Category Archives: English Language Modern Visual Fandom

December 19, 2011

Ghibli Challenge #1: Totoro

By omo

I never sat down and powered through Totoro until when I did a few days ago. It’s a massive piece of Ghibli that I’m missing out, but it isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. Growing up East Asian necessarily means I’ve seen it going to houses of other East Asians with little kids, but never was it a sit-down experience. Given the short length of the movie, all the key takeaway scenes have been countless times repeated by other media, in AMVs and whatever, ever since its first days under the sun. The look and feel of Totoro, by the means of osmosis, is no stranger to most people anyway.

But as Totoro fits the fantasy of that big, huggable bear-thingy without any sign of malice is kind of the thing I wanted to ascertain when I finally saw the film. As in, Totoro’s basic story can be summed up in one sentence. It is closer to a static illustration than a chain of events. And a short one at that. So in a sense if you’ve never seen Totoro, you really aren’t missing anything that much. Instead, treat it as a fully visceral experience, where what is truly attractive is conveyed by the animation, not by words.

But if you’re into the whole inaka stuff, it’s definitely one of the best. At least Totoro shouldn’t bore you, given how short it was.And to me that is already a great feat. In comparison to Mai Mai Miracle, the lack of a notable plot in Totoro seems to work better than the presence of a muddled one. Well, both of those films get at you from the same angle anyways, the difference is remarkable only in this sense.

Well, maybe in one other sense: In Totoro, the sense of danger is actually more pronounced. Death and bodily harm was lurking at every corner, so to speak. It is kind of like the sort of suspense witnessed in Spirited Away, except it isn’t at all a dangerous thing. Perhaps it was best illustrated when Satsuki and Mai were shaking their balcony’s pillar. In Mai Mai, the danger was more with the human elements, and not with nature; it painted a less eco-aware but a more socially-aware world. You trusted people, as kids. In Totoro it feels more like the accumulation of children’s indifference to nature’s hazards.

In the end, it was a movie that you just had to see to believe. Totoro may not stand tall by itself, but it is sure big and round and it is the comfort of children everywhere in the Television age. Writing about it somehow feels like I am cheapening the experience.

This first so-called challenge is a part of an end-of-year festivity among some anime bloggers.  You can find out more about the Ghibli theatrical road show from GKIDS.

2 comments | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Modern Visual Culture

December 12, 2011

Mandarake Online, the Gateway to Wallet Pain

By omo

This post is more like a user review of Mandarake using my token sample size of one. But I guess lately I had to look out for #1 a little more, because all this spending has taken a toll. Figuratively speaking as well as literal. It is times like this, when I think about consumerism in the context of an anime fan, that I appreciate the monster machine that is Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com. Between their tablets/e-reader, Prime, cloud services, high-volume hosting services, and of course their online store that sells just about anything, shopping is actually a simple, effortless, and seamless experience. The stuff is there, the only thing left to think about is shopping for a price. It does not take a toll on my mind and sleep schedule.

Mandarake, on the other hand, subscribes to a paradigm of something closer to a flea market…in China. When you’re buying things overseas, it’s not unlike how you really need to know your stuff unless you don’t mind being ripped off tourist-style. Even worse, you can’t quite bargain for prices (although you can play the waiting game, if it is an option (sometimes it isn’t)). You probably shouldn’t expect much different in terms of customer service either. But thankfully it doesn’t smell like a  Chinese flea market, there’s no examples of outright theft and pickpockets to worry about, and there is a RSS feed.

RSS feeds are neat little things. In a way it provides the foundation of Web 2.0 revolution; we can now reorganize the world wide web using filtered syndicated feeds to reorganize and manage the pure, astronomically large quantity of content produced on the web every day. But who cares about that? If you are like me, all you care about are very specific, individualized items of certain niche-among-niche products that cannot be bought direct from a store; or, second-hand commodity goods sold at a discount (namely home video and music, but sometimes also books). Occasionally you can also use them as an “incidental proxy” (which is my way of saying that because Mandarake can sell anything (tho it doesn’t take orders for you), and sells oversea, sometimes you’ll find something regularly sold in other Japanese stores that do not ship overseas in Mandarake, in which it is really just a proxy for you). This is how RSS is useful.

