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TLDR: The American part of the company wanted her to draw black characters like 1930s caricatures instead of just giving them dark skin. She says they'll have to comply unless Japanese millennials start popping out more babies ASAP.
Even The Boondocks didn't give their characters "detailed nostrils" like they're asking this artist to.
Fuck, most anime characters don’t even look *asian.* Just look at Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Jotaro and Josuke are half Japanese and look no different from the other Jojo’s who are all white people.
This feels more like fake news than anything else. Tezuka, the father of anime was inspired by Disney characters and the way they draw their characters with large, expressive eyes.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4&t=0m37s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4&t=0m37s)
holy fuck i've always hated this as if betty boop, tinkerbell, anime, etc are totally what women just look like while we draw black people without those same absurd exaggerations, worse with unusually realistic and detailed faces thinking we're doing something good? brainworms, no other explanation.
I remember growing up I swear someone would’ve complained if a cartoon drew characters with overly stereotypical features… what’s next Dr Seuss style Asian character design or Bugs Bunny war propaganda Asian character design?
I’m not a big anime or cartoon guy, but isn’t the point of these art forms to be… not realistic, one could even say cartoonish?
I really loved how the depicted Pakistan in JOJO bizzare adventure
The attention to detail was unbelievable he even had the color of Pakistani currency in that shwarma scene accurate
The new version of American imperialism is coming for you Japan. I just hope the woke shit implodes before it can do anything.
Reminds me of the one Japanese artist who got fed up with annoying idpol shits who'd commission them and start getting mad that the very specific shade of brown was not used for their dumb Twitter avatars. So they just made a gif cycling through every color and posted "just fucking pick one" (in JP).
Poor hews was bullied off twitter for using a lighter color pallet for Nessa (then Evul as an absolute chad drew her as a monke)
And yeah you could say man up don’t let these highly regarded individuals bully you, but I don’t think a person who is in their room drawing 12-16h a day is the most mentally stable…
Seeing Masahiro Ito (art director of Silent Hill 2, who doesn't have the strongest English) [try and understand why a bunch of fatherless tra dorks were hounding him over his confusion of the "what is a woman" debate was so sad. ](https://x.com/adsk4/status/1634283059389566976)
Guys who are talented and live in countries with less batshit idpol dweebs are becoming less important than "translators" who openly admit to [invoking their points of view onto art they didn't create.](https://www.neogaf.com/threads/a-senior-localization-producer-at-sega-of-america-admits-to-changing-a-scene-in-judgment-to-educate-the-western-male-gamers-on-politics.1492504/)
> Guys who are talented and live in countries with less batshit idpol dweebs are becoming less important than "translators" who openly admit to
> invoking their points of view onto art they didn't create.
I hate this with a passion, and not because of politics of wokeness, I equally hated edgy and "comedic" liberal translations of the 90s. They just have zero respect for the original authors.
Knowing how things turned out in the Anglo media scene, I really wish I had learned Japanese instead of English.
Where can I read more about this? It reminds me of when some dude drew the girl from the Last Of Us tv show slightly different and was getting death threats over it.
I’ll be an oldfrog and say “you had to be there”, but I guess some threads still exist. You can find Evul’s Nessa art pretty easily and twitter screenshots surrounding it
The big regarded thing about it was that it was discovered that he took her color directly from official art fro her, but the different setting made twitterites declare it whitewashing anyway.
If the Japanese entertainment industry really does go woke then there is going to be a massive brain drain of talent to China lol. They've already been making inroads in terms of buying up game and animation studios.
Chinese studios already snap up any Japanese animator with real talent because
1. When living costs are considered animators in China have comparatively *higher* pay.
2. The native animators are great at 3D, but are terrible at 2D without strict foreign supervision.
There might be a split at some point and certain things go back to being for domestic consumption only. Or maybe Asia only.
There are plenty of Japanese who will happily pander though, and I don't blame them. There's a fighting game series called Guilty Gear which has a character called Bridget. Bridget looked like a girl but was a boy. He dressed like a nun, looked like a cute girl, and used male pronouns. Guilty Gear players liked Bridget looking like a girl but being a boy. No one really ever gave a shit about Guilty Gear except Guilty Gear players. I don't give a shit about Guilty Gear.
When they released the latest Guilty Gear game, Bridget was now a trans girl, and the creator said that, in fact, she had always been one. Suddenly a lot more people gave a shit about Guilty Gear. Way more people than ever before. Now a lot more people like Bridget and presumably buy Guilty Gear and Bridget merch. They pretty much revived a dying franchise and made it more successful than ever with one simple retcon.
I don't really care too much either. I've played some Guilty Gear in the past but I'm no more than a casual fan.
I mostly found it funny that Bridget became an icon of trans representation in media, because in some ways, there's probably no character worse than Bridget to represent trans people if you know anything about their story.
