Kevin Lee2/5/2002
Arth80p &endash; Tatsuya Matsumura
Midterm Question #2 &endash; Corporate vs. Fan Made Web Pages
Japanese animation and comics, known commonly as anime and manga, within the past decade have thoroughly infiltrated the American popular culture through both the curious onlookers and completely obsessed fans. Anime first began making its way to the people of the United States through video and laserdisc rentals, and as the popularity and capabilities of the internet-service-providers grew, the web. Anime fans quickly took advantage of this high speed information sharing medium and used it to distribute entire volumes of anime video clips, image galleries, and of course to publicly inject their personal opinions and thoughts on their favorite anime. Fans were not alone in their anime-conquest of the internet. Anime production corporations also found the internet a useful and cost-efficient way to publicize, promote, and distribute official anime publications. These two distinct sources of information about specific anime bring two completely different worlds to the anime-seekers table. Corporate web pages, because of their single motive to promote and sell their anime, generally tend to be less verbose, more reserved in their presentation, but offer higher quality material; however, because fans create their web pages out of a passion for anime, the content of their web pages are generally more crude in style and execution but deliver more substance thereby coming closer to satiating an anime-seeker's hunger. The corporate web page, www.KodanClub.com, provides just a taste of the classic manga Ah! Megami-Sama with great capitalistic finesse; while the fan page, "Aa! Megamisama Overanalysis" (http://www.concentric.net/~amagai/megamisama/ ) includes a detailed analysis of each volume of the anime series, satiating the veteran of the anime.
The corporate web page, KodanClub.com, is filled to the brim with information about hundreds of manga titles. It is interesting to note that the opening page to the "Popular Works" section is the page categorized under "for teenage boys", perhaps geared towards their largest audience group. Within this category, you can find the page for Ah! Megami Sama. Unfortunately the site only dedicates a single page of information for each title, including a brief publication breakdown, a single sentence to a short paragraph synopsis of the contents of the comic book series, thumbnail sized images of major characters and a sample spread image from the manga. The level of detail provided is very basic and would not satisfy anybody's curiosity towards the title. For example, their synopsis of the Ah! Megamisama Anime Comics reads, "This manga is based on the "Oh! My Goddess!" video animation series (1993-1994)".(www.KodanClub.com) Actually, their presentation is most likely intended to further spark your interest in the manga so you will purchase the comic.
The corporate web page provides a great deal of additional goodies that further promote their products. They feature galleries of single professional grade images for a select number of titles a month. They also provide wallpapers, or desktop background images, of favorite manga titles. Such content is almost expected of most anime web pages, but the KodanClub reminds us again that it is in the business to make money and to get people to come back, by removing wallpapers that become more than 2 weeks old and explicitly specifying copyright and distribution laws regarding these materials.
Links to other pages can be found under the "about Kodansha" category. Here they provide links to business partners and to two popular manga authors. These links may only be useful to super-die-hard fans, who probably would not be visiting such a web page in the first place, or fellow business partners.
The final feature of this web page is by far the most innovative and captivating one of all. They set apart a portion of their site for a "Manga Preview" section. Here they explain the difference between eastern and western comic reading styles, that eastern comics are read from top to bottom, right to left, and provide monthly 5-10 page previews of choice manga. The presentation of these previews is what is astounding. Not only do they provide scanned images of the original Japanese manga, read right to left, but they designed it so that moving your cursor over the Japanese text will display a small pop up text box over it containing the English translation. Clicking "Next", located on the left side of the page, turns the page. This feature truly engages the user into the comics and gives them a taste of what it is like to read them. It gives the reader a sense of belonging, that they are being invited into a fantasy world, previously foreign to them due to an impenetrable language barrier. This single feature would make anyone want to come back every month to read more manga previews, and eventually purchase some real manga, ideally from them; Again reminding us that they are not necessarily on the internet to please fans or to provide more information about their works, but just to promote and sell their products.
Aside from sheer capitalism, an entirely different genre of web pages exists on the information super highway. Specifically a single page called "Aa! Megamisama Overanalysis". This page differs slightly from your typical fan page. A typical Ah! Megami Sama fan page would normally be plastered with crude images of Belldandy and Keiichi accompanied by personal quotes on why they love Belldandy so much and how they wish they could find a girlfriend just like her. Fortunately the author, Satoshi Amagai, has a more interesting approach to the content of his web page, yet unfortunately he also falls into the category of amateurishly designed web authors with his incessant B-class midis of the Ah! Megami Sama soundtrack found on every sub-page in the site.
Content-wise, the author is very creative in his approach to his page. He introduces it as originating from an attempt to answer a simple question of how Belldandy, the main character, actually goes about baking a cake in a certain episode. The idea was that her kitchen, being in an ancient abandoned temple, did not have an oven, and therefore could not have baked a cake. The author speculated that she could have improvised with various methods, specifically excluding the possibility of using her magical goddess powers because she explicitly mentioned that she made the cake with a local recipe. The page, covering much more ground now, has apparently grown quite a lot since it began. It now entails difficult questions and insightful answers about details in each episode. He makes many observations about minutiae in the animation, utilizing his extensive knowledge and familiarity of the Japanese culture and history. Such information would only be interesting to a veteran of the series. The author of the page actually makes a disclaimer in his welcoming page, "I would highly recommend not looking at this page unless you've seen the OAV series at least a few times." (Amagai) Apparently the author fits this category well over. He includes as a feature in his web page, an actual floor plan of the temple in which the main characters reside. He claims that the animators were not consistent in their depiction of the residency because there are discrepancies in the number of sliding doors that lead to a certain room. He tries to justify these errors with the fact that there is magical goddess technology present in the house and it may have been used to change the room around indiscriminately. His passion for the series is obvious, and it seems that this page is intended only for those who share the same level of passion as he. This is an overbearing principle of the fan page world on the internet.
Most of the internet's content is divided into two distinct categories. The first being businesses on the web either selling or promoting products. The second is topical pages produced by people with a passion, for people who may find such information useful, or for people who share a similar passion. The web pages KodanClub.com and Aa! Megamisama Overanalysis fall into these respective categories neatly. Capitalistic corporate pages, with high funding, are capable of producing web pages with quality content and astounding innovative features while fan authored pages are usually littered with large quantities of low to high quality content and completely plastered with personal opinions and expressions of their passion for the topics. Having personally created web pages with the viewer's comfort and ease of navigation as first priority, it was easy to critique both web pages. Both pages had simple intuitive navigation, for the most part. The author of the fan page seemed to be so obsessed with sharing his favorite songs from the soundtrack, that he neglected consideration towards the viewer and incessantly played badly composed bootlegged music in every page. This could be taken as annoying, or as just an expression of his passion for the anime. The lack in content quantity in the corporate site can be seen as a flaw in its design or as a design feature, which is to sell its products. If these are the cases, then I can not complain.