Anime retailer Right Stuf has been acquired by Sony/Aniplex
rightstufanime.com
rightstufanime.com
I'm not particularly excited for this as the big players have already demonstrated themselves to be conservative and censorious when it suits in other areas. I think we're on the edge of the hollywood-ization of the medium. Crunchyroll has already been apparently involved in the production of a bunch of programmes, and was directly responsible for High Guardian Spice, which I think few people have anything nice to say about.
However, focusing purely on anime ignores the rest of the creative pipeline. The most popular anime series are based on manga or novels, and even though the western licensing business is growing again, it's still small enough that manga and novels only get published in English if it's already a hit in Japan. That may help keep anime distinctly Japanese even with all this money flowing in from around the world.
I don't like it, and the only thing I can really do about it is create my own stories and art in my time off when I feel lonely/unheard and share it with the people I'm allowed to be in contact with.
I'm usually active in spacebattles, at least the old-style fanfic writers do still output gems now and then. Like Worm and some others.
The Japanese domestic market is dominated mostly by Manga, Light Novels, Visual Novel, (and now Gacha games) anyways, with Anime mostly being a cherry on-top for those things. Occasionally there will be a good adaptation or a good original Anime product but the industry’s been suffering a little bit. This new cash infusion might be healthy and allow for enough animators to be paid a livable wage that lets them go off and do crazy adventurous things as they advance in their careers.
I think Aniplex is in a position to change this, but the difficulty is going to be luring the studios since money doesn't seem to have as big an impact as one would expect.
Moving on, I don't think you will see changes prominently on anichart or MAL anytime soon; the point is that it's gradual and more subtle than that. Crunchyroll was already involved with 60 productions apparently. Conceptually, in a hypothetical "worst case", they could have been influencing artistic choices for each of those programs. We do know they did one: High Guardian Spice is a particularly explicit example of an anime deliberately constructed to western progressive specifications. A lot of people are rather unkind about it, but that's really immaterial; what it really is is a clumsy first attempt at end-to-end control of the anime pipeline from script, to production, to distribution. They didn't find a winning formula with it, but they'll keep trying because there's too much money on the table.
So, I do think that this change in tone is imminently about to happen. Weatern values have already been injected in other forms in localized content too, e.g. in our uptightness about certain types of expressions of sexuality (e.g. that which is perceived to be pervy; e.g, the infilling of "boob-windows" and covering of midriffs in localized games), and with activist translators who deliberately whitewash phrases they find problematic and also who select progressive translation choices over neutral ones.
The bottom line to me is that the money men have zero interest in the integrity of the mediums in which they dabble. As you note, there's precedent; in the 90's, it was 4kids dubs which routinely butchered shows, sometimes extremely. The nature of the interference will change with the standards of the day, but the fundamentals don't.
For now, it doesn't really have too much of an effect since Crunchyroll and Netflix's subtitles already don't really have a good reputation. But it's certainly a sign that if they could get away with it, they'd definitely do more.
This is a meme that has mostly been spread by people who don't really speak Japanese, but have picked up a few words and are convinced they know better than bilingual professional translators.
> adding in meme language like "sus"
I remember seeing this example making the rounds -- IIRC, it was a translation of the word きょどる, which is a slang term that was coined fairly recently (90s). It's a contraction of 挙動不審, which means roughly "acting/moving suspiciously as though you're trying to hide something". So not only does it accurately convey the meaning, but turning a slang Japanese term into a non-slang English translation would be less faithful to the original intent.
Of course, the anime fans who complained about the translation don't know this, because the word isn't in any of their Japanese-English dictionary sites, and they can't read well enough to just Google it. On top of that, many of them have gotten so accustomed to stilted translations that they think the stiltedness is somehow a reflection of the original Japanese dialogue itself, and therefore any translations that sound more natural in English must be somehow "inauthentic".
And certain anime fans are absolutely convinced that "progressive" values are entirely unheard of in Japan, and therefore could only have been introduced by "Western influence". So they will seize on any shred of evidence that seems to support this narrative, no matter how flimsy.
You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century. But claiming our complaints about major and minor changes to works by Crunchyroll, the entity which officially bought Right Stuff Inc. are bogus do not stand up to examination.
And needless to say there's a lot more where the above came from. For another major corporate example see Seven Seas which just can't stop censoring and altering the work of the "bilingual professional translators" who are native Japanese speakers they hire and credit who are not at all happy about it, for doing that silently and without consulting them reflects on their professionalism.
> You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century.
Well, "sus" has been on Urban Dictionary for about 20 years, and Wiktionary has a citation from 1972, so it's not like it's some radically new term that is likely to come and go in a short period of time. Besides, plenty of creative works use language that becomes dated over time, and that doesn't make them bad.
What does the context matter when the person who made the change, not mistranslation, freely admits to it!
How can you claim to be an authority about these issues when you're not aware of what may be the single worst example of it, and have no interest in investigating this when it's brought to your attention?
