ATTACK ON FANDOM HOW ATTACK ON TITAN FANS USE TUMBLR MARIYA SHCHERBININA ABSTRACT This project will set out to explore how a new media platform, particularly, a micro-blogging website, Tumblr, aids the popularization and reproduction of Japanese anime/manga culture in the Western Hemisphere. My specific case study will observe the fandom of Attack on Titan, a popular Japanese manga and anime (“animanga”) series created by Hajime Isayama, which has become largely known in the West due to the commercial success of the anime series, fueled by the extensive reach of the fandom. Keywords: new media, tumblr, attack on titan, animanga.   ATTACK ON FANDOM 2 Introduction OTP, NSFW, PWP and AU. These are the terms that I encountered the first time I logged onto Tumblr with the sole purpose of finding kindred souls who enjoyed the same cultural offerings. That first time was back in 2010, when the fledgling new platform was still relatively unknown. Facebook was all the rage at the time, but Facebook didn’t have what Tumblr offered – anonymity, the possibility of not offering up one’s name and location, and instead forming a persona online that was solely composed of one’s likes and dislikes. Now, the so-called “fandom side” of Tumblr coexists with the hipsters, the official celebrity Tumblr blogs, the music artists, the tattoo experts etc.; however, the way the “fandom side” of Tumblr uses the platform to its advantage is by far the most expert and advanced. It the prime example of how new media helps shape the cultural industries whose products are being shared and disseminated globally using the new opportunities the Internet offers. In 2014, a friend recommended Attack on Titan to me. I had been ignorant of the popular animanga at that point. My anime fan days were long past, lost somewhere between middle and high school, yet this new discovery led me to devour the 25 episodes of the anime within several days. As an avid Tumblr user (about 4-6 hours a day), I immediately set out to find those who shared my passion for the story. I found that the anime had captured the hearts of millions. And some of those millions had found home in the Attack on Titan-related hashtags on Tumblr. After months of observation, participation, as well as conversations and surveys conducted with the members of the Attack on Titan fandom on Tumblr, I have been able to draw the conclusion that Tumblr allows for the creation of unique fan content, as well as the spread of existing, original products. What is more, these capabilities offered by the platform are paramount to the creation of the fandom culture itself, with its own norms, rules of conduct, and values.   ATTACK ON FANDOM 3 What makes Tumblr so special to the members of the fandom? Why is it the chosen platform for fans, fan artists and writers, to share their opinions and their spin-off works? How does Tumblr shape the type of content the fans are able to share with each other? RQ: How does Tumblr shape the content shared/produced by the Attack on Titan fandom? The Case/Preliminary Research/Literature Review This project will set out to explore how a new media platform, particularly, a micro- blogging website, Tumblr, aids the popularization Japanese anime/manga culture in the Western Hemisphere. My specific case study will observe the fandom of Attack on Titan, a popular Japanese manga and anime (“animanga”) series created by Hajime Isayama, which has become largely known in the West due to the commercial success of the anime series, fueled by the extensive reach of the fandom. Tumblr is a micro-blogging website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Yahoo! It provides blogging services for free, and enables users to have their own tumblogs to which they can “post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme’s HTML” (Tumblr, 2015). While many animanga fans exist outside of new media, the emergence of micro- blogging platforms, such as Tumblr, provides them with the necessary tools to replicate original content and create their own fan art and fiction based on the series, thus spreading the word on the animanga to other users. The way this is most commonly done is by tagging, or adding hashtags to posts relating to the fandom in question. The content is then shared among users via reblogging, an easy-to-use tool which allows the content to appear on the reblogger’s own Tumblr blog within seconds. All the posts from the blogs one follows appear on the user’s “Dashboard,” which makes the content easy to access and fast to spread.   