ABSTRACT
I worked at a community center two days a week helping teens publish their artwork and prose in a local community paper where I met Lo and her friends from the anime affinity group, Inuyasha Central (IC), called Mai and Ava. When I met her, Lo identified as both Native American on her mother’s side and Vietnamese on her father’s and was the shyest in IC. I met Lo and her IC friends who also love to write, read, and draw everything Inuyasha at the local
community center at the start of their eighth grade year. As fanfiction writers of the popular anime series the girls do what Jenkins (1992) refers to as a “borrowing of popular media texts” to produce stories and interact with others with like interests. The Japanese anime series and their shared Southeast Asian heritage in a predominantly African American community is what brought the friends together.
