Media mix
6The Care · 42Also written: mediamix, media-mix franchise
The Japanese practice of spreading one story across manga, anime, games, toys and films at once, each promoting the others.
6Six — responsibility. That is the reduction of this term, and the shelf it is read from.
What it means
A media mix is a franchise in which a single story or set of characters appears across many forms at once: manga, anime, novels, video games, card games, toys and films. Each part promotes the others, and fans may encounter the story through any of them.
Where it came from
The term became widely used in the 1970s and 1980s, when the publisher Kadokawa promoted novels together with their film adaptations. In manga and anime it grew into a standard way of building hits, often planned from the start by publishers, studios and toy or game companies working together.
Examples
Yu-Gi-Oh! is a classic case: a manga that introduced a card game, which became a real game, which fed an anime and video games. Long-running series such as Doraemon and Detective Conan support annual films, merchandise and theme-park attractions.
Why it matters
The media mix explains why so many manga are adapted so quickly and why anime, games and merchandise are so closely tied to them. It is also why a manga's success is measured by more than its sales.
The term by its numbers
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 42, which folds down to 6. The weight sits in “Media”, which carries 23 on its own and reduces to 5.
What the 6 brings is responsibility. The reference files it as an obligation. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 6's pull toward responsibility, care, and the people involved.
The vowels alone reduce to 6, the consonants to 9. The presentation folds back into the want: reckoning in service of responsibility.
The 6 asks you to name the people this was answerable to. The 6 smothers. The same instinct that protects a readership produces the paternalism several of these entries document. The other entries that reduce to 6 are collected on The Care.
Seen in
- Yu-Gi-Oh!A shy boy solves an ancient puzzle and gains a second self, the spirit of a pharaoh who settles every challenge with a game.
- DoraemonA robot cat from the 22nd century arrives to help a hopeless schoolboy, armed with a pocket of futuristic gadgets that always solve the problem and then cause a bigger one.
- Detective ConanA teenage detective is poisoned and shrunk into a child's body, and solves murder after murder while hunting the organisation that did it.