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Last December, Hideaki Anno took to Khara’s website and announced that Gainax had been officially dissolved, ending the four-decade run of the legendary animation studio who were responsible for Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 – 1996), a work whose influence was so monumental that it cleaved history in two—there is a before and after Evangelion defined by subsequent works that trafficked in psychological realism and narrative experimentation, a reflection of the “Lost Decade” and a growing sense of ennui.1
Emerging in the early 1980s with a series of short films parodying not only tokusatsu and mecha, but also American sci-fi, such as Star Trek (1965) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Gainax came to define the otaku in a post-“Declaration of a New Anime Century” landscape. Here was a group of consumers turned into amateurs driven by their passion to produce at first derivative and later new works, perhaps unbeknownst to them, beginning a cycle that would continue some forty odd years later. In short, the formal dissolution of Gainax represents the end of an older era of otaku who were amongst a new wave of “textual poachers”2 who came about during the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, I would also hesitate to proclaim that the death of Gainax also means the end of otaku.
With Gainax long embroiled in financial and legal trouble, and its members abandoning the studio to establish their own ventures—Gonzo, Khara, and Trigger—the company had been a shell of its former self for at least a decade. In the 21st century, what does it even mean to be an otaku? Certainly, the modern iteration of Gainax was no longer representative of that identity. With large corporations such as Crunchyroll ending their free tier while also turning towards poorly done A.I. captions, forgoing their grassroots origins, one can imagine the modern-day otaku as a countercultural and anti-capitalist hero. On this point, in his discussion of otaku’s relation to global markets and official networks, anime scholar Thomas LaMarre suggests that through activities such as piracy and creation of fan-made works, otaku posses a labor power that both helps and hinders corporations.3 Otaku lay the foundation for official markets while also remaining outside the jurisdiction of corporations thereby making them “heteronomous and autonomous.”4 By possessing a shifting power that cannot be contained, otaku achieve a “pure immanence.”5 As LaMarre points out, coincidentally, discourse on otaku, and Gainax in particular, that emerged towards the end of the 20th century from the likes of Hiroki Azuma and Takashi Murakami, also argued that otakus were something radically new and “pure.”6 For LaMarre, this discourse on Gainax posits the otaku as operating within a cooperative system, one that eliminates hierarchies. The fans who obsessively pay attention to animation details are as much as part of the creation process as the producers themselves,7hence the origins of Gainax as otakus. Even with the death of Gainax, such “purity” has not gone away. One would only have to look at the recent launch of the Anime Herald magazine to see the scrappy and DIY ethos of yore kept alive which furthermore, by drawing attention to global histories of anime and otaku, follows in LaMarre’s call that the genre of anime should not be equated with Japan (anime ≠ Japan).8
But beyond “pure immanence,” which at least demonstrates a mode of resistance towards the enshittification of mainstream otaku markets, I am left wondering: what does it even mean to be an otaku in the 21st century?
- A similar pattern emerged in cinema and can be seen in films such as Suzaku (Naomi Kawase, 1997), Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997), and Love & Pop (Hideaki Anno, 1998). ↩︎
- Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, updated 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. ↩︎
- Thomas LaMarre, “Otaku Movement,” in Japan After Japan, ed. Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi, and Tomiko Yoda (New York: Duke University Press, 2020), 358. ↩︎
- LaMarre, “Otaku Movement,” 360. ↩︎
- LaMarre, “Otaku Movement,” 361. ↩︎
- LaMarre, “Otaku Movement,” 360. ↩︎
- LaMarre, “Otaku Movement,” 367. ↩︎
- LaMarre, “Otaku Movement,” 390. ↩︎
Otakus are the seed of something new, a wire extending between the hopelessly degenerate and escapist to the pioneering and reality-defying. The promise of DaiconIV was a Brave New World of wonder and triumph of science and art. Otakus are not an aberration, they’re a chick in a shell they need to collectively break. That shell is escapism. It absorbs Otaku energies in pointless obsessions, when instead these obsessions can be invested into changing the world by making their often extreme ideals reality.
Gainax wasn’t killed by its own failures. It was killed by a society and way of life of modern japan which can only waste its creative energies on quickly consumed media enterprises. We see that death as the demographic death Japan is embroiled with along the rest of the developed world. As said in Utena: “If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever truly being born.”
Otakus’ reckless defiance of the utilitarian reality and their loyalty to their own desires is nothing more than the thrashing of the chick within its shell, seeking to break into an alternative (we might say isekai) reality where beauty, love and self-worth can be found even if they come with strife and struggle, rather than the grey languishing of a dying peaceful and rationalist Island.
The step required is small, but perhaps too hard for a Japanese otaku, as it requires to reject the sticky post-confucian collectivism of its culture, to stand out and proclaim their desires loud and clear as many nails brave enough to stand out in front of the hammer, refusing to back down, rather than wallowing in self-contempt for their failure to fit in with what is increasingly proven to be an old, dying society! There is no future in wallowing. Long deprived of Bushido and militarism, what does Japan even have left if not the fierce fire of Otaku obsession?
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