Term · Anime fandom
Doujin
Self-published, sold by hand, and responsible for more of modern anime than the industry likes to admit.
In Otakana the clue reads: Self-published work sold at fan events
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Anime fandom
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Doujin is work a group publishes itself. The comics are doujinshi, and the same label covers games, music albums and art books made outside a publisher. Some of it is fan work about series the creators love. Plenty of it is entirely original. What unites it is the route to the reader: printed in a small run, carried to an event, sold across a folding table by the person who drew it.
The economics are strange and mostly tolerated. Fan comics use characters their authors do not own, and Japanese rights holders have largely chosen to look away, treating the scene as free promotion and a training ground. A few publishers now issue guidelines saying what they will accept. The arrangement has almost no legal footing and has worked for fifty years anyway.
Careers start here. CLAMP formed as a doujin circle before going professional. ZUN has been releasing Touhou games since 1996, most of them at Comic Market. Higurashi began as a doujin visual novel from a tiny team and ended up with manga, anime and a long tail of adaptations. The training ground keeps producing the people the industry then hires.
Spelling DOUJIN
DOUJIN keeps a letter your ear will not give you. The Japanese 同人 has a long O, written dojin with a macron or doujin with the U that the kana actually contains. English fandom took the U spelling, so the tiles want six letters: D, O, U, J, I, N. Type DOJIN and it looks correct and comes up one short.