2011 has been a really riveting renaissance year for anime, as we’ve seen anime Blu-Ray sales stunningly soar, and strong new offerings in the magical girl and sci-fi genres, both of which had badly needed some scintillating sparks to move them forward again. Perhaps no lone person has played a bigger role in this year of recovery for the anime world than Gen Urobuchi, and in this blog post, I will explore why he’s been received so well and been rather effective.

For many people, Puella Magi Madoka Magica will be their top anime show of the year, and that will almost certainly be the case for me as well. For others, so impressed that they are unconcerned that the 2nd half of it doesn’t come until 2012, it will be Fate/Zero. What do these two shows share in common? Well, aside from both having  a masterfully melodic musical score from Yuji Kajura that could compete with the likes of blockbuster Hollywood movie OSTs, the similarity between the two is that they are both the babies of Gen Urobuchi. You could think of PMMM as his hopeful yet troubled teenage daughter, while you could think of Fate/Zero as his brooding and morose adult son.

In both cases, though, I think what we see is something that you don’t see everyday in the world of anime. And this something is what is actually Gen’s greatest strength within the context of that anime world.

What is that strength?

Why, it’s simply sincere storytelling.

About a year ago, on my old blog “Assessing the Anime”, I wrote the following about what I felt was the greatest weakness in modern anime: Pavlovian Entertainment.

I would encourage Rabbit Poets readers who have never read my old blog to check that link out to get the full scope of what I’m referring to there, but to sum it up in nutshell, pavlovian entertainment is entertainment that operates on the level of classical conditioning. Often in anime, you don’t watch a story unfold so much as you watch a mechanical assemblages of parts in which each part is meant to be an arousing stimulus, appealing to one emotionally or humorously or sexually. So the experience is often less like reading a book, or watching a serious TV drama, than it is like touring an amusement park.

Now, it’s fine for some anime shows to be like that, but back in 2009 and 2010 I felt that there was an overabundance of them, making it very hard to unearth anime shows that were aiming to be compelling stories at least as much as it was aiming to amuse.

And then, as though on cue, this arrived.

By the power of Gen's skull, we have the POWER!!!

Now, don’t worry those who consider Touhou characters to be the masters of the anime fandom universe, I’m only focusing on Madoka Magica here.

Madoka Magica arrived at the perfect time for me, as I was growing increasingly tried with the tropes of anime at the time, and thinking that maybe they needed a little bit of deconstructing you could say.

But contrary to popular belief, Gen does more than simply deconstruct. Rather, he has helped to breath new life into a niche entertainment medium that too often takes the easy way out.

Gen doesn’t take the easy way out, and I think that’s why he’s gained a passionate cult following of sorts, as well as been much of the brains behind two of the very best anime shows to air in 2011.

In spite of having a cast loaded with nubile teenage girls, Gen had no beach episode and no hot springs episode. There was no pantsu, and no steamy bath or shower scenes. Mami’s mammaries managed to avoid molestation, and Sayaka was never literally raped by Kyouko.  Gen, my friends, is the anti-Pavlov.

Nowhere is this more clear than in a certain critically acclaimed sausage-fest by the name of Fate/Zero.

7 Masters, 7 Servants, and at least 11 of them are male. The remaining 3 are the perpetually rage-induced Berserker, the effectively gender-less Assassin, and a gender-bent King Arthur. Not a whole lot here for male otakus looking for cute girls doing cute things.

But then, perhaps that’s the point. Gen does anything but pander to his audience. And that may be why it’s easier to take his stories seriously, and become elaborately excitedly engrossed by them.

Gen, you see, takes his chosen craft seriously. And that is what storytelling is, a craft. Great stories display good craftsmanship. They call for attention to detail, for taking the time to properly develop characters, to present plots with enough meat to sink your teeth into and find it rewarding. And they also call for a certain integrity, I would argue.

It’s Ok for even the most serious of stories to have moments of comedic relief, to embellish a few elements to entertain the audience, and even to give out the odd Easter egg.  But if you do too much of this, the overarching story loses focus, and can even fall apart at the seams a bit.

Ah, but that’s the key to Gen’s approach. He seamlessly incorporates many of the elements that otakus like, without letting them impact on the integrity or seriousness of the story.