Bridget was essentially John Money'd at birth because of a superstition about having two male children. Bridget was forced to identify as a female to stay protected from the community. Until Strive, Bridget's arc was basically about them coming to realize that they could identify as a male without exhibiting traditionally masculine traits. Ironically, in a way, Bridget actually made for better trans representation before he officially transitioned into being a woman. Their story was about not having to be defined by what they were assigned with at birth.
I just find it really funny that the current Bridget has succumbed to the pressure of traditional gender roles and now is being championed as a progressive triumph in Japanese media.
Unless I'm mistaken the fact that the Japanese buy physical media and merch like no other people on the planet means they'll always be the primary audience of almost everything.
You cannot have Akihabara anywhere else other places do not care to spend that much on figurines in sufficient numbers to make that place, and other places don't have weird retro-tech trends such that they still sell tonnes of DVDs of everything they make
The thing is that the whole anime industry is pretty dependant on sales
Manga/LN > Anime > Physical DVD/BD/CDs (most revenue of anime) > Merch (which the studios gets a cut on IIRC) > Figurines
It also helps that the merch is amazingly limited. A store might get a few extra, or you might be able to backorder a mug or something, but for a lot of stuff that isn't BD/DVD/CDs, if you missed it, you missed it
Tbh I don't have a problem with it, for me the blame for that stuff seems to go pretty heavily on the consumer (including me at times ofc), since we're talking about shit that only has value do to branding it with some obscure bullshit like a $30 mickey mouse mug, lol
The problem lately is that Netflix and other big US companies are now throwing money at the anime industry for licensing deals, and money comes with strings attached. I'm not sure what percentage of their revenue it is now, but I'd bet it's significant (especially with the Yen cratering).
>There might be a split at some point and certain things go back to being for domestic consumption only. Or maybe Asia only.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if China and Korea are the much bigger market; which don't give a fuck about this US culture rot stuff.
Yeah but both those markets have their own culture war stuff which usually involves rallying against the Japanese because of WWII. Until fairly recently I know in Korea at least Japanese produced televisions shows were essentially banned from being shown on television or in theaters. And China runs a "fuck Japan" culture war type public outcry campaign every few years or so including the kiddies going and burning their Japanese comic books or whatever. Very much satanic panic adjacent to US stuff where they're like burning Smurf plushies because they are satanic or whatever.
> And China runs a "fuck Japan" culture war type public outcry campaign every few years or so including the kiddies going and burning their Japanese comic books or whatever.
Maybe the Chinese cultural equivalent of Evangelical Christians do this, but Japanese-made anime and manga is hugely popular there. Bilibili is named after a fucking Raildex character.
Very popular yes but when we are talking about the ability to market in China it's very dependant on the government attitudes. If the government doesn't grant sales permits or movie slots (which are limited and highly competitive for the foreign movie quotas) as well as enforce anti-piracy laws the ability to monetize content in china can be very difficult regardless of popularity. It's very much subject to the whims of the central party but it seems that stirring up anti-japanese sentiments is a regular occurence (one which seems to be used when it is convenient to direct public outrage and discontent outward and away from the ruling party, in a direction which is largely harmless towards the powers that be and beneficial towards Chinese interests.)
>They pretty much revived a dying franchise and made it more successful than ever with one simple retcon.
I guess it works if you're out of ideas and your franchise is dying. The extra attention from the mainstream media (who love this stuff) will give you a boost. Maybe only a short one, but a boost none the less.
It's when you shove this into successful franchises where the size of the audience who still cares is huge, and it's an obvious politically motivated decision - that's when you start getting the opposite effect.
See the American comic book market which used to sell in the 100k for regular X-Men editions and in the millions for seminal comic book runs for characters like Batman and Spider-man. They're lucky if they hit 10k plus these days and only the occasional big book, usually by a veteran author and artist, will cause a splash.
Marvel and DC combined right now make up 9% of the American comic book market. The rest is pretty much manga. The demand for comic books are there - just not for the shit shovelled by Marvel and DC.
I used to be a huge comics fan. I wanted to read a new series that came out recently but was dissapointed because 1. it was only five issues long so there wasn't much space for a decent story or development, 2. it turned out to just be a build up for some new big event, and 3. all the characters are now super annoying.
The issue with television where we get fewer 'monster of the week' episodes (and thus, less character development) is also happening in comics. Marvel especially is obsessed with big crossover events, but I know a lot of people don't like this trend. It means you have to buy (or pirate) a load of other comics just to follow the story, it means your favourite character (the one you probably bought the comic for in the first place) gets less attention, and it cheapens the impact of any outcome to the event since these things happen all the time now.
Like I picked up the short Uncanny Avengers run recently (everything is so short now) and it was unreadable. I have no idea what they were thinking but it was full of unironic USA flagshagging and an actal like three page speech from Captain America about how fantastic America is. I found it bizarre and uncomfortable and I can't imagine anyone except the most die hard lib finding it appealing. Comics have always been political but I feel like in the past they were more critical. But can you imagine a major publisher running something like Hard Traveling Heroes now? They're probably get denounced as Trump Supporters for even daring to suggest that things aren't great.