Suffice it to say that in my opinion, context always matters (which also means I'm hesitant to read anything nefarious into a single tweet snipped from a conversation), and I reject the idea that a "change" and a "mistranslation" are categorically different things, rather than points on a continuum. And if you're implying that anyone who has knowledge relevant to this subject must automatically be outraged enough to "investigate", then I disagree with that too.
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I personally don't think that will be an issue because I don't see Netflix turning down an anime that Crunchyroll refuses to carry...
Oh hey! I have a litmus test handy! Got a citation for Netflix carrying "Ishuzoku Reviewers"?
In addition; Per wikipedia, Tokyo MX and SUN both canceled their airing of it as well, so it's not strictly western sensibilities that it is failing.
A lot of my favorite anime still come in from Hidive / Sentai Filmworks. I really enjoyed "Ya Boy Kongming" for example. And Sentai Filmworks are the current owners of When they Cry (2006) and Fate/Stay (2006).
I'm definitely worried about consolidation wiping out the competition. Then again, I hope people can give Hidive / Ya Boy Kongming a try. Its basically an idol anime crossed with Chinese Romance-of-the-Three-Kingdoms / Zhuge Liang as the manager, and my favorite anime this year so far. Give the first episode a try, there's ~3 songs in there. If the songs match your musical tastes, you'll probably enjoy the show. And yes, that's a Liu Bei reference. (Liu Bei visits Zhuge Liang 3 times before the young tactician agrees to join Liu Bei's cause. This parallel's young Eiko's journey as an idol, as she sings three times before Zhuge Liang is convinced to help her). Its actually an excellent mix of subtle Three Kingdoms stories with a good idol anime.
Crunchyroll/Funimation merging, and Sony/Aniplex all being involved here is convenient for sure, I like a lot of what they do. But anime has a lot of niches, and one mega-company will inevitably have blind spots over time. Most of my favorites are in Crunchyroll / Funimation and even Aniplex (Ex: Oddtaxi, Madoka, Dragonball Z/Super).
Honestly for some reason, I'm finding myself watching less and less anime anyways and instead I'm bit more inclined pursuing different activities. (I used to watch at least 5 each season, but only anime I'm watching this season is Made in Abyss...)
Apparently they're also targeting extreme violence too, which I hadn't heard about. https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/playstation-censorship...
It's disappointing that Sony et al feel that they have a right to control the user in this way, albeit unsurprising. Fundamentally, consoles aren't open platforms, and principled user rights advocates shouldn't support them.
Do they have to produce content they don’t want to have a hand in making?
Countries have laws and ratings systems that govern content. We don't need to be subject to the patronizing whims of corporations to boot, creating useless, single-purpose, locked-down hardware and moralizing on our behalf.
If you want an open platform, then please either patron somewhere that wants to be an open platform; lobby governments around the world to mandate that platforms should be open; convince Sony executives that it would be in their interest to make their platform open; or make your own open platform if a suitable one doesn't exist, and try to sustain it with people who want what you want. If enough of those people don't exist, then it should become clear to you that your opinion is yours alone, and that you're entitled to exactly nothing.
Of the venture, Santorum said in 2013, "This is a tough business, this is something that we’re stepping out, and the Devil for a long, long time has had this, these screens, for his playground and he isn’t going to give it up easily.” [2]
[0] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2014-01-24 (second Q&A)
[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2013/08/02/rick-santorum-chr...
Visa's issues with religious fundamentalists started in the Tipper Gore days. During the Bush presidency it was nearly impossible for a porn site to get a US payment processor.
Every government does this.
Who are an unofficial arm of the US government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
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I forgot "random anime tapes that got thrown in the children's section of your pre-blockbuster VHS rental store." as another way to find anime.
One very real alternative is just shutting down when the founder get too old to run it.
To sell it to anyone else but a large or giant company like Sony/Crunchyroll is going to be hard as I said. For what we as consumers would like you'd need to find another otaku or group of them who are wealthy and/or trustworthy enough to pay in installments out of ongoing gross profits, and you'd have to trust their business sense.
You'd want someone like my father to do some of the footwork and all of deal making to avoid distractions from running the business and lowering its value. Or you have to find an interested big player of which there just aren't very many. And here this clearly fits in with Sony's previous actions in America like buying Funimation and Crunchyroll, but unfortunately they're likely one of the worst case buyers.
From the viewpoint of the owners, Wikipedia says Shawne Kleckner who's still with it is 50 and the company was founded in 1987, 35 years is a long time to be running a company. Wven if it started out as a shell to buy and resell telescopes, pretty soon they started bringing the classic Astro Boy to the direct to home market and in due course became a competitive general mail order reseller as well as localizer. When TokyoPop nuked their reselling arm after Y2K they became the highest profile one as far as I know, not counting increasingly untrustworthy Amazon. Which Right Stuff regularly also uses as a platform while doing their own fulfillment.