Anyone can access manga now. Here's why that's good.

• Author: Lauren Orsini

• Editor: Samantha Ferreira

On June 10, the New York Times’ Wordle picked “MANGA” as the result of the day, and boomers went ballistic. Even though “SALSA” had been a result just recently, the comments section was flooded with complaints about how “foreign words” were not kosher. 

“How many English-speaking people would ever have heard of this word?” asked one frustrated commenter.

Wow. Guess I can’t keep saying that everyone and their grandmother knows about manga.

“MANGA” may have been the most contentious Wordle result in some time, but manga itself is bigger than ever. In my journalism career, I’ve written about it for mainstream news publications like Forbes—because there’s now a mainstream news interest in the topic. 

And as manga becomes ubiquitous, I think manga fandom has become quieter. It has shifted from an interest that used to shout for my attention to a low hum in the background of my life. “Oh, there’s the Goku cereal,” I might say while shopping for groceries, and move on. But as a teenager, I might have made a scene to see Dragon Ball Z acknowledged so blatantly in an everyday setting. I probably would have bought it just to have the box as a collectible. 

Let’s rewind to 1999. (Because we had VHS tapes back then, get it?) Back then, anime or manga merchandise was hard to find. If you had some, you must have cared a lot to bother to maintain it. In those days, I made my own anime merchandise at home by printing out pictures of The Slayers and Fushigi Yuugi characters and gluing them to my school binders. I did this specifically so other fans would see them and maybe strike up a conversation with me. 

Now that you can pick this merch up casually, it has opened up to many people with a more relaxed interest in anime and manga, not just otaku like me. When I see anime merchandise in the wild, which is all the time now, I don’t even mention it. In many cases, I think it would be weird if I did mention it! When my daughter’s swim instructor had a Demon Slayer charm on her Crocs, I focused on being A Responsible Adult™ despite vibrating with the urge to say something. When an advisor came to our condo community meeting with their professional ID affixed to a Spy x Family lanyard, I kept my mouth shut. After all, these are items you can buy anywhere now. 

The same week I was thinking about this, Samuel Hines published an essay in GQ echoing this same sentiment, but for fandom at large: “As merch became more ubiquitous… it became increasingly impossible to understand who someone was based on what they wore.” Fifteen years ago, seeing somebody wearing manga merchandise said a lot about their identity. I would have struck up a conversation with them, knowing that we shared a deeply personal interest. But now that anime—and anime merch—has become ubiquitous, there is less emotion and less intensity ascribed to small signs of visible fandom. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic that manga has become so accessible that you don’t have to be obsessive about it in order to become a fan. That’s a good thing, because it means there can be more fans. When people try to gatekeep fandom because it’s easier to be a fan now, it’s the same as people saying we shouldn’t cancel student loan debt because they already paid theirs off. It makes no sense. 

Still, there’s no excuse for not ever having heard the word “manga.” Get with the program, people. Just visit your local library: they probably have a display right up front!