Pretty boys gone bad — First Impressions

Anime
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So I’m not exactly the target audience for pretty boy shows but the past few seasons there have been a couple I’ve enjoyed, so I try to take a punt on any of the new ones that come out this season, but it has been hard. The crop this time is godawful.

Bakumatsu: for nippleless chest lovers

According to the description at MAL Bakumatsu is supposed to be the following:

Kyoto, Japan. The heroine meets a man who gives her a pocket watch somehow leading to a Torii in a shrine, and suddenly it warps her into the Bakumatsu period. In the world of where there is such a difference in importance of value, she tries to find a way to go back. When she meets a man who has crossed time and says, “I will live for you,” a love story between the two blossoms.

Nothing of that is true for at least the first episode, which follows nippleless-chan above and his friend as they steal a treasure from their enemies and somehow end up in an alternate Japan. As the title indicates, it’s all set in the Bakumatsu period and no time lost school girls have been sighted so far. It’s actually an interesting concept, to have two actual historical figures from the period slide into a steampunk version of Japan, if the execution wasn’t so boring. The animation is dull, the character design rather ugly and it all looks and feels flat and cheap.

Gakuen Basara: where teachers go topless

Staying with the theme of historical figures transplanted to a different setting, Gakuen Basara takes the Warring States/Sengoku period and puts it in a modern high school, complete with headmaster Oda Nobunaga and with the struggle for mastery of Japan replaced with the struggle to win the student council elections. Again, an interesting idea handled crappily, with the first episode introducing a zillion characters. The animation and character design are just as lifeless and the humour is of the “let’s shout more that surely is funny” type. The only advantage it has above Bakumatsu is that there are actual female characters. I always like yankee characters and this teacher qualifies, but she isn’t good enough to keep watching various dullards with famous names slug it out to become student council president.

Dakaichi: yaoi face

Finally, I noped out of Dakaretai Otoko 1 I Ni Odosarete Imasu about a minute in, when I saw the yaoi face of our protagonist and having listened to the exposition couple prattle on how he has been the most huggable man in Japan for five years running and I was noo… He’s not even particularly huggable. Reading Vrai Kaiser’s review of the first episode it seems I made the right decision as there was apparantly a spot of light sexual assault thrown in to liven things up. Nope, not for me.

High Guardian Spice looks good actually

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People just don’t understand why Crunchyroll is going to produce original animation series, which is why you get shit like this from people who should know better.



Basically, Crunchyroll, or rather its parent company Ellation, is going to produce new animation series because original content pays more than just streaming anime does and they’ve felt the hot breath of Netflix and Amazon in their neck.

Let’s recap. Crunchyroll started off by doing an Uber, just streaming anime they didn’t actually have the license for, not unlike the evil pirate Kissanime does currently, then went legal when the Japanese anime companies went after them, essentially forcing them to sell streaming licences. This was at a time when this just didn’t happen: thanks to them we now have proper streaming anime in the west. For the most part, they haven’t had much competition either, save from Funimation, which specialises in dubbed rather than subbed anime anyway.

But this changed a year or two ago, when Netflix started to get a bit more serious about anime. They’ve always had a bit of anime, but they started to get more licenses, for example tying up the rights to all new Noitamina series. Netflix of course isn’t as interested in being an anime streaming service like Crunchyroll, but rather wants more, preferably cheap content to provide for its existing audience to keep them happy and if that nets a few otakus, then that’s a bonus. You can tell they don’t really care because they don’t simulcast, but rather treat their anime series like any other “original” content, dumping it in one or two batches once they’re completed.

For Crunchyroll this meant that getting licenses would probably be getting more expensive, especially for the more popular or prestige series. And then the other shoe dropped when Amazon started their Anime Strike service. Amazon was a lot more aggressive than Netflix, teaming up with Sentai –who were already involved with the Anime Network– to get a lot of series available quickly. Cue lots of chin stroking on how this was an existential threat to Crunchyroll, if Amazon is starting a similar service: with the money it has it can always outbid Crunchyroll to get a monopoly in yet another market.

