Interests: studies of anime, comics, and games (ACG) culture / gender / space / intellectual history. An observer on the margins, overflowing with empathy.
Editor’s note: Zhong is a delight.
(This piece came out of a passing impulse while chatting in a group chat. I’ll venture a few words about anime criticism from personal experience—some thoughts and attitudes to share.)
How This Began
A little while ago, objections to prominent anime and manga commentators on Zhihu surfaced in a certain corner of the internet. Critics were quick to dismiss reviews that invoked theory and “put on airs of profundity” as the posturing of anime “Brahmins”—monkeys dressed up in ceremonial caps. There was no shortage of people spouting nonsense or simply watching the spectacle, though some leading figures in criticism did discuss the issues rationally.
But criticism aside, everyone still shares an obvious consensus, rehearsed in these almost-daily debates: we have no normative answer to “how anime criticism should actually be done,” nor can we ever have one. This is partly because criticism brings the writer’s subjective perspective to bear on the work as an objective reality, making it highly relative. It is also because erciyuan—the “two-dimensional” culture of anime, manga, and games—is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon that has followed a grassroots pattern of “challenging those above from below” since its birth, retaining a strong aversion to authority. In criticism, the rejection of professional perspectives has developed into a rejection of theory, ultimately producing a fragmented critical landscape. Critics who base their writing on immediate sensory and emotional experience are no longer interested in uncovering the cultural foundations of a work; some even refuse to develop their experience of appreciating it into theoretical understanding. I therefore think that most of today’s mockery of anime criticism revolves around two things: distrust of theory and a misunderstanding of discursive power.
I. Two Forms of Rejection: An Analysis
I have no intention of delving into the questions in cultural sociology behind this rejection. I merely want to identify two of the conditions that gave rise to it. First, erciyuan culture began as a subculture opposed to mainstream culture. As it developed, this marginal “subculture” was co-opted by the culture industry on its way toward becoming a radical “counterculture.” It became one of the wellsprings of today’s cultural consumerism and lost its practical efficacy. Second, consumer society has dismantled the possibility of grand narratives while also dissolving individuals’ desire for them. Within this subcultural community subject to covert repression, everyday experience has replaced ideology and taken over the center of private life. Otaku maintain a passive form of subjectivity through individualized desire and pleasure, thereby avoiding breadth and depth in criticism. This account is not a criticism of the phenomenon, because, more broadly, it is not just erciyuan culture that rejects this metadiscourse: everyday life as a whole rejects it. Merely invoking theory means accepting the consequences of being difficult, obscure, and irritating. Seen this way, anime criticism is not particularly different from criticism of other literary and artistic works. Some people like theory; others do not. In asking who is right and who is wrong, we need above all to investigate the deeper causes of the conflict, rather than set up opposing camps.
On the other hand, criticism is itself a private narrative based on personal experience, so trying to establish a dominant paradigm in the public sphere is naturally futile. Yet we should also acknowledge that this futility does not make the “struggle for discursive power” itself useless. On the contrary, nobody can deny that, in writing a piece of anime criticism, they also establish, consciously or unconsciously, a center of discursive power. After all, the writer must first believe in the entire process of their own labor, using the finished work to reward their narcissism and self-satisfaction. The writer necessarily exercises power over themself (by persuading themself). It does not matter how extensive, far-reaching, or profound this center’s influence is. So long as the writer takes an active part in representing and understanding the plot, they inevitably bring their inner experience into the process and develop new ways and methods of speaking. This is the premise of all discussion.
Thus, when it comes to anime criticism and its methodology, nobody can confidently claim that what they say is authoritative in the field, or that their understanding of a work is better or deeper than anyone else’s. What they can—and should—ensure is that they construct a model of the relationship between “personal experience” and “the work’s content,” and establish a discursive center around it. If this center gains widespread recognition, it will naturally spread within the community as discourse carrying implicit power. Saying that there is no such thing as “discursive authority” in anime criticism is both right and wrong. It is right insofar as there is indeed no fixed entity that holds discursive authority: its meaning constantly shifts, and nobody can become the authority. It is wrong insofar as the continuing operation of discursive power is visible everywhere: everyone is both spoken about and speaking. To bluntly deny the role that a speaker’s speech plays in criticism—its discursive power—is not only to misread Foucault completely, but also to do serious harm to the world of anime criticism, where voices vie to flourish and a hundred schools contend.
