Otaku USA: As Geek Culture Assimilates, Otaku Remain Outcasts
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But anime has already advanced beyond only appealing to dudes in their 20's in their basement. This is the best-selling late-night show in Japan this year:
Chicks in their 20's in their basement are a thriving market with cash to burn.
The industry's myopic focus on its most hardcore fanatics will surely come back to harm it in the long run, but it's allowed it to endure in difficult times.
Yeah, it seems like a lot of people don't realize that shows that appeal to women like UtaPri, Kuroko no Basuke, Free! etc. are huge sellers, oftentimes moreso than the shitty light novel harem shows.
Oh like the doujinshi ones that just apparently have lotsa seedy content up front and centre? Cos that'd be offputting.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Don't even get me started on seedy doujins
Shouta
Member
Are you referring to JP or US ones?
Japan has Comiket twice a year where all the artists go and sell their handmade doujinshi. Adult content isn't nearly as frowned upon in Japan as it is in the US so racy covers are on display there.
All the US vendors of doujinshi I've seen usually have it setup in a way that it isn't visible unless you actually straight up and go look for it or ask for it.
captainpat
Member
Yea, a lot of people seems to forget how hard of a sell non-western stories are outside their home country. It's definitely not as simple as "remove all the fanservice".
Seems to vary from con to con, though.
From my own experience at DragonCon (both attending and working for it), adult content is definitely allowed, though there is still care taken to not let it dominate the con scenery. Vendors selling stuff with sexual/violent imagery can easily be found in the vendor halls, but they are usually positioned in a way that they aren't exactly front and center, and parents with children in tow can typically catch it in time to avoid it. The anime hall has even been allowed to show hentai, with the obvious caveat of them only being allowed to do it after hours.
Even the gaming tracks are free to feature adult content, provided they were forthcoming about the content. I know somebody actually ran Maid as one of the sanctioned (and advertised!) RPG events this year, for example.
I don't think the west is totally against a lot of what anime has to offer, but I can see issues with marketing and what gets localized.
FLCL for example is well known, very experimental and weird but also well regarded as good and funny. It had a platform to reach people being on Adult Swim and it was marketed well.
FLCL for example is well known, very experimental and weird but also well regarded as good and funny. It had a platform to reach people being on Adult Swim and it was marketed well.
hosannainexcelsis
Member
Given that the people announced for the live-action Ghost in the Shell cast so far - Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbaek, and Sam Riley - are all white, yes, it's pretty clear that the only way Japanese manga or anime or what have you will get Hollywood adaptations is if all the Japanese people are taken out. Even that live-action Kite project, adapting a porn OVA, featured Sam Jackson and a British girl.
When there was the Western anime boom in the mid-2000s, Western money flooded into the anime industry and helped support the production of a wide variety of anime. That ended up being unsustainable. People such as Justin Sevakis actually say that we're headed for another collapse of the Western anime market now, because bidding wars for streaming rights is getting dangerously high and Funimation and Crunchyroll deciding to get on production committees so they can tie up rights from the beginning is a bad sign that the industry is becoming unhealthy.
Meanwhile the anime industry does produce things that are not just targeted on its most hardcore fanatics. Mainstream films such as The Boy and The Beast or Miss Hokusai, a lot of NTV-sponsored shows such as Barakamon and Ore Monogatari, adaptations of widely successful manga series such as Attack on Titan. There are even shows such as Space Dandy which are heavily pushed worldwide. Of course, a lot of the industry is producing things such as LN adaptations and other series targeted at the people who buy anime, but what would you have them do? I'd like to see the situation change - I'd like to get rid of LNs completely - but not targeting the people who financially support anime and focusing all efforts on those who aren't intrinsically interested in the medium would be tantamount to suicide. Examples of lower priced anime discs have not been shown to improve sales. So, barring an unexpected change in the minds of general audiences and/or otaku, I don't see what more can be done.
JP.
Shouta
Member
It's a free for all then. I've been to two or three comikets and one of those times was unfortunately Fujoshi day. All I saw was yaoi doujins.
Why "unfortunately"? This sounds good and not bad.
Shouta
Member
I'm not DTL.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Not appealing to me.
What an odd thing to say. LNs have provided the material for plenty of good shows, whether in the past (e.g LoGH, Spice & Wolf, Moribito, Baccano) or more recently (Hyouka, SNAFU). Throwing the entire medium under the bus because of crap like Testament is really short-sighted.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
To be fair, LN also gave birth to "I Can't Believe My Sister Can Possibly Be This Cute" and "Is It Wrong To Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon".
hosannainexcelsis
Member
Of course not all LN adaptations are bad. (Although LoGH, Moribito, and Hyouka are not light novels.) I will watch LN-based anime if it looks interesting enough. For instance, I plan on watching Hai to Gensou no Grimgar next season even though I have reservations about its content, because Ryousuke Nakamura is a talented director and it looks really pretty. But I don't think the amount of good that comes out of LNs is enough to balance all the bad that comes out of them, and getting rid of the repetitive and annoying tropes that infest that medium would be a boon to anime's artistic creativity.
In my ideal world at least. In reality, if we didn't have LNs bad tropes and lazy story construction wouldn't disappear, and we'd likely be getting more adaptations of crappy VNs or crappy manga. So I realize it wouldn't be some magic bullet that would make every anime good. Still, it's nice to dream.