Luckily they fucked up. Anime strike is gone, Sentai has moved on and created Hi-Dive, which is a proper Crunchy competitor and is splitting the market, but which will never be able to crush it like Amazon might’ve. Nevertheless, this whole fiasco served as a warning to Crunchyroll that they couldn’t depend on being the only or even the biggest player in the market anymore. So they pulled a Netflix.

The problem with making money off of other people’s content after all is that you’re just a replacable middleman, that you will lose your license eventually, that there’s always the danger that either those content creators might do it themselves or a new competitor shows up. Netflix has known this for a long time, which is why it’s has been investing a lot in creating original content, either by creating it directly or just throwing money at people to buy their way into it. Crunchyroll was already doing the same, financing new anime by being on the production committee.

Because as you know, Bob, most anime series are produced through socalled production committees, groups of companies that finance a series, with the actual anime studio often being the least important member or even just a sub contractor. The real money in Japan isn’t in anime: it’s in selling the manga, light novels, statues and other merchandise the anime is an advert for. This is why there are so many shitty 13 episode trapped in fantasyland series. If Crunchyroll can get on the production committee, it means it has a stake in a series it cannot have as just a streaming company.

Creating an original series entirely in house is the next logical step, just like Netflix and even Amazon have been doing for years. If High Guardian Spice is a success, the blueray, dvd, manga and merch sales will all be kept by Crunchy, or rather Ellation. It offers a security you can’t get with licensed material. It’s not in competition with the anime series Crunchy licenses, but rather an addition to it. Granted, there is the danger that, like Netflix, CR gets less …completist… about getting anime licenses if their original series take off, but for the moment that’s a low risk.

All the other complains, that it takes money away from improving CR as a service, or that this is just social justice warrior pandering is nonsense, people judging a series by a one and a half minute long promo video coming out a year before the series is due to air. How much can you tell about it this far out after all. As for the SWJ stuff, yes, Crunchy is hyping that this series has a lot of women working on it because that’s what sells instead of creepy lolicon material for skeevy dudes. (Though it has plenty of that as well.) Nobody wants to be associated with the kind of loser ranting about the females destroying anime from their parents’ basements.

Not Heinlein, not Asimov, certainly not Vox Day

Fandom, science fiction, video
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N. K. Jemisin is the first author to win three back to back to back Hugo Awards for best novel:



This is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers — every single mediocre insecure wanna-be who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor, and that when they win it’s meritocracy but when we win it’s identity politics. I get to smile at those people and lift a massive shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction.

Your Happening World (Anime Overload Edition)

Anime, Your Happening World
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Or, I have too many tabs loaded from Twitter and Chrome is dying.

  • Andes Chucky went to Otakon:
    D fiddled with the knobs of their prop, their patron saint—a Heybot figure, representing the most cursed children series of the past few years. A series they and C had written on multiple times and genuinely loved. “You just look like Andes Chucky,” they said. “The teeth and everything. It’s incredible.”
  • The Backlog: A Year (or Two) in Review:
    A year ago, August 2017, I came to the harrowing realization that at my disorganized, lazy pace, I would never get to see most of the shows I wanted to see. It was not a new realization, but this time was different. I had time on my hands. I set out to do something about it, and The List was born. Since then, my organized backlog has been one of the main guiding lines of my life, as depressing as that sounds, and with its anniversary coming up in a matter of days, I want to take some time to talk about it.
  • Anime Bingo:
    search for your favourites on MAL to create a bingo card showing off your good (or not so good) taste.
  • Ladies Who Punch – It’s Pretty Cure:
    The show isn’t trying to be a male-focused thing, a show about pretty girls kicking ass for a male audience, it’s a show saying that this time, the heroes who do all the cool fighting are girls. Deal with it. Hell, in episode 2 they stop a lift from crashing to the ground with raw strength, Superman style.
  • A very personal look at Clannad and its treatment of queer sexuality:
    Clannad indulges itself in four ‘jokes’ that treat queer sexuality as a punchline in its first season. The first time I watched Clannad, when I wasn’t thinking critically, just mindlessly consuming, I laughed out loud to all four of these jokes. With each rewatch of Clannad, I’ve become more and more perturbed by these ‘jokes.’
  • Why 3DCG Cannot be Allowed to Replace 2D Animation!:
    I’m not here trying to say that 3DCG anime shouldn’t exist, or that people are wrong for liking it. And there’s certainly a lot of talent that goes into creating these works. I just want us all to understand that they are not one in the same. 2D animation isn’t an old way of doing things, it’s a wholly different artform, and one that I and many others love dearly. If we allow 3DCG to be the future and not just an alternative, anime will lose something forever.

