committee post: Seeking a few good anime and manga fans!

[rbarenblat]

The Fanlore wiki committee has been brainstorming this year about outreach to different fan communities, especially fan communities which are unrepresented or under-represented on Fanlore. Anime, manga, and related communities are an area where we’d like to do some outreach.

Before we really dive in to trying to spread the word about Fanlore in various anime and manga communities, we want to make sure that we’ve created a good wiki structure in which fans can add pages. Here are the category pages for anime and manga as things stand now:

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Anime
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Manga

We probably need to reexamine how the above format categories are assigned to fandom pages. Do we want anime movies to be in the Film category? Anime/Manga may also need a separate Fandom by Source Community category (and what should we call it?). One issue we’ve become aware of is that the terms “anime” and “manga” may exclude similar material created in countries other than Japan (manhua in China, for example). We’re not sure what the right answers are. Here are a few ideas:

Option 1: Merge the Anime category with Cartoons and the Manga category with Comics.

Anime + Cartoons → Cartoons
Manga + Comics → Comics

Option 2: Create a new category, Animation, for the combined Anime and Cartoons categories. Merge the Manga category with Comics.

Anime + Cartoons → Animation
Manga + Comics → Comics

Option 3:
? something we haven’t even thought of yet!

We’re hoping for a system that will accommodate many needs, including those of manhua, manhwa, and a variety of animation and comics fandoms from around the world. If you have knowledge in these areas, we definitely want to hear from you! We hope to find a few fans who are excited about the prospect of chronicling and preserving anime or manga fandoms and their histories, who can help us 1) figure out how best to structure this corner of the wiki and 2) reach out to anime and manga communities for more participation once we have a good structure in place.

Might you be that person? Let us know by dropping a comment on this post, or contact us using our contact form. And please feel free to signal-boost this post on your own journal or in the fannish spaces you frequent. Thanks!

Edited to add: stay tuned -- a new post is coming from the Fanlore wiki committee which contains a new proposal for how to handle categories on the wiki, based in large part on response to this post. We've made a follow-up post, which is here: Category proposal.

Comments

[franzeska]

It kind of feels like we're imposing archive-style hierarchical structure on a wiki for no good reason. Why not just make as many comics categories as there are nuclei of comics fandoms?

[franzeska]

And, wow, I don't think I'm the target audience of this post at all, but I have to say that some of the commentary I'm seeing on what 'comics' means is amazingly English- and US-centric. 'Comics' isn't everyone's word, but it's a pretty common cognate/loan word in a hell of a lot of languages (including Japanese). Sequential Art isn't widely used by any manga or Western comics fanfic writers I know, but it's plenty well known in some fandom corners.

[salinea]

Can you elaborate, please? I'm not sure I understand all your points there, especially if it was in connection to any of the things I said.

[franzeska]

That wasn't targeted just at comments on this post at all, but rather at all of the discussions about OTW, AO3, Fanlore, and sequential art terminology. :)

One meaning of 'comics' is superhero comics as opposed to other sequential art. Another meaning is all cartooning or all cartooning that's in a strip or book format. The word is used a number of different ways in English. It's simply not true that it always means superhero comics unless you're only talking to certain groups of fans. (In my experience, often English-speaking manga fans or indie/high brow US comics fans who use 'graphic novel', though from what you say, the comics=superheroes thing is used elsewhere too.) English terminology like 'cartoon' and 'comic' just aren't used consistently the same way by everyone.

Getting away from English, there are lots of tradition or region-specific terms for certain types of comics. I'm not trying to deny that. But it's also true that 'comics' is used in a lot of different languages for various different meanings. Filipino comics are 'komiks', for example. 'Komikku' is a loan word in Japanese, used by Japanese people, about Japanese comics. It's not the primary word I'd use in conversation to tell a friend I like to read manga; it's still a word of Japanese that's in active use.

