Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human

by Frenchy Lunning

An important aspect of the Seimei boom is that there is no central narrative or story that is the object of interest and repetition. Culture producers rummage around in old folktales and histories of the Heian era for ideas about Seimei stories to tell, and patch together and create widely different versions of Seimei’s life. The interest is not in the story but in the character of Seimei. Scholars of manga have also noted the deep interaction between artists and their fans and how this mutually influences both production and consumption. Unlike many culture producers in the United States, who represent their work as artistic endeavors not informed by market forces or audience desire, creators of Seimei like Yumemakura are very open about the fact that their projects are propelled by market reasoning. Most of the Seimei products point toward the interests and desires of an imagined girl-audience.

H. Taneda describes the uranai situation today as being dominated by women as both providers and consumers of services.33 This “feminization of fortune-telling” results in a preponderance of female interests being channeled into the fortune-telling businesses.

As Ōtsuka Eiji notes in his essay in this volume, the elasticity associated with animated characters imparts a sense of their invulnerability and even immortality: they appear resilient and resistant to injury and death. As such, plasmaticity implies another register of deathlessness—the transformative ability of animated characters to adopt the qualities and shapes of a range of life forms (other species) and of developmental moments (phases and stages).

Apparently, human viewers demand a higher degree of verisimilitude in the depiction and movement of human characters. Because humans are much more attentive to details when it comes to depictions of their own species than other species, the human viewer will accept a greater degree of deformation and simplification with nonhuman figures.

Media fans in Taiwan, like American, European, and Japanese sci-fi and anime fans, actively construct narratives and images of the characters far beyond those produced by the mass media.11 Fans write backstories for the characters and place them into new situations and new relationships. They usually see their own fiction and art as drawing out aspects of the characters that are “hidden” within the original serials, rather than pure invention.