Jinying Li, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek-Otaku-Zhai

Since the advent of audience and fan studies there has a growing divide between theorised, abstracted notions of the film viewer and the accounts of filmgoing experiences drawn directly from audiences. In Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek-Otaku-Zhai, Jinying Li offers us a new take on this split. Li’s transmedial and transnational analysis attempts to bridge this divide to provide us with a welcome perspective on Chinese anime fandom, mostly organised around the figure of the zhai (a term itself transnationally lifted from the Japanese for fan, otaku). In approaching zhai as an abstracted, theorised vision of geekdom while immersing herself in Chinese fandom’s particularities, Li draws together threads from both sides of the audience studies split.

Anime fandom is not an unknown country within scholarship. Sandra Annett’s excellent book Anime’s Fan Communities,¹ for example, delves deeply into the emergence and history of local and overseas fandom for Japanese animation. Moreover, some of the world’s top fan studies scholars, from Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills to Hye-kyung Lee, Sean Leonard and James Russell, have studied varying aspects of anime fandom’s global significance. Most of this work appears in Li’s analysis of global geekdom, albeit sometimes fleetingly, but her starting point is notably different. Li begins her study of geekdom in Silicon Valley in the USA. It is this computing centre that Li cites as the source for the rise of global geek culture, rather than looking to the grassroots and fandom’s growth in science fiction conventions in the mid 20th century. In making the case for an alternative starting point for fan studies, Li offers a shift towards fandom as a global, abstracted and encompassing way of understanding media consumption. This is the essence of what Li terms ‘knowledge culture’, a product of geekdom’s work culture, or ‘knowledge work’, undertaken both as careers and as fan praxis.

Li brings a Chinese perspective on anime consumption to Anime’s Knowledge Cultures, offering a refreshing counterpoint to more American- and Japanese-centred views on anime fandom and its global spread. Li’s range of theoretical and art-historical touchstones is dizzyingly extensive, drawing in everything from contemporary Chinese digital art and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Mikhail Bakhtin and Gilles Deleuze. Through this constellation of reference points, Li contends that in China the zhai anime fans are now a de facto generation, and one that is leading the way in cultural and knowledge creation. It is when Li focuses on this generation that Anime’s Knowledge Cultures comes into its own. Chapter 3 on danmaku (‘bullet curtains’) is an exemplar. In this chapter Li relates how Japanese streaming platforms enabled fans to respond to anime while it was streaming, with comments showering across the screen as a near-‘live’ curtain of text layered on top of the original programme. This method of fan commentary took hold in China, and according to Li’s account has been wildly popular on local streaming sites before shifting into television and even cinematic exhibition of animated and live action films. Li’s analysis cogently engages with the way zhai fans’ online community practices are being expanded and commodified by turns, reimagining anime fans as engaged workers for powerful media distributors.

Following the example of danmaku, Li’s chapters intervene in debates about contemporary anime at differing levels. In Chapter 5 on ‘cybernetic play’, for instance, Li rethinks approaches to Japanese franchising (also known as media mix). Noting previous theorisation of anime’s media mix by Toshio Okada (who focuses on grand narratives) and Hiroshi Azuma (who takes a database approach centring on character archetypes), Li proposes a new ‘game-centred cybernetic consumption’ model of anime franchising. Li’s model is based on the rise of a comparatively new genre of anime media mix (or franchising) known as isekai (meaning another world, or parallel worlds) though she never names her case study, Steins;Gate (2011), as such. This kind of anime originates from Japanese light novels and computing gaming, which Li argues creates a different relationship between fans and texts. Instead of collecting narrative segments, or looking to a database of character tropes, in Li’s model it is a search for the ‘true ending’ (or most fulfilling ending) that keeps fans returning to a franchise. In making this move, Li opens the door to a multiplicity of potential media mix architectures. For instance, we might look to the yōkai genre’s origins in dictionaries of Japanese monsters and folkore for an encyclopaedic architecture supporting popular franchises from Gegege no Kitarō (or Graveyard Kitarō [1968–present]) to Natsume’s Book of Friends (2008–24), and perhaps even Pokémon (1997–present). Or we might think about franchises that start in fandom, especially LGBTQ+ genres like Boys’ Love and yaoi, which foster specific and distinct approaches to remixing and iteration than seen in other genres of anime.

Furthermore, some of Li’s interventions inspire and provoke the need to rethink elements of accepted scholarship around anime and manga studies, in addition to fan studies. Not least the final chapter on ‘superflat’ aesthetics, a term popularised by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami but used in anime studies to explain the compression of depth and scattering of vision across the screen in anime. In her rehearsal of superflat theory in relation to contemporary computer screen technologies, Li obliquely prompts us to question such longstanding categories, not least because the camera in contemporary anime is a property of computer animation and can now be placed anywhere and move in any direction. We need only watch the camera in the opening episode of television anime Demonslayer: Kimetsu no yaiba (2019–24) flying and twisting through an early forest scene to see that anime is now technologically, if not stylistically, free of the need for superflat composition.

Through these diverse means and on these shifting levels, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures makes much-needed interventions well beyond the idea of geekdom. But Li’s shifting focal points and abstractions sometimes work against the book’s better instincts. Where the discussion of danmaku offers specific intervention into an understudied fan phenomenon, the discussion of earlier fan work to produce fan-subtitled versions of anime television shows is more reductive. This is the result of an attempt to make the discussion of zhai fit with preceding work on transnational fansubbing groups. It is clear from the analysis of the zhai fansubbers in China that their cultural and political contexts were unusual, if not unique. More attention to the distinctiveness of the early moments of this subculture within China would have been welcome, in place of the culturally and temporally distant debates coming from US-based anime fansubtitling groups. When the book does turn to the specific – in discussions of fan cultures and anime motifs alike – there is such a confident, theoretically rich picture painted about the zhai. So significant is this intervention that we can expect Li’s Anime Knowledge Cultures to be the start of its own subculture within scholarhip, acting as the beginning of zhai studies.

Footnotes