the primary publisher of science fiction and fantasy books in America.
The Vanishing Cyborg: Why Cyborg Theory Remains Relevant in the 21st Century
The cyberpunk movement, rooted in the science fiction literature, films, comics, and art of the 1980's and associated with authors like William Gibson and artists like
Stelarc, initiated its own field of critical theory on the part of Donna Haraway, Chris
Hables Gray, Scott Bukatman, and N. {Catherine Hayles. Cyborg theory focuses primarily on the union of man and machine, at the physical and societal levels.
Following Haraway's Manifesto (1984) it correctly politicizes observation of the body and the right to control reproduction both bodily and textual, and interrogates notions of gendered and embodied identity by steadfastly refusing to participate in binarist definitions of either. Unsurprisingly, the cyborg world characterized by works of both speculative fiction and textual analysis looks very much like the internet: borderless, queer, and dependent on writing and coding as its primary means of
6 communication (though these are quickly being supplanted by video). However, contemporary analysis of both anime and fandom frequently ignores the place of cyborg subjectivity in every day fan practise.
This neglect likely occurs for a variety of reasons. First, the Western model of the cyborg, which draws on more traditionally masculine and militaristic imagery, from the suit of armour to the German Freikorps, is still dominant in popular culture.
And even when the cyborg turns female, such as in television shows like Terminator:
The Sarah Connor Chronicles, it is still a tool for violence rather than communication or intelligence. This is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the traditional cyborg and Haraway's vision - the purpose for which the human organism adopts the technology in question which changes his or her body, identity, and place in the world. Without ready examples of Terminators or Robocops roaming Western streets, it can be easy to forget that cyborgs are already in our midst.
Moroever, the world does not look the way William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors said it would - mirrorshades are still a kind of sunglasses rather than an ocular implant; prosthetic limbs have yet to fully marry the body's nerve impulses with the delicate twitches of costly machinery; cyberspace cannot be experienced as a consensual hallucination but instead remains frustratingly two- dimensional; artificial intelligence has yet to achieve sentience or sapience (so far as we know); memories cannot be shared via any but the most traditional media, despite the plethora of family photos floating through the digital ether. The world does not have the real, visible, compelling cyborgs that we were promised - we cannot swap
7 prosthetic bodies with our friends, or buy nano-sized implants that subtly edit our phenotypes, or replace our fingers with monofilament wire.
Faced with such a lack of whizz-bang technology, it is easy to dismiss posthuman readings of human identity. After all, we are still stubbornly human, and basely so. The current American debate on torture - how to define it, when to apply it, and what it means for the nations that do - has clarified little beyond the connection between our rare and precious opposable thumbs and the dissociative capabilities of our reptilian brains. How can we think of ourselves as uniquely patterned mosaics of technology, communication, and identity when the most intense political debate still centres on the rights and freedoms of the body? How can cyborg theory be relevant when the cyborg has vanished?
I would argue that the cyborg has not disappeared from view by virtue of her impossibility or improbability, but rather through her ubiquity. If the cyborg is what
Haraway defined her as, namely "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction," ("Manifesto"
149), a "disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self," who is "no longer structured by the polarity of public and private," and "defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household," ("Manifesto" 151) then she exists not on film or on television or between the pages of books, but on the street, in the home and the office, on the network.
Cyborg theory is no longer pertinent solely to the "women on the integrated circuit" who manufacture chipsets in Shenzhen or Taipei, or to the fictional characters of
8 Shirow Masamune's manga. Instead, it is pertinent to all humans intimately involved with their attendant technologies, who use their network connections, external memory devices, and collaboratively-produced "warez" to participate in society.
For example, consider the role of technology and social media in Barack
Obama's Presidential campaign. Obama employed Chris Hughes, co-developer of the social network utility Facebook, to coordinate his online campaign. Unlike the more traditional methods deployed elsewhere in the campaign, such as public appearances and television interviews which allowed information to trickle down from the top of the power structure, the online campaign emphasized voter participation and information exchange at a level they would be comfortable with - physically removed and separate, but digitally united. Visitors to Obama's social networking site were encouraged to leave him messages, to follow him on Twitter, and to join Facebook groups through which they could easily organize meetups, rallies, and other efforts that would assist the campaign. In essence, Obama became more than a candidate or a brand name, he became a point of contact. He had more than supporters - he had a fandom. And the tactic worked:
As of May 1, 2008, Obama had raised an amazing $265 million, half of which came from donors who pledged less than $200. Well over $28 million in contributions has been reported online. In February 2008, for example, 256,000 people logged onto Obama's donations page, and 43 percent of Obama's donors gave less than $200. In contrast, Clinton had fewer donors who gave more money (171,000 donors, and only 27 percent gave less than $200.) (Tapscott, "Digital" 251).
9 This was not the first time that constituents - particularly younger ones - took
advantage of the Internet and social media to make their politics known. Tapscott also
documents the case of young protesters in South Korea infuriated over their country's
policies regarding the importation of beef from the United States. Despite the lack of
testing for "mad cow" disease among American cattle relative to European sources,
President Lee Myung-Bak insisted on importing American beef. This so angered
Korean teens - most of them female - that they began blogging their ire on fan sites
associated with popular television stars. Here fandom became the breeding ground for
real world involvement: once the teens had gathered online, they gathered on the
streets - and started uploading their protests to the Internet.
The potential for online video to be used as citizen journalism has been
thoroughly exploited in Canada as well. When footage of the 2007 tasering death of
Robert Dziekanksi in Vancouver International Airport by Royal Canadian Mounted
Police officers wound up online, the incident became a topic of discussion that
quickly turned to the use of lethal force, the training of police officers, and the ethics
of sharing such information online (Frauenfelder, "Tasered"). This footage, captured by a fellow traveller via digital camera, has been used repeatedly in the investigation.
In a very real way, the alacrity with which citizens use their technology and media - their eagerness to use it, and their comfort and confidence with doing so - has a profound impact on the availability of information across the globe, and therefore the shape of contemporary discourse.
10 Whereas the discursive fields that intersect to create culture and subjectivity were once invisible, or at least difficult to discern, they are now sharply visible through the lens of Internet relations. Consider the Chinese government's aggressive censorship of social networking services like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter during the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The strategy was not one of erasure, but blockage. The government correctly recognized that the information itself was less important than a population's ability to access it, and then sought to limit that access. On a smaller scale, similar blockages exist everywhere: some workplace networks deny access to social networking sites; parents choose
"moderate safe searches" for their children's browsing; television channels block access to streaming programs by region; Apple and other companies "protect" their intellectual property by applying DRM (digital rights management) technologies to their products, rendering them un-shareable; Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system pings the native system on a regular basis for un-licensed or pirated Microsoft downloads; the Swedish government took the owners of the Pirate Bay (a site which points its users toward torrent downloads of films, books, software, and other files) to court for copyright violation, and the Pirate Bay responded by running candidates in the 2009 European parliamentary elections and winning two seats. And although it sold off the Bay's site to pay the fees and damages associated with its lawsuit, it has since started Pirate Bay Video, a site similar to YouTube which promises never to censor or remove content contributed or generated by users. The "Pirate Party" has
11 since achieved legitimate party status in Canada, and can be voted for on Canadian ballots as well as European ones.
What these incidents prove is that cyborg politics have moved beyond the reproductive concerns voiced by Anne Balsamo and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky regarding the observation of the female body, to include the politics of access to all information and the ability to observe globally. Evidence of John Gilmore's 1993 maxim that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," Internet users both fannish and mundane have chosen to sidestep, bypass, or route around
attempts to block information: the Pirate Bay continues unabated; freeware programs unlock DRM on software and hardware from operating systems to gaming consoles; the iPhone has a thriving "jailbreak" community that removes proprietary technology from the device. As in Korea, this trend can turn political, with users fighting for the right to preserve open access to information and technology. Perhaps the most famous example is Canadian Michael Geist's 2007 use of Facebook to spread the word of possible changes to Canadian copyright law:
On December 1st I launched the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, with limited expectations. This seemed like a good way to educate the public about the Canadian government's plans to introduce new copyright reform within a matter of days. I sent invitations to a hundred or so Facebook friends and seeded the group with links to a few relevant websites.
What happened next was truly remarkable. Within hours the group started to grow, first 50 members, then 100, and then 1000. One week later there were 10,000 members. Two weeks later there were over 25,000 members with a new member joining the group every 30 seconds.
.. .Ten days after the Facebook group's launch, Jim Prentice delayed introducing the new copyright reforms, seemingly struck by the rapid
12 formation of concerned citizens who were writing letters and raising awareness. ("Power", par. 6,7,11)
While young people in affluent countries are frequently criticized for their
"entitlement complex," the verve with which fans, hackers, pirates, and bloggers pursue information is fuelled by little more than a sense of entitlement - to information, to media, to participatory culture, to products and services that do what they want. Users believe they possess a right to these things, rather than seeing them
as privileges to be earned through hard work. But ironically, this sense of entitlement
can lead to hard work all on its own. Fans who believe themselves entitled to media
from all over the world can work on translations, on encoding files, on building and maintaining websites. Internet users who believe themselves entitled to browsing without observation can relay on proxy server services like Tor or ProxyZilla, which work with open-source browsers like Firefox to provide masked IP addresses.
Entitlement can lead to innovation, to education, to participation. This participation
exists outside national borders, outside the law, outside prior metanarratives of identity based on country of origin or gender. This participation is cyborg behaviour,
"committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity," ("Manifesto" 51) and it is not invisible but ubiquitous, not individual but diffuse, not the stuff of fantasy but the work of a generation.
The cyborgs described in this thesis may not have specialized brain-to-Net interfaces or mirrorshades for eyes. They may not be replicants with a four-year lifespan. But their identities, from sexuality to social activism, are increasingly dependent upon and mediated through communications technology. And as that technology - from computers to mobile phones - grows smaller, more powerful, and more broadly distributed, it turns into the prostheses imagined by Gibson and others.
Despite Canada's relative tardiness in developing 3G networks capable of handling the Apple iPhone's wide array of online applications, the device has surged in popularity here with consumers demanding that Rogers (currently the phone's sole
Canadian service provider) lower prices. The iPhone is the perfect accessory, one that reflects everything the dominant culture tells consumers to be: white, powerful,
connected, smooth, and costly to maintain. Haraway's analysis was not merely perceptive but prescient: "Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light
and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves; a section of a
spectrum. These machines are eminently portable, mobile - a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence." ("Manifesto" 52) Like the
subject of so much analysis from viewers and critics of anime, Motoko Kusanagi (a character this thesis examines at great length), it is into the digital ether that the cyborgs disappeared, not into the realm of impossibility.
Girls Who Are Plugged In: The Subjects of This Thesis
In her Manifesto, Haraway says, "the boundary between social reality and science fiction is an optical illusion." Haraway herself drew on science fiction, discussing
James Tiptree, Jr. (pseudonym for for Alice Sheldon) and her short story "The Girl
14 Who Was Plugged In," a 1974 story about a girl whose consciousness is downloaded into a computer so that she can control a perfect body like a puppet while her own
degenerates. This thesis operates from a similar premise. It offers a mingled analysis
of lived social experience online and depictions of imagined futures. Animated women are discussed alongside three-dimensional ones, fictional cyborgs beside
factual ones. Throughout, there is an emphasis on positioning the cyborg as a new metaphor for the online fan. Since Haraway's cyborg itself is a metaphor intended to disrupt binaries of gender, sexuality, nationality, work and home, each of the chapters
contained within this thesis examines how both animated texts from Japan and fans online have further complicated the borders and boundaries of various dichotomies traditionally involved in identity formation.
We begin with an acknowledgement of fan scholars past in the first chapter.
As the field of fandom studies grows and changes with influences from a variety of disciplines and methodologies, it is important to understand its beginnings. This chapter catalogues a number of metaphors previously used to understand fandom, at the same time charting the growth of fandom studies as a field traditionally reserved for observing small groups of women to one that interacts with much larger groups of people from an insider perspective.
The dichotomy of insider and outsider is analysed again, this time from the perspective of transnational media flows, in the next chapter on anime's curious relationship to Japanese history and anime fandom's appropriation and defence of
Asian culture. This second chapter draws on scholarship from Susan J. Napier,
15 Toshiya Ueno, and Koichi Iwabuchi to look at the way anime has played with
Japanese cultural heroes like Akira Kurosawa, and with Edo Period history in
Shinichiro Watanabe's series Samurai Champloo. It also looks in detail at the racial
politics of M. Night Shyamalan's live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last
Airbender and other anime adaptations, and how fans deploy post-Colonial critique
on the Internet while simultaneously articulating what made the text meaningful for
them as readers.
In chapter three, we explore issues of authority, ownership, and the body, with
respect to cyborgs depicted in anime, and anti-fanfiction backlash online. This
chapter invokes previous scholarship from Susan J. Napier, Christopher Bolton, Brian
Ruh, and Carl Silvio while comparing three important anime texts: Ghost in the Shell,
Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Serial Experiments Lain. It then examines anti-fan
sentiment in light of posthuman anxiety and Freud's theory of the uncanny, looking to
the animated women described earlier as role models for reproduction, copying, and
freedom.
From criticism of fanfiction, we turn to explanations of its charms in chapter
four. Many theorists have chosen to examine the pleasures of fanfiction through the
lenses of feminist and queer theory, but this chapter instead takes advantage of
cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. It calls on Lisa Zunshine's Theory of
Mind explanation for literary pleasure, and advances the idea that fanfiction is not
only common, but natural. This reading of the roots of fan craft separates it from
traditional narratives of fandom as a queer thirdspace or as the domain of women,
16 moving the explanation into context that is free of gender and thus open to all, while at the same time offering another field of study for cognitive narratologists like
Zunshine.
Finally, we conclude with the limits of this study, as well as the future of fan studies both online and elsewhere, by discussing both my time in Japan as an unsuccessful researcher and my time with Lisa Drummond researching the phenomenon of fansubbed "K-doramas".
17 The "Home Theory Network": A Shopping List of Metaphors
Since the 1980s, academic study of "fandom" — the growing community of individuals with an affinity for a licensed property, including but not limited to media titles like films, television series, and novels, and often defined by the production of fan-crafts like fanfiction, fan "vids," and other home-made, media-inspired practices of artisanship — has enjoyed exponential growth. Where once it was strictly confined to anthropological and cultural studies such as those undertaken by Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith surrounding the Star Trek fandom, "fan studies" now encompasses methodologies from a host of different disciplines. Anyone undertaking involvement in such study must now familiarize herself with media theory, queer theory, literary criticism, and, in the case of the Japanese anime titles I am to mention later, Asian studies and the impact of Orientalism, as well as a variety of other approaches. "Fan studies," once the ethnographic study of a select few American women who met once or twice a year, has evolved into an interdisciplinary nexus, an
"inter-discursive collision," to use Rhiannon Bury's phrase, where only a "collective intelligence" can possibly contain the diversity of perspectives available for
18 examining the choices, tactics, and affinities of a global populace of media-sawy
individuals and groups.
Unsurprisingly, "fan-studies" has re-named itself. Academics who study the
wild polyphony of fandom have begun to term themselves "aca-fans," with an
involvement in "aca-fandom." This portmanteau acknowledges the close relationship between academics and fans, and the by-definition alliance between both "sides."
Indeed, the word itself implies that the binary opposition between fans and those who
study them is a fiction. "Aca-fandom" calls into question the necessity of objective
distance between academics and fans, and much of the most recent literature and research in the field of "aca-fandom" reflects this approach, with some academics bringing their personal experiences within their respective fandoms to bear. When
once this crumbling of the wall separating observer and observed might have seemed revolutionary or even undesirable, it is now tacitly understood as the most common
approach. After all, many of the academics most interested in fandom are fans themselves.
With the arrival of a new nomenclature came a shift in locale. When fandoms migrated to the internet, aca-fandom moved with them. Many of the most prominent thinkers in aca-fandom — Henry Jenkins, Nancy Baym, Karen Hellekson and Kristina
Busse, Mafalda Stasi, and Robin Anne Reid to name but a few ~ currently maintain online correspondences with fellow academics and fans via blogs and social networking sites online. One of the most important gatherings of "aca-fans" happened
19 recently not at a conference, but at Henry Jenkins' blog, with multiple posts from
well-known "aca-fans" on the subject of gender division in fan studies1. A mirror site
quickly sprang up at the social networking/blog site LiveJournal (LJ), with a
community called Fan Debate whose goal was to import the conversation to LJ users
so that they might also participate11.
This emphasis on participation and community is key to understanding the
current climate of "aca-fandom" and the ways in which aca-fans discuss fandom, as
well as the manner in which fandom discusses itself. Rather than privileging a small
number of gifted individuals, aca-fandom instead grows to encompass the ever-
widening circle of interested parties, young and old, male and female, academic and
commercial, fans and non-fans. With the emergence of so many voices in the field, it is no wonder that so many aca-fans have contributed differing metaphors for fandom in an attempt to clarify fandom for outsiders and further hone the definitions used in
common parlance by fellow aca-fans.
This chapter will examine a series of those metaphors. I will then offer one of my own, based on Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Next, I will discuss images of the female cyborg in Japanese anime, in an attempt to offer another vision of the cyborg that might better resonate with the current research on fandom and that much of the scholarship on media fandom seems unfamiliar with. The complication and diversity of these images, as well as their transmedia nature, reflects the ever-
20 shifting face of fandom, including its gendered identities, technical prowess, and
capacity for protest.
A Shopping List of Metaphors
During a conversation regarding Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse's
anthology Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, I remarked
that "reading the book has been a lot like shopping for metaphors." A fellow
LiveJournal user replied: "Or maybe like watching the Home Theory Network, where
a new metaphor goes up every few minutes."
This conversation, in which we used similes from popular culture to describe
metaphors adapted from literary theory and elsewhere, is not unlike what aca-fandom
does on a regular basis. Many in fan studies find it expedient and helpful to examine
fandom through a particular metaphor in order to see whether their particular vision
of the community accurately describes what fellow members experience and fellow
observers have perceived. These metaphors fall into two rough categories: fandom-
as-location and fandom-as-behaviour. Both phenomena constitute one's subject position, and there are multiple instances in the following list when locale and activity
intersect. But for the moment, let us examine the latest offerings from the Home
Theory Network.
Poaching: In 1992, Henry Jenkins unveiled Textual Poachers, wherein he borrowed a metaphor from Michel de Certeau to claim that fans "poach" elements
21 from a given text in order to extend new meanings to the "canon" text that better approximate their subjective reading. In an earlier essay on Star Trek fandom, Jenkins characterized this movement as inherently rebellious:
"Like rebellious children, fans refuse to read by the rules imposed upon them by the schoolmasters. For the fan, reading becomes a kind of play, responsive only to its own loosely structured rules and generating its own kinds of pleasures.
Michel de Certeau has characterized this type of reading as "poaching," an impertinent "raid" on the literary "preserve" that takes away only those things that seem useful or pleasurable to the reader. ("Fans" 39)
Jenkins himself was responding to the work of Jonathan Fiske, who elsewhere offered a vision of fandom as Cultural Economy, saying that "The shadow economy of fan culture in many ways parallels the workings of the official culture, but it adapts them for the habitus [habits, inhabitation, performance] of the subordinate."
