Category Archives: industry

Fansubs, Digital Distribution, Shenanigans

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This post is perhaps far too late, and even then, lots of people have more knowledge and insight than me, so I won’t really bother with explaining about WHY the anime industry is in danger. To sum it up, the people in charge need to catch up to modern times. That’s about it.

All this talk though has reminded me that Nintendo is planning on a service for their Wii where a person can purchase something from their online shop FOR another person. You buy, say, a virtual console game, and then the game gets sent to the person you bought it for. And I think this would be a great system to implement somehow for anime.

There’s little doubt that a good number of anime fans love to spread word about their favorite anime, and having the ability to purchase episodes for your friends (because they’re lazy or refuse to watch but you just know they’re going to like it!), I think, would only be embraced by people.

Granted, once the episodes are obtained, it’d probably be pretty easy to pirate them. Maybe there could be some kind of reward system for recommending a show to someone, a way to earn goodies like Naruto headbands or copies of Iroha Gokko and Anato no Tonari. Barring that, I look at the Wii again, with its library of virtual console games, and the fact is, people are ACTUALLY buying them, including the NES ones. You can download the entire NES library for like 50mb onto your computer, and people are still buying NES games.

I know that selling old games isn’t exactly like selling new anime, though.

Except perhaps when the anime isn’t new at all, and it’s just never been released here.

Does learning Japanese hurt the domestic anime and manga industry?

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I have taken years of Japanese. I studied abroad in Japan in a university with virtually no English speakers. The result is that I am more or less fluent, and that at some point I decided to start buying some manga in the original Japanese because it usually comes at a lower cost. Genshiken is an example.

However, by doing so, I am also directly taking away from sales of the Del Rey release in respect to me personally. At the same time, though, my early fandom into Genshiken I know has caused other people to pick up the manga as it was being released her. My consistent and long-term Ogiue fandom has caused people to take notice of Genshiken, buy it, read it, and enjoy it immensely. If I had never started reading the Japanese versions, this may not have happened. So it’s tricky to say, at least as it concerns myself and my interactions with others, whether or not this has hurt the chances of certain things succeeding in the US.

I think there may be a certain balance, and that there is a potential point where if too many anime fans were fluent in Japanese, it would hurt the domestic industry, but that with a certain percentage of fans as Japanese-literate that it may actually be very beneficial. This might sound like I’m encouraging a portion of the anime-viewing population to remain ignorant, but that’s not the case, and the chances of “too much” of the population learning Japanese leans on the slim side anyway.

Mangaka or MANGAKA? Artist or ARTIST?

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I’ve recently been reading a book called Adult Manga which came out in 2000, which deals with various aspect of the world of manga during the 90s, including the otaku community and issues on censorship during that time.

One chapter is titled “Manga Editors and Unusable Artists,” and it talks about the increasingly creative roles that editors were taking during the 90s. On the topic of “unusable artists,” the chapter recounts various editors lamenting the situation that artists were in at the time. One mentioned that with manga becoming so commonplace, they had to take risks picking artists who were willing to be more experimental, but often times it seemed the artists didn’t have the enthusiasm to try something new. Another editor talks about how the current generation of manga artists aren’t really manga artists. He compares the previous generation of mangaka, and how they consisted of people who lived in and addressed issues of their time, with mangaka of today, who often seem completely disconnected from reality. In other words, they were just people who grew up just reading manga (a topic I discussed in a previous post). This same editor basically says that too many of the artists only know how to draw cute girls. The book then goes on to mention one particular artist who seemed so far removed from the public that he had to ask his editor for relevant story topics.

I found this to be extremely relevant to my own situation, as I am both an artist and an otaku, and I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of just wanting to draw cute girls and just ignoring the real world and sticking with anime and manga. For me, it is a struggle to appeal to others and to express myself, as often times the art in which I am most invested is not the most aesthetically pleasing, at least in terms of moe qualities and the like. Reading the chapter on unusable artists has refocused my attention, and I realize that I must at least take the occasional look into the real world before I can progress artistically. I also need to improve my ability to draw cute girls as well, but the former must come before the latter if I dare to try and make a difference with my art.

That said, I’m still an otaku and I’ll still be making incredibly dorkish posts just like this.