This is day four of a twelve day series of posts. These are not in any particular order of preference. These posts are simply what I enjoyed reading this year. You could kind of count this in CCY’s Twelve Moments of Anime 2008 project.
Scott of The Anime Almanac likes to be controversial and knows that his controversial posts net him the most attention. It wasn’t a surprise when he reported about anime dub voice actor Greg Ayres’ stance on fansubs and Scott’s personal views, it generated lots of crossfire between the two camps (or rather, it was one-way fire).
Despite personally despising how Scott handles his blogger relationships and his view on fansubs and the industry, I have to say I did love this post because it was honest and well researched (for the most part). Controversy does make for fun times, and I did enjoy some of the responses to his post, both in his comments (which are now lost) and blogs (which included Hinano’s RAEG post, but is also unfortunately lost).
Even though we may not agree with his post, I think it’s good to hear our opponents once in a while, even if their arguments may be the same thing over and over again. It keeps us thinking about these issues because they do affect the Japanese anime industry as well as the American distributors.
Or maybe I’m just being nice and I think the post actually sucks. Whatever, I wrote this much, don’t want to back out now.
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I have to admit that is also one of the “lost” posts that I’d miss lol
Also, why am I a tag! Does this mean there will be more posts in the future where I will be tagged? XD
@Hinano: Quite possibly!
@omo: Heh, yes. Which reminds me, I need to go look at his newest post…
it’s always fun to tilt windmills once a year, each time with a different group.
OH LOOK WHAT I FOUND:
(there was a video of the panel here)
watch as your hero gets first ignored, then ridiculed, then bs’ed because he brought up a topic that isn’t easily straw man’ed and then made fun of in a cartman voice!
We even ended up have to kill time during events we wanted to go to. The bento making workshop, for example filled up 30 minutes before it was even scheduled to start. Then the cosplay makeup one ended early. And of course, there were panels that we wanted to go to that we had to just quit early because they ended up sucking. The big one here was Greg Ayer’s fan subbing panel.
We wanted to go to that panel for some kind of a debate or discussion about the perilous situation that the American anime industry is in, and ask questions about things like streaming video or raws. Instead, the thing was basically a big straw man circle jerk. The “arguments” that people were giving for downloading were so specious that I couldn’t believe that people actually used them to try to justify their actions. We’re talking about things like preferring subtitles to dubs or purposely trying to “hurt” ADV because it’s so big and bad. Funny, I could’ve sworn that I read an academic study about piracy in anime compared to music piracy and while music fans often saw their piracy as resistance, anime fans thought that it was a misguided kind of support.
These straw mans were mocked, and generally when people gave reasons for why they downloaded they were shoehorned into a straw man. I also rolled my eyes at the almost confessional nature of some of the responses. “I had heard about it and I really wanted to see it but it had been out for a few years and I didn’t think it would ever get released on DVD at that point and FORGIVE ME FATHER FOR I HAVE SINNED PLEASE SHOW ME THE TINIEST GLIMMER OF YOUR INFINITY MERCY WHILE I LASH MYSELF IN PENANCE!” Oh, and along with the straw mans were a lack of understanding of some recent trends (like saying that Japan doesn’t stream and isn’t going to, when Gonzo has been streaming two, soon to be three shows) and those “When did you stop beating your wife?” arguments. Sigh.
I had sticky, nuanced issues that I wanted to discuss but basically got shouted down after asking some of them and gave up. I tried to ask how Tivoing Code Geass and not watching the commercials was different from watching a fansub of Code Geass when some guy in the audience started babbling on about timesharing. After I said “I’m familiar with the legal decision in Sony vs. Universal (I learned about when I did my MASTERS in TV AND FILM and needed to brief my boss about AT MY JOB IN TV LICENSING)”, the guy kind of waddled out of the room. Additionally, I believe that Greg Ayers had said something about how anime lost its advertising 2 months ago or something. This was news to us, and we said amongst ourselves “Whoa, what’s this? I hadn’t heard about this”, to which the dude in front of us was like “THERE’S NO MORE ANIME IN THE ANIME BLOCK IN JAPAN NOW!” Again, this was also news to me so I was like “Whoa, which one? I just saw the ratings last week and the big blocks like Sunday morning and Thursday night were still there. Do you mean like the late-night shows that air at like 2:30am?” to which he just babbled on again about how there’s no more anime.