Madoka Magica has its yuri subtext, its attractive magical girl aesthetics, some popular anime archetypes, and moments of melodrama. But these all serve to merely frame and polish the work, rather than to be the work itself.

Instead of an otaku painting that few non-otakus could like, we get an otaku frame around a story that almost anybody could appreciate. Now, that doesn’t mean that Madoka Magica and Fate/Zero are going to be absolutely huge (in a mainstream entertainment sense) in North America, or Europe, or Australia. But it does mean that you can appreciate these shows at a different level than you would many (if not most) other anime shows.

To be fair, other anime shows do have good overarching plots worth caring about. But often they are frequently shunted into the background for lengthy periods of time, allowing frequent fanservice filler to take center stage once more. Hanasaku Iroha, Kamisama Dolls, and Kamisama Memochou, though all good anime shows in my view, are nonetheless good examples of what I’m referring to here. Each and every one has compelling stories in them, but those stories often disappear for entire episodes at a time, even if those episodes are not your standard beach and hot springs episodes.

With Madoka Magica and Fate/Zero, though, the story remains a key focus from episode to episode to episode. Everything feels interconnected, everything feels whole. A series identity is allowed to take hold and flourish, drawing in viewers looking for something deeper and more intellectually rich than your run of the mill harem comedy or ecchi adventure.

Those harem comedies and ecchi shows have their place in the anime world, but I don’t think that they should define the anime world.

Thankfully, due in large part to Gen Urobuchi, they’re not defining the anime world this year.

This is the year when serious sincere storytelling makes a comeback, thanks in large part to Gen, but also thanks to some degree to Mari Okada’s Anohana.

Now Gen’s works are not without their flaws. Some may find them too dialogue-driven. Others may find them too dark. But these flaws are usually minor ones, occasionally making the work have a stronger or thicker taste than what you would like. But at least the taste is rich and satisfying precisely because it avoids needless fluff.

Gen doesn’t muck around in his works.

He continually gets things done, and pushes things forward. The plot may occasionally seem slow and methodical, but at least it doesn’t take detours to spend a night at the Kissuio Inn in order to let an inner Jiromaru take over for awhile as you forget the plot direction prior to the detour.

Such forgetfulness is not in Gen’s works, creating tight plots and hence captivating stories.

Gen Urobuchi, and to lesser extent Mari Okada, has shown that not only do narratives of this sort have an audience within the ranks of the modern otaku, but that there is a passionate audience that is longing for this material, as sales success clearly demonstrates. And that’s why I hope and think we will get more stories like Madoka Magica, Fate/Zero, and Anohana in the near future.

The world of anime has indeed recovered from a relatively week 2009 and 2010, but let’s not forget why it’s recovered.

And in this post, I honor the man who has played a huge role in pushing that recovery forward. Perhaps Gen Urobuchi is a healing writer, after all.

...and this picture helps explain why.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Read through the first post on that anime thread carefully. Take particular note of Nichijou’s DVD sales figures. And let it sink in that these sub-1000 sales is for a Kyoto Animation anime.

Kyoto Animation pulling down fewer than a thousand DVD sales from Nichijou is truly a clamorously careering collapse for what previously seemed like the ultimate brand name in the industry. But due to that collapse, and the meteoric Madoka Magica rise, I would argue that SHAFT has now overtaken Kyoto Animation as the biggest and strongest name in the anime industry. In this blog, I will go on to explain how we’ve come to this point, and what it means for Kyoto Animation, SHAFT, and the anime industry as a whole. First of all, my intention here is not to bash Nichijou. I respect that it has some passionate fans, and that it does have an uniquely surrealist comedy that may appeal to people in ways that few other anime shows do.

Nonetheless, its poor DVD sales are a reflection of the possible Kyoto Animation/Nichijou mismatch that I first noted back in April.

I think that Nichijou would have worked better as a comedy if given a less visually dramatized approach, which KyoAni has unfortunately consistently applied to it. As is, however, the comedy is very hit-and-miss because the punchlines are very hit and miss. And given that the comedy aspect of Nichijou is hit-and-miss, and the show has virtually no plot to speak of (not even episodic ones), then the anime’s marketplace reception would have to depend on moe appeal.