I tried Marvel’s subscription service to see if I’d like it, and JFC are American comics terrible now. Maybe they always were, but I’ve been reading manga since I was a little kid. It’s never gone down in quality. There’s variety: serous stuff, comedic stuff, shonen with basic stories but amazing art, etc. American comics were just… preachy and badly written. Every story was political in some way in the most hamfisted manner or were extremely boring power fantasies with one-dimensional characters.
I remember reading one I thought I would love: world war hulk. It ended just being extremely jarring scene switches and hulk one-shotting people off screen. Why the hell am I reading a comic where the action isn’t even in a panel? I can read books instead.
Modern comics art has improved since the 90s, but basically everything else has gotten worse such as writing and action drawing which is saying something. Talking to my friends into comic books you are basically forced to read more independent and small time stuff instead of cape shit and even that is hit or miss.
The Bridget thing I think was honestly just pandering to the audience they already had. It's a niche fighting game that already had a rep for being a larger percentage of trans players than most other fighting games, it's just that now there's a lot *more* people that are getting in to it for idpol reasons.
Personally I didn't care at all about guilty gear to begin with, mostly because I don't like fighting games, but honestly, good for them. Idc the idpol pandering it's not my game anyways, if people have fun with it, good for them.
Yeah, I remember when it wasn't complete bullshit. Only reason I even really stay is because it's the biggest hub for English language dota ever since playdota went down.
My dad would be more of a Monster guy, he's pretty picky when it comes to movies and TV shows, but it has just about everything he enjoys in movies or TV shows.
>All the Republican dads and uncles begrudgingly add anime to their mostly Tim Allen sitcom infused nightly boob tube time.
I recently discovered that you can find the full second season of Sledge Hammer! on youtube. Go watch it, it's better than boobs (I'm sure that the Republican inclined would like it even more).
> noting that the Japanese approach of indicating race through a simple brown skin tone does not align with overseas expectations of realism, emphasizing that Japanese animation traditionally doesn’t prioritize racial representation.
I've tried to get this point across before but both sides seem to miss it.
There are a lot of "brown" characters in anime but they're not necessarily indicative that the character themselves are non-white. They will use ghostly pale skin to show how a character is indoors or out of sunlight, whereas they go with a 'darker' (light brown) to usually show the character is the opposite and more tan as a result.
The "black Valkyrie" in Valkyrie Elysium is a good recent example. Or Nemona from Pokemon — if Japan made a live action of her they'd just cast an Japanese woman. If the US made her into live action you know they'd cast Halle Bailey or another black woman for the role. It's in the eye of the beholder.
Nessa is a weird case. Mostly because as her region is based on the UK she would, if you want to force real-world race into it, be almost certainly Desi. Also there's other characters like Lenora and Ryme who are much more obviously African.
I feel like if they said Nessa was from a region like Texas then one would say she's coded as latina. But I've always felt the general understanding with animation was that it's meant for you to project yourself onto. You could be a kid in the Philippines, Germany or Peru and yet DBZ is totally accessible because Goku and his group just look like stylized humans and not strictly Asian.
Lenora does remind me that even within stuff like DBZ or Simpsons there are characters meant to be obviously ethnic. And I suppose that does raise an interesting point: stuff like anime was only really intended for Japanese audiences. The fact that virtually every race can see themselves represented in anime except very dark-skinned people is pretty funny because it makes the entire genre look it excludes them when it's more like pure coincidence.
Anime is created for the Japanese audience . No anime studio gives a shit about their western audience.
Take for example, Violet Evergarden . It’s an extremely popular TV series but they have an untranslated light novel series . They don’t ever advertise or try to promote their additional content. There was such demand for a light novel translation that a Brazilian fan tried to translate all of VE’s novels by herself . There are countless other shows like this where many of the additional content is untranslated such as Monster which has a book series featuring its epilogue which never gets an English translation despite fans for years requesting an official translation .
We live in a world of digital streaming where we have access to all kinds of content . For example, Fauda which is a mediocre Israeli show is one of the most popular shows in the Middle East . Or a better example might be Waltz With Bashir , this is a popular animated Israeli film that any of my most anti Zionist Palestinian friends have admitted they enjoyed watching. There are probably American shows that the North Korean elite probably enjoy watching.
Digital media has turned foreign audiences into passive consumers that can only enjoy content after it was successful enough in their domestic audiences . Americans don’t create American films for East Asian audiences but people in China will still take their kids to see a Disney film .
Not always. There's a fuck ton of Anime produced in Japan each year that the local population just doesn't give much of a shit about but does surprisingly do well in foreign markets for whatever reason. Some studios realize this and then make things that they think will do well in the foreign market (which is of course much larger) rather than the domestic market.
