rm | Dragon*Con panel recap - Fannish response to character death (Anime/Manga fandom studies)

Entry tags:

Dragon*Con panel recap - Fannish response to character death (Anime/Manga fandom studies)

I was on this panel with Brent Allison from Gainesville State College. While, on the surface, there was not a lot of relationship between his paper, "Japanese Animation Fandom and Media Education: A Response to Media Education Literature and Classroom Practice," and mine, they certainly did intersect both on matters of authenticity (an issue he raised) and, I think, very strongly in the response from the room.

While I mentioned this in passing at the panel, it's worth reiterating I'm not an anime and manga person by default (the same goes for Western comics and animation for me); it's not a medium I respond to instinctually. However, working on this aspect of my mourning research and hearing Brent's paper along with some of the presentation from the panel before us, I feel like I have a lot more tools to approach anime and manga than I have in the past, so that was personally a very rewarding expansion for me.

Over the past year, I've had the opportunity to talk about fan responses to character death a lot -- at Gallifrey One, at the Desiring the Text conference at the University of Bristol (UK), and here on Livejournal, where I started this research really in response to what I was seeing and experiencing in the Torchwood fandom, which didn't feel new to me, so much as very, very old.

Most of the time there's a lot of anger when I talk about this topic. The Torchwood fandom isn't just still gutted by the narrative events of its third season, but large swathes of it remain in conflict -- with the show writers and producers, and with other fans who have had different responses not just to the program, but to their feelings about it.

And, of course, it's not just Torchwood fandom. Joss Whedon fans are still nursing wounds from deaths like that of Tara on Buffy, and those wounds are very real, even if I posit that they are less likely to create a ritualized mourning response because of the way Whedon structures his narrative arcs.

In fiction, death is everywhere, and given more than twenty minutes there's lots to say about tons of other properties -- some of which I was able to mention in Atlanta -- like Harry Potter, Elf Quest, Ashita no Joe (Tomorrow's Joe), Sherlock Holmes and the work of Dickens (there's a lot to say about Little Nell) to name just a few.

If you love stories fannishly and so also love characters privately and passionately and in a nearly embodied sense, chances are you know all about this type of mourning, because you've lived it, even if you've never talked about it.

But for a lot of people, this type of grief is really alien, or, if experienced, has been uncomfortable or eclipsed by non-fictional losses. When we talk about the pain of absence, there's a lot for anyone to get pissed about.

Which is to say, a lot of the time, the response I get to this work is one that is angry and in pain (Seriously, I've been on panels with yelling matches, tears, personal stories of non-fictional loss, and more. Grief is big). And that's fine, even if I'm not always as gracious, generous and supportive as I wish I knew how to be. Because my choosing to this work is also a response to my own losses (I even refer to it as "my own 1,000 cranes" in the paper I did for the Bristol conference, not afraid of sentimentality am I).

Spending a lot of time around grief is pretty exhausting. I've been doing it for over a year, and it's taken me on one hell of a trip (including to the UK twice). It has forced me to mourn fictional characters that matter to me both more publicly and more privately than I would wish and to find commonalities with people I'd, quite frankly, rather just argue with in fandom.

Often, when I present on this topic, it's really heated, and it leaves me drained and uncertain of the value (but not the relevance) of this work. Dragon*Con, however, was an entirely different experience.

The audience was generous and curious, provided a perspective through manga, anime and comics, that framed a lot of new and exciting questions (how do we emotionally respond to comics that are constantly retconning and resetting? are we mourning a fictional lover or friend or are we mourning the self?) and also helped to further confirm a lot of the arguments I've been working with.

More than anything though, I felt a sense of eagerness and relief from the audience, and really felt we could have gone for far more time than the slot we had allowed. Unfortunately, I also had to run to another panel right after.

