How Has Anime Changed Over the Past 15 Years?
Ask John the same question, and you can read his answer.
It is a tough question to tackle, so I felt it was unfair to criticize him behind his back. Rather, I want to supplement his survey of the last 15 years of anime by pointing out some key changes that JP and I (mostly I) felt that was too important to be left out of John’s answer. There are also some erroneous bits, but I’m going to ignore them for now (ie., LOL moe and tsundere in anime predates 1995 kkthx).
Japan, now online: Between 1995 and 2010, cellular phone penetration has skyrocketed in Japan. If you recall Makoto Shinkai’s 5 cm/s, that was a key plot device in the first segment, especially coming into the film as a generation who find their cell phones second-nature. I presume this is how most modern Japanese teens and young adults feel about cell phones. Of course, Japan is this weird place where more people go online and do their internet stuff via cell phones than with their personal computers, so that also means places like 2ch is really a socially important thing today. Let’s not even go into how important 2ch is for anime fans of Japan. And 2ch didn’t officially exist until 1999.
The impact of 2ch on anime is hard to point and cite authoritatively, even if I’m sure we could cite to a bunch of stuff. It is, however, notable as a way for industry folks to gauge and interact with fans. Leaks to 2ch is almost like a marketing tool nowadays. (Kanatagatari’s leak is widely thought of as on purpose, for example.) We have anime and manga made about the Train Man story, which is essentially a national-cultural nod to 2ch. Obviously 2ch gets referenced in anime and manga, too. Still the real impact of 2ch has on anime is on the fans, on the fan industries (read: doujin market), and as a social hub that can make or break a work. Gurren Lagann episode 4 anyone?
And that’s just 2ch. Blogging; Mixi; online stream sites like Nico and Youtube, DTO sites, paid-streams, even the likes of Crunchyroll and foreign-operated licensees all play a notable role in the evolution of anime especially in the latter part of this decade. Pixiv and similar communities fostered growth of talents, even if only in part. It also presented a fan-facing revenue stream, complemented that whole “Comic Market” mentality that, well, we’ll get right to it.
Matching Passion with Preordination, Examples from Gamers
The post came to mind after listening to the latest ANNCast, with guests Adam Sheehan and Lance Heiskell from Funimation.
I sort of knocked Funimation a bit last year when I compared their online streaming stuff with Crunchyroll, but that’s probably something I didn’t intended to do at first. The thought came to and it was kind of fun to run with it, you know? Partly because it’s true that their approach to “new media” (in quotes as the term of art) is along the lines of what we see from the more entrenched players of the publishing industry, no matter how much better Funi is compared to most of the others that we know. That particular subject matter deserves its own post, anyways. Like this.
The thing is, I think Funimation’s marketing team is doing a very good job overall at least on their web-facing arm of the department. I think guys like Adam, Lance and Rojas all are doing it right. At the same time, it’s no fun when Funimation may be the only US-based anime company that not only can benefit greatly from that sort of marketing, but also they’re the only ones who have the resources to hire people to do that full time among these anime publishers here.
After listening to ANNCast (I somewhat skipped the movie talk bits, since I don’t really care), it occurred to me that while the two ANN hosts are trying to entertain their audience in their own ways, they come off as unprofessional. This was because compared to the two Funimation guests, who are both professionals and as sufficiently genuine as a PR gig can be, Zac and Justin come off like clowns who hate their jobs and the shows they have to watch. I guess it is forgivable in the sense that Zac and Justin were trying to make it entertaining, but uh, I wouldn’t invite Lance to a podcast if I want it to be entertaining. That’s worse than inviting Holo to be your anime’s co-lead, to use an economics in-in-joke.
Well, I’m sure both Zac and Justin are working in a field in which they like. I mean who would otherwise put up with the things they put up with? At the same time, I look at Chris Beveridge’s twitter, and I’m like, man, that’s kind of a nice job. But then again he is the guy who can watch all of One Piece and enjoy it, and the next moment review the torrential outpouring of crappy hentai anime that he reviews out of some notion of journalistic and artistic integrity. In fact, because he’s seen so many crappy anime, I think he’s got it: He knows how to reconcile with Sturgeon’s Law.