Long story short, Mandarake’s online site has a RSS feed of their inventory (as fast as their data input freeters can type things up anyways) and when pairing it with regexp or something simple (like Yahoo! Pipes) you can make your own notification feed of stuff in your watchlist. I’ll go over some very basic how-to later on how to do this, although if you are sufficiently Japanese and logic-literate you can do this already!

But before we get to that, I just want to give my $0.02 about Mandarake in general, purely from the online store perspective. And to do that I’ll just spell out a few fundamental stuff that you probably already know.

Mandarake is a chain of used otaku goods store. By otaku goods I don’t mean manga or anime-related goods, although that is the bulk of it. By otaku goods I mean what occupies people like Patrick Macias’s free time, which goes as far as idol goods, plastic figures from the packaging of gums in the 1970s, posters of old Japanese chanbara flicks, doujinshi made of words, costumes, etc. You get the idea. Of course, that’s not where the money is; used figures (more along the lines of the PVC crap that has exploded since 2004, but also dolls), artbooks, doujinshi you can fap to (ero or not), and used DVD/BD/CDs are probably Mandarake’s mainstray. And to make it clear, by doujinshi I mean for guys and gals, and even for children of all ages. I wrote about 1kuji and that artbook the other day, if you want examples of what you can be looking forward to in a typical transaction.

It’s important to remember that Mandarake is a series of stores, and the online store is more just a gateway than some monolithic entity that typifies the online store version of some chain store you may be familiar with. This is probably mostly because Mandarake deals in used good only, and they do not need a distribution chain (and thus no such a thing as a centralized warehouse or fulfillment center). You’ve got these people that go to Mandarake to sell things, that’s Mandarake’s primary stock. And each Mandarake location has its own stock.

Unfortunately, this also means when you buy from Mandarake online, you are dealing with these stores as individual sellers, and not a single one. This means if you have 3 items in your shopping cart and checks out, you have to pay your bills 3 different times. Each store will give you a PO sort of thing to fill out, although the store website saves you some hassle by consolidating the shipping info, for example, when you log in, etc. This is mostly evident that for orders < 5000 yen there is a 500 yen handling fee, and if it happens you can be paying that fee several times, when you didn’t have to if all the items were located in the same store. That, plus having to pay shipping separately too as well.

Another side effect is that the data entry in the system totally depends on who is entering the data, which branch they work for, and what it is. And because every single item in stock has to be entered (it’s not like they just stock x items of type y; info about condition, etc, and photos of the thing has to be associated with specific items in stock). From what I can tell there’s not much in terms of standardization of formats. Most of the time I construct my searches purely by keywords. When you are looking to buy specific things, that’s pretty easy to handle. It’s not so simple when you, for example, want to split out all the doujinshi from the main RSS feed into a different one.

Personally I think this is a large business opportunity. Mandarake should hire like a couple gaijins (or just anyone who can design data structures) and work this out. But alas. All this market op as valuable as a black hole. It’s just like how there’s this market op for small but powerful laptops, so hopefully it will be just a matter of time. (That said I’m still waiting for an ultraportable that can play games, instead of this not-netboo-v2-ultrabook nonsense, to speak of another toll.)

As for actually buying from Mandarake, once you identified and located the exact thing you want, it’s pretty easy to enter all the info. Unlike many online shops from Japan, Mandarake actually takes your oversea credit cards (supposedly Visa and Mastercard only, no debit cards, and maybe some others) and if you have a good card set up (eg., one that doesn’t charge that foreign transaction fee) it’s more preferable than Paypal, which they also take.

