The Rise of Internet Genre Fiction.

The (new) media of writing (and reading) that has changed the publishing trade.

Sometime in early July 2021, in the middle of yet another pandemic-driven lockdown in Malaysia, I began watching donghua (动画) seriously for the first time in my life, which ignited my ambivalent relationship to anime (アニメ). At that time, I just started teaching at a creative arts program of a university in Malaysia, had started on a remote three-month fellowship that allowed me to focus on researching social media over the semester break, and had nowhere I could go. Around that time, many people turned to the internet to fulfill most of their basic and less-than-basic needs, including yours truly.

Those fortunate enough to live in a society with easy access to the internet could give thanks that the pandemic happened in 2020 rather than in 2010. Nevertheless, just as it is with clean water, internet access is not a given, as the pandemic quickly unveiled the access gap between the haves and have-nots. But for those fortunate enough, the internet of 2020 gave unprecedented access to all kinds of entertainment content that the internet of 2010 could not.

What did we have in 2010? YouTube was still in its early days (I remember writing a student seminar paper on it back in late 2008), Netflix was still largely about getting your DVDs delivered (with minimal streaming offerings) and you could only access it in the US (Hulu was just a teeny step ahead in its stream-able offerings but equally geographically locked-in), and if you wanted to access any original popular work of fiction or art digitally, there were limited platforms beyond static websites.

There were cable TV and satellite TV (depending on which country you were from). There was Spotify but mostly with music from Western countries (even K-pop was nowhere to be found on North American music apps, although Netflix already hosted some of the more internationally mainstream K-dramas for the US audience). There were various community and online fan sites, but most were very North American centric before 2010. Nevertheless, just barely 10 years later, and before the 2020 pandemic, the change was so complete that we forget that things were not always this way. In the same vein, we have forgotten the existence of a pay phone, let alone the existence of a switchboard operator.

YouTube very quickly went from being a space where you could only watch amateurish short videos to a site that rivals many other content streaming sites. It was also the wellspring of a creator economy that its predecessor, the blogging sites, were never quite able to sustain. And it has also become the inspiration for later emerging social media apps that derive their value and traction through the creator economy, such as Instagram, Bilibili, Twitch, and TikTok. The rise of e-sport would not have been possible, the infrastructure that had gone behind making streaming a bandwidth viable activity — changes in the design and constitution of the telecommunication architecture and backbone (I would probably do another article about the international diplomacy of cabotage and its impact on the quality of internet access). Many media companies, big or small, regardless of origin, have chosen YouTube as their international platform.

The most important change lies in how the internet has developed to a point where it could become a ‘digital bubble’ of your choice, should that be one’s preferred mode of engaging with cyberspace. This is thanks in part to the proliferation of social media applications that not only allow you to message each other directly but engage in multi-modal synchronous and asynchronous communication — leading to the creation of para-social relationships that also define what gets on your news/content feed. From my experience in teaching, even if you might be connected to a whole world wide web of openly available information, you are not likely to know how to search for them unless you know that such an information exists, much less care that such information exist.

The internet has also gone through significant demographic shifts, and the content available reflects that shift. What the internet looks like to you depends on how you choose to access, and your purpose for accessing it, given that the learning curve for getting connected is becoming increasingly non-existent. I remember the time when I was a teenager on the internet, in the second half of the 1990s. I was a science (and computer tech) geek through and through, and was pretty much looking for others like me, or even better, smarter than me, to commune with. But to do that, I had to master the art of not merely rigging up the modem but also learning how to program the connection between my modem and my rather low-capacity PC (I think I managed to switch from a 386SX to a P5/P6 at some point), all supported by a phone line that was running on copper wires.

Once I went online, I would once again be bombarded by the need to master different command lines to gain access to anything that was not remotely a web-browser. I also quickly learned that the ones who were the most respected were the ones with the highest technical prowess and ability to play ‘god’. There was an actual caste separation between the script-kiddies (the hacker-wannabes who were mainly running another’s code blindly with no critical insight) and the true hackers. Some of these hacker ‘gods’ of yesteryears are present day middle-aged pioneers of today’s ‘digitalization’ transformation and app-saturated internet.

