ABSTRACT

This chapter situates the subgenre of anime-based transmedia fiction called sekai-kei (“world-type”) against Japan’s sociocultural shifts during the late 1990s and early 2000s. While sekai-kei’s narratives of youthful romance amid vague “world” conflicts are often read as mere symptoms of Japan’s decade of economic recession, I suggest that the original sekai-kei texts have wider significance as inaugural examples of a distinctive social imagination now found throughout anime-based “otaku media.” I show how sekai-kei fiction constructs subjective visuality within a macroscopic transmedia environment, building phenomenological “worlds” of sensory experiences, mediated images, fictional genres, and scalar social relations. Closing with a look at how sekai-kei’s affective and imaginative dynamics have been incorporated into subsequent works, I will argue that sekai-kei provides valuable insights on how concepts of society and the social can be represented within the media environments of late capitalism.