doujinshi et al

[charmian]

Must say, my immediate reaction was "well, manga by women for a female audience is going to have fewer doujin and such, because 1) most doujin is about pairings and shipping, and b) most manga by women for a female audience has pairings in it (and pairings that the audience is interested in). Thusly, since it's already in the canon, there is less of a need to create fanworks."


But then, what about gen? (What, there is gen?) IMHO, a lot of the gen is produced by people who are also shippers of one stripe or another, and also, in fandoms, a critical mass is needed, and that goes for gen as well. Are there Japanese doujin fandoms of substantive size involving female fans making nearly all gen doujinshi? I haven't seen such a thing. IME in doujin fandoms, most of the doujin produced by women are pairing-focused.

Also, at the same time, hasn't shounen changed a bit since the days of Sailor Moon? Nowadays WJ and SS are courting a female audience also, and providing moe fanservice for them. That may affect the equation a bit. Then you have stuff like Kuroshitsuji, which uh... really seems aimed towards women, and magazines with an ambiguous audience.

Plus, I think Meril had a great point about how the genre (meaning actual content, not the shoujo or shounen thing) affects fanworks. Nana and Nodame Cantabile are romance or soap operas (for lack of a better word) set in the real world. Now there are people who write fanfic for such things, but like, they're rarer, and most fanfic is written for SFF or other genre series. They can't really be directly compared to Naruto in terms of content.

After all, people read/watch manga/anime for reasons other than moe. Simply because something is popular doesn't mean that it's solely because it's for moe reasons, you know? (As in, not all readers of manga are otaku; as in, there are Western TV shows widely watched by female viewers which nonetheless inspire far fewer fanfictions than far less popular shows) "Moe" I associate with fanservicey (including the giant robot type of fanservice) titles; and although moe =/= escapism, IMHO the sort of titles which really solicit moe are escapist ones. Nana is not really realistic, but emotionally it's much more so than most shoujo or shounen.

It might also be interesting to consider which titles are widely read by male readers, yet fail to inspire male fan creations? Another thing to ask is, compared to female doujinka, do male doujinka, say, create the same amount of doujinshi for top series like One Piece, Bleach, and Naruto? I don't have raw stats, but the impression I get is that at Comiket, the majority of Naruto doujin is 女性向け, clearly, men are reading Naruto, but they are not producing doujin. Instead, they seem to be producing doujin of other titles: I mean, check out this post, in which the blogger isn't talking at all about titles like the WJ ones, but about Touhou, Higurashi, and Vocaloid.


In other news, am rereading slowly the Ravages of Time. BTW, I heard that someone refused to read it because there was a lack of bishounen, which totally confuses me. (I mean, not that all the characters are pretty, but it's not like there is a lack, either?) But then, I read Jojo, so maybe my aesthetic values have been permanently warped.

Comments

[histoirede]

I don't have raw stats, but the impression I get is that at Comiket, the majority of Naruto doujin is 女性向け, clearly, men are reading Naruto, but they are not producing doujin.

But in Japan, the male readers of Naruto are mostly 8/10 year-old... they don't produce doujinshi.

[charmian]

Okay, that's another good point, one which I failed to consider. XD (So older men don't read Naruto at all?)

[histoirede]

I guess they do, but way less, and maybe it won't be the real otaku that would read (or love) Naruto, as Jump is really mainstream manga everyone could read.
Anyway, I heard that info in a French documentary, they were interviewing someone from Jump who said the audience of Naruto was definitely younger in Japan than it was in France.

Also, "jôsei muki" do get gen stories in lots of fandom. I agree pairing oriented is certainly the most common doujinshi, but there are a lot of gen and gag doujinshi written by girls. I'd say more than by boys, but getting in a "dansei muki" doujinshi section is way too scary for me to get there and verify ^__-

[charmian]

Yeah, it is definitely younger, but I also think that that might be true of the female audience, yet clearly it's not the 9-12 year old girls who are producing the doujinshi either.

I wasn't saying that there were zero gen stories, though, and a lot of the times, the gen stories have had BL overtones, even if they were not explicitly BL or romance genre.

[petronia]

Yeah, I always feel like the male fans of WJ series are "normal" kids and adolescents, and the otaku draw for KyoAni moe series like Haruhi, K-On, etc. and stuff like Touhou (it's also gotten more compartmentalized since the 90s as the industry's gotten better at targetting otaku specifically). This makes sense if you consider that WJ casts are skewed hugely male, which 1) makes them interesting to kid/teen male audiences, 2) makes them interesting to fangirls seeking bishounen, 3) makes them not interesting to fanboys seeking cute girls. Where there are cute girls, ex. the Bleach cast, you do see male-oriented fanworks for them.

I think the point about some series being easier to draw/parody than others is a huge one as well - particularly since the idiosyncrasy of the art often parallels idiosyncrasies in plot or "genre fit", so we may be attributing too much effect to the latter when it's really about the former.

it's all about the bishounens?

[charmian]

Yeah... the amount of stuff for Touhou and eroge and other moe-ish titles, if we're talking about otaku, is staggering, esp. compared to how much they're viewed in the mainstream.

Indeed, although Nodame Cantabile's art is much less stylized and difficult to render than Nana's, also, and a lot of shoujo doesn't have art like Nana's either, so I'm not sure what that means. (IMHO Nana is a poor example because it's such atypical shoujo in many ways)

What do you think about the point of the lack of gen for shoujo/BL titles?

