/jp/ - Japan/Anime

Judging by this trash OP and the recent garbage being posted on this board I am convinced the bar got very low recently.

>You can not go into a romcom discussion these days without seeing everyone talking about how the romantic life shown in the show compares to their own.
Yeah you should really go back to whetever shithole you came from and stop posting here. You're not fooling anyone.

Anime haven't been good since about 2012 or so after the impact of Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica proved you can make a deep intellectual lovecraftian anime without having to rely on cute anime succubi being the main selling point.

The current anime fans are mainly consumers and not community contributors as well. They will watch the newest japslop of the season but will go no further to progress their hobby by say posting screenshots online on imageboards or start non-waifufag tier discussion. That's another point, once waifu-fagging became popular online a lot of normies got into the hobby as secondaries. These are people who only lurk Twitter/booru to find ecchi art of their favorite japslop moeblob garbage to spam and try to fit in with the rest of the posers.

Before this happened, streaming sort of started killing off anime communities because when PC/internet tech was still fresh it was mainly distributed among otaku circles with high barriers of entry due to elitism and gatekeeping. So this fits in with the average anime consoomer/secondary today by giving them low commitment to the hobby. {Most don't own physical media or even download anime to store these days} which would be seen as fake fans a decade and two ago.

I could go on but it's basically shifting generational interests, they become lower and easier to please as barriers of entry to anime series fandom become easier to get into and consume.

no

everything is always made with the intention of reaching out to masses so they sell more.

>>40489
wise words

>>40483
>Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica proved you can make a deep intellectual lovecraftian anime
Idiot.

>>40480
>I only started really getting into weeb shit back in late 2009/early 2010, so maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.
You came into it so late that it doesn't even matter anymore.

>>40480
It's a business like any other, of course the powers that be are going to want to make as much money as possible. Sadly, that usually leads to the hobby being watered down and trashed to make it more suitable for normalfags, as seen when gaming became popular. Publisher Kadowawa or whatever they are called even outright said they are targeting expanding overseas, especially with isekai, which is a major red flag considering how trash most westerner's tastes are.

>>40480
>You just keep coming across many shows that seem to validate normalfags' way of life and opinions in the past few years.
I haven't seen anything new for good number of years, but I assume it hasn't changed that much. What I assume has happened, is that amazing thing that normalfags do, which is to recontextualise things so that whatever they're consuming is centred towards them.

>>40482
I hope that character stays bitter forever. He's earned it. You know what the craziest thing is? It basically proves that normalniggers actually have no moral compass of their own. If pig-fucking was artificially trending on social media, no matter how personally a normalfag would be disgusted at the prospect of it, they would eventually join in on the craze.

Kenshin 2023 is so bland compared to the 1996 version. Who is this remake for?!?

I don’t think it’s made for normalfags now, anime and Otaku culture in general have always emphasized escapism and rejection of real world, actually this is probably the biggest difference between US and Japan media, US tries to portray real world issues realistically and in a way the viewer can relate while Japan celebrates and encourages escapism and coming up with so unrealistic scenarios that can’t possibly happen IRL.

What happened is that a lot of people got into the bandwagon because of the internet, but I think it’s not as bad as you think, the actual barrier is very low considering that it’s just watching videos, but real otaku culture is so dense and detached from real life that it drives most normalfags away.

What’s actually true is that a sizeable part of the culture is made up from fe-males, a big part of the illustrators, writers and producers are fe-males, and of course the cosplayers, but that’s not new and they do try to keep a los profile and avoid attention (except cosplayers and seiyuus) that’s another difference from the US, here people loves attention and they would gleefully brag on social media about how they’re the true talent of x thing, while in Japan they don’t even show their faces and you know they’re females because they casually referenced it on some blog.

>>41296
See >>40531
>that amazing thing that normalfags do, which is to recontextualise things so that whatever they're consuming is centred towards them.

They can claim to be anything and nothing can stop them. There are people I know who've only started to take an interest in anime because it's trending who repeat the old adage "subs are better than dubs" not because they believe it but because it's the assumed thing to do. These same people do not have the patience to see a subtitled foreign film (unless it is trending).

Yes. I've noticed an increase in anime remakes being sanitized and removing politically incorrect behavior and new anime either being super generic and safe isekai or tranny power fantasy/wish fulfillment.