ATTACK ON FANDOM 4 I would like to study how the features of Tumblr contribute to the production and reproduction of original and fan content, based on previous research done on Tumblr, and statistical popularity of the various types of posts, as well as object description of Tumblr as a whole. I will examine the types of content Attack on Titan fans share, to see how Tumblr’s exclusive features cater to the needs of the production and reproduction of cultural content; and how such content is shared and spread in the West using micro-blogging. I will also look at “scanlations,” fan-translated scans of the original manga, as well as the fans’ own spin-off manga, called “doujins” or doujinshi, and how those are shared via links and clippings on the platform. Additionally, I will analyze what sort of discourses circulate among the members of the fandom particular to Tumblr through textual analysis in the ‘attack on titan’ hashtag on Tumblr, interviews with the members of the community etc. In addition, I will ground my research in what has been written about Tumblr and fandoms – not only academically, but in the press, as well. I chose this topic not only because Tumblr was what made me aware of the existence of Attack on Titan to begin with, but also because it is a fascinating case of how non-Western cultural content can be translated, reorganized and shared through Western new media, popularizing cultural content that would have otherwise been silenced by traditional media. Tumblr allows users to shorten the process of content appropriation and does not concern itself with ethical issues: Attack on Titan is graphically violent, and would have been unlikely to be released on mainstream television channels in the U.S. In addition, the fandom existing on Tumblr around the anime and manga series has the features of a creative and heterogenous community that prides itself on its identity as Attack on Titan fans, highlighting their own shared characteristics and engaging in a number of fandom-specific behaviors, such as participating in “ship wars,” and shifting constantly as the manga series gets published and scanlated every month, and the anime is prepared for release in 2016.   ATTACK ON FANDOM 5 Tumblr proves to be excelled ground for studying how hash-tagging and certain new media features can spread cultural content through new channels, generating an entire fandom around it that creates and internalizes its own microcosmical community grounded on fan-produced and -reproduced works. Investigation Site What is Tumblr? Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform founded in February, 2007, by current CEO David Karp, with headquarters in New York. On March 18, 2015 alone, the website had 78,6 million posts. According to the About page, the website has 227,7 million blogs, 106,4 billion posts and only 297 employees. Tumblr allows users to share “text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, e-mail or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme’s HTML” (Tumblr, 2015). In other words, it is different from other micro-blogging platforms, such as Twitter, in a variety of manners: there is no text post size limit, it allows multimedia posting, hashtags that are separate from the content of the actual post, linking and “mentioning” other users using the ‘@’ tagging system, and no differentiation between so-called “validated” and non-“validated” accounts (Chang et al., 2014). These possibilities allow the users to customize and generate more of a variety of content, ranging from full-length text posts (as opposed to Twitter’s 140 characters), to 10-photograph posts, videos that can be uploaded by the users and linked from other video sharing platforms (such as YouTube and Vine), audio posts uploaded or sourced from Spotify and SoundCloud, so-called ‘chat’ posts, quote posts and links to other pages. The hashtagging system allows to build up a network of relations all stemming from one post: five is the limit for hashtags that show up in the searchable system on Tumblr; however, the user can choose to add more hashtags in order to categorize their posts according to the   ATTACK ON FANDOM 6 topic of their interest. Mentioning other users by typing in @[url] makes it possible to tag users in a post, and build up a multiuser posting system via reblogging. Reblogging is an important aspect that is exclusive to Tumblr. Once an original post is shared, other users can put it on their own blogs by hitting the reblog button, and even retag it using the editor option. Though the post does not go into the search system on the main website, tags are then used as a categorizing system for users to maintain their own blogs in relative order. Once a user signs up on Tumblr, they can choose a changeable URL address, and their blog will then be located at http://[url].tumblr.com. A user can have side-blogs as well, however, the functionality of such blogs is limited in relation to the initial, “main” blog. Side blogs can be edited by multiple Tumblr users, making them an ideal place for aggregate usage and/or contribution of content. Messaging, however, is limited on Tumblr: users can send ‘asks’ to each other, which constitute 220-character messages, which may not include any rich HTML editing or link (such asks are not delivered because of the existing spam-filtering system). Asks can be send both anonymously and under the Tumblr user’s main moniker; they can also be turned off, should the user choose not to receive such messages whatsoever. Asks can be answered as private messages, which then go directly to the user’s inbox, and publicly, wherein they are posted on the user’s blog (anonymous asks are only posted publicly). Tumblr does not allow tagging ask posts by default; however, many users utilize add-ons (such as amateur-made XKit) to make their ask system more comprehensive. In addition, Tumblr recently introduced the system of ‘fan mail,’ through which users can send messages to the blogs they have been following for more than 3 days. Fan mail is not postable, it can only be answered back and forth, and can include non-clickable links.   