Anime is eating the world
a16z.com
a16z.com
It is hard to know because financials aren’t public but it’s not clear to me that Crunchyroll has really addressed the commercial problems anime had in western markets. In the VHS era there was a fight over subtitles vs dubs which was acute because you could not put multiple content tracks on the media, in the DVD age you could.
More fundamentally, dubs cost a lot of money in comparison with subs and were always terrible until the people who made those terrible dubs gained experience and some of them got good. (Though they do their best work for game publishers like Idea Factory and ATLUS who care.) At the time people though subs had a limited market but now subprime anime (and sometimes good anime) gets shoveled onto Tubi and people watch it —- today we’re in the habit of watching movies with subtitles because you can’t make out the dialog on half of the new Hollywood movies anyway.
Since crunchyroll is in the vainglorious subscription racket I can only assume they’re as profitable as Netflix, Disney Plus, Peacock, etc.
The article touches on but doesn’t really stress how it is very rare for an anime to start out as an anime (Precure?) but rather it is the way you know you made it if you made a manga, light novel, visual novel, video game, etc. The economics are brutal and nobody is going to invest in it if the story, characters and settings haven’t been market tested. Of course this leads to problems like you can find out how the anime you like ends if it you look at the source material.
> Haruhi Suzumiya (Japanese: 涼宮ハルヒ, Hepburn: Suzumiya Haruhi) is a Japanese light novel series written by Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Noizi Ito.
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Haruhi_Suzumiya_light_...
But apparently there's a Manga version too?
Never read it. Is it any good?
Based on context (since the next picture to the right is captioned "text based game" and shows an image from a visual novel Clannad[1], I think), the article just got the terminology wrong.
I completely bounced off of the Anime, but both the LN and the Anime were wildly popular at the time, to the point where I immediately recognized the cover despite only having seen the first 2-3 episodes of the Anime and never having read the LN.
It was a pivotal anime for a few reasons. One of them was that there was a technological change from producing anime with cels that get photographed on a multiplane camera to drawing the "cels" in a computer and compositing them digitally. Haruhi Suzumiya was not the first to be done with CG compositing but it figured out how anime would look with the new technology. So it looks far ahead of older stuff like Sailor Moon but looks behind something like Accel World or Bleach.
Story-wise it was an advance in postmodernization which was already well developed
https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...
but it used devices such as telling the story out of order and building systematically on tropes that seemed fresh at the time but now seem cynical to me.
> Riot’s Valorant was one of the most accessible entries into tactical first person shooters.
I mean, Valorant probably has some anime design influence, but in the grand scheme of things it's waaaay on the minimal side and has no place in an article like this.
But also...
> So many things are wrong with this article but I’ll start with Haruhi Suzumiya being a ‘light novel’
Haruhi was a light novel?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Haruhi_Suzumiya_light_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate/stay_night
? Some visual novels are fully or partially voiced.
Anime includes masterpieces like Spirited Away, trashy harem / male fantasies like Jobless Reincarnation, touching dramas like Anohana, female oriented romances like Fruitsbasket, literally pornography like... Erm... Well you know.
Etc. etc. etc.
It's not fair to compare one anime with another. It's not like cartoons in the USA that fall under the rough set of same humor or writers. Anime is much broader and thus has something for everyone
And anime also has a lot that you'll hate. I personally hate recent male fantasy trends like Solo Leveling for example (despite enjoying Overlord, a male fantasy from yesteryear).
There are a lot of harem anime out there that do not do that type of deeper character work and function solely as male power-fantasies. See, for instance, Tsukimitchi or Rosario X Vampire
That was and still is my point
I personally couldn't get very far into Jobless Reincarnation. So I'm on the haters side. But in any case, the controversies of this anime are well known.
> I personally couldn't get very far into Jobless Reincarnation.
explains your choice. Based on how other modern isekais typically go, it definitely starts out looking like this one is going to go down a similar route, but it really doesn't. The overall character development for the main character is about him figuring out how to relate to others and develop healthy relationships instead of the fixations and fears he started with.
It's a modern Fate/Stay Night. It took a lot of trash Isekai tropes but played them straight and dramatic.
Like F/SN took your harem tropes and video game stats and crafted a magic system out of it... Jobless Reincarnation starts with panty thieves, sex scenes, voyeurism, a harem of three girlfriends and the tries to reverse engineer a story out of the tropes.
It's good for what it is. But it doesn't change that it's fundamentally starting with so called trashy tropes.
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It's clear that they're setting up a love triangle between the Red Head Tsundere hothead, the quiet traditional wife type, and his hot teacher who is a 100+ year old demon but looks like a teenager.
Like, there's more merit to this than maybe I'm making fun of. Because the author tries really really hard to make these situations play out with how a real life person might react to these revelations. But that doesn't change the fact that I can smell these trash tropes from a mile away.
Subjectively, I think Saber/Rin/Sakura of Fate/SN played out more realistically with their harem tropes than Jobless Reincarnations Roxy/Sylphie/Eris.
There's the benefit that F/SN are three different universes so each waifu pick is a totally different story. Jobless Reincarnation is on the other hand separated out by many years. But it's bloody obvious that all three girlfriends are going to come back together later for your old school anime triangle drama.
I guess that was what I liked with F/SN. The three girls were not yet another cheesy triangle.
The reality of child abuse is neither solved nor rebuked by depictions or explorations of psychology in adult fiction.
Come on, don't try to kid me. It's there for the same reason all the other seinen anime have a ton of borderline softcore porn tropes in them.
I'd recommend reading deeper into the scholarly literature of sexual themes in anime and manga before assuming that fans necessarily interpret 'children' into the text. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639806
In this case, it does. You can't have a show about a pedophile's redemption while simultaneously appealing to that demographic.
Let's not act like there's any consensus in the "scholarly literature" — if you could even call the writing of some guy with no credentials that.
The researcher I'm quoting (who's by far not alone on writing this topic in his field) is Patrick Galbraith, a researcher and associate professor of cultural anthropology at Senshu University in Tokyo.
The difference is that Jobless Reincarnation plays out these sexual situations out to the full extend of their drama (ex: Paul Grayrat is caught making a child with the hot maid, there's multiple episodes of fallout because of this as Paul and Zenith, his first wife, have arguments over this).
I'm not sure if this is a teaching moment for Rudy (the main character) though, as it becomes clear that the entirety of the Grayrat line is full of sexual deviants and even some inbreeding.
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Doing the sexy time with the hot maid is... I mean.... its a trope. Its normally a comedy routine. But its played straight here.
Stealing the panties the main character's 40+ year old hot teacher (who is from the demon continent so she looks like only a teenager) is... a comedy trope in anime. (Ie: Panty stealing is all over Konosuba, a comedy anime). But its completely different when its played out straight and in a dramatic anime.
Being open with what fetishes you're cool with, and which ones make you squeemish is part of growing up. I can comfortably say that the stuff Jobless Reincarnation takes as core plot points are uncomfortable to me / "squicky" and unsatisfying sources of drama for me. And due to their long history as a comedy trope in older anime, its difficult for me to take it seriously.
Perhaps your argument is that the "point" is to take these adultery scenes more seriously and think deeply about them and the characters they affect. Except I already know that adultery is wrong, that panty stealing is wrong and I don't have any plans to do either.
So as a source of Drama, my overall confusion with this show is "Why are you dramatizing porn/harem/eroge plots?".
Uh no. Its a stupid plot for stupid porn-level writing setup. I don't consider it a source of drama at all. Personally anyway. I see that a lot of other people seem to like it so I don't want to hate on it too much or cause undo harm to your opinions or whatever. But... its really hard for me to take the eroge/hentai level plots seriously in Jobless Reincarnation. That's all.
Even if I 100% recognize that the author works very hard to set up these situations and think out the fallout and drama in a reasonably "realistic" way (or at least, all the characters acting like they should while still qualifying for the trope). And I think that's the part a lot of people like: the deep thought the author put into this work. Thinking deeply about how all these characters would act in the face of these sexually deviant actions.
