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Script variation as audience design: Imagining readership and community in Japanese yuri comics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2019

Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd
Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd The Ohio State University Hagerty Hall 398 1775 College Rd Columbus, OH43210, USAdahlberg-dodd.1@osu.edu
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Abstract

Building on recent work supporting a sociolinguistic approach to orthographic choice, this study engages with paratextual language use in yuri, a subgenre of Japanese shōjo manga ‘girls’ comics’ that centers on same-sex romantic and/or erotic relationships between female characters. The comic magazine Comic Yuri Hime has been the dominant, if not only, yuri-oriented published magazine in Japan since its inception in 2005. Though both written and consumed by a primarily female audience, the magazine has undergone numerous attempts to rebrand and refocus the target audience as a means to broaden the magazine's readership. This change in target demographic is reflected in the stylistic representation of paratextual occurrences of the second-person pronoun anata, indicating the role of the textual landscape in reflecting, and reifying, an imagined target audience. (Script variation, manga, popular media, Japan, yuri manga)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , June 2020 , pp. 357 - 378
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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