let's go to fanime pt. 2: the unbearable lightness of fujoing out
I went to Fanime and Manga Ichiba and all I got was a bunch of thoughts about what it means to be in a community.
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Despite having been an anime and manga fan for most of my life, I have only been to two anime conventions prior to going to Fanime last weekend (and one of them was as a panelist, though it has been over a decade and I can no longer remember what for). Part of it is because I have always been Your Most Employed Oomf and prone to saving my vacation time for international travel with friends and family. But the other part of it, if I'm being honest, is because of shame.
In another life, I wrote about being a person motivated by shame, who hides the things she loves so that it is easier to maintain a normie persona for over forty hours at her job each week, who never tells her coworkers exactly why she's going to St. Louis or Los Angeles or that she once rescheduled her honeymoon so that she could watch the League of Legends esports world championship in Shanghai, because then she'd have to explain the entire concept of esports to people who are at least ten years older than her and/or have multiple children and have never heard of, much less ever accessed, Twitch.
Well, seven years later (and it has been almost exactly seven years since I wrote that blog post), I still have not changed. I am still that girl, motivated by shame and the desire to "pass" as normal. Though I have a sticker of Hoshi-sensei from Onna no Sono no Hoshi on my phone (which people routinely mistake for BTS merch), and though I have a "Let's Go to the Family Restaurant" keychain on my work bag (which people never notice or ask questions about), I still lie when asked about my interests. What do I do in my free time? "Oh, movies," I say with a smile. "And I cook." Not, I read approximately ten hours of BL manga a week, probably, and if I'm lucky, sometimes I write about it.
Recently I have been thinking about this a lot, because recently I have been trying to make peace with another revelation about myself: I am not One of the True Perverts.
By this I do not mean sexual perversions (though I am mind-numbingly boring in that area as well). I mean that I do not love things vehemently, depravedly, abnormally, the way a True Pervert does. Instead, I am apprehensive in my enthusiasm for things, a cormorant who furtively dives into the water before reemerging to, motionless, spread its wings in the sun, as if to say, nothing to see here. To be clear, I am not (as the kids might say) a tourist or a larper. When I love something, I am genuine and effusive in my praise for it. For better or worse, my tastes have always been too idiosyncratic to ever risk me becoming a bandwagon fan. But I live in fear of being consumed by something. I do not ever want to seem perverted by my love, derailed from some nebulous path that is cousin to "respectability" and a relative of "sanity." I fear the abyss, over or into which the true fanâthe True Pervertâjumps.
The end result is that I am always in awe of my fandom compatriots who do throw themselves headfirst into the abyss. I'm jealous of friends who have favorite idols, series, pairings, authors, dynamics; who have, for lack of a better word, A Personal Aesthetic; who can easily list their influences and formative experiences and pinpoint when and how they first fell in love with [x], whatever [x] is; those friends whom you associate with that One Thing and their love of that One Thing is cleanly obvious. From my chilly vantage point, they are the SS+ heroes, whereas I am the lonely F-ranker who can only love things like a normie, a side character whose soul has a limited capacity for true love, who perhaps does not even have a soul with which to love, and thus does not love anything at all.
The point is, at Fanime, I was surrounded by the True Perverts. They were my friend and her long-time cosplay friends, who not only invest hours into costume design and makeup and wigs and prop construction, but also travel with boxes of costumes and book themselves for eight photoshoot sessions in a single day. They were the couples in detailed handmade outfits interpreting characters from series that have long fallen out of mainstream attention. They sold and bought body pillows of the lads from LADS. They traded stickers, and fan goods, and tips on which artist was selling unusual merch, and memories, and in-jokes, and a deep, vast understanding of characters from games I had never even heard of, much less played. In some cases, they were the True Perverts that Drank the Miku Feet Juice, and on that, I have nothing at all to say.
When asked if I had fun at Fanime, I kept saying that I had a great time, only it was just a little overwhelming. At some weeks distance, I think that statement was a lie designed to protect myself. In fact, at Fanime, what I felt was an abstract loneliness. I had learned in my many years of fandom life to be too self-sufficient, internalized too strongly the admonition to not seek validation from others.
What I have sacrificed, in return, is an openness to belonging.
Belonging is not the same as blending in, or getting along, or making friends-for-the-time-being, all of which I consider my strengths. I have friends (she says, well aware that having to say such a statement out loud makes it automatically suspect) and have never considered myself friendless or a lonerâbut to have many personal friends is not the same as community.
In fact, in some ways, to belong to a community is diametrically opposed to being enmeshed in a personal network of friends. It requires both an allegiance to and a responsibility for and an ownership over perfect strangers. Belonging is not about a total erasure of discomfort, alienation, or resentment; community is not and was never meant to be utopia. But it is a recognition that tolerating others in your communityâand receiving that tolerance from others in turnâis important in the face of some grand cause, which can sometimes be simply belonging itself.
