Manipulating the Message: a Multi-Modal Analysis Investigating Far-Right Reappropriation of Japanese Anime

This article investigates the far-right's cultural misappropriation of Japanese anime. While the far-right has long engaged in manipulating narratives and imagery across trending topics on the internet, the specific appeal of anime's fictional worlds remains under-researched. The study addresses the research gap by answering the question: How does the far-right strategically and communally manipulate themes, narratives, and imagery from Japanese anime to advance their ideological agendas and ontological positionality? To answer this question and expand our understandings, the research employs a multi-modal analytical approach combined with netnography, enabling a comprehensive examination of the far-right's engagement with these fantasy worlds across various storytelling mediums–including visual, audio, and textual data. Additionally, netnographic fieldnotes capture the dynamics of community discussions and co-created comprehensions of these televised stories that contribute to the far-right's interest in anime as belief-reinforcing entertainment. The project explores the hashtag #animeright, analysing hundreds of posts and their related discussions on mainstream and fringe social media platforms across various anime series. The ensuing findings provide a nuanced understanding of how the far-right exploits popular culture, particularly anime, to appeal to and influence online ideological positions and ontological perspectives. Moreover, it illustrates how the community attempts to corroborate and establish collective normalcy and non-normative desires through the fantastical (and oftentimes extreme) nature of the content. These results are not only relevant as a first-of-its-kind investigation into this cultural manipulation but they also provide a future framework for researchers interested in studying similar manifestations across the internet and other widespread pop-culture phenomena.