In before people furiously try to rationalize by saying, "Well sure she looks like she's a prepubescent 12 year but ACTUALLY she's 3000 years old", yeah okay sure - but as the saying goes "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...".
agreed. redo of the healer or bastard would fit "trashy male power fantasy" a lot better.
I was optimizing on controversy with this pick. Looks like it mostly worked given the conflicting viewpoints that have come up.
There's very well written drama in Jobless Reincarnation. But it is also paired up with a literally panty worshipping (holy artifact of Roxy) panty-thief.
I'm genuinely not trying to be a shithead or anything, it's just a style that lends itself well to industrialization and specialized tooling to speed up the process of creating. Unless you get into highly stylized executions, if you as a company just want to turn out a perfectly average and forgettable anime, you can do so at scale pretty easily, and the glut of artists looking for work means you don't have to pay a lot for the labor either.
I have nothing against this but frankly as a creative it is slightly demoralizing to see just more and more consolidation and mechanization in industry. There's so little that feels genuinely creative anymore, and it feels like year over year the art people produce is crushed harder and harder into pre-made molds that do well on content algorithms.
Maybe nobody else gives a shit.
The unstated thesis might just be surprise that this once-nerdy stuff has become mainstream at all and therefore has investment potential that was heretofore unrecognized.
Can you have "Western" anime? Some hardcore otakus scoff at the idea. If you made an animated version of Star Wars - is that anime? Is Avatar: The Last Airbender an anime?
"Chinese anime" or "Korean anime"? Again, some would scoff at the idea. But what is all that Hoyoverse stuff? Or all those Korean webtoons (though that's really more comparable with manga - and the korean word "manhwa" uses the exact same Chinese characters as "manga").
Rather than "if", here's two instances of that idea I know of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Squad_Isekai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Anime
Edit: And it actually looks like some anime studios did get in on Star Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Visions
Are you unaware of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Visions
??
Avatar, Star Wars, even Boondocks comes up.
I think My Adventures with Superman was Korean at least, but stylistically it's close to anime.
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The one people may have forgotten about is RWBY, which was the famous Texas Anime (erm... Texas made anime-inspired art?) that split so many people with debates on 'Anime or Not'.
There's not really anything stopping creative individuals who aren't Japanese from producing anime. The thing that many attempts miss (and I suspect what makes hardcores bristle) is that they tend to miss the point in one way or another, resulting in a product that might have many of the outward characteristics but ultimately misses the mark.
In my opinion Avatar is actually pretty close. I've seen clips from various animated productions from France that also seem to capture a similar spirit.
I would definitely think that all the French-Japanese and Italo-Japanese coproductions of the 80s somehow qualify as western anime, yes. See for exemple Ulysses 31 and Esteban: Child of the Sun.
Then you have things like Radiant which a “manga” by a French artist in French which was turned into an anime by a Japanese studio.
I guess there probably is animation made in the typically Japanese somewhere. I can’t really help you there because I only read mangas and never watch adaptations (they are always strictly inferior to the material they adapt). So the only Japanese/Korean animation I watch is original content of which there is sadly very little.
The anime community has, for as long as I've been a part of it (13 years or so), decided that anime is "animation made in Japan". This heuristic has actually worked pretty well.
But the lines are increasingly blurred.
- Japanese produced shows are outsourcing some animation to China and Korea, and sometimes taking direct funding and story writing input from the USA.
- Non-Japan produced shows are taking notes on what works, drawing on it for inspiration, and in rare recent cases even outsourcing animation directly to Japan.
- There is a TON of money in gacha games, and the biggest "anime" titles some people may recognize are gacha games, butand the majority of those are run 100% by Chinese companies. Ironically, sometimes sending them over to Japan for the TV adaptation.
Just like food: Italy may have "invented" pizza, but New York pizza is now its own thing.
On the higher quality end of the spectrum, I think one of the main differentiators is just how seriously the staff takes the production. They lean into the cinematography, storyboarding, directing, music, choreography, etc just as much or more as one might expect from western live action prestige TV. This is exceedingly rare in TV animation in the US and is only really seen in our animated movies (which are rare these days, at least in 2D form).
The other thing is that high quality anime is exceedingly good at building atmosphere and creating vibes. Half of the enjoyment of Cowboy Bebop for example is just basking in the ambience.
To be fair, most Japanese anime is also meant for kids and teens, but they were willing to explore content that would absolutely shock Western parents (violence, sex, nudity, as well as more nuanced stuff like sociopolitical commentary).
Is this different today? I feel modern Japanese anime is more toned down compared to say, the 1990s, while non-Japanese animation has been “toned up” in content.
Similarly: One Piece / Luffys gears have been confirmed to be various powers that Tom and Jerry (the cartoon cat and mouse) have done over the decades with Gear 5 being a full on cartoon logic power up.
The amount of play and borrowing from Japan to America and back to Japan and back to America is epic.
Samurai films are inspired by Westerns. But then Star Wars was inspired by Samurai films.
Bouncing back and forth between the two cultures is part of the fun of it all. Including borrowing words like anime, Isekai. Or Japan borrowing the letter 'H' (ecchi) from us with completely new meanings.
Overlord does a better job with grimdark. I'm fond of Log Horizon though S3 sucked. Solo Leveling came out the same time as Weakest Tamer began a journey to pick up Trash, and that was delightful for me.
I think the visceral stuck at the bottom of the ladder feeling was better handled by weakest tamer. A young girl who was forced to run away from home because her village considered her 0-star skill literally a heresy and religious blight.
Unlike Solo Leveling, the Weakest Tamer actually sticks with the plot. She never becomes much more powerful than she was, and instead leverages her relationships / friends she makes rather than literally solo leveling.
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The Isekai / Reverse Isekai genre is literally animes biggest genre right now. There's so so so many better shows out there than Solo Leveling.
But I guess the question is: what do you like about it? Solo Leveling is a passable male fantasy do-it-myself-by-plot-armor always win kind of show. But.... This plot honestly has been done better back by Sword Art Online (and I didn't even like that anime either).
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Jobless Reincarnation, despite all the controversy, is probably the local optimum on that 'Do it myself' / solo leveling / get stronger loop.
Hmmmmm... I'd give either Reincarnated as a Slime or I'm a Spider, So What? As my top picks on this genre / storytelling style. For personal enjoyment. Maaayyyyybe Re:Zero if you're into the body horror stuff that Solo Leveling also does.
Shun is an underdog who is suddenly thrust into war because the Spider Demon Queen attacks. He obtains the sacred power of the hero and is the one destined to kill demon lords.
Fortunately for our Spider protagonist, Kumoko is not the demon lord but just an underling (a major underling... but nonetheless an underling) of the Spider Demon.
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IMO, it's fun to see Shun do 'Regular Isekai Things' while Kumoko has to survive in the dark dungeon.
It's also very interesting to me that Shun's entire world and story ends up being irrelevant in terms of world powers.
Still, I love street level and other such 'less powered' beings in my stories. It gives you a sense of what the ordinary humans are up to while our Spider is leveling up in the dungeons.
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Solo leveling doesn't do the power of friendship thing that Shun and his party does. But otherwise, Sung Jinwoo is a chosen 'hero' of sorts thrust into a role. Much like Shun is suddenly chosen by God to be a hero as the skill passed to him.
It's from Shuns perspective that we see how Kumoko's far away actions have a rippling effect onto human society. It's an integral part of the story despite being a bit more boring.
But that’s a different plot than Solo Leveling, and in particular, a female rather than male power fantasy. (Social control vs individual strength.)
Your criticism that Solo Leveling isn’t something it wasn’t meant to be is strange.
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The number of anime that goes in the direction of Weakest Tamer is ... much fewer. A bit of variety and branching out is nice.
I'm not even sure what in Solo Leveling sets it apart that all the other shows didn't do better.
I can say that Overlords focus on leadership / kingsctaft is next to none. Slime's leadership and optimism sets it apart from Overlord even if Overlord does the leadership thing better.