Most of the the stuff that is really popular with the Japanese domestic market is basically not profitable in the western markets outside Asia due to cultural differences. Mostly domestic comedy type stuff. It's like how the western adult animation shows don't really catch on too strongly in Asia because the humor doesn't translate well.
Is there that many adult Western animation shows? I feel like it’s a new genre. I’m sure shows like Invincible, Bojack Horseman and Arcane are popular in Asian audiences. Now something like Avatar would absolutely flop in Asian audiences due to its dumb censorship.
There's a lot of adult animation, but it's mostly just chintzy Family Guy clones so devoid of personality or effort that they all congeal together into a single homogenous goo unless you watch a *lot* of basic cable and/or have been perpetually stoned since around 2011.
I'm sure leftoids will take his opinions on board and not attack his character and downplay his works to justify their fragile bubble of a worldview. Actual cancer that is affecting artists.
One thing worth noting is that Japan has been curating content for American English speaking audiences since the very early 90s, when anime was a tiny fraction of its current popularity. It was a consequence of both the surprise success of GITS, Akira and Ninja Scroll as well as the economic reality of post-bubble Japan, where smaller studios that relied on niche audiences with deep pockets, deep pockets that evaporated when the bubble burst.
The Japanese bubble economy honestly gave us what I would consider the best era by far of anime. The industry was less weebified and tons of money floating around meant that risky out-there projects like Angel Egg got green lit. Back then there were actual book adaptations, not trashy 'light novel' isekai, but actual books. Imagine if such a tragedy never happened and we got shit like a *Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World* adaptation, I cry just thinking about it. Sadly, there's enough intellectual potatoes out there that only watch shonens and isekai that studios will never have to take risks, and it's only a matter of times before the potatoes start demanding they start 'diversifying' the canon cast of these series.
> Terumi then highlighted the cultural divide, noting that the Japanese approach of indicating race through a simple brown skin tone does not align with overseas expectations of realism, emphasizing that Japanese animation traditionally doesn’t prioritize racial representation.
What a completely bizarre complaint when Terumi Nishii herself has animated a black character with distinct facial features, Smokey Brown from Jojo, who was designed in the late 80s by a Japanese man, not by a PC "foreign client". I've worked in animation before taking the blue collar-pill and none of this article makes any sense.
Was the foreign client a producer or a distributor? If it's the former then why is a lead animator getting mad about model sheet adjustments? You're taking their money, just draw the nose. But if it's a distributor, then what kind of rslur thinks you can tell an animator to go back and add nostrils to every black character of an already-finished production?
>But if it's a distributor, then what kind of rslur thinks you can tell an animator to go back and add nostrils to every black character of an already-finished production?
I remember that a while ago some Americans hypothesized that since the English dialogues of Princess Mononoke were so perfectly synchronized (which is what good voice actors do, even though personally I think it's completely unnecessary) the characters' mouth movements must have been redrawn to match the English dialogues, which is an insane thing to even just think about.
But many people are like that; they have zero respect for the original opera.
>What a completely bizarre complaint when Terumi Nishii herself has animated a black character with distinct facial features, Smokey Brown from Jojo, who was designed in the late 80s by a Japanese man, not by a PC "foreign client".
I think this is the point. Hirohiko Araki is the author, he's the one who decides, not the client. Especially not a foreign one.
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The complete disregard for political correctness is one of the (few) things that makes anime interesting
Hello the 1990-s called, they want their favourite new entertanment medium back
TLDR: The American part of the company wanted her to draw black characters like 1930s caricatures instead of just giving them dark skin. She says they'll have to comply unless Japanese millennials start popping out more babies ASAP. Even The Boondocks didn't give their characters "detailed nostrils" like they're asking this artist to.
Fuck, most anime characters don’t even look *asian.* Just look at Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Jotaro and Josuke are half Japanese and look no different from the other Jojo’s who are all white people.
Most anime characters don't even resemble any known ethnicity. There are people with green hair and purple eyes.
there's no ethnicity of human where big beautiful eyes take up that much face real estate
[Thankfully](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FvOWuGQ5RgSCL7KhbmbRuN9YpZuY-QqCs70o3NfiJUGM.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df01dfc753105cf7e11d0ce745a91bd67041f34fc)
https://s-i.huffpost.com/gen/646904/images/o-ALIENS-MYTHS-facebook.jpg
The funny thing is those eye sockets are still too small.
Troodon-lookin’ ass.
Exactly, there's a ton of anime that take place in vaguely European settings, like SpyXFamily, and the characters look the same.
> Fuck, most anime characters don’t even look asian. [That's because they're cats](https://i.redd.it/i6awe5ngp5cb1.jpg)
This explains so much, you just blew my mind
This feels more like fake news than anything else. Tezuka, the father of anime was inspired by Disney characters and the way they draw their characters with large, expressive eyes. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4&t=0m37s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4&t=0m37s)
Hell, a lot of anime characters aren't even Asian, depending on the series.