("Cultural Economy" 45) Building on the ideas of Fiske and others that recognize the position of fans as subordinated readers, Rhiannon Bury characterizes fandom as an example of Foucault's Heterotopia, wherein one's subordinate status ~ or one's status as a member or practitioner of subordinate culture — is inextricable from the widely- held, socially-constructed perception of deviance, but still affords opportunities for subversion (in this case, semiotic resistance):
However, defining such spaces in terms of deviance alone fails to accord agency to those thought of in such terms. It is important to also understand the heterotopia in terms of resistance, inversion, subversion or perhaps simply a space in which active consent to normative practices is suspended. ("Cyberspaces" 17)
22 Abigail Derecho continues to link resistant reading to subordinate subjectivity when applying theory from Derrida's Archive Fever to fanfiction. She describes fanfiction as Archontic Literature that functions as the part of an archive created by those in interstitial spaces who draw attention to voids and gaps within existing
"canon" works by supplementing them. This supplementation merely increases the
"archive" of the canonical text, and allows and encourages multiple readings of the same text in the context of other archontic readings:
A literature that is archontic is a literature composed of texts that are archival in nature and that are impelled by the same archontic principle: that tendency to toward enlargement and accretion that all archives possess. Archontic texts are not delimited properties with definite borders that can be transgressed. So all texts that build on a previously existing text are not lesser than the source text, and they do not violate the boundaries of the source text; rather, they only add to that text's archive, becoming part of the archive and expanding it. An archontic text allows, even invites, writers to enter it, select specific items they find useful, make new artifacts using those found objects, and deposit the newly made work back into the text's archive. ("Fan Fiction" 64-65)
If archontic literature allows a variety of related texts to co-exist under one archival label, Mafalda Stasi's concept of slash fan-texts as Palimpsest highlights their inherently, always-already intertextual nature, and the complex web of relationships of influence between them. Stasi characterizes these relationships as horizontally-oriented and persistently haunted by the existence and instrumentality of previous contributions to the larger fan-text:
Like any other text, a slash text is a node in a web, a part of an often complex intertextual sequence, and it bears a close and running relationship with (at least) one other text. This is why I use the term palimpsest to indicate a nonhierarchical, rich layering of genres, more or less partially erased and
23 resurfacing, and a rich and complex continuum of themes, techniques, voices, moods, and registers. ("Fan Fiction" 119)
However, resistant reading, creation of fan-texts, and the subsequent sharing
of said texts has to happen somewhere. Often it occurs online, and the potential of the
internet for anonymity, identity-performance, and social networking has
fundamentally changed the face ~ or perhaps more accurately, the avatar — of
fandom. That change allows a larger variety of individuals to participate using a
wider range of identities. Both Kristina Busse and Robin Anne Reid have argued for a
view of fandom as a Queer Female Space or a Counter-Public wherein female fans
can perform queerness both within the scope of their fiction and in their relationships to other fans: "We see fans working in a virtual queer space that allows the integration of fictions with other markers of our lives." ("Fanfiction" 196) For Busse, this performance is intrinsically related to slash fandom, where depictions of homosexuality remain central to the identification, activity, and enjoyment of the community: ".. .slash in particular raises particular issues of identity and sexualities: women writing fantasies with and for one another projected through and by same-sex desires suggests that fandom may be a queer female space - if not at the level of the text and the writers, then at least at the level of their interaction." (208)
The phenomenon of performance also extends to the creation of fan-texts, according to Francesca Coppa. Coppa analogizes fanfiction to Theatrical
Performance, suggesting that fan-texts rely more on traditions within drama than prose and that fan-texts should be viewed simply as "versions" of a single text in
24 much the same way that one director's "version" of a Shakespeare play is different
from another's. For Coppa, characters within fanfiction ~ indeed, within most if not
all texts ~ possess the ability to "walk" between texts and genres, a phenomenon which reveals them to be origin-less: The existence of fan fiction postulates that
characters are able to "walk" not only from one artwork to another, but from one
genre into another; fan fiction articulates that characters are neither constructed nor
owned, but have, to use Scheduler's phrase, a life of their own not dependent on any
original "truth" or "source." ("Fan Fiction" 230)
All of these phenomena have a profound effect on how fans understand and
share texts. Whatever their differences in identity or resistance to dominant culture,
fans can collaborate on community-construction through the establishment of knowledge-based cultures. Sean Leonard calls this a Cultural Sink, explaining that it most often occurs surrounding foreign media like Japanese anime:
A cultural sink is a void that forms in a culture as a result of intracultural or transcultural flows. Like physical black holes, cultural sinks have a tendency to attract foreign objects. Furthermore, they are difficult to detect without measuring their relative effects - their pull - on media texts, on the real and virtual sites on which those effects surface and on the discursive clouds surrounding the nuclei of the recentered texts. Cultural sinks are inherently characterized as loci of intense generic debate around the shifting meanings and modalities that they attract to themselves. (3-4)
We end this segment with the theorist who opened it, Henry Jenkins. Having made his entry into fan studies through the use of Michel de Certeau's concept of textual poaching, he has since moved on to Pierre Levy's notion of fandom as
Collective Intelligence. For Jenkins, fandom naturally creates mnemonic spaces or
25 memory palaces that supplement individual knowledge regarding a text. The collective, an ever-increasing group of individuals who contribute their unique perspectives to a given text, constantly grows the knowledge-base while simultaneously making the entirety of that knowledge available to neophyte and veteran alike. "The fan community pools its knowledge because no single fan can know everything necessary to fully appreciate the series...Collective intelligence expands a community's productive capacity because it frees individual members from the limitations of their memory and enables the group to act upon a broader range of expertise." ("Convergence" 139)
What each of these metaphors — whether they pertain to fandom as behaviour, identity, or place ~ has in common is the notion of supplementation. Fandom and its accompanying activities, performances, creations, and locations form a sort of prosthesis for both texts and everyday life. Fandom adds what is missing, be it the acknowledgement and investigation of homoerotic subtext or human interaction with like-minded individuals. It is this metaphor ~ fandom as prosthesis — that I wish to explore while examining the way in which Donna Haraway's cyborg theory might apply to fandom.
The Cyborg in (American) Academic and (Japanese) Popular Culture
With the close relationship between many fans and their technology of choice, a comparison between them and cyborgs seems inevitable. However, Rhiannon Bury states that the female fans she studied resisted such a comparison:
26 When I suggested in an early conference paper that they were cyborgs, the participants strongly objected. Given the representations of cyborgs in popular culture as muscle-bound, robotic men - Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator films and the Borg of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation to name but two examples - they felt that the term stripped away not only their humanity but their femininity. This reaction is certainly understandable in light of the historical struggle that women have waged against being positioned as "minus male." ("Cyberspaces" 12)
This perception of the cyborg bears out in research done by Bukatman and others.
Bukatman identifies most popular depictions of the cyborg as inherently hyper- masculine and fascist due to their influence from the Nazi Freikorps movement: "An obfuscating technology unifies body and psyche ~ the subject as weapon, the subject as machine. The subject becomes an armored figure, hiding both the erotic and mortal truth of its being." (303) However, Bukatman locates an alternative vision of the female cyborg in cyberpunk science-fiction. Cyberpunk acknowledges the female body as a site of discursive collision and conflict, from Melissa Scott's depiction of
Trouble in Trouble and Her Friends to William Gibson's frequent employment of female characters who regularly struggle for privacy, safety, and legitimacy. For feminist science-fiction writers, this means that a rejection of that body can mean freedom from the cultural baggage that over-burdens it: "the body ~ and so the subject — is understood as a cultural construction... and so the dissolution of the body becomes a potentially positive maneuver in a struggle for self-definition." (314)
Toshiya Ueno has linked this strategy to Haraway's concept of cyborg feminism, and cites the cyborg Motoko Kusagani in Mamoru Oshii's film Ghost in the Shell as an example:
27 .. .when a subject takes up the tactics of transgression, it unconsciously becomes like a cyborg. So for the cyborg feminist, this strategy should be extended further than "animating the oppressed minority." Cyborg feminists must make the automatized and animated situation of their own voices the conscious point of departure in their intervention. By abandoning and sacrificing her identity and ghost to the Puppet Master, Motoko takes up the strategy of cyborg feminism. ("Techno-Orientalism" 230)
We shall return to Motoko Kusanagi in a moment, but for now we must examine how this vision of cyborg feminism fits with previous conceptions of fandom, specifically female fandoms online. Many of the metaphors discussed within this paper rely on the subordinate status of "fannish" readers. Their reading happens against the grain, highlighting voids and slippages within the canon text and exploiting them for pleasure and self-expression. Often this process involves the crafting of fan-made "products" like fanfiction or videos or collages. Within Donna
Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs," this use of writing and semiotic resistance is a key component to cyborg subjectivity: "Contests for the meaning of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious." (93)
For Haraway, the cyborg's decision to appropriate writing technology means inscribing the world with new meanings and new emphasis. "Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallologocentrism."
("Manifesto" 95) In the context of fandom activity, this struggle against the "one code" happens at a variety of locations, and for a variety of reasons. Although the face of fandom constantly changes and fans remain individuals even when participating in a collective, the "aca-fans" mentioned earlier continually speak of fandom in terms of its capacity for resistance to dominant culture ("slashing" same- sex characters not already depicted in a relationship) and even copyright law
("fansubbing," doujinshi). This resistance occurs as a direct consequence to the fannish appropriation of writing technologies ~ not only in the writing of fanfiction, but in the coding of websites and episodes of Japanese anime, scanlations, and the editing of footage for fan-made videos. These acts of subversion closely resemble the goal Haraway sets for cyborg feminist writing: "Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control."
("Manifesto" 175)
However, the Harawayan cyborg's use of writing as a strategy for subversion, protest, or pleasure does not necessarily improve the popular image of the cyborg or remedy the issues that Bury said her participants had with it. Here I would like to offer another image of the cyborg from Japanese anime that stands in direct opposition to the hyper-masculine, inhuman cyborgs portrayed by Schwarzenegger and others. Ueno remarks that anime frequently depicts an affinity between women and advanced technology:
It is well-known that, especially in Japanese animation, women are figured in very specific ways, and the theme of the merging of women and technology is the most visible one. In much of Japanese animation, female characters are numerous and frequently supposed to possess special abilities of being more adjustable to machines and technologies. ("Shock" 234)
29 Although Ueno had written previously on Ghost in the Shell and mentions
Five Star Stories in his essay, other examples abound. The shy, childish title character
of Serial Experiments Lain possesses an instinctive, intuitive grasp of "the Wired," or
the internet, and she slowly grows to control the network through sheer will rather than keystrokes. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Dr. Yui Ikari allows a giant robot of her own design to absorb her body and mind ~ when her son pilots the same robot years later, her spirit seems to come alive when his enemies threaten him. Battle
Angel Alita features a young cyborg female who fights to regain her memories in a post-apocalyptic dystopian hell; the Knight Sabers from Bubblegum Crisis all use mobilesuits tuned to their bodies while taking down the multi-national corporations that rule a futuristic Japan. Even Sailor Moon has its own cyborg in the form Hotaru
Tomoe ~ otherwise known as Sailor Saturn. Oshii's sequel to Ghost in the Shell, titled
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence even has an aging forensic pathologist named
Haraway who reveals herself to be a cyborg in her final frames. These cyborg women are young and old, wealthy and impoverished. They are scientists and rock stars and schoolchildren. They eat, sleep, sing, make love (or don't), they have children (or don't), they are children themselves, they have bodies (or don't). Most all of them are beautiful, or at the very least cute. With only a few exceptions, all of them are capable of devastating violence, and all shoulder the burden of this ability in different ways.
And this is only a very small list; the image of the female cyborg in Japanese anime is no less individual than the image of the fan, or the academic, or even the woman.
30 I highlight these examples to show that in contrast to the Freikorps-mspirQd male cyborg of Western cinema, the female cyborg of Japanese anime comes in a number of sizes, shapes, social positions, and stages of development. She even stands in contrast to the cinematic depiction of the cyborg female from popular American cyberpunk films like Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic, or The Matrix, wherein the cyborg females are almost entirely heterosexual white adults incapable of living long lives or fully taking control of their destinies due to the forces of design, poverty, or predestination. It is notable that in the three films mentioned above, the female cyborgs all die or suffer extreme pain and hardship because their cyborg subjectivity makes them Other; in the anime I mentioned, the women either repair themselves, regenerate, or disperse their consciousnesses into realms where they enjoy greater power.
This is not to say that the world of Japanese anime is a blissful Utopia of self- actualization and freedom for cyborgs. Several scholars have pointed out the deeply problematic depiction of Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell. Brian Ruh says of
Oshii's film:
In the case of Kusanagi, the system of control is the government for which she works. She is portrayed as being very powerful, but she can use that power only at the behest of her employer, not for her own freedom...
However, Kusanagi is able to find release, not by overcoming the confines of the body, but rather through the further blurring of the mind/body and organic/artificial dichotomies. ("Stray Dog" 131)
31 Carl Silvio takes issue with the film's resolution, in which Kusanagi and a bodiless entity "born of the Net" called "The Puppetmaster" somehow "merge" to create a new, shared identity with near-ubiquitous presence online and unforeseen powers over communications technology:
The evocation of this conventional trope of reproduction, the female body as the bearer of life, profoundly qualifies the subversive potential of the film's ending by transforming Kusanagi's radically re-coded and resistant cyborg body into a maternal body, a vehicle for the production of offspring. Because this final scene is entirely packaged within the familiar rhetoric of this trope, it is difficult for the audience not to think of Kusanagi as anything other than a "mother," a maternal figure whose role is ultimately synonymous with her corporeality. The fact that the new (Kusanagi/Puppet Master) entity's replacement shell is that of a child further strengthens the efficacy of the reproduction trope as a vehicle of containment. Finally, when we consider that Project 2051 effectively ghost-hacks into Major's shell and takes possession of it, controlling all of her physical actions during this scene, we find that her body is not only maternal but passive as well. (par. 30)
Susan J. Napier views events in a more optimistic light: "While the American films
[like Blade Runner] seem to privilege a kind of individual humanism as a last resort against the encroaching forces of technology and capitalism, Ghost simply repudiates the constraints of the contemporary industrialized world to suggest that a union of technology and the spirit can ultimately succeed." ("Akira" 114)
The majority of this analysis focuses on Ghost in the Shell, and an equivalent number of similar papers have yet to be written regarding the franchise's other media incarnations. Oshii's film was a cinematic adaptation of a long-running manga by
Masamune Shirow; the film has since had a sequel and companion novel released, and Shirow has written a sequel to his manga called Ghost in the Shell: Man/Machine
32 Interface. The franchise has even leapt to televised anime format with a 52-episode series called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and that television series has its own film called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society.
Prose novels inspired by the series and penned by one of the screenwriters, Junichi
Fujisaku, have already appeared on store shelves in North America.
Thus, even in her "canon" state, with her name trademarked by official license holders and shared between corporations intent on exploiting it for profit, Motoko
Kusanagi functions as something like a fanfiction character ~ a meta-textual cyborg.
Each author of the Kusanagi "archive" subtly edits, de-constructs, and re-builds her.
She "walks" from one medium to another, altered slightly but still recognizably
Kusanagi — still beautiful, still deadly, still troubled by her humanity or possible lack thereof. Each canon author "poaches" elements from previous iterations to re-generate her. The character of Motoko Kusanagi, both textually and meta-textually, hovers in a constant state of repair, augmentation, and creation. On the meta-textual level, her cyborg subjectivity is not unlike fan identities proposed by the authors above: it occurs in interstitial, possibly-queer places like the anime counter-public or cultural
"sink"; it is "performed," it has the potential to expose the experience of the subordinate through the technology of writing, especially when it extrapolates issues of Japanese domestic and international policy. An ever-increasing number of individuals work on building Motoko, but without Motoko there would be no work to do. She is both an archive of previous works, and a community of individuals contributing to those works.
33 In offering the Harawayan cyborg ~ and Motoko Kusanagi in particular ~ as another possible metaphor for fans and fandom online, I wish to close with one of
Motoko's most important cyborg augmentations: her invisibility. Both Oshii's Ghost in the Shell and Kenji Kamiyama's Stand Alone Complex feature a Motoko who can hide herself using "thermoptic camouflage," a device which leaves only shadowy traces of her visible to the naked eye. It is while invisible that Motoko does the most damage to her enemies, and also when she laughs at them: in Oshii's film, Motoko hangs invisibly suspended from a rooftop and scoffs at a representative from the
"American Empire" who insists that his country's treatment of others is justified, before blowing him to bits. I can think of fewer positions more appropriate for the online fan: hanging between two places, invisible but strong, and inverting the tried- but-untrue sophistries of established capitalist patriarchy through clever recognition and enunciation of the lived experiences of the subordinate.
Conclusion
Bodily dissolution or invisibility may at first sound like an anti-feminine movement, one that asks women to let go of the physical properties that define them as such. But many of those properties generate problems of their own that Haraway identifies with the expectations of motherhood:
Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions.. ..Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be a global identity after all. ("Manifesto" 99)
34 Many women on the integrated circuit of fandom have already accepted this aspect to their sexuality, sharing highly-sexual narratives and experiences with individuals whose bodies they never see, touch, or taste. For them, coalition through
"affinity ~ not identity" ("Manifesto" 73) has become the norm, although sections of fandom still recognize themselves as predominantly female. And despite the
"invisible" or "disembodied" qualities of online fandom, fans have still managed to organize, coalesce, and raise their hidden voices in defense of the community. For example, the Organization for Transformative works, a non-profit organization by and for fans, has outlined within its goals the attempt to create a legal defense fund for fans. If fans are cyborgs, they are on the way toward creating an even larger digital entity, shifting in scale from Kusanagi to the Puppet Master. As Haraway says,
"The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self." ("Manifesto" 82) It has room for individuals and communities, for multiple authors and editors, unique visions and shared dreams. This multiplicity of visions has grown to encompass a wide variety of texts that continually unseat and disrupt dominant historical and national narratives, which we will examine in the following chapter.
35 Orienting the Otaku: Fandom, Fantasy, and Mash-up Asia
"As people do in hip-hop, taking old jazz and soul records, sampling them, and making something new, I did the same thing with Samurai Champloo... I took images and ideas from old samurai films... and remixed them... to make something very new that was appropriate for today's age. " — Shinichiro Watanabe
Formerly the domain of a small number of Asian immigrants and college-aged males, anime fandom has spread to youth, females, and adults of multiple ethnic background and education levels. While numerous scholars, fans, and critics have attempted to answer why this might be, far fewer have delved into the implications this movement has for our understanding of post-modern Orientalism. Although any understanding of anime and anime fandom from a cultural studies perspective necessarily implies some sensitivity to the politics of representation, the questions that arise from prolonged analysis are more nuanced - and more difficult to answer - than whether or not Japanese animation presents an historically or culturally accurate representation of Japan itself, or whether non- Japanese fans are "Orientalizing" when they dress up as fictional Japanese characters from their favourite animated series. To cast the relationship between foreign consumer and Japanese producer as wholly colonial is to elide many of the recent developments in Japanese cultural criticism, as well as the
36 complex history of influences that foreign fans and Japanese creators, for better or worse, share in common. This chapter attempts to explicate both.
During this attempt, we shall also closely examine some pertinent anime titles, produced both in Japan and abroad. These include both historical and supernatural
fantasies involving magic or action and adventure. They all, however, take place in
Asian "mash-ups," fictional Asias that never existed, but whose narrative power relies
on specific fantasies of Asian history and culture being plucked from various sources
and re-mixed. These re-mixes exist on both sides of the Pacific, notably in the form of
two animated properties: Samurai Champloo (2004-2005, Japan) and Avatar: The
Last Airbender (2005-2008, America). While Samurai Champloo features a hip-hop re-mix of rap music, Japanese history, and high-octane action scenes, Avatar: The
Last Airbender draws directly from the works of Champloo creator Shinichiro
Watanabe and seminal anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki to create a story that was
deemed appropriate for young American audiences by the US cable television
network Nickelodeon. It incorporates cultural signifiers and historical elements from
Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and even Inuit (or possibly Ainu) culture. Clearly, the re- mix phenomenon exists in a wide variety of genres, and each of them speaks to the relationship between anime and Asian identity at home and abroad.