Once you put in the order, you don’t pay until they are able to find your item and mark it for shipping to you. Then they will email you a payment page in which you can do that credit card/paypal dance. I’ve only used credit card, so I can’t speak to how it works using other methods. Items that are marked as a “store front” item are items in the B&M store (ie., some guy can walk in and just buy it). By putting such an item in your cart and checking out, you may not actually get the item if the item is no longer there (ie., someone bought it between the last inventory check and the time the shop employee goes to fetch it from the storefront), which is why Mandarake also offers the service to cancel the order if something is missing by the time you pay.

The shipping offered vary between EMS, Fedex and SAL. SAL takes its usual sweet time. Packages are boxed and lightly packed, although I also found a difference between stores on that regard. And is it me, or does the Osaka store have the best prices?

I guess ultimately, it also comes down to if you can get over buying used goods at a premium. It’s an odd concept but such is the way free market works. I find Mandarake’s prices generally on the high side. They price their mint condition stuff almost as much as they are new. It’s gotten to the point where the new price (on Amazon.co.jp for example) is only 10% or 20% higher than the used price. It is just nonsense on some items, but if saving money is your thing it may be still worth the while. But usually if that bothers you, you would rather be waiting for a better deal or shop around some more. Such is how the Rulers of Time roll. And things do get cheaper, generally, the longer you wait. Prices changes based on market indicator (Y!J auctions for example), but if you can risk something being hard or impossible to find, patience does pay.

Yes, that moniker is for real. Anyway.

The pipes! I’m going to give you the quickest Yahoo! Pipes tutorial on how to filter the Mandarake RSS feed. First, find Mandarake’s English portal (You can do it from the Japanese side as well, but I’ll keep things simple here). Find the RSS link in the footer of the page (down at the bottom). Now go sign in to Yahoo Pipes! and create a new pipe. Drag in the “fetch” widget that reads the content of a feed into the workspace. Put in the RSS url into that. Next, drag in a ‘filter” widget and connect the fetch widget to the filter widget. In the filter widget, you can add what you want. Like “allow only (一番くじ)” to get a list of all ichiban kuji things. Or “block 【中古】” to filter out certain books. You get the idea. You can make more fancy filters if you want to mess around in Pipes.

Once you are done with filters, remember to daisy chain them to each other and connect the final filter to the “output” widget. Once you save and run the pipe, you’ll get a URL for your pipe, which is the new Mandarake feed now with your filters. Stick that sucker in your favorite feed-processing thing like Google Reader or something else that alert you when something cool pops up, and you’re done. You can even share those links if you want.

It’s a good way to do your holiday shopping…back in November. Speaking of which, this year I probably won’t be arsed to write much on the blog. Way too much stuff is going on and I am really short on free time to goof around online. Maybe I’ll still write something, I guess.

You, do you have any better ways to do this? I am eager to listen.

2 comments | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom

December 9, 2011

Remake and Sequels, Anime Ver.

By omo

Making up reasons why anime remake and sequels exist looks like a fun game. Here’s my try. Going to avoid using paragraphs (as much).

Underlying observations, concepts and assumptions:

Many anime are based on existing material. They are adaptations. Furthermore many anime suck badly when they “run out” of material to adopt within the context of a single adaptation effort (tho what are notably excepted are “filler” material that can expand on existing material in the context of filling in gaps or providing better fanservice. Even so, mileage vary on that. It is just there some very notable exceptions like K-ON and now, Fate/Zero).

There are more sequels than prequels. As usual Ask John begins with a question that is probably not too well-phrased.

Both sequels and prequels have good commercial viability.

Things like copyright law exist and companies and IP owners generally plan their businesses (eg., anime production) according to those business practices. I mean, this is a no brainer; I’m just writing it here to raise this fact. (Actually that is what I want to see in that Ask John article. Except he totally didn’t get into it.)