Part of the problem was that when the straw men were combined with actual legitimate reasons, the legitimate reasons weren’t really tied together in any way. For example, he started to debunk was the “it’s too expensive” argument. If a season of Lost costs $40, why should I have to pay $30 for one DVD (of 5) for an anime? And there are legitimate reasons for this based on how a show like Lost is monetized or the economics of scale. Additionally, there was discussions about how a store like Best Buy uses DVDs as a loss leader for more expensive items and Suncoast doesn’t/can’t, so that’s why a DVD was $30 there before it died (and you all made it die, you awful, awful fans). However, a variant of this was brought up again, to which the reply was “Don’t worry. I’ll talk about how to be able to save on anime shortly.”
Here’s the problem: that discussion is fundamentally about how to get anime without paying for it. The shame argument for buying DVDs is centered around saying “You didn’t spend $30 for everything you ever watched, and now Suncoast video died and that’s your fault and now anime will die too because people won’t be able to buy anime at the mall because you killed Suncoast.” Yet now we’re getting told how to buy DVDs for less than $30 even though that’s what you just said was bad! Similarly, we were also just told how the anime industry can’t afford to price DVDs like Hollywood can, but now we’re going to get told how to be able to buy the DVDs for prices like what Hollywood charges for that season of Lost! If everyone did these practices, the industry WILL STILL DIE. There’s a reason that they’re not doing them now! It reminds me of the complaints about the lines at Anime Boston. People would complain about how they missed the entire Friday of the con when that’s all that they paid for and get told “This is why you should’ve picked up your badge on Thursday night”, yet if everyone actually did that, the only difference is that there would’ve been 14 hours lines on Thursday instead of Friday.
I honestly didn’t want to go there to try to pwn. I wanted to ask about nuanced aspects of this problem. My Tivo one was based on the fact that Cartoon Network isn’t going to know that I watched it if I Tivoed it, nor will I have seen the ads. I was also going to extend that into a streaming video one about watching something on an anime equivalent of Hulu, but clicking to a different tab in Firefox while waiting for the ads to finish (and if that’s any different from clicking away from Cartoon Network during the Code Geass ads.) I wanted to bring up Nico Nico because it blurs a line between piracy and fan parodies, which he said were OK because they’re different. Not only I would never, ever pay to watch Rosario + Vampire, but I only watched that show because the Nico Nico peanut gallery made it funny.
Finally, I would’ve asked about Netflix. I think that they’re trying to close the barn doors after the horses have left, since there’s no real way I could go to DVD-only and not watch raws. It’s about trying to get back onto that release tract. I figure that I’d have to wait 18 months to 2 years before I’d finally be at a point where all of the DVD releases would be new and not something that I watched (or had the opportunity to watch) as it was airing. I’m looking at AoD’s release calendar for this year, and here’s what I see:
Death Note
Emma
Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time
Kujibiki Unbalance
Maburaho
Otoboku
Papuwa
Pokemon
Red Garden
Shattered Angels (that Kyoshiro to Towa no something show)
Blue Seed
Cosplay Complex
Desert Punk
Gakuen Heaven
Kanon
Lucky Star
Nuhroodo
Samurai 7
Cromartie High School
Gurren Lagan
Super Robot Wars OG
Tokyo Majin
Welcome to the NHK
Yuu Yuu Hakusho
Aquarion
Devil May Cry
Di Gi Charat Nyo
Dragon Ball Z
Full Metal Panic Fumoffu
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Strawberry Panic
Towards the Terra
Bleach
Detective Conan
Pumpkin Scissors
Tweeny Witches
Beck
Inuyasha
Maria-sama ga Miteiru
Ranma
Samurai Gun
Shuffle
xxxHolic
Yu Gi Oh
Code Geass
Godannar
Gokusen
Kodocha
Simoun
Zegapain
Angelic Layer
Voltron
DNAngel
Sasami
School Rumble
GaoGaiGar
Hakugei: The Legend of Moby Dick
Pretear
Rumbling Hearts