ATTACK ON FANDOM 7 Image posting on Tumblr is limited to 25 megabytes and/or 10 pictures per post, they are taggable and rebloggable, making Tumblr a good choice of image sharing platform for emerging artists. Recently, Tumblr introduced a system by which users can copy image links from other websites and thus post pictures on their own blogs (this addition has been controversial among the creative community on Tumblr, as it allows for ‘stealing’ images without tracing them back to the original source). Videos can be either uploaded to Tumblr or linked from other popular platforms, such as YouTube and Vine; however, users often choose the latter, as Tumblr videos take a longer time to load and are limited in terms of size (100 megabytes) and resolution. Audio posts are both uploadable and linkable as well; sourcing from SoundCloud and Spotify is available to all users who have accounts on these platforms. Since its acquisition by Yahoo!, Tumblr has been tightening copyright enforcement on the website, and regularly deleting posts that contain copyright material, therefore more users have turned to using external audio sources to avoid having their posts deleted and their accounts blocked. Link posts can be reblogged as links and as text posts as well, and longer text posts have the option to be shortened and converted into a link for further inspection. Chat posts constitute text posts that are visually designed to represent each starting line as a line by a different interlocutor in a conversation. These can be reblogged, but commenting on them by adding more text to the original post and reblogging is inaccessible. Quote posts can be graphically customized to present the quote itself in a bigger font and the attribution in a smaller font with an added dash in front of the name of the author. This is where the hashtagging system comes in – hashtags are used for classification on Tumblr; but more than that, it is also a system that many users, particularly those on the “fandom side” of Tumblr, use to comment on posts they reblog without formally adding to the original post. Hash-tags cannot be reblogged, therefore the comment is only there to be   ATTACK ON FANDOM 8 seen by the blog’s followers, and will be erased upon further reblogging. There is no length limit on hashtags; however, the number of hashtags that are sent to the appropriate search category is limited to 5. Users can add more tags indicating the category they want to place the posts into – some users even have their own exclusive hashtags for certain posts (e.g. “omgsocutewhyy,” “hellofaheichou-writes” etc.). Another unique feature Tumblr offers is unlimited HTML customization of each blogger’s theme – that is to say, the design and layout of their blog can be altered using HTML and CSS coding; as such, many Tumblr users offer their own self-made themes to anyone who would want to use them on a pro-bono basis in exchange for due credit (Tumblr’s official themes offered on the website range from basic, free of charge themes, to more advanced themes that can cost around $49 for use). What are animanga fandoms? According to Oxford Dictionaries, a fandom constitutes “the fans of a particular person, team, fictional series, etc. regarded collectively as a community or subculture” (Oxford Dictionaries). The key term here is community, that being a group of people who share certain values and engage in lively discussion over their interests. In the context of animanga, the fandom tends to cover both manga, Japanese-origin comics drawn in a specific style, and anime, series or original videos produced using a specific animation technique that is used almost exclusively in Japan, and that are oftentimes based on manga (with several notable exceptions). The animanga fandom often identifies itself or is often identified by other online users with the broad term Japanophiles, as well as its more derogatory cousin, weeaboos, a noun derived from a Perry Bible Fellowship comic indicating someone obsessed with Japanese culture and media while at the same time knowing very little about them (1d4chan, 2014). The rise of the animanga fandom is attributed to the early 2000’s, as previous attempts to bring manga to the U.S. dating all the   ATTACK ON FANDOM 9 way back to the beginning of the 1980’s have yielded mediocre results – mostly due to the fact that publishers attempted to ‘westernize’ original manga to make in more accessible. Now, however, the animanga fandom prides itself on the difference of its topic of interest from Western comics, to the extent of fetishizing it (Brienza, 2009). Anime fandoms are actively expanding over a series of social network, in the way that Baym had seen Swedish indie music fandoms do: they distribute themselves over the Internet, merging together in a semi-coherent way (2007). There are significant