Let it be known that if you do want to write reviews for a living, you will end up fighting Sturgeon’s Law, that’s for sure. For a good example of what not to do, just read ANN’s reviews! Joking aside, it’s also possible that some may wander into the deep end, so the editorial and review policies of a thing like the ANN is not easy to balance. I knock ANN, because they have this big bull’s eye on their backs, since they are ambitious enough to take up their crosses and nobody else has (or could). Not because they suck (which could be true) and should go away (hah). Well, it’s probably unfair to criticize the whole organization for the failing of a few, and the problem I am talking about in this post is universal (as I see it on Jtor all the time).
So what’s the best way to approach this problem?
What I want to share is what has already been said, many times, by the video game folks online. The video game “web 2.0 press” industry has had a much bigger head start on blogging and reviewing that they’re past this phase already. Instead of reinventing the wheel I’ll I quote from Penny Arcade’s less eloquent half. After all, if the gamer world is the Matrix, Gabe and Tycho are like The Oracle. Except instead of cookies they make charities, cons and comics:
I think the biggest complaint I saw [in Assassin’s Creed] was that the missions become repetitive and boring. I actually didn’t understand this complaint at all until just the other day. I had gotten an early copy of the game just like everyone else in the media but I was just playing it for fun. I’d cracked into it over the weekend and when I got into the office on Monday I started seeing these negative reviews. When I saw the low scores I was actually really upset and I wanted to talk about the game here on the site. I wanted to tell everyone that these guys were full of shit. However, since so many of the complaints were based on the ending I wanted to beat it first so I was sure I wasn’t missing anything. I attacked the game again but this time with the goal of beating it as fast as I could. I was determined to get a post up on Tuesday and I was pushing through the game as fast as I could. I went from finding every high perch in a district to only getting the ones I needed to advance the story. I stopped saving every citizen and avoided any unnecessary confrontations. The informer missions that I had really enjoyed before, I now avoided because I knew they took too long to complete. I did the bare minimum of missions to progress the story and anything that “hindered” my progress was frustrating. Monday night after skipping over another combat (something I used to really enjoy) I stopped myself. What the fuck was I doing? I wasn’t playing the game because I wanted to I was playing it because I had a deadline and I needed to beat it. I stopped immediately and decided I’d write about the game whenever I got around to beating it. I spent another day and a half with it and during that time I hunted for hidden flags and explored the cities again. I came in this morning and finally did beat it but I did it at my own pace and I enjoyed every part of it.
Imagine what an open ended sandbox title must look like to a reviewer especially right now. How many games do they have piling up on their desks? A game like Assassins [C]reed isn’t meant to be played under a deadline. You shouldn’t be trying to beat it as fast as you can so you can move on to Mass Effect or Mario Galaxy. As soon as I gave myself a deadline all of a sudden I understood all their complaints. It was like a fucking Escher painting. I had put myself in their shoes and suddenly the landscape flipped and I could see games from their perspective. In the end I wasn’t angry at them for their bad reviews. I actually just felt bad for them.
If you’re not sure what Gabe is saying, go hit up the link and read the whole story, hopefully it makes a lot more sense. And yeah, I do feel bad about some of the reviewers out there, having to cram down crap moe shows they hate because that’s what they’re paid to do. In the end it tortures themselves, their organization, and their readers, all just for some traffic spikes. And it isn’t that they can’t or shouldn’t review moe crap or whatever, but they are incapable of handling it.
