5 ms·
A corollary to this is that resources are eventually going to get diverted to produce the kinds of things which appeal to hyperconsuming outliers who actually s
by patio11 15y ago
A corollary to this is that resources are eventually going to get diverted to produce the kinds of things which appeal to hyperconsuming outliers who actually spend money on anime rather than e.g. a broader demographic which prefers to steal their anime. That is a large portion of the reason why the Akihabara crowd gets what they want in Japan -- they actually plunk down $X00 for a boxed set of Young Geek Improbably Surrounded By Beautiful Women Who Suffer Wardrobe Malfunctions Around Him with some degree of regularity, though that market appears to be drying up in recent years. (For obvious reasons I don't follow it, I just hear things on the IP grapevine.)
More mainstream audiences can't get things done for them without e.g. a cross-subsidy from Nintendo who can afford to treat the anime as a loss leader for the video game or collectible tie-in.
This is a shame for folks who care about distributional access, by the way. For example, there exist people who think that shoujo manga is a Good Thing (TM) for the U.S. comic books industry because it provides young girls with stories they can relate to and helps counteract the insanely rampant hypersexualization and misogyny of the US comic industry. Unfortunately, shoujo manga has fairly few crossover hits and hasn't had a commercialization success in the US comparable to e.g. Disney's line of princess products, which means that the industry is largely a) not willing to devote marketing muscle to promoting it as much as Bleach / Naruto / Pokemon / etc and b) some would argue that the old guard justify their marginalization of the genre and its fans by saying that (because of their marginalization!) it failed to sell well.
n.b. I'm neither a fan of shoujo manga nor a great lover of women's studies but someone who was both had veto power on my degree, so you can bet I at least listened for the more credible claims.
- Kuiper 15y agoI think that a lot of westerners fail to realize the impact of the "otaku as superconsumer" effect on the Japanese media industry, in part due to the way that anime is priced in western territories. In Japan, anime blu-ray volumes are tremendously expensive; right now the latest volume of Madoka is selling for over ¥9,000 (>$100), and that's a fairly typical price for a single volume containing three 25-minute episodes. In the west, $300-400 will get you several hundred 45-minute episodes of Deep Space 9 on DVD. In Japan, $300-400 is the amount that a hardcore fan can be expected to spend on the blu-rays for a dozen 25-minute episodes. On top of this, there is merchandising galore; CDs for OP/ED, insert songs, character CDs, along with physical goods like figures. On top of this, sometimes hardcore fans will buy multiple copies of their favorites to inflate sales numbers. For an extreme example, see this man who bought 5500 copies of a single AKB48 CD: http://blog.esuteru.com/archives/3347822.html http://blog.esuteru.com/archives/3347822.html To put things into perspective, the Bakemonogatari blu-rays sold around 50,000 copies per volume during the release window, which catapulted it to the status of "most commercially-successful anime since Evangelion." Based on this, it's not hard to see how a base of several thousand really dedicated fans could be enough to justify an anime production.
- yardie 15y agoI've seen the inside of a typical Tokyo apartment, I gotta ask, honestly, where do they keep all this stuff?
- w1ntermute 15y agoThe inside of an otaku's apartment is anything but typical: http://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E3%82%AA%E3%82%BF%E3%82%AF%E3%81%AE%E9%83%A8%E5%B1%8B&hl=ja&tbm=isch http://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E3%82%AA%E3%82%BF%E3%82%AF... Here's a nice example: http://www.wolfheinrich.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/dsc00307.jpg http://www.wolfheinrich.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/dsc00...