Anime and affect: professional fandom and the Youtube platform in the age of monetization

Over the past few decades, scholars of fan studies have been engaged with questions of capital and consumerism in fandom— with writers such as Henry Jenkins and his canonical Textual Poachers investigating the ways in which fan-production can challenge or critique existing capitalist structures and modes of consumption, and later scholars such as Matt Hills identifying those challenges as being paradoxically implicated in those structures by nature in his book Fan Cultures. As fandom increasingly relocates itself into the digital world, with its ability to connect individuals and share creations across geographical borders— and more importantly, its potential to monetize that connection— those questions of fandom and capital become increasingly important to discuss. Given the high concentration of affect present within fan communities, an analysis of the process by which online platforms influence the affective relationships of fandom will serve as an important barometer for future studies of other online communities as well. As such, I have chosen to analyze the professionalization of anime fans within the YouTube platform via a hybrid approach of ethnographical and archival analysis. This approach includes textual readings of fan-created content uploaded to the YouTube platform, personal interviews conducted with fan-creators active within the anime community on the platform, and a chronographic analysis of changes to YouTube’s structure and conventions over time— with focus on social, legal, and monetary policies in particular. In this thesis, I argue that the conventions of the YouTube platform, such as its subscriber and ad-revenue systems, simultaneously lend themselves to the core affective drives of anime fandom, while necessarily implicating fan-creators and fan-viewers in a more calculative form of play than previous forms of fandom— functioning to transmute subcultural and social capital into economic capital at an unprecedented scale. However, this also maintains that while the introduction of financial incentive does complicate the affective relationships of fans on the platform, the pressures those incentives exert on fans ultimately fail to replace affect as the core motivational force behind the majority of fan activity on the YouTube platform.M.A.Includes bibliographical reference