Similarly, production companies are sometimes organized into umbrella pipelines. For example Aniplex is much more likely to use other companies associated with Sony for shows Aniplex produces. Companies will plan their adaptation plans around this fact as well (but that is just a guess).

I’m going to assume that in soliciting funding for anime/media-mix projects, the fact something is a direct sequel versus a reboot versus a hybrid, has an impact in terms of how a work is solicited, how the funding may be determined on past performance of not only the production committee, but the franchise itself. (I.e., “Did the first series do well? Can we do it again better?”)

Discussions:

One good talking point (and not so much of an example, as you’ll see) of this sequel versus remake discussion is in the case of the Rebuild of Evangelion. Let us take big, clear, red, highlighted note that Evangelion is not an anime adaptation. It is also Gainax’s baby in that they own it (which bypasses what John said about WMFH). And now it’s Studio Khara doing the production. I think it is best to ignore this specific example when talking about this subject because it is more like a Batman or Superman reboot, where copyright, artistic consistency, branding, etc., are all at issue. It is very different than, say, why they’re remaking Hunter x Hunter (nobody knows why). I mean at least we know why Columbia wants to reboot Spiderman, for a long list of reasons, some of which do not have to do with how profitable the Sony ones were.

Actually now come to think of it, is this why the new Saki is a reboot too? Anyone knows?

There are plenty of artistic reasons as well to make reboots than sequels, besides the wider-audience kind of thing. Let’s talk about that for a moment. John’s pretty spot on in that we would watch (for example) a reboot of Yamato, as I don’t know if we can find enough people under age of 30 who can sit through all of the original to fit in a bus. I mean, it’s classic but dire stuff. He didn’t explicitly say, simply, that there are a lot of reboots today that are based on some really, really old shows. I mean there are reasons based on physics why we have ST:TNG and ST:Enterprise, etc., and not just more footage of Shatner goofing around (he does that enough on the side)–people age, retire, get fat, and, in some cases, die. Until we all become seiyuu-cogs for robot actors, those are problems in which reboots and remakes can overcome.

There’s another artistic reason; it’s the one Tomino applied a few times: retcon. More precisely, it is about how you can remake a work as a second draft. It’s much easier to sit through 3 Mobile Suit Gundam movies today than watch that in the TV format. Trust me. Doubly so for Turn-A Gundam. And let’s not even get into the ZZ films. Even more drastic examples include Do You Remember Love, Utena the Movie (RIP Kawakami), and even one of my all-time favorite examples, Futakoi Alternative.

Conclusions:

Undeniably, reboots are created today because there’s a market gap for it. In a linear narrative kind of sense, it makes more economic (and other sorts of) sense to redo some shows and sell it again, since the old version may have some limits purely as a result of the long time that has elapsed. In a technical sense, it avoids some problems sequels have, such as copyright ownership and production consistencies. In a creative sense, it frees the reboot from the character, plot, and setting limits of the original work. So when I read this:

Reboots may generate more revenue, but they limit creative progression. However, if creative evolution is the ideal goal, then even sequels are less constructive than focusing effort on creating entirely new franchises and new adaptations instead of resurrecting older titles for either remake or continuation. […] However, right now, when titles like Dragon Ball Kai seem as popular, if not more popular, than Dragon Ball Z, and anticipation is high for the forthcoming Berserk theatrical remake, consumer support seems to validate and encourage the continued production of remakes and reboots in place of sequels.

I’m like, cool story bro. But creative progression? LOL? I mean, didn’t they finished adopting Dragon Ball Z? How can it “creatively progress” any further? Oh wait there are how many movies now? What do the letters G and T spell? Seriously give me a break. In DBZ’s case, we’ve already depleted “sequels” entirely (from an economic perspective) and now we’re moving into reboots since there’s nowhere else to go, and it’s about time for it anyway.

