Within the last two decades, the specialized term “chara” has gained recognition for denoting fictional beings that seem typical for Japanese popular media. Usually, a distinction is made that charas – distinguished from “characters” – are somehow independent of the narrative. Since the term emerged in a variety of different discourses, however, it serves many contradictory functions. This chapter maps different ways to conceptualize the protagonists of Japanese popular culture as charas with regard to the popular franchise Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba). It introduces four relevant oppositions: “consequentiality versus cartoonishness,” “representational realism versus ludic realism,” “narrative consumption versus database consumption,” and “authorized works versus secondary productions.” What connects all these vastly different meanings of charas and the respective “other sides of narrative” is a shared interest in characters not as parts of closed, fictional stories or worlds but as nodal points of historically changing media practices and conventionalized modes of imagination and participation.

One of the most common criticisms of Fantasy is that it is repetitive, derivative and uninspired. This chapter argues that this is a misconception. Rather than repeating, Fantasy iterates: its creators self-consciously rework tropes and patterns in manners that acknowledge the necessarily entangled nature of human communications and cultures. Drawing on work by Colin Burrow on imitation and Linda Hutcheon on adaptation, it argues that originality is recent, problematic and overrated as a criterion for judging art, and that fantasies demonstrate a productive awareness of culture as being collaborative and renegotiable. The main subjects discussed include Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and The Dark Lord of Derkholm; Thomas Malory’s Launcelot and T. H. White’s Lancelot; Death in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman; dragons many and various; Terry Brooks’ much-maligned The Sword of Shannara; fan fiction and N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance series; and the marriage of lore and mechanics in Magic: The Gathering. The chapter closes by considering the archetype-focused criticism of Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell, discussing both the attractions of such models and how imposing grand patterns can blind us to both stories’ irreducible specifics and their exclusions.

This chapter considers the possibility of a form of literary realism fit for the Anthropocene, which would not only allow readers to participate and intervene in the disclosure of climate catastrophe but would also position them within a climate-conscious collective. It begins with a brief discussion of realism, particularly its reliance, as analysed by Fredric Jameson, on an interplay between readerly engagement with actions and consequences and readerly empathy with experiences and emotions. This realist effect is both rich in ethical potential for addressing climate crisis and deepens this crisis’s anthropogenic arrogance. In considering a new form of realism that would avoid this dilemma, the chapter deploys Gerard Genette’s structuralist theories of transtextuality, arguing for the relevance of these ostensibly external, but deeply integrated, aspects of narrative in extending realism’s ethical effects while building a collective consciousness. Using this as a framework, it then discusses two authors whose work, textually and transtextually speaking, responds in some way to climate crisis: Kim Stanley Robinson and Liu Cixin.