That, was in contrast to the ‘gods’ of that time that used to offer donation-based freeware (think mIRC for those old enough to remember) as part of their ‘democratizing internet and knowledge’ effort. One such person from that generation was Aaron Swartz, whom many of the present generation may not recognize as a co-founder of Reddit. If you are a new user of Reddit, now a community board that sees thriving subreddit communities of many subcultures (and emerging popular cultures), you probably only know of his more famous co-founders Alex Ohanian and Steve Huffman. In this 2013 memoriam blogpost on him (of a now defunct blog), I provided an informal insight into hackers and their motivations (while clearing up some confusion caused by the media), as well as antiquated physical infrastructure supporting connectivity back in the good old days. Since then, a book, edited by legal scholar Lessig, containing Swartz’s writings had been published.

While the ‘technical’ side of the internet were largely dominated by males between the 1990s and turn of the 21st century, the more social side saw more females (in group chat sites like the mIRC, MUD, web-forums and mailing lists hosting particular interest groups or fandoms). I will not even venture into the different gendered identities, which, at that time, were barely recognized. But there was definitely popular content being brewed and hosted on various internet sites between the late 1990s and early 2000, though they were few and far between. The sort of content available then tended toward subcultural practices that some would refer to as the otakku culture even without being Japanese centric. You would find subcultures centered around goth (Buffy the Vampire Slayer!), cosplaying, comics (and some manga), gaming, anime, popular cult franchises, fantasy or science fiction genres (and subgenres), and, as I just found out recently, boyslove (the latter with its own fraught history of gendered identities, guilty-and-hidden pleasures, and subcultures).

By the time I started watching donghua and anime seriously in 2021, the text-based internet of the yesteryear is, at most, a lost memory. Rather, the internet of the present is one where a person merely needs to turn on their digital devices to access the various international versions of platforms from China such as Youku, Tencent (WeTV), iQiyi, MangoTV; the Japanese Rakuten’s US-based Viki platform that features Asian content, US-based Kocowa (that focuses primarily on K-drama and Korean content), and Taiwan queer content streaming platform GagaOOlala. There are other lesser known, more regional platforms I did not mention here. The ones that have gone big began life with limited geographical coverage but have since expanded their reach. While the protocols for connecting are actually more complex, their user friendliness have actually improved, therefore making the learning curve, and potential security threats, invisible to the users.

Netflix, and all these platforms, are no longer merely providing infrastructure services, but have entered into the business of content creation. More importantly, Netflix, as an American company, is now facing increasingly stiff competition in the arena of Asian content from other platforms that were able to provide a wider range of genres even as it is also producing original content in collaboration with the entertainment industries of other countries so as to penetrate their market more thoroughly.

Much has changed in the ‘static’ visual content realm as well. Back in the late 1990s, Japan began the trend of cellphone fiction as mobile phones went from looking like walkies-talkies to becoming more streamlined flip-phones. If you were a fan of Japanese films or dramas from between the mid 1990s to the first five years of the 21st century, you will probably be familiar with the sight of these phones, which also appeared in some American TV from around the same period. What probably sparked the possibility of using a mobile phone as more than just a convenient tool for keeping in contact while on the move was the rise of the first mobile phone games. Around the same time, community forums for fandoms to congregate online and produce fan content (including fan-fiction) were also proliferating, though mostly in North America.

Within the first 10 years of the 21st century, we began to see the circulation of these ‘born-digital’ content which largely escaped the notice of the traditional literary world that tends to snub such works. What I mean by born digital here are the internet novels (and their kin) rather than this other kind of electronic literature. Rather, these born digital fictional content were the purview of cultural anthropologists, communications and media scholars, and cultural theorists. It is an unfortunate missed opportunity for examining these works, even the ones subjectively considered as trashy, for their contribution to humanity and culture in ways that only a deep analysis of their aesthetics, narrative form, poetics, and stylistics could provide. Moreover, some of the works are imbued with cultural references, sometimes even of lost cultures, that are deserving of deeper scrutiny.

Many of these born-digital content have been around for more than two decades, and practice intense serialization (where you can find novels or comics that can go on for hundreds, if not over a thousand, chapters). This is particularly the case with East Asian internet novels, and now, also Southeast Asian internet novels such as the ones emerging from Thailand and mainland Southeast Asia (though probably not to hundreds of chapters, unless they are translations of other internet novels).

