Within the last two decades, the specialized term “chara” has gained recognition for denoting fictional beings that seem typical for Japanese popular media. Usually, a distinction is made that charas – distinguished from “characters” – are somehow independent of the narrative. Since the term emerged in a variety of different discourses, however, it serves many contradictory functions. This chapter maps different ways to conceptualize the protagonists of Japanese popular culture as charas with regard to the popular franchise Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba). It introduces four relevant oppositions: “consequentiality versus cartoonishness,” “representational realism versus ludic realism,” “narrative consumption versus database consumption,” and “authorized works versus secondary productions.” What connects all these vastly different meanings of charas and the respective “other sides of narrative” is a shared interest in characters not as parts of closed, fictional stories or worlds but as nodal points of historically changing media practices and conventionalized modes of imagination and participation.

This chapter takes a studio-centered approach to examining the relationship between the genre of science fiction (sci-fi) and anime production, using the animation studio Gainax as a case study. While Gainax became internationally celebrated in the mid 1990s through the creation of the smash hit Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shinseiki Evangelion, 1995–96), the studio’s growth during the “first anime boom” of the 1980s was much more precarious. Before its foundation, Gainax relied on the collective activities of sci-fi institutions for promotional marketing and professional labor. The studio’s pre-history and survival is an inflection point between the institutions of broad sci-fi fans and creators in the 1970s, and anime and manga otaku, or superfans, in the 1980s. Considering the historical precarity of Gainax, this chapter is framed around the frenzied organizations that comprised Gainax before it was established as GAINAX: the licensing store General Products and the production company Daicon Film. By analyzing Gainax’s business origins before it became incorporated as a studio, some of the ways in which the anime industry integrated sci-fi institutions become visible.

In Japan, the management of anime series as intellectual properties has developed over a long-time span, growing into a sophisticated system of transmedia serialization professionally known as the “media mix.” Content derived from well-established anime series, however, is not exclusively developed to promote spin-offs and merchandise notoriously associated with fans and otaku subcultures. In a changing domestic market, it is increasingly exploited to add value to products and services in unprecedented commercial spheres, including drinks, tourism, and urban requalification. By taking the 40th anniversary of Mobile Suit Gundam as a case study, this chapter reflects on recent trends in anime licensing, providing a brief introduction to their effects on what might be called “extended” anime distribution. Through this perspective, it becomes possible to identify a series of apparently unrelated phenomena that are nonetheless connected to the aging of anime series and the changing demographics of their consumers.