If you're here because you were at the panel (or not) and want to talk about this topic more in comments here, please feel free. If you have particular feelings about how you'd like to access more material on this subject (i.e., book? website? academically focused? pop-culture-y? travel-log of visiting sites of fictional grief? etc), I would love to hear it. In addition, I am always grateful to hear more personal tales of mourning for the fictional. While I do not necessarily feel an obligation to request permission to quote people discussing such issues publicly on the Internet, since I am soliciting your input directly here, I will say that I will not quote or paraphrase anything you say in comments to this post without your explicit permission, and I'll drop you a note if I ever need it.

In addition, if you're curious about the work that's coming out of the Bristol conference, please visit The Society of Friends of the Text. You can also get more information on the Dragon*Con Comics and Popular Arts Conference that put this panel together and its parent, The Institute for Comics Studies. A big thank you to Dragon*Con Anime and Manga Track for giving us the time and space necessary for this panel.

Thanks for attending the panel and/or for reading along here. The Dragon*Con panel was one of the most lovely experiences I've had since I've started working on this project, and I am truly full of gratitude for it.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Hey sweetie. Would it be okay if I linked this on the

su_herald as a discussion on fan responses to character death?

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you. :)

It would be interesting to compare how fans mourn for fictional characters versus how they mourn for real people whom they view in the same sort of fannish way. For instance John Lennon, who is a subject of a great deal of fic and is still being actively mourned by people who weren't even alive when he died.

Yeah. I've definitely gotten into discussions about this, particularly at Bristol, in terms of the lens of RPF and the way that celebrities are characters. I'm thinking I need to get on a bus for Graceland soon, frankly.

Ah yes, Graceland would be another angle entirely. I don't know much about Elvis fandom but it doesn't seem that it has that LJ-based/fic-writing contingent, which Beatles fandom definitely does have. Both of them fit into the broad continuum of fannishness but there is a distinction there, just as there's a real people/fictional people distinction.

Personally I'm not a huge John Lennon fan but I have made a pilgrimage to Brian Epstein's grave and left flowers near his house on the anniversary of his death. So yes, I guess I know more about fannish mourning than I thought I did. I'm not sure that I would be nearly as affected by the death of a fictional character... I think I'd probably just ignore it, or attempt to.

*nod*

There's been a fair amount of work done on the celebrity mourning thing, and I'd have to reference it in passing in any book-length work on the subject before. The mourning of the entirely fictional, however, is this area that there's a dearth of thorough material on, despite a lot of known (and suspected -- the Sherlock Holmes issue is quite murky and complex) incidences of it.

There was also a rash of entrepreneurs in the late 19th-century that bought grave plots and put up headstones for fictional characters and then charged money for people to visit.

Yeah, I definitely agree that you have an angle that's been very little explored. What I was thinking was more that it might give you some analytical leverage to be able to compare similar groups of fans with similar cultural practices (social networking, fic writing), who differed in terms of whether they were interacting with real or fictional characters. Something to offer a nod to in an opening chapter, perhaps.

Strikes me also that there might be a difference between fandoms where you could actually track the impact of the death event, and fandoms where you couldn't. King Arthur's death, for example, is a key part of the Arthurian legend but it's been part of the legend, I'd assume, as far back as we can trace. (Then you get into the question of whether he actually was originally a real person, but that's a whole other can of worms.)

I think there is some crossover. An acquaintance of mine is the son of a very famous TV actor (as in if I mentioned just the last name, most people could guess who it was...note I'm not mentioning the last name). When his father unexpectedly died, there were all manner of crazy-ass fans who came out of the woodwork.

Fans who could not separate the character from the actor. Who told my friend that their grief was "worth more" because they lost the character as well as the actor.

Because clearly, that trumps somebody losing, oh I dunno, *their father.*

I wonder if time and distance has made the difference here. When we did that panel at Gallifrey, CoE was still so raw and fresh for so many people that even daring to point at that pink elephant in the livingroom might have been like rubbing salt into an open wound.

Now, with more time having passed, the reactions may be quite different. I am ruminating on suggesting the panel again for Gallifrey, to see if this may be the case, but I feel that I should defer to you, since this was your baby to begin with.