However, Kyoto Animation is shockingly being beat at their own game by SHAFT. Specifically, by the most insanely moe show I’ve ever seen…

Denpa Onna, for its part, is pulling down respectable sales figures of 5,267 Blu-Ray sales and 1,361 DVD sales. Perhaps more importantly, though, Denpa Onna proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that SHAFT has mastered the art of moe appeal. This was the art that Kyoto Animation revolutionized and popularized. From 2006 through 2010, Kyoto Animation would have to be considered an animation company of unparalleled success (on a per anime basis, at least), and this was on the backs of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, K-On, and Key adaptations, all brought to animated life with a dauntlessly delectable dash of moe.

So why has Kyoto Animation, once an unassailable force in the anime industry, fallen on hard times with Nichijou? I think the that these woes began with a certain endless recursion of time…

Haruhi 2009 was a sure symbolic sign that Kyoto Animation had developed an unhealthy degree of hubris. They had become overly fixated on cheap gimmickry, at the expense of doing simple solid work. Even before a certain infamous anime arc of 2009 became the main anime controversy of a summer of discontent, we could see a hint of such gimmickry in how Haruhi 2009 began as a stealth airing from out of nowhere, bucking standard marketing and promotional approaches for the anime industry as a whole.

Kyoto Animation basically felt it could do whatever the hell it wanted to do, and the customer would lap it all up regardless. But with Haruhi 2009 selling significantly worse than its 2006 predecessor, the first chinks in Kyoto Animation’s armor were displayed.

Thankfully for them, though, The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya movie was a rousing commercial success, as was K-On!! Back in 2010, these two helped to reassert Kyoto Animation’s dominance.

One key about Disappearance and K-On!!, though, is that you could tell that KyoAni was sincerely putting some real effort in with these two, and lovingly crafted them to be appealing to their core consumer base.

The animation was made to fit the material, rather than the material being made to fit the animation.

What I mean by that is that Kyoto Animation’s artistic and animation approach to both Disappearance and K-On!! was to have it play to the inherent strengths of the source material for each, while doing what could be done to negate their inherent weaknesses. In Haruhi 2009′s case, though, the material was made to fit the animation – specifically by stretching out the Endless Eight story to ridiculous extremes while giving Kyoto Animation’s various animation teams an excuse to play around and experiment with their artistic styles in one E8 iteration after the next after the next after the next.

Much the same is now happening with Nichijou, I believe. Kyoto Animation is pulling out all the stops, animation-wise, for Nichijou, and is once again experimenting artistically. The problem is that this is being done, I think, with little respect to what would serve the source material best. Nichijou is nowhere near as suspenseful as Disappearance is, and so while a flair for the dramatic makes perfect sense for Disappearance, it often doesn’t make sense for Nichijou. I would argue that it’s causing the comedy value of Nichijou to suffer, and this is not good since Nichijou is first and foremost a surrealist comedy.

But Kyoto Animation’s hubris is not merely impacting their basic animation work. I would argue that it’s also having a negative impact on what projects they choose to do.

Prior to Nichijou airing, I don’t recall there being a great fan push to get it animated ASAP. On the other hand, I know that Haruhi and Full Metal Panic fans have grown increasingly impatient with Kyoto Animation over the years, wondering why it takes the studio so long to do more of one or the other or both. In FMP’s case, I know sales have struggled, but on what basis does Nichijou get greenlit for two cours over Haruhi getting more adaptation work done when there are seven Haruhi novels left out there to adapt?

This choice on Kyoto Animation’s part shows how out of touch it is with its own fanbase. Many Kyoto Animation fans are longing for more Haruhi, while relatively few were crying out for Nichijou before it was slated for an anime. Now, in an ideal world, Kyoto Animation would do more than just two or three projects a year, but given those limitations, choosing to adapt Nichijou instead of adapting more Haruhi was a mistake, in my opinion.

While Kyoto Animation has grown out of touch with its fanbase, SHAFT has unquestionably learned how to appeal to anime fans in general.

As of this writing, two of the three best selling TV anime shows of all-time belong to SHAFT, and you can see both of them in the picture above.

What Shinbo has effectively done is adapt his quirky and unique style to be one that still has a distinctively avant-garde feel, but is also an alluringly accessible one. It hence feels different, but not too different. SHAFT has also wisely, and consistently, made its animation fit the material, rather than making the material fit its animation. This is why Bakemonogatari looks much different than Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and why both looks much different than Denpa Onna.

