Meanwhile you can nag this guy about just what is so special about iM@S. I was this close to picking up a copy of Dearly Stars over the weekend. It was in my grasp (as in, the copy of the game was in my hand). Maybe I should have. Maybe I should not have. Maybe I should not have started playing the game a week ago. But it’s too late now. (Maybe I should hold out for a copy of iM@S SP Perfect Sun…).

There is a strange “one more turn”-itis going on with iM@S2, similar to what I experience in those 4X games. I’ve already mastered the rock-paper-scissors thing. I can, I guess, read lips. Telling seiyuu apart is harder than it sounds but it is something I’ve had some training for years, to say the least. Even when it is just by voice. (The concerts are something else, I assure you.) I still can’t read Japanese, which is what really counts in the end. Not knowing Japanese, or not knowing anything else for that matter, doesn’t present itself as enough of a stopping block, when you have websites like this. Truly we live in the information age.

[I guess Steve Jobs's contribution to import gaming was enable that Sakura Taisen experience that I had many years ago, when going through the game on the PC (actually it was my Dreamcast hooked up to a TV card) on one side of the screen and the translation on the other, but using a tablet or smartphone instead.]

Fundamentally, the game is the core user experience. The anime is mostly fluff, although you can enjoy fluff by itself. It’s akin to pouring whipped creme in to your pie hole directly. The anime does serve better as icing on the PS/Xbox/DS cake, so much so that I want to go back and re-watch it. This is notably different than most galge adaptations. I mean I can go and play Kanon or even Fate Stay Night and get most of it from the corresponding anime (at least the adopted arc), and vice versa. I might even want to revisit the anime after I am done (although it didn’t happen for either of them). But iM@S, given its arcade lineage, has so much “game” to it that it elevates the experience beyond just a flat read of the stereotypical visual novel presentation.

[Tho I wonder if there was the "Nayuki Minase" equivalent in iM@S anime--someone who gets the short end of the stick. I guess that is what fans debate after all. And speaking of which, I even want to go re-read what 2DT shipped. Knowing the characters better, would it make more or less sense in terms of his pairing?]

The mistake I made was trying to “get it out of my system” by playing it as much as possible. Ha, never again. The light at the end of the tunnel, however, is that like all the 4X games I have encountered, the novelty eventually wear thin given the repetitiveness of it all. No amount of pretty girls dancing (prettily) will reduce the fact that I’m just hitting the highest-general-appeal-scoring-button, infinite times, every time, all the time. Okay, occasionally it’s about timing your memory appeals, but once you figure it out, you just do the same thing every time. So the question is no longer “if” I could get out of the hole Yukiho dug for me, but how deep she has dug it.

The same can be said of Nisioisin’s animated Nonexistent Youths in Nisemonogatari. Actually we should be talking about Bakemonogatari, because that show is also similar in that there’s all this porn. Maybe not all the time like Nise, but Bake has several moments where I have to wring my brow and consider what I was truly watching.

Unlike people who shy away from the source material, Nisioisin’s treatment of his characters is key to understanding what actually is going on in Bake and Nise from the perspective of the anime adaptation. Granted, all I had was a few books translated into English, but Nisio Isin is pretty much writing like the database animal was living on his sleeves. JP mentions that so far the scenarios and set pieces in Nise are all like what you would find in a doujinshi for Nise, and it’s painfully obvious once we reduce the scenes to what they really are. What you all should know is Nisioisin’s works are all like this, or at least every one that I have looked into. I think the naming scheme he has adopted for the whatever-monogatari stories says as much about the interchangable, mash-up set pieces of his works.

By focusing the plot on these well-understood scenarios, it allows the director to do whatever the hell he wants in the mean time. That allows the story to highlight these quirky characters that live like pixel-perfect, graphed conical equations sharply focuses on the stress points that these well-curated tropes–the word trope seems woefully inadequate here–and their intended effects. It is the difference between showing you a picture of a snake and showing you the word “snake” instead, but both the image and the word behave the same. It’s like, who cares about what the snake is actually? You know what it signifies and you know how it is in your mind, you just want to get to the money shot (which in this case, for readers of Nisioisin, the animated versions of their favorite things).

Oh wait, that’s an actual SHAFT trick isn’t it?

[Next up: SHAFT draws a shark and writes SAME a hundred times in a cut in the same episode.]

When Nadeko went full-frontal in Bake I was pretty uncomfortable. I understood all the stuff that was going on (perhaps too well). But when Shinobu enjoyed her bath with Koyomi I was nowhere nearly as queasy. I think I was suppose to react to it not unlike the way he harassed Hachikuchi. Am I suppose to react to it the same way when Kanbaru got naked and wrestled Araragi? Or when Nadeko tried to seduced the same? What does that say about Karen and Tsukihi?

