Fanfic Forensics

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Research into fan communities and the media they produce (fanwork) is no longer a rarity in European and American academia. Similar sociological and literary inquiry into the activities of Japanese fan communities has remained very limited up until now. Japanese fans' chief medium of expression, the amateur manga (Japanese comics) called dōjinshi, which feature characters from commercial titles, have enjoyed very little scholarly attention. Research into dōjinshi has focused mainly on their legal status, not their contents. For this reason dōjinshi remain a blind spot both in fan studies and manga studies, in spite of their importance for these fields as a medium of amateur manga expression online and in print.

This project unlocks dōjinshi for research by manga and fan studies scholars by constructing a theoretical framework specifically suited to the cross-cultural comparison of fanwork, comparing narrative and visual elements in dōjinshi to elements with a similar function in English-language fanwork (fan fiction and fan art), and establishing the position of dōjinshi as a medium within Japan's contemporary system of cultural production through analysis of the data within the aforementioned theoretical framework.

A solid theoretical framework is necessary in order to correctly and objectively analyse data about dōjinshi and identify the place dōjinshi can occupy in fan and manga studies. I have constructed a theoretical framework that rests upon the situation of fanworks as a practical contemporary expression of the 'open work' as described by Umberto Eco. This 'open work' is an artwork specifically designed by its creator to require active practical involvement by consumers. Eco explained the function of the 'open work' by claiming that a work in this format alone correctly reflects the vision of the world expressed by contemporary scientific thought (Eco 1962, 1989)

Eco's 'open work' remains somewhat utopian (Bondanella 2005) and has mostly been applied as decoding tool for certain forms of avant-garde art, although several attempts have been made recently to utilize the concept of 'open work' for examination of online texts (Hayles 2001) and cross-cultural analysis of literature. 'Harry Potter' and most other source texts that are used by fan authors are not intended as 'open works' by their original creators. However, recent technological developments, particularly online social software, have radically transformed media used for the dissemination of fanworks (Hellekson and Busse 2006), and this change has emancipated readers to such a degree that they do not wait for the content industry to adapt the formats of its products to reflect today's particular system of cultural relationships (Russo 2002). Through use of technology, readers now reclaim agency from authors and themselves transform closed works into 'open works'. Although the location of agency in this new incarnation of Eco's 'open work' (fanwork) has shifted, the work's function in society remains as Eco articulated it.