2025/03/06 by Nur Saqifah Aisyah Azlan · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Digital Games and Media #Literacy, Media, and Education #Media, Gender, and Advertising
paper · doi:10.1080/10350330.2025.2473984
openalex publication_date 2025/03/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
This article examines how affect is multimodally configured on manga covers in Japan. Focusing on commercial Boys Love (BL) manga, a genre where affect is central to female readers’ engagement with homoerotic stories featuring male characters, the covers become crucial for producers to strategize in engaging their audience. Using Martin & White’s Affect framework and the concept of “focalization,” the monologue titles on fifty BL manga covers and their interaction with character visuals are analyzed. The strategic use of three types of monologues reveals patterns of affect that align with various appeal points for BL readers, demonstrating how titles are not just representational but also fulfill an interactional function. Additionally, titles and visuals work together to focalize different perspectives of the same affect, enhancing emotional resonance of the covers through multimodal perspectivization. This study highlights semiotic strategies that maximize the minimal affordance and space to circulate affect for affective commercialization of media within Japan’s highly commercialized popular culture landscape.