Wanting sequels over reboots is pretty much the purest instance of otaku fetishism in my opinion. Because, why, it’s somehow socially okay to crave for narrative constructs without want of the creative integrity of the original work, over concepts like “artistic freedom” or “creator’s expectation to copyright”? Or even over the notion of fixing-your-mistakes, to improve on an existing work in an in-place effort? I see that no better than craving for breasts or panty shots, if not worse in the sense that those things are pretty open-ended, where as fans are fickle as hell when it comes to “their” stories and characters. It’s like the snake that devours its own tail; that they crave the thing that slowly destroys the essence of its original existence. Remakes may be one one method to get out of that trap!

4 comments | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Modern Visual Culture

November 28, 2011

On noitaminA, Again

By omo

Farming twitter is easy picking, especially when someone already collected the tweets. Take this snippet, originated from an interview of three key dudes behind Guilty Crown.  (So pardon the twice-in-a-row.)

I think this is indicative of how derailed how a few vocal types on the internet think what “mainstream” entertainment is. I mean, when I think about it, I think things like Michael Jackson, Transformer 3 or Donald Duck. I certainly don’t think Guilty Crown panders to the male otaku niche–that’s the same as saying action-fighting-violent Hollywood SFX in the likes of Avatar or Transformers panders to the minority otaku crowd. I think those words do not mean what some people (namely, this guy) think it means.

The twitter conversation went on from there, lots of people talked about certain things about noitaminA and the various shows from it. It’s not really important unless you do marketing and licensing for noitaminA, because I feel for those of us overseas who recognizes the name, that’s somewhat representative as to how we feel about the “brand.” But I wouldn’t trust it much further than I can throw it.

Unfortunately it isn’t typically possible for the average consumer to “reverse engineer” the brand’s image (especially when it’s projected without any direction from the original owners of the brand) and figure out what the business decisions are, when we’re talking about a multi-faceted franchising effort. Especially when it isn’t even in the same language. I mean I don’t even know if people know what the business decisions actually are, yet people are just shooting at it. [And I don’t mean it in a negative way per se: You go armchair anime producer, don’t ever let ignorance stop you from being creative.]

And I think likening Guilty Crown to Code Geass is also partly because in both cases, the producers were trying to attract the same kind of audience. I mean after all there are lots of girls who like Code Geass, I’d think. More than, say, Trapeze probably. So who am I to criticize? Well, maybe only at the fact that noitaminA is a crazy, 2am time slot kind of deal.

If you don’t believe me about the girls-liking-crap-like-this bit (if we can even consider that there are people at all who likes Guilty Crown; certain nobody admits to liking it), let’s not forget: Something like 35% of people who watch K-ON in Japan are actually girls. Is it pandering to otaku? I think it does–but it does also so, so much more. I mean, I’m going to have a :V face towards anyone who called it a moeblob show and left it at that. But since so many did, it just highlights the fact it is really hard to guess these things unless you’ve got the right context. (Or perhaps just as important in the noitaminA discussion: 30% or more of Kuroshitsuji 2’s viewers are male!) I mean there are probably more girls than guys reading Shounen Jump, a magazine clearly pandering to guys. (That one is a guess.)

And who knows, maybe K-ON is the answer, or at least it contains the start to it, a nugget of truth. Maybe noitaminA is known for things like Antique Bakeries or Houses of Five Leaves (to single out one creator on there that I dislike), but it just doesn’t pay. And who is to blame for that?

Reading the actual interview (Dave is in his usual form here), it all makes a lot of sense. They’re following a formula. It only further confuses me why people don’t understand what is happening here; this is hardly new territory. I suppose this can also be chalked up to another case of “catering to someone elses’s tastes = pandering” as per the usual otaku blogger parlor tricks for some people, but com’on man.

And whatever you do, don’t read the ANN forum thread for that topic. It’s even more stupid. Or perhaps the comparison to Transformer 3 is not too far off the course, in that it is a profitable and popular flick that got universally panned. And in that case it’s Mission Accomplished, no?

