as long as I have subculture and SNS, I can survive

This is a reprint of an article originally published on my personal site: https://denden.garden/2024/10/20/subculture-love-plus

halloween night in tokyo was not always a romp. thanks to disney, along with intersecting cosplay culture, halloween had already been successfully imported as a recognizable holiday for the japanese through the early aughts. by 2009, though, it would still be a few years away from discovering the shibuya scramble antics that are more likely to color perceptions of the holiday now. the savage gaijin party animals were not at the scramble then, but instead hogging the festivities to themselves by riding the yamanote party train, roaming between cars in costume to surprise commuters. it would end up being an abrupt send-off this year, as after fed-up protestors scolded them for disrespecting cherished japanese tradition, these brave trendsetters would abandon the concept and retreat to the local HUB in years after. the japanese men disciplined enough to shave regularly were more likely to have been dragged by their girlfriends to see the fireworks at tokyo disneyland. the rowdiest boys were instead left behind to party deep underground, celebrating the standing japanese tradition of 2D love. here, in the basement of neighboring shinjuku loft/plus one, sporting their best uniqlo shirts and conbini socks with fashionable neutral tones, two hundred men were gathering in solidarity and collecting their boyfriend power to express their devout commitment to rinko, manaka, and nene.

4gamer was the sponsor of loveplus one, a fan event that occurred on the rise of loveplus mania just beyond its base release on the DS. it's an impressive cavalcade of hosts both contemporary to the event and in retrospect, most notably producer uchida akari (tokimemo girls side, rumble roses) and character designer minotaro, but also industry connects and heavyweights like ishii jiro (999) from chunsoft and ishihara "dire1" akihiro of idolmaster and, more recently, horsegirls. while it would be wrong to call it an unserious event, it did capture the tongue-in-cheek of the cultural moment. uchida proclaimed christmas would be canceled that year. mega teriyaki udon burgers, the aspirational stupid food you invent when taking manaka to winning burger, were served alongside cocktails of "beautiful blue sky" mixed with rinko milk. if there was a chance to interject with a joke about christmas, home security guards, or the meditation of 2D love, it was probably taken. you'll just have to trust me that this was gut-busting comedy for otaku of the era that relished the spotlight mainstream press was putting on men abandoning social chivalry and marrying their DSes. out west, where "seasonal waifu" was punted as mild insult and SAL9000 was still mocked by the weeaboo that tagged haruhism as their religion on facebook, we have always lacked a commitment to the same sort of performance art¹.

this would not be the only loveplus event put on by 4gamer, and sugita would show up the next time to throw his arms around rinko that christmas, but this inaugural event has a strange legacy that teases philosophical about the otaku. although the otaku today is buried under a waterfall of new content that makes it often difficult to appraise value or legacy, otaku at the tail of the moe boom still recognized and savored the novelty. the broader cultural consciousness did as well, and as part of beat takeshi's white paper on japanese education, an annual special for six years on fuji TV that explored the minutiae of japanese society, loveplus one found itself focal to an exploration of modern love. the college student interviewed about his affection for rinko, a humble if pitiful loner, was approached with a quizzical respect. our talking heads, instead, reserved their horror for the sweaty, faceless mass of a crowd, led to chant "as long as I have loveplus and conbini, I can survive!"

the loveplus timeline is much richer than the understanding of one event, but this moment has been retained as a sort of representative capture of the nijikon. konami, mired by uchida and minotaro's departures after gazing into the dating sim crystal ball, let the franchise fall into a deep sleep. like james bond, the perennial heartthrob, they did promise it would surely return. the otaku in this parting chant are more nebulously projected upon, often invoked by matome blogs as macro images to provoke the next owacon, or to puzzle over an aging society: where could they possibly be now? are they still stuck to loveplus, making their conbini runs? would they still even consider themselves otaku at all?

loveplus by now will either register to you as a nostalgic artifact, or a curiosity either too old or too foreign for you to have ever experienced. loveplus is, of course, noticeably absent from any modern system, sent to timeout with the rest of the konami catalog. most franchises, especially in the otaku sphere of influence, go through a sort of natural retrograde as they age out of popularity, though not always strictly from this kind of mismanagement. it is conceivable, even now, that kemono friends could have avoided becoming the black sheep if it didn't experience a very abrupt breakdown when tatsuki was ousted by kadokawa. loveplus was certainly no exception to this fate, when it delayed a mobile game reboot for two years, fell into a month of emergency maintenance, and eventually recovered only to reveal that it had grafted stamina timers and instant dates on to girlfriends that you used to set your watch to with real time mode. even after a failed launch, expectations were discovered to be hilariously sky-high, and datamining found a graphic was already prepared at launch to celebrate 3 million registered players. the lukewarm reaction and collective groan from fans, most probably a majority old enough to already respect the aura of rinko and to have had their relationships blessed by pastor sugita before, instead meant loveplus every exited service after less than a year. the window had closed on loveplus, and as it attempted to hurriedly catch up to mechanics that had emerged in its wake while wasting away its influence, it instead self-destructed in spectacular fashion.