The Nation in Translation
37 Before any close reading of these texts can commence, however, it is important to
establish both theoretical and historical context regarding both Orientalism and anime
fandom. Orientalism, a formal term that once designated academic study of the Far
and Middle East, is now understood as a discourse that enforces untrue attitudes about those same geographic areas based on stereotypical images. Orientalism assumes that these regions are fundamentally unknowable and must be "spoken for," or
"translated" into an easily-digestible form for Western audiences: "Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the
West." (Said, "Orientalism" 20-21)
To be fair, much of the popularity of anime abroad depends on some degree of translation, either on the part of the official English-language licensed holders who translate and "dub" English-language voice tracks over their finished product, or as a responsibility of "fansubbers," groups of unpaid fans who download anime directly
from Japanese television and work on it, piecemeal, to turn around a subtitled translation and share the file over the internet. Of the two, fansubbers are clearly less
constrained by commercial concerns, and "fansubs" frequently feature extra information within the translation - coded as superscript - that clarify Japanese language puns or history, or even explain the contents of a traditional Japanese meal
for global audiences. Official license holders, who purchase the rights to anime titles
from Japanese production companies and then sell their own DVDs with English- language tracks in addition to the subtitled ones, often do not engage in this practise,
38 preferring rather to either change the nature of a problematic sentence or to forgo
explaining it entirely. While this may not seem Orientalist at first, consider a famous
example: Sailor Moon. The anime series, inspired by a shoujo manga (Japanese
comic book targeted at a female audience) by Naoko Takeuchi, featured two lesbian
characters, Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus. When the series was imported to the
US by Cloveway Inc. for broadcast on America cable channel Cartoon Network, the
two were changed to cousins, prompting one fan to comment: "In an attempt to avoid
controversy, Cartoon Network and Cloveway took a sensitive issue and actually made
it even more potentially offensive by inadvertently throwing in a suggestion of
incest." (Sebert, "Kissing")
This alteration to both characters' sexuality is illustrative of an attitude
surrounding the import and translation of Japanese animation since the 1960's. Since
the adaptation of Tetsuwan Atom (later dubbed "AstroBoy") from Japanese screens to
NBC, Japanese anime has been treated as a medium that requires not only translation, but sanitization. When the series was first brought to American shores, much of the
violence was scrubbed free of the series - deaths that were key to the series' plot were
removed, as were jokes that were deemed too mature. (Schodt, "AstroBoy" 83) Still, the adaptation is regarded as among one of the best for its time, and represented the
original series' content better than many others despite the bowdlerization:
To appreciate what Ladd [translator of AstroBoy] did requires knowing what later happened to other animated series from Japan that were adapted for the American market. Some of them became virtually unrecognizable - the classic example of this being the 1985 TV hit, Robotech, which was
39 assembled from three completely unrelated Japanese animation series that were deconstructed, reedited, and turned into one entirely new story. (82)
As Schodt notes, the treatment of anime as too racy, too violent, or too mature by American television producers extended into the 1970's and 1980's. Roland Kelts highlights the dramatic re-versioning of Gatchaman (later called G-Force when syndicated for American afternoon programming) by producers who wished to capitalize on the Star Wars phenomenon:
Frank's team attempted a western whitewashing of the darker undercurrents in Japanese animation: no one died, plot points were softened by the R2-D2 clone, anomie was replaced by logic, or at least some signs of cause and effect, and the entire series was moved to a distant planet to avoid earthly unpleasantness. ("Japanamerica" 14)
In this context, the "straightening" of Neptune and Uranus' sexualities comes as no surprise. If anything, this aura of the forbidden or "adult" has bolstered the reputation of anime on cable television, where the Cartoon Network showed "mature" series like
Cowboy Bebop during its late night "Adult Swim" block, a timeslot reserved for the likes of Leno and Letterman on mainstream networks. Billed as content that was too grown-up for afternoon or even primetime television, the Adult Swim block promised series replete with violence, cleavage, and swearing. But even Adult Swim fell into lockstep with earlier American broadcasters: scenes of gay sex were shaded out of one Cowboy Bebop episode, and during the 2001 airing of the series, an episode was removed from the rotation that dealt with exploding buildings (a reminder, executives worried, of the September 11 attacks).
40 But are these acts of translation, re-interpretation, or even censorship
Orientalist acts? It would be dangerously essentialist to automatically assume the existence of a Japanese national character that embraced sex and violence, or that
"genuine" or "true" Japanese texts are inherently more violent, more sexualized, or more dangerous to youth than cultural products from elsewhere. Said cautions against placing too much importance on myths of originality stemming from a
Platonic ideal of Asian-ness, and invites us instead to examine the representation of the exterior:
The things to look at are the style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient. ("Orientalism" 21)
Changes to the "exteriority" of anime by Western editors are not to be dismissed.
Why was it necessary, for example, for the characters of Sailor Moon to receive
Western-sounding names? The title character, Usagi, was changed to "Serena" in the
English-language version, a pun on the lunar Sea of Serenity. (Usagi's original
Japanese name is "Tsukino Usagi," a phrase that literally means "rabbit of the moon," after the Japanese custom of seeing a rabbit shape on the moon's surface rather than a human face or other form.) While this change may have been in keeping with Ms.
Takeuchi's' original vision, it also assumed that English-speaking viewers were somehow incapable of identifying with characters whose names sounded so Japanese.
This assumption not only categorizes Japan as hopelessly, unreachably foreign, but
41 essentializes the English-speaking world - particularly its youth - as either too
intellectually lazy to broaden their horizons, or culturally ill-equipped to do so. As we
shall see with the case of Avatar: The Last Airbender and its viewers, this is patently untrue. Moreover, censorship is not strictly a Western phenomenon. Returning to
Cowboy Bebop, it is important to point out that the series was less popular in Japan than it was in America, and that fewer episodes were shown there on the grounds that the series was too violent for Japanese television. So while it may be easy to see
American censorship as reactionary or conservative, it is important to recall that
Japanese texts exist on their own national media continuum, one that re-mixes with the best of them.
"This Show is Not An Accurate Historical Portrayal ...Like We Care."
After Cowboy Bebop, Shinichiro Watanabe followed with Samurai Champloo, a hip- hop infused story set in the Edo Period, during the persecution of Catholics and the decline both samurai culture and the Tokugawa shogunate. Against this backdrop of social and cultural upheaval, Watanabe set the story of three drifters, each at odds with their society: Fuu, a penniless orphan; Jin, a ronin (masterless samurai); Mugen, an ex-con fresh out of prison. All three are on the run from the government and from their pasts. On their way to find "the samurai who smells of sunflowers," they meet a series of similar misfits: a group of renegade monks who grow cannabis, a Dutch man impersonating a Japanese in hopes of obtaining a homosexual lover, a kind-hearted
42 mobster, and even an Ainu man who may be the last of his tribe. The pilot episode
opens with a scene of modern Tokyo, then a signature "scratching" sound like that
produced by a club DJ is heard. Time appears to reverse like film played backwards,
then to jog forward, then back again, as an invisible mixer and editor slowly
transforms the landscape and costume into something more period-appropriate. A
disclaimer appears: "This show is not an accurate historical portrayal....like we care."
Samurai Champloo, which might be classified as seinen (mature) anime, is a
work of radical historical fiction that borders on gonzo. In one episode, the "black
ships" arrive twenty years early and are expelled by the ragtag group of main
characters, after a comically lethal baseball game. Never mind that baseball had yet to
gain ground in America at the time, and that the Japanese had not yet learnt it. The
key is that the Americans were beaten at their own game, and scared off by Mugen,
who hails from Ryukyu - the region now known as Okinawa, the site of a major
American military base. This episode overturns myths of both American colonialism
and Japanese unity, implying that it takes an outsider to deflect another outsider's
advances. Critic Takayuki Tatsumi recognizes this potential within Japanese media,
suggesting that the gesture of overturning history in order to point out current issues
is actually a necessary function after a period of too much self-satisfaction on the part
of Japanese. Citing the long-running manga Yapoo, the Human Cattle (in which
Americans transform Japanese into "Yapoo" or infinitely-malleable semi-sentient
creatures, some of whom function as mere furniture), he says:
It is in this type of hyperconsumerist atmosphere that the concept of avant-pop becomes most convincing. When the logic of economics has demolished the distinction between aesthetically radical, politically subversive art (the traditional domain of the avant-garde) and MTV pop songs, as well as between what is realistic and what is antirealistic, it becomes necessary to rethink how art might resume its important "sadistic" role of "punishing" its audience in order to reawaken it to a life of "real" pleasure and fulfilment. ("Apache" 37)
But Champloo - itself a transliteration of an Okinawan term meaning "stir-
fry" or "mash-up" - is not a nationalist, anti-American diatribe. In one episode, Andy
Warhol makes an appearance, as do beat-boxer kids carrying "boom boxes" fashioned
from bamboo. Watanabe portrays his white characters - a young Vincent Van Gogh,
a lonely gay man who had heard of the shudo traditions of a now-decaying samurai
culture - as mostly sympathetic. Rejected by their own culture, they came to Japan
looking for a place to fit in. They are, in short, not unlike anime fans engaged in
cultural costume play:
At its best, anime cosplay suggests a world...in which one is finally liberated from the power dynamics of race, sex, gender, and nationality and even of species. That this is a fantasy world cannot be stressed enough, but it is probably no accident that at a time when national and ethnic concerns seem to be growing more and more oppressive, a countermovement toward emancipation from these very concerns should appear as well. (Napier, "Impressionism" 167)
For both the fans that Napier investigated, and the immigrants that Watanabe
animated, Japan became a deep intellectual and emotional investment. Watanabe's
Dutch renegade spent hours practising Japanese, and even insists (at first) to Jin,
Mugen, and Fuu that he is Japanese, despite his blue eyes and fair hair. He knows more about Edo's tourist attractions than any of the Japanese characters, and although he bungles things horribly, is always depicted as a sincere lover of Japanese culture
44 rather than a mere colonist. The episode ends at a kabuki playhouse, where not only is the onstage production disastrously interrupted by the intrusion of Dutch officers, but the Dutch character's cosplay must end. He leaves for enforced exile on Dejima, no longer able to play the part he had so desired on the fantasy stage that is Japan.
Watanabe highlights this performative aspect of both national and sexual identity - and the inevitable return to reality - by including a traditional kabuki player removing a woman's makeup and wig to reveal a man's face beneath during the story's climax.
Here, the Dutch character learns for the first time that the actors onstage function in two ways: as cultural ambassadors carrying on the tradition of high national culture like kabuki, and as men who enforce the ideal of feminine beauty and refinement for the benefit of the community. "That's even better!" he proclaims, undaunted. This same playful, optimistic spirit that delights in the mixture of high and low culture pervades anime conventions. Napier highlights one such experience:
The whole panel was a kind of cross-cultural tour de force. Evan's ease with the Japanese language; his knowledge of history, geography, and local customs; even his donning of the happi coat made him an excellent sample of a genuine transcultural figure. The fans saw an American who was clearly at ease with his own nationality (he made jokes about his home stay in Japan where "people's idea of a wild fun time is a bottle of sake and a mahjong game") but also comfortable in and enthusiastic about the Japanese environment. (Napier, "Impressionism" 159)
In addition, Champloo uses its re-mix style to call into question the darker aspects of Japan's past, and to interrogate the role of the Japanese in creating that history. Some characters face crucifixion thanks to the anti-Catholic measures taken during the time period, and we learn that the Dutch traders who worked from Dejima
45 Island required special dispensation from the shogun to visit the mainland. Watanabe gives no more quarter to the shogunate than he does the American colonizers; the story makes plain that both forces are concerned with nothing more than total control and dominion over their subjects. And although he points out the tragic history of the hakare Kirishitans ("hidden Christians"), he also skewers believers who follow too blindly in an episode where a con-man pretending to be Francis Xavier's long-lost relative dupes a group of underground Christians into making weapons for him. The episode is an inversion of the earlier story: here a Japanese man cosplays as a
Portuguese, and despite claiming to be a priest, insists on taking an unwilling virgin as his bride. Once again, we see a moment of unmasking near the climax of the story: his false nose and eyebrows fall away as he begins to sweat, exposing him as a counterfeit foreigner.
Toshiya Ueno adroitly articulates this confusion and complication of national and ethnic identity between Japan and the West, saying:
I think that the stereotype of the Japanese, which I would like to call " Japanoid" for not actually Japanese, exists neither inside nor outside Japan. This image functions as the surface or rather the interface controlling the relation between Japan and the other. Techno-Orientalism is a kind of miiror stage or an image machine whose effect influences Japanese as well as other people. This mirror in fact is a semi-transparent or two-way mirror. It is through this mirror stage and its cultural apparatus that Western or other people misunderstand and fail to recognize an always-illusory Japanese culture, but it also is the mechanism through which Japanese misunderstand themselves. ("Techno-Orientalism" 228-29)
Techno-Orientalism, then, is a game that Japan and the West play wherein neither has the upper hand for very long, but which both use to define a sort of Japanese metafictional brand identity to perpetuate images of Japan. This Japan exists either in
46 the past (where it can remain antiquated, noble but primitive, as in Madama Butterfly) or in the future (where it is unreachable and unknowable, like the Japan of a William
Gibson novel such as Idoru). Samurai Champloo effectively re-mixes both past and future to create a fantasy of Japan that never happened, but which tells its own painfully-accurate history of Japan's relationship to both foreigners and itself by invoking the voices of Japan's own misfits - the Ainu, the Ryukyu-jin, the hakare
Kirishitan. According to Ian Condry, this involvement of multiple perspectives is indicative of a larger trend in anime and manga:
Global anime means that we cannot understand anime only in terms of its Japanese-ness. Anime may well have aesthetic links to Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th century and to picture scrolls of the 12th century, but the more proximate links are American comics and Disney films of the first half of the 20th century. Japanese comic books—manga—reinterpreted those Western forms. Moreover, anime is produced not only in studios in Japan, but also in South Korea, the Philippines and China. Finally, overseas fans are deeply involved in the circulation of anime through online networks. All these forces expand and globalize anime culture. (Wright, "Global" par.4)
"Long ago, the four nations lived in harmony."
The globalization of anime and manga (and the ensuing profit margin) has led to the inevitable adoption of "anime style" art on American screens. Although both the
Matrix and Kill Bill franchises involved animated sequences, some American animators are now in the business of making their own anime. Foremost among these are Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, two Nickelodeon employees who took their love of anime - especially the work of Shinichiro Watanabe and
Hayao Miyazaki - and created Avatar: The Last Airbender. Bryan and I love the films of Hayao Miyazaki. The stories and emotional depth of Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke were big inspirations for us when we began creating Avatar. Also, the character design and animation of Fooly Cooly from studio Gainex [sic] was influential as well. (Vasconcellos, "Interview" par. 5)
Having an American show done in anime style I was curious if they were lifetime anime fans, DiMartino said, "Growing up, I wasn't really, I'd watch shows like Tranzor Z (Mazinger Z in Japan), but I don't think I had the concept of anime, I was just like, that's a cool giant robot, and then later on Bryan got me into Cowboy Bebop, and Miyazaki, and stuff like that, I wouldn't say I am a hardcore anime fan, but there are select series that I really enjoy." Konietzko said, "I was into stuff when I was a kid, like Mike said; Tranzor Z, Robotech, Akira, and then when I was in college I saw some stuff and it was getting really masochistic and it really turned me off, it's not what I was interested in. Unfortunately I kind of wrote off the whole industry, it wasn't until Dave Filoni ~ our friend and director on Avatar — back in the day he turned us onto cool stuff." (Mell, "SDCC 08" par. 3)
Avatar is the story of Aang, a twelve-year-old boy who emerges from a hundred-year mystical coma to discover that his whole civilization - the Air Nomads
- have been decimated by the Fire Nation, a technologically-advanced archipelago
who, like Japan once was, are interested in establishing a colonial sphere of influence
and have gone to war with the other three nations as a result. Aang is the "Avatar," a
spiritual figure who has the latent potential to "bend" air, water, earth, and fire.
Already a native airbender, his journey takes him to find other benders who can teach him how to control the other elements so that he can end the hundred-year conflict
once and for all.
While Samurai Champloo re-mixes signifiers from postmodern American
culture to tell a story about Japan's Edo Period, Avatar plucks choice elements from pre-modern Asian cultures to tell a very recognizable Western narrative about a messianic figure who has descended to earth and will redeem the world with help
48 from a group of loyal followers. These elements include martial arts choreographed
for animation by a certified professional, Sifu Kisu of the Harmonious Fist Chinese
Athletic Association, classical Chinese calligraphy on shop signs and road markers by
artist Siu-Leung Lee, and art direction that came from Elza Garagarza, an anime and manga fan educated as an architect who studied ancient Chinese and Japanese buildings for inspiration:
The show was for the most part inspired by Chinese culture. We had books of all kinds of motifs. Mike and Bryan went to China and took a great deal of pictures of Beijing that became our library. Ba Sing Se and its palace were very influenced by these pictures. We saw a lot of Chinese movies, both recent and old. A calligrapher took care of the Chinese signage. Everything was referenced to look authentic. Other Asian cultures were featured too. To name a few, Kyoshi Island was Japanese. The Eastern Air temple was referenced from Angkor Wat ruins. Sokka's Master, Pian Dao, lives in a castle with Tibetan influences. The Western Air temple is also influenced by Tibetan monasteries. And the island where the Firelord's beach house is located is inspired by Thailand. Other non-Asian architectures came into play too. The most notable example is the Inuit influence on the water tribe. The north water tribe had Inuit and Indian influences in its buildings (Well, India is part of Asia). The Fire Nation landscapes, heavily affected by volcanic activity, were based on Iceland. (Miller, "Gallery" par. 13)
The series also featured minority voice actors, including Mako Iwamatsu,
George Takei, George Hong, Tsai Chin, and Dante Basco. They played characters
who were noticeably different in race from one another: Fire Nation soldiers are usually pale with black hair, Earth Kingdom citizens a shade darker, Water Tribe people black with bright blue eyes and coarse hair, and Air Nomads a mixed colour palette (perhaps owing to their inclination to travel).
However, despite this obvious embrace of ethnic difference and sensitivity to
the rich heritage that is Asian art and architecture, Paramount Pictures (the franchise's
49 owner) caused controversy when M. Night Shyamalan, the director of a live-action
adaptation called The Last Airbender, revealed an almost all-white cast. Notably, the
roles of two Water Tribe characters were to be played by white actors. Fans quickly
organized a letter-writing campaign to tell Paramount that this was unacceptable:
Avatar, they claimed, was a series inspired by Asia about Asian people. The
community at aang-aint-white.livejournal.com posted this letter to the
Kennedy/Marshall Company, producers of the adaptation:
.. .The Nickelodeon show "Avatar: The Last Airbender," on which this film is based, featured Asian and Inuit characters in a fantasy setting inspired and informed by a variety of Asian and Inuit cultures. The characters fight with East Asian martial arts, have Asian or Inuit features, dress in Asian or Inuit clothing, and write with Chinese characters. The cast and setting were a refreshing departure from predominantly white American media, and were a large part of the show's appeal as well as an inspiration to many Asian American children.
I am disappointed to read that the four actors selected to play the lead roles are all white. While the casting is not final, the statement has already been made: this film will take a culturally Asian and Inuit world and populate it with white actors. Orientalism this obvious and this dramatic is inexcusable, and I would urge Shyamalan and Paramount Pictures to reconsider their casting choices. Asian characters in a world built from Asian cultures should be played by Asian actors.
If Paramount Pictures continues to go forward with this cast, I will not be supporting this film with my money, and I will encourage my friends and family to do the same. ("Postage" par. 26-28)
However, owing to the nature of anime itself ~ especially its unique philosophy behind and practise of character design — many viewers outside the Avatar fan
community saw no difference. This ignited fierce debate that touched on the politics
50 of representation and viewers' personal experiences of race and identity in media.
Here is a representative sampling from an io9.com comment thread on the subject:
I am so glad you guys finally go to this story. I, too, am pissed about the current Avatar casting. While I normally feel that M. Night's child direction is fantastic, I just cannot believe that a person of color would sell out quite like that. I figure that it may be the studio casting rather than the director because they don't trust him having too much power over a film anymore. I mean with the last two M.Night movies being major flops, maybe they want to ensure that this will "appeal" to Palin's "real America."
