Katakana and the Mediatized Other: Script Variation in Fantastical Narratives

ABSTRACT Katakana is commonly used to represent recent loanwords in today’s Japanese, but because of this function, it also maintains a semiotic relationship with a sense of linguistic ‘foreignness’ more generally. As a result, in fictional narratives that are grounded in everyday occurrences, katakana can also function as a means of representing disfluent uses of the Japanese language, particularly by non-native speakers. Using this relationship as a point of departure, this article analyzes data from six recent text-dependent video games to explore how the usage of katakana to represent disfluency manifests in fantastical settings. This article shows that the application of katakana-oriented stylization indexes its user as ‘Other’, positioning that character as cognitively, culturally, or behaviorally marked relative to the narrative context. Engaging directly with the semiotic phenomenon of ‘indexicality’, I demonstrate how katakana can function as a tool by which broader ideologies of linguistic difference are transposed from everyday settings to fantastical ones, shedding light on the larger role of script variation in the characterological construction of the text-based speaker.