Demon Slayer has better animation.
Sword Art Online came out first and was freshest (there were older Isekai but not this Solo Leveling type aloneness / level up grind).
Spider So What was one of the most compressed boss raid stories with the shear number of fights being quite impressive.
However, to me this is a good thing, in terms of cultural diversity. Trying to adapt anime to more mainstream tastes in the name of global profit would do it a disservice.
And a large portion of those who do watch is due to a small number of very popular tentpole series. Most anime productions cater to a relatively niche nerd/geek audience.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/807367/marvel-movie-view...
To me it's just bad data, pretty much asking for folks to be like "no". But also I can't find anyone having bothered to do any other data collection on it.
TFA quotes 31-32% of people (young and old) in Japan as anime watchers. That is very mainstream!
Your argument is like trying to claim Metallica is not mainstream. Sure, most people do not listen to them, but everyone has heard of them. I would wager back in the day less than 32% of people listened to Michael Jackson.
There's a grain of truth here. A huge grain. The US comics were long stunted by the Comics Code of 1954: http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/labeling/comics-code-1954
It had been revised a bunch of times, but arguably it went away only in early 2000-s. Mostly because of the anime/manga influence.
An artist with a unique vision and aesthetic. Samurai Jack is one of my favorites.
E.g. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, etc.
That’s why properties like Star Wars rose to prominence as well:
> underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world
Such a hysterically bad take that it calls into question your entire point.
Quick list of cartoons that have an incredible variety, both in terms of animation quality, sophistication of humor, and target demographic:
- Steven universe
- Bojack Horseman
- adventure time
- helluva boss
- Invincible
And this is just within the last decade. Want me to go farther back?
- Animaniacs (the original series)
- Spaceghost Coast to Coast
- Justice League
- Ugly Americans
I'm also excluding for the most part animated comedies, such as Futurama, South Park, the entire Adult Swim lineup of the late 90s / early 2000s.
Most american animation seems to be: stuff aimed at young children (pixar type shows), super hero adjacent stuff, or adult commedy (like south park). A few exceptions here and there but on the whole there just isn't that much variety.
That's kind of my point though. There are exceptions (for a recent example i really liked "undone"), they just tend to be few and far between.
- slice of life
- isekai
- shonen
Here's a few more: (not super hero, not necessarily geared towards children, and not comedy)
- Owl House
- Pantheon
- Infinity Train
- Final Space
- Castlevania
I think you're simply less well versed in the variety of western animation. There's also not nearly as much MONEY in western animation, so of course there's less of it.
I would consider Final space to be adult commedy (wikipedia also describes it that way)
The owl house literally won an award for best childrens tv (albeit it does look deep enough to be enjoyed by adults)
Infinity train is fair, but also cant even legally be purchased, which isnt exactly a great sign.
The other two are fair examples. (I never claimed there are none, just that its pretty limited)
> There's also not nearly as much MONEY in western animation, so of course there's less of it.
Sure, but that is both a cause and effect of it failing to capture audiences the way anime has.
Yes, but it also has a large adult following. It is not TARGETING children unlike a show like Blue's Clues. Therefore I don't think you can classify it as you put "pixar level children shows" (which I don't even know what that means).
> Wikipedia describes Final Space as a comedy
Maybe... personally while I think Final Space does have comedic elements - it also has an overarching storyline and is more of an epic adventure dealing with tragedy, death, and loss at a pretty adult level.
> Infinity Train can't be legally purchased
Literally this has nothing to do with the main point which was that western animation does not have variety
> Sure, but that is both a cause and effect of it failing to capture audiences the way anime has.
We weren't discussing whether or not something appeals to an audience. We were discussing whether or not there was sufficient variety. I think the root of our disagreement is in "volume" and I would argue that there is plenty unless you absolutely need to be consuming media every day.
There might be significantly LESS from a quantity perspective, but the DIVERSITY in shows is 100% available if you know where to look.
And in fact the actual OP post that I was addressing (because I think we're getting a bit off track) was that "cartoons in the USA fall under the rough set of same humor or writers" which is, assuming one possesses even a modest amount of experience with western animation, patently false.
In anime not too unusual to see shows like Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju which is a historical drama that follows the apprentice of a master stage entertainer in the Showa era. Very niche, but also quite interesting. Stuff like that almost never gets animated TV shows in the US.
USA certainly produces a lot of entertainment and celebrates niches.
What's weird and interesting though is that Japanese Anime covers just so many genres (including edutainment. I'd add Ninja Girl and Samurai Master as a very educational plot about the Warring States period of Japan). Maybe even Kenshin as a more mainstream historical fiction about Mejia Era / dawn of industrial Japan as the perspective of an old Samurai assassin.
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USA has assassins creed for example (or Canada does at least??) but that's a video game. Shogun and Game of Thrones has fantasy + history in them.
I guess general USA entertainment certainly covers all the genres. But anime alone attempts to cover all the bases. That's quite unique for a medium IMO.
Around 20 years ago, I tried watching a few US cartoons and comics to get better acquainted with the culture, but they were all pretty bad.
Without listing specific cartoons that you watched, it's hard to know where you "went wrong". Part of it might have been a culture gap - pop culture heavy cartoons wouldn't really appeal to somebody who didn't grow up in the US.
This could have just as easily happened to you if you'd moved to Japan and been exposed to shows like:
- Failure Frame (PARALYZE POISON PARALYZE POISON LOOK LISTEN LOOK LOOK) - if you get this joke, you get it.
- Faraway Paladin (devolves into some of the cheapest flash animation YTMND level I've ever seen)
- Diabolik lovers (...)
Conversely there's a lot of good anime out there as well:
- Cowboy Bebop
- Mob Pyscho 100
- Hells Paradise
it can be a great art form. even some of the emotional pornography can have artistic merit (recently: Frieren). but increasingly, despite diversity in genre and visual presentation, all anime just tries to push the same emotional buttons of loneliness, belonging, connection, in a very heavy-handed way that is more about provoking the emotions in the body than about artistic expression.
not everyone has those buttons, which is why anime fans are a devoted minority, and why it seems like lonely, traumatized, and marginalized people are drawn to it.
Western cartoons aimed at kids recycled the "power of being yourself" to death. Ask my tweens about the shows they've watched, and they'll pick apart how repetitive the story beats are between them.
The beats that anime is recycling may be different, but all of them get tiresome and feel pandering.
It's a bit social commentary (not very heavy but you can feel it). But I don't think it's about loneliness or relations much at all (I guess the Walrus and the Nurse Llama have a bit of a romantic fling but I don't consider it a major part of the show).
I'd say one of the major villains is someone who has fallen into the stereotypical gachapon gamer / whale / hikkomori type shut-in that sounds like you'd enjoy him as a villain.
So rather than catering to that demographic, OddTaxi skewers it by clearly marking that character as villainous.
It's just a solid Film Noir murder mystery, except the main character is the Taxi Driver with damn near perfect memory and facial recognition rather than a proper detective. It takes some time and discussions with various people around town to figure out the murder plot, but I was quite satisfied by it.
It's a dry show with a lot of talking. The bulk of the show is just the Walrus / Protagonist picking up customers around town, talking with them for 5 minutes and dropping them off.
But it's those discussions alone that leads him to the murder plot. It's really fun to see how everyone around town was so close to the murderer.
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I agree with you that there's a genre of anime that celebrates or dramatizes the Hikkomori / shut-in type (ex: Re:Zero, Jobless Reincarnation). But at this point, the Hikkomori is a stock character, just one tool to tell a story.
There's a lot of different uses of the "emotionally stunted Hikkomori" (ex: Anohana is the Hikkomori who through the drama of a Ghost coming back to talk with him, he gets pulled out of it and emotionally heals).
But anime and anime culture is above all, about stock characters that are borrowed, remixed, and turned into something new in the next story. The emotionally-stunted Hikkomori can become the hero in Re:Zero, the antagonist of OddTaxi, or a source of Comedy in Devil is a Part-Timer.