It's a fucked up thing nonetheless (user: "Evlsushi")
All I'm saying is that it seems Nickelodeon got it wrong in the first place. Not knowing the show, I would not have known they were of Asian/Inuit descent just looking at them. I'm not saying they couldn't be cast with more sensitivity to their supposed origin, but M Night seems to me to be casting pretty accurately based on the way the characters are drawn, (user: "Gann")
That's pretty common in much of the anime (and anime knockoff) shows and movies I've seen. The characters don't have any of the physical characteristics of a stereotypical Asian despite that obviously being their nationality. The art, however, of these types of shows (Saturday-morning-cartoony or not) follows a style rather than adheres to those stereotypes. They're still Asian or Inuit or whathaveyou but eye shape and skin tone (among other things) are modified for design effect and to 'fit' the character to their personality type and role within the narrative. Stuff like age, trustworthiness, and gender changes shapes and sizes according to the lead artists' concepts.
Part of the appeal of this particular show is the Asian flavor. You lose that when you cast someone so very obviously white, (user: "Imbri")
Although many manga and anime artists appear to be drawing caucasian features, I question whether the artists or their asian audiences interpret them that way. Plus, growing up in a culture which has trouble depicting Asians in a non-stereotypical manner probably lends itself to expecting some sort of visual cue to indicate Asian-ness. So while I think it's entirely plausible for white American audiences to interpret most of the character's ethnicities as 'white' based on how they're drawn, I think that's a facile analysis. Given that Asian animation doesn't use the same conventions to depict ethnicity as Western animation, it seems best to go along with the show's content, which
51 suggests not-white/Asian ethnicities for the characters. (Veteran of several "OMG-Japanese-People-Keep-Drawing-Themsel... Wars here.)
Plus it's just stupid of them not to use Asian actors at all. It pisses off the parents/fans who enjoy the diversity in the cartoon, and they don't really need the additional boost from established tween stars because they're already going to be marketing this thing freaking everywhere. And teaching white kids to see non-white actors is better for Paramont in the long run, cos it lets them hire based on acting ability, not 'who looks the part' and enables them to start marketing movies towards people's tastes instead of race, (user: "napthia9")
Aang is supposed to be Tibetan. Katara and Sokka are supposed to be Inuit. Zuko is supposed to be Chinese. Culturally, and racially.
The casting is appalling. I am BOYCOTTING this movie. Who's with me?
My hatred for that egotistical, piece of shit director knows no limit. It's a shame, cause I used to really like him. (user: "5amFrenchToast")
As a young girl of Filipino decent, I find this incredibly discouraging. I grew up in America, with very little Asian role models in American media. It seemed that every other girl I knew had someone like them to look up to, except me. Now, I am a little old to have heroes like I once did, but I know plenty of little Asian girls who are discouraged to see no one like them up on the big screen. I'm sorry, but this casting is utterly ridiculous. What a completely wasted opportunity to allow people who don't fit the typical movie star appearance to succeed. It's like they didn't even make an effort to meet with actors of different races. Which, is doubly discouraging to me, since I love to act and this is just shows how unlikely it is for actresses of a race that isn't Caucasian to do well in this white washed system. It's crappy all around, (user: CVWilson) (McMillan, "White")
Many first-time viewers of anime question why the characters "look white."
For them, the "big eyes, small mouth" style looks unmistakably Caucasian, as does the blond (or pink, or green) hair sported by some characters. Japanese critic Koichi
Iwabuchi also questions this phenomenon:
52 The characters of Japanese animation and computer games for the most part do not look "Japanese." Such non-Japanese-ness is called mukokuseki, literally meaning "something or someone without a nationality," but also implying the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics or a context, which does not imprint a particular culture or country with these features. ("Globalization" 28)
For Iwabuchi, a man unable to locate himself in the art of his own country, this is a deeply disturbing trend:
If it is indeed the case that the Japaneseness of Japanese animation derives, consciously or unconsciously, from its erasure of physical signs of Japaneseness, is not the Japan that Western audiences are at long last coming to appreciate, and even yearn for, an animated, race-less and culture-less, virtual vision of "Japan"? (33)
Both Iwabuchi and master animator Mamoru Oshii see in the lack of visibly-Japanese characters an attempt (although perhaps an unconscious one) to appeal to Western audiences out of an assumption that their patronage grants the artform legitimacy. In interviews with other animators and production company representatives, however,
Roland Kelts has commented that "the global anime boom of the twenty-first century has taken Japan, a country whose corporate culture prides itself on knowing the next new thing, almost completely by surprise" (73) because no similarity or appeasement was consciously intended. Kelts' research leads us to another possibility: that in order to understand the state of anime from AstroBoy to Avatar, we need to go back to its roots, and Osamu Tezuka's Disney fandom.
Fans Who "Go Pro": Cyborgs, Gender-benders, and Cosplayers
53 In an interview with a Yoshihiro Shimizu, who worked beside Tezuka at Tezuka
Productions for eleven years, Shimizu revealed to Kelts the complex nature of the
Tezuka/Disney relationship:
Tezuka loved the Disney stories and illustrations so much, he copied them line for line - not from comic books, but by going to the movie theater and sitting with his sketch pad through several showings of the Disney films. The books he produced were originally sold on the streets of Japan in the 1950's, without Disney's knowledge or permission. The copies Shimizu is showing me are reprints, issued a few years ago as collector's items. Disney now collects 50 percent of the sales. (45)
Tezuka's almost fanatical affection for films like Bambi, which he allegedly saw 80 times, led to his creation of fan-comics not unlike the ones now sold all over Japan in doujinshi shops and at massive conventions like the twice-yearly Comic Market.
Some of these fans have turned professional, following in Tezuka's path. This route reflects an apprenticeship model proposed by Henry Jenkins to explain the phenomenon of adolescent fanfiction surrounding major media properties:
Many adults worry that these kids are "copying" preexisting media content rather than creating their own original works. Instead, one should think about their appropriations as a kind of apprenticeship. Historically, young artists learned from established masters, sometimes contributing to the older artists' works, often following their patterns, before they developed their own styles and techniques. (Jenkins, "Convergence" 182)
According to Jenkins' thinking, fans use fan-crafts to hone their skills before possibly branching out to the professional arena or, as they desire, maintaining their fan identities and remaining embedded in their fan communities. Notable fans-turned- professionals include CLAMP, a group of four Japanese women who created doujinshi that later turned into profitable manga and anime franchises like RG Veda
54 and Magic Knight Rayearth, and Naomi Novik, a self-professed former fanfiction
writer who is now a John W. Campbell Award winner for her fantasy fiction.
But Tezuka's fan-to-pro career path is not the only way in which he impacted
the history of anime and fandom. Tezuka adopted his recognizably rounded style of
character design from Disney, adding his own spin and telling his own stories, going
darker places that Disney could never go: Dororo tells the story of an infant whose
father allows a group of demons to dismember him; Blackjack features a rogue
surgeon who uses experimental procedures to help his patients; Ribon no Kishi
(Princess Knight) is the story of a princess with a blue "boy heart," an extra organ
that allows her to pose as a prince and inherit the throne in a patriarchal kingdom.
Like AstroBoy, these stories became intensely popular; they were adapted for
anime. But Tezuka had already laid the groundwork for the anime economy with
AstroBoy, his profits as a doujin-ka-tumed-manga-ka allowed him to "dump" his
rights to AstroBoy for a fraction of their worth:
Tezuka's embrace of the television medium, from the 1960s onward, also turned out to be a trap - not merely for himself, but for generations of anime artists. What is referred to somewhat discreetly by industry insiders as "the curse of Osamu" goes something like this: In the early 60's, when Japanese television first began broadcasting anime series, Tezuka was the leading artist. Producers naturally sought his work, and Tezuka set the price at an absurdly low (roughly) $3,000 per episode - which would have been significantly less in real value forty-odd years ago.
The result was, and is, that no one could ask for a higher price. Tezuka, already from a privileged background and having established himself as the leading manga and anime artist of his era, was able to forge ahead, dominating the Japanese airwaves with his titles while competing studios dropped out of sight. Essentially, Tezuka was dumping, selling his episodes for cheap to keep others out. ("Japanamerica" 47)
55 With this deal in place, Tezuka was able to dictate what made it to Japanese television screens simply by outbidding his competitors. In so doing, he set the precedent for the look and feel of anime, as well as the subject matter. AstroBoy and Ribon no Kishi are widely credited with igniting anime's fascination with both robots and characters of shifting gender identity:
When you ask a Japanese robot engineer why he decided to work in this area, he almost always answers that being a kid, he watched the cartoon Testuwan Atom on TV. This character was invented in 1951 by the famous cartoonist Tezuka Osamu. It is a small infant-like robot equipped with an "atomic heart" that defends humanity against various threats often coming from outer space. It can be considered as the primary ancestor of most of the friendly artificial autonomous creatures, both imaginary and real, invented in Japan since then. (Kaplan 2)
[Ribon no Kishi] is considered a landmark work, which offered a hard look at gender issues and was enjoyable fiction at the same time. The protagonist is a princess who has both a boy and a girl persona because of an angel's mistake. This was a very popular series, and the writer produced three sequels and an adaptation over the years.. .Tezuka created many more shojo manga, supported this art form in the 50's and 60's and contributed to its growth. (Toku, "Shoujo" 19)
Tezuka's success allowed him the freedom to dominate the airwaves at a time when anime was still new. His character designs, which looked neither Japanese nor
Causasian so much as fantastical, became the industry standard against which others were measured. Might we not attribute the appearance of a majority of anime characters to his inescapable influence - the influence, that is, of an otaku?
Jonathan Lethem says that,
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying
56 oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. ("Plagiarism" par. 12)
This is clearly true of Tezuka, who adopted Disney as his inspiration and then exceeded him - going far beyond short- or feature-length animations and establishing storylines that arced across multiple episodes of multiple television series, such as
Atom's struggle to understand humanity or Kimba's search for his parents. Like
Evan, the convention attendee who prided himself on his knowledge of Japan, Tezuka was a genuinely transcultural figure who invested long hours in studying American comic art at a time when it, too, was changing forever. But despite Disney's influence, we cannot call Tezuka's works wholly American: they remained Japanese despite maintaining the trappings of Western culture in the form of body shapes and facial designs, much as Avatar: The Last Airbender remained American despite its strenuous efforts to emulate anime. Indeed, the series was accepted by the network for this trait:
One thing that stands out about "Avatar".. .is that it is not Japanese. Nickelodeon calls the cartoon "Asian influenced," but it is the brainchild of Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, American graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design who are both veteran animators of the network series "Family Guy" and "King of the Hill." In 2002, Nickelodeon was in the market for an action-adventure cartoon, having commissioned a few anime-inspired pilots that didn't go anywhere, and rejected a few Japanese series as either too derivative or too mature for the Nick audience. Enter Mr. Konietzko and Mr. DiMartino. (Laswell, "Kung-fu" par. 3)
So, while AstroBoy and Sailor Moon required translation at both the literal and cultural levels to become acceptable or palatable to American audiences, Avatar translated its Western sensibilities into an "anime style," then accentuated the series
57 with Asian signifiers like calligraphy and architecture to boost the sense of
authenticity - although not to, as Said says, "some great original." Avatar is set not in one Asian country but in all Asian countries, not in one historical period but in a mythic, unreachable fantasy of the past, not during one conflict but during an intersection of metaphors for Japan's Co-Prosperity sphere, the suppression of
Tibetan culture by the Chinese, and the eradication of native Inuit or even Ainu from their lands.
Both Sailor Moon and Avatar are engaged in acts of cultural cosplay, much
like Watanabe's Dutch Nihongo-phile or counterfeit Portuguese priest. This practise
of assuming another culture's identity and adopting its trappings lies not necessarily
in a self-loathing or self-Orientalizing, but in the roots of anime and fan culture: in
Tezuka's loving reproduction of Disney's works. Like Tezuka, Konietzko and
DiMartino studied the works of Watanabe and Miyazaki, then did their best to reproduce a fantasy of not-Asia that was inspired by and cobbled together from the works of others: a mash-up, a re-mix, a fan-craft, a tribute. Who exactly owns these
tributes is the subject of the next chapter.
Ownership, Authority, and the Body: Does Anti-Fanfic Sentiment Reflect Post-human Anxiety?
"I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation." - Helene Cixous
58 Thanks to the Internet, mainstream media has slowly awakened to the existence of fan practices that were once relegated to convention halls and fanzines, such as fanfiction and fanart. While most of the media attention remains playfully spiteful, a few copyright holders have spoken out vehemently against fanfic writers. Despite their small number, their complaints are many. Primarily, prose fiction authors like Robin
Hobb and Lee Goldberg argue that fanfiction writers are "stealing" their original characters when writing their own stories. They frequently liken fanfiction and the violation of copyright and intellectual property law to physical theft, or to a physical -
- perhaps even sexual ~ assault on characters who feel like friends and family. These critiques surround fan involvement with and interpretation of ownership, authority, and the body.
Bodies and their owners, creators, or authors, as well as the question of who
"holds the rights" to them, frequently arise in cyberpunk science fiction. Films like
Blade Runner and The Matrix feature plotlines wherein villainous characters — be they human, mechanical, or commercial — exploit the bodies and talents of post- human characters like replicants and cyborgs based on the precept that they "own" those bodies through authorship. In Blade Runner, genetic engineers Eldon Tyrell and
J.F. Sebastian "wrote" or "coded" the replicants, maintaining control for themselves by shortening the replicants' lifespan (and shrinking the number of possible copies),
59 thus allowing their creations a limited amount of autonomy. Similarly, the sentient machines in The Matrix invert the paradigm by "growing" humans in tanks to power their expanding empire, then keeping them forever enclosed in uterine tanks.
Japanese anime has similar stories of corporate rights-holders exerting influence over the bodies they created: the main character of Mamoru Oshii's film Ghost in the Shell worries that once she quits her government job, her government-funded cyborg body and all the memories it has accumulated will be taken from her. In each of these cases, the "authors" exert a frightening amount of control over their creations in a manner that impinges on their presumed humanity, having asserted private ownership and authorship of a specific body. "Unauthor-ized" use of this body becomes criminal.
Of course, the writing of the body and the depiction of female subjectivity through writing has long been a tenet of feminism. Cixous exhorted women to
"Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it." ("Laugh"
309). Haraway later claimed writing as the premiere technology for cyborgs in her
"ironic political myth" of a new feminist subjectivity based on affinity, rather than identity. The affinity-based communities Haraway described have migrated online, often in the form of fandom circles, whose crafts are frequently concerned with the body and who owns it, as well as the discovery of sexuality through depictions of that body. The goal of this paper is to compare these real and fictional notions of ownership and authorship and their impact on the body — both the way
(predominantly female) fanfiction writers relate to real and virtual bodies, and how
60 bodies are portrayed in fictional works, specifically Japanese animation. Along the way, we shall see how the market for Japanese anime and manga has created a space for fans. This space includes their interpretation (and possible violation) of copyright and intellectual property law, as well as their rights to their readings of the text, and their practice of copying commercially-licensed characters and settings. In what ways are the anxieties and ethical concerns surrounding the post-human body and the post- author fandom similar?
The Post-Human Body
Examples of the post-human body abound within popular culture narratives, and they have been a staple of science fiction. Whether rendered post-human by genetic engineering, mechanical augmentation, or psychological advancement, these characters often form the crux of stories set in uncertain, dystopian futures. Japanese anime enjoys examining the cyborg body in particular. Theorist Toshiya Ueno has said that
"It is well-known that, especially in Japanese animation, women are figured in very specific ways, and the theme of the merging of women with technology is the most visible one. In much of Japanese animation, female characters are numerous and frequently supposed to possess special abilities of being more adjustable to machines and technologies. "("Shock" 234)
In her liberatory "Manifesto for Cyborgs," Donna Haraway defines the cyborg as "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. "(65) As she reminds us, the first creature to be
61 referred to as a cyborg was a white lab rat from New York's Rockland State Hospital
with an osmotic pump grafted to its tail. ("Symbionts" xi) Since the 1950's,
organic/synthetic composites have become more common in medicine: surgeons can
insert replacement hips, knees, or jaws; pacemakers assist the human heart with
rhythm. Similarly, depictions of cyborgs and post-humans have increased in popular
culture. And although Haraway writes of the female cyborg body as one that has gone beyond the limits of binarist thinking about gender, age, class, or ethnicity, other
critics remain wary of the promise of cyborg life. In particular, Balsamo notes that
"As a cyborg, simultaneously discursive and material, the female body is the site at
which we can witness the struggle between systems of social order."1 It has yet to go beyond the material, and thus remains "identified by its reproductive responsibilities
and sexual connections to men."(Balsamo, 1995, 39)
These issues of cyborg reproduction, sexuality, and power are frequently played out in Japanese animation, or "anime." Although the definition of anime is
continually changing as non-Japanese cultures appropriate its tropes and traditions
and as the technical production of the animation itself spans across media and
international borders, the term "anime" most commonly refers to animation from
Japan, in either cinematic or serial televised format, often with themes and content unexplored in Western "cartoons" intended for children. This is not to say that anime
does not exist for Japanese children - it is as much a staple of their media diet as
"cartoons" are for Western children. But in addition to programming targeted at
62 children, the anime spectrum contains titles as broad in focus as the rest of live-action commercial television: comedies, dramas, and romances intended for a range of ages.
Because anime appeals to adults as well as youths, and because both the gray-legal
"fansub" market (discussed later) and the for-profit licensed market for anime in
English translation has increased, anime has become a more frequent subject of critical analysis. Like fan studies, anime criticism sits at the intersection of multiple fields: film theory, Asisan studies, technical innovation, cultural studies, translation studies, media theory, economics, and design. Like fan studies specialists or "aca- fen," anime critics often begin as connoisseurs of the artform. This paper attempts to connect both anime criticism and fan studies within the figure of the fan and the cyborg.
Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Serial Experiments Lain involve women who merge with technology at the bodily level, and whose relationship with high technology — often dictated by fathers or male employers or other patriarchal authorities — leads them to question their reproductive potential as a path to wholeness and humanity. These women are each aware of "copies" or
"clones" of themselves, and all three must resolve the conflict of identity within themselves that meeting their uncanny — sometimes mechanized ~ double creates.
The tensions at play in this conflict — reproduction, authority, and identity ~ closely mirror those in the discussion of "original" or "canon" texts and fanfiction. However, for now we must further explore the three titles mentioned above.
63 Of the three, Mamoru Oshii's 1995 film Ghost in the Shell is the one written about most frequently. Oshii adapted the story from a popular manga (graphic novel) by Masamune Shirow. Napier describes the film as an "exploration of the possibilities of transcending individual and corporeal identity." ("Akira" 104) It revolves around
Motoko Kusanagi, a powerful female cyborg who works for "Section 9," a fictional anti-terrorist organization within Japan's government in the year 2029. In the film,
Kusanagi must track down an elusive hacker named "The Puppetmaster." This quest occurs alongside Kusanagi's continuing ruminations regarding her existence as a cyborg, wherein she questions her personal uniqueness and that of her memories.
When she does eventually find the Puppetmaster, she discovers that he is not a human but a powerful sentient intelligence born on the internet as part of an espionage program. The Puppetmaster then asks her to "merge" with him so that they both might achieve a fuller sense of identity by reproducing their "offspring" into the net.
She agrees, then uploads and shares her consciousness with the Puppetmaster while a fragment of herself remains in her cybernetic "shell." The film highlights this as an act of reproduction ~ Kusanagi's original cyborg body, once a powerful signifier of adult femininity with its assorted curves, is destroyed by her own government and replaced by a child-sized version that her partner buys on the black market.
