2019 | 29 | Themenheft

Browsing 2019 | 29 | Themenheft by Subject "culture"

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  • Article
    Deviating Voice. Representation of Female Characters and Feminist Readings in 1990s Anime
    Ishida, Minori (2019) , S. 22-37
    In the 1990s, Japanese anime sophisticated both their ›visual database‹ and their ›voice database‹ for their character design. These two ›databases‹ usually cooperate in a complementary manner in order to construct characters for an audio-visual medium. In the following article, however, I am going to point out that there are always possibilities of deviation, because, fundamentally, the visual appearance and the voice of the character are created independently. This has, in fact, opened up the possibility to introduce a new style of charac-ters like Haruka Tenou, one of the most popular characters in the Sailor Moon series (1992–1997). According to Azuma Hiroki, moe (affective responses) to-ward characters had drastically altered the reception of anime in the 1990s, preparing the way for the so-called ›kyara-moe‹. Within otaku (fan) cultures, however, another kind of reception took place, which was inspired by female, queer characters, such as Haruka or her successors. Feminist audiences who experienced moe toward these characters interpreted them enthusiastically: with regard to the gender and the sexuality of the protagonists, they created their own narratives.
  • Article
    Recontextualizing Characters. Media Convergence and Pre-/Meta-Narrative Character Circulation
    Wilde, Lukas R. A. (2019) , S. 3-21
    This introduction to the topic of character recontextualization sets out to ad-dress a variety of character products that cannot be adequately described as ›narrative‹: Coffee mugs, clothes, office supplies, and other material objects. Fictitious entities such as Hello Kitty or Hatsune Miku have given rise to a veri-table wave of literature in Japanese studies outlining a ›pre-narrative character theory‹. Characters without stories, based entirely on highly affective iconogra-phies, often function as hubs, interfaces, or intersections for diverging ›games of make-believe‹ that are in turn often forms of an aesthetic, medial, social, and especially diegetic recontextualization. Consequently, every pre-narrative char-acter could also be addressed as a decontextualized, trans-fictional, trans-world, or »meta-narrative nodal point« (AZUMA). Often, these recontextualiza-tions take place within the collaborative networks of participatory culture, high-lighting the decontextualized character state as central to what is known as ›media convergence‹ or ›media mix‹. I will situate these discussions within the field of international character theory, arguing that a systematic divide runs through existing literature on how to deal with decontextualized, trans-fic-tional, trans-world entities. My article closes with some indications on what a discourse often seen as specific for Japanese studies, might contribute on a variety of international phenomena and perspectives.