MHWilliams
Member
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Unfortunately I was drowned with Hestia stuff on the feeds.
That wasn't fun.
Oh well. I haven't been really involved with anime stuff. Too lazy to finish what I started even.
Eh I don't see the good/bad ratio being any better or worse than anime based on manga, games or original IP. The tropes are endemic no matter the source, and are more of a cultural problem than anything to do with a particular medium.
MHWilliams
Member
It would be soooooooo good without Hestia. That's the kind of fanservice that sticks in my craw. Leave it in the Monster Musume/Testament/To Love Ru stuff. Hell, I even enjoy stuff like Prison School, which takes sexuality to a completely different level. I just dislike the fanservice bleeding into otherwise decent shows, ostensibly because producers feel they need to cater to that stable userbase.
Shouta
Member
To be fair to DanMachi, it's pretty front-loaded with one major sequence later in the show. At least as far as I can recall. Otherwise, there's not all that much most of the time. It's relatively tame and it makes for some decent jokes. I just find her character annoying more than anything.
A more annoying example to me would be Heavy Object, which is a pretty watchable show aside from those instances.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
How often are we talking? Because I remembered making a joke based on synopsis on how it was going to be about people being treated like objects... and then a few snippets actually made it true to me.
hosannainexcelsis
Member
Her "boob string" is really annoying and just another example of why Yasuda is a bad character designer.
Shouta
Member
Danmachi or Heavy Object?
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Heavy Object.
AnathemicOne
Banned
Danmachi was shit
Shouta
Member
Episode 1 and 6 are the ones that are pretty bad in this area in regards to having it on screen. The other episodes have some slightly lewd dialogue (some stuff about armpits and feet?) between the characters but nothing actually shown.
Otherwise, it's basically metal gear solid: the anime in regards to content, the people vs giant mechs angle of MGS.
That never died out and has been around for awhile, lol.
*picture of me as a plumber under your sink with my butt crack showing*
Well there's ya problem.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
No.
This and NGNL are shows that now have interesting premises, but then there's the jank that's kind of... ehhh.
The Silver
Member
Soma was really fucking annoying with the random fanservice that did need to be there at all.
Its a damn action cooking shounen, I loved it and how it actually described cooking techniques and ingredients, but by god whenever some big breasted girl showed up on screen they made damn sure you are going to see those boobs bounce all over the place.
It's a show that I would otherwise not mind recommending to someone newish to anime, it didn't need to be like this brehs.
Its a damn action cooking shounen, I loved it and how it actually described cooking techniques and ingredients, but by god whenever some big breasted girl showed up on screen they made damn sure you are going to see those boobs bounce all over the place.
It's a show that I would otherwise not mind recommending to someone newish to anime, it didn't need to be like this brehs.
Also the one for Gargantia. I think several character designers work with hentai.
Interficium
Banned
Japan stopped making the type of anime (DBZ, Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing, etc) that had the potential for crossover success in the western market by the early 2000s as the tastes of their domestic fans turned predominantly to moeblob/waifu stuff. Once the reserves of 90s anime to bring to the States were exhausted there was nothing to replenish with to keep the "fad" from dying out.
The most 90s anime in a long time came out this year though
Ushio to Tora
it's pretty fucking rad
Hatty
Member
I cant tell if this post is serious or not. you make it seem like anime is a public resource.
like the ol' 90s anime-mine has dried up or something
Anime has always been mostly moe~ stuff anyway
We got series like Jojo finally animated right after so many years, we got Free!, we got GATE, we got One Punch Man this year, with other hits throughout this year. We got a new a digimon this year.
I just don't get it, so much variety in anime right now with many different fanbases pleased and yet people still think it doesn't appeal enough to different genres? Nah like somebody said above its Japanese and some people just shun it for that reason.
I tried showing for example Beautiful Bones to somebody I know whose a big fan of the series BONES on Fox. Their reasoning for not getting into it was because it wasn't in English and the phrases they fully didn't understand even shown the dubbed. Even though so far in the anime the series involves many of the same themes, it has no obligatory boob shots or trip over lewd scenes. They straight up just don't watch it because its Japanese.
I just don't get it, so much variety in anime right now with many different fanbases pleased and yet people still think it doesn't appeal enough to different genres? Nah like somebody said above its Japanese and some people just shun it for that reason.
I tried showing for example Beautiful Bones to somebody I know whose a big fan of the series BONES on Fox. Their reasoning for not getting into it was because it wasn't in English and the phrases they fully didn't understand even shown the dubbed. Even though so far in the anime the series involves many of the same themes, it has no obligatory boob shots or trip over lewd scenes. They straight up just don't watch it because its Japanese.
A lot of mangaka started as doujin artist, it's not unheard off.
Granted, Tosh is only the artist.
It's like that in the shops too. Minding my own business looking at one aisle, turn and corner and whoops I'm suddenly faced with a lot of adult content.
Even the stuff that doesn't (which is most, to be sure) still has bits that are difficult to translate or rely on tropes that are unfamiliar with westerners, making it hard to digest.
Yeah, I've got a class of 20 girls studying design and almost all of them are aiming to work in manga or animation when they graduate in a few months (I work at a technical high school). One or two that I talked to found work in the adult side because the work is readily available and they can transition later.
POWERSPHERE
Member
*thumbs up*
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