For the largely English-speaking audience, Wattpad is where you go to read these born-digital works that include fan-fiction, although one could also see non-Anglophone works, such as fan-translated Asian fiction, or even Asian-language translation of other Asian-language internet novels. Diverse non-standard Englishes flourish on the platform, something which you are unlikely to find in traditional publishing platforms. In China, an industry has grown around internet novels for more than a decade, and as the Chinese diaspora begin to spread throughout the world and as the mainland’s own internet access improved, they have also carried their interest in these works into a more international fandom space, especially through the love-labour they had provided in translating these thousands of pages of serialized internet novels. If you would like a deeper look into the internet novel industry in China from the perspective of a non-Chinese journalist with a long-term relationship with Chinese culture and literature, I suggest reading Megan Walsh’s The Subplot.

Western fans who were long-time fans of Japanese subcultures gradually shifted their interest, in the past decade, to works produced out of South Korea, China, and Taiwan. The shared cultural resonances and even creative influences between the popular content coming out of these countries made the shift natural and familiar. As the media industry is acutely aware of the influence of these fictions, they have fed that craving for more through various adaptations: audio dramas, animation, anime, live actions, games; and then promoting the multiple products through various fan conventions.

While the internet novel, and its predilection for serialized writing, is reminiscent of the serialized novels of 18th and 19th century Europe, as well as other forms of serialization found in magazine fiction elsewhere, particularly in the US, what is different between then and now is how these works of internet (digital) fiction, more so than any print pulp fiction, have contributed to a reification and identification of tropes and narrative (plot) lines. Moreover, similar practices from the internet novel could also be found in print novels that have gone the more traditional publication route.

For one, in more traditional literary criticism, you are unlikely to encounter Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice characters and plot discussed along the lines of: a tsundere male lead and an annoying and prideful female lead who had to have her ass saved by the male lead, creating some angst along the way, before they ride together toward a happy, fluffy ending. However, such are the kinds of readerly reviews you would find on a subreddit on romance or a review under novelupdates. Instead of literary criticism, the reviews are merely coded messages to other would-be readers who may base their decision, whether to read or not, on the ratings and reviews. You can think of it is as reading an IMDb (or Mydramalist/Myanimelist) review of a film, drama, or anime. Or a Yelp review of a restaurant. But when you think about it, such a review of Austen’s work, even with the bracketing out other complexities, is fairly accurate. Tropes also exist in literary fiction, just that the latter are better at burying the former under layers of poetic form, allusions, metaphors, allegorical subplots, and unstructured story-telling that prefers ambiguity over unequivocal pronouncements.

In Reading the Romance, literary critic and cultural theorist, Janice Radway had discussed the reification of expectations among readers of romances when it came to a stable of characters, story arcs, and endings preferred. This was at a time when the romance fandom was largely confined to local bookclub meetings, fan newsletters, physical fan conventions, and maybe fan-fiction printed in booklets (although she did not speak of fan-fiction in the book). In a way, this was evocative of parallel developments in twentieth century boyslove literature in Japan, whether as light novels or mangas. Even a predisposition toward the literary never steered the stories away from a clear path of expected story development (including who the OTPs are), be it a happy or less-than-happy ending. Scholars of different stripes and nationalities have also published their analyses on the topic, with one of the oldest examples of transnational scholarship in this being Boys Love Manga and Beyond. The study of Western receptivity to all forms of Asian popular content (such as the ones above) by scholars could be found in works categorized under transcultural fan studies.

While the adaptations-to-screen of literary works persist, the number of viewers they generate in the age of streaming platforms are nowhere as profound as the adaptations of works with a ready-made fandom that could be marshaled into drumming up hype and publicity in ways no publicity arm of a production company could. If you go back twenty years, you could see that same anticipation for Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter even without the social media of today, or perhaps, just about a decade ago, Game of Thrones.

Moreover, the demographics of the internet is such that we now have the senior Boomers and the younger Gen-alphas co-existing, and surprisingly, consuming similar content. However, most research on senior TV viewing habits had focused either on unpacking the health implications or the psychology behind this past-time. Little attention is paid to why seniors choose to view certain content, are drawn to certain content, or even participate in the fandoms of these content. Given that much of the developed world is ageing, it has become increasingly important to pay attention to the kind of content that could attract the growing number of seniors on social media, some of whom are part of the silver streamers cohort. Moreover, it is not only young adults or teenagers who read internet novels, even seniors do! When you think about it, reading a serial internet novel is similar to watching a drama or animated series, which fits well with the strategy of present-day content platforms.