Friend of the Retreat Rawle Nyanzi put out a post today on an independent anime project--Kodai Senkaku Genocider--made to resemble the fantastic heroes of yesteryear.
And got sweet fuck all traction, both in Japan and in the West. Author David Stewart says what Rawle says in his post: Fandom wants the Brand.
Rawle nails it - fans want what they like to be good again. They really don't want to find something new.
— David V. Stewart (@DavidVStewart) May 27, 2020
Fandom is a kind of filter - an easy way to know that you're going to like something. What do you do when it's broken though? https://t.co/ypRA8YmG9k
Where have I seen this before? Oh, only with the Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Marvel, DC, Biohazard/Resident Evil, The Last of Us, and so many other Western corporate properties.
There are two key differences between what's going on with anime and what's going on with Western entertainment. The first is that the Death Cult doesn't run Japan's culture industry, not the way it is in the West. The second is that the entertainment corporations don't outright hate their customers. So, instead of esoteric Molech worship we have the (by comparison) easier problem of a Brand Fan problem.
"What?"
While it is true that new properties are released and find traction with audiences, all of them come from established corporate sources and follow a business model now so well established that even international outsider observers (i.e. foreigner plebs like me) can see it in action and stay abreast of developments thanks to an Internet-focused network of fans using YouTube, Twitch, etc. to spread the word on both the business model and the players in it.
The problem with Genocider is where it came from, now how good it is, and it looks like its creator sees that; he's looking to get corporate attention now. In the short term, the best way to help this man is (a) to directly compliment and encourage him and (b) politely assist him in getting the institutional attention he's after.
The reason? For now the wealth of disruptors Western media actors can employ are not viable for anime, not yet. It's still a business that rests its legitimacy on a massive corporate infrastructure of production and distribution focused on a massive scope and scale that individuals and small actors simply cannot do; this is a barrier to entry, as we see in the fact that you can count the exceptions on one hand. This will not change anytime soon.
Now, with a quarterly level of frequency promoting disposability and an emphasis on Muh Waifus to push merch and tie-in products (and get butts in seats for live events like concerts by the voice cast), while you do get big hits you also get a disdain for anything not current and scorn for anything older than 2000; very little has the lasting impact of Zeta Gundam, and certain genres and styles get favored due to extensive A/B testing via things like Shounen Jump's ranking system by the readership at the detriment of long-term overall cultural fertility. This has long-term implications and we'll see soon how bad this gets.
The tools to disrupt anime production are present, and one-man projects like Astartes and Otaking's Star Wars and Doctor Who short fan films are Proof of Concept that a determined creator can compete on quality. The issue, therefore, is the audience; they are long accustomed to the established way of doing things and find no reason to change away from that.
A large part of that reluctance does come from the fact that, to date, this corporate infrastructure actually works as intended for the benefit of the audience. If there is a flaw to be had here, it is a blind faith that this system performs good stewardship and cannot degenerate into mindlessly pleasing the most insistent (who become like Veruka Salt) or be gamed to produce desired outcomes- states that should be guarded against.
Remember that good stewardship is not just limited to literally land and livestock. It applies to the things of the soul also, and that means works of culture. Just as it is wrong to pervert such a thing into a propaganda outlet for Satanic propaganda, so is it wrong to blindly use it to serve up whatever is demanded without thought for the common good or for posterity- and it is this latter trap that I see as the current flaw in the design for anime, and that flaw is a sign of a problem with the Mammon Mob.
These are not insurmountable challenges, but they cannot be overcome by doing what's being done.
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