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The Glimpse and Fan Service: New Media, New Aesthetics

2008; Common Ground Research Networks; Volume: 6; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.18848/1447-9508/cgp/v06i05/42444

1447-9559

Keith C. Russell,

Media Studies and Communication

New media forms often open up new understandings of aesthetics.Japanese comics (Manga), and animations (Anime) arose in a time of limited social constraint.This allowed them to explore unmentioned topics and develop new aesthetics that involve Fan Service and the Glimpse.Fanservice is the random and gratuitous display of a series of anticipated gestures common in Manga and Anime.These gestures include such things as panty shots, leg spreads and glimpses of breast.In their valorization they indicate a deep philosophical concern with the status of personal experience.These vagrant moments of libidinous possibility underwrite the anticipation of sensual fulfillment; they indicate the genuine access of the personal to a realm and/or moment of reality in which the physical and the imaginative are co-extensive.The connection between the eye and desire is re-established in defiance of the general requirement in society to deny the Glimpse.The Glimpse, in its mediated form as Fanservice, confirms the imagination as the dimension of the interpersonal: someone else also already understands the glimpse.This is perhaps the "darker" freedom because it offers to forgive the otherwise unique nature of vantage (I alone could see from where I stood).What I see you could also see; how I see you might also see.The Glimpse affords a new aesthetic understanding of being within the transitional world of the adolescent.