The Bridge to an Otaku’s Heart, Over the River of Bank Accounts

It’s another case when I try to articulate the obvious: Buying stuff–why we do it, what it means.

TL;DR: Sub-licensing companies need to focus on the question “Just because you like it, will you buy it?”

Partly inspired by reading Funimation’s latest survey on what they should license next, I had a moment of clarity in how to articulate this issue. I live in a land where legit DVD and Blu-ray releases are relatively cheap–anywhere from $10 to $50, you can buy a season of something. You can definitely buy a single, new movie at that price, save some crazy special release.

I ask myself: why do we buy what we buy? I can think of lots of different reasons that are common enough: love for the show, wanting to support the creator, liking the physical format, want to collect stuff, convenience, as a gift, etc. The money is not a big barrier at any given SKU in that price range.

Contrast this with people who, for this week, propped up over 6000 copies of HanaIro #7. It’s just an example. A copy of HanaIro #7 is still over 6000 yen at Amazon.co.jp, which is one of the cheapest place to buy Japanese anime (new, not used). That makes it 5800 yen before tax, or about $75 USD by today’s exchange rate.

It isn’t like Japanese otaku are rich people. A lot of people are doing it because they really love the thing, so they can afford the mental fortitude and determination to cut whatever they need to make ends meet. And there are 9 volumes of HanaIro in total (I think). At the same price that comes to $675, which is like, a lot of money for 26 episodes of anime. Well, the actual cost might be a bit more or less, but you get the idea.

All I’m trying to say is the majority of people who buy Japanese releases are people who really loves to own that very specific title. Only truly the rich buy anime just so they can collect stuff. The guilt trip, the store sale bonuses, the ultra-high quality release details, all that and more, are purposed to solicit people who already like a given show to take that next step and become owners, in a physical sense.

[It just occurred to me I bet a lot of people bought HanaIro just because they are fans of particular seiyuu-things. Maybe. Or maybe they work for the Toyama Prefectural government.]

It is in bizarre America land where we still treat TV anime like, well, OVAs. The OVA market is half-dead in Japan, for lots of reasons. The economics just don’t hold up as well today than it did during the “good o’ days.” Well, in America it was still the “good o’ days” until just recently, and today we are still expected to buy the anime we want to watch sight unseen. And not just high quality, high budget OVAs, but almost everything anime. Can this business model truly work in the long run? It seems like a very far-fetched idea. But I guess “sight unseen anime on DVD” still has a market if the price is low enough. Supply can meet with demand when the price is right, to go back to 16th century economics.

I hope you see what the problem is.

[Ok, it's not immediately obvious what the problem is, but it is definitely why the anime market in America is not growing organically, when there already exists an entire generation who grew up on Pokemon and Japanese video games, who are now entering the workforce. The Naruto Generation is due in another 8 years or so?]

Of course there are some titles, namely movies and OVAs, that could be treated this way. And we continue to do so. And it works. But the bulk of shows that gets pumped out by the usual R1 distros are not such things.

Because nobody respects the gap.

I think this is something everyone is aware of, or at least everyone that matters. Again, I’m stating the obvious. Again, this is why Funimation asks you what they should license, but also what titles you will end up buying. I mean after all this good talk about Redline, does this mean I’m going to buy it on Blu-ray? Probably not, at least not until it’s $10 or something. Kind of like why I didn’t buy FLCL on Blu-ray, since that would quantify as a triple-dip. Seeing Redline in theaters was enough for me.

There are countless ways why someone may buy or may not buy something. That is the bottom line. It has a correlation to quality, but it is not causally linked I would think. I have only my observations to support that conclusion, but I think it is sound.

This is one place where spreadsheets will tell the tale.

The real issue I want to get at is why Japan keeps on making moe anime that some people complain about. It’s because those sort of show fosters some kind of obsessed fans, in the way how idol fans buy everything a group releases, three times over. Shows that largely appeal only to people’s good tastes, however, don’t foster that kind of attitude towards their product. “Cool story bro.” You know the drill. And that doesn’t pay the bills.

Shows like Kaiba or Tatami Galaxy are great, and I like them. But it’s incredibly difficult to feel obsessive about those shows the way I do, say, Manabi Straight. (Did you know that thing is getting a BD remaster?) I’m sure some people loved those shows enough to buy it on home video, but it should not be surprising to see low sales for them, at the usual otaku-only price points.

