To give prospective contributors more time to complete their work, the deadline for this year’s Rags Drum call was extended from July 22 to August 15. All subsequent dates, including the review schedule, were postponed accordingly. We ask for readers’ understanding and continue to welcome anyone interested in writing and submitting an essay.
Introduction
Yes, like Mother Courage, we have the same war at our gates, and a handbreadth from us, if not in us, the same horrible blindness, the same dust in our eyes, the same earth in our mouths. We have the same dawn and night, we skirt the same abysses: our unconsciousness. We even share the same history—and that is how it all started.
—Louis Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” trans. Ben Brewster
Some readers may be surprised by this title; others may find it familiar. Rags Drum was Lab on Roof’s annual call for criticism from 2020 through 2022. It fostered and collected a number of outstanding essays in ACGN criticism before going on hiatus for several reasons. In part, both Lab on Roof and Chinese otaku criticism were then passing through a period of reorientation. As new translations began appearing in the book market, a wave of interest in otaku criticism arose in Chinese intellectual circles. Hiroki Azuma, Tsunehiro Uno, and Tamaki Saitō—the thinkers introduced by that wave—were already familiar to our readers. We therefore felt that Lab on Roof, as a grassroots organization for intellectual production, might no longer need to write criticism of Japanese animation and manga merely to set off another wave. With theory entering on a relatively professional and organized scale, surely the knowledge already woven into readers’ everyday lives would be enough to stimulate criticism of a new and higher quality.
In retrospect, that optimism was not borne out. During the years in which Rags Drum was suspended, the critical wave we imagined never arrived. Otaku criticism, understood as a performative movement back and forth between works and language, has instead become increasingly scarce. The once lively discussions of animation and manga on Chinese platforms such as Zhihu have plainly fallen silent. Even within academic and intellectual markets that have taken up otaku criticism, misunderstandings of concepts such as sekaikei have accumulated to the point of becoming entrenched. These institutional ventures in otaku criticism appear to have prematurely lost the vitality and possibility needed to open new spaces of discourse.
At the same time, consumption of the “two-dimensional” in China is flourishing amid a boom known as the “IP economy.” As Chinese otaku, we can access works of animation and manga and enjoy modern audiovisual culture. We can attend live events and experience the appeal of idols; we can buy merchandise and arrange it into fan shrines, finding recognition within the relevant communities. These practices have become our everyday lives, producing a reality continuous with, but not identical to, that of the 2010s. Everywhere we see declarations and performances of this consumer everyday. They can even sustain a myth without historical context: as though every work and commodity simply grew on a store shelf, leaving us free to consume contentedly within our own island-universes, with no need to ask why these works and these ideas appeared here and now. What is missing from this boundless reality is a parallax through which we might attend to one another’s everyday lives—a language of publicness.
Even as this brief introduction was being written, however, that consumer everyday was entering a crisis. Recent upheavals in East Asia and across the world make the approach of crisis discernible. Within this long postwar condition, it is not hard to see that even this everyday life is fragile. As we enjoy the present from within the crisis, what justifies our confidence that this everyday will continue without end? Yet the everyday also seems to persist within crisis as a point from which resistance can begin. Harry Harootunian’s discussions of Kiyoshi Miki and Jun Tosaka offer one suggestive intellectual posture: the conviction that a concrete everyday life may carry a utopian hope. This everyday insists on its particular time and place and is therefore distinct from the boundless everyday that forgets its own roots. To activate the everyday as a utopian possibility—to keep it rooted in a concrete historical situation while granting it aesthetic transcendence—we urgently need to reflect on the everyday itself.
In 2025, Lab on Roof also translated and edited a number of essays on this question. Essays by Ayahiko Shizu and てらまっと tracing “everyday-kei” animation provide a useful history for locating the genre’s rise and transformation since the 2000s. Shunsuke Sugita’s reconsideration of criticism in the 2000s gives the well-known concept of game-like realism an everyday foundation close to what Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism.” Stevie Suan’s reflections on the “spatiality” of Japanese animation partly disclose the anxiety beneath the popularity of everyday-kei anime: in a transnational age, the form of Japanese animation can become detached from its national identity. 红茶泡海苔’s study of the literary magazine Faust’s transformations and misreadings in East Asia, meanwhile, describes the reading culture of young people at the intersection of youth literature and the light-novel movement in the 2000s, while recovering a historical possibility for an ACGN ecology that was not always dominated by platform capital such as Kadokawa.
Across these essays, “the everyday” appears both explicitly and implicitly. It is criticized and dismantled, yet it also offers an occasion for reflection as a desirable utopian possibility. These analyses crossing national borders provide important points of reference. We hope, however, that Chinese criticism can go further and produce work attentive both to local conditions and to transnational movement: criticism grounded in works, approaching reality obliquely rather than speaking of it head-on, yet always bound up with the real. Yet, as Thomas Lamarre and Eiji Ōtsuka have both suggested, criticism always runs the risk of becoming a technology of subject formation.