SHAFT is showing admirably astute ambition, in that it is slowly but surely eating one slice of the anime pie after another after another.

With Bake, it conquered harem anime in general, and made an excellent foray into Light Novel adaptations.

With Madoka, it now is competing with Nanoha for dominace in the Mahou Shoujo sphere, while showing how well it can handle one cour anime originals.

And now with Denpa Onna, it is making an impressive play on moe fans in general.

They key for SHAFT is to simply keep doing what it has been doing since Summer 2009 (while also taking more care to budget properly for later episodes, admittedly).

SHAFT can learn much from Kyoto Animation’s recent disappointments. From them, SHAFT can learn how an animation studio needs to be very in touch with the anime fanbase, and responsive to its current anime wants, in order to be successful.

And for Kyoto Animation to pull a comeback, that is what it will have to do. It will need to learn from its mistakes, cut out the gimmickry, and get back to basics. Hopefully, we’ll see more Haruhi work soon.

But Kyoto Animation will need to act quick. SHAFT is not its only major competitor that’s on the rise.  A-1 Pictures and PA Works are also posing serious challenges to the once seemingly invincible Kyoto Animation.

A-1 Pictures has shown an uncanny ability to appeal to otakus with its great success in Anohana (according to what I read on that, it will sell well in excess of 20,000 DVDs/Blu-Rays), while PA Works has demonstrated animation quality (and commercial success) to rival Kyoto Animation in anime shows like Angel Beats! and Hanasaku Iroha.

These two animation studios also have their finger on the pulse of the modern anime fandom. And if Kyoto Animation doesn’t soon get their finger back on that pulse, they may find that their own pulse might start to be weak…

I hope it won’t come to that, as Kyoto Animation’s talents are great, and work marvelously when applied wisely and seriously.

2006 through 2010 will likely be remembered as the KyoAni era in anime. But whether that continues further into this decade remains to seen. At the moment, you could say that KyoAni is getting SHAFTed.

What do you think, good reader?

Meaningful red herring screenshot

Consider this to be an addendum or a side post to Scamp’s fascinating post on the life-and-death of an aniblog.

The decline of the anime blog

My RSS list is heavily weighted towards older blogs. Blogs that have been around at least a year. That’s partly due to when I started writing and paying more attention. And partly due to the ranking exercise I undertook for the aniblog tourney. But one of the things I do occasionally is troll around on Anime Nano to check up on some of the newer blogs that have entered the fray. When you have 100+ blogs on your list, it makes it harder for new voices to stand out, but a couple of the younger blogs that I like are Visual Violence, an episodic blog that seems heavily influenced by RandomC, but is well written, and Seanver, which is what I guess I’d call a moe/ecchi-appreciation blog, and is unique in that it also summarizes games and books.

But one of the things I noticed as I’d check up on the list of new blogs is that it seemed like there were less and less new blogs showing up on Anime Nano. So I went back and did a count by month, and lo and behold, my suspicions were confirmed – 2010 was the worst year for new anime blogs since Nano started.

After the initial aniblog gold rush in the 2006 and pre-2006 era (Nano only came to being in the middle of 2006), 2007 was a bit of a dud, but then came a second gold rush of aniblogs in 2008 and 2009, before interest dropped off a cliff in 2010. Admittedly, Nano isn’t the perfect arbiter of blog birthdates, since they’ve usually been around for at least a couple months before joining, but I think it’s a good measure of the level of activity that’s going on out there.

And the trend isn’t just on Nano, because we see a similar drop in search activity for “anime blog” on Google Trends, down over a 1/3 since it peaked in 2008 and 2009. This is interesting, because a lot of those 2008 and 2009 blogs are right in the thick of the 2-3 year death mark that Scamp wrote about.

A year of deaths

Many of those 2008 and 2009 blogs have already met their demise. Some like Grand Punk Railroad, Low on Hit Points, Epic Win, Exce7ion and heck even Chartfag suffered slow, drawn-out deaths. Others like Hontou ni died unexpectedly (although Zyl moved to Sea Slugs). Ha Neul Seom pulled a Subculture right at the two year mark. While others like Mikotoism actually did die, before being reborn (proving that sometimes you can’t walk away). And there are still others are just a hiatus explanation/”I’m not dead!” post away from sticking a fork in themselves.

