Introducing the Media Mix

“Media mix” names the Japanese and transnational practice of creating, marketing, circulating and engaging with cultural goods serially across media types—from games and light novels to manga and anime to toys, foodstuffs and much else. In some accounts it designates something like transmedia storytelling; in others it names an ecology of practices and relations between media forms; in yet others it names the queer potentialities or community-forming properties of fan-based practices around cross-media serializations.

It is a term, a series of often lucrative media and licensing practices, and an epistemology implied by the term and formed in practice.¹ It is a set of models for how to do media business; how to organize media production and distribution; how to merchandise products; how to think about media conglomeration and its effects, even. It is well-worn pathways reused time and again; but it is also occasionally new experiments with emergent media forms (not to be confused, however, with “mixed media” art—a single artwork composed of different mediums). It has various histories or ways of historicizing, depending on what aspects one highlights and what story one wants to tell. The media mix is also the body of theories and theoretical works that are associated with these histories. It is a cast of characters: real life figures in the form of industry leaders or day-to-day practitioners; but also fictional characters and the media mixes built around them. It is likewise a set of techniques developed by the media industry over the past decades—the past century according to some. On a granular level it is the advertisement on a manga cover or in a train announcing the soon-to-be-released anime version of the manga and the coming media mix around it. On a macro level and in an academic context it is also a call for distinct fields of study to intersect—from medium-specific fields like animation studies to game studies to toy studies; to fields like industry studies or platform studies; and the object of various methodologies from ethnography to textual reading to historical or archival research. Media mix practices are embedded in the very term contents in Japan and Korea, the plural form of content that designates IP-dependent media mixes.² It is a field of open possibilities as much as it is entrenched commercial transactions.

This volume of Mechademia: Second Arc features articles that offer exciting new paths forward in media mix research. They shed new light on the media mix as practice, as theory, or as history—and quite brilliantly take media mix research in new directions. Building on the work of the past two decades on the topic, but also bringing in other distinct fields from game studies to platform studies and media historical research informed by decolonial and feminist perspectives, this special issue features exciting new work, emerging scholars, and novel interventions. The media mix itself continues not only to persist but to adapt and change; so too should scholarship. This special issue showcases cutting-edge work in the field, taking the topic in new directions that will, I hope, in turn inspire further work.

In this introduction I offer a brief and necessarily limited mapping of existing work on the topic, some significant new directions of research, and a summary of the contributions made in this volume. I take the liberty of offering extensive citations since bibliographies are sometimes the best place to learn about the richness of a field of study—with the caveat that even these are too limited to cover all the work produced and focus almost entirely on English language materials.

Media Mix Then and Now

This special issue comes out 11 years after the 2012 publication of my Anime’s Media Mix (perhaps the first book dedicated to the topic); 14 years after Thomas Lamarre’s 2009 book The Anime Machine that offers some crucial insights on the media mix and Tanaka Emi’s 2009 media mix theorization; 17 years after Anne Allison’s Millennial Monsters, which tracked Pokémon media mixes; two decades since Mizuko Ito’s early 2000s work on the media mix and play (the first English-language work on the topic), and Azuma Hiroki’s theories of otaku consumption; and more than three decades since Ōtsuka Eiji’s theory of narrative consumption (1989), which has become one of the frequent reference points for media mix theory—though he does not use the term.³ Prior work in children’s literature and marketing in Japan of the 1950s and ’60s equally paved the way for this research. As for the term itself? The term media mix / media mikkusu was first widely adopted to describe the serial franchising of media in Japan in the mid-to late-1980s. Before that there were other terms in use (including the odd but quite materialist “three-dimensionalization of mass communication” [masukomi no rittaikai] coined by Kan Tadamichi in the late 1950s), none sticking the way media mix did.⁴