Critics vary on whether Kusanagi's decision to leave her body behind and join the Puppetmaster is truly an act of cyborg feminism as described by Haraway, or whether the film undermines any potential radical message by surrendering to the
64 metanarrative of heterosexual reproduction. Borrowing from Balsamo, Silvio has said that
The evocation of this conventional trope of reproduction, the female body as the bearer of life, profoundly qualifies the subversive potential of the film's ending by transforming Kusanagi's radically re-coded and resistant cyborg body into a maternal body, a vehicle for the production of offspring. Because this final scene is entirely packaged within the familiar rhetoric of this trope, it is difficult for the audience not to think of Kusanagi as anything other than a "mother," a maternal figure whose role is ultimately synonymous with her corporeality. (Silvio par. 29)
Conversely, Ruh has argued that: "Although [Kusanagi] was powerful, she was not powerful for herself, but rather a pawn of the government and bureaucracy. Kusanagi was confined by the technology of the body, but through the technology of the Puppet
Master she is able to slip the shackles of her imprisonment." ("Stray Dog" 139)
Bolton attempts to step outside these two positions by saying that
treating Kusanagi as a living subject clearly misses the ways in which her body will always fall inside quotation marks; she is a virtual or performed subject that is both unreal and more than real from the start. As a performed medium, anime must be approached not just as a generic category of social text but also on its own aesthetic terms. ("Wooden" 737)
All of these arguments centre on and attempt to define Kusanagi's relationship to the patriarchal forces at work in her life, specifically the forces that hold control over her cyborg body. These exist on both the real and fictional realms. Bolton writes of Kusanagi in the context of Japanese puppet theatre, categorizing all anime characters as the puppets of their animator-puppetmasters, whereas Silvio and Ruh
65 focus on her treatment at the hands of her fictional employers and engineers, the men
who pay and build her body "to perform work about which one has no choice."
("Stray Dog" 138) However, while the aforementioned analyses of Kusanagi's body
examine it as a cybernetic organism, none of them focuses on that body as a
commercial property. Ruh's analysis comes closest, saying that while "Kusanagi
'inhabits' her body, it belongs to the government, thereby ensuring her obedience."
(137) He sees Kusanagi's rejection of her body as a rejection of her government's
control and observation.
However, one of the film's more lyrical scenes may shed light on another
interpretation. In it, Kusanagi sees a copy of herself in an office window. Napier
describes this copy as "a presumably human woman who appears to be a double of
Kusanagi herself." ("Akira" 106) The scene takes place as part of a long montage
wherein Kusanagi tours her city. Her sudden recognition of her double occurs after
she observes a group of mannequins in a shop window. Kusanagi only meets her
double while literally window-shopping in a highly-commercialized context. This
scene highlights her body as a commodity which can be copied and sold for various purposes. Which is the original? Is Kusanagi's double a human, or simply another
cyborg who has purchased a similar body and face? Who owns the right to that body
and its image? Certainly not Kusanagi — the film repeatedly stresses that if Kusanagi
loses her job or decides to quit, she will have to forfeit that body. In short, Kusanagi holds the right to neither her body nor its signifiers ~ she has no control over the
66 meanings that intersect within it. Her only control over that body is to destroy or
abandon it.
Similarly, Rei Ayanami in Neon Genesis Evangelion can only enact a form of
agency over her body by destroying herself. Like Kusanagi, Rei is conscious of her
identity as a copy, although the series is unclear whether she knows who she is a
clone of or if she is indeed a clone of a human being. Like Kusanagi, Rei has a close
relationship to technology. She is the pilot of a giant humanoid robot called the
Evangelion. Her body is a particularly voluptuous vision of a fourteen-year-old girl's,
and unlike any of the series' other human characters, she has blue hair and red eyes
that signify her Other-ness. In addition, Rei claims that she is a "girl who doesn't bleed," hinting at a possible inability to reproduce. So, while Rei cannot have her own
children, she is fully conscious of her identity as one of a series which might be
endlessly reproduced and for which there may be no true original.
At several points throughout the series, Rei questions her humanity and her
identity, often during moments when she has the opportunity to end her own life.
During an intense interrogation sequence near the end of the series, Rei comments
that she is happy only because she wants death: "I want despair. I want to disappear
into nothingness. But he won't let me disappear into nothingness." ("Neon") Here,
the "he" is Gendo Ikari, commander of NERV, the organization for whom Rei works
as a pilot. The series makes clear that Gendo is a callous, unfeeling villain from the
2 Emphasis mine. first episode, but his relationship with Rei seems particularly cruel: we learn that she
may be a clone of his dead wife, and that his only interest in her is as a means for him
to bring about the end of the world. Throughout the television series, Gendo seems to
care for Rei's well-being (saving her life) or to be content with using her as a pawn
(such as when he nearly deploys an injured Rei to pilot the Evangelion, thereby
causing his reluctant son to volunteer for the job). In each case, Gendo takes on the
role of father, commander, employer, and possibly lover (he observes Rei naked and
takes her on trips with him), all situations in which he maintains control and power.
Moreover, Gendo is fully aware of Rei's status as a clone: after his wife's death, we
see him leading a very young Rei around his workplace, and in a flashback we learn
that Gendo had wanted to name his daughter Rei, were his wife pregnant with a girl.
Within the scope of the television series, we see Rei claim her agency very
little. One of her fellow pilots even accuses her of being a "robot," "wind-up doll" and
"unthinking, emotionless puppet" who will blindly follow orders. However, the
accusation is to some extent false. Rei frequently disobeys orders if given the chance
to end her own life — at one point she even self-destructs her Evangelion to save the
other pilots, despite direct orders not to. During one desperate attempt to defeat an
enemy, Rei acknowledges her understanding that she is a clone, saying "If I die, I can be replaced." (Once cloned again, she says: "I think I am the third.")
Similarly, during the End of Evangelion film, Rei disobeys Gendo's orders in
order to assist the main character, Shinji. During a pivotal scene, Gendo reaches
68 inside Rei's body with his bare hand ~ her body is in an advanced state of decay, and her skin is permeable ~ in order to transmit to her an embryonic Angel and bring about the apocalypse and rejoin his dead wife. Hearing Shinji's screams for help, Rei snaps Gendo's hand off at the wrist, joins with yet another Angel, and grows in size and power to help Shinji as Gendo shouts in pain and protest. She plainly informs him that she is "not a puppet [for him to control]," and also "not [like] him." ("End of *
Evangelion")
Like Kusanagi, Rei chooses her own path at the expense of her body, then gains a much stronger and more powerful — one might even say divine ~ body in exchange. She then uses her new form to assist Shinji and express her feelings to him. In defying Gendo, she becomes a hybrid who evolves beyond her simple clone double ~ a cyborg of sorts who carries multiple identities within one body. This body takes on different shapes and planes of existence throughout the film ~ Rei, a human- shaped Angel named Kaworu, Shinji's mother, a ghostly vision of Rei herself. Rei thus regains the "right to copy" her body by fundamentally changing the nature of that body and re-purposing it. This reflects her growing ability to copy herself infinitely on a psychic or spiritual level and appear as a sort of ghost or harbinger of death for the other characters ~ a plot point that cyberpunk science fiction author William
Gibson may have adapted and reversed for his novel All Tomorrow's Parties, in
3 Please note that there are subtle differences between the subtitled translation and the English- language dialogue, here. The English-language dialogue has been bracketed off.
69 which a holographic singer named Rei uses fabrication units to "print" multiple
copies of herself into physical existence.
Other authors have commented on Rei's unique post-human subjectivity.
Orbaugh mentions Rei's cloned status in the context of the series' other female
characters:
Shinji's mother has been fused with the inorganic material of the EVA suit—as well as being cloned to produce Rei—and Ritsuko's mother has been fused with the MAGI computer system. It is noteworthy that, in every case, it is a woman whose complete intercorporation with the inorganic has produced the weapons powerful enough to resist the angels. (Orbaugh 442)
Ortega also examines the phenomenon of Rei's "inter-corporation" and bodily mergers during her analysis of End of Evangelion: "she also becomes a symbol of
internalized sexuality, onanism, oedipal desire, and stagnation, a cipher for the refusal
and/or inability to individuate sexually and physically, as well as the latent potential
to do so." (Ortega 227) Like Bolton, Napier draws a parallel between animated
characters and puppets, then cautions against reading too much liberation into the
series' apocalyptic ending: "even when we think we can control the reality around us, we are actually at its mercy, cartoon characters in the hands of the fates or the
animators. The happy ending that we see is one ending but, as the series makes clear,
it is only one of many possible endings." (Napier, "Machines" 430) Napier's reading
again highlights the theme of the double. This particular theme within the screenplay reflects the larger reality of the Evangelion franchise as a whole: it has existed as an
70 animated television series, two feature films, two different graphic novel series, multiple videogames, and has since been "re-built" as a series of six films with new animation but the same director. Much like fan-created materials such as fanfiction, doujinshi (fan comics) or even hand-painted models, the "canonical" franchise has copied and reproduced Rei's image (while under the protection of an official license and copyright). As a commercial property, Rei remains a clone, eternally and multiply doubled.
In defining the cyborg, Haraway mentions both doubling and reproduction as key to cyborg identity, saying "cyborgs have more to with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and most birthing.. .We require regeneration, not rebirth..." ("Manifesto" 100) She likens the cyborg to a salamander, which can regenerate after injury. She also privileges writing as the an act of cyborg reproduction and resistance: "Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other." ("Manifesto" 94) The third character we examine here both doubles or regenerates herself and uses the technology of writing to take charge of her existence.
The title character of Serial Experiments Lain is a shy adolescent girl who slowly becomes more interested in a virtual world called "the Wired" when she receives email from a classmate who recently committed suicide. When Lain uses this mysterious email as an opportunity to make friends, she learns that multiple versions
71 of herself have appeared both on "the Wired" and in the "real" world. Lain's doubles have interacted with others, causing trouble. This is a classic example of the uncanny double4 — we learn that Lain has suppressed various parts of her personality that make a disturbing return to her via the Wired, forcing Lain to acknowledge the reality of her existence as a "goddess" of the Wired. After a discussion with her father about her true origins, Lain understands her power over the Wired. She uses her newfound strength and cleverness to overthrow an oppressive force within the Wired, but in claiming her power she — like Kusanagi and Rei ~ must erase her physical body. Like
Kusanagi, Lain achieves an ubiquitous, omniscient presence within the Wired. This new subjectivity affords her god-like powers of observation and control, and with her abilities she can constantly watch over her friends and family, but at the expense of ever joining them. In addition, she must destroy the memories that others have of her.
Napier characterizes the movement thusly:
The erasure of memory is seen here ironically as comforting, a way to rewrite an unhappy history—much as Japanese textbooks have erased certain episodes of the Pacific War—but underneath the irony is a tragedy of a child's non-existence. The ubiquitous still shots of a nude Lain in fetal position surrounded by computer wires and components suggest her total takeover by the machine. ("Machines" 432)
4 Here I am relying on Freud's essay on "The Uncanny," wherein he describes the phenomenon of the double at length. Freud in turn relies on Schelling: "'Unheimlich' is the name for everything that out to have remained.. .secret and hidden but has come to light." .
72 As we have seen, all three of the women examined here must undergo a process of self-discovery that involves their confrontation with a kind of double ~ be it a factory-floor reproduction of a cyborg body, a clone, or an uncanny return of elements of the subconscious ~ that ends with their rejection of the physical body and new powers to re-write their existence. Although the prospect of this double may seem frightening or demoralizing at first, each of them finds a way to transcend the control that their creators and employers have over the reproduction of that double. In
Kusanagi and Lain's case, this occurs as the result of a deepening relationship with high technology. For Rei, it means a new edit to her very genetic code, rather than the simple death of the physical body. In addition, this evolution involves a rejection of patriarchal control: they overthrow government, employer, and paternal authority over the body and the rights to its reproductions and copies by editing themselves as they see fit.
Like Haraway's cyborgs who are suspicious of traditional reproduction, these women have no apparent desire to give birth. Instead, they wish to alter their very selves while maintaining a kernel of identity. Although the titles in question frequently code them as mothers or goddesses, we never see their offspring. Instead, we meet their new, more empowered selves who remain recognizable-but-different, often with the ability to be in multiple places at once, endlessly copied, their subjectivity shared this time on their own terms rather than at the behest of authority figures who claimed ownership and control based on creation. On the one hand, these stories can be read as a classic adolescent romance narrative ~ the characters go on
73 quests to find their identity by separating from parental authority. But in these characters we might also find a metaphor for fan activities online, and an understanding of why some find those activities so troubling.
The Post-Author Fandom
While defining postmodern anxieties regarding high technology, Bukatman writes: "There has arisen a cultural crisis of visibility and control over a new electronically defined reality." (1) Although he does not mention the Internet explicitly, his words resonate for the unique predicament that the Internet has helped introduce regarding fandom, copyright, and authorship. In recent years, academics have yielded greater attention to the phenomenon of fan-created materials like fanfiction, fanvids, and fanart. Self-proclaimed "aca-fans" ~ academics who also engage in fan practices or watch from afar ~ have ascribed various metaphors to these activities, some of which have to do with the unique embodiment of fictional characters in media. Some prose fiction authors simply request that fanfiction not be written using their characters, while other authors seem untroubled by fan practices.
The creators and license-holders who claim to dislike fan-crafts (and fanfiction in particular) also use embodied language when describing what they see as not just illegal, but morally and ethically reprehensible, even harmful. Part of their critique is a clear indictment of what their (predominantly female) fans find arousing, and thus a criticism of their fans' sexuality and performativity online. This is another example of
74 the female body intersecting with technology to create a discourse of authority, sexuality, and rebellion.
Two prose fiction writers who have made their unfavorable opinions on the matter known are Robin Hobb and Lee Goldberg. Both of them use embodied, sexualized language to describe their stance on fanfiction and how it uses ~ or, to their way of thinking, abuses ~ characters. In a weblog post that has since been taken down, fantasy author Robin Hobb described her disagreement with fanfiction as a battle between fan and author, wherein the fan misinterprets or attempts to "fix" what the author has done "wrong." In addition, Hobb used embodied language to describe what she sees as the inevitably-sexual nature of fanfiction, and habits which she believes to be unhealthy.
Every fan fiction I've read to date, based on my world or any other writer's world, had focused on changing the writer's careful work to suit the foible of the fan writer. Romances are invented, gender identities changed, fetishes indulged and endings are altered. It's not flattery. To me, it is the fan fiction writer saying, "Look, the original author really screwed up the story, so I'm going to fix it. Here is how it should have gone." At the extreme low end of the spectrum, fan fiction becomes personal masturbation fantasy in which the fan reader is interacting with the writer's character. That isn't healthy for anyone.
She codes fanfiction as both perverse and insulting, because it interferes with the author's original intent. This makes a moral claim on authority based on creation. In essence, Hobb has claimed parentage of her fiction, as though her characters were her children that she did not wish to play with others that she had not previously approved of. Taken to its logical conclusion, Hobb's preference would remove her
75 work (and any fiction work) from the gaze of literary interpretation and criticism, as they might threaten the work with analysis of subtext and other unintended meanings in the way that fanfiction has been praised with doing.
Similarly, author Lee Goldberg's criticism of fanfiction seems largely to do with the alleged perversity of its writers and readers, and their interference with another author's characters, as well as the violation of copyright and intellectual property law. Goldberg actually pays very close attention to the fanfiction community online, tracking their movements and commenting on emails and comments to his own website. In response to one such email, he writes:
Call me crazy, but I think there are lots of ways you can discover and explore your sexuality without taking characters you didn't create or own, writing stories about them, and publishing them on the web without the author's permission. It's one thing to write fanfic for yourself to fantastize about or as a writing exercise, it's another when you publish and/or post the stories on the web without the original authors' consent.
I believe it's theoretically possible that women will still discover that they are lesbians without writing and publishing/posting stories about Buffy and Xena exploring the joys of sapphic love together...and that men might continue to discover their gay selves without writing and publishing/posting stories about Harry Potter giving Ron blowjobs... (par. 8,9)
Like Hobb, Goldberg focuses on the sexual fetishization of commercially-licensed, fictional characters, as well as the lack of consent to use or creatively re-purpose them. This thinking treats the characters as physical beings who can be stolen or kidnapped by perverse fanfiction writers for their own nefarious purposes.
76 To think of a fictional character as analogous to an embodied subject,
especially to an author's child, is nothing new. Gilbert says
...the patriarchal notion that the writer "fathers" his text just as God fathered the world is and has been all-pervasive in Western literary civilization, so much so that, as Edward Said has shown, the metaphor is built into the very word, author, with which the writer, deity, and pater familias are identified. ("Paternity" 487)
This very concept of "author-ity" allows power and control for the original creator ~ the parent — over the text, but fans frequently subvert this authority through their readings of the text. In their hands, fictional characters become rebellious children who escape kid flout the author's parental authority. Or, to extend the metaphor into the realm of the posthuman, these characters become subject to what Asimov termed
"the Frankenstein syndrome," or the fear that "any artificially created humanoid will necessarily turn against his creator at some point." (Kaplan 11)
Since the Wollstonecraft-Shelley novel from which Asimov's idea derives its name, science fiction narratives have continually examined this fear of rebellion. This fear is etched into the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition of literature ~ in Blade
Runner, Tyrell recites verses from Paradise Lost when referring to the angry replicant
Roy Beatty, automatically characterizing their relationship as that between a god and his flawed, subjugated, even evil creation. The fear and disgust expressed by Hobb,
Goldberg, and other prose fiction authors about fanfiction is nothing more than another iteration of a deep-seeded cultural assertion about the nature of authority, originality, and control, especially control over bodies. Like Frankenstein horrified by
77 the Creature's intelligence, cunning, and violence, these authors recoil from the sheer potential offered by their fictional creations, or as Foucault has termed it, the "many infinite resources available for the creations of discourse" within "an author's fertility." ("Discourse" 155) Once their creatures escape into the wilderness of the
Internet, where they may encounter families of fans and participate in new languages, they may make an uncanny return of their own, changed from their travels into something the author no longer recognizes as her own creation. Here, the author's character may become what Halberstam calls a "totalizing monster," a figure whose monstrosity "allows for a whole range of specific monstrosities," such as other sexualities, other desires, other ethnicities or classes or histories "to coalesce in the same form." ("Skin" 29)
Informed by the multiple perspectives available in the fan community, the author's original "property" becomes a poshuman subject unto itself, like
Frankenstein's Creature composed of disparate parts: "an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction." (Hayles, "Posthuman" 3) In short, the discursive field of fandom allows fictional characters to become cyborgs, creatures of what Haraway later called "life itself,' with its temporalities embedded in communications enhancement and system redesign." (Haraway, "Modest" 14) This cyborgification of the fictional character means the separation of author and character, parent and child, as unsettling and uncanny as the posthuman fantasy of an ectogenetic fetus grown outside the womb, as in The Matrix. If the cyborg is, as
78 Haraway said, "suspicious of most birthing," then fan practices can be read as cyborg reproduction via writing, not unlike the proliferation of multiple selves by Kusanagi,
Rei, and Lain.
This is not to say that fan reproductions occur without human sentiment or affection, nor are they always regarded with such skepticism or disgust. Japanese fan practices enjoy key differences from their English-language counterparts. Despite the rigor of Japanese copyright law, some fans engage in flagrant violations that — unlike the practices of most English-language fans online ~ actually earn them some money.
Conventions like Comic Market allow doujinshi — fan-produced manga based on commercially-licensed characters — artists to gather and sell their wares for profit ~ a practice largely unheard of and even frowned upon in English-language fandom.
Some of these doujinshi eventually arrive in the same bookstores as the "canonical" manga title. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the best-known manga-ka started in the gray-legal doujinshi arena, including the enormously successful manga circle
CLAMP. Since their days as unlicensed artists re-mixing others' work, CLAMP's original manga titles have gone on to be animated. The former doujinshi artists' work is now so successful as to have its own doujinshi:
During our conversation, I reached into my backpack to show her the three Clamp dojin titles I'd bought at K-Books. Her handlers — a few managers and a guy from legal — winced and exchanged worried looks. But Ohkawa burst into a delighted laugh and then flipped through Sakura Remix and Hacker Chobits. "Any popular manga is going to have this treatment done," she told me. "It is by people who are truly in love with the work, and you have to respect that."
