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Erciyuan
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| Synonyms: | 2次元 or "nijigen" (Japan); ACG (Anglophone) -- stands for "Anime, Comics, Games"; AVGC (India) -- stands for "Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, and Comics", otaku |
| See also: | Sanciyuan, manhua, donghua, Anime, Manga, cosplay |
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Erciyuan (二次元, lit. "second dimension", Japanese reading is nichigen) is a term in Chinese fandom.
As a subculture name, it refers to fans of anime, manga, video games, and sometimes light novels. It is contrasted with 三次元 ("Sāncì yuán", lit. "third dimension") meaning the real world. Although the subculture is understood and talked about as a Chinese phenomenon, the term also gets used in Japanese. ACG (stands for "Anime, Comics, and Games") is the term English Wikipedia uses to describe similar subcultures outside of China.
(erciyuan二次元 is similar to otaku, describes people having an intense or obsessive interest with a particular topic especially in the fields of donghua, manhua, animation, manga, computer games, etc. erciyuan literally means two-dimensional space, which means that it is separate from the real world, because the things that erciyuan like usually exist only in two-dimensional space. this term is neutral giving that it doesn’t carry the derogatory sense that "otaku" might have.)[1]
Japanese “two dimensional” culture, or erciyuan (二次元), has lost none of its cachet for Chinese youngsters more than 40 years after the debut of Astro Boy, the first animated show imported to China from Japan. In Chinese, erciyuan is an umbrella term for a variety of visual products imported from Japan, including animation, comics, games, and novels (ACGN), as well as offshoot merchandise like action figures and costumes.[2]
As a webnovel genre term, it might refer to self-contained fantasy worlds, similar to the concept of "secondary world" in Western fantasy literature.
Need to know: “二次元” has a good connotation and it’s usually used when people like the 2D world, on the contrary “贰刺螈”（èrcīyuán) is used when the speaker wants to ridicule, to mock this world.[3]
Links
Subculture
- Wikipedia:ACG (subculture)
- Not freaks or prostitutes: A subculture seeks understanding, Archived version, article by Ying Wei for The Global Citizen
- Love in 2D, Archived version article by Aaron Hsueh for The World of Chinese (2020)
Webnovels and other media
- 二次元 èrcìyuán, Archived version explanation bynewchinesewords (2017) -- discusses it as an umbrella term for "2D media", but shows how it probably became adapted to webnovel genre usage
- Erciyuan novel list at mtlnovel.me
- Welcome to Nijigen by Escaliber (2021) -- an OW on AO3 that seems to be using the term "Nijigen" in the genre sense.
References
- ^ OP: The Day My "Erciyuan" Identity Was Exposed at the Courier Station posted to tumblr by fuckyeahchinesefashion on 15 February 2025. The quote is an explanation provided by the tumblr blog as a preface to a story from Chinese social media.
- ^ Hsueh, Aaron (2020-12-24). "Love in 2D". The World of Chinsese. Archived from the original on 2020-12-26. Retrieved 2025-03-30.
- ^ 二次元 èrcìyuán, Archived version at the blog NewChineseWords. Posted 15 August 2017.