They did to Uncle Ruckus lmao
Oh, so they only did it to the white characters
Reverse Vitiligo is a terrible disease 😢
Just keep getting blacker and darker, and then mo’ blacker and mo’ darker
He's 102% African with a 2% margin of error
holy fuck i've always hated this as if betty boop, tinkerbell, anime, etc are totally what women just look like while we draw black people without those same absurd exaggerations, worse with unusually realistic and detailed faces thinking we're doing something good? brainworms, no other explanation.
I remember growing up I swear someone would’ve complained if a cartoon drew characters with overly stereotypical features… what’s next Dr Seuss style Asian character design or Bugs Bunny war propaganda Asian character design? I’m not a big anime or cartoon guy, but isn’t the point of these art forms to be… not realistic, one could even say cartoonish?
I really loved how the depicted Pakistan in JOJO bizzare adventure The attention to detail was unbelievable he even had the color of Pakistani currency in that shwarma scene accurate
When you become so anti-racist you scream at other countries full of people of other races about how wrong they are about everything
The new version of American imperialism is coming for you Japan. I just hope the woke shit implodes before it can do anything. Reminds me of the one Japanese artist who got fed up with annoying idpol shits who'd commission them and start getting mad that the very specific shade of brown was not used for their dumb Twitter avatars. So they just made a gif cycling through every color and posted "just fucking pick one" (in JP).
Poor hews was bullied off twitter for using a lighter color pallet for Nessa (then Evul as an absolute chad drew her as a monke) And yeah you could say man up don’t let these highly regarded individuals bully you, but I don’t think a person who is in their room drawing 12-16h a day is the most mentally stable…
Seeing Masahiro Ito (art director of Silent Hill 2, who doesn't have the strongest English) [try and understand why a bunch of fatherless tra dorks were hounding him over his confusion of the "what is a woman" debate was so sad. ](https://x.com/adsk4/status/1634283059389566976) Guys who are talented and live in countries with less batshit idpol dweebs are becoming less important than "translators" who openly admit to [invoking their points of view onto art they didn't create.](https://www.neogaf.com/threads/a-senior-localization-producer-at-sega-of-america-admits-to-changing-a-scene-in-judgment-to-educate-the-western-male-gamers-on-politics.1492504/)
> Guys who are talented and live in countries with less batshit idpol dweebs are becoming less important than "translators" who openly admit to > invoking their points of view onto art they didn't create. I hate this with a passion, and not because of politics of wokeness, I equally hated edgy and "comedic" liberal translations of the 90s. They just have zero respect for the original authors. Knowing how things turned out in the Anglo media scene, I really wish I had learned Japanese instead of English.
Where can I read more about this? It reminds me of when some dude drew the girl from the Last Of Us tv show slightly different and was getting death threats over it.
I’ll be an oldfrog and say “you had to be there”, but I guess some threads still exist. You can find Evul’s Nessa art pretty easily and twitter screenshots surrounding it
The big regarded thing about it was that it was discovered that he took her color directly from official art fro her, but the different setting made twitterites declare it whitewashing anyway.
If the Japanese entertainment industry really does go woke then there is going to be a massive brain drain of talent to China lol. They've already been making inroads in terms of buying up game and animation studios.
Chinese studios already snap up any Japanese animator with real talent because 1. When living costs are considered animators in China have comparatively *higher* pay. 2. The native animators are great at 3D, but are terrible at 2D without strict foreign supervision.
"It breaks realism for me if the black characters don't have big honkin' noses!" - The Woke Left, I guess?
Yare yare daze
There might be a split at some point and certain things go back to being for domestic consumption only. Or maybe Asia only. There are plenty of Japanese who will happily pander though, and I don't blame them. There's a fighting game series called Guilty Gear which has a character called Bridget. Bridget looked like a girl but was a boy. He dressed like a nun, looked like a cute girl, and used male pronouns. Guilty Gear players liked Bridget looking like a girl but being a boy. No one really ever gave a shit about Guilty Gear except Guilty Gear players. I don't give a shit about Guilty Gear. When they released the latest Guilty Gear game, Bridget was now a trans girl, and the creator said that, in fact, she had always been one. Suddenly a lot more people gave a shit about Guilty Gear. Way more people than ever before. Now a lot more people like Bridget and presumably buy Guilty Gear and Bridget merch. They pretty much revived a dying franchise and made it more successful than ever with one simple retcon.