I'm terribly sorry to have missed the panel.

I'm happy to go again, and I think we would benefit profoundly from the insights of Jane Espenson, because the way Whedon and RTD have handled death is significantly different. Her voice would really help make it a whole new panel, especially if we focused on the nature of time, as there's distance both regarding CoE now, and the BtVS and AtS stuff as well.

If nothing else, time has made me a better moderator, as I'm engaged differently, certainly, at this juncture.

I don't know that it was time that made the difference at D*C (I've also had intense anger responses from people who are just angry at the idea of anyone mourning anyone fiction at all ever) so much as the track positioning meant I had a room full of anime and manga fans (so I tried to talk about illustrated media a lot) who have a different outlook on these themes. Universally, they seemed to know what Torchwood was, yet seemed to be removed from the fandom. I certainly did speak with several other people throughout the weekend who are more directly involved with the fandom, and time seemed to be a factor in the discussions we were having, but certainly it had not closed all wounds nor necessarily significantly changed the nature of the discourse.

Edited 2010-09-08 18:58 (UTC)

Strangely, I met one of the anime fans who attended your panel later at the Marriott. We were talking about our fandoms and he asked about Torchwood - so I think you interested him in the topic. :D He mentioned the panel, said it was interesting, and wanted to know what the heck Torchwood was like.

Did NOT connect that to your panel at all, because I hadn't realized the focus was anime/manga too.

Yeah, I did some stuff about GDL's comic and Elf Quest, and Young Superman and Tomorrow's Joe and Ellen Kushner's "The Man With the Knives" but I was chugging through fast to make my points, and I had to start with a lot of non-illustrated/animated stuff to get there first.

But when I did "Do you all know about Torchwood?" there was a collective cheer, which saved me time.

YAY NEW FANS COMING FOR THE DEATHITY DEATH DEATH.

Edited 2010-09-08 19:04 (UTC)

Did anybody mention Buddhism on the panel?

That's something that's always sort of interested me... I'm not part of any anime fandom, and I don't even watch much contemporary anime, but I can recognize a very Buddhist approach to death and impermanence in a lot of it, and I think that often goes right over the heads of most US anime fans.

I got there in passing because of Ashita no Joe (a Buddhist funeral was held for a character that was killed off -- 700 people as well as the artist and some of the people from the publisher attended), but it was a complete drive by moment because a) I've barely gotten there in my work as I've just started exploring stuff outside of western media and b) I've never talked so fast in my life.

I definitely need to find more Eastern instances of things like this, because I think you're absolutely right. I think the events around Ashita no Joe really did serve as transition rituals, whereas I don't (unsurprisingly, just look at our fandom) necessarily see change and acceptance as themes in a lot of the Western examples.

The IMO interesting—and even somewhat ironic—thing about the explosion after CoE and Ianto's death is that both sides, fandom and RTD, clearly had very strong feelings about how fictional death should be seen and experienced. Sometime back in January I wrote a post where I attributed most of the fall-out to the gay author/slash fandom divide, but I'm not so sure any longer; I think it might have been mainly due to vastly different ideas about (fictional) death.

I wrote an essay that started out analysing the deaths in DW and TW (here, in case you're interested), and while the theme in TW tends to be about the necessity of finding meaning in a life that is full of death, RTD's DW, especially (but not only) Ten's arc, is one long story about how death, or at least the risk of death, has to be accepted as a part of life. It's not just WoM and TEoT, it's in every season finale, even S2, where Rose didn't actually physically die, but still talks about her 'death', and in so many episodes throughout all seasons. (And then of course there's The Second Coming, where the acceptance of mortality plays such a crucial role and whose ending is so similar to the end of Ten's story.)

Haha very true about the change and acceptance in TW fandom!

I think an accessible place to start is with Miyazaki... Ponyo was a retelling of the Little Mermaid story, which is very, very Christian (or the transition between paganism and Christianity)... it's all about the eternal soul and sacrifice and salvation. Ponyo turns the story Buddhist and makes it all about compassion, inter-reliance and accepting change.