In order to get people to not just like, but buy, anime, there needs be some kind of added factor. A franchise, a release, whatever, needs to build that allegorical bridge. Sure, you can simply drop prices, but the distance between my heart and the show would not have moved closer by even one centimeter.

On Google Search, Ads, And Anime

The other day I was thinking about who matters–a company that created a set of products sells it to their customers. By some chance or reason a lot of non-customers end up with the same products and it took off, generated a scene. What should the company’s response be?

Do the voices and activities of these uninvited third parties matter? I’m thinking it does in some cases, and it does not in others. The very obvious use case of this is in media piracy when you have a niche, expensive release of something (like a galge) and it is then widely pirated (perhaps even fan-translated) and enjoyed by a lot of people, perhaps even more people than the number of legitimate purchasers of the game.

In this case, the people who pirated the game should only have a say as someone who has played the game in the way they did. For example, if most people who bought the game prefers one particular way (for example, physical releases over digital) and most people who did not prefers another way, it would make little sense for the game company to change their ways that would isolate the people who buy the game to satisfy those who didn’t. Ideally, you want to satisfy both groups, and satisfy those who didn’t buy the game on the promise that it will lead to those who didn’t buy the game to buy the game. And outside of that promise, it’s hard to say what and how would motivate the example game company.

I mean, I suppose there are examples like societal pressure (eg., Rapelay incident) which influences how game companies behave. Government regulation and stuff like the Tokyo Nonexistent Youth ordinance, too. The government is not a consumer, a customer, or a player (typically), so I’m not sure how it fits, but the government reflects the general public (typically) so it is an instance where non-buyer of a game would influence the game company almost in a direct way.

And then there is the topic of this post. Relevance.

To actually talk about anime now, one major pet peeve I have is when I go google the title of some show, way too often the results end up being illegal streaming sites or download sites. I realize you can actually issue DMCA takedown requests for google search results (and I invite license holders to do so, if anything, just to improve Google’s search results). It’s even worse when it comes to manga, but at least in those cases a lot of these semi-legal or illegal sites are actually the best sources of information on the material.

WSJ today posted the story of a US Federal Government sting operation that painted Google as a criminal organization of willingly advertising illegal activity, specifically of pushing ads of foreign illegal pharmacies to US customers. And as an ex-Adsense customer I know I have served ads, on occasion, that advertised these kinds of sites. It was hard to fish for them because it comes and goes, and 99% of the time I was on an ad-blocking browser, but I saw them.

This stuff is a real concern. Granted, it doesn’t really matter in the big picture, but better SEO and fluency with Google search from a marketing perspective will deliver a better experience for everyone who wants to work with your title, even if they are not buyers.

The real question is how does non-purchaser’s web activity increase the relevance of these illegal sites. That is what I mean earlier by relevance. As you might know, Google rank its search results by how “relevant” a particular link is to the search query. Loosely speaking (since nobody but Google knows how it works exactly) it means how pages link to each other, and the “quality” of a web page adds or removes credence to the things a page links to. So if a very popular forum links to some DDL sites, those sites will get props. There are companies out there that create content on the web to “game” Google search ranks that is the basis of “SEO” or search engine optimization. And that is beyond the less controversial stuff, like developing your webpages in a way that is friendly to Google’s web robots that index and discover your page’s contents and display them the right way on the search results page.

Of course, it’s not to ignore the “real relevance” of non-purchasers on purchasers, let alone the content publisher. That is why copies of things are given to press to review, and why word of mouth is a powerful advertising tool. Similarly it can lower sales in such a way. I think one example that shows up statistically is how piracy-before-purchasing can change some potential buyers into non-buyers, after they have sampled the thing and found it not satisfactory [which says nothing about such an effect being, in my opinion, a very good thing] or otherwise undesired due to some other reasons [which could be a bad thing].

The responsible thing to do, in light of this, is actually police the things you link to. As a blogger it is clearly one venue where it could happen (and I profess linking to at least a couple sites where wholesale copyright infringement was at hand, despite the quality and legitimate information it provided). Other places include twitter, Google+, forums, and lots of other fixed web media. You know what? If you manage the online presence of a brand, the least you can do is make a website that is informative. So many companies fail on this in the anime/game/manga sphere it is incredible.

For companies, it is to monitor relevance and get people to realize the impact, both as purchasers and non-purchasers. But also to respect people who don’t buy your stuff, to the degree that it facilitates people who do buy your stuff. This is a vague statement to put into practice, but that has to be the overarching goal, I think. What I invite people to do is storyboard specific use cases. I think the better you are at this, the more likely you will be successful at niche markets like for anime, manga, and bishoujo/otome games.