anime followings on forum websites, such as 4chan and Reddit, on social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. Tumblr accommodates its own significant number of so-called weeaboos, all of whom form a fluctuating and fluid network of anime and manga fans across genres and franchises. Multifandom blogs, or blogs that focus on more than one anime/manga fandom at a time, are abundant, and serve as one of the links through which fans may explore new titles. According to an article on About Tech, the so-called Tumblr fandom is: “A unique part of Tumblr culture that sees hoards of mostly young people come together, forming small subsets of fan-driven communities to enjoy one another’s creative fan art, gifs, photosets, fan fiction and discussions, usually about a popular TV show or movie or band/artist or something else. Members of these fandoms can often be found quite easily just by searching through Tumblr tags for a specific word or phrase.” Among these, in a list of the 10 popular Tumblr fandoms, the collective anime fandom ranked 9th (Moreau). Fandoms engage in a variety of specific behaviors centered around their shared interests: besides discussions of the original material, fans generate a significant amount of new work based on the source – so called fan art and fan fiction. This type of engagement is   ATTACK ON FANDOM 10 very popular; so much so that people may use social networks in order to find other fans who could help with proofreading, editing and translating fan fiction works, most of which is done for the price of comments and votes. Using new media, fans have been able to connect in new, different ways, altering the notion of frienship and sharing a new definition of storytelling (Šesek & Pušnik, 2014). Fandoms sometimes take on the roles of co-producers and disseminators of cultural content. In the case of animanga fandoms, these roles frequently include fansubbers and scanlators, people who obtain products in Japanese, translate them into another language, different to the original, and then release the translated version to other fans without regard for copyrights. These products are different from normal user-generated content as they are based on existing copyrighted material (Lee, 2011). Attack on Titan: a phenomenon? Attack on Titan started off as a manga penned and drawn by Hajime Isayama, a Tokyo-based manga artist, back in 2010. It is a story set in a world where humanity has been devastated by giant humanoids called Titans, of which little is known, except for the fact that they devour every human being in sight. In order to save themselves from danger, the remaining humans have locked themselves within three giant walls, and for a hundred years, no Titans had been seen. The story begins with a new type of Titan appearing and breaking through the outmost Wall, urging humanity to fight back (“Attack on Titan 1 by Hajime Isayama,” 2012). The manga was published by Kodansha Comics, Japan’s largest genre publisher, and the English version was first published in English in 2012 by Kodansha USA Publishing (KUP) in New York. The anime series debuted at the same time in April 2013 in Japan and the U.S. (subtitled and then dubbed into English by Funimation), and given the popularity of the series, KUP released one volume of the translated manga per month between August and   ATTACK ON FANDOM 11 December of 2013 (“Attack on Titan Now Monthly,” 2013). Besides garnering great critical acclaim and numerous faithful fans, the manga also won the 2011 Kodansha Manga Award in the shōnen category, and was nominated for the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize for 2012 (“Attack on Titan 1 by Hajime Isayama,” 2012); the manga has also been on New York Times’ Bestselling Manga list in 2013 and 2015. As of March 2014, the manga had over 31 million copies in circulation in Japan; it was translated into eight languages and led to Kodansha’s first revenue increase in 18 years and its first increase in both revenue and profit in 19 years (“Attack on Titan Manga Has 31 Million in Circulation,” 2014). According to ICv2, the turnaround of manga sales in 2014 continued in 2015 for a second year after a long decline, and “a big driver of sales was … Attack on Titan, which not only contributed significant sales on its own, but also gave a new sheen to the entire category” (Griepp, 2015). The anime aired between April 6, 2013 and September 28, 2013 on the channel MBS, and included 25 episodes and 6 OVA’s to date. It won multiple prizes during the 3rd Newtype Anime Awards, an award for Best TV Animation in 2013 at the Animation Kobe Awards (“Attack on Titan Wins Top Prizes in Newtype Anime Awards,” 2014), and had garnered a lot of attention in the neighboring countries of China and Taiwan. Method Based on the previous literature review and press analysis, I engaged fully with my fellow Attack on Titan fans on Tumblr through a mixed-method study of participant observation, surveys and interviews, in order to better understand the culture and capabilities of the people using this platform for the proliferation of their shared interest. Participant observation mostly stemmed from