The Business: The Time Of Western Animation As Adult Day Care Is Done

Clownfish was right again.

This dropped about a week ago. Nothing changed since then, and Clownfish is right to say "We told you so!" about this.

Lots of people are going to either learn how to do the startup game, or they're going to have to rely on patronage via Patreon/Subscribestar/etc.

No, you ain't going to Japan, South Korea, etc. either (unless you're one of them AND you're accepted as by them- not the same thing).

Remember the "safe anime" video? That's coming for Western animation out of the corpos, and because you can reduce all of that to a Madlib template you can automate that shit good and hard; what formerly took teams of dozens, scores, or hundreds will soon be done by single-digit teams- and it is an indie animated satire that proves that this is how it will go.

The Will Stancil Show! [FULL EPISODE]

Episode Four: Triumph of the Will
After a failed campaign causes him to crash back to reality, Will Stancil binges on tacos and beer with his friends.
By Emily Youcis 2025 pic.twitter.com/llNiaUAaT0

— Linda (@AlfredAlfer77) November 16, 2025

Emily Youcis did all of that by herself with AI.

You can bet that a handful of people, with financing from a dedicated Patreon following, can easily do better than that on a far more frequent publishing schedule going forward.

"But I can just work on a corpo IP show."

LOL-fucking-NO! They're going to hand that to some connected insiders, who are going to have someone riding heard over them all the way, who can do top-end production cheap, on time, and to spec- exactly the sort of thing bots are excellent at delivering.

At this point, and for the foreseeable future, LLM-based machine generation works like spinning up a factory: you're going to spend a lot of time tooling the machine to execute on the template that you impart upon it, but once you do then you can churn out The Same But Different dirt cheap at industrial scale. Then, when you are done, you can archive all of that up-front work instead of letting it rot or wear out; if demand again returns past the threshold of commercial viability, pull it out from the archive and start the machine churning out more of The Same But Different until that welcome is again worn out.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

That's how corpo animation will be in a few years. Live-Action will take a while longer, but it will follow; data used for one form is applicable to another, and motion-capture is a thing (as are virtual sets), so all that tech James Cameron pioneered for Avatar will--like Lucas did generations before--will become industry standard by the time a child today comes of age.

Which, by the way, means that current issues--like the recent cessation of Super Sentai production--will be permanently solved inside a decade.

You won't be worried about having nothing to read, watch, or play. You will be worried about being buried under a mountain of mediocre mass media and be (nigh-)unable to opt out of it.

And don't be surprised if getting away from this is not commercially viable. I've warned you about the need for the underground to exist, to be non-commercial. Now you're starting to see why.