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

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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.

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

su_herald as a discussion on fan responses to character death?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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).

In a slightly related stream, I thought you might be interested in this, which is apparently a huge topic of discussion. He writes osme interesting things about the perspective of imminent death.

Satoshi Kon, the director of anime movies Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Actress and Paprika, as well as the TV series Paranoia Agent, died on Tuesday, August 24th at the age of 46. (NY Times obituary.) He left behind a rambling but extraordinary document, which his family has posthumously posted on his blog.

Have you ever compared fan reactions to character deaths to the public British reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales?

I was fourteen and still coming to terms with my sexuality when I started watching Buffy. I lived in the south, in a super-conservative area, and there were no gay people in my life, much less lesbian couples. Seeing Willow and Tara was my lifeline when I felt alone. With all the passion fourteen year olds have, I loved Tara. I wanted to be Tara. I identified with Tara on the deepest level I knew possible.

I cried more when Tara died than I did over the deaths of some people I knew in real life. I was a wreck. My parents knew something was wrong, but I couldn't explain what in a way that they would understand.

Tara was my hope as a kid. She was good and happy and gay all at the same time, and up until then, I hadn't known if that was possible. So when she died so suddenly after a reconciliation I'd been so happy about... I just felt lost.

I don't know if it's what you're talking about when you talk about mourning rituals, but I drew art and printed off pictures and quotes and had a miniature... I don't know, "shrine," I guess, for Tara for quite some time. Like I could keep her alive, for me at least, by doing that.

That's my fannish mourning experience. It grew me, I guess. It pushed me to accept myself for me, not me-as-Tara. It doesn't hurt like that anymore, or for a long time. But it did, and it was really hard.

Followed the link from su_herald.

I am always grateful to hear more personal tales of mourning for the fictional.

When I was fifteen, the character I'd thought most like me in all fiction, Henry Blake on M*A*S*H (for his wishy-washy manner, not his adultery and drinking), died on tv. He was definitely mourned by the characters. He was also mourned by me, by then familiar through Star Trek with fanfiction, with a story that took a year to complete about what happened to Henry after he died, which did not turn out to be discovered not to have been killed. The story remains one of my readers' favorites to this day, and seems to have served the purpose of mourning and acceptance because I must have been quite affected (even though the death had been spoiled for me a week early by People magazine) but now I don't remember how I felt. I have stronger memories of my feelings about the series' end, though that'll be at least partially because I wrote specifically about them at the time.

The fictional death that stands out to me in memory is rather that of Gary on twentysomething. I'd never watched that show when I saw the news that he was going to be killed off in an upcoming episode, and I never did again. But the night that episode aired, I tuned in on a lark about forty minutes after the hour just in time for Ken Olin to get the phone call. The way the episode played from then on affected me as if I'd been following the series and the character all along, and I've never known whether the scripting was just that good or my background in loved character loss (by then I'd also lost Nick Yemana, Adric, Spock [with initially no certain knowledge that he'd be back], Supergirl and Barry Allen) instinctively took up the slack.

I don't know about formalized rituals (considering that these books were published the year I was born), but I was just reading the Annotated Legends by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, and your post brought it to mind. They had a lot to say in the marginal notes about Sturm Brightblade's death, and how badly a lot of fans of the series took it. They apparently got a lot of infuriated and distraught mail and had a few... interesting experiences at Cons, from what they said.

Someone mentioned characters coming back further up and your post had me thinking about characters who ought to be dead in a final way being resurrected. The big example for me is Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. Malcolm (and the book in general) are tremendously important to me in a way I can't articulate at all. So the fact that Malcolm is inexplicably alive in The Lost World should be pretty awesome from my perspective, but I'm forever put out about it. I suppose it cheapened whatever emotional response I had to Malcolm's death. I actually couldn't tell you at all what my response to Malcolm's death was, only that I must have had one, else I wouldn't be so annoyed about his resurrection.* Of course, I can console myself with an entire book about him.

*I do get hung up on details often. But I forgive the unexplained time travel in Cryptonomicon that results in plot holes big enough to drive a truck through.

I wrote my master's paper on that subject once upon a time, and made a quick translation that is up on my website (http://privat.bahnhof.se/wb243891/meta/essay.html). It hasn't been corrected - in code or grammar - since I put it up, so it's not very pretty, but it might still be of interest.

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It's so encouraging to know that there's a community of fans who are interested without being hostile. I'm habituated to the hostility (oh, Torchwood) and the idea that this conversation can happen without people getting ridiculous brings me a lot of hope.

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tsarina referenced to your post from things of note (http://tsarina.livejournal.com/1628004.html) saying: [...] ich recap some of that are relevant and interesting.

Some thoughts on fannish response to character death [...]

I've been thinking about a lot of this stuff lately. I'm a soap opera fan. In that I watch soap operas and engage with them fannishly, and have for years (in fact I engaged fannishly before I knew what it was and I've written a couple of stories for them - not many due to the fast moving nature). Anyway, although the show in question, As The World Turns, didn't air in Australia, I've been a member of the LJ community for one of the gay couples on that show (I joined when someone on my flist started talking about them). Anyway, long story short, not long before the show finished, one of the gay characters was killed off, and some of the posts felt almost too personal to read. But there's some wonderful things going on - I encourage you to take a look around the community

lure_atwt as it's an interesting perspective - I know I saw it differently than I did Ianto and TW and I am sure some of it's because I've never seen the show.

I also like that the fans banded together and raised money for Doctors Without Borders as a reaction to the character's death.

Dickens? *ears prick up* I love Dickens! I've even got a blog about him at http://dickensblog.typepad.com (pardon my tooting my own horn, but I thought you might be interested). I'd be interested to know about your work on his characters.

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