79 So, I asked, is Hacker Chobits actually good for the real Chobits?
She paused. "I think it's good because they are expressing love for the work. And, of course, we come from the dojinshi world, so I understand this." Fans even sometimes send her their dojinshi, and what she admires about these works is the dedication and the innovation they show. "There is originality here. There are new stories. It's not a copy." (Pink "Manga" 2007)
While Ohkawa's position may not represent the feeling among manga-ka as a whole, and while her opinion seems to differ from that of her publishing and legal representatives, it does reflect a certain reality within the anime and manga market that allows for fan distribution. In fact, the market for US-licensed anime in the 1980s and 1990s began with fans distributing VHS tapes among themselves, and attempts by anime studios and distributors to crack American markets relied largely on their involvement with these fans who had already engaged in a kind of copyright infringement.
Fans used the introduction of the videocassette recorder (VCR) to share raw untranslated anime with others, as a slew of fantastic imagery and incomprehensible language bombarded audiences at the back of science fiction conventions. The birth of fan distribution followed, releasing anime shows upon a vast underground network of fans throughout the country. By 1990, fans started to 'fansub', or to translate and subtitle anime videos. Many fans started anime companies, becoming the industry leaders of today. ("Cultural Sinks" 282)
This almost Harawayan blurring of boundaries between producer and consumer is key to what Napier identifies as key to anime fandom's appeal among
Western audiences: "As Western thought turns away from Cartesian reality to embrace the uncertainties and flexibilities of a world of a world with fewer and fewer
80 master narratives, Japanese culture, with its tolerance of ambiguity and ephemerality, might be a particularly apt vehicle with which to confront the complexities of the
current period." (Napier, "Impressionism" 214) But where does this leave us? At
what point do the concerns of the post-human body and the post-author fandom meet?
In the age of the Internet, both issues involve the topography of cyberspace, "an erotic
space, a space defined by the flow of desire and the circumvention of (the poaching upon) instrumental, capitalist, space." (Bukatman 310) Moreover, they are linked to
the discourse surrounding ownership, authorship, and the body, specifically the
female body, which "is no abstract notion (as the battle for reproductive rights amply
demonstrates) and is more evidently bound into a system of power relations."
(Bukatman 314) These power relations are frequently bound up in notions of both
authorship and property, both of which establish meaning by pre-supposing users,
consumers, or participants who remain firmly planted on the other side of a
discursively- and legally-produced but little-enforced "property line" - the line
separating those who possess "author-ity" from those who do not As Haraway says:
"Only some of the necessary "writers" have the semiotic status of "authors" for any
"text," (Haraway, "Modest" 7) because "Property is the kind of relationality that poses as the-thing-in-itself, the commodity, the thing outside relationships, the thing that can be exhaustively measured, mapped, owned, appropriated, disposed."
The intersection becomes clearest if we accept the body as a text, and,
implicitly, the text as a body, for "a literary text is not only speech made quite
literally embodied, but also power mysteriously made manifest, made flesh." (Gilbert,
81 "Paternity" 488) The body is a discursive crossroads formed and coded by multiple authors and perspectives on both the real and figurative levels. Every child is a collaborative work whose (genetic) code was written by two individuals (and whose psychological programming is the product of an unknown number of contributors), and adults slowly take on the ability to "edit" speech, appearance, and mannerisms for various social contexts. The body and its associated values are similarly coded, interpreted, and otherwise made the subject and product of discourse. Cyberpunk fiction makes this reading of the body clear: the cyborgs that populate William
Gibson's novels or Mamoru Oshii's films are able to re-write their memories, modify their bodies, and treat themselves as works-in-progress. They are bodies of work that
"are not slaves to masterdiscourses but emerge at nodes where bodies, bodies of discourse, and discourses of bodies intersect to foreclose any easy distinction between actor and stage, between sender/receiver, channel, code, message, context."
(Halberstam and Livingston, "Introduction" 2)
At these nodes are both the cyborgified characters of fanfiction, and the cyborg authors who act as their puppetmasters. If the body is a text that can be read, it can also be copied, interpreted, edited, and re-written. This is the same for the fictional body, or the body that enacts fiction. The writing of the body, and the self- discovery of the body through writing, is a phenomenon that both Goldberg and Hobb
(but especially Goldberg) criticize within fanfiction. Drawing on performance theory to develop a metaphor for fan practices, Coppa writes: "Fan fiction's concern with bodies is often perceived as a problem or flaw, but performance is predicated on the
82 idea of bodies, rather than words, as the storytelling medium." ("Fan Fiction" 229)
The same may hold true for puppets, which Bolton links to animated characters — and the female cyborg Kusanagi in particular — via the tradition of Japanese puppet theatre through the use of voice, weight, and story:
But through analogy with the puppet theater, we can regard the words of the Puppet Master (itself a piece of code, a being of language) as a kind of michiyuki [lovers' suicide that brings transcendence], highlighting the power of words alone to bring about the pair's transformation. A moment after the Puppet Master finally finishes describing the merge, it is complete. Its speech has rewritten them both. (Bolton, "Wooden" 764)
This reading strongly resembles Haraway's hope for the cyborg to write herself into being and her claim that "Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs," and that cyborg politics is "a struggle for language." (Haraway, "Manifesto" 95) Bolton concludes his analogy by saying that viewing the cyborg Kusanagi requires a greater cyborgification of the viewer:
Unlike the live puppet theater, the animated language of Oshii's drama is so high tech that we require a prosthesis to see it, a projector, DVD player, or VCR.. .Every moment that we watch the artificial bodies of Oshii's celluloid cyborgs, the technologies of reproduction implicate us in the loop or the network of high-tech representation that is turning us into cyborgs ourselves. (767)
In short, fans of cyborgs do in some regard become cyborgs themselves. This is especially true of anime fans who rely on their Internet connections — both mechanical and interpersonal — to scavenge the wilderness for new texts and new products. Writing is their "pre-eminent technology," as they engage in translation,
83 fansubbing, coding, and downloading. It is no less true for producers of fanfiction, who attempt to "mark the world" of the Internet not only through their bodies of prose but through their participation in affinity-based communities. Online fandom has become a discursive field within which to discover and enjoy both the physical and the written body, to answer Cixous' afore-mentioned call despite the fact that, as she so plainly pointed out, "Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women - female-sexed texts. That kind scares them." ("Laugh"
310) It is a place for new subjectivities, new bodies of work and new bodies at play, in infinite diversity. Like Kusanagi, Rei, and Lain, these fans can and do disregard
"author-ity" and continue copying, editing, and changing characters (and their bodies) to suit their pleasure and to stretch and define their freedom and potential within "the
Wired." But doing so requires the creation of another self, not merely an alias but an identity shaped by participation in community. Like Haraway's cyborg, this writer
(who may not have the semiotic status of "author") is unconcerned with origins or
"author-ity" and focuses instead on the joys of inhabiting a shared textual/virtual/imaginary space with like-minded people. Rei Ayanami articulates this cyborg subjectivity best, though her words are startlingly relevant for a fictional character constantly re-interpreted by both fans and license-holders: "I became myself by the instrumentality of the links and relationships between myself and others. I am formed by interaction with others. They create me as I create them."
But as with all "ironic political myths" that use the cyborg as a key metaphor, this particular narrative of fandom must question whether the fan-cyborg's position is
84 truly liberated. As Balsamo warns us regarding Haraway's cyborgs, fans cannot escape the materiality of the body or its associated politics. Success as fans does not mean material or financial success. It will not feed or clothe anyone, and it does little to end war or disease or to otherwise ameliorate global suffering. Unlike Motoko
Kusanagi, these cyborgs cannot stop crime. In fact, to choose cyborg subjectivity in this context is to choose an identity steeped in the potential for criminality, and an implicit splitting of the self into "real" and "virtual" personae.
And yet if the animated narratives above are any indication, this shift in identity and subjectivity is key to understanding humanity in "the present cultural moment, a moment that sees itself as science fiction." (Bukatman 6) In an era when bodies are endlessly observed and discussed, when state-sponsored surveillance is expected and when bodies win prizes for most weight lost and least space taken up, when official political discourse strives to divorce the body from words like "torture" while simultaneously pushing tortured bodies into a place beyond words, where the female body is judged not only for sexual desirability and reproductive potential but also for the possible religious, ethical, and political meanings behind the textile signifiers of clothing (both the burqa and the combat uniform), it is not surprising that legions of female fans all over the world rejoice in the rejection of the body by the likes of Japanese-animated women, and that they find pleasure in the performance of new identities online in order to subvert the relatively-unthreatening authority of a single author or even a faceless media corporation seemingly more concerned with digital piracy than the fictional lives of fictional characters. For if Kusanagi and Rei and Lain have done anything, it is to violate the copyright of their own existence, to become their own greatest fans and copy, edit, and share themselves, as Ohkawa put it, out of "dedication," "innovation," and "love." This ability to change the self and claim new agency and fresh identity is the dream of the cyborg, the fan, and the human. But sometimes changing the self can be deeply traumatic, even when the change is empowering. We look at this dichotomy in the next chapter.
86 "Getting Our Bodies Back: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fan Foresight, and Cognitive Narratology"
"Storytelling is basic to our species. It's one of the ways we parse our experience of the universe." — Teresa Nielsen Hayden
Fullmetal Alchemist is an ongoing 2001 manga by Hiromu Arakawa that has spawned
a fifty-one-episode televised anime series, two feature films, and multiple console
videogames5. Within the scope of this chapter, we are primarily concerned with the
anime series. The premise of the franchise is this: Edward and Alphonse Elric,
residents of an alternate "steampunk" universe where the science of alchemy eclipsed
physics, are the children of a famous alchemist named Hohenheim. Their father
leaves the boys and their mother behind early on, and does not return when the
mother dies of a long illness. The boys, gifted alchemists like their father, resolve to
try the forbidden in order to bring back their mother: a taboo alchemical art called
"human transmutation." Their attempt fails, and in the process Edward loses his left
leg, and his brother loses his entire body, to a null space between worlds called "The
Gate." Thinking quickly, Edward draws a "blood seal" inside an empty suit of armour
with his own blood, then bonds his brother's soul to the armour with alchemy -
5 In 2009, Bones began releasing a second anime series based on Arakawa's manga, called Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. This chapter examines the first series.
87 sacrificing his right arm to the Gate in order to do so. The boys spend the rest of the
series trying to right their mistake, and get their bodies back.
Toward that end, twelve-year-old Edward must become a State Alchemist, part of his country's military personnel. His goal is to find or create the Philosopher's
Stone, a material which he believes will allow him to skip alchemy's first rule: equivalent exchange. Equivalent exchange is a poetic term for the conservation of matter - as Edward later comments, he can only use the proper elements to create an object; a radio cannot become a tree, but a tree can become a sheaf of paper. In the anime timeline, Edward spends almost his entire adolescence in pursuit of the Stone, which he hopes will grant him enough power to regain his and his brother's physical bodies without having to sacrifice anything further. Various enemies and obstacles keep him from achieving his goal, and when he does finally retrieve his younger brother's human body from the Gate, he does so at terrible cost: he's exiled to the other side of The Gate, in a world that closely resembles Germany around the time of the Beer Hall Putsch, where alchemy is impossible and his only hope of entering his own world is to learn early rocketry.
Like many popular anime before it, Fullmetal Alchemist deals with issues of identity and the body, and aligns the power of narrative with the development of the body. Susan J. Napier has highlighted this theme in anime like Akira and other stories of "monstrous adolescence":
"Despair and a feeling of entrapment are emotions often associated with adolescence. They are also frequently emotions projected onto the adolescent body, an object that becomes the site of a welter of contradictory feelings, from tremulous hope to savage disappointment." (Napier, "Akira" 39)
88 Intent on further investigating this theme, I would like to attempt my own grafting of
disparate elements, and take an interdisciplinary approach to analysis of Fullmetal
Alchemist by invoking not only cyborg theory and fan studies (as in previous
chapters) but also science fiction studies and cognitive narratology. Both of these
latter disciplines are concerned, in different ways, with how participants create
narrative — as writers and thinkers predicting future events or trends, or as readers
and viewers engaged in a constant guessing game with the fictional story at hand.
Along the way, I shall excerpt scenes from fanfiction based on Fullmetal Alchemist
which predict bodily wholeness for the Elric brothers, often engaging in practises that
closely mirror science fiction writing in the process as they imagine potential ends for
the series or the impact of specific alchemic technology. In the end, I would like to
show how fans of the series have engaged in their own acts of human transmutation
(a different kind of forbidden art, perhaps), while simultaneously behaving in an
utterly human (which is to say, narrative) manner. In doing so, I hope to point out
how disciplines that might otherwise have little connection to fan studies - science
fiction studies and cognitive narratology - can find and engage with a younger and
more diverse population that is constantly generating new material for analysis.
My Brother, My Burden: Fullmetal Alchemist and Cyborg Reproduction
89 Throughout this chapter, I plan on examining Fullmetal Alchemist as a science fiction series. What follows is a close but limited reading of it as such. The series comprises fifty-one 22-minute episodes and an animated feature film, which makes any in-depth analysis a Herculean task. I will be focusing on specific elements within the series that illustrate its similarities to other science fiction texts, and examining their relevance to fan involvement.
Despite taking place in a world where alchemy has eclipsed physics,
Fullmetal Alchemist is primarily concerned with using science to solve problems.
This is one of the traits which sets it apart from other anime which fall more completely on the fantasy side of the genre spectrum, in that it shows alchemy as a dynamic system for which there can always be new discoveries based on reproducible results of experimentation, rather than a static system reliant on magical objects or phrases. Even the series' internal social logic confirms this — for example, State
Alchemists like Edward must continually demonstrate new techniques in order to maintain their certification and government funding, much as university scientists must do in the hopes of obtaining or keeping grants. Edward treats alchemy as science, and it offends and irritates him when a man posing as a religious leader passes off alchemically-produced products as miracles. Edward is also a staunch atheist, and regards human transmutation as more akin to cloning than anything else
(Edward doesn't believe in the existence of the soul, and offers up drops of his and his brother's blood in hopes of reproducing his mother's consciousness). Similarly, the series is concerned not with a battle between good and evil, as in other popular
90 fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series, but rather with the harmful use of alchemy as a tool, and whether alchemy, like other technologies, is ultimately beneficial to humanity. This theme, the use of technology, locates it more firmly on the science fiction (SF) side of the genre spectrum.
Approaching the series as science fictional allows us to use critical perspectives more traditionally associated with the genre when analyzing the series, and allows us to consider it in comparison with the other anime that share similar science-fictional stories of cyborg bodies. Fullmetal Alchemist certainly shares some easily-recognizable themes with Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley's Frankenstein, such as the responsibility scientists have for their creations, piecemeal bodies and "forbidden" techniques which, not unlike the Elric brothers' attempts at human transmutation, can resurrect the dead. Several of the series' early episodes deal with the ethics of human and animal testing, and reproduce and re-mix familiar "mad scientist" plots about the temptation among brilliant professionals to continue innovating at the expense of human life. These depraved alchemists routinely compare themselves to Edward, chiding him for his seeming hypocrisy - "We're the same, aren't we?" one asks, after having used human transmutation to fuse his four-year-old daughter and her beloved pet dog into a "talking chimera." Each case offers Edward the opportunity to re- consider the impact of his childhood hubris, as well as tantalizing glimpses at the truth behind the Philosopher's Stone. The Stone itself is another example of "mad science": it can only be created at the expense of hundreds of human lives, often
91 inmates kept in secret military prisons or the colonized tribesmen known as
"Ishbalans," a nation of exiled refugees whose religion opposes alchemy.
The series also shares the cyberpunk concern with the relationship between
the body and technology, and its implications for identity. At one point during the
series, Alphonse even doubts his humanity and wonders if his memories of life before
being bonded to the armour are fabrications, much like the replicants in Ridley
Scott's seminal 1982 film Blade Runner. This anxiety surrounding the technologized
body mirrors those of the developing adolescent one, which strives for completeness,
mastery, and power. This is especially true in Fullmetal Alchemist, as Christopher
Goto-Jones notes while speaking of the highly functional, steel alloy "automail"
prosthetics that Edward uses in place of his right arm and left leg:
It is worth noting immediately, however, that Edward's quest throughout the Fullmetal Alchemist cycle is precisely to revert himself and his brother to their organic and 'original' forms. In some ways, this underscores the appropriateness of the label 'medicinal prosthetics,' since although they do grant Edward much greater speed and strength than would come naturally to such a diminutive figure (Edward is constantly teased about being very short for his age, as though to reinforce this point), they retain their significance of being wounds in need of repairing. (Goto-Jones, 3)
Prosthetics and armour have long been part of the anime and manga lexicon,
especially as emblems of self-definition. The best-known example is Osamu Tezuka's
Astro Boy franchise, about a boy robot on a Pinocchio-like journey to discover his
humanity. Tezuka also authored a manga series called Dororo which bears a striking
resemblance to Fullmetal Alchemist, about a man whose father allows 48 demons to
tear him to pieces. The main character then spends the series fighting the demons one
by one in order to regain himself piece by piece, and uses prosthetics in the
92 meantime. There too, the story centres on the quest to achieve bodily wholeness and completion. Napier pinpoints the long tradition of using prostheses and machine parts to express insecurity regarding bodily identity and individual autonomy while describing later popular mecha anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion:
"Although the most conventional mecha, along with certain Western science fiction films such as Terminator, seem to privilege the robotic or cyborg body, many other anime present the technologically armored body with profound ambivalence...
It is this contrast between the vulnerable, emotionally complex and often youthful human being inside the ominously faceless body armor or power suit and the awesome power he/she wields vicariously that makes the most important tension in many mecha dramas." (Napier, "Machines" 86-87)
Frenchy Lunning has echoed this sentiment, saying:
"Between the child inside and the mecha outside is a gap: a symbol of a yawning sense of lack suffused with a complex of narratives that lie between the child-pilot subject and his or her mecha-ideal image of power and agency." ("Between" 267)
It may seem unusual to consider Fullmetal Alchemist as a mecha or cyborg anime. It doesn't feature giant robots, after all. However, Alphonse is a boy inside a suit of armour, forced to "pilot" the hollow shell of steel that forms his new body. (He is the quite literal embodiment of Masamune Shirow's most famous manga title, a
"ghost" inside a "shell.") Though his consciousness may have been bonded to the armour through alchemy and not cutting-edge surgery, he still falls along the cyborg spectrum: "The first broad category of cyborg is the simple controller group. This label is used to denote cyborgs of two smaller subsets; Implants and Suits. These cyborgs are characterized either by the simplicity of their system or its removability,"
93 (Oehlert 221). Moreover, other science fiction authors, most notably William Gibson, have used the trope of the prosthesis to similar effect:
The striking thing about Mona Lisa Overdrive is that so many of the characters are waifs, young and vulnerable, deprived or bereft, and in depicting them Gibson sees things and other persons as transitional objects or prostheses. A romantic sense of loss and homelessness is coming to haunt and almost dissolve Gibson's sense of the powers and opportunities that a hypertechnological future might offer its subjects, though the outcome in the narrative is a series of hesitations. (Palmer "Prosthetic" 227)
Palmer reads these prostheses not only as physical stopgaps or crutches, but as emotional coping "mechanisms" that highlight each character as an adolescent on the way to maturity and self-sufficiency. These prostheses can be figurative as well as literal, taking the form of attendant cameras or personal mentors which initiate a constant negotiation of power in worlds where technology, like adulthood, offers the mixed blessing of simultaneous opportunity and constraint:
Our need for guidance and mentoring, from people or technologies, can intersect with the ability of the powerful to control us, to see into us. Yet to secure ourselves, to mediate the largeness and power of a sublimely vast postmodern urban world, we need things or people that are attached to us: we need prostheses. Growing up and coping with loss involves a distinct kind of mediatory relation to the world; the notion of the prosthetic is best equipped to explain this. (Palmer "Prosthetic" 231)
Palmer's reading of Gibson's prostheses is especially resonant for Edward and
Alphonse Elric. Their relationship to the world is mediated through both their physical prostheses (Edward's automail arm and leg; Alphonse's armour) and through their affiliation with the military via Edward's position as a State Alchemist.