I used to watch this series called Galaxy Express 999 when I was a little kid in Japan. It was about a little boy who leaves Earth on a flying steam train because he wants to get a metal cyborg body so he can live forever. They stop at a bunch of planets on the way and all this incredibly bleak stuff happens that just keeps slamming home the message EVERYBODY DIES AND NOTHING WILL EVER LAST AND HAPPINESS IS A FLEETING ILLUSION. It's the sort of thing no one would never dream of letting kids watch here.

Okay, Galaxy Express 999 sounds AWESOME, and I must hunt it down.

I was all set to say, "I haven't reacted like that..." except that I'm suddenly thinking that maybe the deep upset I felt at the portrayal of Faramir in Peter Jackson's LOTR was partly betrayal, and a lot because it felt like he'd killed Tolkien's Faramir and sent in an impostor.

I'm sure this has come up as a topic of discussion -- is there a difference in the mourning for characters who are clearly going to return, versus those who most likely won't? For instance, when Buffy died in The Gift, it was a given that she would be back the next season (if for no other reason than the fact that, well, the show isn't called "Look How We Get Along Without Buffy"), and so the question wasn't *would* she return, but *how* would she return.

Another example that's all too common is character death in comics -- the death of Superman, for instance. DC Comics has killed and brought back virtually every "big name" superhero (and a lot of the lesser-known ones as well). With an iconic character like Superman, again, the question isn't *will* he return, but *how* will he return (and when).

So does that make the mourning different than, say, mourning for Tara?

Or maybe my question should be, *do* people mourn for characters who are virtually guaranteed to return? I can't say I mourned for Buffy after The Gift, because I knew she would be back. But I know that other people did, and so for those who *did,* I just wonder if was it different than it was for characters who weren't guaranteed to return (and didn't).

I don't believe it's something all fans experience, and my work is largely about how there is a certain character archetype that seems to set this off, but I think your "where is this character who is mine?" that you describe is the thing that very much makes this possible in so many places.

A lot of what I'm looking at isn't people being sad or experiencing grief, but formalized mourning ritual -- i.e., memorials, wakes, charity funds, tattooing, cutting off the hair, not shaving, rites of some kind.

And there seems to be a lot less impulse to do that when a character is going to come back and also when the character is mourned in the source material. Whedon tends to include lots of mourning activity in his work, so no matter how angry people get (i.e., Tara), there are way, way less examples of this type of ritualized behavior when compared with pieces that don't show mourning. Additionally, fans tend to mourn for characters who would not be mourned in the source material -- the biggest displays have been for characters who are estranged from or without friends or family (which is something else that changes the nature of mourning response for Whedon's characters; people may be pissed, but they know the friends in canon will mourn). There are bunch of other criteria too, but these are two of the biggies.

The people you know that mourned for Buffy after "The Gift" -- can you tell me what they did?

Good luck! I think this is one of the only places to find the original TV series (as opposed to the movie and many sequels)

*nod*

I can't think of other examples about death and mourning at the moment (possibly I will kick myself about something obvious later) but I think you would find these interesting.

Astro Boy, one of the most famous manga/anime characters in Japan, was made a Japanese citizen on his birthday on April 7, 2003. (He's a boy robot who first appeared in 1951 with a creation date of April 7, 2003.) There were also a few other birthday events.

There is a post in the Japanese government to promote animation which is held by a popular anime character.

(I then Googled a bit for actual death related things and found that there was a small funeral in France for Goku of Dragonball, and there was also a funeral for a Fists of the Northstar character in a Buddhist temple in Tokyo a couple of years ago. The article says that was the first time a Buddhist temple has been involved with a fictional funeral.)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 3

Dragon*Con panel recap - Fannish response to character death (Anime/Manga fandom studies)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Related?

no subject

Re: Related?

no subject

no subject

Re: Related?

no subject