This may be controversial, but I believe community should be in service to some greater cause, and as a result, it is a disservice to be "in community" with everything you like. To create belonging is no small undertaking, and is an obligation that should be taken seriously. It's okay to not treat your fandoms or your hobbies like your community (which is not the same as saying it's okay to be rude!), if you don't feel like they are in service of a cause, or a cause that is important to you. I find it enormously difficult to believe in bestseller charts or streaming numbers or awards or rankings as a grand cause. This is probably why I didn't survive for long in kpop fandom (and also perpetually find myself cheering for the worst team in every league).
And this is probably why I have not found it important to find community in anime or manga. I have been lucky enough to have friends, and to have found belonging in other ways, and to carve even in my fandoms little gatherings of fellow sickos who dive into the same waters and sit on the same logs and spread their wings beside me, enjoying the same sun. I haven't discovered a grand cause worthy of devotion. But then again, I haven't needed to.
At Fanime I thought for the first time, what would I need to be in community here? Who would that be community be with? And what could we be possibly be in service of?
In Fai's post about their experience at Manga Ichiba, they wrote about how their experience of kinship with other anime fans has changed:
Fandom now is bigger and more varied than ever. Anime is mainstream. When I first started going to anime conventions as a young adult, the most exciting feeling I had was kinship. I could be confident that everyone near me knew the same jokes, watched same shows, heard the same songs, and these were all things we couldnât easily share with other people in our lives. Cons still give me that feeling, but fandom is pop culture now, and monoculture is dead; itâs become too vast for a one size fits all to actually work as perfectly as it did before. I canât turn to the person sitting next to me and talk about the best anime ever made (Fullmetal Alchemist) because they may not even know what that is (ouch); they might be only into Gacha Games, or Vtubers, or TCGs, or Danmei, or Webtoons, or they might have only watched Demonslayer. And you know what? I havenât watched Demonslayer. That puts me at an extreme disadvantage. On the bus to Manga Ichiba, I knew that the people sitting around us all liked doujinshi. That was the same kinship I used to get in AA, when it was hard to get official merch of any kind of your favorite anime unless you went to a con. If you read my post about prepping for Manga Ichiba, youâll know that in the midst of my busiest drawing time I decided to take a week off in order to go to Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest, an official convention for the MMO video game. The kinship was overflowing there.
Recently, I've been listening to a lot of Rian Phin's video essays on fashion, not because I am particularly interested in fashion but because it's clear her mind moves a hundred miles a minute tying together art and philosphy and the search for both in our daily lives in a way that is catnip to me. In one about the different interpretations of Y2K fashion, she talks about how it's easy to assume that people wearing mainstream costume-y interpretations of trends don't care about authenticity, but we must recognize that there is psychological safety in numbers and in the comfort of being clearly legible to others. It is disheartening to not be understood, so to interpret a trend differently, even if that different is "more realistically" or "more authentically" or "more deeply researched", is a risk that you have to be willing to take. In doing so, you signal that it is important to you to find others with those small overlapping circles of interest. There is social value in being seen and understood, not just seen.
I am going to state the obvious: Being an anime or manga fan (and, similarly, being a fan of BL) is not at all like being into fashion. You participate in fashion, whether or not you want to be, simply by wearing clothes, but being an anime or manga fan is largely a cryptic fandom. The choice to identify as such is wholly intentional; you cannot accidentally demonstrate interest in being an anime or manga fan (though you could be a fan of an individual anime or manga without the rest of the identity attaching on). Thus, when faced with an opportunity to gather as a group, I think many of us (especially older fans like me) have not left the early mentality of wanting to embrace everything and everyone, of thinking about ourselves as belonging to the same community of nerds, even though we have long outgrown that as a useful mode of organization. I think spaces like Fanime still inherit this old-school purpose of being a public place where you could be, above all, seen and understood as an anime or manga fan. It is a no-judgment zone, a show-and-tell lovefest where all your interests are accepted, all your faves valid, All Perverts Welcome.
But to do so in an age where we have access to so many anime and so many manga (and so much bl and so much danmei!), we end up flattening our fetishes. Our safety in numbers is safety in the easily legible, and our commitment to tolerate each other is a genial kowtowing to the Intellectual Property, because that's the only way to communicate. Oh, you like Dark Souls? I also like Video Game. Oh, you like SVSSS? I also like Danmei. Oh, you like Chiikawa? I also like Cute Things. Oh, you like Umamusume? I also like Horse Yuri. When we left the conventions paces and walked the streets of San Jose, we were an undifferentiated smoothie of cosplay and fursuits and itabags and anime merch. We are all Perverts of the Same Kind, and in being so, we are no perverts at all.
Well, all this is an overly long prologue. I went to Fanime, my first anime convention in decades, not because I suddenly wanted to experience the community of my fellow anime and manga fans, but because I wanted to be a part of the inaugural Manga Ichiba, the first ever dedicated doujinshi market in the United States.