What if this is the real normal?

What if 2007 and 2010 were the norms and 2008 and 2009 were the aberrations? Maybe the better question would be what drove the spikes in 2008 and 2009? Was it the shows? 2008 was the last hurrah of the mecha era apparently, with Code Geass R2, Gundam 00 and Macross Frontier all taking their turns leveling up mechas. Spice and Wolf, Aria the Origination, Soul Eater, Toradora, Clannad Afterstory and DMC rounded a pretty solid year. In 2009, we had the return of Haruhi, the revamp of Brotherhood, and the original K-ON leading the way, while shows like Bakemonogatari, Eden of the East, and Umineko provided a surprising level of diversity. Not nearly as strong as the 2008 lineup, but a good number of genre busters, and a surprisingly trollish year, with Endless Eight pissing off Hitler, the anti-moe crusade waging war against K-ON, Senjougahara Fascination and Ryukishi trolling errbody in sight.

Meanwhile, 2010 can only be considered a disaster in comparison. K-ON 2, Nodame Finale, Angel Beats, Arakawa are probably the only shows that received critical and popular acclaim, and none of them were as big as the 2008/2009 shows. Shiki, Kuragehime and the Tatami Galaxy were all good, but too niche to gain much broad popularity. None of the 2010 hits carried the imagination like the hits from 2008 and 2009. And I don’t think any of the winter 2011 shows, nor the spring shows will reverse the tide. So barren times will probably continue.

What if the next Aniblog gold rush is… Twitter or Tumblr?

Maybe anime blogging just isn’t sexy anymore. It’s not like people have stopped talking about anime. On the contrary, the discussion has moved to other places. To Twitter and to Tumblr largely. This has its plusses and its minuses.

Twitter is about as close as you can get to liveblogging a show with a roomful of geeks (except for those Skype folks, who actually are in a chatroom together). It’s instant gratification. And when you’re tweeting back and forth with a bunch of people about something that happened on a show, it’s a really cool experience. But the downside of Twitter is that it’s insular, and it’s transient. It’s insular, because you have to be a.) a member and b.) really active on it to get much out of it. It’s only slightly more open than a chat room or an online forum. Unlike reading a blog post, it’s harder to enjoy Twitter passively, because each tweet has so little information. If you only spend a few minutes a day checking it out, it’s like hearing a snippet of a conversation. Or just watching the promo scenes of an anime. You only get so much out of it. Twitter is just too transient. A shelf-life of a blog post is about 3-4 days. That’s when most of the visits and comments come in. But there’s a long tail of readers that will read posts that are years old and occasionally even leave comments on it. In contrast, the shelf life of a Tweet is 3-4 hours. A string of conversations might last an hour. And after 24 hours, consider it all dead and gone, never to be seen by anyone again, except maybe you in your loneliest moments.

But while I see value in Twitter, to me, Tumblr is a wasteland of wannabe anime-themed LOLCATS. Tumblr, in a strictly technological sense, is set up to be more enduring than Twitter. It’s not as full-featured as say WordPress, but there’s a lot of stuff you can do with Tumblr. Unfortunately its turned out to be the most unstructured discussion platforms of them all. It’s become an imageboard home for anime memes, random screenshots and fan art. It’s like if 4chan had user accounts. There are some really amusing Tumblr’s, the bad anime subs tumblr is the funniest blog/twitter/tumblr/thing you’ll ever read and even though it’s not exactly Tumblr, I love all the seiyuu soup.io miniblogs like Cowboybibimbop, Seiyuup and watermelon soup.  But they’re rare. For one good Tumble, there’s 500 Tumbles of utter garbage. And unlike Twitter, Tumblr isn’t ideal for conversation chains. There’s only so many ICanHasAnimeCheezburgers this world can handle. If anyone has good Tumblr examples that are different from the typical aniblog style, and aren’t just imageboards, I’d love to hear about it.

