My Life In Fandom: They've Found A Crack In The Wall

I told you they'd be making a move sooner or later, and that's come.

Quoting Clownfish: "Crunchyroll is for sale, and its GM Joanne Waage seems to be doing some damage control by talking about how rosy the future looks for the streaming platform, and what great partners WarnerMedia and HBO Max have been. Translation: PLEASE don't sell us! What's really interesting is her comments pertaining to the relationship between the West and Japanese anime production studios. She seems to be saying that they need GUIDANCE from American studios to make "Global Franchises." I dunno... Japan seems to be doing JUST FINE on its own, thank you."

Sony buying Crunchyroll doesn't change CR's aim at pozzing anime at all. Sony is a Japanese company successfully converged and usurped from Japanese to Globohomo control. That aim at "global markets", as Friend of the Retreat Rawle Nyanzi has pointed out, is the weakness they aim to exploit due to Japan's disastrous birthrate- a birthrate induced in part due to demoralization into their culture since World War 2.

Crunchryoll, as with Netflix and Cartoon Network, have seen that getting on the production committees and bankrolling productions is the way to bring the poz. They also know that more informed Western fans--us--are communicating the containment efforts to our Japanese counterparts, but that information can only go so far so fast and only have so much impact due to corporate concerns of persistent quarterly growth vs. a local culture with a serious morale problem.

Rawle's right to see this as how they can get their hooks in, start demanding changes and being the wrecking process so that anime resembles Western animation's awful state and thus ruin yet another thing that those outside the Death Cult enjoy as an escape from same.

And don't think this can't be done to their live-action shows also, or that digital offerings can't be altered to fit Current Year like Western ones are.

CR can do this because you let them; they hate you, and yet you pay them. Stop doing that. NOW.

The containment strategy was always meant as a backup, but its primary purpose was as leverage: comply or we cut you off from the West. We'll see how well this goes, but since CR is backrolling trash productions that poison the well, productions it will own and thus push like it's better than sliced bread even as the shit burns your sinuses, I don't expect any surprises like Knights of Sidonia to come out of this- or even passable trash like the Castlevania series.

It's not in a fail state yet, but it will get there faster than we think if we don't figure out how to act now.