And it probably comes as no surprise that at Manga Ichiba, I was delightfully shocked into feeling the sense of community I didn't realize I was looking for. What I found at Manga Ichiba was this unapologetic expression of the subversive, the risky signaling of the in-group that Rian Phin espoused, the rejection of the need to buy everything simply because it is There and part of the General Anime Intellectual Property, replaced by the passionate drive to only participate in the very specific thing that made you a True Pervert. Weeks out from the event, I can't stop thinking about all the True Perverts I met at Manga Ichiba: the one artist during the Saturday morning session of Manga Ichiba who was selling, of all things, a Boogiepop Phantom doujinshi and was excited when I approached their table to talk to them about the 2001 anime, the free pamphlet encouraging you to watch all 100+ episodes of the slowest and most body-count-heavy space opera ever written (Legend of Galactic Heroes), all the variety of original comics I saw that ranged from demoted MyReadingManga incest tags to short, plotless adventures with longtime OCs that, understandably, no one recognized.
None of these were profitable ventures, and they were not trying to be. They were little lighthouses on lonely shores, shining a beacon out into the darkness, hoping to be seen and understood, and we were all boats paddling furiously towards each artist's table. You could not be there in that space as a lover of manga and not feel a kind of a protectiveness, an anxiety over the precarity of the event's existence, but also somehow a delirious hope that it might go on forever and ever, spreading all over the United States.
Comic Market, still (?) the largest doujinshi convention in the Japan and thus the world, is famous for its motto that "there are no 'customers' at the Comic Market." In the eyes of Comiket, we are all simply participants. While the circles provide works and concepts, the general attendees participate as readers and supporters of the creative works.
I love this conception of the doujinshi market, because firstly, I love the Weird, the works where you can feel the creator's soul moving like the spirit of God over their work of art, where something is so imbued with the individuality of its maker that you know it is off-putting to someone. To encourage this kind of art, the reader cannot be a "customer," to be serviced and pandered to. Instead, the artist and the reader must be co-conspirators, participants in a crime of self-expression. And at Manga Ichiba, I was a participant in many crimes.
But Comiket's explanation of the doujinshi holy trinity does not end there. The doujinshi market is where "creativity," "collection," and "community"âthat is, interaction among participantsâmeet. And importantly, the reader participates not just through their purchasing of doujinshi but also in their "interaction."
What does it mean to be a non-artist participant outside of simply buying? Comiket seems to posit that there is an obligation unique to the reader that extends long after money and doujinshi have exchanged hands. In other words, it's not the buying that makes a reader part of the community. It is the reader's interaction with the doujinshi.
Nowadays we favor the term "BL" over "yaoi," but a part of me has always been drawn to the playfulness of "yaoi" as a word, even more so when I realized that it was a self-deprecating in-joke based on one artist's friends reading an original doujinshi she wrote literally titled "Yaoi" (ć€èżœă). To me, this is the essence of yaoi, and with it, doujinshi: an exercise in whimsy, an act of bringing forth art and weirdness and selfhood into the world, but also something that can only spring into existence through community participation, through its creator offering it up for presentation, the readers recognizing its existence and commenting on it, and its placement inâor rejection fromâthe commercial world.
"Yaoi has been called 'masturbation fantasy,' but its pleasures are nevertheless meant to be shared," Patrick W. Galbraith wrote in "Moe Talk: Affective Communication among Female Fans of Yaoi in Japan." I have posited before that the yaoi/BL/slash fiction space is so unique but also prolific with its very specific tropes and formulations of narratives because the lines between authors and readers are so porous. BL creators tend to also heavily consume BL, both amateur and professional, and often inspired to create by comments from their readers, even citing suggestions or overwhelming responses from their readers as inspiration for their work, while readers often become inspired to create their own work.
I think, then, if we are to have a community, our readers must read, and let othersânot just the authors, but also other readersâknow what they have read, how it made them feel. Not in a product review way, or like a customer reviewing a restaurant on Google, no matter how glowing such a review may be. But in a way that reflects the reader's own self-expression, that reaches deep into the reader herself, and leaves her a little vulnerable. Yes, that's why I ended up writing a post blurbing every doujinshi I bought at Manga Ichiba. And it worked! It was a labor of love in every way, and writing it made me feel like I was giving back to the authors in a way separate from money, like I was helping Manga Ichiba in its journey to continuation and proliferation, like I was actually contributing, opening myself up to be seen and understood.
I realize it's incredibly self-centered to write a three-thousand word post that basically boils down to, "I went to an event full of wonderful artists and had a realization about Me." But I'm so thankful I went to Manga Ichiba and that it made me think about the reader's place in community, my place as a reader, my obligations to the wider yaoi community. I believe we have a grand cause: self-expression. I believe every day we live in this world, with is constant commercialization and domination by corporate interests and consolidation of capital in the hands of increasingly robotic and soulless men who do not see the value of art, that cause is under attack. I believe in the power of the True Perverts, of the appreciators of the Weird, of necessity of self-expression in all its forms. And I believe we can all bring forth the whimsy that is Yaoi in the World, as readers and creators both, as participants, as partners in crime.
