The Business: Sony Swallows Right Stuff, Adds To Crunchyroll

Remember when I said that whatever the Cult can't converge, they destroy, and what they can't destroy they choke off? Yeah, that's happening.

Regardless of what you think of pornographic media, one thing is consistent: every censorship regime starts with the spank bank.

Given that we are talking about the Death Cult here, and they do control Sony, we can be confident that it won't stop there and will instead move on to adulterating (as they've tried) other material before moving to either converge the Japanese end of things or choke off access to it entirely.

Given how well the "localization" has gone, count on the latter.

The means for choking it off will not be outright shutoffs; it will be a continual degradation of availability, quality of release, convenience of sale, convenience of access, and so on meant to funnel the audience into the streaming service with related sales being confined only to branded merchandise. They want to kill physical media sales, and watch for them to push their shit dubs over proper subtitling (and accurate translations).

This is not a good move. None of these are. You are right to be suspicious, and you would be wise to keep your lines of communication with Captain Harlock ready for action as you may again be required to rely on him over anything else. (Oh, and that also means that you aren't going to see a relief from the bother of importing or buying knockoffs anytime soon.)

We'll see how this shakes out, but given past episodes I recommend preparing for fuckery.

This is not the only attempt to head off the opposition. J.D. Cowen has another front covered here, where he talks about Fake Pulp magazines trying to put an entryism job--badly--on the very New Pulp scene that Cirsova and others have launched.