II. The Methodology of Anime Criticism
(1) The Breadth of Anime Criticism: The Stranger’s Perspective and Categories Left Unexplored
I am certainly no professional; I have not even reached the threshold of criticism. I cannot presumptuously offer opinions on “literary criticism.” What I can do, however, is bring my personal experience and disciplinary background into the analysis of a work, both discovering its value for my discipline and putting that disciplinary value to work in interpreting it. This is a way to produce heterogeneity in criticism. Here, please allow me to introduce the sociologist Simmel’s “stranger” into the discussion. The “stranger” is an important concept in cultural sociology. It refers to people who define the nature of a group from an external perspective, taking a “reflective” or “detached” stance toward it, and thereby forming a complete whole together with that group. Two points are essential to understanding the concept:
- The stranger is not external to the group, but internal to it. The concept locates the stranger within the group.
- Strangers may emerge from within the group or arrive from outside. What matters is that they carry distinctive personal experiences, take root within the group, and yet maintain a certain cautious distance from its culture.
Each person brings different memories, cultures, social backgrounds, and bodies of knowledge, forming distinctive fields and habitus where cultures intersect. This not only expresses the stranger’s subjective interpretation of the local culture, but also greatly enriches that culture’s horizons, vitality, and creativity. We might say that otaku play just such a role as a group of strangers in relation to the mainstream population. They cannot live apart from it and must interact with it, yet they maintain a cautious distance from mainstream culture throughout. It is precisely this distance that enables otaku to produce new cultural categories and interpretations. Without mainstream suspicion and distortion, and the counterattacks against them, subcultural groups would not internally generate their own “indexical expressions” (such as the in-group meme 哲♂学, which inserts the male symbol into the Chinese word for “philosophy”). If the critics of anime critics are themselves advocating an “orthodoxy,” where does that leave the critics they denounce as “anime Brahmins”? Who, exactly, are the “Brahmins”?
I do not mean to argue against anime criticism having some degree of “orthodoxy.” My point is that erciyuan is a community with extremely unstable boundaries, and relying on “orthodoxy” to establish itself is unreliable. Rather than maneuvering within the concept of “orthodoxy,” we would do better to remain open to more possibilities. First, for anime critics, [neutral evaluation is impossible]: a reader of hearts who cares about characters’ emotional entanglements and a hardcore geek devoted to analyzing sekai-kei—stories linking intimate relationships directly to world-scale crises—will naturally judge DARLING in the FRANXX differently. Second, for anime critics, [absolutely neutral criticism is “unreasonable”]. Although we stress that criticism should have a style of its own and that the writing should not be as unintelligible as scrawled talismans, the critic’s sensory experience matters far more than a formulaic approach to writing—and that experience is in turn connected to the critic’s individual life. Third, critics face [the impossibility of securing their intended effect]. Readers will inevitably understand an essay in different ways. We can hope in general that it will prompt thought rather than do harm, but we cannot specify what thoughts it will prompt, or how much thought. And if critics write to entertain themselves, they must naturally acknowledge the relativity of criticism. How reliable, then, are their grounds for attacking other forms of it?
In anime criticism, critics set out their personal understanding of one or more features of a work. It therefore needs breadth. No anime critic can cover everything; there are always unexplored categories worth investigating. So long as a case is reasonably argued, we should not reject criticism simply because its angle is “unconventional.” Instead, we should welcome it openly, criticize it reasonably, and work together to uncover the meanings of the work and even of the culture behind it.
(2) The Depth of Anime Criticism: “Structured Thinking”
(Here I’ll slip in a pet idea of my own.)
When otaku encounter cultural studies theory, especially critical theory, their first instinct is to object. Yes, grand narratives have problems of their own. The first is a lack of empathy for the otaku community. Otaku culture is understood as the other of mainstream culture, and it is taken for granted that, because otaku culture has been alienated, otaku have suffered exclusion. In social work, this line of thinking is called the “oppressor model.” But the problem with this model is that it presupposes that otaku want to be saved. Are their lives really that unbearable? Does anyone know how otaku themselves view erciyuan? The second is treating a fundamental cause as the only cause. Some commentators argue that the market churns out cultural garbage everywhere, that audiences with terrible taste are everywhere, and that all this is ultimately the result of alienation under the logic of capital and consumption. Yet capital is not the only factor specifically affecting erciyuan culture. If it were, individual agency—that of creators, for instance—would mean nothing, and even the commercial works we love would have no value. This is plainly absurd.