Well, I don’t really think how we reacted to those things are important. It’s more important to note that we reacted to those things, and not to the fact that 4 episodes in we have barely started on the arc’s main story. To me it says nobody really cares exactly what those plot events are like (unless it accumulates into some awesome fight scene that SHAFT couldn’t animate in time), but we want to see Senjougahara tilt her head or Nadeko play Twister. So here we are, full of it in Nise. That is fanservice. And if you watched Nise episodes 1-4, every episode is full of fanservice, from start to finish. It’s by far the most fanservice-y thing on the air right now.

So when we talk about the discomfort some felt when Shinbo revisits one of his favorite subjects–the aged loli vampire–we have to take that into perspective. Is fanservice expected in a fanservice show? Is this fanservice somehow different than other fanservice? By what measuring sticks are you relying to make that distinction? Is that stick one that retracts or extend upon arousal? Do we even want to know? Can we couch our hard-ons with some, well, context? I really don’t want to go and read people’s valid objections and come away with “man these people are prudes and hypocrites.” Because that’s not who you really are.

I suppose there’s always a lack of dutch angle porn on the internet, and SHAFT works hard to remedy this.

Of course, that isn’t how the story begin. My first run-in with iM@S (for the sake of sanity it will remain in its insanely abbreviated form in this post) probably has more to do with being born a male East Asian during the time in this world that I did. Although it is a stretch to call that an encounter with iM@S, I think it was fundamental in the makeup of what makes up the average “Producer-san,” the anonymous term in which the various in-game characters refer to as the player.

I think the only other game to date that walked (or perhaps trailblazed) the same path as Project iM@S is Sakura Taisen, and that is one blueprint in which a video games achieve mix-media franchising immortality. It’s one thing to create a game that goes on being immortal (and we can name a dozen of these easily), it’s another to create a game like a caterpillar creates a cocoon. The game may fade over time and yield to newer, glitzier ideas, but the franchise lives on with a dim, but ever-burning core fan base that participates in its extra-curricular activities. It’s just in the case of Sakura Taisen, the cocoon hatches a zombie butterfly of some sort; undying, but not immune to decay.

And like butterflies they were in those kayou shows, those brave actors and actresses, some even came to the stage as experienced stage actors. But yes, some others were, well, the seiyuu idol variety. They had to sing and dance, and act. It was interesting in that they were not only acting out the characters from the show, but also as actors of their own stage personalities.

Back to iM@S–it is entering its 8th year since the very first game. The recent PS3 port and the anime adaptation are sure to bring in new fans for the franchise, or at least get people curious enough to check out the game, like myself. I’m slightly more interested initially at the iM@S live shows, as the cumulation of sentimental energies and collective moments of orgasm from a bunch of male otaku types. And also, seiyuu fandom. I think someone reported like >90% male-to-female ratio at those lives? Not surprised.

The point I wanted to make about stage personalities is important because invariably this girl walks on the stage, and I was like, “heh, I don’t even have to remind myself of this video being Azusa.” I mean, some people commented on how her character in the anime is acted by the same person as in that video, but there is nothing holding you back from seeing it when it is the actual person on stage.

Oh, right, the stage shows: It was “The World Is All One” two-day live July 3rd to 4th, 2010, at Makahari Messe. Day 2 is what I linked above to Danie’s write-up, a solid read if you want to know what actually happened. Day two is also the day to go if you are a Kugimiya fan. In fact both days are good for that. There are a lot of people who really dig this gal, so I’m not going to talk about it too much, besides that I watched that two-BD boxset and now am ready to talk about it.

It is at these sort of fantasy-meets-reality events where we truly get to see the meta. If I were to rank the 13 girls again like how I did for the anime, it would come out very differently. Even more so is the “cumulative” score that true fans of the franchise put on their ranks, combining what they like and dislike about each character, from who stands behind the mic stand in real life and who stands behind the protective layer of their LCD screens, and everything in between.

Well, at least now I can achieve an 80% success rate at identifying the faces of the girls behind iM@S. Which is to say before the anime started, I was probably not even 80% successful at identifying the characters in iM@S. In the few hours I’ve spent with the game, I guess it actually tried to train me to be able to listen to their voices and pick them out. That’s pretty hardcore. All told, there’s a considerable learning curve, lack of a better term, to entry to iM@S fandom. The thing has been around for a while and the games are, while a little easier to get into than Sakura Taisen, are not exactly self-documenting. Sorry Kotori, the voiceovers are not quite enough. There’s just too much crud, as part and beyond the franchise, to wade through at this point.