[canis_m]

This may be overgeneralization, but it seems to me shoujo art (esp. non-SF/F shoujo art) often tends to be more naturalistic in some sense than shounen art, in the sense that shoujo character designs often don't have exaggerated distinguishing features. Not that I read a lot of shounen, but in series like RuroKen, FMA, Bleach, HikaGo, and Inuyasha, the characters tend to have particular trademark elements in their designs--hairstyles and clothing and props all contribute to this. I'm assuming series with these sorts of exaggerated designs would be easier for artists to appropriate--like, all a fanartist has to do is draw a long-haired redhead with a scar on the cheek, and the viewer can immediately recognize that figure as Kenshin, even if it otherwise varies wildly from Kenshin as Watsuki drew him.

Now that I think about it, the shoujo series I've seen that do generate more fanwork--such as CLAMP series and Loveless--not only tend to be SF/F, they also have these sorts of more exaggerated character designs with trademark features.

[charmian]

I think it may depend on genres in shounen, and also be influenced by cast size. (I suspect if you go and look at a romance shounen series with like three major characters, you might find the art to be more naturalistic; same with seinen) Basically, when you have a large cast, you need to have a lot of variance in their designs, or people will get fairly confused about who is who. [Also, I am not sure that you can generalize that much about shoujo. Stuff like Arina Tanemura seems to have a lot of distinguishing features]

True, but also isn't there a connection between fandom popularity and cast sizes as well?

Oh, I also thought of another example. Togainu no Chi seems to have a fair amount of doujin. (It's a BL doujin game, though, so some of it might be by the creators themselves)

[canis_m]

Well, I did say I might be overgeneralizing. You're probably right. The more I talk about this the more I feel like I haven't surveyed enough shounen or shoujo to be able to make any claims at all. -_-;

Connection as in, series with big casts are more likely to have bigger fandoms? I expect so.

[charmian]

I suspect a good way to start might be by getting a copy of the Comiket catalog and seeing what's going on there? Then you might be able to see things like what proportion of Naruto (for example) circles are done by men/women, and what series are the most popular among men vs. those among women, and which shoujo fandom is the most popular.

Yeah... IMHO, I think part of the reason why the most popular shoujo titles are mainstream (non-SFF, not too otaku-esque) ones are that one of the modern developments is that WJ et al are marketing towards the fujoshi and such. So if the doujin-creating otaku part of the female audience is paying attention to the WJ stuff, that leaves less room for that part of the market in the actual shoujo mags.

[As for why? I think it's a similar reason as to why a lot of the most popular shows in Western mostly-female-fanfic-fandom are actually not the most popular shows among female viewers in general.)

[canis_m]

RE: prevalence of gen, in the J-fandoms I'm most familiar with--12K, Sen to Chihiro when that was active, and Harry Potter--there is/was a lot of gen fanwork (fanfic, fanart, and doujinshi) made by fans I assume(d) to be female. I don't feel able to make a good estimate of exactly how much, percentage-wise, and it may not have been a majority, but it was a major chunk, such that if you eliminated all the gen, the total amount of fanwork would be substantially reduced.

(In fact I used to get frustrated that there was so much 12K gen, because I wanted pairing stuff. XD; And I would've thought 12K would be especially conducive to pairing fanwork, because the canon includes very little romance--so there is that lack to be filled--and it has a large cast of both male and female characters, which is also a key ingredient apparently. But in turns out that in this instance, a gen canon results in lots of gen fanwork.)

I'm glad you mentioned Touhou, because I'd never even heard of it. That's how distanced I am from male otaku spheres, I guess, orz.

[charmian]

Yeah, but I mean, the people who produce it, do they produce only gen? Or are they pairing fans who also produce gen?

Gen is an interesting question, though. I wonder what your commenters would have to say about it? (Yet, is 12K a very large or typical fandom? What about Sen to Chihiro?) I also wonder about male fans and gen. IIRC they say that a substantial portion of the stuff produced by men at comiket isn't pr0n, but I'm not sure what it is.

It may be in 12K's case, the format is also influencing it (novel).

Yeah, Touhou is huge. The Touhou-only event is filling one of the larger arenas in Tokyo. Have you seen Higurashi also? That's also pretty popular, and is more interesting to me because it's got an anime.

[canis_m]

I'm not sure? If all you have to go on is a sample of fanwork from a given author/circle, and that sample consists of mostly gen with some smaller amount of pairing stuff, how would you classify the producer? Is there a significant distinction between "pairing fans who also produce gen" and "gen fans who also produce pairing stuff"? My impression is that fans who produce either pairing stuff exclusively or gen exclusively are uncommon, and that most fall somewhere in between.

12K is neither large (I'd call it middle-sized, but relatively dormant/languishing at the moment) nor typical of anything, in my estimation--I only mentioned it above because it's one of the fandoms I'm most familiar with.

[charmian]

Hmm, it's hard to say. I'd say it depends on the proportion, but if most fans produce both, then it's difficult to figure out which factors promote gen fanworks in fans vs. pairing fanworks.

The shoujo (Japanese) fandom I'm most familiar with is Saiunkoku, and from looking at the web pages, mainly gen fans are in the minority, although many people are also interested in the gen aspects as well. But then, it's also not typical because it's a novel.

I have to wonder what the largest current shoujo-based doujin fandom is.

[canis_m]

Higurashi know of chiefly because you've mentioned it in posts before. But I haven't seen it.

[catcurl]

*wry* It's the aesthetic. I do have a manga reading buddy whom I realised long ago it's impossible to recommend series with 'meat' if the art isn't up to par. Her aesthetic is very mainstream shoujo/shonen, anything else looks ugly to her eyes and she doesn't enjoy it. Since part of the experience is eyecandy as much as anything else...

I really should get back to reading ROT, but since the English scanlations are a lot further along, maybe I'll do my reread in English instead.

[charmian]

Ah... Sometimes I do see series where I really hate the art (I detest the Honey and Clover art), but if I'm just meh about it, it's okay.

Oh, they're up to the latest chapter. Want links?