Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eight: Chapter Twelve: Otaku Imaging
In other words, otaku consumption of anime destroyed the old-fashioned model of communication in which a message is generated by someone and received as such by someone else. They began to see anime and anime-related products in terms of a distributed field of production and consumption, in which anyone might participate. Rather than a story or message to be passively received or consumed, the ‘anime world’ began to appear as an assemblage that even fans could disassemble and reassemble.
The otaku fan is at once collector, connoisseur, amateur critic, and budding producer. In fact, Okada provides diagrams of three rooms, deemed characteristic of three generations of otaku, and these rooms look more like workstations than traditional bedrooms.
As a team of amateurs who formed their own studio, the Gainax team embodied this new relation to production and consumption of anime. Gainax became the otaku studio, and Nadia was their breakaway series.