Frieren seems to cover a lot of Hikkomori Tropes (emotionally stunted character who is suddenly learning how to deal with emotions as she interacts with humans). So I think you're right in that she's seemingly related to the trope. I don't think I thought of her like that before but it seems to match up more-and-more that I think of it. She has all the markings of a Hikkomori in terms of attitude and even story progression (Himmel had to convince her to get up and try)
that’s not all of what bothers me though. if you look at Frieren, every main character is going through some kind of lonely attachment thing, even the ones that follow other stock character archetypes. it’s the whole show. It’s also the main drama in Spy x Family (another show that’s good on the merits).
I recently watched the first episode of “Wind Breakers”. They set you up for 5 minutes to think it will be about a strong guy fighting his way to the top. Surprise! It’s actually about belonging and finding friends who care about you.
Fine to have works of art about lonely people coming together and finding belonging. But it really is weird how much of a dominant theme this is, seemingly in the majority of new anime and manga.
“Chainsaw Man” is interesting because it sets up and subverts this at every possible turn, over and over.
If you dig through the older stuff for just the gems, you'll be ignoring a mountain of "emotional pornography" shows from the past that are largely ignored today because they weren't especially good art.
You do not have to watch too much of it to get the sense that writers are just going nuts tossing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Endless remixing of ideas from what came before, and outside influences.
Example: Legend of Black Heaven, which featured a middle aged retired rockstar guitar player working as a software engineer, who is tracked down by aliens to get him to use his guitar playing as a weapon in an intergalactic war. Sure, why not? Is it good? Debatable. Have you seen anything like it before? Unlikely.
I think he's a middle manager, not an engineer. His title is "Section Manager" and I only remember this because the Japanese title of the show is Kacho Ouji, which translates to Section Manager Ouji or Section Manager Prince if you translate his name
RIP.
I'm amused at their assumption that they can squeeze tighter than the currently existing notoriously abusive segment of the market.
Also, the way they talk about exploiting parasocail relationships, I'm assuming their next big announcement will be funding a startup that is a call center to handle texting on behalf of onlyfans creators.
Which is to say, a few dollars over $0?
> The ultimate end state of Globohomo is one in which all sexual, ethnic, racial and national identity is broken down, leaving the demoralized masses to work for $12 an hour in an Amazon warehouse while a small cadre of billionaires rule over them.
Would be nice if VC’s would go destroy something of theirs for once, and leave everyone else out of it.
Meanwhile western fantasy adaptations seem to be full of arrogant showrunners that think their vision is better: wheel of time, the Witcher, House of the dragon (to an extent). George RR Martin even publicly criticised HBO for this recently.
Never read The Witcher or played the games but also really enjoyed the netflix series
I wouldn't put to much weight on someone not liking something. After all, either they haven't watched it all, or they are watching something they don't like. And that's not someone's taste I trust.
Having said that, what do you think of people like GRRM (wrt House of the Dragon) and Brandon Sanderson critiquing these adaptations? Your last paragraph seems to imply there's no value to someone dislike something.
That's some very "heads I win, tails you lose" logic right there.
It honestly baffles me that anyone who liked the books is able to enjoy the TV show, it feels like bad fan fiction.
* Rand and Egwene's relationship going from "they like each other but are kind of hesitant" to "sneaking away to have sex in the woods". Not only is this completely unnecessary, it's completely at odds with the moral values of Two Rivers culture for them to be doing that.
* Perrin being married (WTF), and then killing his wife by accident (WTF squared). In the books Perrin is very careful to not accidentally hurt people as he is conscious of his strength.
* In general, trying to change the Two Rivers to have the diversity of modern day NYC. A region so far off the beaten path that even their de jure queen doesn't remember they exist is simply not going to have a broad selection of races. This isn't as big of a sin as the character changes, but it's also completely free to have this bit of worldbuilding via character casting. There is no good reason whatsoever to give it up.
* Generally changing relationships in ways that just aren't supported by the books. Like, Siuan and Moiraine aren't in a sexual relationship at that point in the story so it's idiotic to depict them as such.
* Trying to act as though the Dragon could be any of the Emond's Field kids is against the very metaphysical foundations of the WoT universe. The Dragon could only be a boy, and Moiraine would know this damn well. And while we're at it, Moiraine had no idea that there were ta'veren in the Two Rivers at all, certainly not more than one, unlike what the show claims.
* Aging up Min severely and making her a Darkfriend. Just WTF.
* At one point Nynaeve heals death, which is again completely impossible in this universe.
* The damane costumes... so bad it's laughable. What on earth were they thinking? How could they get it so wrong? How you go from collars (in the books) to ball gags in the show is utterly beyond my ability to even imagine.
Those are the main things I can think of, and that's just season 1. I didn't even bother trying to hate read about season 2 after how bad season 1 was, but from what I heard it wasn't better (like apparently Rand bangs Lanfear, which he absolutely would never do). I understand that adaptations need to change things. But the changes they made to WoT aren't necessary, and often make the story worse than what Jordan wrote.
It all shows a grave disrespect for the source material, contrary to the staff's claims that they love the books so much (bullshit). As far as I can tell, Rafe didn't want to do an adaptation of Jordan's story, he wanted to tell his own story. Which is fine, but then tell your own fucking story, don't take a massive dump all over someone else's work which many people love.
I'd argue that there is benefit to re-evaluating one's tastes based on new information. It's always good to think critically of the content you consume.
EDIT: Wow. Can't even post comments on a new account. Not gonna beg dang for approval in his e-mail so I guess that's it for me and anyone else who's privacy-aware.
They made so many changes (mostly shit) that it was hard to even see it as an adaptation. The official statement (mental gymnastics) was that it's "another turning of the wheel".
In the fandom, it's fairly well received. JordanCon/WoTCon had everyone loving it. Sure, some people might not like it, but the majority of people who watched it loved it.
Martin's criticism of HoD is silly considering he still hasn't stuck the landing on his original series, and I imagine is holding back because people didn't like his resolution and is now stuck. Regardless, lots of people love these things. That you don't is fine. Not everything needs to be for you.
I didn't like Witcher 3. Overrated lame open world with boring stories and poor combat. Never finished it. So I had zero interest with any of the Witcher shows. But I also realize that a lot of people love it. I'm happy those people have something they enjoy.
As an aside, I imagine the commenter you're replying to will find "That you don't [love these things] is fine. Not everything needs to be for you." to be patronizing.
"the majority of people who watched it loved it"
Because why someone who doesn't like something watch it all the way through. The majority of people who watched Wheel of Time loved it. Sure, some people who disliked it or weren't interested would have watched it all the way through, but most people don't. Did the majority of people who watched only an episode or two love it? I don't know. But that was never my claim.
Maybe you can share why you think people, outside of being reviewers, will watch things they don't like? Am I the odd one out? Seriously, if I don't like a book I stop reading it. If I don't like a show I stop watching.
"JordanCon/WoTCon had everyone loving it." (completely different from saying "everyone loving it")
Because I attended them, and everyone there was loving it. Judging by the cheers and the interest at the associated panels, and well everyone I spoke with.
> I imagine the commenter you're replying to will find "That you don't [love these things] is fine. Not everything needs to be for you." to be patronizing
Facts hurt?
No it isn't. On Reddit, people are extremely critical of the show. And outside of Reddit, I literally do not know one fan of WoT who actually enjoyed that monstrosity.
I'm talking about the people that attend conferences. Not just people who happen to stumble across a subreddit.
I also played the games (which take place after the books) and loved them - although despite having a great story, the first game was really rough. Witcher 3 is in my top 10 games of all time, and it rewards you for playing all three by letting you carry over your saves and seeing your impact on the world. I hear they're remaking the first game as well as a fourth, so there's a lot to look forward to there.
Take Dungeon Meshi, for instance: The anime only covered about half of the material of the manga. So if you liked the show and you want to know how the story ends, you've got to pick up the books. If the showrunners changed important plot points, finishing the story might not be so easy...