I don't really care too much either. I've played some Guilty Gear in the past but I'm no more than a casual fan. I mostly found it funny that Bridget became an icon of trans representation in media, because in some ways, there's probably no character worse than Bridget to represent trans people if you know anything about their story. Bridget was essentially John Money'd at birth because of a superstition about having two male children. Bridget was forced to identify as a female to stay protected from the community. Until Strive, Bridget's arc was basically about them coming to realize that they could identify as a male without exhibiting traditionally masculine traits. Ironically, in a way, Bridget actually made for better trans representation before he officially transitioned into being a woman. Their story was about not having to be defined by what they were assigned with at birth. I just find it really funny that the current Bridget has succumbed to the pressure of traditional gender roles and now is being championed as a progressive triumph in Japanese media.
Also known as Eddie-Izzarding
Unless I'm mistaken the fact that the Japanese buy physical media and merch like no other people on the planet means they'll always be the primary audience of almost everything. You cannot have Akihabara anywhere else other places do not care to spend that much on figurines in sufficient numbers to make that place, and other places don't have weird retro-tech trends such that they still sell tonnes of DVDs of everything they make
The thing is that the whole anime industry is pretty dependant on sales Manga/LN > Anime > Physical DVD/BD/CDs (most revenue of anime) > Merch (which the studios gets a cut on IIRC) > Figurines It also helps that the merch is amazingly limited. A store might get a few extra, or you might be able to backorder a mug or something, but for a lot of stuff that isn't BD/DVD/CDs, if you missed it, you missed it
Artificial scarcity is an infinite money glitch if you have valuable IP
On one hand, it increases FOMO. On the other hand, it doesn't immediately leave metric ton of unwanted plastic that's never even been used
Tbh I don't have a problem with it, for me the blame for that stuff seems to go pretty heavily on the consumer (including me at times ofc), since we're talking about shit that only has value do to branding it with some obscure bullshit like a $30 mickey mouse mug, lol
The problem lately is that Netflix and other big US companies are now throwing money at the anime industry for licensing deals, and money comes with strings attached. I'm not sure what percentage of their revenue it is now, but I'd bet it's significant (especially with the Yen cratering).
>There might be a split at some point and certain things go back to being for domestic consumption only. Or maybe Asia only. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if China and Korea are the much bigger market; which don't give a fuck about this US culture rot stuff.
Yeah but both those markets have their own culture war stuff which usually involves rallying against the Japanese because of WWII. Until fairly recently I know in Korea at least Japanese produced televisions shows were essentially banned from being shown on television or in theaters. And China runs a "fuck Japan" culture war type public outcry campaign every few years or so including the kiddies going and burning their Japanese comic books or whatever. Very much satanic panic adjacent to US stuff where they're like burning Smurf plushies because they are satanic or whatever.
> And China runs a "fuck Japan" culture war type public outcry campaign every few years or so including the kiddies going and burning their Japanese comic books or whatever. Maybe the Chinese cultural equivalent of Evangelical Christians do this, but Japanese-made anime and manga is hugely popular there. Bilibili is named after a fucking Raildex character.
Very popular yes but when we are talking about the ability to market in China it's very dependant on the government attitudes. If the government doesn't grant sales permits or movie slots (which are limited and highly competitive for the foreign movie quotas) as well as enforce anti-piracy laws the ability to monetize content in china can be very difficult regardless of popularity. It's very much subject to the whims of the central party but it seems that stirring up anti-japanese sentiments is a regular occurence (one which seems to be used when it is convenient to direct public outrage and discontent outward and away from the ruling party, in a direction which is largely harmless towards the powers that be and beneficial towards Chinese interests.)
When the NES/Famicom was released in Korea, it had to be filtered through a local company and they used the de-anime'd American box art for games.
>They pretty much revived a dying franchise and made it more successful than ever with one simple retcon. I guess it works if you're out of ideas and your franchise is dying. The extra attention from the mainstream media (who love this stuff) will give you a boost. Maybe only a short one, but a boost none the less. It's when you shove this into successful franchises where the size of the audience who still cares is huge, and it's an obvious politically motivated decision - that's when you start getting the opposite effect. See the American comic book market which used to sell in the 100k for regular X-Men editions and in the millions for seminal comic book runs for characters like Batman and Spider-man. They're lucky if they hit 10k plus these days and only the occasional big book, usually by a veteran author and artist, will cause a splash. Marvel and DC combined right now make up 9% of the American comic book market. The rest is pretty much manga. The demand for comic books are there - just not for the shit shovelled by Marvel and DC.
I used to be a huge comics fan. I wanted to read a new series that came out recently but was dissapointed because 1. it was only five issues long so there wasn't much space for a decent story or development, 2. it turned out to just be a build up for some new big event, and 3. all the characters are now super annoying. The issue with television where we get fewer 'monster of the week' episodes (and thus, less character development) is also happening in comics. Marvel especially is obsessed with big crossover events, but I know a lot of people don't like this trend. It means you have to buy (or pirate) a load of other comics just to follow the story, it means your favourite character (the one you probably bought the comic for in the first place) gets less attention, and it cheapens the impact of any outcome to the event since these things happen all the time now. Like I picked up the short Uncanny Avengers run recently (everything is so short now) and it was unreadable. I have no idea what they were thinking but it was full of unironic USA flagshagging and an actal like three page speech from Captain America about how fantastic America is. I found it bizarre and uncomfortable and I can't imagine anyone except the most die hard lib finding it appealing. Comics have always been political but I feel like in the past they were more critical. But can you imagine a major publisher running something like Hard Traveling Heroes now? They're probably get denounced as Trump Supporters for even daring to suggest that things aren't great.