selecting posts tagged as ‘snk’ (short for Shingeki no Kyojin, the romaji version of the original Japanese title of the series) and ‘shingeki no kyojin’ within their respectful tags and on my dashboard (I have been part of the AOT fandom for several months now, and follow mostly blogs which post content related to the series). The   ATTACK ON FANDOM 12 analysis of the posts is limited to the number of posts that appeared on my dashboard and in the tag at the time that I was online; as content is being generated and reblogged constantly, there is no predicting which posts will appear for each individual user, as everyone “follows” a unique combination of blogs. The survey was administered anonymously online, across 53 respondents, between February 18, 2015 and March 20, 2015. The link to the survey was shared on Tumblr using Attack on Titan–related hashtags, such as ‘snk,’ ‘shingeki no kyojin,’ ‘attack on titan’ and ‘aot.’ The survey was limited in the number of respondents, as well as the time when the link was “hot” (a.k.a., the time it was posted), making it more relevant for people presumably online around 12 a.m. GMT +1 (however, this time tends to be peak blogging time for users in the U.S.). At the survey was conducted anonymously, the demographic is unknown. For the interviews, I selected respondents representing the most prevalent forms of fan content generation on Tumblr: fan fiction writers, fan artists, scanlators and headcanon writers. I conducted structured interviews via the Tumblr askbox with them, using three questions relating to Tumblr usage and user content generation; asking them to define their chosen form of artistic expression, state their opinion of the reason for the popularity of Attack on Titan, and state whether they consider Tumblr the most suitable platform to engage with their fellow fans. My respondents all have a significant following of their blogs, and their content generates many reblogs across the entire fandom (they are considered ‘senpais,’ the Japanese honorific for ‘seniors,’ by the rest of the fandom). The AOT Fandom Content According to the survey conducted among Attack on Titan fans on Tumblr, the most popular type of posts generated within the fandom is image posts (with 83%), despite the post size limit to 10 images and 25 megabytes per post. To compare, text posts came in as a distant second with 15%, and link posts only got 2%, with the rest of the proposed options   ATTACK ON FANDOM 13 collecting none of the votes. What is curious, however, is that when asked whether they posted original images on Tumblr themselves, 66% of the respondents said no, thus meaning that the community of artists within the fandom on Tumblr is relatively small as compared to the number of people reblogging. This tendency is visible throughout the entire spectrum of proffered posts: with only 47% of the respondents admitting to posting text and 8% posting videos on the platform. This leads one to believe that 1) Tumblr is not the most ideal platform for original content (or fan content, in this case) and/or that 2) original content generation is reserved for the select few who take their time to learn how to circumvent the system. Indeed, when asked about the suitability of Tumblr for the generation of content, one of the interviewees, who posts “head canons” (unofficial ideas about what the characters are like outside of the canon), said: “I definitely would only use Tumblr for this. Tumblr is a platform most suited for fandom needs in my opinion. The layout as well as the content of the site works well for this sort of thing.” Another user, who is famous in the fandom for their fan fiction writing, responded: “On Tumblr it still takes time but there are communities and collections of people who all reblog from each other in a fandom. Not only are you more likely to trust a rec [recommendation] from someone you follow on Tumblr, but it’s also easier for someone’s rec to reach a wider audience. For example, one rec list can be liked and reblogged countless times.” It would seem that Tumblr is used for popularization of content primarily due to its reblogging capabilities – as one post can branch out into thousands if reblogged a sufficient amount of time by relatively well-known users. Fandom Tumblrs are also unique in their proliferation of RP’s, or role-play, which lends itself to the websites reblogging functions quite well. The users impersonate their characters of choice and take turns reblogging the same text post and building on each other’s   ATTACK ON FANDOM 14 responses. Some even invent a unique hashtag in order to follow the progress of their RP easily. This way, if someone else wants to read through the entire RP from the start, all they need to do is type the hashtag into Tumblr’s search bar and come up with chronological results. Another popular type of text post that is quite unique to Tumblr is headcanons. One of the respondents, a headcanon blog, claims that: “…I’ve received some wonderful headcanon submissions in response to my own headcanons, and I’ve found that posting headcanons has been a great way for me to give back to the fandom as well as get closer to other