while this trajectory is not unique, there are far more franchises in the modern era that have retreated to a background hum than that have experienced this sort of disgraced fall from content heaven. while love live and kancolle are still giants ー 15000 admirals to a fan event in kure last week and a sold out yokohama k-arena for nijigasaki 7th this weekend ー they have certainly not demonstrated a lasting hegemony that would displace any of the three pillars, a status that has arguably persisted over the last 17 years. this is a fundamental reality of network effects being exhibited through fandom: while each of these pillars has at times appeared frayed or reclined, they have persisted not only with careful stewarding that has adapted them generationally for young fans, but specifically because they emerged on the cultural ground floor before an explosion of otaku subculture into the mainstream. there are still chances to upset some of that hegemony, if we decide to treat circle numbers as a leading indicator for territory claims, but the categorical truth is inertia is difficult to counteract, and there is a flood of franchises now, more than ever, competing in the otaku media swamp to displace even a small sliver of that attention. those allegiances, however, remain more elastic than is usually perceived, and the success of examples like blue archive and genshin impact serve as reminders that there remains a latent willingness and ability for new entrants to overcome the resistance of comforts.

Top: Bluesky's latest surge in activity due to changes announced to X's terms of service. Bottom: C91 (2011) circle numbers by genre, with Kantai Collection on top and destined for infinite growth

"subculture" itself has been consumed by platforms. today it appears less like a rich tapestry, as it did when communities were organically independent and mostly isolated, and more like a monolith crushed into a small cube, now that fandoms have been corralled into the fiefdom of services like twitter and reddit. as a trainspotter, or a chika idol diehard, or a blue archive fan (sneer quotes absent), you're probably engaging with twitter because it has emerged as a defacto public utility for those and almost every interest. twitter diffuses the bad jokes, delivers fresh ero when you're on the bus, and starts the next struggle discourse to rage over, all in one convenient place, and principally because it enjoys an incumbency privilege that crowded out other social attempts at microblogging like plurk and friendfeed. twitter got in on the cultural ground floor for microblogging as phones became a default, letting third parties build up the experience where portal sites lagged behind, and it has been able to coast on this network value by polishing its stability, even as it has struggled to profit and has at times confused its identity. gone are the days of mixi, or fc2, or livejournal, or xanga blogs, and shrinking too are the off-topic threads and 5ch generals of quarantined kuso posts. personal sites? those, I must confess, are really for nerds. an instant, public access to everyone has become a personal and professional expectation globally, and although the results are predictable when posts escape their intended audiences, it has given twitter an unmatched lifeblood and interconnectivity that was never possible with a thousand invisionfree forums or static websites. it is only somewhat recently, with an improbable series of missteps, that its incumbency has come anywhere close to being threatened at all.

stability is a desirable quality for a platform to have, if you eek out a living by using self-promotion to slingshot your posts; those interests are equally aligned with large corporations that benefit all the same from access to hooked audiences and robust analytics. especially now, though, I would argue that it is an overvalued aspect of incumbent platforms, as it is what has enabled the concept of a "large platform" to exist at all. large platforms are, by their nature, corrosive. they are the obvious vectors for miscommunication and disinformation that are part of a general cloud of malaise hanging online, yet they have effectively outmoded the web itself for most of the audiences that return to them with a daily cadence. they are, also, more of a liability than has been fully appreciated during their growth. stability should have never be an expectation of closed, for-profit platforms, and their default state should always be considered failure, unless they can significantly scale back to a barebones feature set and a smaller moderation surface area.

twitter, now that it is more obviously unaligned with creatives than ever, will only be the latest casualty. inertia says it is unlikely to fully croak for a while, but I don't think it is much exaggeration to qualify it this way when independent artists specifically have run for the hills. retreating to the small web is an obvious, more effective antidote, but the motivations aren't tremendously compelling when open standards on it have lagged and audiences have been placated by far more addictive patterns that place content directly in front of them. the dynamics of promotion online have changed since twitter's launch and reformulation, and promoting yourself as a freelancer with a dot-com and a blog is woefully insufficient when exposure is now shaped by recommendation feedback loops. creatives are already to bending to these expectations now, so it is notable, then, that they appear to be the leaders of an exodus that is almost unheard of for a platform as large and entrenched as this since the participatory web era expired into crypto junk. undoubtedly, it takes considerable mental stamina for them to decide a migration must even be worth the trouble when they risk uprooting their influence to less fertile social soil. elon musk, it seems, is comfortable enough to let this saga unwind, perhaps if only to prove the trust thermocline overrides newton's first law of large platforms: saying you're a haven for porn doesn't mean people will actually want to use it.

