Circulation, Reframing, and Invisibility

Shonen Manga in the Digital Culture of the One Piece Brasil Group

Abstract

In Japanese comics, known as manga, the most iconic heroes are typically associated with the shonen demography, originally targeted at a young male audience. However, the concept of demography as a category based on target readership is specific to Japanese cultural contexts, which creates gaps in how these classifications are understood by other audiences. Drawing on the debate around cultural circulation, this article explores the defining characteristics of shonen manga and seeks to understand how these features, and shonen more broadly, are perceived and reinterpreted by Brazilian readers, particularly through digital fan practices within the Facebook group One Piece Brasil. Our findings suggest that demography plays a minor role in the digital culture of Brazilian One Piece fans; in this context, reinterpretation tends more toward erasure within the dynamics of digital circulation. This is because fans tend to value One Piece for elements they perceive as unique to the work itself. As a result, what stands out in the digital culture surrounding One Piece distances the manga from the shonen category to which it originally belongs, reinforcing a reading centered on the work itself rather than on its demographic classification.