Over the past decade there has been a wealth of research, books, articles, and analyses of the media mix, some tracing it back to Japan’s wartime propaganda (Ōtsuka in particular has been at the forefront of this, in both his own work and edited work, bringing new generations of scholars to trace media mix histories to the wartime propaganda machine), others, like Sandra Annett, moving it into considerations of transcultural fandoms.⁵ If my 2012 book anchored it around anime, Alexander Zahlten’s work on the 1980s popular films and Kadokawa in particular and Rayna Denison’s work on adaptation and more recently Ghibli production studies have been two particular sites for the close consideration of the media mix in relation to cinema.⁶ Jason Karlin and Patrick Galbraith’s edited volumes have put the concept to work in idol studies and in relation to the media convergence discourse more popular in North America.⁷ Work in game studies since the mid-2010s has been suggesting (convincingly) the need to port the concept to game studies, from a 2015 special issue of Kinephanos edited by Martin Picard and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon, to the 2019 DiGRA conference on “Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix,” to recent work by Dorothy Finan and Joleen Blom showing the productive work that can be done at this intersection.⁸ Complex historical and theoretical questions have been raised about the very term media mix—what epistemologies of mixing it presumes, and whether it assumes there are media that pre-exist the mix.⁹ Kathryn Hemmann has asked how to queer the media mix.¹⁰ Akiko Sugawa and Edmond Ernest dit Alban have been advocating for a fuller consideration of women’s media mixes, particular in urban environments, taking the media mix to the streets, asking how and where and in what embodied forms the media mix is lived.¹¹ And this overview only scratches the surface, as it does not include most of the incredible Japanese-language scholarship that has also blossomed over the past decade in particular. It also does not include the parallel fields of media franchising and transmedia that tend to focus on the US as its object of study—though as the work of Derek Johnson, Henry Jenkins, and others acknowledges, many of these works also have transpacific connections.¹² Stevie Suan’s work to decenter Japan in studies of anime given its transnational production circuits could equally and effectively be taken up to focus on the inter-Asian networks of the media mix.¹³ Work on boys love by scholars such as James Welker and Thomas Baudinette does just this; as does Jinying Li’s writing in this issue and elsewhere.¹⁴

In brief, it is a good moment to revisit the media mix as a topic. What are the limits of the area as sketched and defined, where can it be pushed further, and what potentials does it have either as framing series of questions or as a springboard for cross disciplinary conversations? I open this review of literature with my own book because, for better or worse, it sometimes too narrowly set the parameters of research (around anime) or the historical lineage (post-1960s)—parameters I’m delighted to see articles in this volume challenge, destabilize, and quite profoundly transform. I am particularly thrilled to present the work in this volume since much of it features newer voices in the field, suggesting bright futures for the topic—and for Asian media studies more broadly. In addition to article-long research pieces I also solicited shorter “provocations” from a few leading voices in this field of research. Many of these articles ask crucial questions about what has been excluded from media mix research so far, or what existing research might contribute to other fields. From women’s pro-wrestling to Instagram use as an extension and transformation of the print club; from the structuring role patriarchy has in pre-school media mixes to the impasses of nation-based media mix (versus transmedia) research; to the importance of considering bodies in space as key components of this research—what is included here stretches the existing contours of media mix research. Indeed, the works included here do precisely what I’d dreamed they would: expand the medium locus, gender, and time period of media mix analyses from the present, often anime-centric and presentist work, to other media, women theorists, and historically sophisticated interventions. This is certainly more than I could have hoped for in preparing the call for papers for this volume.