I mean, if I want to find a download link, I’ll add the search term “download” to the query :p

Judge Book by Cover: Winter 2011 Edition

Another year, another season, another activity under the sun. Three-ep test time, right?

Danshi Koukosei no Nichijou – Nichibros is great fun. But I am not compelled. I think Nichijou was more compelling, despite significantly less gut-busting fun. Maybe it will grow on me. Maybe not. It’s still a lot of fun though.

Symphogear – Only if Polyphonica was like this. That said I ought to drop it. Wake me up when Minami Takayama shows up again. What is up with Nana Mizuki and crap anime anyways? At any rate, the weird feeling that I should go suffer through Blood-C first before this prompts me to do that first before watching any more Symphogear. Which is probably unlikely.

Kill Me Baby – It’ll probably be fun to watch at 2x speed. But not for me.

Ano Natsu de Matteru – Probably my most anticipated anime coming out of the first 3 episodes. There is a warmth to the characters and the animation radiates love. Kind of like how iM@S was. And believe it or not, Ichigo Morino (kind of wondering what would go with Umino) takes the spot of the first fixed pose PVC moe girl figure I ever owned. But actually, even if none of what I said just now is true, I would’ve put AnoNatsu in the #1 spot on the strength of episode 3 alone. It’s just a terrific piece of witty rom-com in the span of 23 minutes. It’s this kind of stuff that elevates late-night otaku fantasy into the realm of something that can be taken seriously as entertainment.

Mouretsu Pirates – Definitely my most anticipated anime going into this season. Does not disappoint. I am fine with the slow pace.

Rinne no Lagrange – This and Aquarion fight a bitter fight to see if it can fit into my even more restricted anime viewing time. It has an edge because it is on Hulu.

Aquarion EVOL – Just like the old series. But unfortunately I didn’t like the old show that much. I get the feeling it will be a mid-season call for this one, or will it have more staying power than Gundam AGE? One weird thing I noticed is how watching the OP and ED without any subtitles drastically improved my viewing experience. It’s like there is a saturation point in terms of what happens on every cut at any given time. The credits actually reduces the load on my sensory organs, but the subtitles (especially my favorite Karaoke subs) pushes it way over the edge and you missout that immersive experience as your eyes begin to ignore the stuff the subs breaks out from one moving frame to the other. Or at least it was for me.

High School DxD – Boobs are great, aren’t they?

Nisemonogatari – I wish I could just say “Boobs are great, aren’t they?” Definitely will finish it, simply because despite how much I find Nisioisin’s tricks worthless, they are quite entertaining. Also, at this point how can anyone take this show beyond pure fanservice? I have a hard time taking it seriously at all, maybe at the most as a funny word problem.

Papa no Iukoto wo Kikinasai! – Better known as Papakiki or “Listen to Me Girls, I Am Your Father!” it is more like, well, a planewreck than a train wreck. The first two episodes does a great job making a serious matter serious in this heavily saturated genre of man meets loli. The only question left is will the man meats loli? Also, the sempai character is kind of interesting.

Knight in the Area – Sums up why I have a hard time embracing shows like Cross Game, which I further contemplate if it has to do with why sports manga will never fly in America. Also, carwreck lol.

Another – I generally dislike horror as a genre, but this show is so gorgeous I don’t know if I can drop it. Also, Chihiro vibes where? Episode 3 ends with a very nice punch. Too bad she was my favorite moe character in the show; also makes a great first target.

Amagami SS+ – Glad it only has 2-ep arcs. First arc was kind of dreadful actually. But at this point I might as well finish. Good thing about 2-ep arcs is that any bad stuff only lasts for so long before another two reroll. Rihoko arc has proved to capture a bit more of the charm from the first series already!

Inu x Boku SS – I’m blogging it over at Jtor, and so far it is a deviation from what we typically expect out of David Pro. While I’m not holding my breath on it I expect it to be actually entertaining enough along the lines of, say, Maid-sama. Except instead of the annoying feminist blunders, it’ll have a lot of fujoshi baits. Or I hope. Ending is a great little nod.

Thermae Romae – It’s short and sweet. Being educational is a bonus. Also I’m really happy that it is only 6 eps long, because I’m not sure how much more of this I can handle.

Poyopoyo – It’s short and sweet and I can handle cats like this.

Recorder and Randsell – It’s short. Watching this on CR makes me wonder why am I not watching Morita-san or GDGT Fairies instead? But being on CR and being short means I can watch it on the commute.