8 comments | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Guilty Crown, Modern Visual Culture

November 16, 2011

The Anime Ghetto of America

By omo

This is not about the ghetto of an excuse for NYAF in 2010 and 2011, even if that is probably tangentially related. This is about Kuraghime and Tatami Galaxy, and why I think there is some problem with the way some people think about anime. These problems may or may not be related, they just happen to pop in my head in the past 36 hours.

1. Liking is a state of mind. I remember talking to some people about the Passion of the Christ, a controversial film about a gruesome depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus as per the Gospels. The content of the discussion doesn’t really matter, but the conclusion was that the film became more about how you (in this case, secular press versus fundie types) react to a film has just as much to do with you as it does to the film. I think that sort of mirror-transparency is critical in today’s media reviews. I think this is a big reason why it is difficult to take reviews from sites like ANN or Fandompost seriously, unless you’ve hooked on to their particular bandwagon and can appreciate how those respective reviewer-mirrors work. I think over time I have done that for Chris B., but more because he does offer a much more technical-savvy perspective on a video transfer or sound space or whatever, something that is sorely missing among reviews of anime today.

2. The problem is further exasperated, that far majority of anime out there are derivative media crossover things. This means when someone looks at Fate/Zero, for example, they aren’t thinking it is not pandering to the max, but that they are suppose to think it is pandering to the max. [I mean, how can the anime moeficiation of a popular prequel set of light novels to a popular visual novel (that was also consequently “moe-fied” via anime) be not pandering? Seems impossible.] To use an analogy, it’s like we’re in the league of extraordinary lunch box collectors, and then there’s this awesome Twilight-themed lunch box available. Some guy who doesn’t even know what Twilight is beyond what they see in the news reviews the lunch box, and says it’s kind of lame or kind of good, whatever. I’m going to be like, derp. It is missing the point. Maybe that isn’t even a good example because the hypo reviewer at least knows it is pandering, s/he is just not assigning any or assigning the correct value to that part. It’s worse when it comes to some anime: I don’t think this guy is aware of the pandering at all. Or for that matter this other guy, let alone assigning value to whatever.

While it is valuable to have the perspective of someone who would judge Fate/Zero as someone outside of Nasuverse fandom, it feels invariably that they’re doing it wrong. It’s probably because they don’t know the material is pandering. Maybe this is the majority position on a lot of anime for us gaijin, since we’re not living in a deluge of otaku-bait-marketing as our Japanese counterparts may be swimming in, but one can make a strong argument that you can’t fairly judge the work if you don’t have this context baked into your perspective. Again, that hypothetical Twilight lunch box is intended to be sold to your daughters, not hardcore lunch box collectors. By reviewing it like box collectors instead of its intended audience, it feels almost like we’re ghetto-fying the whole thing. There’s this artifice in which we’re trying to fit the anime we consume into said artifice. And for what reason?

I think this is a major issue with the ghettofication of anime. It feels helpless to have to read reviews like that. It feels probably just as helpless to review anime like that while being completely blind to that side of the equation. I say ghettofication because these mix-media slums is where the bulk of the primary late-night TV anime audience lives, and it’s kind of a silo-style, little Hooverville camps that most mainstream people don’t even want to turn an eye to, let alone adventure into and gleam the essences of what makes the inhabitants enjoy the shows they watch. Or I should say, especially on ANN, it feels like they purposely want to stay away from that sort of evaluation. I want to posit this as a problem with anime, and not so much the way people review them–after all, they can review however they want. But the fact that ANN has reviews like this it is just kind of a joke. It’s like suddenly you read a crazy rant from Steve Jobs about how he hates charities or a crazy rant from Roger Ebert about how he hates video games. I mean, LOL? (By the way both are probably untrue.) This is kind of a problem that ANN has in order to obtain any kind of credibility as an reviewing organization. (Then again, this problem can be milked for pageviews! So hey.)

