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.

Chapter 2 revises some seminal definitions of ‘genre’ and key conceptualisations in genre theory, such as ‘genres as frames for social action’, ‘intended audiences’ and ‘communicative purpose(s)’. The intention is to introduce and reflect upon recent conceptualisations of web-mediated generified activity – for example, ‘genre remediation’, ‘transmediality’, ‘polycontextuality’ and ‘context collapse’, among others – from the perspective of structuration theory. This chapter also expands on Swales’s understanding of metaphors of genre to critically address the aspects of generic evolution, hybridisation and change. The chapter also critically reflects on the concepts of ‘language collusion’ and ‘language collisions’ and draws on the metaphors of genre(s) and language(s) ecologies to explain the emergence of new genres on the web, the evolution of traditional genres, the interdependence between traditional and new genres and, more importantly, the creation of complex genre assemblages that support multilingual science communication on Web 2.0.