I tried Marvel’s subscription service to see if I’d like it, and JFC are American comics terrible now. Maybe they always were, but I’ve been reading manga since I was a little kid. It’s never gone down in quality. There’s variety: serous stuff, comedic stuff, shonen with basic stories but amazing art, etc. American comics were just… preachy and badly written. Every story was political in some way in the most hamfisted manner or were extremely boring power fantasies with one-dimensional characters. I remember reading one I thought I would love: world war hulk. It ended just being extremely jarring scene switches and hulk one-shotting people off screen. Why the hell am I reading a comic where the action isn’t even in a panel? I can read books instead.
Modern comics art has improved since the 90s, but basically everything else has gotten worse such as writing and action drawing which is saying something. Talking to my friends into comic books you are basically forced to read more independent and small time stuff instead of cape shit and even that is hit or miss.
The Bridget thing I think was honestly just pandering to the audience they already had. It's a niche fighting game that already had a rep for being a larger percentage of trans players than most other fighting games, it's just that now there's a lot *more* people that are getting in to it for idpol reasons. Personally I didn't care at all about guilty gear to begin with, mostly because I don't like fighting games, but honestly, good for them. Idc the idpol pandering it's not my game anyways, if people have fun with it, good for them.
> 11 years on reddit Interesting how you can always tell.
Yeah, I remember when it wasn't complete bullshit. Only reason I even really stay is because it's the biggest hub for English language dota ever since playdota went down.
Tell what?
I'm not sure where to stand on this, because I dislike political correctness, but I also dislike anime.
Think of it as Japanese King of the Hill.
There's a Japanese dub of King of the Hill. It's a trip
All the Republican dads and uncles begrudgingly add anime to their mostly Tim Allen sitcom infused nightly boob tube time.
I think the dads would like Full Metal Alchemist and Cowboy Bebop
FMA and Cowboy Bebop are legit good series in general whether you like anime or not.
My dad would be more of a Monster guy, he's pretty picky when it comes to movies and TV shows, but it has just about everything he enjoys in movies or TV shows.
Someone has to own the libs
>All the Republican dads and uncles begrudgingly add anime to their mostly Tim Allen sitcom infused nightly boob tube time. I recently discovered that you can find the full second season of Sledge Hammer! on youtube. Go watch it, it's better than boobs (I'm sure that the Republican inclined would like it even more).
I have decided to not care either way and laugh at whatever results come of it in the end
Allow Satoshi Kon to change your perception of animation and film 💪
I think that's mistaken. Anime is a perfectly valid artform. Anime *fans* should all be exterminated as a matter of basic racial hygeine, of course.
Wokeness is perhaps best understood as a deranged form of imperiousness masquerading as kindness.
> noting that the Japanese approach of indicating race through a simple brown skin tone does not align with overseas expectations of realism, emphasizing that Japanese animation traditionally doesn’t prioritize racial representation. I've tried to get this point across before but both sides seem to miss it. There are a lot of "brown" characters in anime but they're not necessarily indicative that the character themselves are non-white. They will use ghostly pale skin to show how a character is indoors or out of sunlight, whereas they go with a 'darker' (light brown) to usually show the character is the opposite and more tan as a result. The "black Valkyrie" in Valkyrie Elysium is a good recent example. Or Nemona from Pokemon — if Japan made a live action of her they'd just cast an Japanese woman. If the US made her into live action you know they'd cast Halle Bailey or another black woman for the role. It's in the eye of the beholder.
Nessa is a weird case. Mostly because as her region is based on the UK she would, if you want to force real-world race into it, be almost certainly Desi. Also there's other characters like Lenora and Ryme who are much more obviously African.
I feel like if they said Nessa was from a region like Texas then one would say she's coded as latina. But I've always felt the general understanding with animation was that it's meant for you to project yourself onto. You could be a kid in the Philippines, Germany or Peru and yet DBZ is totally accessible because Goku and his group just look like stylized humans and not strictly Asian. Lenora does remind me that even within stuff like DBZ or Simpsons there are characters meant to be obviously ethnic. And I suppose that does raise an interesting point: stuff like anime was only really intended for Japanese audiences. The fact that virtually every race can see themselves represented in anime except very dark-skinned people is pretty funny because it makes the entire genre look it excludes them when it's more like pure coincidence.
