From cultural to toxic capital: Algorithmic and capitalised toxicity in a platformised ACG culture

This article develops the concept of toxic capital to explain how antagonism, derision, and nationalist outrage are converted into value within China's platformised anime, comic, and game culture. Moving beyond celebratory accounts of participatory fandom and predominantly Anglophone discussions of fan toxicity, it examines the 2024 controversy surrounding The Game Awards (TGA) as a revealing case of conflict-driven cultural participation. Drawing on digital ethnography and 12 semi-structured interviews, the study identifies three interconnected forms of toxic capital. At the micro level, toxicity becomes a source of affective gratification. At the meso level, it becomes a resource for factional belonging, boundary-making, and status. At the macro level, it is translated into monetisable traffic within conflict-driven platform economies. The article argues that algorithmic visibility and engagement metrics increasingly reward aggression over expertise, producing a shift from cultural capital grounded in taste and knowledge to toxic capital organised around exposure, antagonism, and circulation. Toxicity, therefore, operates less as an aberration than as an infrastructural logic of contemporary platformised cultural production.