This long preamble explains why criticism must be raised again in an age of crisis. It also establishes a shared basis for thinking and writing in Lab on Roof’s 2026 annual call for criticism: this year’s call is about the everyday.
Fields and Submission Format
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We invite original critical analysis or comparative research on video games, animation, manga, light novels, film, and related works, creators, histories, industries, and phenomena, including derivative works and without geographic restriction. Submissions may approach their subject from philosophy and the social sciences, the humanities and arts, technology and media, industrial production, communications, political economy, or other perspectives. We do not accept translations alone or game guides. We encourage criticism that considers both content and form, and we also welcome autoethnographic writing on the conditions of otaku life. Work engaging the broader intellectual and artistic space of the postwar period is likewise welcome, though submissions should remain as closely connected as possible to this year’s theme: Rethinking the Everyday.
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We recommend, but do not require, a broadly academic format that includes citations and notes, an abstract, keywords, and a bibliography. The suggested length is between 5,000 and 20,000 characters. Submissions may take the form of an essay or a transcribed roundtable. Chinese, English, and Japanese submissions are accepted, though Simplified Chinese is recommended. We encourage original work, but previously published writing is also eligible when it complies with commercial and republication requirements. All borrowed material and arguments must meet reasonable academic standards. If plagiarism or misappropriation is discovered before or after evaluation, the organizers will publicly disclose the matter and revoke any award already granted.
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Use of generative artificial intelligence:
(1) We do not accept submissions credited to or written by generative-AI tools, nor submissions that directly present AI-generated material as the article itself.
(2) We do not accept submissions that use generative AI to produce the article’s principal structure, core argument, or main content; rewrite existing scholarship; fabricate information about AI use or conceal that use; fabricate or falsify sources, content, data, or other material; generate images of existing ACGN works; or otherwise violate accepted standards of AI ethics or academic conduct.
(3) Generative-AI tools may be used only for non-core tasks such as language polishing, literature searches, and data organization or analysis, and such use must comply with generally accepted ethical and academic standards.
(4) Any contributor who uses generative AI must disclose which parts of the submission involved such tools, including but not limited to data collection and analysis, and must provide the tool’s name and version, the time of use, and screenshots of the relevant output page. Authors bear full legal and ethical responsibility for everything in their submission.
We want to encounter the author’s own language and thought in every submission.
Process and Rules
To make participation more flexible, this edition of Rags Drum does not use the former “Eve Festival” and “After Festival” tracks and does not conduct two rounds of judging. Instead, a single review determines the essays selected for Rags Drum Repeat.
Eligible work: Previously published work that is original to its author and has not been used commercially—for example, work whose copyright was acquired by a commercial venue at first publication is ineligible—as well as unpublished, original, noncommercial work.
Submission form: Both kinds of work must be submitted in full.
Schedule:
- March 22: submissions opened with the launch of the event.
- August 15: submissions closed.
- September 1: qualifying submissions will be announced, and production of the Rags Drum Repeat criticism dōjinshi will begin.
Judging:
The jury evaluates submissions by simple majority, emphasizing originality, intellectual substance, and critical force.
Publication and honoraria:
After judging, the organizers will contact contributors with the results as soon as possible. Qualifying essays will then be published promptly across Lab on Roof’s platforms. We will edit the selected Rags Drum essays into a critical dōjinshi and provide a copy to each winning author. We will also consider bringing it to dōjinshi markets such as Comiket and Comicup; any proceeds from such events will be used solely to support the next annual call and encourage new original criticism.
Each qualifying essay will receive an honorarium of approximately RMB 300.
Submission channels (choose either):
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Email the manuscript, together with a QQ contact, to a1835631041@163.com.
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Join the event QQ group, upload the manuscript to the group files, and notify the organizers (recommended): 1077208212.
Use the subject or filename format “Rags Drum Submission – Author – Essay Title.” In exceptional circumstances where neither method is workable, contact Lab on Roof through its Zhihu account, Bilibili account, or WeChat public account to make other arrangements.
Jury
A group of enthusiasts of ACGN and audiovisual art who hope criticism can give works new life.
Other Provisions
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For qualifying submissions, Lab on Roof requires only the author’s permission to publish the work across its platforms on a nonexclusive, non-first-publication basis. If an author would also like the work included in the later dōjinshi, the author must be able to authorize publication in that form without infringing any rights that may belong to another venue. All rights not expressly granted remain with the author.
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To encourage the reproduction of stronger ACG criticism and research, and exchange among critics, Lab on Roof may adapt qualifying essays into video essays or other forms. We will notify the author and obtain consent before doing so, and the author’s rights will be protected in the resulting video essay.
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We thank “球团” for creating a new mascot character for Lab on Roof, and thank the critics, groups, and platforms that offered the event their generous advice and sincere assistance.
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Because our experience in organizing an event of this kind remains limited, and to the fullest extent permitted by law and platform rules, the organizers reserve the right to interpret and amend the event’s methods, schedule, and related provisions. We ask critics and readers for their understanding.
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Readers and critics are warmly invited to share the announcement, tell others about it, join the discussion, and take part in the call.
