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OTAKU_BASE

                                               April 29, 2012
                                     Re-start: May    7, 2012

"Oatku Japan's Database Animals" (2001)
   by Hiroki Azuma
                                                 OTAKU_WAY
English translation:
  Jonathan E. Abel & Shion Kono


As befits a "postmodern" analysis, the
terminology doesn't really make much
sense, but while "your brain is a
computer" has become a dull cliche,
"your culture is a database" is a       But then there's the other
new one on me, and Azuma deserves       puzzle of Azuma's title:
credit for this alone.                  "Animal"?

  The wonky diagrams explaining               OTAKU_ANIMAL
  the terminology are pretty
  funny as well.

  He begins with the idea is that there
  are many small narratives visible to
  any individual, but that they have an
  invisible structure underneath them.

  Back in the good old "modern" world,
  there was supposedly a single underlying      Azuma calls this the modern
  "grand narrative" beneath them all.           world with a central grand
                                                narrative a "tree view", and he
  But now, here in the postmodern world,        doesn't say so, but I gather
  world that many-to-one relationship           that the idea is that there's
  breaks down into a many-to-many.              one central trunk that all the
                                                smaller narratives branch off
  He calls this the database view,              from.
  where in place of one grand
  narrative, the many small visible
  narratives map to a series of
  slots that Azumi thinks of as          Which I would call a collection
  entries in a database.                 of familiar tropes, and perhaps
                                         "genre conventions".
      The particular
      case that Azumi
      is interested in
      is the otaku
      sub-culture, and
      the database of     This restriction does
      moe elements.       not seem implicit in
                          the model.

                                                    TROPISM
            I gather from his exposition,
            that this insight was inspired
            by an actual on-line database,          NOUNIFICATION
            a Japanese website created in
            1996: tinami.com




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