Instead of writing up what I thought of the two days in a song-by-song blow-by-blow way, I’ll just keep it short(er):

1. Hibiki – Sharp-looking girl doing her dance moves. Got good presence. Can sing. A winner.
2. Ritsuko – Slightly less sharp-looking girl making all those fetish points work but not fetishy! As much as one can harp on her singing voice, I think she is the best embodiment of this weird iM@S concert concept.
3. Miki – Not the bombshell blonde, this Miki carries it on with the full deal. It felt like she’s got what it takes, but yet not what it takes, to do Miki justice. It’s realizations like this that makes this feel like an elaborate seiyuu event rather than an idol live.
4. Azusa – CHUPA RIKO wwww. No, really, Chiaking is an accomplished entertainer even if her achievements are relatively minor. She can dance and sing and struct, which is more than what most people sharing a stage with her could do. Mucho respect.
5. Chihaya – I think she sings much better on CD. Also what is up with her hair? They can surely do a better job. BTW I really like LPCM 5.1 and this is something the game was able to deliver too.
6. Makoto – She’s definitely the most seiyuu-ish looking person on the list, if that made sense. But that’s fine, I think Hirorin is also one of the best performers with good stage presence. Kind of like Hasegawa in that sense.
7. Iori – I owe her fans an apology for not ranking her last time, but I was limited to 12 and it had to include Ami separately from Mami. I think Kugyuu live was definitely well-received and she appears so…langly. It’s rare to see a girl in this industry like this unless they’re built like a model (which she is not). It was wise for them to not work her as much as they did for some others, and we never really ask so much from Iori anyway. She just needed to be cute and upstanding, and Kugimiya was just that.
8. Haruka – Eririn is actually just as unremarkable as her character. However, she is still pretty good at getting the crowd going and had good stage presence.
9. Mami/Ami – If I wasn’t already positively predisposed to Asapon, I would probably rank her lower than Maya-chan. She didn’t quite pass the cute as cute would do, but her vocals were solid.
10. Takane – It feels like her character is just an overly-embellished version of her on-stage performance. Pretty looking person I suppose.
11. Yayoi – Guh. Actually out of all the girls I think I respect her the most. You can also tell how none of this is lipsynched given how terrible it was. It was sheer and paper-thin presence that managed to carry the performance. It’s like magic made of unrelenting willpower to carry out an act that just didn’t make sense visually. Again, endless respect–Maya-chan impressed, even if the performance was one of the worst.
12. Kotori – I was glad she was there, but I guess so was she!
13. Yukiho – I put her last but I think that is more because she was the least notable. The NEW Yukiho is a bit more of a looker though. Well, I won’t go into details, but someone has to hold the bag, be #12, and it was just the easiest thing to put her there.

I guess in the end I still didn’t really describe the magnitude of that 2-day live. It’s a big deal if you were into it, and I don’t mean into iM@S alone–it is more like if you subscribed to iM@S you probably subscribed to all the things that independently iM@S’s live had as separate parts. It became greater than the sum of its parts, but the sum itself was a big deal already. It’s like you had to be born a certain way and grew up a certain way and got exposed to certain interests, and it comes together like some crazy thing.

But then again, I guess even I too missed the train there.

What is left is trying to know all the songs, and that is a task too tall even for me, lest I get serious. But I just want a short fling with iM@S! I don’t want to turn into this guy (I jest). Even if some of those songs have the cutest/catchiest/funniest calls.

Then, go watch Thermae Romae. It’s an enjoyable show. Not because what is amusing about that show is how it subtly extols exactly that virtue. But what’s even more amusing is the way our time-traveling designer/architect adopts those technologies for his own use.

I mean, it’s almost offensive if you read it too deep.

[Also, when I see Mingosu on stage I always think "FLAT-FACED TRIBE" now. Also #2, inc. iM@S post.]

It makes the cultural exchange in Croisee a little more palatable (rather than boring, I suppose) because now you have at least two cultures of similar status trading things.

As opposed to, say, in Aria, which is more just tourism.

The other day I read an article about how Sony is considering shutting down its battery manufacturing operation within Japan and moving to some other Asian country. That’s how everything in the electronics industry is going these days, as well as many others. But there are still some consumers who cling to that national brand/identity as a synonym as quality. It belies the nature of IP and mass production, at least by today’s standards. Of course, I am not going to disagree to the observed reality that at times, one factory can produce something better than another producing the same SKU, but usually there is some specific reason that can be (and often is) resolved by engineers, managers, and employees, on the road to globalization. I mean don’t Honda and Toyota spend a ton of effort and money to fight this problem?

I think more concretely, and importantly, there’s something to be said that in the end, at the end of the day, at last, we can enjoy Thermae Romae as a fun piece of entertainment. It is just like how I can surely enjoy the tastes of the best French cuisine made in Japan, or the best Japan has to offer, imported from Ohio. Or go to Uniglo and see how everything is made in the same countries that makes clothes for every other brand anyway. This is the truism that props up this whole cultural remix-ism and give people even the slightest reason to give it damn.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There are a million better explanations than this one as to why SOPA and PIPA are bad. But to someone like me copyright enforcement is really just about money. The sad thing is, things like integrity and the notion of “theft” about music and movies in the context of internet piracy are all artificially grafted into the mainstream consciousness, to serve money. It’s not a natural concept to apply it to mass media. I think maybe when it was print publishing’s earlier days, it made sense. But now? It’s like bottling air and selling it to people. It’s unfortunate you have so many people using these emotional and irrational notions to argue their cases. (What was the thing Socrates said about persuasion? Oh hey they do that in American law schools don’t they.)