fans.” As certain blogs allow submissions, which can later be edited and posted by the blog owners, Tumblr becomes an ideal platform for such posts, which are constantly expanded and built upon as users reblog. In terms of fan fiction, few posts contain the works in their entirety – while shorter, under-500-word fan fics (“drabbles”) are generally posted directly, authors of longer works have a tendency to upload their fan fiction to external resources, such as ArchiveOfOurOwn.com and FanFiction.net, and then posting a link to the fic together with a summary, an excerpt, or, less frequently, a banner. This contributes to the amount of readers of the fic posted – most users frown upon flooding people’s dashboards with long texts, instead opting for putting their entire works under a link or a ‘read more’ page break. Besides .gif sets and regular images, fan artists also post doujinshi, fan-created manga based on the original source material. The average doujinshi post is either the starting panel posted as an image with the following posted in the reblog comments, or a panel accompanied with a link to an external doujinshi resource, e.g. myreadingmanga.com. The tendency is to translate Japanese artists’ doujinshi into English and share the links; there is much more translation than genuine production going on.   ATTACK ON FANDOM 15 Videos that are short, under 100 megabytes, and most frequently, videos that can be looped (as the Tumblr video player uses that option by default), are uploaded to the Tumblr website directly. Otherwise, fan videos find their way through the YouTube/Vine/Tumblr integration mechanisms, and are reblogged and shares just like any other post. Fan videos typically use frames from the anime, backed up with a “relatable” or “relevant” song (and accompanied by a copyrights disclaimer). In terms of circumventing limitations, the Tumblr community has proven to be creative in turning these very limitations into advantages. A prime example would be “gifsets,” posts including up to ten .gif images, all of which are connected chronologically or thematically. By breaking down a number of video frames into separate .gif images, the users are able to create a mosaic of .gifs, and, skill permitting, make them into aesthetically sound pieces of art within themselves. The AOT Fandom Culture What is peculiar about fandoms on Tumblr is that they tend to aggregate a certain amount of cultural values that are unique to solely them: the respondents of the survey mentioned sourcing art (instead of “stealing it” without linking it to the original poster), not engaging in “ship wars,” arguments over the viability of real or imagined relationships between the characters of the series, as well as discussing possible future plotlines or alternative / “unmentioned” plotlines and characterizations. There seems to be an agreement on sharing not only informational but emotional involvement in the series: one of the survey respondents stated “we all share the pain and tragedy in an oddly humorous way,” while others mentioned sharing “feels” and making “friends” over the process of shipping. The definition of friendship is understood differently in this online community – although many users share the sentiment of “building relationships” based on the empathic connection they feel in regards to their characters.   ATTACK ON FANDOM 16 Besides friendship, however, many people express frustration over “stolen” fan works, particularly because of Tumblr’s offering the ease of posting images on one’s blog and citing oneself as a source when, in reality, the piece of art had been taken from another artist’s resource. Tumblr’s new post-images-via-URL feature adds fuel to the fire, as the source URL can be changed; the images can be downloaded without any obstacle, and re- uploaded to a new post. This, in particular, is the source of new concerns for creating unique fan art watermarks that are usually added as a layer over the piece in order to designate ownership. In addition, there is a rise among fandom participants’ collective disgruntlement over stolen art, and art thieves often get publicly called out for their actions using Tumblr’s posting features, e.g. a post that garnered 252 notes (reblogs and likes): “User (…) has been taking original pieces and making cheap color effects and edits before stamping her name on them. When asked to stop politely she got defensive and claimed that there was nothing wrong with what she was doing as long as she credited the artist and if people wanted to see the original they could do so but she will not stop. Please stop this behavior and take time to report her. Her account is locked but this behavior is disrespectful to the artist that take hours and even days to gift us with their hard work.” Besides resentment towards such users, there is also growing frustration over so- called “ship wars,” which are verbal conflicts that arise between the members of the same fandom who are rooting for relationship development (usually romantic) between different characters (particularly main ones). This causes links between users to be broken, as exemplified in this response: “But then an