The Dungeon Meshi anime probably made some money on its own account, but there are a lot of marginal anime series that aren't really designed to make money, but are intended to increase awareness/sales of various manga properties.
I would argue that reinterpretations/taking liberties aren't always a bad thing. I went back and watched the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure OVA from the 90's that compressed/deviated the Stardust Crusaders arc considerably, especially compared to the more recent anime, which follows the manga panels to a 't'. I would argue the OVA holds up very well and makes some necessary edits for the sake of the pacing. Plus, the OVA staff clearly did their research, because OVA Egypt feels way more authentic than anime Egypt (which looked like your stereotypical mishmash of Middle East/India).
It seems like mega series with 200+ episodes where fillers are needed aren't getting made now? Demon Slayer is only on 63 for example.
Animation standards have gone up enough, and there are so many more competitor series, that just needing to fill a broadcast TV slot forever just isn't as important as back in the day. The levels of animation repetition of the Sailor Moons and Captain Tsubasas of the day, which allowed for a lot of episodes with a reasonable budget, would be seen as unacceptable today.
That's because they made it at a rate of an episode per week, and in parallel with the source material. That doesn't give time for anything very fancy, so it's mostly a panel by panel adaptation. Plus some filler in the mix, because a chapter usually doesn't have enough meat in it to last a whole episode. It's often 2 chapters per episode or so.
And that's why the slow pacing and the awful fillers.
If you're turning a prose novel into a tv show, you have to basically create everything from scratch. You can set it in the world of the novel and basically follow the plot, but the pacing is impossible to translate directly, and you don't have any of the visuals.
Most just want to have their own take on whatever they're adapting and I think that's preferable because whether good or bad, at the very least they're adding something new.
The nostalgia and fanbase driven reproduction of the same stuff over and over adds nothing, it's just fanservice. If I want The Witcher the game I can just play the actual game, if I want GRRM I should read his books. Adaptions in which authors take liberties have much more potential to be interesting. King famously hated Kubrick's The Shining, Garland took a lot of liberties with Annihilation and Starship Troopers was straight up subversion and satire of the book and Heinlein's worldview.
Given that we're in the age of maximally non-offensive Disney and comic book adaptions that just refuse to die and with so few genuinely novel media out there to begin with, I'm in favor of people at least taking some risks with adaptions.
If I took Fahrenheit 451 and adapt the story so that the state executes Guy Montag because my vision is that hate speech is dangerous, it's not Fahrenheit 451 anymore.
Take the most recent Dune movies as an example; In the books, Paul spends so much time becoming Fremen and trying to resist the prophecy as well as endlessly worrying about a space jihad, only taking the water of life when he was not able to predict that Gurney would try and kill his mother.
In the new vision "Let the Jihad begin!"
The first is the story of a reluctant hero who is trying to keep his family alive and cherish the love of the desert people who adopted him.
The second portrays a mother and son who scheme to use those around them to further their end goal of power and revenge.
If I enjoy eating Oreo cookies and I buy an ice cream that is labeled "Oreo Ice Cream" but when I taste it, it is Strawberry Jam flavor, I am not going to be writing a review that praises the product designer for their bold vision. I will be taking the product back for a refund.
That was present in the books at times as well.
>“I must tell you about my waking dream,” Paul said. (Now there was fury in his voice.) “To be sure you accept what I say, I’ll tell you first I know you’ll bear a daughter, my sister, here on Arrakis.”
>Jessica placed her hands against the tent floor, pressed back against the curving fabric wall to still a pang of fear. She knew her pregnancy could not show yet. Only her own Bene Gesserit training had allowed her to read the first faint signals of her body, to know of the embryo only a few weeks old.
>“Only to serve,” Jessica whispered, clinging to the Bene Gesserit motto. “We exist only to serve.”
>“We’ll find a home among the Fremen,” Paul said, “where your Missionaria Protectiva has bought us a bolt hole.”
>He suddenly saw how fertile was the ground into which he had fallen, and with this realization, the terrible purpose filled him, creeping through the empty place within, threatening to choke him with grief.He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead—in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: “Hello, Grandfather.” The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him.
>The other path held long patches of grey obscurity except for peaks of violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor. Gurney Halleck and a few others of his father’s men—a pitiful few—were among them, all marked by the hawk symbol from the shrine of his father’s skull.
>“I can’t go that way,” he muttered. “That’s what the old witches of your schools really want.”
>He remained silent, thinking like the seed he was, thinking with the race consciousness he had first experienced as terrible purpose. He found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this—the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad. Surely, I cannot choose that way, he thought.
So no, what happened in the book after the fall of the House of Artradies and what was shown in "Part 2" of the movie are diametrically opposed.
Even before he meets the Fremen, he hates that everything was manipulated by the Bene Gesserit. He does not want to go along with the pan and wants to find his own way that would result in a better future.
What it is, is your relationship to the story and that's really what an adaption is about. A good adaption I think always shows you what someone feels in regards to the original work, it's a response to or a dialog with the original and that can include any emotion you have towards it. Artistically you don't really owe Fahrenheit anything, that's the sort of "fandom" mentality that I think is pretty misplaced and immature in art, but popular now because everything has fans and followers.
I agree with your observation about Dune but I think it's quite smart. Villeneuve has basically rewritten Chani entirely and shows us the story from her point of view, starting and ending the two movies with her deliberately. It's a critical outside view on Paul unlike the book in many ways, and I think that just reflects Villeneuve's perspective. (and also coincidentally Herbert's actual intent for Paul, it will hopefully spare people the awkward monologues from the second book)
Deep Space 9 is another example of this right, there's the die-hard fan mentality of "It goes against everything ST is about!", but ultimately it makes the universe much more interesting and compelling because it gives you another perspective from another point in time from someone who didn't quite buy into the utopianism and just expressed that.
To use my food analogy again: If I take pita bread, stuff it with cheese, spread tomato sauce on top along with toppings, it may be very delicious but if I serve it when someone orders a pizza...well I doubt they will be a repeat customer.
I bet you could make an amazing comedy by showing the events of "The Christmas Carol" from someone other than Scroog's point of view but it's not "The Christmas Carol" then and shouldn't be labeled as such.
"Old Man and the Sea" from the fish's point of view could be an interesting commentary but it would also not be "Old Man and the Sea"
I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy is also quite good, even though it does stray quite a bit from the books, omissions aside.
It's really hard to make good media and I haven't found any reliable indicators hinting at whether an adaptation will be good or not. I found The Hobbit trilogy to be laborious despite having Peter Jackson at the helm of it as well. Though in that case, maybe the source material itself is the issue.
With The Hobit , there was a change in directors (originally Guillermo del Toro) and lots of studio meddling (eg pushing for 3 movies when the original is a 200 pages book, inclusion of LOTR actors for wider appeal).
I think Peter Jackson was brought in to try to salvage what he could.
There are so many stories of the insane hours that animators in Japan have to deal with. Part of that is the "normal" toxic overwork culture in Japan, but animation seems to be one of the biggest perpetrators.
There are artists who would rather be paid even less, but given more creative freedom and control over the final product, (deciding on dubs, script changes, etc…) Especially in anime production.
Other industries do that, but at least they have the decency to compensate fresh hires decently. (E.g. law, management consulting)
This has to be shown in some way... Usually done on HN via some number of arguments with some logical structure.
Ask a better, more thoughtful question, get a better answer.
This approach seems bizarre frankly, it can only be to your detriment because it implies you are putting in even less than 'minimal effort'.
[0] https://comicbook.com/anime/news/mappa-studios-animators-wor...
A lot of people grow up as anime fans and want to work with it. With high supply comes lowered prices.
Something similar happens in (cool) computer games programming compared to (dull) regular SWE jobs.