Although initially reluctant to take on the role of a "military dog," Edward soon finds himself embracing the State Alchemist creed: "Alchemist, be thou for the people." He
94 and Alphonse use his new status to make change across the country and to educate others about alchemy, often pulling aside the veil of mystery surrounding the discipline to expose the science beneath. (This strategy has mixed results; in one town
Edward ends the fiscal oppression of one military observer over a depressed mining town and the town appreciates his efforts, but when Edward ends the false miracles of an over-reaching preacher, the village full of devout believers hates the way he has ended the illusion - and the village's sudden prosperity thanks to the pilgrim trail.)
Though Edward refuses to wear a military uniform, he is proud of the silver pocketwatch embossed with his nation's seal that acts like a badge for all State
Alchemists, and frequently uses it a prosthetic signifier or fetish object to gain him instant authority - and instant retaliation, as the case may be. Although he routinely insists that the pocketwatch itself gives him no alchemic power, the mingled respect and fear it encourages in others is enough.
The military further supplements and mediates Edward's identity by giving him a new name - each of the State Alchemists are known for their alchemic specialty and granted a special title in addition to their legal name. This is how Edward comes to be known as the "Fullmetal Alchemist," for the automail prostheses that allow him to do alchemy without the otherwise-necessary component of a transmutation circle, or alchemical array that most other alchemists require to be effective. Edward's new title soon achieves great new heights as he does good deeds and makes narrow escapes all across the country while in pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone, and is the source of a running joke in the series: strangers assume that the name "Fullmetal" must refer to
95 Alphonse, because he is the one in the full suit of armour, and those who haven't seen
Edward's prostheses have no idea why the term "fullmetal" should apply to him.
Perhaps for this reason (in addition to his exploits), Edward soon earns the title
"Alchemist of the People," or "The People's Alchemist," among civilians, yet another identity prosthetic that acts as a supplement to Edward's formation as a subject.
All prostheses, however, supplement a critical lack or injury. Other analyses of mecha anime, most notably Lunning's and Ortega's, highlight the absence of the mother and Fullmetal Alchemist is no different. Edward and Alphonse are orphans, abandoned first by their father and rendered yet more vulnerable by the death of their mother. It is her death that convinces the boys to try human transmutation, and the story unfolds from this failed attempt. In losing their mother and then trying to gain her back, the boys engage in a kind of reproduction, and the theme of reproduction repeats itself throughout the series. In an early episode, Edward and Alphonse help a woman deliver her first baby, then reflect on the difference between alchemy and organic growth:
Edward: This alchemy stuff - turns out it wasn't any help at all, huh? In contrast, mothers are something awesome, huh? They can do something an alchemist wouldn't be able to do in a hundred years.
Alphonse: The same goes for our mother.
Edward: Al..?
Alphonse: I wonder if I was that warm and soft when I was born.
Edward: O- of course you were!
Alphonse: Really? (Alponse begins crying, while Edward looks on, forlorn.) (episode 6, "The Alchemy Exam," 2004)
96 Alphonse's clear anxiety regarding his body and its unnatural form gives rise to a similar conversation later in the episode:
Edward: "Al... We chose the right path, didn't we?"
Alphonse: "I don't know. But the one thing I'm sure about is that I want to touch you once again, Brother. It's strange, huh? Here we are, always so near to each other, but I can't even remember what it feels like to touch you, or the warmth of your body." (episode 6, "The Alchemy Exam," 2004)
Alphonse understands his humanity and his identity along two avenues fundamental to posthuman and cyborg critique which are especially pertinent to science fiction: memory and the body. Without embodied memory - the recollection of physical sensation - Alphonse feels insecure and un-tethered to the family history which is supposed to give him his identity and his life its grim purpose. He is quite literally living in the wrong body. The hollow cavity in Alphonse's steel abdomen becomes both a liability and an asset throughout the series; it can become "full" of sand or straw and weigh him down, or it can hide friends or even stray kittens. However, its ultimate use is as an incubator for the Philosopher's Stone, when one of the series' villains implants Alphonse with the raw materials necessary for building the stone.
Alphonse moves from being an alchemist to a tool of alchemy.
Alphonse is also a reflection of villains who appear later in the series, the
Homunculi, for whom body, memory, and reproduction are also an issue. Within the scope of the series, the Homunculi are creatures born of the Gate, soulless beings whose bodies come from those humans that alchemists try to resurrect using human transmutation. Edward and Alphonse later meet the Homunculus who has taken the shape of their mother, and their alchemy teacher takes in a Homonculus who is an amalgamation of both her own stillborn child, and Edward's missing arm and leg.
Like Alphonse, the Homunculi retain only the slightest traces of memory of their lives before transmutation, and desire the Philosopher's Stone so that they can become fully human with mortal bodies. Like the "replicants" in Blade Runner, the
Homunculi want to find their creator and either punish him for having created them in the first place, or figure out a way to change their circumstances. This is another point of connection between the Elric brothers and the Homunculi - they share the same father, Hohenheim. As with the "mad scientist" plot, this theme of reproduction and origins is familiar within science fiction:
"Yet, science fiction strikes one as the cinematic genre that ought to be least concerned with origins since its "proper" obsession is with the projection of a future rather than the reconstruction of a past. Nevertheless, a great deal of its projection of that future is bound up with issues of reproduction - whether in its constant emphasis upon the robot, android, automaton, and anthropomorphically conceived computer or its insistent return to the elaboration of high-tech, sophisticated audio-visual systems...
From L 'Eve Future to Blade Runner, the conjunction of technology and the feminine is the object of fascination and desire but also of anxiety - a combination of affects that makes it the perfect field of play for the science fiction/horror genre." (Doane "Technophilia" 118-119)
This intersection of technology and the feminine leads us to the intersection of
Fullmetal Alchemist as an anime text and all the fan-texts it has produced. Edward and Alphonse's "indelible sin" is to commit the ultimate alchemic taboo: using their science to resurrect the dead. They fail miserably (their mother is reborn a twitching, non-sentient tangle of deformed limbs in the centre of their alchemic array), and the
98 "equivalent exchange" principle of alchemy requires their physical bodies as material.
However, Edward's next attempt at human transmutation is miraculously successful -
so much so that the other State Alchemists comment on Edward's genius after discovering his secret. For in using his own blood as a seal to ground his brother's
consciousness inside the hollow suit of armour, Edward solidifies a bond between them that goes beyond brotherhood: Edward becomes his brother's creator. He literally writes his brother back into being using his blood as the ink. Doing so,
Edward fulfills one of Haraway's precepts for the cyborg of her Manifesto, for as she
states: "Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century," (Haraway, "Manifesto" 95).
This is not to say that Edward is a Harawayan cyborg. Haraway's cyborgs have moved beyond binarist, Cartesian thinking about the mind and body, and do not desire any return to cohesive bodily identity: "The cyborg is a creature in a post- gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity," (Haraway, "Manifesto" 67). Edward and
Alphonse are the opposite. Their goal is to achieve bodily wholeness again, to "get things back to normal." Their "normal" means bodies with all their functioning parts and signifiers, including sexual ones. These signifiers - of both humanity and adulthood - are of great importance in our next section.
99 All Parts in Working Order: Fullmetal Fandom and the Body
Anime fans frequently produce their own fan-crafts, ranging from drawings and costumes to doujinshi (fan-created comics) and prose fan fiction of variable lengths and genres. Fans of Fullmetal Alchemist are no exception. In this chapter, I plan on excerpting specific fanfiction stories that pertain to both Edward and Alphonse's unique cyborg bodies, and fan predictions about how those bodies might develop and behave. Within the scope of Fullmetal Alchemist, we might consider alchemy to be what Darko Suvin and other science fiction theorists call the novum - the new development within a story that provides the changes setting that particular fictional world significantly apart from our own. In some stories this might be the ability to
"jack in" to a virtual environment (William Gibson's Neuromancer), the discovery of a planet without gender (Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness), or a continent-sized fullerene balloon whose residents exist without benefit of gravity
(Karl Schroeder's Virga novels). As we shall see, fans of Fullmetal Alchemist have used alchemy as a novum from which they extrapolated answers to the problem of
Edward and Alphonse Elric's incomplete bodies.
During the 1970's and 1980's, numerous science fiction theorists and authors attempted to define their genre, especially its relationship to the future and predictions of the future. Perhaps foremost among these was Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris, who pointed out the virtues of science fiction as a method of examining alternative social realities thusly:
100 Even when the happenings it describes are totally impossible, an SF work may still point out meaningful, indeed rational, problems. For example, the social, psychological, political, and economic problems of space travel may be depicted quite realistically in SF even though the technological parameters of the spaceships described are quite fantastic in the sense that it will for all eternity be impossible to build a spaceship with such parameters. ("Structural" par. 15)
Huntington echoed this sentiment, saying:
Though SF often gives us a sense of facing the unknown, its true insights are generally into the known, and its primary value lies not in its ability to train us for the future, but in its ability to engage a particular set of problems to which science itself gives rise and which belong, not to the future, but to the present. (Huntington, "Future" 345).
The emphasis on science and scientific thinking here is not coincidental. In this lengthy exerpt, Gopnik and Gopnik highlight the similarities between scientific prediction and science fiction writing:
The "thought experiment" is designed before, or in place of, asking the questions of nature directly. Whether or not it is feasible to experiment, to observe directly or indirectly, it is necessary to formulate the possibility of getting a falsifying result. This must often be done by imagining a world in which one could, in principle, coax nature into answering.
This basic notion of constructing an imaginary world to test a theory should be familiar to all students of literary art. It is very close to the basic notion of their field: fiction. If, in addition, the particular brand of literary art in which they are interested is "'Science" Fiction, then what does that demonstrate but that there is a particular genre with a high degree of self-consciousness, even embarrassment, over what fiction implies.
The positive similarity, then, between science and "science fiction" resides in this very familiar territory. They both, as a matter of critical method, try to construct idealized (in the sense of selecting only the relevant parameters) worlds against which to test theories that otherwise would go untried. And they do it in an explicit and highly self-conscious way (other kinds of fiction do it usually in an implicit and relatively un-self-conscious way). (Gopnik and Gopnik "Guide" 200).
Reading Gopnik and Gopnik from a perspective of fan studies, it's easy to see the
101 similarities between fanfiction and science fiction as creative endeavours. Although fanfiction can be found in any genre from sci-fi to romance to alternate histories, both it and science fiction have, as mentioned above, "a high degree of self-consciousness, even embarrassment, over what fiction implies." Much like science fiction, fanfiction is also undergoing a continual period of self-definition that involves the notion of fiction itself, often at the hands of science fiction or other genre authors. Consider confessed fanfiction writer and science fiction author Cory Doctorow:
Much fanfic — the stuff written for personal consumption or for a small social group — isn't bad art. It's just not art. It's not written to make a contribution to the aesthetic development of humanity. It's created to satisfy the deeply human need to play with the stories that constitute our world. There's nothing trivial about telling stories with your friends — even if the stories themselves are trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is practically sacred — and it's unquestionably profound. (Doctorow, "Praise" par. 15)
Here Doctorow is echoing sentiments from science fiction editor Teresa Nielsen
Hayden, who wrote:
In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn't exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It's a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can't. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable. (Nielsen Hayden, "Nature" par 3, 4)
The similarities do not end there. Both fanfiction and science fiction have a specific niche that must be sought out by interested readers, a kind of thirdspace
102 where like-minded people can gather. Defining the genre or the medium creates this space - the corner of shelves intended for science fiction literature at a major book retailer (or even a bookstore devoted entirely to sci-fi books, or science fiction fan conventions), or the web archives that specialize in fanfiction (from major websites like Fanfiction.net to individual LiveJournal communities designed around specific romantic pairings of fictional characters from pre-existing media properties). Fan scholar Rhiannon Bury categorizes these spaces online as heterotopias, and her reading of female fan practices online (especially those of female slash fans) emphasizes their subversive potential and unique manner of identity formation:
"It is important to also understand the heterotopia in terms of resistance, inversion, subversion or perhaps simply a space in which active consent to normative practices is suspended.. .Members of women-only [fan groups] challenge the normative order simply by refusing to accept the fan practices engaged in by male fans and gathering in spaces of their own." (Bury "Cyberspaces" 17).
These spaces can become specialized knowledge communities, with participants engaging in mutual support and learning unavailable to them in three-dimensional educational, religious, or familial environments. Often, these fan spaces are safe havens for adolescents, and a key component in their growth, as Henry Jenkins notes of Harry Potter fans: "Here, many people of many different ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds (some real, some imagined) formed a community where individual differences were accepted and where learning was celebrated." (Jenkins,
Convergence 173). Jenkins refers to these communities as "affinity spaces," borrowing the term from Paul Gee, who in turn may have borrowed it from Donna
103 Haraway, who called for a united feminist movement "through coalition - affinity, not identity," (Haraway "Manifesto" 73). Similar to Haraway's vision of the cyborg's post-gender, post-origin world, affinity spaces
"are sustained by common endeavors that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender, and education level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine his or her existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others." (Jenkins, "Convergence" 177).
From these cyborg spaces come cyborg stories, as in the case of Fullmetal
Alchemist fans. I will now excerpt and examine a few fanfiction narratives surrounding the series. Most of them concentrate on Edward's efforts to regain his brother Alphonse's body, and the results thereof. First is "Embodied" by Mikkeneko.
Archived in 2004, when the anime series ended its original run in Japan, "Embodied" is the story of the Elric brothers after Edward's successful attempt to bring back his brother's body. However, in Mikkeneko's story Edward loses his eyesight, hearing, and left arm as well as the right. (Alphonse returns whole in exchange.) Although he is not an invalid and continues to use automail prosthetics, Edward remains even more emotionally dependent on his younger brother to maintain his sense of reality:
But A1 doesn't know how desperate Ed is for his touch, his constant, grounding presence, because that is all that separates this pleasant world of warmth and sweet smells from the nightmare inside the Gate. Without sight, without hearing, he doesn't know where he is, doesn't know whose hands are on him unless he can smell his brother's scent nearby, feel the reassuring warmth of his body.
The story effectively reverses the roles between Edward and Alphonse from the series. While once it was Alphonse who pined for his brother's touch and smell (as
104 mentioned in the excerpt from episode 6 above), now Edward needs his brother's
"grounding" physical presence. This is also a parallel to Edward's "grounding" his
brother's soul inside the armour with his own blood - a physical, organic, fleshly bond and sign of their union. Mikkeneko extrapolates this emotional and physical
dependency into an incestuous relationship, one that Edward needs to feel human:
"This is all he has left to him, sometimes, the only thing left in his life that he can
enter into completely and feel like a whole person.. .He's not entirely sure what it
means to be human, but surely must include this."
Here, Alphonse's bodily wholeness (gifted to him by his brother) means taking
on adult responsibility and adult sexuality. Now he has taken on Edward's former
role as primary caregiver, and, within the context of the story, has taken on Edward's
old goal of getting his brother's body back. Their situations have fully reversed,
granting them a kind of equality they did not have in the anime storyline. Here,
embodiment means agency and authority. In another story by the same author, "Only
Family," Edward once again restores his brother's body to wholeness - with a catch.
We see the story from a shopkeeper's perspective as she tracks a handsome man and his son through a marketplace. The father closely resembles Edward and Alphonse's
father Hohenheim, sporting a ponytail and spectacles. But we soon learn that the
"father" is none other than Edward, and the "son" is Alphonse. Moreover, Alphonse
seems to be strikingly mature - an adult trapped in a four year old's body. This, we are meant to assume, was the trade: Alphonse would get a body back, but would have to start over at the very beginning, from infancy. This is another role reversal that
105 plays on images common in the series: where once Alphonse was tall and powerful, physically more imposing than his brother, he is now a mere child.
Other stories take on the challenge of Alphonse and Edward's restored bodies in a more gruesome light. LiveJoumal user Tobu lshi, inspired by a community blog post about what years in the Gate would have done to Alphonse's body, wrote a story called "Catharsis" in which Alphonse returns piteously disabled. His nervous system ruined by years of sensory deprivation inside the shadowy world of the Gate,
Alphonse's new body interprets every stimuli as pain. Despite the story's fantastical elements, the language remains starkly scientific:
Sensory deprivation, leading to tactile hypersensitivity. Atrophied muscles, eyesight, bones, brain. Psychosis. Malnutrition. They put him on a feeding tube, at first, to spread a layer of something between thin skin and brittle bones. He could have solid food now, if they could get him to eat it, to swallow it without agony and incoherent panic. Until he can, the tube stays in.
From scientific explanations, the story turns to mad science. Driven insane by his role in his brother's suffering, Edward begins making a new body for him from parts of their friends. Alphonse, finally restored, is horrified to recognize the eyes of a childhood friend staring at him from a mirror, and kills both himself and Edward.
The preoccupation with science does not end there. The "Alter Series" is a group of collectively produced short stories inspired by the end of the Fullmetal
Alchemist anime series, in which we learn that Edward's price for restoring his brother's body is exile on the other side of the Gate in what corresponds to our reality during Germany's twentieth century interwar period. Although initially started by
106 one LiveJournal user calling herself "Himel 999," the series now involves the work of
several authors who participate in a shared "fanon" or "fan canon" work. Himel 999
controls which chapters of the story are canonical to her original vision, but regularly
accepts submissions from other authors, and together they create a whole picture of
an alternate universe. This universe makes winking reference to the fictional one that inspired it, with Edward meeting an alternate incarnation of his old superior officer,
Colonel Roy Mustang, on the other side of the Gate. This version is called Ichiro
Masuta and is Japanese, but writes dimestore novels under the name "Roy Mustang."
In this "Alter" universe, Edward's quest has changed: no longer concerned with his or his brother's body, he wants only to return home. Masuta assists him in this quest, but when Edward is gravely wounded, the Gate opens for both of them and they are transplanted to the original universe where Alphonse - and the original
Mustang - are waiting. In this section of the story, author Mikkeneko speculates on the differences between alchemy and other sciences:
"Then imagine it. Imagine that same city a dozen times bigger — a hundred times — and full of people, not abandoned like Lior or Ishvar. As tightly packed as downtown Central, and bigger. And then — in a flash of light ~ it's all gone."
A shocked silence filled the library, before Roy stirred himself to speak. "But surely that's impossible," he said. "There's no such place in this world, and what you described — it sounds like an alchemical reaction, but there is no such thing in the other world --"
"It hasn't happened yet," Ed said, and then quirked half a smile. "At least, I don't think it has. Time doesn't work the same way in the Gate, nor distance. I moved — I'm not sure how, but I moved ~ through the dark to a place I'd never been, a time that hadn't happened yet. I'm not sure, but I think it was Masuta's homeland — the buildings looked the same as the pictures he showed me. And there was a war, just like in this world, and it destroyed the
107 city, just like in this one. It wasn't alchemy, no. It was something else, something I can't really understand, but it was enough to turn a city of a hundred million people into cinders in a single burst of light.