I am not arguing that this makes 'comics' a good category on Fanlore or that anime fandom should adopt the word 'comics'. I am saying that actual usage is way more complicated than comics=superheroes.

[salinea]

Oh, I guess I hadn't been clear. When I said that comics means "American superhero comics" to me, I didn't mean that it was the only meaning of the word. I know it can be used to describe the medium in general as well. I was talking more in term of evocation and connotation of the word.

the comics=superheroes thing is used elsewhere too
Well, in French. And I've spent lots of time in English speaking manga web communities as well.

Thanks for going in detail into what you mean, that was interesting, I didn't know Japanese had adopted the word Komikku! :)

radical!

[aethel]

That sounds like a good plan. Where will we put these categories?

In terms of not imposing archive category hierarchy, would you be in favor of getting rid of the format subcategories under Fandoms by Source Text? The ones that aren't fandom names:

Fandoms by Source Text

* Books & Literature
* Film
* Radio
* Television
* Theater


And then create more fandom categories either here or under Fandoms by Source Community? Comics, Manhua, Gaming/Games, ...

Re: radical!

[franzeska]

Ok, I have to preface this by saying I'm a long-time wikipedia user and have always found like 99% of their categories horribly useless, and I never browse wikis that way. I'll go to google and use its superior text search over a wiki's own bad one before I'll resort to large category browsing in almost every case. (So maybe somebody on the other end of the spectrum does find these categories useful?)

To me, given the Fanlore focus on fandom to the exclusion of canon minutia, categories like 'film' make no sense. That's how the source product is organized outside of a fandom context. Fandoms are usually thematically organized (HP books, HP movies, HP cosplay, HP conventions, etc.). Even canon source texts that aren't based on anything and that haven't spawned major offshoots in other mediums often have a tie-in novel or two floating around. It's a rare fandom that's both large and absolutely, positively single-medium. Some fandoms are easy to guess the "primary" medium for; some are more evenly split. Tiny fandoms can be single-medium, but if they're tiny enough, I usually find they're more like fanfic of books of micro-genre X rather than an actual fandom for book Y. The organizing principle is more likely to be Yuletide or Raymond Chandler or m/m romance than "books".

As a category on Fanlore, 'theater' seems like it should cover... I don't know... articles about people standing in line to get tickets or stage door waiting practices, not plays and musicals themselves. Takarazuka is a form of theater with a relatively unified fandom where the format and the fandom elements seem more directly linked. "Theater" as a whole does not seem like that to me.

And movies? Books? True, some people prefer one to the other, but there isn't really any such thing as "movie fandom" or "book fandom" in a general sense. Anime and manga fandom are different because they actually have groups of people who organize or conceptualize their fandom activities around the idea of being an anime/manga/whatever fan. In Japan, lots of people are fans of BL or otaku culture or are part of the doujinshi scene or something, but I haven't seen people talking about being "anime fans" or "manga fans" the way they do outside of Japan. In the US, anime fandom strikes me as being more like Japanophilia fandom than people who like a particular shape of cartoon eye fandom. The common thematic and stylistic features of anime are significant in that people are likely to like multiple series and in that they make anime more obvious and distinctive as a category, but I don't think they're the reason why there's a distinct anime fandom any more than "spaceships are cool" explains why SF fandom is its own thing. Lots of people like to watch tv. Media fandom isn't "tv" fandom. Blah blah blah.

Anyway, I'm not going to actively campaign to get rid of these categories if they're helping people find things, but they don't make sense to me.

Re: radical!

[zebra_in_dream]

Wouldn't the vast majority of manga, manhua and comics actually fall under Books & Literature. Just as anime and cartoons usually are TV Shows or Movies. Video Games would than be at eye height of Movies and Literature. Which would leave, among other things, stuff like webisodes and other things on the web, which are sometimes like Television but not on Television.

So one could group them:
Literature
->Comics
->Manga
->Novels

ALthough all that doesn't take the franchise nature of some fandoms into account, which would go into many, many of the available categories.