As East Asian audiovisual media and entertainment has grown, it has found significant popularity amongst youth audiences globally. With its international proliferation, this form of media has garnered a large fandom which not only consumes the products but also supports the creation, derivation and circulation of its products, such as anime and manga. The more involved members of this group have gained a term for themselves, "otaku", which was originally a proper and respectable way of referring to someone's house.
    However, even within this East Asian youth pop-culture, precarious work, defined by Lex here, has seeped in as the dominant force of labor. While precarity being relevant in a voluntary and fan-based phenomenon may seem somewhat odd, I argue that these fans are actually still being taken advantage of by the industry, despite the differences in where the value of work resides for the fans and the industry. I review case by case different sections of the fandom to demonstrate how prevalent precarity is.
    Finally, it is important to note that while the term otaku actually defines intense fans of any subject matter, not just anime and manga, for the sake of simplicity, I will be using the term otaku as referring specifically to the fanatics of anime and manga in this path.

Begin this path: Precarity in the Otaku Youth

1. The Payoff in the Third and Fourth Space
2. Case Study: Fansubbing
3. Case Study: Doujin Circles
4. Precarity in the Professional Industry
5. Is This Kind of Precarity Balanced?

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