I suggest anyone who is interested in anime, is involved in the ‘Animation, Comics and Games’ subculture within the East Asian context (ACG), has friends who are anime geeks, or identifies as an ‘nijigen/erciyuan’ to have a look at Anime’s Knowledge Culture: Geek, Otaku, Zhai. This book may help them understand the social-historical development of this fandom, as well as the theories and frameworks that construct the uniqueness of anime geek culture. This book contributes to the existing scholarship of ACG and anime by investigating deeper into how this geekdom associates with the history and development of international relationships, social structures and media trends within Greater China and East Asia.

At the beginning of the book, Li helps the reader to define some of the key terms within, and fundamental attributes of anime geek culture. As someone who identifies as ‘erciyuan’ myself, I totally understand the complexity of anime geekdom within the contemporary media environment. The contextualised definitions of terms such as ‘virtual geography’ (p. 3), ‘cool media’ (p. 16) and ‘cybernetic affect’ (p. 25) in the Introduction provide the reader with some quick ‘background knowledge’ that is needed to understand ACG geek culture. The rest of the book discusses topics of various areas but in general, they are centred around these key terms. There are many books on anime fandom, but what makes this book original is the focus on knowledge transfer across cultures but within the same mediascape, and the investigation of connections between cyberspace distinctiveness and anime geekdom.

Although the book does cover anime geekdom in western countries, the main study subject seems to be Chinese anime geeks/geekdom. This makes it inevitable to discuss the tensions as well as changing relationships between China and Japan after WWII. While it is not surprising to see Astro Boy as the character who helped with building Sino-Japan relations, it is quite intriguing to see him being introduced as the ‘founder’ and ‘source’ of anime fandom in China – the boy who was introduced as someone who loves science and educates kids, has eventually led to fansubs, localised words and danmaku. Of course, the changing roles of Astro Boy and Japanese anime is closely linked to the constantly changing political circumstances in China, and this contributes to the charm of anime geekdom – it adapts, changes and form new characteristics. These nuanced intersections are discussed in the book with much detail.

An important argument in the book is that the ‘by fans, for fans’ attribute of geekdom ‘challenges the dominant model of corporate-controlled cultural globalisation’ (p. 83), which is especially represented through the practice of fansubbing. On the one hand, the variety of styles in fansubbing challenges conventions in typography and translation, which seems to protest against the ‘corruptness’ of corporate subtitling, but on the other hand ‘fast capitalism’, gatekeeping and hierarchy are demonstrated in fansubbing culture. The book focuses on the discussion around fansubbing but these attributes may apply to many other fan content creation areas within anime geekdom too, such as fan merchandise and fan websites. If you are an ACG geek yourself, you might acquire new insights into fan content creation after reading Chapter 2 of this book.

Chapter 3 discusses danmaku culture and how it has been successfully adopted in Chinese anime geekdom. Personally, I think the discussion of danmaku can be extended a bit more beyond fiction-based videos, especially considering the ‘quasi-liveness’ attribute of danmaku. For example, on Bilibili, many workout videos contain lots of danmaku as well. The audiences of these videos are expected to be doing the workout as the video plays, and this makes the quasi-liveness much more engaging – by reading the danmaku, the audience will not only feel like they are watching together with others live, but also working out with others live, and perhaps generate confidence/discouragement when they read ‘I’m struggling’/ ‘too easy’ danmaku on the workout video screen. This is a missed opportunity of discussing how aspects of zhai culture are influencing things that are not within the fandom. Additionally, I have recently seen some discussions on why danmaku was never a thing in the west, and there were some analyses around the linguistic structures of Chinese/Japanese script as compared to western Roman alphabet… but that’s another story for another time.

If the first three chapters focus on the link between anime geekdom and societal development, the latter three chapters trace the connection between anime geekdom and digital media influence. The discussions around ‘little-boy otaku’, mecha child and mecha-fetishism provides insight on how the development in technology and digital media contributed to anime geeks’ love for cuteness and intimacy with character merchandise. It was a very interesting read for me personally as someone who loves collecting character merchandise (figure 1). That said, the term ‘character goods’ appear quite often but is not defined well enough for western readers who may not have much knowledge in the area. I’m not sure if it’s beyond the scope of the book, but more could be added to the topic of character goods culture as well – the fact that they come in so many different formats, the online-exchange system as a result of ‘gacha’ goods, the increasing number of ‘ita bags’, etc. The rise of social media and Web 2.0 allows geeks to share their own play with character goods, and subsequently, inspire other geeks on how they could play with them.

Examples of ‘character goods’ of Barok van Zieks, a character from The Great Ace Attorney by Capcom. The ‘goods’ come in various formats such as badges, coasters, acrylic stands and plushies, and can be official or fan-made. Author’s collection.
Figure 1 – Examples of ‘character goods’ of Barok van Zieks, a character from The Great Ace Attorney by Capcom. The ‘goods’ come in various formats such as badges, coasters, acrylic stands and plushies, and can be official or fan-made. Author’s collection.

The last two chapters are thought-provoking in that they connect the design of ‘play’, as well as the trends in graphic styles with the influence of anime. These two chapters are what really make the reader feel the influence of anime and geek culture outside the fandom, and how these influences blend into other categories of visual media seamlessly.

Overall, this book picks a unique, innovative perspective of looking at ACG fandom, and has managed to establish a connecting network among ACG, technology, digital media, cyberspace and fan community. The knowledge, play and pleasure of geekdom is demonstrated in the form of cybernetic control and cybernetic affect. Whether you are an ACG geek or not, this book will refresh your views on this community and subculture.

Xiyuan Tan is a Lecturer in Graphic Design at Loughborough University. They teach a broad range of subjects including graphic communication, illustration, visual narratives and practice-based research methods. Their research interests are character design, visual storytelling, visual representation and application of illustration and animation in various contexts. They have published research in areas of comics, game studies, drawing and animation. Although working as an academic, Xiyuan continues their commercial illustration practice as well as their engagement with the online art community.