Worldcon screwed up: incompetence or sabotage?

Fandom
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This is utterly ridiculous:

Finally — and this has come up a few times — there’s a generation of amazing Hugo finalists who represent a set of voices that is exciting to nominators, but completely unfamiliar to many folks who will be attending. I can give you a concrete example of this: we have no panel explaining what #ownvoices is, and I’ve had to field multiple questions essentially asking me, “What is that?” I suspect *everyone* at WisCon is familiar with the hashtag and its significance. I would guess maybe 20% of Worldcon 76 members know what it means.

IF PEOPLE DON’T KNOW ABOUT #ownvoices AND YOU’RE NOT RUNNING A PANEL ON IT, RUN A PANEL ON IT.

Preferably on day one. How hard is this shit that you have to write a patronising email with a completely unnecessary dogwhistle about WisCon to explain to people you haven’t been doing your job because you couldn’t be arsed?

Note that all this is in the context of the convention blatantly ignoring and snubbing the Hugo finalists, especially the newer and upcoming writers, “because they’re not well known enough”, so they can’t be on panels.

THAT’S WHY YOU HAVE PANELS.

Worldcon 76: science fiction fans are a notoriously incurious breed, wary of anything new, so let’s keep programming the same people we have had on panels since 1976. It’s not as if the people coming to our con are the same as the people who nominated these writers in the first place, right? It’s not as if you want to value these fans as a con, the most dedicated ones that could actually be bothered to nominate, to give them a chance to meet and get to know the people they’ve been nominating, to get to know those writers they got curious about because other people nominated them.

All of this is bad enough, but the official Worlcon biographies pages misgendered Bogi Takács, who goes by either E/em/eir/emself or they, which isn’t hard to find out, but who was written about as a “he”, something e has never used for emself. This stuff isn’t that hard to get right if your intentions are good, but at this point feels like a deliberate slur. I’m not saying this is some deliberate gamergating or something, but it does feel like it.

There has been more going wrong with this con after all, with the request that Hugo finalists should wear formal clothing during the ceremony being perhaps the most innocent incident, but even then it’s obnoxious at best and downright hostile at worst to expect this when this is not how Hugo ceremonies have ever been run. It would’ve frozen out or made to feel unwelcome all those who for various reasons cannot or would not wear formal clothing.

Combine this with the scasual gatekeeping that seemed to have happened in the programming, with Hugo Finalists as said ignored for not being noticable enough yet the conrunners and their friends assigned multiple panels as well as the misgendering of Bogi and similar incidents with other marginalised writers and a nasty picture emerges of a convention that wants to take Worlcon back to a more narrower, whiter convention. If it doesn’t want to keep this impression, it has some ‘splaining to do.

Meanwhile the damage has already been done. As Foz Meadows put i:

I will say, though, that it frustrates me how discrimination of this sort always ends up having a double impact on marginalised writers, as they are both the most frequently targeted and the first to resign in solidarity with the mistreatment of others. The Worldcon program is changing, but the people who stepped down from programming to force that change were overwhelmingly POC, women, queer folk, disabled folk, immigrant voices and marginalised writers from around the world – exactly the same people whose mistreatment by the programmers was the problem in the first place. Those with the fewest seats at the table shouldn’t have to step aside to effect better treatment for those who take their place while the majority, unaffected, stays where they are. That doesn’t increase the number of marginalised speakers; it just treats them as a resource to churn through, burning them out and replacing them while claiming to give them a platform.

I have good hope that Worldcon 77, in Dublin, will not take the path this year’s Worldcon has taken, but all this does highlight the need for Worldcon to stay out of the US, especially with Trump as president. America is the heartland of the fascist adjecent Sad Puppies movement, and the fascist right in general has been using nerd culture as its recruiting base there as well as a battlefield. I don’t feel safe going over there and I’m a boring old cishet white bloke with only a few intemperate tweets to worry about.