But not every anime blog dies

But even if the number of new anime blogs doesn’t pick up this year, we probably won’t have any shortage of blogs anytime soon. The elder blogs Scamp highlighted: Star Crossed, Kur­ogane, Sea Slugs THAT, Blog­suki, Omonomono, Baka-Raptor, Karm­aburn, Batezi, Anime Diet, Hashi­hime, are all still going strong, and I would dare say are better now than ever before. Ran­dom Curi­os­ity nearly died, but was saved in the last second by a white knight and even though Omni’s gone, I think Divine and his crew haven’t missed a beat.

And of the 2008 blogs, some of the blogs that successfully crossed the two year threshold and into red alert territory recently include Mono no Aware (edit: 4+ years and in the free and clear if you count its previous incarnation. Thanks to gl and iknight below for the info)  We Remember Love, Eye Sedso and Scamp himself (and I guess myself too).

But there’s hope for those in red alert state. Looking back at the aniblog tourney list I had, there were 22 blogs between 2-3 years old when 2010 started. And over the past year, only 3 of them died, with another 3 I’d classify as dying. Which means more than 70% have successfully escaped red alert territory. Who were some of the blogs that escaped the state of red alert and crossed the threshold into 3+ year land, where boys become cherry boys, girls become fanservice fodder, and anime blogs become immortal? Hanners, Canime, Listless Ink, The Null Set are some of the recent ones. And Baka Raptor’s a month from reaching immortality.

So maybe the 2 year mark isn’t as bad a death knell as I might have thought. I still think it’ll be interesting to see if the number of new aniblogs rebounds this year, but give credit to modern medicine, not only is it extending our lives, it’s extending the lives of anime blogs. Or something like that.

Rob Lucci would make a fitting representative for Funimation.

Sorry for taking so long at putting up my first RabbitPoets blog, but I hope that I can make it worth the wait!

Before I get into the meat and potatoes of the thunderously triumphant topic of discussion, let me set some historical context in order for people to better understand what’s going on right now.

For roughly a decade, this was more or less “the system” for heavy internet using anime fans outside of Japan:

Fansubs were there in order to watch anime shows as quickly as possible, and to sample them before putting money down on DVDs or Blu-Rays.

DVDs or Blu-Rays would then ideally be bought by fansub viewers based on the shows that they saw *and* liked. This is how anime fans would support the anime industry.

Now, that’s an admittedly somewhat idealistic take on things, as some fans don’t buy anything, but it was still an approach that many anime fans took.

And on the whole, I felt that it was a good approach.

Fansubs are, as the term suggests, produced by fans and for fans. They hence are made by people with strong ties to the anime fandom. They tend to have their finger on the pulse of the anime fandom, and know what we want in the animes that we watch. So, fansubs are often tailor-made to be as exceptionally entertainingly enjoyable as possible.

They are also, generally speaking, not put out for profit, but rather for reasons such as…

1. Contributing to the online anime fanbase
2. Promoting specific animes by getting them to as many fans as possible
3. Gaining some degree of appreciation, if not fame, from fellow fans

This means that fansub producers have a vested interest in making the highest quality fansubs possible. There’s generally no staff to be paid to produce the fansubs, so financial concerns are not major ones. There’s no need to cut corners in order to lower costs, in other words.

So, the internet was like this pioneering land of fantastically frolicking freedom and awesomely anticipated adventuring. For anime fans, the world was their oyster when they ventured on the internet, with loads of different options for where and when and how to acquire digital copies of all the animes that they wanted to see.

Then, after these fansubs were watched, the anime fan could choose to go out and give back to the industry by buying the DVDs or Blu-Rays.

All-in-all, it was  a pretty good set-up, I thought. Granted, fansubs are technically illegal, but it’s the sort of illegality that is rarely enforced, and which companies tend to not care about as long as their bottom lines look as impressive as the Grand Line of One Piece.

However, a lot of anime fans didn’t want to support the anime industry through buying DVDs or Blu-Rays, but they did want to help the anime industry in some fashion at least. And so, there was a big push put on for the anime industry to engage more and more in digital distribution. And so, we now have Crunchy Roll and Funimation.

And so, we now have unintended consequences.

At least they were unintended from the fans’ perspective.

Those consequences are Funimation (after getting into some hot water with the Fractale Production Committee due to online piracy of Fractale) going after the pirates of an anime based on pirates.

And those consequences might also include VIZ media now trying to take control of Narutofan.com.