But that goes both ways–there’s nothing wrong about bottling air and selling it to people. Or water, for that matter. Fresh water is one of the hardest thing to get, and we cannot live without it. Or at least live without dysentery. It is very much about putting money where it counts, but at the same time doing it in a way that respects the nature of the thing. If we want to inject any kind of morality into this situation anyways. And I still fail to see why we should, besides as an alternative to more elaborate, truthful, and rational reasons why we might want to support laws that protect IP creators. They tend to be subpar alternatives, I’m inclined to think. These are alternatives that can be used to manipulate a body of lawmakers to pass laws primarily motivated to profit one party’s bottom line over another, at the cost of a legitimate and potentially greater good to society.

The truth is, the copyright code is not written with the common man in mind. It is written for companies and businesses and libraries and guilds and schools and such. It doesn’t even care about software publishers. Just look at who were in those legislative caucuses for the 1986 copyright code, the foundation of today’s US copyright law. In the 90s when the US Copyright Code was amended to take care of the internet, well, it was written in the 90s. The internet is profoundly a different thing since the 90s. But in regards to the Copyright Code, people were asking the same questions back then as they do now. It made as much sense as it did as it does today. Which is to say, it doesn’t even make sense to most lawyers! [Free book on this, great read.]

That is also why I don’t think we should care (much about) how SOPA can be used to censor legitimate speech, or kill anime blogging, or whatever. Those are simply unconstitutionally broad provisions that deserve to die, and even if passed would not come to. I think it distracts from the core discussions on issues behind SOPA, and generally internet & copyright and other systemic problems that lead us down this road in the first place.

SOPA/PIPA are pretty much the same kind of patchwork as what we have today. Except there are no lobbyists for the American people. Even organizations like the EFF kind of lets you down, because it can’t override the system: in the end our legislative system bases itself on the individual voters as the core voice for their elected officials. Is that tin-can-on-a-string sort of communication-representation working? It does when you call or write or whatever your congressperson. And it only does when you do that. It doesn’t do it when you “vote with your wallet.” No number of copies of Fate/Zero preorders will change this. Or for that matter, the only thing worse is when you boycott. Seriously, don’t boycott anime. Boycott, I don’t know, BP or something actually meaningful. Or at least boycott someone like GoDaddy, guh, I don’t know why people sign with them at all ever in the first place.

The real way to ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH is to replace it. Go to NYC or San Jose or something, start a company. If Hollywood and the recording industry really suck, then you can make money in the vacuum that they are overlooking. A Steve Jobs sure did. And someone like him contributes to society way more than any RIAA goon or random Internet Quarterback has ever did, and Jobs isn’t even a nice guy, for example. Or, hey, if those SOPA hearing makes you want to run for Congress, well, politics can make for an exciting career!

This is why I prop companies like Crunchyroll. Because they are a force of change for the better. They see a business that they can capitalize on and exploit, and they did. That changes things. It brings simulcast out from the ghetto and into, well, 21st century standards. And as it should be, right?

Let companies like Funimation and Section23 pick over the half-dead body of the home video market. It’s their jobs. It’s not to say home video will die–it won’t. In fact it’ll remain profitable (and it will continue to have my money for sure). It just won’t grow and develop into the Pocket Monster Master that anime used to be 10 years ago. It won’t bring change, at least not any foreseeable sort of change that hasn’t already happened 15 years ago. It will not increase the freedom of a society, or bring new ways for fans to interact with content creators and with each other (as these things have already been accomplished to the extent home video is capable of doing). All it’s going to do is to look at the same spreadsheets and balances and market data and pray that by doing the same business they’ve done for over a decade, that they will still be able to put food on the table.

I suppose that’s fine and all, but if I had a choice to reward those who seek to improve the current situation versus those who are just keeping the status quo, I think the choice is obvious. It’s about what you do with the money, not who has it.

Because, to someone like me, when Funi sued ADV, it’s also just about money, too. Funi had an obligation to realize the value that their Japanese overlord had as creditor. It was bound to happen. The question was  just how it mattered and how can Funi soften the blow that it will invariably have against themselves and the defendant. Commercial litigation is just a protracted negotiation since something like 90% of them settle. It costs money to play the game, no matter who you are. And there are risks for both sides. Both companies have my best wishes that they can wrap up what they need to get done, and soon.