My Life In Fandom: How To Signal Irrelevance

If you had money on "Wokeness is a sign of Brokeness", go collect your winnings because Toonami delivered on that this weekend.

TOM Speech: #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/7tzA15T80t

— Toonami News (@ToonamiNews) August 30, 2020

The most hilarious part of this virtue-signal backfire is so obvious that it got immediataely called out and the roasting continues.

Again How the fuck can toonami make a promo about blm and not use black characters from animes that aired on the block. https://t.co/COMo2hoKst pic.twitter.com/DGvR20ENnL

— DJ.Blackhammer (@blackhammerv2) August 31, 2020

They aren't wrong. Toonami couldn't even carry Burn Loot Murder's Molotovs without spilling it on itself. All it would have taken would to have cut in a few seconds of footage of characters from show they either currently air as of that air date, or are historically associated with, that fit the narrative to have had the desired effect. But no, they didn't. This was cheap and lazy virtue-signalling, and even those Toonami sought to pander to aren't having it. Nor should they.

It should be no surprise that the same cohort that's crashing Crunchyroll is behind this state of affairs across North America's sad excuse of an animation industry, be it their own productions or translating foreign ones (i.e. the shitfest that is NA anime dubbing). Yes, we're talking Dangerhair Dykes and their Karen Queens, wielding Soiboi Squads to be their enforcers. It's one of the day jobs that the Antifa/BLM Commissars move into when they're reaching the end of being street-level effective.

It's not a surprise that this incarnation of Toonami has hit the wall already. They rely on the NA anime industry to get broadcasting licenses due to nigh-exclusively airing dubbed shows, and the NA scene has been a shitshow since the entire Vic Mignogna situation kicked off; once the Gamedropping started, it just got worse and now--for damn good reasons--more and more people are shitting on Crunchyroll and Funimation. You can add Toonami to that list, if you haven't already, and add Steve Blum (the VA for TOM) to the long list of NA voice actors you can't trust to not be unprofessional. (Also add Grey DeLisle.)

Here's the truth of the matter: Toonami is irrelevant.

The casuals prefer to use streams, legal or otherwise, if they don't buy physical media. (On that, come back tomorrow.) Toonami is a TV relic, and most anime viewers are also cord-cutters and as such don't give a shit about it. Old-timers like me, who are now grossly underserved, have also walked away from the returned programming block due to it no longer being fit for service. It was already going broke; in this respect, going woke is nothing more than providing narrative cover to save the careers of those in charge for when the block is canceled again- and this time, for good. (Look, when your tribute-successors do better jobs, its time to call it a day and close down.)

And that was before Animelog was announced. Now that we're on a count-down until we can get it free from the source legally, if I ran Toonami I'd be winding operations down and advising everyone to update their resumes.

So no, I don't weep for Toonami anymore than I wept for my grandmother when she died. We're looking at a patient well into advanced dementia, and for all intents and purposes...