"While there seems to be a lot of money in X, the $people_providing_value are underpaid and highly overworked"
They always let themselves get shafted.
however, do note that people in anime have a trade union unlike most game devs outside of Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Animation_Creators_As...).
maybe it starts to make more sense why the gaming arm of a16z wrote this. besides the overlap, there seems to be many things that work similarly between the two industries.
I understand that commodification is inevitable (and yes anime is already a soulless business), but goddamn if it doesn't look like some form of neurosis. It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.
>It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.
At least for old growth forests you could argue that it's mispriced because it's providing biodiversity/carbon sequestration which can't be sold on the market. Meanwhile the benefits provided by anime accrue solely to its consumers. What's the problem with getting them to pay for it?
This is too generous, particularly with regards to a16z coming into an already existing market. In reality, it's more akin to taking something that already exists in a form that people enjoy and are already willing to pay for, and both bastardizing and cannibalizing it into something of lesser quality just so that you can have additional excuses to charge more money for things that you never used to charge money for before.
"Nice thing you have there, be a shame if we fucked it up so that we could make more money off of it," is a mental illness.
This is definitely not accurate: a functioning market drives profits toward zero. Therefore "extract profit" is always synonymous with "break the market" i.e. monopolize through regulatory capture, trade secrets, network effects, proprietary protocols, or whatever else.
To quote Mr Thiel [to a venture capitalist, at least] "monopoly is the condition of every successful business".
Fwiw it might be fair to say extracting revenue means providing something people are willing to pay for. Not profit though.
>It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.
He writes from the perspective of, "How are we having so many shortages during this global pandemic? We used to BUILD things, goddammit!" And now, fewer than 5 years later, a16z says:
> Yet, we believe that anime is just getting started – today, new technologies and business models are accelerating a once niche industry to even greater heights.
To the extent that anyone in power in tech claims to believe in the greater good, they are full of shit, a16z very much included. It's fun for CEOs and VCs to make grand proclamations about what's wrong in the world. But at the end of the day, they only care about making money.
Or maybe anime is one of those "new industries" Marc Andreessen said he was so excited about?
For a second imagine what environment they went through, what battles they had to fight for decades and keep being on top. You can't be a normal balanced person with good friendly personality and achieve any of that. Even if you start at absolutely stellar lucky place, you will end up as say Stallman (respect to that guy, but you can see life path vs Jobs difference mainly due to character).
The fact that such people are celebrated and imitated and there is a lot of strive to replicate their success path is normal. Why - as per J. Peterson (topic on its own, but his psychological stuff I still respect) there is cca 1:20 sociopaths and 1:100 psychopaths in general population. Do the numbers, they are not nice but then you can understand whats happening in this world and politics much better. HN isn't representative of general population, that ratio is much worse although smart folks like that know when to be quiet and just watch/read.
I am not trying to scorn those folks, at their best they do move whole society further, and we desperately need that now. But they are overall not good people, sort of necessary evil IMHO.
It might be a natural consequence of reaching those positions. While their rise often comes with harsh decision-making and the development of certain traits, it's not just luck or randomness. Gates, Jobs, and others possess(ed) unique talents and vision that propelled them forward. Their abilities, whether in technology, leadership, or understanding markets, are rare, and that's a critical part of the equation. Of course, such talent, combined with navigating cutthroat environments, shapes the person in ways that we don't like. Let’s not forget politicians in this discussion, as they add layers to the same dynamic. It may simply be the way things work, at least until we shift (or not) toward something else.
Beyond the ethical and moral debate, someone has to do the work. For example, during the antitrust case against Microsoft, Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems' CEO, was one of Microsoft’s most vocal critics. At that time, I couldn’t help but wonder: would McNealy play the same game if he had the chance? Interestingly, this was also a period when Sun and IBM were reportedly bribing politicians in other parts of the world to stay competitive in the very game they criticized.
It's like The Scorpion and the Frog fable: entities in power often act according to their nature. Microsoft's dominance might have been inevitable, and even McNealy, in a similar position, could have behaved the same. The question is whether this is just the nature of competition at the top, or if there's another way forward.
You ever notice how their visions for the future of humanity make THEM ever more powerful and wealthy, and when it comes to discussing the harm their plans do to other people, it's "well, you can't make an omelete, you know..."
I'd also argue we decidedly DON'T need that right now. We are at the start of a genuine climate catastrophe, and these titans of business, these movers of society, in response, they're... Investing at a record pace in technologies that require re-commissioning old power plants to supply them. Brilliant. I'm so glad our future is in their capable hands. /s
As for a16z, andreeson's 30k word moronic Randian rant speaks for itself. People obsessed with optimization should not be involved in public policy.
I mean, they should. It would be cool if we could optimize public policy. Optimize means make as effective as possible, right? They should just not be so laser-focused on one metric that they're blind to the side effects created by optimizing for it.
A counterpoint, though, just for fun. Optimizing for one thing usually means tradeoffs in another. Optimize for space, lose out on time. Optimize for efficiency, lose out on resiliency. Time spent optimizing one metric means time lost for working on others, that kind of thing.
There are a lot of qualities you want from those who work on policy, but "hyperfocusing on pet policies and specific metrics" ain't one of them.
If you make a good one you could always port it and sell it later (Celeste), but that's kinda beside the point.
I truly can't believe they had the gall to publish this article. The more of the article I read the more I felt like I was reading their strategy for preying on the weak and unfortunate.
I'm not defending the article and agree with you that it's despicable, but the only thing successful VC firms know how to do is to bet on companies that will make them money. It's clear that a future where AI companions exist is coming, and it will be a huge industry, so it's only logical that they would latch on to it and promote it in the only way they know how.
As for AI companions themselves, sure. They will be addicting and harmful, but technology is already that. Yet loneliness is a worldwide epidemic, and I reckon that AI has the potential to also improve the quality of life for many people. This in turn will lead us to even lower birth rates, but that seems inescapable as well. The next 50 years will be interesting, to say the least.
Specifically, I would want to make it illegal to sell access to AI companions, but not criminalize talking to or using AI companions. This targets punishment at the exploiters rather than the exploited.
It’s possible I could be swayed by the “these are more helpful than harmful” argument, but more evidence is required on both sides. I’m sure there will be plenty of evidence coming.
Seriously? How could that possibly work for people who don't want to build their own robots and AI? If there's demand for it, there should be a free market for it. Regulated in some way, of course. Yes, there will be companies that will abuse this and people will get exploited, just as there are companies that do that today, but the alternative sounds like living in a police state.
This argument is similar to the "war" on drugs. We know that an outright ban does more harm than good, but even just decriminalizing consumption doesn't get rid of a black market and associated issues. See the current situation in The Netherlands, for example. The path forward is clearly full legalization, regulated in some way by the state, as exemplified by the US in the last couple of decades. These regulations can be too broad or strict, but as with any market, some balance must be found that benefits society as a whole.
While I am in favor of places trying drug legalization, and certainly think there are drugs that are currently illegal that should not be, I (and most people) are unconvinced that legalization is the correct path for highly addictive drugs like opiates or amphetamines. Oregon has recently reversed their drug decriminalization due to its perceived negative externalities and failure to reduce harm. No, this is not solid evidence that decriminalization/legalization doesn't work, but is some evidence. More data required.
To the point - yes, I generally believe that the law should prevent the sale of some things due to their negative externalities. Most people feel the same.
But both of those have legitimate use cases and are on the legal market. The crucial part is getting the regulation right, which starts by getting rid of corruption in government agencies like the FDA that are supposed to do their job, so that criminals like the Sackler family can't market and sell them to everyone. These are all institutional challenges that governments need to tackle, but they're unrelated to how addictive a substance is. After all, we've been marketed and sold tobacco and alcohol for decades, which have done immeasurable levels of harm to our wellbeing. But it's possible to reach a place where we can all live with the personal decisions of one another, without becoming a nanny state. Whether or not most people agree with this hardly affects my opinion.
Anyway, it's clear that we disagree on some political points, and I don't want to steer this way off the original topic. Cheers!
Fixed.
