LogFAQs > #960513746

I get that the topic isn't actually serious, but...



Blightzkrieg posted...

Anime is being bought up and redistributed by streaming giants, which provide low quality subs and encourage binge watching rather than following a weekly release schedule like kami intended

I seem to recall discussion years ago that implied the anime industry had actually grown to the point where the weakening Japanese economy was actually killing it. Because it was essentially becoming too expensive to produce, and the Japanese market didn't generate enough revenue to keep animation studios alive. Which is why there was a spate of studios dying off, or animation getting outsourced to Korea where it was cheaper.

With the implication that, if not for the huge upsurge of interest in anime from the West (and the Western anime nerds' willingness to spend money on shows and merch), anime would pretty much be a dead genre in Japan at this point.

I know it was definitely brought up about Big O (which only got its second season at all because of the West's strong interest in the show), and how stuff like Trigun was basically considered a failure in Japan but was a huge success in the West, which was the main reason why it became a long-running show at all. And there are definitely other shows that seem to be way more popular with Western audiences than with the original Japanese market.

And then there's stuff like RWBY, which is basically pseudo-anime made in the West, but which the Japanese wound up loving...



Blightzkrieg posted...

Anime has become saturated with references to Western culture, such as superhero capeshit, dungeons and dragons, and coffee

I feel like anime has always referenced Western culture to some degree. Record of Lodoss War came out 30 years ago, and that was literally an anime based on a series of light novels that were based on the author's home D&D campaign. Lupin the Third is a direct reference to a detective from a series of French novels. Speed Racer was directly influenced by Elvis and James Bond. Rose of Versailles is set in the French Revolution. Gundam was actually inspired by Starship Troopers. Entire genres like magical girl, kamen, and sentai were basically born straight out of Disney princess and comic book hero influences.

And it's not limited to just anime. Final Fantasy was more or less a blatant D&D rip-off originally, and part of why D&D tropes and concepts are so ubiquitous in RPG-style games in general is at least partly from how much influence it had over the early video game industry. And the Japanese have always mined the shit out of Western culture for fantasy ideas, whether it be medieval knights and kingdoms, Norse and Greek mythology, or even heavily skewed Christian archetypes or overtones in certain works. And almost anything you see involving supernatural magical evil has a very strong chance of using Hermetic symbolism and demon names from the Lesser Key of Solomon rather than native Asian demons or myths.

A bunch of Kurosawa's most famous samurai films were basically just reinterpreted versions of Shakespeare plays (and Yojimbo was a reinterpretation of a Dashiell Hammett story - aka the guy who wrote The Maltese Falcon). The Japanese love of things like baseball and wrestling come straight from the West, and are older than most of us here.

The Japanese LOVE the West.

And hell, anime literally only exists in the first place because the Japanese really liked Disney and wanted to try and make their own version of it. Astro Boy (almost always acknowledged as one of the first anime shows ever and a massive influence of everything that came after) was explicitly based on Pinocchio, and explicitly referenced stuff by other American animation studios. Without the West, anime likely never exists at all (and likely manga as we know it doesn't exist either, considering how much of a debt it owes to the Western comic strip and comic book industries).
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