On the face of it, Hiroki Azuma calling otaku "Database Animals" seems self explanatory; you only have to look as far as sites like MyAnimeList or AniDB to understand the near feral desire to categorise and analyse and verify. Were that the whole story, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals would be an unfulfilling read which thankfully is far from the reality.
If that sounds a little like an otaku Escher painting you're not far wrong
Coming from Minnesota Press, the same publishing house house as Beautiful Fighting Girl, Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams as well as the Mechademia series, the book is in good company with its academically targetted, psychological study of otaku as a recent cultural phenomenom. Indeed core to the book's central theory is that otaku are very modern, only coalescing in the early 1970's.
I came to Tamaki Saitou's Beautiful Fighting Girl with the expectation that it would answer the question I have pondered on for a while now: why does anime have so many "combat" girls? I left somewhat disappointed. The unfortunately abbreviated BFG was, if the translator's opening blurb is to be believed, the first in a opening salvo of critical academic writing on the subject of anime, manga and the subculture of otaku, much of it yet to be translated.
when the last remaining human component, the voice actor, is virtualised, the desirability remains
This book is unfortunately academic in the worst possible way. The author evidently expects nothing less than enthralment and in the same way a narcissist babbles endlessly into a microphone, he is content to fumble and meander across a hundred and sixty pages. Compounded by dense language - understandable for a high-level text - and vast swathes of superfluous text, a tip for wide eyed, enthusiastic reader: skip the opening prelude if you want to avoid a barrage of vocabulary smackdowns like: "Insofar as their repetition perpetuates a libidinal attachment to a fictional construct". Suffice to say, if you don't have at least a cursory knowledge of the psychiatrist Lacan and his theories, prepare to persevere as I did or at least gird yourself for further research.