We know perfectly well that our fondness for erciyuan is simply “love,” not an inability to distinguish reality from the virtual world, as a certain advertisement for Mr Love: Queen’s Choice portrays it. Yet I often used to feel troubled: Why can’t the things I love become real? Why can’t the things I love have a greater influence? This contradiction is not an isolated case. On the one hand, we acknowledge that erciyuan is merely a place to lodge our desires, and resist intrusions that would vulgarize it. On the other, we long for recognition outside the community. This dialectical tension manifests itself in the way our pursuit of culture is always oriented toward sublating reality—negating it while also preserving and transcending it. As in Simmel’s description of cultural modernity, culture is always something that transcends reality.
As discussed above, perhaps the deeper external factors behind this contradiction can be understood as follows. The culture industry co-opts erciyuan subculture into the logic of production and consumption, forcing an “implosion” of the boundary between subculture and mainstream culture and exposing the contradictions within the erciyuan community. On the one hand, the circles we cling to no longer exist. Mainstream content floods our “space of expression,” leaving almost nowhere for our “commitments” to go. To maintain our distance from the mainstream, we begin to pursue the “hardcore,” retreating into places the market has not yet touched. We re-anchor our positions in how much we have watched, the games we play, and the obscurity and difficulty of the anime we watch. On the other hand, more of our living space is exposed to the real-world logic of production and consumption, subjecting us to mainstream discipline. When faced with real-world social relationships, we remain noncommittal about our “erciyuan attributes” and struggle to justify them. Ultimately, this process means that merely distinguishing subculture from mainstream culture is far from enough for the subject. The safest course is to abandon awareness of the subculture itself altogether—to give up subcultural self-awareness. We neither inquire deeply into the concepts of “subculture,” “otaku,” and “erciyuan,” nor anchor ourselves in the identity of an “otaku.” Through snark and abuse, we practice a philosophy of survival through the fragmentation of the subject (“I just watch cartoons…”), constructing a superposition of erciyuan and non-erciyuan identities to cope with the contradiction between our desire for something better and dreary three-dimensional reality, with mind and arm severed from each other.
So, when we become trapped in the puzzle of “garbage audiences and garbage productions mutually producing one another,” I believe the key to breaking out is not simply to demand that audiences improve their taste, or to call on producers to make anime they themselves consider excellent. It is to develop “structured thinking” about aesthetics through anime criticism: to look at a work as a whole, from multiple perspectives and with a synchronic focus, considering its various elements together in terms of their interconnections and development. We need to move beyond simply analyzing the functions of elements or the emotions of characters. This means not only noticing how a work is similar to and different from others, but also engaging in reflexive practice through reading it: attending anew to the fact that the subculture we love maintains an ambivalent relationship of closeness and distance with mainstream culture, and to the problems that relationship brings. I venture to call this “otaku self-awareness,” in correspondence with Stuart Hall’s concept of “subcultural self-awareness,” to highlight both what subcultures share and what makes otaku culture distinctive. Such a critic is certainly not the ideal anime critic, but is the “idealist” I have in mind. Whether any individual chooses this path is, of course, up to them; I have no intention of making demands or offering advice based on my own wishful thinking. Ultimately, I love this culture, and I appreciate every serious, conscientious anime critic, whether a painstaking researcher or a theorist drawing on a wealth of sources.
Finally, drawing on my limited knowledge and understanding, I have taken it upon myself to put together two little “contraptions”: a “diagram of categories” and a “chart of the dimensions of anime criticism.” Their purpose is to express criticism’s diversity and relativity. The chart summarizes only four “ideal types.” An accomplished critic may well shower all four with equal attention—even cover all four dimensions in a single essay. Nor does this rule out criticism that goes beyond these dimensions altogether.
In approaching “anime criticism,” we should put tolerance before criticism. More than that, I hope we can draw out theory while attending to experience, and notice the culture behind a work while attending to analysis of the work itself. And cultivate a measure of awareness of this identity of ours.
I offer these thoughts because I felt moved to speak, though my abilities are limited. I’ll leave it here. Thank you for taking the time to read; corrections are welcome, and I thank you in advance.