Eruri vs. Ereri [the two most popular ships in Attack on Titan] broke out. I was already starting to dislike Eruri, which used to be my OTP [OTP = One True Pairing], because the shippers forced their headcanons down my throat. But after that   ATTACK ON FANDOM 17 mini war over ACWNR [ACWNR = A Choice With no Regrets, a two-part original video animation from the same producers as Attack on Titan, portraying the background of the fandom’s most popular character, Levi], I gave up the Eruri part of the fandom.” Many users characterize their experience in the fandom as “frustrating,” some due to the fact that Tumblr allows anonymous messages to be sent through the website. The only way to respond to such messages is by posting them publicly, therefore the respondent’s “humiliation” (according to several users) is out there for the community to see. “Anon hate” increases tensions between shippers on the opposite sides of the barricade. However, there is a culture of respect for fellow shippers, as well as a support system that extends beyond the fandom – many users upload personal posts to fandom tags, and find a response, whether it is via reblogging or messaging. In addition, there is a culture of regard for fan artists and fan fictions writers, that is to say, most members of the community value the time and effort these people put into their works, as seen in posts like the following one put under the “snk” hashtag: “God bless the doujinshi artists, God bless the fan art artists, God bless the fan fiction writers,” which amassed 2,985 notes between March 17 and April 14, 2015. Conclusion The Attack on Titan fandom on Tumblr is a prime example of how new media help shape fan content and spread original works that can be distributed online. The fandom spans a community of varied individuals, from participants to onlookers, all enabled by the offerings of the new media platform in question. The medium is the message, according to Marshall McLuhan, and this rings true for this particular community, just one of many that take up residence on micro-blogging platforms like Tumblr. The way in which content is shared and created has changed over the years, starting with manga publishing in hard copy, and continuing on now until today by   ATTACK ON FANDOM 18 means of scanning, re-appropriating and adding to the source material. While this fandom is only one of the many, it offers an insight on how communities can be built online through mutual regard for a work of art originally intended for traditional media that transcended the barrier between old and new media, offering a fresh look towards the future of cultural industries. The usage of new media, particularly, platforms such as Tumblr, offers new possibilities to those who want to make their content known to other people interested in the same topic. Though the original producer of the idea, the copyright holder, if you will, stays within the realm of traditional media, it is clear that by using online platforms like Tumblr, users are able to connect and share in new ways that have never been possible before the rise of new media.   ATTACK ON FANDOM 19 References Attack on Titan 1 by Hajime Isayama. (2012). Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://www.randomhouse.com/book/218360/attack-on-titan-1-by-hajime-isayama Attack on Titan Manga Has 31 Million in Circulation. (2014, October 3). Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2014-03-10/attack-on-titan- manga-has-31-million-in-circulation Attack on Titan Now Monthly. (2013, July 8). Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://kodanshacomics.com/attack-on-titan-manga-to-move-to-monthly-release- starting-in-august/ Attack on Titan Wins Top Prizes in Newtype Anime Awards. (2013, October 13). Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-10-13/attack-on- titan-wins-top-prizes-in-newtype-anime-awards Baym, N. (2007). The new shape of online community: The example of Swedish independent music fandom. First Monday 12(8). Retrieved April 3, 2015. Brienza, C. (2009). Books, Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the Unites States. Publishing Research Quarterly (25):101-117. Retrieved April 3, 2015. Chang, Y., Tang, L., Inagaki Y., and Liu Y. (2014). What is Tumblr: A Statistical Overview and Comparison. arXiv:1403.5206v2 Definition of fandom in English. (2015). Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/fandom Griepp, M. (2015, March 10). Manga Continued Turnaround in 2014. Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/31049/manga-continued-turnaround- 2014   ATTACK ON FANDOM 20 Lee, H. (2011). Participatory media fandom: A case study of anime fansubbing. Media, Culture & Society 33(8): 1131-1147. Sage Publications. DOI: 10.1177/0163443711418271 Moreau, E. (n.d.). 10 Popular Tumblr Fandoms List. Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://webtrends.about.com/od/Tumblr/tp/Tumblr-Fandoms.htm Šesek, L., and Pušnik, M. (2014). Reading popular literature and digital media: Reading experience, fandoms, and social networks. Anthropological Notebooks 20(2): 103-126. Weeaboo. (2014, June 15). Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Weeaboo