>>41295
I feel the same way about the Urusei Yatsura 2022 remake. What the fuck happened?

>>41295
From the rap OP I already knew they had fucked up. How did they even manage? To this day the original series is always ranked among the top anime ever in Japan, they need to work hard to make it be disliked.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2021/06/04/love-hina-mangaka-warns-of-rising-pressure-from-foreign-markets-to-introduce-political-correctness-into-manga/

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/sonys-growing-exposure-anime-content-232322946.html

Anime is now effectively a commodity traded on the stock market - or at the least a major component of something that is so traded. There was a point that actually finding anime to watch was something of an accomplishment - dial up torrents, RealMedia 1 minute clips, the actual file format being a problem to open in the days before VLC shipped as an all-in-one solution - this is where I started. In a very real sense, watching good anime was something you had to work towards; non-trivial time could be spent making it *possible* compared to the actual partaking, and then you also had to know what to look for to make it worth the effort. In the face of this, spending money on a DVD actually made sense.

I have no doubt that the VHS era crowd had a similar reaction to the step towards 'commodity' that marked my own starting point. Their era was identified by the transportation and acquiring of anime taking longer than the time spent actually watching it. It was work - hard work some times - and built community (sometimes) and a sense of value (through exertion) into the activity.

Progress marches on; automation and standardisation makes it a non-artisan market. The scarcity of a given episode, a given theme, even a given genre in the case of isekai has been eroded to parity with everything else.

So with that in mind, sadly the marketeers had to step in to try and make a given anime get a return on investment. I personally think the tipping point was Kill Me Baby - which (from memory) sold so few box sets that either the studio or the publisher posted a collage of 2 something thousand images from the series as a spiteful thank you to the tiny number of people who bought it. KMB isn't particularly good to be sure, but the market had to adjust in such a way that things like it can be *made*, which is to say, funded. Scarcity really did mean that outlandish anime had a valid shot at making a return and thus the mechanisms and institution behind it could survive and produce the exotic and elaborate - no scarcity means no value to capture, means no resources to do something elaborate.

So reframe the question:

Can anime afford to be made for people other than normalfags now? - No; unless the author can afford it to be a financial loss and does it anyway
How can a given series break even? - By getting people to buy it or pay subscription fees
Who buys/spends on anime? - people with resources to spend on something they can get for free, or folks who want to make a fashion statement, or pathological collectors
Who does something like that? - children,crazies,idiots and succubi; the target demographics of 2020s anime

There will be breakouts- I think we're yet to see the anime equivalent in quality and execution of Lord of the Rings for example, something that took some 80 years of cinema as an industry to happen. But commodity anime is not going away and will not get better in the aggregate.

My local weeb shop_s_ are staffed by succubi at 75% or so, are patronised by teenage succubi or the boys who want to bang them almost exclusively, shift to carry merch for that demographic, and looking up their annual financial reports this is a valid business model. An anecdote is the singular tense of data of course but consider this board's population, are most of them *dumb* enough to pay for anime? Why would the market take a risk at making products for us that we will never buy but still consume?

There is probably an even deeper chain of cause and effect to investigate wrt Japan itself and the anime/merch purchasing demographics reshaping to accommodate midwits which I would be interested in reading; speculation and educated guess work can probably get most of the way but i've yet to read hard data.

>>41460
When something goes very popular or goes mass market, is almost guaranteed that the required "mental effort" will go down to appeal to the necessities of the market dynamics to keep afloat.

>>41462
what kind of delusional are you that anime, a passive consumptive hobby required mental effort? it was TV for weirdos and losers, lets focus on what theyve taken away, not make shit up about how mentally complex watching TV is

>>41463
Lain and Tehnolyze send their regards.

>>41464
I've seen Lain. its the matrix for japanphiles, are you retarded? its ok but certainly not mental effort. its not like the scenes of a child writing lisp are anything that requires effort

>>41465
Nigger, are you retarded? The main point is what's sell today is some dumb shonen about some dumb boy fighting some dumb villain, just simple plot for the lowest people can follow, more "experimental" anime and manga becomes more rare because of normirfication of otaku culture. Fucking dumb nigger.

>>41466
I am smart enough to not need mental effort to watch a TV show.

>>41467
You can watch, say, Detective Conan while trying to solve the mystery of the episode, or just listlessly watch in wait for the revelation. The first case makes for a much more interesting experience and better use of your time. In any case, the mental effort is on the viewer, be it to accompany the plot or to reflect on the themes. It's also clear that you didn't do it for Lain.