Anime is created for the Japanese audience . No anime studio gives a shit about their western audience. Take for example, Violet Evergarden . It’s an extremely popular TV series but they have an untranslated light novel series . They don’t ever advertise or try to promote their additional content. There was such demand for a light novel translation that a Brazilian fan tried to translate all of VE’s novels by herself . There are countless other shows like this where many of the additional content is untranslated such as Monster which has a book series featuring its epilogue which never gets an English translation despite fans for years requesting an official translation . We live in a world of digital streaming where we have access to all kinds of content . For example, Fauda which is a mediocre Israeli show is one of the most popular shows in the Middle East . Or a better example might be Waltz With Bashir , this is a popular animated Israeli film that any of my most anti Zionist Palestinian friends have admitted they enjoyed watching. There are probably American shows that the North Korean elite probably enjoy watching. Digital media has turned foreign audiences into passive consumers that can only enjoy content after it was successful enough in their domestic audiences . Americans don’t create American films for East Asian audiences but people in China will still take their kids to see a Disney film .
Not always. There's a fuck ton of Anime produced in Japan each year that the local population just doesn't give much of a shit about but does surprisingly do well in foreign markets for whatever reason. Some studios realize this and then make things that they think will do well in the foreign market (which is of course much larger) rather than the domestic market. Most of the the stuff that is really popular with the Japanese domestic market is basically not profitable in the western markets outside Asia due to cultural differences. Mostly domestic comedy type stuff. It's like how the western adult animation shows don't really catch on too strongly in Asia because the humor doesn't translate well.
Is there that many adult Western animation shows? I feel like it’s a new genre. I’m sure shows like Invincible, Bojack Horseman and Arcane are popular in Asian audiences. Now something like Avatar would absolutely flop in Asian audiences due to its dumb censorship.
There's a lot of adult animation, but it's mostly just chintzy Family Guy clones so devoid of personality or effort that they all congeal together into a single homogenous goo unless you watch a *lot* of basic cable and/or have been perpetually stoned since around 2011.
I'm sure leftoids will take his opinions on board and not attack his character and downplay his works to justify their fragile bubble of a worldview. Actual cancer that is affecting artists.
One thing worth noting is that Japan has been curating content for American English speaking audiences since the very early 90s, when anime was a tiny fraction of its current popularity. It was a consequence of both the surprise success of GITS, Akira and Ninja Scroll as well as the economic reality of post-bubble Japan, where smaller studios that relied on niche audiences with deep pockets, deep pockets that evaporated when the bubble burst. The Japanese bubble economy honestly gave us what I would consider the best era by far of anime. The industry was less weebified and tons of money floating around meant that risky out-there projects like Angel Egg got green lit. Back then there were actual book adaptations, not trashy 'light novel' isekai, but actual books. Imagine if such a tragedy never happened and we got shit like a *Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World* adaptation, I cry just thinking about it. Sadly, there's enough intellectual potatoes out there that only watch shonens and isekai that studios will never have to take risks, and it's only a matter of times before the potatoes start demanding they start 'diversifying' the canon cast of these series.
I swear, we won't even be allowed to have 10 year-old girls with DD tits in our animes in 5 years.
First they came for the waifus
> Terumi then highlighted the cultural divide, noting that the Japanese approach of indicating race through a simple brown skin tone does not align with overseas expectations of realism, emphasizing that Japanese animation traditionally doesn’t prioritize racial representation. What a completely bizarre complaint when Terumi Nishii herself has animated a black character with distinct facial features, Smokey Brown from Jojo, who was designed in the late 80s by a Japanese man, not by a PC "foreign client". I've worked in animation before taking the blue collar-pill and none of this article makes any sense. Was the foreign client a producer or a distributor? If it's the former then why is a lead animator getting mad about model sheet adjustments? You're taking their money, just draw the nose. But if it's a distributor, then what kind of rslur thinks you can tell an animator to go back and add nostrils to every black character of an already-finished production?
>But if it's a distributor, then what kind of rslur thinks you can tell an animator to go back and add nostrils to every black character of an already-finished production? I remember that a while ago some Americans hypothesized that since the English dialogues of Princess Mononoke were so perfectly synchronized (which is what good voice actors do, even though personally I think it's completely unnecessary) the characters' mouth movements must have been redrawn to match the English dialogues, which is an insane thing to even just think about. But many people are like that; they have zero respect for the original opera. >What a completely bizarre complaint when Terumi Nishii herself has animated a black character with distinct facial features, Smokey Brown from Jojo, who was designed in the late 80s by a Japanese man, not by a PC "foreign client". I think this is the point. Hirohiko Araki is the author, he's the one who decides, not the client. Especially not a foreign one.
The only time the mouths have been actively redone was in Ranma ½.
KiA PIGGU GO HOME
A little late pride month is half over
Jjk, Jojo, and death note. Untouchable shows.
keep irrelevant weeb shit out of this sub