Love Live! as an affective-religious medium in the postsecular era

Abstract

This chapter examines how the voice actress-character live concerts (seiyu-kyara live concert) of the Love Live! series work as a religious and affective medium in today's postsecular situation. To pursue this end, this chapter focuses on today's socio-technological conditions and the affective dimension of religion. The reality of the postsecular is the post-belief world in which capitalism operates as the only principle capable of producing values, and the advancement of digital media technology has fortified this tendency more than ever before. In the world of this capitalist realism, money alone works as the pseudo-religious object, and digital media platforms extract the information by which more people are likely to be influenced. To counter this postsecular platform capitalism, we should explore the possibility that the religious and affective object that can overcome the belief in money is produced under the same conditions. This chapter seeks to find this possibility in the relationship or interplay between the Love Live! series and its otaku, or "Lovelivers."