>>41470
>>41469
Try reading a book, brainlets. No TV consumption is not mental effort.

>>41471
What type of book? Some Brandon Sanderson? That's what your idea of "mental effort"? Reading western anime in book format?

>>41472
Studying, doing puzzles, meditation. Comic books is marginally better than TV. I don't know that author.

>>41470
Bonus points for succeeding at it without subs or dubs; *that* is mental effort.

>>41463
>lets focus on what they've taken away, not make shit up about how mentally complex watching TV is
Stop replying to him you fucking moron.

It's an interesting post you've made though. The bit about the succubi though? I don't know, wizchan has an understandable bias against them but because of it, it is hard to get an impartial view of their impact. Wizchan and most imageboards view succubi as solid monolith and no nuances can be made. I'm sure female outcasts/geeks/nerds/weeaboos have had their own personal apocalypse related to their gender. It would be interesting to see and compare the effect of nomalfaggation of anime. (It's a big ask for wizchan I know).

>>41478
Good point; the standouts I can think of are wiccan stuff wherein the *actual* monolith of midwit succs jumped in as a Fun and Quirky (tm) personality attribute, and knitting. For both i've seen market adjustments in my lifetime to accommodate either the actual monolith or The New Men (tm).

A good comparison would require distinctly succ spaces or undertakings for which i'm drawing a blank beyond the former. That said, you could make the case that femboys have crowded into the performative feminine space, leading to a drive towards more extremes by those succs who were 'casually feminine' and don't stand out.

>>41482
>A good comparison would require distinctly succ spaces or undertakings for which i'm drawing a blank beyond the former.
I was thinking that uniquely feminine genres, the ones where you can pick up a random manga and think "a succubus drew/wrote this", must have been ridiculously impacted by the dickless brigade. Wasn't there articles of female mangaka getting harassed by troons who wanted more "trans-inclusive" ideology in their manga?

Of course I'm not expecting a deep dive here, just an outline.

>The New Men (tm).
The what?

>femboys
I cannot believe that pederasty has taken hold of male geek culture.

>>41485
I remember harassment of that sort specifically happened on either twitter or pixiv - and more to the point the stellar rebuke that one of the community managers put together about it - can't find it sadly.

By New Men (tm) I'm referring to the plaid wearing, competitive beard growing sensitive types; the sort who have to decorate themselves to convince others of their masculinity and have a tendency to remarkably feminine habits - like the aforesaid knitting.

It's perhaps not as widespread outside of degenerated university cities and the like, but they are a significant demographic that unironically buy beard oil and so on.

>>41486
>stellar rebuke that one of the community managers put together about it - can't find it sadly.
Care to paraphrase?

>>40531
>What I assume has happened, is that amazing thing that normalfags do, which is to recontextualise things so that whatever they're consuming is centred towards them.
You know, a chunk of anime is wish fulfilment of sexless, mateless otakus, so you have waifus and self-inserts, so what goes through the mind of a normalfag watching it? Do they self-insert into a character that's clearly an idealized version of a nerd/otaku? Do they empathize with the main character when he does the japanese *anime* romance tropes and cliches which would look absolutely retarded outside of anime?

>>41489
I will ruin it, but the gist was:

"Do not engage, do not compromise, do not allow people who are not fans to dictate how you produce and enjoy your hobby. These people do not represent the interests of the community, they do not even represent your audience and are just after causing trouble. This is a Japanese service/platform and only subject to Japanese rules and standards of culture."

But really elegant.

>>41491
>outsiders
What happens if the rot comes from within?

>>41460
You miss the difference between East and West. Western actual animefans torrent the shit out of everything, but may buy merchandise if they have any money, Western normalfags just leave them on Shitflix or some other such service while doing some normalfag shit, maybe buy something for the aesthetic value. A lot of them don't even see anime as a separated thing, you often see them listing Avatar, Castlevania or that DC superhero succubi animation among anime, and anime events became "nerd events" (and I say the idea of "nerd culture" pretty much ruined all subcultures that might be categorized as "nerd"). It doesn't seem to me that either one is sustainable as an industry goal. To this day the only thing that actually worked in the West was anime targeting young boys. In the East it's different, people of all sexes and ages will spend a lot in manga, movie tickets, plush toys for succubi, plastic models for boys, and the hikki/NEETs that live on allowance will spend 100% of their disposable income on their hobbies. Just think about how Pretty Cure manages to have minutes of movie quality animation in regular weekly series episodes. I don't think the young succubi care about it, and I don't think they do it for the artistic endeavor.