Power Word: Please!

I’ve been looking at some of the blog posts and online reactions to Ano Natsu de Matteru. The general concensus can be categorized into three bins: 1) those who has seen and enjoyed the Onegai Teacher and Onegai Twins series, 2) those who did not enjoy those two shows, and 3) those who knew nothing about them until recently.

I find the general concept of AnoNatsu intriguing, coming from a reboot perspective. I think this guy kind of points out the problem–or better put, the trick. Does AnoNatsu stand on its own? I think that isn’t a question that those in groups one and two can truly answer, and Chris B. is firmly in that category. Actually, he kind of comes off clueless there, but that’s not the point I want to get at.

The general reaction among the 3 groups are:

Group one typically loves AnoNatsu just purely running on nostalgia alone. To use a sweet analogy, it’s like Peanut M&Ms, but now you have Almond M&Ms. And typically people who like nuts like both. We’re (because that’s who I am) the kind of people who gets excited seeing Ichika wearing something like Mizuho’s negligee or understand the secret behind Remon’s identity (as oppose to merely having knowledge of who she is). We are, I guess, Hayama. Actually, it’s more than just that. Some people get really into it and there’s plenty of Easter eggs in AnoNatsu that you can get tripping with both the new material and the old material and how the old material is in the new material. That’s three-fer-sugar high, to extend the sweet analogy.

Group two are, I hate to say it, made up largely of stereotypical Americans that gets hung up on teenage sex fantasies. Of course there are some legitimate complaints here and the Oneti/Onetwi series is all about adolescent romantic fantasies as a core component of that magic, so invariably some people will have issues with that. It is kind of interesting to see how people react to it now that they’ve been armed with 10 years of fandom vocabulary and development that wasn’t present back when Onetwi was around. I think regardless, AnoNatsu comes off somehow different than the genre tropes people are used to, even for this group, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

Naturally I am most interested in the opinion of people in Group Three. I think what made Oneti and Onetwi fun to watch is present in AnoNatsu so I expect that new viewers to find themselves reacting to it the way we did 10+ years ago. It helps that there’s a good amount of self-selection going on, given AnoNatsu doesn’t beat around the bush and doesn’t distinguish itself beyond that it is the spiritual successor of the Please! franchise. Also I think people prefer that to begin with. For example, like what this ANN reviewer said. I think just like back then, Please Teacher and Twins are romantic comedies for guys that actually walked that really scandalous road where fantasies are fulfilled from the get go, rather than a carrot on a stick form that is way too typical (especially given the constraints of serialized manga publication). From there, the rest of the show is set up to exploit that tension of fantasy being reality, but with a twist. (It slightly deviated from the typical Alien Girlfriend plot generator.)

[Well, If Ah My Goddess can do it, anyone can too. Also if you review anime for $, please do me a favor: Please do not quote from TVTropes unironically.]

I think more importantly it isn’t common to see reboots drag new fans into the fold of old, the original series, in this genre. I mean I can’t remember a single time when people quoted either Oneti or Onetwi in their “must watch” list. But for entertainment, I think they are a good time for everyone. It’s neat to see that some people are really enjoying it today even when they missed out 10 years ago.

PS. There is actually a mysterious fourth group of reactions that I left out: Those people who know about Please Teacher from way back but forgot Please Twins existed. They … are a fun group to watch. A bit of category 1 and 2 in those.

How to Make Redline Better

My reaction to Redline, in a word: overrated. I think the hype surrounding Redline is largely founded on good faith but it’s like a great down payment but defaulting on the rest of the loan, Redline doesn’t bring home all the goodness promised. And it’s sad because I don’t think the film and marketing material promised much–it’s what all the excessive word on the street is preaching.

However I am going to put that pedal to the metal is to cram as much car and racing puns into this delivery vehicle. You on board with me?

At the end of it all, in order to find something “overrated” it has to have some basis for me to have such a turbocharged expectation. I blame posts like this, selling it like a high school dropout turned used car salesman (because he was too busy watching Ninja Scroll than to study); the mentality drives such reviews, not the actual quality of the thing. It makes me wonder if it does more harm than good by kicking up dust like that. I appreciate the passion to go to town but like every other anime, it is but a small sample in a wide and broad swath of possibilities, among fans of all sizes, where the mileage invariably will vary. It’s like screeching of some dynoqueen Civic for being, well, dynoing like crazy. But when rubber meets the road, you’ve got to wonder.