It’s worse because I know how some of you out there “work.” I am too an infinitesimal part of this nefarious cloud of individuals who can actually write a review in the disguise of press, and this is not a labor to be done without joy. If you are doing this web journalism thing for real, as a career, as your calling in life, please do not discredit your and your colleagues’ reputation by putting out reviews of things that aren’t labor of love. Because in truth, the whole Web 2.0-way of reviews is to connect, not to arbitrate. We look at reviews as just a data point to make a purchase decision. It’s YOU be the judge, not our REVIEWS. To cite the more eloquent half of Penny Arcade:
If I had to state the difference between our approach and others, it’s that we seem to understand that we are simply expressing an opinion. The age of the psychic reviewer shaman is over. You should never allow a meaningless, arbitrary integer promulgated by an arbitrary voice who came to power arbitrarily make decisions for you. That’s essentially what Gabriel was trying to say, but he said it in a Gabriel way and it may be that the signal was lost.
You can also read what I think about a large portion of the “pro” reviews out there for anime, because Gabe sums it up. It’s a very relevant tangent, but I won’t go into it here.
The ability to overcome this hurdle is what makes a real pro, well, a pro. It’s what makes you credible. The cold, harsh economics of it all is something you want to deal with as a pro, and not something you can put off to your readers just because “no publicity is bad publicity.” It is not a good community-building approach. It doesn’t mean a reviewer can’t express his opinion, but any idiot online can express his opinion, what makes yours earn your pay? A professional critic’s opinion is valuable in of itself, and not just because he has a title that is a professional critic. It is not couched in personalized contexts but truths that connects with the audience. Heck, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do troll reviews–again, any idiot online can troll. If I’m going to pay a troll, that troll better be a good troll, if not an excellent one.
I suppose, thankfully, that anime reviews have not reach the levels of seriousness in business that game reviews have. This mixed blessing both curses us to a sea of mediocre reviews being created merely on the merit of traffic, with better reviews gaining no clout on them; and it blesses us with a “yukkuri” attitude that, in the end of the day, reviews are just yet another pile of pies in the sea of opinion in which we exist.
This Just In: The Internet Schemes to Let Everyone Know about K-ON Season 2
The second season of K-ON, a hot Japanese television series about a music club, has been confirmed on December, 30th during a live event at Yokohama, Japan. Little did the attendees of that concert know, it was just the beginning of a massive conspiracy being revealed.
The news of the second season of K-ON spread by word-of-mouth and using Japan’s extensive electronic and internet communication network as concert goers go online to affirmed of what they saw and heard on the show. TBS Japan’s website for the animated sit-com updated its graphic and reaffirmed the news. However, that was a trigger of something worse.
Cyber-investigators world-wide have been studying a newly-discovered botnet, a network of computers that are hijacked by malware or worm. While traditionally botnets are used to send spam messages, this new botnet, named Kado.3, not only send spam messages, but also compose viral marketing news posts about whatever is deemed the latest fad.
“You know all that chatter about Kanye West’s ‘Imma gonna let you finish’? Kado.3 was responsible for about 5-10% of the talk you see out there, mostly in the form of Twitter messages and pointless Tumblr posts,” said internet security expert Dr. Brian Conflick. Dr. Conflick is one of the first researchers who discovered the new bug, and what they saw might mark a new age in internet attacks.
“Kado.3 is smart enough to act completely autonomously and meaningfully compared to older botnets. Rather than just indiscriminately target its victims when spamming by generating email addresses randomly, Kado.3’s new design allows it to target specific individuals and access a wide variety of network types.” Dr. Conflict showed a real-life example in which a particular Twitter account was suddenly gaining thousands of followers within the matter of several hours. The Twitter account, undisclosed here to protect the privacy of the individual, was a musician who was already on Twitter for many months prior to the attack, and had only a few hundred followers at the time of the attack.
According to experts, like most modern botnets, Kado.3 will dial into pre-determined internet addresses to get software updates and instructions for further activities. Many of these internet addresses, as researchers have determined through reverse-engineering the botnet worm, originates from Japan. Further reverse engineering have revealed even more shocking effects.