the actual stability of the net, and not just the facade of it, has always existed in the plumbing powering it at the protocol level. TCP/IP is still the bedrock, HTTP is still HTTP, and even with bolted on revisions it is largely a dumb pipe. FTP, bittorrent, and IRC all continue to exist ー they're how I download manga, CPU-melting fansubs, and prefer to be alone with others², respectively ー but they are underdeveloped and generally obsolete for most modern uses. AT protocol (atproto), the plumbing backing bluesky, is definitely more modern in every sense of that word, right down to its over-engineered complexity; the bespoke engineering this time feels more sober, at least, when it's righting some of the wrongs that continue to ache activitypub by drafting a public protocol that can, hopefully, outlive whatever funding is left to develop it. for now, as long as it operates with only one relay, bluesky does teeter on the same uncertain edge as the monolithic platforms before it. the silver lining is that if it isn't making money now, then it is difficult to lump it together with the ongoing scams and snake oil schemes³ that make their own proud claims, and we can be reasonably charitable when the bluesky team say that their goal is to develop it as a meaningful place for community. if the clouded nostalgia of cory doctorow says RSS is feasible again and anil dash feels confident enough to say things feel like 2004, when the money had already dried up for the first time and ambitions like this that remained still presented some critical appetite for social good, then it may actually be worth taking seriously. fred wilson, the bubble veteran VC now enamored with blockchains, demonstrates how closely this will always teeter on mania, as long as nothing important ever gets built without irrational exuberance.

the wrinkle is we are not entering this chapter with fresh eyes. bluesky has done everything to button down its attitude as an old twitter, equally as much of a throwback as spacehey, and it is still entrenching feeds as the preferred delivery mechanism under a big tent with atproto. activitypub is a backwards looking protocol in comparison, localizing communities around more of an email model of federation, so it does not surprise that it has also carved out a niche for social media detox that bluesky has never entertained. there is nothing necessarily flawed about this approach, when your mental model of community exists under dunbar's number, but it is a curious half-step that still enshrines the feed while being just obtuse enough with discovery that it will always struggle with any mass-scale adoption. sone of its proponents may, even, qualify this as a feature. bluesky stands to benefit as the only serious alternative, as addictions do not break when there are equal substitutes available, and potential users are only more likely to migrate where people already are.

feeds, it should be clear by now, are still a pattern that users believe can be tamed to be affable. algorithmic presentation is a primary vector for abuse, yet there is a prevailing belief that bad behavior can be coached by moving laterally between websites, which always conveniently scales right up until the moment it doesn't. audiences are not particularly great at internalizing this, and it is difficult to accept a diagnosis that drinking from a firehose is still likely to give you water poisoning. bluesky, I expect, will be unlikely to solve this with cottage algorithms, even as it discovers interesting collections like back alley views and explosive love. these are novel categorizations of noise, but they are not human-scale, and they do not sift or curate it in any way that develops community rather than unrelenting feed delivery. atproto is designed with an extensibility that could feasibly enable quieter formats that respect attention, and some of those solutions are starting to sprout already that provide some hope that the micropost does not need to remain a default format. twitter itself could have gone down this path before it hit third-party clients at the knees and monopolized the platform, effectively excising the exploratory variety of those functions into a lost future. the question for atproto, then, will remain if it can keep the plane flying long enough while it is being built to develop a stable atmosphere to give those efforts long-term security. if it does make a splash landing, it will at least be aligned with those interests, since you will be able to watch the fuselage rain down from an RSS reader, or from another bespoke client of your choice.

subculture, today, is accessible to everyone, a concession that has allowed it to exist in a superposition of death and overwhelming diversity. the evolution we should expect it to undergo is not likely to yield any clear platform winners, the same way idolmaster does not reign supremacy over the otaku today, and this should be viewed as, if nothing else, a recovery phase for it. the big tent is blowing away, and the monoliths that have stripped it for content and smothered it into a crush are now crumbling. subculture, and the people celebrating it, still have time to escape the underground and find sunlight, before the foundation caves in.