I suggest here, from my own perspective, some further issues for media mix or media mix-adjacent research to grapple with. The first, raised by Kimberly Hassell here, as well as in my own recent work and that of Aurélie Petit, is the relation of the media mix to platform studies and internet studies, increasingly significant (and expanding) fields of research.¹⁵ Petit in particular explores the uglier side of anime fandom and its links with the alt-right and what she terms gender-exclusionary practices. This draws on larger questions about logics of exclusion (or alternatively what Tressie McMillan Cottom terms “predatory inclusion”¹⁶) on or around the Internet that upholds forms of patriarchy and white supremacy—including the complex manifestations of both in Asia and Asian studies.¹⁷ The second is to create more fulsome conversations with adjacent fields of research such as production studies (as advocated here and elsewhere by Hartzheim), Japanese industry studies and streaming video (notably by Shinji Oyama and Yoko Nishioka), and game studies (notably Blom and Ernest dit Alban in this issue).¹⁸ This work points to the wider industrial context for the media mix, including questions about how the shift to streaming—whether on Netflix, Crunchyroll, or bilibili—affects everything from animation production to geographies of circulation to how much the media mix remains a component of anime in the streaming context. Third, expanding the geographies of media mix analysis seems crucial too; Chinese technology giant Tencent’s investment in content production and Korean tech giant Kakao’s embrace of webtoons are both media mix-adjacent practices of tech-content conglomeration. Such a geographical expansion would require a reckoning with emergent formations of media power with inter-Asian regional specificities that deserve both further analysis and critique. Fourth, much can be learned from the material and elemental turns of media studies, whether via the turn to a logistical media studies, which draws attention to how media circulate in the world, or via the elemental approach to media, which asks us to consider the infrastructures, machines, and environments that make mediation possible.¹⁹

Finally, I continue to think—along with Seuffert’s article in this volume on women’s wrestling and Nan’s on Imperial-era idol media mixes—about all the other non-anime/manga/game fields in which the media mix might offer a useful framework for deeply researched media historical analysis. What fields are we not paying attention to just because media mix research has historically been anchored around the study of anime-related media? Even as I continue to believe in the importance of research around “anime’s media mix” I equally believe we must expand research beyond it—as so many of the contributions here so eloquently do.

Brief Overview of Articles in This Issue

This issue opens with four shorter provocations meant to suggest new pathways for research around the media mix or ask key questions relevant to its study. In the first, Bryan Hikari Hartzheim offers an overview of research on the media mix while also making a plea for an embrace of production studies approaches, reminding us that “the study of media mix is also the study of people.” In his piece he focuses our attention on four crucial areas for media mix production research.

In the second intervention, Alexander Zahlten asks a key question: how do we sense the media mix? If the media mix is a system of connections between media, how is it we can make sense of—and research—the media mix in its totality? To frame this question he engages past work on the topic, draws on systems theory—uniquely suited to offer insights into how to study large scale systems like the media mix—and suggests pathways forward. Building on these methodological questions, Jinying Li focuses our attention on so-called danmaku or danmu in the Chinese context, the “bullet curtain” comments that float over the video image in platforms like bilibili or Niconico Video. The indistinctness between content and system that Zahlten highlights is here further developed by Li who argues that we need to “rethink media formations as force fields.”

In the fourth provocation, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada focuses our attention on the relation between media mix and 2.5D productions, highlighting the fandoms associated with the media mix in particular. The research she and her associates have been doing in this area is significant (and an earlier issue of Mechademia is dedicated to introducing them).²⁰ Here she emphasizes how the media mix is “dynamized” through and by fan activities.

Three sections follow, with the topics bleeding one into the other. Opening the “Gender, Politics, and Power” section, Kirsten Seuffert directs us to the media landscape of women’s professional wrestling in the 1970s and 1980s, a moment when women wrestlers crossed over to idol singers, and brought a distinct form of corporeality to the media mix. Contra analyses of the media mix that focus on the immateriality of the character, Seuffert shows how different media ecologies require attention to different kinds of materiality and corporeality. This article offers a close, deeply engaging account of spaces previously outside the purview of media mix analysis. It is a model article that offers both new empirical research and theoretical engagement with the media mix concept—and in doing so sets the tone for the rest of this volume. Gender and idols equally inform Nan Mei Mingxue’s article “Imperial Media Mix.” Moving back in time and asking questions about historization, Nan focuses on distinct media mix strategies during the wartime period, differentiating two notable models of the “imperial media mix” at work. This contributes to idol studies in resituating the history of idol groups to the wartime era—and showing the complex work of these groups to at once ideologically integrate their listeners as Imperial subjects (the goal of Japanese Empire) and make a profit (the goal of recording companies). Akiko Sano’s consideration of “Anpanman and Patriarchy: Media Mix for Preschool Children in Japan” extends Nan’s pairing of Empire and commerce to account for the intersection between capitalism and patriarchy that the Anpanman media mix represents. Preschool media mixes function, Sano argues, as necessary, infrastructural parts of childcare for mothers expected to take on the sole duty of caring for their children. As such she focuses on the social function of the media mix. Beyond its expressive potentials the media mix functions within the current crisis of care as a means of getting by for mothers who often work and bear the duties of childcare at the same time. It is a sobering portrait indeed, and one that resituates media mix from entertainment to survival mechanism.