2b. I have this thought about Kara no Kyoukai. That show, too, is a sort of pandering. But among these attempts (IwakamiP gets an extra nod for taking that, Madoka and Fate/Zero to somewhere slightly less ghetto. Maybe.) I’m left to scratch my head and ask if people have otherwise really tried to build a bridge between the otaku and the growing number of kids-turning-into-adults who are friendly to the cause.

3. Sating the demand of the mainstream. Continuing in good o’ OWS spirit let us talk about the 1% versus 99%, even if it comes out to be a false dichotomy of sorts. It also pings one of my pet peeve about people who says “anime is a privilege not a right.” I think that saying is largely bullshit–this is not a have-versus-have not issue. This is an artistic proliferation and industry viability issue. I might like my moe anime as much as anyone, and I do a healthy amount of importing (if such a thing can ever be healthy). But that kind “hey I paid for it so” of thinking causes two major problems. First, it drives the have-nots to what all the have-nots do in the 21st century: media piracy. There are some good studies on this topic, and it really comes to artificial barriers to entry to extract cost based on some perception of value that does not optimize supply and demand. In other words, things are unnecessarily expensive and inaccessible due to a variety of reasons (some are forgivable but others are just petty) and not only the content creators and middlemen make less money than they could have, it encourages people to pirate things. It’s a lose-lose scenario. Second, it unnecessarily ghetto-fies the industry. Talent drain and race to the bottom in production cost? Because it keeps on pandering to those who would pay the biggest bucks, because the work, the condition, and the products loses mainstream relevance. I mean how many people entered the anime industry because they saw something awesome when they were little? Tons. I also believe this is a root cause of Japan’s fandom-industry vacuum now filled by doujin production. Is Ghibli all we need? I think that is clearly a “no.” I am not saying no to moe; I’m saying yes to everything. There will always going to be trashy moe crap to consume. We can count on the least risky thing to continue to exist, but that cannot be the dominant thing out there. And in order to do that, it means we have to make anime affordable and accessible. It’s the best thing for both fans and anime industry. It’s also good for society in general.

4. But of course it’s easier said than done. I think the biggest hurdle is that the financing model for anime in Japan just doesn’t lend itself to that sort of business models. The problem comes down to that mainstream production is expensive and they have a much smaller safety net when one flops (and they do all the time). Or not even that; just taking risks to make something of it is, well, risky and potentially expensive. You can just look at Anime-no-chikara and noitaminA for examples. What goes around does come around: if nobody buys Kuragehime, nobody is going to license shows like it. What I propose is not that the problem is nobody buys Kuragehime, but the problem is why should the proliferation of works like Kuragehime depend on people buying it on home video? Shouldn’t our energies be focused on solving the root issue and not run up the same pile of dead horse corpses?

People don’t buy Star Trek (TOS) (mainly because it is really, really expensive), but people loved the show and it went on to become the thing we know today. It’s very profitable. It transformed science and technology in America and abroad by inspiring a generation or two of scientists and engineers, and generally contributed so much good to the world. Not to mention its contribution to science fiction media, TV and film. It may sound mad-old Tomino-esqe but can’t we have that as a goal? It sounds like this has to be a part of whatever solution that flushes out the dirt, the good stuff, from the ghettos and release it to the masses. If there’s all this spite and bad blood between 99% and the 1% we want to be, the going would be tough on the road to reconcile the 1% of anime fans being catered to and the 99% of fans who don’t even want anything to do with that 1%.

[BONUS ROUND: 5. This is why I find Colony Drop problematic–they seek to reinforce this ghettoficiation; I should say, that is the schtik that they make a clapping noise upon, that cardboard wall of makeshift tents in which we live in. I’m just hoping that is offset by CD pointing out such a ghetto actually exists. They do not do this explicitly, but maybe they should.]

Leave a comment | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Fate, Kuragehime, Modern Visual Culture