The Limits to North American Fan Discussion of Anime: Further Thoughts

Previously discussing the limitations of North American fans' discussion of anime my first thought was of the limits to their access to the material and its cultural background--most of it a closed book to them, limiting their ability to register and interpret the patterns, continuities, allusions, traditions, topicality, of the content they see in the medium and much, much else with it. Yet alongside the practical matter of access there is the willingness and ability to use it, which one ought not take for granted. To put it as politely as I can I entirely reject the irrationalist and anti-rationalist abasement of so many before "difference" that sneers at the idea of a common humanity, and the postmodernist view that makes us all hopeless captives of pathetic little subjectivities, with language itself supplying the bars that keep us locked in--but I also think no reasonable person should be complacent about the ease with which we can understand other cultures, or even a good many persons' appreciation of the considerable mental and cultural work required to even begin and try to gain an understanding of artifacts of another culture on terms besides their own (with the aforementioned obsession with "subjectivities" not helping). Indeed, I suspect it is more difficult for some than others, and especially hard for us in North America, in part because of plain and simple insularity--how due to a host of practical circumstances that are not a failing or fault in any sense North Americans as a whole are simply less exposed to foreign languages, foreign countries, in part because they have been more accustomed to export than import popular culture, making the frame of mind, the habit, less familiar. However, it also seems partly a matter of the turn that North American culture has taken in our time--in the direction of the culture wars, and a preoccupation, indeed obsession, with the politics of gender along certain lines that even those rejecting them still engage with in rejecting, and in particular the prevalence of what may be called "woke gender politics" (as with feminist/queer theorist views of the "social construction of gender," "patriarchy," "heteronormativity" and the status of the LGBTQ+ that they see as problematic and desire to redress), which may not be terribly helpful in understanding other societies, especially outside a limited portion of the Western world (as Emmanuel Todd, for his part, reminds us again and again). With these obsessions muddling even journalistic coverage of high politics (consider the extreme attention to the French President's marriage, and the latest twist in that attention with Candace Owens' turning Austin Powers on us), it certainly carries over to how American commentators of the mainstream approach matters like anime, and the manga on which it tends to be based.

Consider, for example, how Japanese publishers of manga deal with the matter of the "four quadrants" of the market for entertainment casually acknowledged even in the United States created by its fourfold division along the axes or age and gender. Conventionally the magazines that are the first scene of a manga's printing identify themselves with one quadrant, as indicated by the well-known labels seinen and josei, shonen and shojo, with said labeling tending to carry over to the anime adaptation from them. Just to preempt the addicts of straw man argument, I will acknowledge that no one pretends that this is a perfectly tidy system of division, that there are no gray areas, anomalies, exceptions, all as some manga and even some magazines hew closer to the borderlines than others, where gender as well as age are concerned--while there are female readers for male manga, as well as vice-versa. Still, as everyone who can understand and respect the difference between a generalization and a sweeping generalization should be able to appreciate, generalization does not have to be completely perfect all the way down the line to be sound and useful, and for the most part the classification system holds up. Thus does one not expect to find Fruits Basket in Jump, or Chainsaw Man in Hana to Yume--all as on close inspection the anomalies are not always that. (For instance, seeing a comedy about a bunch of high school girls in a male audience-oriented magazine some will scratch their heads, but those familiar with how such stories are written for the female magazines will notice that when in a shonen, or a seinen, they are not handled the same way as in a shojo--the situations, the sense of humor, even the art style apt to be different, not least with the sort of romantic content female readers conventionally get in their fiction likely absent, eschewed in favor of wacky comedy. It's simply a comedy about high school girls that male readers might find funny, and so not really out of place.)

Of course, this does not align well with the presumptions about these things among mainstream North American commentators. To demarcate some magazines as aimed at a male audiences rather than a female audience seems to them in line with the essentializing, the stereotypes, they desire to combat (that men tend to be a certain way, women a certain way, and each enjoy certain things accordingly). Making matters worse still they take the view that cultural production by, of and for males has historically been more prestigious and better-remunerated than that by, of and for females (a view that a glance at the bestseller lists will not set at ease here, male-authored and -oriented titles dominating), while they also look askance at those things that men conventionally enjoy (be it male heroics they denigrate as "toxic masculinity," or male gaze-indulging "fan service" of exactly the kind that makes them censorious, while even the "centering of a male perspective" is enough to make them take offense). Indeed, the existence of a distinctly male space labeled as such is something they are accustomed to think of as a male bastion to be stormed, and transformed. Thus are such commentators likely to dismiss the categorizations rather than try to understand them--to indeed make straw men of them in their contempt--while fixating on those aspects of manga/anime culture that they find more salutary, most obviously material directed at female readers, dealing with LGBTQ+ themes, or both. Consistent with their ideology, it is far from making for a serious understanding of the form on the part of the commentator or their readers, with Publisher's Global's Shaenon K. Garrity's piece of a few months ago ("Girls to the Front of Manga Readership") exemplary of the tendency and its significant shortcomings.