"There was my power source, Mustang. A hundred million souls, rushing through the Gate all at once ~ there was more than enough to power any transmutation I could have imagined. And it's possible that if I had reached further, looked further on, I could have found more. Does that satisfy you, Mustang? You seem to think I was some kind of miracle worker. Is that the kind of power source you'd want to invest in?" (Mikkeneko, "Miracle")
Of the authors profiled above, Mikkeneko seems to think in the most "science fictional" manner, i.e. extrapolating potential events and problems from the series' canonical elements. Here, she is speculating on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and the possible relationship between atomic energy, alchemy, and the mechanics of the Gate bridging both universes. Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of
Shamballa, a 2005 film presented as a sequel to the animated series, also dwelt on atomic energy and featured a sequence wherein Edward and Alphonse dealt with a scientist who had discovered the radioactive properties of uranium. Whether
Mikkeneko predicted this development within the plot is difficult to say, however, because she wrote the above excerpt in 2005, the same year as the Japanese release of the film. Of course, science fiction is not necessarily about accurate predictions. As
Rafail Nudelman has stated: "What is really significant in SF has nothing in common with the "real future" and real prediction. SF deals with the novum and not with the future; with changes and not with prediction." (241-242) Thus, it is less important that Mikkeneko and other authors were "right" or "wrong" about how the series might turn out or how Edward and Alphonse would relate to one another in the future,
108 but rather that their speculations branched from the same source material into so many different directions. This, I would argue, is one of the primary values of fanwork and fan studies in general; the spaces inhabited by fans offer a model for how groups think about the future based on given clues.
Be Thou For the People: Fan Studies and Other Sciences
What many fanfiction narratives have in common is the construction of a human relationship based on "evidence" within the canonical text. Part of this is an intellectual exercise - just as Biblical scholars continually re-examine the relationship between the historical Jesus and his adherents through the lens of freshly-unearthed archaeological sites, fans can and do return to the relationships between characters after certain facts are revealed, looking for clues about motivation that they might have missed earlier. But this "evidence" is not always easy to quantify or categorize; one's reading of a text, especially an animated one, is highly dependent on the ways in which the viewer interprets subtle cues like the movement of an eyebrow or the pitch of a voice. Recently, cognitive scientists and literary theorists have examined theories of reading from this perspective, intrigued by the possibility that how we read a text is as much dependent on evolutionary biology as cultural training. This field is called "cognitive narratology."
Cognitive narratologists work with a model of the brain frequently called
"Theory of Mind" or "ToM," which states that the way average-functioning human
109 brains work now depends on adaptations that proved beneficial to survival over time.
This mental model includes everything from how we order the elements of a narrative to emphasize causality, to how we guess "whodunit" in a detective novel based on
subtle (even spurious or specious) clues about a fictional character's nervous tics.
Narratologist Lisa Zunshine explains it thusly:
First of all, we have to remember that our Theory of Mind is not an adaptation that enables us to apply a single universal set of inferences to any situation that calls for attributing desires, thoughts, and intentions to another living creature. Rather, it could be thought of as a "cluster" of multiple adaptations, many of them functionally geared toward specific social contexts. ("Why" 144)
Zunshine refers to this act as "mind-reading." During "mind-reading," she
says, the human brain is constantly making unconscious decisions about the motives
about the other surrounding humans based on a steady stream of sensory information which can be hard to consciously organize, such as posture, gestures, tone or volume
of voice, and physical proximity. Our ability to survive as a species, Zunshine argues,
stems in part from our ability to successfully interpret these cues and act based on those interpretations. Without this ability (and the evolved adaptations which make it possible), we might not know when a disagreement is escalating into a full-blown
fight, or when our words are hurtful enough to threaten the status of a long-term relationship. However, despite the presence of these adaptations, cultivating the
ability to use them effectively can be difficult. (How many of us have argued with a
friend or partner based on the "tone" or "nuance" of a thoughtless phrase?) Zunshine
contends that fiction acts as a training module for these interpretations, offering a
110 harmless playing field that teaches the interpretation of the simplified human subject.
As an example, she offers a scene from Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway in which one character greets Clarissa Dalloway with trembling and kisses on both hands, then asks, "how do we know that his "trembling" is to be accounted for by his excitement at seeing his old love again after all these years and not, for instance, by his progressing Parkinson's disease?...In other words, what allows Woolf to assume that we will automatically read a character's body language as indicative of his thoughts and feelings?" (3)
Part of the pleasure of reading fiction, Zunshine argues, stems from making these assumptions and then testing them out against the unfolding narrative. Our brains have developed to encourage this activity, even require it, for stimulation and learning: "As a sustained representation of numerous interacting minds, the novel feeds the powerful, representation-hungry complex of cognitive adaptations whose very condition of being is a constant social stimulation delivery either by direct interactions with other people or by imaginary approximation of such interactions."
(10) Zunshine's research depends on a perspective outlined earlier by evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Lisa Cosmides, who claim that "Fictional information input as a form of simulated or imagined experience presents various constellations of situation-cues, unlocking these responses, and making this value information available to systems that produce foresight, planning, and empathy." (Tooby and
Cosmides 27)
111 This is not to say that the cognitive narratology perspective has been wholly accepted, or even that it should be. A recent Scientific American article pinpointed the fallacies in Tooby and Cosmides' approach to evolutionary psychology, namely that it relies on the assumption that "modern skulls hold primitive brains," when in fact neuroscientists and anthropologists alike know very little about how the brain evolved over time and what the differences between our brains and those of our ancestors are.
As David J. Buller shrewdly observes: "To discover why any trait evolved, we need to identify the adaptive functions it served among early humans, for which we have little evidence." (Buller, 2008, 77) This would include the "cluster" of adaptations that Zunshine claims make reading fiction so pleasurable to the modern human mind.
And without the opportunity for comparison, it is difficult to know whether the traits
Zunshine and other narratologists claim aren't simply learned behaviours.
Regardless of the root of the behaviour, cognitive narratology offers a compelling frame of reference for fan studies, and a heretofore-unexamined explanation for the human storytelling impulse and its relationship to fanfiction. Cory
Doctorow summarizes this perspective best:
Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through his own lens. ("Praise" par. 17)
Here, Doctorow is echoing Zunshine's points, especially regarding the primary drives she believes fuel the human narrative mind:
112 The detective story in which the investigator's love interest is also one of the suspects exploits the suggestive cognitive ambiguity of such a situation. Such a story derives titillating emotional mileage from making the readers mix the inferences from the mate-selection aspect of mind-reading with the inferences from the predator-avoidance aspect of mind-reading. ("Why" 152)
In short, though these two writers express it quite differently, both maintain that the pleasures of narrative are, to some extent, hardwired into human cognition. Rather than reading or creating fictional narratives solely for the purposes of self-expression, social protest, or the hope of recognition, humans may be physiologically compelled to do so. While we can easily read Fullmetal fandom as a queer female space, in which fiction written by women for women frequently veers into the pleasures of slash and shared narrative, and while these spaces are doubtless their own form of social prosthesis supplementing everyday interaction, I wish to move beyond these traditional readings of fan behaviour. The narratology reading of fan meta-texts stands outside gender or sexuality and focuses on the purely human - albeit in an environment that is gradually shifting toward post-humanity.
This explanation does not invalidate other theories of fan involvement, however. As other authors have observed elsewhere, fandom does build specialized communities, enable sexual and creative self-expression, create alternative gift economies, and allow for informal pedagogies. However, this flourishing ecosystem may simply be the result of our brains' activity, rather than the principal motivator. I contend that thinking about both the future and relationships are human behaviours that repeat across genders and cultures, that they are as natural as wondering, "what
113 happens next?" or "does she like me?" Fanfiction does this in spades, asking, "what would happen if...?" and tweaking some elements of the canonical work to perform a thought experiment. This is science fiction in miniature: where science fiction takes what is known (or suspected) about the physics, biology, and chemistry of our planet or others and extrapolates possibilities from the data, fanfiction takes advantage of plot developments, character profiles, and the uniqueness of a given fictional setting to speculate about both character motives and the possible outcome(s) of the unfolding story. This speculation occurs frequently in the stories above, because much like the "hardest" science fiction, they rely on the strict rules of alchemy outlined within Fullmetal Alchemist, but arrive at wildly different outcomes based on the questions asked. The series becomes fuel for a predictive engine, a sort of random number generator that unveils countless possible directions for the text to move in. I suspect that other readers looking for similar speculations would find it in abundance: stories that "predict" how a series will end, stories that correctly anticipate information that an author has yet to reveal, or imagine the possible uses of fictional elements like magic or cloning or the existence of vampires and werewolves.
In my opinion, both specialists in the cognitive literary sciences and science fiction studies should pay attention to the movements of fan culture, to see how groups gather together to create and preserve narratives that are explicitly speculative.
For although fanfiction is a mediated form, regulated by the author's position vis-a- vis available technologies and her position within a community of like-minded others, it (for the present moment) remains free of the same constraints that burden literary
114 and commercial fiction. There need not be any lag-time between an author's speculation about the future of a character and the publication of that speculation, and it need not be tested against the opinions of an editor or manager. While some mark this lack of editorial culture as a point against fanworks, for the anthropologist or narratologist it means a virtually-pristine ecosystem of texts in context, wherein we can observe how readers and writers make their decisions and why. It is an ecosystem that must be preserved and protected, even when it provides a habitat for people or subjects that make us uncomfortable. This discomfort will be examined in my concluding remarks.
115 Conclusion: Women on the Integrated Circuit
Lost in Yoyogi
It is August, the hottest month in Japan. Foreign visitors often forget that, like the Fire
Nation mentioned earlier in this thesis, Japan is a tropical archipelago whose climate can feel almost equatorial at times. The heat is worst in Tokyo, where massive towers of steel and glass reflect the sunlight down to the baking concrete below. Summer is also cicada season, and in any spot where there are more than two or three trees, the air fills with the siren-like drone of small but noisy groups of the same species singing to one another in air thick with humidity.
As I duck under the same tree for the third time, it occurs to me that this drone is not unlike a LiveJournal community: alive, active, and occasionally annoying.
I am near Yoyogi Park, across the street from the Yoyogi Animation Gakuen, a school for animators. Because it is the summer break, no one is there. My intended destination, Frog Nation Studios, is similarly abandoned, only more so - contrary to the studio's website, the third-floor walkup is now occupied by what appears to be a
116 chemistry lab of some sort. (When I knock hesitantly at the door, a woman in full scrubs and a rubber fume mask answers.)
I planned my trip to Japan badly. I did not have the Japanese skills to write a proper letter of introduction for the studios I wished to visit, and I did not obtain a translator in time. I also did not yet have the language skills to phone the studios I wanted to speak to and ask for their permission to visit. The few I managed to contact
(like Bones) did not seem to want anyone to come by. This is perfectly understandable; most anime studios are tucked away in the quiet neighbourhood of
Mitaka, near the Ghibli Museum but far from everything else Tokyo is famous for offering. They are outside the more otaku-oriented areas like Akihabara and
Ikebukuro, where doujinshi shops abound and anime-themed pachinko parlours open at ten am to throngs of penny-ante players and stay open all night long. The animators have a tough job, one that rarely pays well. (A recent report indicated that the starting animator makes the equivalent of $11,000 US a year.) They do not wish to be bothered by fans or foreigners - or, in my case, both.
I had come to Japan in part to hand out a questionnaire and, if possible, obtain interviews with animators and anime writers and directors. My intention was to answer the question of how anime writers and fan writers were similar or different their approaches to their craft, their sense of accomplishment or reward or community. I still do not know the answers to these questions, because one whole side of my study refused to answer. I sent out translated questionnaires, accompanied
117 with Canadian chocolate and other consumable gifts (Japan's gifting culture is legendary), and received none back. My online efforts to get fan writers to talk to me were similarly unsuccessful, if to a lesser degree. I received only a handful of responses, although each was considerate and nuanced in perspective. I have declined to write about them here because their number was so small as to be statistically insignificant and inadequate for the purposes of substantive analysis.
Having ill-prepared myself as both a traveler and a researcher, I wondered how I would possibly answer my friends and family when they asked if I had accomplished my goals in Japan. "No," I said, upon my return. "But I discovered something else. I discovered what a huge part of the common culture anime and manga really are."
And this is true. For as much as any anime or manga fan thinks they know about Japan based on their media of choice, and for as many hordes of titles Japan manages to produce each year, it takes a visit to really understand the placement and position of anime and manga within the country's economy of cultural production.
Although more recent efforts have been made to maintain a sense of history through museums, like the Ghibli or the Tezuka or the Kyoto International Manga Museum, or the Suginami Animation Museum in suburban Tokyo (a humble affair that takes up two floors of a quiet hotel and conference centre seemingly built in the mid 1960's), the greatest monument to anime and manga culture is in the sheer number of goods emblazoned with anime logos and characters. Tickets to the Ghibli Museum are
118 available in Lawson's convenience stores, and anime toys are available in 7-11. A new Pokemon feature was running in theatres when my husband and I visited, and posters with Pikachu's face adorned whole subway cars. Massive posters for the latest
Naruto: Shippuden feature were everywhere, as were posters for the live-action adaptations of both the Ge-Ge-Ge manga and the Detroit Metal City manga. In
Kyoto, we watched re-runs of Death Note, and in Tokyo we watched Saturday morning episodes of Seirei no Moribito and Soul Eater, among others. Each newsstand, bookstore, train station, and convenience store we visited was replete with both manga tankobon (bound volumes of a single manga title, much like the manga available commercially outside Japan) and the manga monthlies or weeklies like G-
Fantasy, Shounen Jump, Morning, June, and others.
In Japan, anime and manga are more than normal. They are banal.
This banality extends to fan culture, as well. While in Japan, we visited both the major otaku areas, Akihabara and Ikebukero, and stumbled upon the cavernous
Shibuya Mandarake store, where we perused stacks of fan-drawn pornographic, comedic, or alternative doujinshi. We also visited Comic Market, a twice-yearly gathering of doujinshi artists, manga fans, and industry professionals who meet at the
Tokyo Big Sight to sell and share fan-drawn comics in four convention halls each roughly the size of a football field and packed with tables piled high with doujinshi of all genres. Both fans and artists bring steamer trunks, rolling suitcases, and other pieces of luggage to carry their fan-made comics, videogames, and craft items. At the
119 end of each day, they pack it all up and go home, often while wearing elaborate cosplay in boiling temperatures. This is Japan's fan culture at its most extreme: an obsession for collection and a passion for detail encouraged by a steady stream of products both licensed and not. But it is only one end of a broad spectrum that includes casual lunchtime or subway manga readers and children watching anime during their precious few hours away from school. Not all Japanese are fans, and not all fans are otaku.
This diversity reflects the panoply of anime and manga offerings available to the Japanese consumer. The percentage of total production which arrives on foreign shores in commercially-licensed, translated format is pitiful compared to the larger whole, and does not represent the wide variety of genres, styles, and voices present in manga and anime. During my visit, an acquaintance pointed out a popular new manga called Saint Oniisan, which she explained was about Jesus and Buddha living together in a studio apartment. We informed her that the title would likely never arrive on store shelves in English-speaking countries due to its subject matter which, in a failing economy, might be seen as an even riskier investment.
The decline of the publishing industry, which American newspapers blame on
Google, can barely be felt in Japan. Although Japan's economy has collapsed alongside that of every other first-world nation on the planet, the Japanese love for the printed word continues unabated. While in Ikebukero, we visited a Kinokuniya bookstore nine stories high. The story was the same in Kyoto: bookstores of all
120 shapes and sizes sat on every street, and instead of bookstores featuring coffee shops inside, the coffee shops featured tall shelves full of books in multiple languages. In a culture this literate, it is no wonder that all forms of publishing, from magazines to manga, should survive so well.
Surviving the Econopocalypse
The diversity of publications available in Japan, and the ensuing fan engagement with these publications (and their tacit acceptance by rights-holders), ensures that there is enough material to satisfy the offshore desire for doujinshi, scanlations, and fansubs.
However, it also means that publications not licensed for foreign commercial markets can make it into countries like the United States via private mail. Such was the case for an Iowa man named Christopher Handley, who in May of 2006 was charged with the possession of "obscene materials" after a postal worker searched packages
Handley had ordered from Japan and found manga containing images of minors. This initial search led to a further search of Handley's home, where his entire manga and comics collection was taken as evidence. Handley was prosecuted under the
PROTECT Act of 2003, and although a judge later ruled parts of the Act unconstitutional under the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, Handley agreed to plead guilty to "Title 18, United States Code, Section 1466A(b)(l), which prohibits the possession of any type of visual depiction, including a drawing, cartoon,
121 sculpture, or painting, that depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct that is obscene." ("Handley" par. 4)
The Handley case is part of a larger picture of the relationship between foreign consumption and Japanese cultural production. As Napier has documented elsewhere, anime fans frequently answer that Japan produces media different from anything that can be found at home, when asked why they favour anime over their native national media. This includes depictions of sexuality and violence that would never make it to North American screens, especially not in an animated format. This contributes to a larger discourse of Japan as an "odd" country by Western standards, unique not only in the technological advancement that Ueno has argued contributes to its Techno-Orientalist brand identity, but in its alleged acceptance of sexual proclivities. Naturally, this feeds into a much older tradition of Orientalism, which characterizes the East as sexually free in a way that both opposes and defines the
West. But with cases like Handley's looming over the relationship between the two markets, and with the ongoing and apocalyptic collapse of the global economy, what is the future of anime fandom worldwide?
Ironically, the fans who have trained themselves to work hard on stories, vids, websites, and other hand-crafted media for no money whatsoever might be the best equipped of anyone to deal with what Cory Doctorow calls "the econopocalypse."
Fandoms require constant engagement and attention in order to prove and sustain community membership, and they thrive on creative contributions in the form of new
122 icons, fanart, fanfiction, vids, layouts, fanmixes, or cosplay photos. These contributions can enhance social capital within each community, and help shape that community's identity through texts that everyone can enjoy and take pride in. They also take significant amounts of time, and cooperation between both individuals and communities: the person who edits a fanvid isn't necessarily the same one obtaining the footage necessary; the person who creates a wallpaper graphic may not have scanned in the original image herself. Fandom is a team effort, and it embraces a DIY spirit. These are the new women on the integrated circuit. As the global economy continues to evolve, this kind of work will likely become more common - labour shared in small but specialized pieces across countries largely via Internet connections, with workers educating themselves task by task in the latest and most helpful technologies.
In an effort to understand this kind of work, I founded FandomResearch.org with Lisa Drummond, a professor of urban studies and geography at York University.
Already interested in the discourse of the feminine in Asian spaces like the bourgeois neighbourhoods of Hanoi, Lisa's interest was sparked by the television dramas she saw on Vietnamese television, which had originally been filmed in Korea. She became a fan of these "K-doramas," and when I spoke to her about fansubbing and vids from an anime perspective, we started talking about fan studies and Asian media.
When she decided to research these "invisible workers" who produce fansubs, she asked for my assistance and I built her a website as a base of operations. My interest
123 in the invisibility and technical savvy of these workers reflects my initial interest in the cyborgs put forward by Shirow, Oshii, and Tiptree: invisible women, laughing at the dominant culture as they hack it from behind the scenes.
Our new website has turned into a blog that I curate. I ask for guestposts from professionals in the field of fandom research, and ask for their opinions on specific issues. So far, the results have been very interesting. Of my contributions to the field, this may be the greatest: another platform for people to share their fan-related questionnaires and research, and for professionals to discuss the issues of the day.
The face of fandom is always changing, but as fan studies grows more popular as a discipline (or, more accurately, an intersection of disciplines), I hope that sites like mine can be of some use to future students and the professors who instruct and
supervise them. Like many fan efforts, it was collaborative, spread across national borders, shared between two women of different ages and levels of training and
expertise, and created for the benefit of the community.
In this thesis I have discussed anime fandom primarily, but Lisa's interest in
K-doramas speaks to the fact that fan trends repeat across both nations and media. My husband is an avid comics and manga fan, and often relies on scanlations or scans of old, hard-to-find (and difficult to afford) comics. My students watched television online. My friends use BitTorrent to access television and film from a variety of countries. Although this flagrant "abuse" of rights holders is often seen as part of our economic decline, I would argue that it points the way to the future of work. All
124 media is now international, and should be treated as such. Borders should be opened.
Communities should be allowed to police themselves. Multiple ethnicities and
sexualities should be acknowledged. These are the lessons of fandom. Ad when the
fans grow up, when the girls who are plugged in become women on the integrated
circuit, the world will look different.
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