Fan Anime – This Week in Anime

The new Berserk animation has been disavowed, but is this the only case of publishers coming down hard on fan creations? Steve and Chris dive into the world of doujin to find out.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

This might seem like a pretty simple case on its face. Studio Eclypse doesn’t have any rights to Berserk, with The Black Swordsman specifically being pitched as a “fan-animation project”. This sort of thing is ripe for C&Ds, depending on how zealous the publisher is.

Notably, what Hakusensha put out was simply this disavowing statement, clarifying the unofficial, unsanctioned nature of the project, and it doesn’t look like any other further legal actions or takedowns have occurred yet.

Right, and Studio Eclypse themselves have yet to officially respond, so it’s possible little to nothing will come from this. Or the whole thing might get canned. What is interesting to think about right now is what differentiates this particular project from the bevy of other fanworks out there. It’s not as cut-and-dry as one might think.

It is also not strictly “legal” when it comes to works based on copyrighted material. Rather, the explanation goes that publishers and creators consciously look the other way at all the infringing works being sold. Probably because coming down on doujin would not be a good way to endear themselves to fans, and also because a lot of those creators remember they came from the same humble origins!

It’s a fascinating little (or large) grey area! And what I find especially fascinating is the apparent unity among most major Japanese publishers. Nothing legal is stopping any of them from enforcing their copyrights, but they mutually choose not to. There’s a weird symbiosis there, and I’d love to know if each publisher arrived at that conclusion on their own, or if there’s some unofficial pact between them to maintain the status quo.

Wild to think that there was a moment, however brief, when they thought they might be able to clamp down on Pokémon porn. Or maybe it’s just that the Pokémon people at the time didn’t want unofficial creators stepping on Toshihiro Ono‘s toes when it came to horny Pokémon manga.

If you know, you know.

It’s to the point where the players and fans interested in these games are trying to look the other way and keep them on the down-low until they can be finished and released, lest some big outlet report on the games and bring the Big N’s hammer down.
It’s an odd comparison too, because the infringing doujin at Comiket are being sold for money while these fan game projects are typically distributed-for-free affairs, yet one gets the authorities sicced on them far more often than the other.

The internet contributes to increased visibility for these sorts of projects, and the litigation that results. So it’s a double-edged sword and an element that’s been a part of the weeb community for quite a while now. Fan comics, games, and animations have been distributed across the web for decades, becoming pretty foundational to the culture.



Imagine what the fandom would look like if Crypton more strongly contested how animators used Hatsune Miku.

Weeaboo culture—at least when I was indoctrinated into it—was inseparable from doujin culture. There simply was not one without the other. No nerd-dominated space survives without heavy fan input. What separates anime/manga from its neighbors is the amount and degree of sophistication in doujinshi. These aren’t just pieces of fan art or songs inspired by stuff. These are often complete one-shots, serials, albums, animations, and more. Individuals might put these together alone but they’re a part of a thriving community.

Touhou itself is a doujin series! It’s not just derivative works; it’s more about the spirit of amateurism. Half the charm of Touhou is that ZUN can’t draw that well, but he does so anyway as the sole member of Team Shanghai Alice. It infuses those games with a ton of personality. The same thing with the 07th Expansion and the When They Cry chronicles. That’s all doujin, too, and I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t love Ryukishi’s original Higurashi sprites.

But yeah, Touhou for the longest time was doujin culture to me. It was much bigger than any of its contemporaries, and it frequently dominated the Comiket scene.

Truly this art best sells the dissonant horror of Higurashi since I could never believe that these adorable girls and their big, meaty claws would hurt me.

That is cool. Speaking of Touhou, my go-to example for a doujin-artist-turned-pro is Nio Nakatani. Before she wrote the excellent Bloom Into You, she cut her teeth on a bunch of yuri Touhou doujinshi. Just think of girls in funny hats smooching next time you read/watch something of hers. It all adds up.

This is like finding out that the character designer for Bang Brave Bravern is also a yuri fan artist. Thus explaining the sheer number of distinctively designed ladies in what was otherwise the robot yaoi show.

There’s yuri everywhere for those with the eyes to see. And circling back to our original example, Berserk is an especially ontologically interesting example if we’re talking about the distinction between official and fan works. One could argue that Berserk as it currently exists is a fan work.

These examples are more legitimate than some Joe Schmoe off the street trying his hand at a continuation. In Berserk‘s case, where it’s being spearheaded by friends and colleagues, it’s hard to criticize. Moreover, I think these situations emphasize how slippery the concept of “copyright” can be. It’s not as simple as a shield meant to protect creators and their creations. It’s a complicated set of legal definitions and bindings that more often than not are wielded by estates and corporations to suit their needs.

And that sort of wielding is what happened last week, and what brought us here, with the current powers-that-be behind Berserk feeling the need to disavow the fan animation project that was The Black Swordsman.


Interestingly, while they aren’t exactly “Joe Schmoe off the street,” Studio Eclypse are fans trying their hands at a continuation of Berserk, after a fashion, since this project nominally seeks to provide an anime adaptation of the manga where they feel the series has been underserved, particularly with the dissatisfaction around the 2016 Berserk anime.

A grievance held by many, to be fair. But it’s also hard to look at the whole situation and not conclude that Eclypse was playing with fire. They’ve got an open Patreon. The trailers have millions of views. They’ve received some buzz from the press. These are the flags that seem to attract the interest of legal departments.

I understand that animation, especially at this scale, isn’t cheap. Lord knows we call for official anime studios to pay their artists better all the time. Aspects of money and scale can complicate what’s already a nebulous legal situation.

There’s having passion and pride in your work, but there’s also the act of flying too close to the sun.

Irrespective of all legal points, I’m also going to be petty here and say: The Black Swordsman Arc? Again? There’s so much Berserk besides that and the Golden Age Arc, but fans are so tunnel-visioned on the early volumes. I don’t think the manga truly turns transcendent until much further along. Maybe try tackling the stuff that no anime adaptation has gotten to yet. Who knows, the lawyers might have felt less litigious in that case.

I’m also suspect of any project that parades 1:1 comparisons with the manga like that’s a good thing anime adaptations should strive for. You’re also seemingly preparing the legal department’s PowerPoint slides for them.

The good news is that this situation with The Black Swordsman seems to be an outlier—and as mentioned, they haven’t even had to formally take anything down as of this writing. Otherwise, we can reasonably presume that the filthy fanworks will keep flowing from Comiket, and our good old Vocaloid and Touhou MVs aren’t going anywhere, no matter how many burgers they try to use them to sell.