No one else wants to play acafan okay fine

[canis_m]

Can anyone think of shoujo series or other by-women, marketed-to-women anime/manga (including BL, josei, and yuri) that have generated substantial fandom activity in Japan? By "substantial fandom activity" I mean not just discussion or attention but a decent body of doujinshi or other fanwork, fansites, etc. (edit: NOT limited to textual fanwork

Comments

[worldserpent]

Ah, okay. I think you'd get better responses if you limited to J-fandom in the post.

As for male otaku, I don't really know as much (though I have read some doujin made by male fans: look at Touhou for some examples), but it seems to me that their fanworks are much less dependent on shipping/pairings. Obviously some male fans do like pairings and some female fans are indifferent, but it seems to me that female Japanese fans are much less interested in creating/painting figures and models and a lot of the stuff female fans are interested in.

No, it's not always the case, but from what I've seen of doujinshi, most of them produced by female fans are heavily pairing oriented. Which is not to say that they are all so (there is gen other genres). [also iirc a lot of the people who produce the gen are are ALSO shippers and the same people producing the pairing fanart] I think also there is a feedback effect, where if something is big, it encourages more production in general, because there are more readers, more people encouraging producers.

I have to say that I also don't really know why FMA fans are more likely to produce fanart than Nodame Cantabile fans or Nana fans. I think it might have to do how 'moe' deals with how appropriable a series is? (thinking idly) Stuff that is moe is often kind of geared towards a fan audience, and is easy to repurpose. (Nodame Cantabile and Nana are also in terms of storytelling genre quite different from FMA or WJ, I think, and that might have an effect)

[canis_m]

Agreed on all of this...Azuma especially would probably agree with the last bit, that degree of appropriatability/recyclability depends upon presence of moe elements. Not to say that Nana etc. do not also contain moe elements, or that readers don't feel moe for those characters, but the moe seems more incidental than central.

meril pointed out that genre (in the SF/F sense) may also be a factor. Although come to think of it I don't have an explanation for why a correlation exists between SF/F and otaku behavior, in Japan or anywhere else. More to mull over.

[worldserpent]

It depends on the definition of "moe" after all; I'm sure people are moe for certain characters in Nana, but IMHO that's not what people read the manga for, most of them. Speculating idly, I think a lot of people read Nana for reasons other than moe, because they like the complexity of the relationships, which in some ways goes against the whole 'looking for my 'fetish'' aspect of moe.

I think it definitely is a factor.

BTW, there have been essays written about this topic before. Not sure how well they apply to Japanese doujin fandoms, but for Western LJ fanfic, people have noted that genre (SFF) is a factor, as is relatively light-heartedness in tone. Speculating idly, I'd say it's the non-mimeticness, the 'it's a construct/metaphor after all!,' and the way a lot of SF/F is explicitly aiming at an otaku/fan audience who read it for the genre.