Personally I find the biggest problem in Redline the lack of that rival component. It’s got nobody to race with. In fact the handling of all the racers besides JP and Sonoshee is pretty half-assed. There are about a dozen concurrent plot lines in the span of 90 minutes, give or take. And all but the main one is…just thrown in there, without a lot of passion. Certainly much less than the eye-dropping animation on display. I mean, the half-assed execution is probably a product of having just too much in too little, givng the audience very little reasons to put money on anything in the movie except the primary pairing. By the time when the film crosses the finish line, you’re left wondering what difficult challenge JP and Sonoshee have overcome. I guess it’s about themselves? Being determined and courageous enough to pick themselves up to cross the finish line, against tremendous odds? Odds expressed as bets? And such bets are actually being gamed, because everyone we care about (namely you, the viewer) knew JP is way better than the odds?

And wait, isn’t JP’s real struggle not even on the course? It all had to do with his friend/mechanic and the mob? Isn’t that exactly the UN-anime/manga thing in regards to what typically passes for a fight/sports setup? Oh wait, this is where people are suppose to say “no” to angsty teenage characters trying to improve their game over their bitter rivals. It’s closer to some HK Blood Opera, except JP is not full of bullet holes (tho not for lack of trying) and bleeding to death because he has terminal cancer, or something ridiculously Jun Maeda-like.

I mean, racing is a sport, right? Where you can “win” at something? Or is it an allegory in Redline? But without defining the challenges, it’s not clear if what JP and Sonoshee accomplished across the finish line is really the proverbial “all that.”

At least, instinctively, when JP and Sonoshee did their best Utena Movie impression at the end, it did not leave me impressed beyond the audio-visual treat that none can deny. What is there for JP to lose? Or Sonoshee? It feels like seeing a bunch of clowns racing down the track, with explosions going on, but you know they’ll be fine because they are, like all the other racers in Redline, clowns trained to survive these high-octane stunts. Plus they’ve got Plot Armor.

The lack of this realism definitely is something part of the visual presentation. Unreal, more like. Fantastic dialed up to eleven. Yeah, maybe in their various flashbacks and tearful rememberences, JP and Sonoshee appeared human. But that is not only just the backdrop to the film, it isn’t even the purpose–I’m here to see some badass racing. I mean, if you go into Redline with any other expectation (and besides to see some gorgeous animation), you will be disappointed. I find that fundamentally two contrasting flavors to this film. On one hand they could ditch all of that and just parade it down the raceway like a pro; but it probably won’t work in the feature-film format.

TL;DR–these are the things Redline can do better:

• Ditch more of the side plots so it can spend time on the main characters.
• Spend more time making Sonoshee and JP human by spending less on those in the show that aren’t.
• Change or lessen the contrast between superhuman feats and motivation based on the lack of by defining the challenge as something JP could not overcome.
• Have better marketing instead of having semi-fans parade nonsensical claims that distort the quality of the film. (Instead they can have contests in which they will try to cram as many racing and driving metaphors in their reviews.)

In other words, my biggest complaint of the film is the lull in the 30-35 minute gap between when we first see Sonoshee’s tits and when the proper Redline race begin. Most of those things will go to making that segment a lot more engaging. I mean, the whole introduce-to-rest-of-racer thing ought to be important but in the end that whole sideshow doesn’t add anything to the main story. It felt contrived in that they had to explain those elements as they play pivotal roles in the final race, but it was not possible to elevate those elements beyond one-dimensional props. I mean who cares about the motivation of the SuperBoins? Or the crybaby cop? And those two are way more outstanding than the other half-dozen miscreants that line up at the starting gate. I think this audience is better served if they spent more time studying the superlaser satellite thing or driving around in circles at the river bed.

Seriously, after such an high octane opening, it feels really tedious having to wait like, 40 minutes, just to get to the next race, with a plain-Jane Vanilla buildup. It’s like going from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds and it takes half an hour to do a quarter-mile. Give me a break.

I’ve said it before: Redline is more like the final crow call of an era bygone than something that saves something else. Get over it guys, the market has already long spoken as to what kind of businesses and what kind of franchises sell. I think I’m with you in that the world may be a better place if more productions like Redline existed, but it isn’t going to happen if they would have the flaws Redline has. The market just cannot sustain that volume of arthouse projects as a mainstream sort of thing, even if said arthouse project is Redline. You are better off standing in line with all the other otaku with their niche entertainment. I mean that’s where everybody is going to be soon enough.