The whole article reads like a book report from Steve Buscemi’s “how do you do, fellow kids” character, with a few choice phrases from a “most popular anime quotes” buzzfeed article. I cringed.
It is unsurprising that both “contributors” have “web3” listed as one of their focus.
(2) Mixed feelings about lumping all gacha games under the "anime" umbrella based on art style, especially when so many gachas are original properties (Genshin Impact et al) or spinoffs of non-gacha games (Fire Emblem Heroes, Pokemon Masters). I get why they're drawing the association, so maybe I'm just being a purist for no reason, but in my head it's only an anime if it's an animated show or movie!
ETA: Or how some gacha series get popular enough to have bona fide anime spinoffs—I think both Fate and Granblue fall under that category?
Fate/ is one of the weirdest meta-stories of all time. The evolution of that universe is utterly fascinating to me, more so than the actual story today.
The gist is that Nasu always wanted to create a Comic book style shared universe, and that Nasu sees himself as a Stan Lee or George Lucas type who is in charge of a community of writers rather than just writing one singular plot.
That reminds me of a not-really-description I read once about Homestuck, basically saying that the many manifestations/spinoffs are too twisty to be worth explaining.
BTW, this comment is not a request for clarification, I'm fine with my ignorance on the franchise itself.
It's just 3 or 4 scenes. But they are clearly full on pornographic scenes. They are also completely irrelevant to the story and were removed from later adaptations.
---------
I'm mildly convinced that Nasu started with the pornographic market so that his story would be the king-of-porn first, building up a niche within that sub community first. It's highly unusual for pornographic stories to receive the shear detail and writing effort that went into F/SN.
Call it the Facebook strategy. Don't aim to be king of all the market, instead aim to be king of some sub-niche first. You can always pivot away later.
But you are correct in that the level of detail and character development even in the original novel far exceeds that of any porno. But I argue that this fact was Nasus explicit strategy for growth.
It's early days yet. Still plenty of time to get used to reminding yourself of that.
On a semi-related note: A16Z, stay the hell away from Square Enix.
They got into games during their Web3/Blockchain/Metaverse phase so you're forgiven for not noticing given that hype train went absolutely nowhere.
Now they're all about AI being the next big thing in games, because of course they are.
- Arknights - Azur Lane - Kancolle
Just off the top of my head.
I share your mixed feelings. On the one hand, I like "anime" to refer to something very specific. I think the world is more confusing when terms evolve and redefine too much.
But on the other hand, the Gacha games clearly owe a good deal of their success to the anime elements they copy-pasted, even if the core game mechanics are anime-indifferent.
Over time, these lines will get blurred even more as the market maximizes where those elements can be incorporated. The art and story elements clearly have appeal, and they'll probably get incorporated into more and more into media that's not Japanese-produced TV shows.
And when those non-animes get adapted into true animes because they're obviously such a clean fit, it feels like the similarity needs to be acknowledged with some a broad umbrella word to cover everything. Which might as well be the word "anime"...?
For a more positive outlook on the animation industry, check out "Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!"—an incredibly creative love letter to the joy and passion of creating art through the lens of animation.
One thing that is striking to me is just how much budget Japanese high schools have for clubs and stuff. Meanwhile in America we have teachers buying basic school supplies from their meager wages...
I find it incredibly exhausting to watch. Anime can be a nice refuge from that, as can older tv-shows from before this was a thing.
I think the transition to streaming is also an exaserbating factor, since it's less important to resolve events the same episode, characters can now hold much longer grudges.
My best guess is that the overarching emotional climate biases what people consider "realistic" or "mature", and since the mid-to-late 2000s it's been pushing that perception in a more cynical direction.
Breaking Bad is a solid example that gets it right.
But then I made a scatter chart of my ratings of all 200+ anime I watched vs MAL rating and I found literally ZERO correlation! The MAL rating means nothing for my anime tastes. So now I start watching random anime starting from episode 1 and if I hate it I drop it, no bad feelings, if I don't love it by episode 3 I drop it as well. There are over 17000 anime. And finally I was able to find good anime again that I truly enjoy watching, easily 10*. I don't even read ratings or reviews beforehand as there is no correlation for me. Just pick random anime and watch.
I've been into anime for over a decade and for fans of animation, it's a wealth of unique stories and characters tailored to any demographic. Like action, romance, slice of life, etc., there are stories for you most with unique voices from artists and creators doing it out of passion rather than just another writing gig.
One thing that troubles me about this is the idea of a human having [what they feel is a] deep, meaningful relationship with what ultimately is a bit of code and conversation history owned by a for-profit corporation. They might even experience [what they interpret as] romantic love towards this construct. This could give the controlling corporation unbelievable leverage over that person, even worse than casinos or cigarette companies, because AI companions aren't as fungible as these other highly-optimized dopamine delivery systems.
Of course, Blade Runner 2049 explored this well.
American comic books are incredibly stagnant and have been so for the past 20 years. Not a single new character with any cultural relevancy (besides reboots of old characters) has been made in the last 20-odd years. Meanwhile, series like Attack on Titan, Chainsaw Man, and Jujutsu Kaisen have become million dollar global franchises in the last decade. The manga => anime => cultural zeitgeist pipeline has produced tons of recent compelling series.
Another example is one punch man. The source material is just some draft uploaded by some random guy.
Nothing can topple the talent yet
Also makes me think a16z's games division may struggle to find a hit... generally the people who are hyper-focused on producing great work aren't also looking to make the next billion-dollar empire.
So, I started investing more into anime, and I have had zero regrets. Sure, there's plenty of low-quality near-pornographic trash, but I've found far more diamonds in the rough than I was initially expecting.
Let me give a recent example: Kotaro Lives Alone. It's a story about a four-year-old who lives alone due to some extenuating circumstances I won't cover for the sake of spoilers. It's funny, heart-warming, cry-inducing, and overall, extremely entertaining for an otherwise outrageous plot. I've found dozens of gems like this in the past five years, and a lot of them are "recent" enough to give me hope that the Japanese haven't forgotten the art of making quality media.
I can't even tell a modern title or an author.
Nowadays, most of it is nearly mainstream. Granted there is still some weirdness like grown 40yo men obsessed with schoolgirl harem anime...
I also don't watch anime and don't know anyone who does really.
I know nothing of anime nor manga, apart from recognising the style. Never watched it - looks like kid stuff TBH.
> looks like kid stuff TBH.
Especially when this is the attitude held by most of the older generation.
Western (live action) movies are sequel after sequel of predictable plots. Western animation is relegated almost exclusively to children (and ocassionally raunchy adult comedy). The formula is stale, so other media is taking its place.
Despite the insane popularity of anime, it feels like only a limited subset actually fully capitalize on the market.
For example, take Violet Evergarden. It's a gorgeous show with a compelling emotional narrative, produced by Kyoto Animation, one of the most acclaimed studios. It's even on Netflix, available on demand for an international audience.
There is zero merch for it anywhere. The only thing you can buy is the Blu Rays. If you like the show, you can't give them your money if you want to.
This kind of thing is rampant in anime. A select few get merch and marketing out the wazoo, and a ton of other things are neglected, despite a clear interest from the fanbase.
The article claims:
"Anime is where the future of creation and play is happening—whether through mobile games, fanfiction, roleplaying, or AI interactions. We believe anime will become a dominant format for content engagement."
But is this really "anime"? In my opinion, no. Vtubing and AI tools aren't anime.
The article describes a fan’s journey as starting with popular IPs like Attack on Titan or One Piece, then moving into deeper social engagement with UGC, VTubing, and cosplay. They argue anime has evolved from passive to interactive.
This shift, however, feels like a corporate "anime-as-a-service" model, exploiting aesthetics rather than preserving the original spirit of anime before the 2010s.
And of course, the 2010s anime is nothing compared to the 00s which, really felt like the height of anime with fansub communities and then The 90s where the community really started cosplaying and trading by VHS tapes while being blinded by the futurism of Japan.