(If anybody wants more info on that, just ask in a comment reply – I’m still getting used to this new blog format, so I’m not going to try linking to other sites directly yet).

Much of the anime fandom wanted the anime industry to engage us more online. To offer a legal digital distribution method for all of its shows. To become more in touch with the vast online anime fandom.

But one of the main questions that I want to pose here is the following:

Do we really want that?

When it comes to the internet, fans rarely get to set the terms of contact and transaction between them and the businesses that seek to sell to them.

A good example of this is the video game industry, where DLC (downloadable content) has sadly become little more than a way for the video game industry to gouge their customers by selling digital content that probably should have been on the game to begin with.

It’s important to keep in mind that unlike fansubbers, the anime industry is in this primarily to make a profit.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. People do have to earn a living after all.

But still, once a profit motive is factored in, that means that some of what you like as a fan might be factored out, in order to serve that profit motive.

In the case of video games, what is often factored out is getting a truly complete game at the first point of sale.

And in the case of anime, what is often factored out is video quality, the option to download to save, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to have an online fan community organized by fans and for fans.

Because VIZ Media is threatening that by trying to take over Narutofan.com

And if Funimation is successful in its case against 1337 One Piece pirates, then you might eventually see a far less free-wheeling exchange of communication and content between fans from across the various corners of the globe.

Once you have corporations running sites for fans, and holding a virtual monopoly over digital distribution, you get people at the very top that are not really in touch with your average fan. So fan concerns can often get sidelined, if not unnoticed entirely.

I don’t really blame Funimation for doing what it’s doing. And while what VIZ Media is doing is probably not ethical, I can definitely understand their motives in doing it.

But we as fans should probably take a step back, and take a good hard look at the bigger picture.

I think that we should ask ourselves “What do we want the online world to be like for each of us as anime fans, and for the online anime community as a whole?”

Before making suggestions, try to keep in mind possible unintended consequences.

Now, in the interim, I would actually encourage fans living in America to check out any available Funi stream for an anime show that they like. It is one small way of helping an industry going through tough times to stay afloat.

At the same time, though, if you’re comfortable and content with just fansubs for the shows that Funi or Crunchy Roll don’t yet have, then make that known. If you want the old “fansub for sampling, DVDs/Blu-Rays to help the industry” system to stay in place as much as possible, then make that known. If there’s internet sites that you think should be ran by fans and for fans, then make that known.

I think that the online anime fandom is nearing a crossroads. More and more we see anime companies getting interested on the internet side of things. This is also what Yamakan, of Haruhi and Kannagi fame, has pushed for. From his perspective, it’s an intuitively intelligent innovation. From the fan’s perspective, though, is it for the best?

Well, it can be very good in some ways, but it can also have unwelcome undesirable unintended consequences.

Speaking personally, I don’t want the anime industry to take over the online side of things like the video game industry has done. I think that there needs to be some sort of buffer between fans and the industry that serves us, in order to ensure that we anime fans don’t get taken advantage of like many video game fans unfortunately have.

What do you, good reader, think?

Please let me know.

And please let me know what you thought of this, my first blog post at Rabbit Poets.

We have crossed the two year threshold. So what does the future hold? Besides an eventual death?

Source

Much thanks and love to all who’ve been visiting to those who’ve visited over the past two years. Double thanks and love to those who’ve taken the time to leave a comment. And triple chance and luck to those who’ve supported Rabbit Poets through the years.

I feel like it’s been a pretty ho-hum year, but when I think back, I guess this and that did happen:

• Taking a trip to Japan, including the real life Hinamizawa, was tremendous. I would love to go back, and next time try to be less of a tourist with a camera, and be more like a natural NEET with all the time and freedom in the world.
• Being one of the OG’s in starting up the aniblog tourney. Despite the lack of moe, I think the tourney had a positive impact on the blogosphere.  At the very least, there’s blogs like Blogsuki, Caraniel’s, and Canne’s to name a few, that I didn’t know of before the tourney, but eventually became a regular reader of.
• Being the only tie to have happened in the tourney. Cheers to my tie counterpart, Janai Blog. I feel forever connected. Of course, we then proceeded to get thoroughly whomped by psgels. The one thing I learned during the tourney was how much of a giant Star Crossed actually is.
• Multiple design and theme framework changes. I should’ve took screenshots of what the site looked like before, because I have no recollection now. But a lot of thanks is due to gargron/Eugen for his help.
• And last, but not least, Having Janette and Libera come on board, writing for the blog this past year. Both will be taking a break this next season and we’ll see where to go from there. But even if you don’t write again, thank you, gals. I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t done a great job as the blogging banchou as I’d hoped, but I’ve really appreciated having you two on board these past several months.

