My Life In Fandom: An Open Letter To Big West Regarding Bringing Macross Westward

Dear Big West,

Now that your legal barrier to making the Macross franchise a global brand is removed, I know that you intend to catch up to your Gundam rival by distributing all of the existing Macross media under your sole control world-wide. Your recent uploading of Flash Back 2012 shows this intention, as well as awareness that streaming in general--and YouTube in particular--can easily allow you to reach that global audience at a fraction of the cost that the old television syndication model required.

However, I want you to consider that there are parties other than Harmony Gold that want to exploit your property while interfering with your business affairs regarding that very global audience. Here in the West, the most relevant threat remains a minority group with disproportionate influence and media presence we call "Social Justice Warriors" (hence "SJW"), but rather are nothing more than partisans using the methods of Communist China against their enemies here.

These people are embedded into the corporate hierarchies of Western entertainment corporations such as Sony and its subsidiaries. Of those subsidiaries, the ones most relevant to your business objectives are Funimation and Crunchyroll. Both of these corporations are little more than cells of subservise SJW activity, and those in charge think nothing of using the property of others--your property--to advance their domestic political agenda. They have willfully mistranslated dialog to insert political propaganda into the English language version of a show, and they routinely hire and promote throughly unprofessional incompetents to perform those roles.

You do not need a Western partner to distribute your property anywhere in the West. You do not need Sony, nor any of its subsidiaries, nor any of its supposed rivals like Netflix or Amazon.

All you need to do is to change how you respond legally to foreign fan translations of your property and you can circumvent the aforemenioned SJWs, reduce your localization costs to zero, and rush to market accurate and faithful translations of your properties into English and other languages.

You know that foreign fan translations exist. Rather than blindly send Cease & Desist letters, or similar measures, to shut them down you can end those unauthorized distributions while gaining goodwill with that fan community by making them an offer similar to what Games Workshop offered to the fan that created the Astartes video series: accept that work by that fan organization as the legitimate translation and localization, credit them for their studious effort, and in return for not pursuing legal action you merely require that they surrender their work to you for redistribution on your platforms instead.

Because you will have a foreign language translation ready to go, you can accelerate plans to produce and distribute physical copies of your properties in that market. By having your own translation and localization already done, you avoid malicious third parties sabotaging your global expansion plans by willfully mistranslating your work to serve their ends, which greatly reduces risk.

All my alternative leaves for you to negotiate would be how to release your physical copies into the targetted marketplace--for English, I recommend via Southeast Asia (as Bandai Namco did for the last three console releases for Super Robot Wars)--because you can directly control your online streaming options in-house via using the official Macross channel on YouTube and controlling for region.

It is my wish that you achieve great success in making Macross equal in popularity world-wide with Gundam, Mazinger, Getter Robo, Evangelion, and other globally-known brands from Japan. My advice is offered only in that spirit, and I thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

--Bradford C. Walker