Hello, welcome to my blog! I'm a Singaporean Masters student who's planning to do research on anime and/or manga fandom for my Masters' thesis. While there is growing interest in fan studies, I noticed there appears to be little research on anime and manga fandom despite the growing popularity of anime and manga outside of Japan. Basically, if you are keen to talk about fandom or anime and manga,whether you are a researcher, fan or a producer, feel free to drop a note or just say hi in the comments section.
Having fallen in love with anime and manga since the age of 10*, I thought it would be fantastic if I base my research on anime and manga fandom, exploring something I'm interested in and contributing to existing literature at the same time. Of course, having an interest in this area helps makes research a lot less tedious and a lot more enjoyable too.
I personally believe that fans are a powerful group who help bring in a huge amount of the revenue that media companies make from film franchises like Stars Wars because of the how much merchandise they purchase. I think film makers are probably more aware of fans' purchasing power seeing how many of them did their promotional rounds at this year's Comic-Con. I think the growing awareness among producers of the need to cultivate fans is a rather exciting development. On the other hand, there seems to be growing tension between producers/distributors and consumers as well (as you'll notice in my later posts on this issue).
While consumers-producers relations are of interest to me, I'm hoping to explore issues such as fans' relationship with the anime and manga characters, relations and identity within the fan community and so on and so forth. Essentially, I'm not ruling anything related to anime or manga fandom out since my thoughts often run ahead of me and do not really enjoy being restricted. :)
*I have to confess that the first anime that got my attention was actually Sailor Moon. I still have the entire manga series nicely put away in an airtight container too.*
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