Opening the “Platforms, Characters, and Worlds” section, Kimberly Hassel continues this focus on gender and women’s practices. In “The World as Photo Booth” Hassel combines media mix studies with platform studies to offer a longer history of Instagram practices of making the world a photobooth by taking this practice back to “purikura.” This fresh take on photo-sharing apps and Instagram pushes girls’ practices to the forefront of media mix research, and equally demands that Silicon’s Valley’s story of platforms not be the only one told. Joleen Blom’s “The Genshin Impact Media Mix” picks up this emphasis on platform studies, here focusing on one free-to-play game to demonstrate the wider stakes of asking the fields of game studies and media mix studies to intersect—and together better account for a regional approach to the “platformization of cultural production.”²¹ Building on some existing work in this regard, Blom shows how the character analysis offered by media mix research could benefit game studies, while game studies’ focus on mechanics, play, and monetization systems could help nuance media mix research. Both lead to larger responses to the need to analyze the “platformization of cultural production” in context-specific ways. Paul Ocone’s “Contents Tourism, the Media Mix, and Setting Moé” resonates with Hassel’s article in asking media mix research to consider more seriously the issue of space—of the media mix as a world. Offering a typology of several modes of fan relationships to actual space, Ocone’s article asks us to consider “setting moé,” where the setting (rather than characters) lead to fan pilgrimages around particular media mixes. Olga Kopylova closes this section by offering an analysis of power relations in the production of media mixes, focusing on the distinct roles taken by character designers and animators in creating (or disrupting) the homogeneity of the character image. This attention to production studies nicely echoes Hartzheim’s call to better integrate production studies into research on the media mix.

The final section, “Terms, Histories and Methods” features debates around terminology and history to ask wider questions about the political consequences of method. In so doing these works implicitly build on many previous articles in this issue that challenge method (Zahlten, Seuffert, Blom, Hassel), historical trajectory (Nan), or terminology (Li, Sano, Ocone). Ōtsuka Eiji opens this section by challenging my periodization of the media mix to the 1960s, making a convincing case that the media mix must be traced back to wartime Japan and government-led media efforts. This also addresses the social function of the media mix in a manner that emphasizes Sano’s point that the media mix ultimately functions as a support of patriarchy—albeit here as a support of Empire. Continuing on the thread of space, while also linking it to questions of gender and method, Edmond Ernest dit Alban’s article and title ask what it means when “Disney meets Anime.” What methodological issues are brought to light in the tension between the framework of transmedia (prominent in North American scholarship) and the media mix (as deployed in Japan and Japan studies)? How might these tensions allow us to go beyond the impasses Ernest dit Alban detects in the nation-focused, male-centered accounts? In posing these questions they also direct our attention to the materially situated, women-led practices of the media mix thus far too little attended to in existing studies of the media mix, building on their own earlier work, and echoing the work undertaken by Seuffert, Sano, and Hassel in the issue.²²

Finally, “Between Media Mix and Franchising Theory: A Workshop on the Theoretical Worlds of Transmedia Production” offers a selected and well-constructed account of an academic workshop organized to stage a dialogue between theories of the media mix and theories of media franchising at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. This 2019 dialogue is a nice way to bring the volume to a close, reflecting on a past event and previous works from the perspective of 2023. If held again, this workshop would no doubt refer to many of the wonderful interventions showcased in this special issue.

Indeed, the articles here reinvigorate the media mix concept and demonstrate thrilling ways forward for this area of research. They suggest an exciting future and emergent formations of a field I am now convinced we can call “media mix studies.”