Rune Soldier
Tsubasa Chronicle
Gundam Seed Destiny
Overman King Gainer
Tide Line Blue
Afro Samurai
Devil Hunter Yoko
To Heart
Otogi Zoshi
Blue Dragon
Aria
Joe vs. Joe
Busou Renkin
So basically out of these, I barely watched any of these for even an episode or two. Out of those, the only one that I’d probably watch using Netflix would be Simoun. The only ones that I even finished were GaoGaiGar, Rumbling Hearts, GSD, Beck, Code Geass, Kodocha (of which only the first half was licensed), Gurren Lagann, Haruhi, and Fumoffu. Out of those, I basically watched Rumbling Hearts because I was trying to kill time while coked up on Vicodin after getting my wisdom teeth out, and if there was no online anime watching ability, I might, MIGHT get Beck from Netflix. As for the others, sure I might buy those. The reason I might buy them, however is because there are money-saving versions of them available! Sure, I’ll buy GaoGaiGar for $48 from DeepDiscountDVD.com! That’s only about $1 per episode, which is about what it would cost to buy something like Family Guy. Oh wait, but I’m spending normal DVD prices and not the anime nerd premium. Whoops! So ultimately, without piracy the gains from me would be miniscule. I’d just shift to another paradigm, like Netflix, especially for the shows like Beck that I really didn’t have much personal attraction to.
Which I think is the ultimate problem. There are plenty of new media business models out there. There’s the iTunes model (people will pay a nom nom nominal fee for things that they’d otherwise pirate), the Netflix model (people will pay for good selection and a constant stream), and the Hulu model (people don’t mind watching your ads on your homepage if the content is there) just off of the top of my head. The anime industry, however can’t really adopt any of these models for one reason or another. When they try using the iTunes model, the price becomes too high. The fansubbing setup is like the Netflix model, except without any DVD purchases of any kind (since at least Netflix needed to buy those DVDs in the first place). Finally, Hulu doesn’t work because the infrastructure would require way too much capital too set up and I doubt that advertisers would find the audience that lucrative.
Honestly, I think that the business model is simply broken, and unfortunately the anime industry is too tiny (and fragmented) to be able to change and do something like Hulu. The best, most nuanced, and most intelligent approach to piracy that I’ve seen is from the computer game company Stardock. Stardock knows that piracy (in computer games anyway) massively outstrips purchases at a ratio like 10 to 1. At that point, if only 2% less people pirated, they’d make 20% more money. That’s huge. But at the same time, they know that a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale. They never pretend that the retarded, entitled 13 year old who is pirating the game would actually ever buy the game if there was some ironclad anti-piracy setup that made it impossible to pirate. Therefore, they target an extremely specific audience that they know will buy their games. And with that business plan, they’ve done pretty damn well. On that note, I wonder if failed niche titles like Princess Tutu were sort of like this. Perhaps they didn’t actually have the core that they thought they had and it really was just that other 90%? I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s gonna happen with the anime industry. Huge hits will make money through scale and boutique titles will work if costs are kept down, but it’s clear that mass licenses simply won’t work. Oh, and my actual response (as in what actions I actually took) to the ye olde days argument of “Yeah well 10 years ago you only had $50 dub VHS tapes with two episodes!” was “…and that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t watch anime 10 years ago! I saw some tapes of Evangelion in a mail order catalog once and thought that they were on crack for charging that much. The only times when I would watch anime was when I could find something to rent for $4 at Blockbuster.”
Of course, we didn’t get a discussion like this. We just got Cartman voices making fun of HATER02 on the AoD forums.
…wut