This article really paints a dim future to what brought me joy and what pulled me into IT/Tech/NetSec/Programming and I couldn’t even get out of the first few paragraphs before I wrote all this.
But I’m flabbergasted. Anime as a service is here.
I've watched a lot of anime and western cartoons and feel like the bar isn't that high. I'm pretty confident I could write and direct something that's competitive with most of what's currently being produced. At a minimum, just making a solid show that doesn't abuse common tropes while including a strong story and art direction seems like it would put you miles ahead of most existing anime; see for example: Frieren. Frieren avoids common anime tropes and is happy to explore the setting while giving the characters room to breathe; this was enough to propel the series to the top of every anime rating website.
Even evaluating top-tier producers like Studio Ghibli, despite being able to create S-tier art and animations, I think they no longer have any stories worth telling which they haven't already presented in some form or another. It's like they continue producing movies because the studio has to do something, but there's no strong driving force to guide them. Modern Studio Ghibli movies aren't driven by a burning passion from the director's soul to be summoned into this world.
If you want high concept, good, unique stories, it's going to take you to some much more indie sutff. Serial Experiments Lain, The Tatami Galaxy, Perfect Blue (and everything that director made), Ghost in the Shell (the first movie), Akira, and a bunch of other weird 80s/90s anime films you likely wouldn't even consider.
I saw it recommended somewhere. Had no idea I was in store for a legit psychological thriller.
Still, one issue with these works is just big they are. And them often falling into repeating same patterns and tropes even inside the same work. Sadly medium does not do editing well. As very often you could easily get rid of 20% or even more and not loose too much...
Still, Chinese and Korean works do offer something different. Even if you have to take some nationalism with it.
Currently many of the efforts are trying to fit a peg into a square by either "westernizing" the content, as done in Hollywood, or completely jumping the shark as with most Japanese releases. Both only make for a less palatabl result.
Instead, a selective "offset" approach should be taken. I illustrate this briefly in a YouTube mini-essay:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WiyqBHNNSlo
It is also how I write my IP:
https://www.weedonandscott.com/narrative/keepers-of-alteria
And it's how I assess exiting IPs for adaptation.
Until current stakeholders shake the current models out of their system, this field is leaving a lot of creative output (and profits) on the table.
I have stopped watching the live-action Cowboy Bebop after about 5 minutes, so much of it was spared.
The same production company (Tomorrow Studios) is currently making the live action One Piece, which, ironically, could be more detrimental to live-action anime than Cowboy Bebop was.
The reason is that even though the live-action One Piece is not something I'd consider live-action _anime_, it's actually quite good and is definitely well received, which may cause producers to adopt its formula, and stop researching alternative adaptation paths.
Ugh. I just… it was so… ugh.
What do you mean by live-action anime? This reads to me as contradiction in terms. Anime is a term of art for CJK animation, especially Japanese animation.
The term is not well-defined.
You could say it applies to Ghost in the Shell, because it is based on existing IP of the genre.
You could stretch it to include The Matrix, which is an original IP but employs a lot of the style
Edge of Tomorrow, even though based on a Japanese light novel, has deviated enough both in plot and style for the term not to apply
The closest thing I can think of that I myself could describe that way would be Alita: Battle Angel, due to the big eyes/small mouth style of Alita, but I would never actually call it live action anime, but rather, a live action anime adaptation.
Maybe this is related to modern speech patterns? The closest thing I can think of is “it’s giving x” which seems to me to be a shortened version of related phrase “it’s giving x vibes.”
On a related note, The Matrix actually has an animated spinoff The Animatrix, which has segments that are arguably anime, as they are produced by Japanese creators in a typical style.
However, I find that the phrase live-action anime perhaps says more about the person saying it and their perspective than it says about the content being described as such.
I have never thought of its origins before, but I'd assume it's a short hand for "live-action anime adaptation". Maybe this makes it more palatable for you?
As for Animatrix, yes -- it really went full circle, considering how they pitched the original feature:
> When Larry and Andy Wachowski were pitching The Matrix to their producers, they played them a DVD of an 82-minute Japanese cartoon and said: "We wanna do that for real."
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/oct/19/hollywood-ghost...
I think finding the term live action anime slightly off is my own issue, as I also find the term Japanimation also slightly grating. It probably has something to do with being a fan of a historically somewhat mocked/maligned subculture.
- in recent year or two, saw lot of people in the streets wearing clothes with Japanese words. Saw such clothes in stores. I thought initially that they were fans of Japanese culture, but it seems that it is just a fashion trend and they probably cannot even read them.
- when entering a bookstore or a school supplies store, there are notebooks and sketchbooks and other goods with anime-style characters, translations of novels. Novels are now even in some supermarkets. Again, it started recently.
- that anime-styled Chinese RPG game is somewhat popular among young people, and when reading laptop reviews there are comments like "Will (anime-styled Chinese game) run on this?"
- I am not sure if we can count anime-styled avatars on social media because I don't remember if they were always widespread or only recently
Hope these trends will continue. I wonder is it our local (Russian) trend or something global?
https://a16z.com/the-next-generation-pixar/
https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-pahdo-labs/
Podcast in December that covers some of this, too.
https://a16z.com/podcast/2024-big-ideas-voice-first-apps-ai-...
Looks like they want to capture the anime market and push AI Anime film/game combos.
I could care less about the game spinoffs, or the vtubers, but I do hope we can get beyond the current plot trend of "living in an imaginary world with my smartphone, where I pretend to be dwarf listening to Irish jigg music".
There are so many awesome anime: Heike Monogatari, House of Five Leaves, Angolmois - Genkou Kassenki (depicting the Mongol invasion of Japan in the 1200s).
Sadly, anime for addults is not currently a factor in that blossoming industry described in the article.
See FRIEREN as an example ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avZ-7tEj9W8
It's the ultimate form of mass-produced entertainment for the age of cheap, binge-able content. "Quantity has a quality all of it's own".
"The greedy countries, corporations and criminals can see in AI unparalleled and unprecedented means to accrue wealth, power and influence."
https://stephenfry.substack.com/p/ai-a-means-to-an-end-or-a-...
Tl,DR; All of culture is constantly fleeing the curse of the MBAs - the destroyers of all things good with the Middas touch.
There's always been trash anime, but it feels like there's some very original work being produced.
I enjoyed the good old days from the 1980s to the 2000s when it was actually more creative and good quality not to mention that there were more competition at that time period.
Well, of course it isn't! They ain't vampires - these just need blood an power, and also are completely fictional.
If you’re able to tolerate some more intense themes, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is widely regarded as one of the best anime ever created, and rightly so.
Most anime’s pretty off-putting if you don’t know how to “read” it—you have to get used to all three of: quirks of the medium (e.g. how emotions are expressed visually, confused Engrish intro songs); cultural differences between your culture and Japan’s; and a pile of tropes that are very common in anime but less common elsewhere, which you can use as a way to understand the genre of what you’re watching and how it’s supposed to be read.
It’s why Cowboy Bebop is such a popular gateway anime: Ed aside (and even there, only sometimes) there’s minimal reliance on alien-to-Westerners visual expression, the genre is entirely familiar and uses familiar tropes and archetypes, and it’s culturally hardly any more Japanese than Blade Runner. (Plus, I mean, it’s good—but so are a bunch of others that do not work well as gateway anime)
SO hates animation things usually and really liked it.
Ew. I really hate this.
I'll go back to studying my WaniKani flash cards for the day and hope that I forget that I read this by the end of it.
It's true that anime (as in: TV shows and movies) is more popular than ever, but its business has lots of problems. I'd love for someone to improve this situation, so that we could have more episodes of beloved sagas that are somehow paused, eg Berserk and One Punch Man.
But I'm completely uninterested in AI generation or parasocial stuff. Let art be art, even across mediums (comics, TV, games), but the rest just sucks the humanity out of the art.
Also, there is absolutely no way that the involvement of venture capitalists is going to improve anime culture. [shigechi.gif]
It was announced about a week ago. Surprised no one mentioned it yet.