And to make matters worse (or better, really), there's a difference between Eastern and Western likes and dislikes. For example, Witch from Mercury was well received in the West, but if you look at Japanese services, it's the worst rated Gundam series to this day, to the point of Bandai Namco having to attempt some retcom for damage control. What I may see as possibility is different Japanese productions being targeted specifically to the domestic or foreign market, maybe even through subsidiaries so as to not tarnish the names of the studios.

>>41490
No one'e answered this. How do normalfags self-insert in characters that are nothing like them or are distinctly power fantasies for losers?

>>41573
Some of the replies may have touched on the answer. They don't, they watch it for tangential reasons, such as it being "the current thing", or to be part of a cliqué, or to get succubi that are part of it, or they just mix it with all other forms of media without giving much thought.

>>41574
So they consume it even if they enjoy it or not?

>>41575
Apart from those who do so just casually, it's how things are nowadays, people first decide their identity and then force themselves into it. Even within wizchan you often see such threads or posts, "why don't I like anime", "why can't I enjoy video games", "why don't I have fun programming", etc. It's not people who enjoy something and then pursue it as a hobby, they are just taking steps to fit into an image they arbitrarily created about what they should do.

>>41563
So you don't think everything is slowly converging into one single market?

>>41577
No, it doesn't seem to be the case for me.

>>41563
Now this is a valid point to be sure, and not being in .jp puts my perspective out a bit.

*however*
https://www.statista.com/topics/7495/anime-industry-in-japan/

Market researchers think that the non-domestic market is within parity of the domestic market; and I think the Isekaishit tidal wave suggests that some kind of 'parity' is close at hand, if not already here.

>>41579
>Current state of the industry
>Due to the increased demand, the anime industry is currently marked by a high number of shows that are aired every year. Newly broadcast programs clearly outnumber continuously broadcast programs, which leads to a high turnover of shows. A high demand for animation works can also be observed in the case of the film industry, with animated movies ranking regularly at the top of the box office. Examples include the Makoto Shinkai hit “Your Name” in 2016 and the theatrical adaptation of “Demon Slayer,” which was released in 2020 and became Japan’s highest-grossing movie to date. The boom in animation has led to an increase in animation companies since the turn of the millennium. Animation works are often produced by so-called production committees, which consist of different corporations specializing in a certain field of business. While this cooperation reduces each company's risk and enables specialization in a market where success remains difficult to predict, the actual production companies earn only a fraction of the generated revenues. As a result, animators are often severely underpaid, and many quit in the first years of their careers.

>Anime and the streaming wars
>A breakdown of the industry revenue by segment shows that merchandising is by far the most valuable business within the domestic market. High growth potential is seen particularly in the case of anime streaming. The competition between major platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+, has spurred on the Japanese streaming market and opened up new possibilities for animation production companies. These companies are increasingly in demand as content creators and can request a higher compensation per single episode. Cooperations with major video streaming services have become a lucrative business and have led to many shows being created with international audiences in mind. To better position itself in the distribution market, Sony acquired the anime streaming website Crunchyroll for almost 1.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, which can be seen as a further indicator of the importance streaming will likely have for the anime industry in the coming years.

I want to read more but the site paywalled the more detailed info.

>>41579
>Market researchers think that the non-domestic market is within parity of the domestic market

Large franchise such as Pokemon, Yu-gi-Oh, Boku No Hero Academia, and other long-running 4kids stuff is likely enough to sway these numbers significantly in favor of non-domestic market hold.

>>41579
It seems from the article that the revenue in the West comes mostly from streaming services. That service in itself has not been shown to be a profitable model of business.

From this same site:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273884/netflixs-quarterly-net-income/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362405/financial-key-figures-dtc-segment/

To this day, the only direct-to-consumer streaming service to make a profit has been Netflix, even giants like Paramount and Disney have been taking huge losses. It only works if Japan produces its own thing and then together with an intermediary business they make a secondary profit by distributing it in the West. For Japanese producers to profit from creating anime to be streamed in the foreign market they'd have to be bigger than Disney, and that would have to be all of them together.

