#readyforspringbreak

I’ve noticed a common theme of published work by thinkers and critics containing complicated and unnecessary Jargon which often excludes the population they are critiquing and or/ talking about. If they really wanted to get their message out to a more general audience, they would frame the information in a way where people could actually understand it. It can be done, as we saw in Craig Norris’s “Manga, Anime, and Visual Art Culture, where he mentioned various manga being made to appeal to different demographics, which helps get a broader message across.

My understanding of Otaku is that it encompasses a specific group of people who have a strong obsession with certain aspects of Japanese culture, such as anime, manga, movies, and games ( to name a few). Hiroki Azuma, author of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, describes it as people who prefer the fictional worlds offered by the entertainment industry, over reality. It gets to a point where this culture feels like a home and familial to those participating in it.

I found his ideas of narrative consumption particularly interesting. Essentially people pick and choose what they want out of certain media and fail to look at the big picture, instead making the once minor detail into its own category. A strange cycle of reduce, reuse, recycle, where ( characters for example) are reduced to simple parts (specific clothing, catchphrases, looks), reused (imitating character/ characters start being known for specific traits), and ultimately reused (character fall into easily recognizable categories).