“What makes Kado.3 incredible is that it can behave via triggers on the web, and they don’t have to be tied to these pre-determined update sites.” Dr. Conflick said. “We’ve discovered that certain fragments of code that passes through the infected computers’ web browsers can trigger a new set of behavior in Kado.3. It could be used to orchestrate a cascading attack in which the internet in general picks up these stray triggers innocuously, spread them around, but computers infected that consequently downloads the trigger will execute a new set of instructions, further spreading these triggers along the same transmission method that the infected computer was first infected. These triggers could be images. The first one we’ve found was a curious logo of some club that called itself ‘SOS.’ Thankfully from what we can tell, it did not trigger Kado.3 to become anything different, as if it was a test of some sort.”
What does this have to do with a Japanese TV show? Internet researchers discovered that a combination of the words and images of K-ON and its protagonist, Yui Hirasawa, as used by TBS’s website to announce the new season of the television show, is the next trigger of the Kado.3 worm. As expected, upon the first hours of the news breaking online, researchers detected a burst of activity of the Kado.3 botnet, causing an undetermined numbers of suspect blogs to suddenly parrot the news. Investigators are currently working on determining as to who could be behind this latest attack, even if it seems relatively innocuous.
“This is the biggest break we’ve had since discovering Kado.3,” James Torpi, a federal investigator working with various internet security institutions, described the developing situation. “Traditionally botnets are controlled via IRC or in the later cases, Twitter and other social networking sites. This is the first botnet that could be controlled from any plain website. It is of utmost importance that we get to the root of it and put an end to this new threat.”
[The above is fabricated, if you didn’t know.]
Year In Review: N-Squared List
Just like last year, I guess some things have not changed. This could be a reference.
Anime Is a Privilege And a Right
[I’m farming my drafts, here is one of the abortions that I felt made some sense.]
There’s a school of thought among some anime fans that anime is not a right, it’s a privilege. And I understand well enough where that thought come from. But I think it’s wrong to think that–at least, it’s no more correct from an economics or moral perspective than self-entitling warez kiddies ripping UR DVDs.
Of course, you have to bear with me. The saying of “anime is not a right, it’s a privilege” is just a saying. It doesn’t actually mean anime is a privilege. Because the word privilege is not so different from right–both are legal devices that allow a category of people’s freedom to do something they aren’t entitled to. For example, everyone in the US has the right to receive reasonable medical care but only the rich and insured are privileged to do so. On the flip side, since there’s no right to economic solvency, poor people go bankrupt when they get tagged with a bad disease without health insurance, where as the insured and the rich are privileged to afford their health care. To be precise, the on-the-face meaning of the saying implies that anime is a right–the privilege is the ability to watch it legally and foster a (potentially) positive, mutually beneficial relationship with the copyright owner. The statement “anime is…” refers to its existence and not just the partaking of anime as fans do.
Which is to say, all of that is not at all what these people mean. Or is it? I think I wouldn’t be writing this rant if people said “anime is a right and a privilege.” But the saying, I think, addresses the fundamental, “all man are created equal” concept that is so beholden in American culture. And anime is not any kind of that.
Or is it? What exactly is a right under those conditions? Our freedom of speech, assembly, privacy, the right to own firearms for traditional use…none of them are absolute rights. The right to watch anime? The right to buy anime? The right to demand it? The first two are rights of privacy, the last two are rights of expression… So to me, anime is definitely a right. What else do you really need?
As far as privilege goes, if it’s a right, it’s also a privilege as long as you can pull it off via influence, wealth, or the rule of law. I think anime falls under the “wealth” category. After all, it’s “lol anime” in the sense that it is a commercial expression for the most part–used to sell books, manga, toys, “a moe moe gay ol’ time,” or what have you. Nobody is entitled or privileged to that unless they pay.
So there you have it–anime is a right and a privilege; or neither. I just find it ironic one of the biggest supporter of the North American anime industry think otherwise. I guess it just never occur to some that there are parts in the world where speech is not free, and people really do have to fight for the right to party. That they can’t even buy half the anime that gets released in America because it’s “not a right” and it doesn’t pass mustard against moral censors or the local government’s opinion on what passes as permissible media. Heck, stuff like DRM and region coding suggest that anime isn’t even a privilege, and they have the legal right of way as well. So I guess it’s more accurate that anime isn’t even a privilege.