>>41577
Just chiming in on this but there is a huge difference in how westerners view and consume anime/manga to actual Japanese. It will never be the same since our cultures, values and even how we consume media is radically different at a fundamental level.

>>41631
True - in the same way that Westoids and China view and consume vidya in different ways, culture, difference etc.

… and so the Chinese market is large enough and the major players influential enough to *bend* the industry to the Chinese market. In the words that mark the most public breakpoint; "Do You Guys Not Have Phones?"

China actively doesn't want anime so I have read (as in, buying it reduced your social credit score at one point) so that leaves the westoid market.

Hence the thesis coming out of this thread I think:

1. If The westoid market is either near, at or already past parity with the Japanese market (which the reports indicate) And
2. The westoid market is primarily normalfags(that is; of the people who spend money, normalfags will be overrepresented) and children who buy toys Then
3. The viciously low margin anime industry will sensibly pivot in the same way the US film industry did _to keep the doors open_ by making more easily translated, low complexity works (Anime Equivalent Capeshit, if you will) to pander to the market that actually buys the product with the lowest marketing outlay.

>>41582
points out the streaming situation. The stream services don't *have* to make a profit, they just have to keep the doors open on their patronised studios who are making what the services are willing to buy for this state of affairs to continue.

I do believe it will change (again) in our lifetime; my guess is through a bubble crash in the next major global recession.

Thus the answer to the OP is, mostly, yes.

>>41634
Of course stream services have to make a profit, do you think they do it out of charity for the studios, and will keep doing so indefinitely? The streaming world implosion will probably come before any other major economic event, unless they radically change the system in a way not yet predicted.

>>41635
If the value of a streaming service was media delivery, sure.

I'm not convinced, seeing as the youtube model is apparently profitable. "What people watched at a given time" and of even more utility, "where and on what device they did it" - has *considerable* value when sold in a side industry.

For e.g. an insurance broker would very much like to know how often a given neighbourhood's population is at home on week nights, and thus how much higher they can get away with adjusting car premiums without cancellations. The ROI for that information used correctly would be measured in the hundreds per home per year - far in excess of what the service delivery cost.

Then add how the film & tv industry famously use creative accounting to mask and funnel income, including manufacturing tax losses (almost certainly in such a way that the suits other business ventures are the beneficiaries) and it's quite likely that a streaming service turning a profit could be considered a bad outcome.

Hell, making *any* taxable income in the modern era - at least in the markets I have worked in - is a good reason to sack the accountant for incompetence. There is no legitimate reason to turn a profit once an enterprise goes beyond a certain scale, because there's no intrinsic value in doing so - compared to realising gains through shell companies and service providers in tax friendly jurisdictions.

Circling back to the topic, I'm not too familiar with the specifics of .jp tax and finance laws but I have read that after the real estate bubble the regulations got a lot tighter for this sort of creative accounting and profit masking - which would suggest that the studios are ripe for exploitation when used by a foreign actor.

But as you rightly say, the implosion could well happen independently (or even be the kick starter) of the next recession.

>go to Jersey Mikes
>they play this as background music
"hey i'd like a large hoage"
>I SWEAR
"yeah I'd like chesse, lettuce, and
>IF I LOSE IT ALL, BEYOND THE WALL
"and could you add mayo to tha"
>BREAK FREEEEEEEE

>>40480
Manga has always had a normalfag following in Japan, anime was more cliche, but that is changing as more people want to see their manga animated. Western compaines like Netflix is a big reason for anime becoming more mainstream in the west, they are funding multiple anime. And netflix loves pushing shit where doesn't belong, so your are going to see more anime normalfag behaviors (sex, cheating, etc), more diversity, more social-issues drama, more western-oriented, etc. This bleeds in Japan's own culture and you start to see more manga and anime appealing to the lowest of the low. It's disgusting.

>>41657
Anime will stay the same, it will just be recontextualized ala >>40531

I went to a cinema showing of an anime series, it wasn't a movie it was one of those shortened versions of a series arc. People laughed at the appropriate moments but like they were conditioned to laugh like dogs given a command. The crowd was mostly hipsters and younger normalfags with their parents, as opposed to the usual weaboo crowd (though it is almost impossible to determine who is a weaboo since no longer requires effort).