So we move onto year three, where the only goal is to… LIVE DAMMIT!

There were some very interesting posts today (and some very hot & spicy discussions, I might add) about the use of fanart in blogs, and the courtesy of proper attribution.

I appreciated the posts, because I do care about attribution. I know how much work goes into creating a good picture and I don’t want to unfairly take credit for someone else’s work, nor do I want to post something that they don’t want posted. I want people to be proud of their work when they see it – not frustrated or angry. When I started out, I actually set out to make sure everything was well attributed, I even checked for the header images I use on this site, although I ended up just linking to Sankaku since I didn’t see a source. I was naive then, and it’s something that’s slipped in my mind as time’s gone by. So the posts above were a very good reminder.

But I question the tactic of RAEGing at anibloggers and making meaningless ultimatums. For one, raging at anibloggers sort of feels like a situation where you’re mad and you take it out on the closest person to you, just because they’re there and will listen. I mean, there’s like what, a couple hundred anibloggers, who may post a couple fanart images a week? Versus the thousands of image posts that happen daily on sites like 4chan, and all the other anime message boards?

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about the aniblogging community, it’s that people are really, really mindful about attributing quotes and links to other bloggers. (I’m just going to refer to non-artist anibloggers as "we" and fanartists as "you" from now on – not that I’m trying to draw any battle lines. But pronouns make it so much easier.) So it’s clear we understand the value of attribution, and aren’t out to misappropriate anyone’s work unfairly. And generally we’re a pretty reasonable bunch who’re willing to talk things out and give credit where credits due. But speaking down to us, insulting or chastising us, doesn’t exactly make me want to help anyone out. Yeah, it gets more attention, but ultimately isn’t compliance the goal? I think a level-headed post would be just as effective.

And tips are even better. For example, I don’t use fanart too much, but when I have, I’ve pulled them from Sankaku or Photobucket, which generally don’t have any attribution info. But I had no clue that danbooru often does include attribution (I assumed it was just a mirror of Sankaku’s image database). Any images I use in the future, I’ll be getting from there. The pixiv tip is helpful, but I’m going to be honest: I’m not getting paid for this, I’m just doing this for fun. I’m not going to learn a new language just to find pictures once in a while, that’s just not a realistic expectation.

The thing is, if you really care about people properly crediting you, make it easy for them to do so. This is a general rule. Bloggers quote other bloggers, because the name of the author is right in front of our face. We don’t need to google a guide for how to register to pixiv, we don’t need to post a twitter waiting to see if anyone knows who the author is, it’s all right in front of us. Additionally, those words are typically more integral to our posts, so attribution becomes a natural action, for example, "blah blah blah, but blogger X said blah blah blah, but actually I think blah blah blah." Whereas I tend to consider the image as a garnish on top, which makes it more likely that I’ll forget about properly crediting the author.

Like I mentioned above. We care. I care. I’d never steal words from another blogger and claim it as my own, and it’s extremely mortifying to think that’s what fanartists think I’m intending when I use an image without attribution. It’s certainly not my intention. But after spending an hour or two writing a post, and searching for a suitable image to put in place, a lot of times I just plum forget. I hate to admit it, but it’s just the simple truth. But I will be more mindful of it in the future.

But if you really, really care about attribution, I, blogger, have a request of my own. Help us, help you. Sign your art or even watermark it. I know it can be unobtrusive. I know it can even be done creatively. There’s no shame in it, the greats have done it. It’s really the only way to make sure your art doesn’t lose its identity. If that image above said Ixy, a.) now it’s automagically credited and b.) I’d probably be more likely to call it out anyway.

Old habits die hard. In a few weeks, many will have forgotten about this post and the posts above, and all the attribution that’s going on now will die down somewhat. New anibloggers will join the fray and be unaware of the rules. But a signature on a picture lives forever and keeps the thought forever alive.