So many things are wrong with this article but I’ll start with Haruhi Suzumiya being a ‘light novel’ (a novel printed in large text as if for seniors with a few illustrations) as opposed to a ‘visual novel’ (something you would make with https://www.renpy.org/)
It is hard to know because financials aren’t public but it’s not clear to me that Crunchyroll has really addressed the commercial problems anime had in western markets. In the VHS era there was a fight over subtitles vs dubs which was acute because you could not put multiple content tracks on the media, in the DVD age you could.
More fundamentally, dubs cost a lot of money in comparison with subs and were always terrible until the people who made those terrible dubs gained experience and some of them got good. (Though they do their best work for game publishers like Idea Factory and ATLUS who care.) At the time people though subs had a limited market but now subprime anime (and sometimes good anime) gets shoveled onto Tubi and people watch it —- today we’re in the habit of watching movies with subtitles because you can’t make out the dialog on half of the new Hollywood movies anyway.
Since crunchyroll is in the vainglorious subscription racket I can only assume they’re as profitable as Netflix, Disney Plus, Peacock, etc.
The article touches on but doesn’t really stress how it is very rare for an anime to start out as an anime (Precure?) but rather it is the way you know you made it if you made a manga, light novel, visual novel, video game, etc. The economics are brutal and nobody is going to invest in it if the story, characters and settings haven’t been market tested. Of course this leads to problems like you can find out how the anime you like ends if it you look at the source material.
> Riot’s Valorant was one of the most accessible entries into tactical first person shooters.
I mean, Valorant probably has some anime design influence, but in the grand scheme of things it's waaaay on the minimal side and has no place in an article like this.
But also...
> So many things are wrong with this article but I’ll start with Haruhi Suzumiya being a ‘light novel’
> Haruhi Suzumiya (Japanese: 涼宮ハルヒ, Hepburn: Suzumiya Haruhi) is a Japanese light novel series written by Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Noizi Ito.
TFA puts a picture of the Suzumiya cover on top of a caption saying "Visual Novel" Wikipedia is right, TFA is wrong.
Based on context (since the next picture to the right is captioned "text based game" and shows an image from a visual novel Clannad[1], I think), the article just got the terminology wrong.
A common pattern is light novel -> manga adaptation -> anime adaptation. From the first few release dates on the sidebar of the main page, it looks like this one followed that pattern (with lots of spinoffs and sequels).
I completely bounced off of the Anime, but both the LN and the Anime were wildly popular at the time, to the point where I immediately recognized the cover despite only having seen the first 2-3 episodes of the Anime and never having read the LN.
I liked it at the time it came out, I like it less now.
It was a pivotal anime for a few reasons. One of them was that there was a technological change from producing anime with cels that get photographed on a multiplane camera to drawing the "cels" in a computer and compositing them digitally. Haruhi Suzumiya was not the first to be done with CG compositing but it figured out how anime would look with the new technology. So it looks far ahead of older stuff like Sailor Moon but looks behind something like Accel World or Bleach.
Story-wise it was an advance in postmodernization which was already well developed
but it used devices such as telling the story out of order and building systematically on tropes that seemed fresh at the time but now seem cynical to me.
It's because anime is multi-genre and sub-genres of anime cater to basically every demographic.
Anime includes masterpieces like Spirited Away, trashy harem / male fantasies like Jobless Reincarnation, touching dramas like Anohana, female oriented romances like Fruitsbasket, literally pornography like... Erm... Well you know.
Etc. etc. etc.
It's not fair to compare one anime with another. It's not like cartoons in the USA that fall under the rough set of same humor or writers. Anime is much broader and thus has something for everyone
And anime also has a lot that you'll hate. I personally hate recent male fantasy trends like Solo Leveling for example (despite enjoying Overlord, a male fantasy from yesteryear).
It's true that Anime is a broad field, but the vast majority of works is heavily shaped by Japanese idiosyncrasies and themes, which also means that, barring singular exceptions, anime is not really something for everyone. Conversely, the non-Western storytelling, themes, and character/interaction stereotypes are what many are drawn to (but still only a small minority of the population). I therefore don't see it "eating the world" in the sense of becoming completely mainstream. It's arguably not even mainstream in Japan itself.
However, to me this is a good thing, in terms of cultural diversity. Trying to adapt anime to more mainstream tastes in the name of global profit would do it a disservice.
There's something to be said about Waifu lists transcending anime genres / subgenres. I would say compared to 70s-90s anime landscape, stylisitically anime / east asian animation has converged a lot. At least mainstream stuff - we've nearly reached peak moe, there's still seasonable optimizations / stylistic tweaks here and there - but IMO it's fair to suggest convergence in waifu/husbando aesthetic has driven and is driving a lot of growth, and it's fair to put everything under umbrella for extrapolating market trends. I feel animes' ability to make fans horny and the increasing culture around anime fandom (now) unabashedly wanking over their affection/fondness over random constructed characters across genres is... potent.
Even the aesthetic/art style varies tremendously - i.e. even the "big eyes" thing so often correlated with anime art isn't universal either.
Can you have "Western" anime? Some hardcore otakus scoff at the idea. If you made an animated version of Star Wars - is that anime? Is Avatar: The Last Airbender an anime?
"Chinese anime" or "Korean anime"? Again, some would scoff at the idea. But what is all that Hoyoverse stuff? Or all those Korean webtoons (though that's really more comparable with manga - and the korean word "manhwa" uses the exact same Chinese characters as "manga").
What I find the most interesting is that there is clearly something that makes anime stand out as being its own thing, distinct from the majority of other animated TV, but it's hard to put a finger on exactly what that attribute is and where to draw the line.
The anime community has, for as long as I've been a part of it (13 years or so), decided that anime is "animation made in Japan". This heuristic has actually worked pretty well.
But the lines are increasingly blurred.
- Japanese produced shows are outsourcing some animation to China and Korea, and sometimes taking direct funding and story writing input from the USA.
- Non-Japan produced shows are taking notes on what works, drawing on it for inspiration, and in rare recent cases even outsourcing animation directly to Japan.
- There is a TON of money in gacha games, and the biggest "anime" titles some people may recognize are gacha games, butand the majority of those are run 100% by Chinese companies. Ironically, sometimes sending them over to Japan for the TV adaptation.
Just like food: Italy may have "invented" pizza, but New York pizza is now its own thing.
I would definitely think that all the French-Japanese and Italo-Japanese coproductions of the 80s somehow qualify as western anime, yes. See for exemple Ulysses 31 and Esteban: Child of the Sun.
Then you have things like Radiant which a “manga” by a French artist in French which was turned into an anime by a Japanese studio.
I guess there probably is animation made in the typically Japanese somewhere. I can’t really help you there because I only read mangas and never watch adaptations (they are always strictly inferior to the material they adapt). So the only Japanese/Korean animation I watch is original content of which there is sadly very little.
I think it should be the other way around and we should call anime "animation". Anime is just the word Japan borrowed for animation, no need to borrow it back when English has a perfectly usable word for it already.
> Can you have "Western" anime? Some hardcore otakus scoff at the idea.
There's not really anything stopping creative individuals who aren't Japanese from producing anime. The thing that many attempts miss (and I suspect what makes hardcores bristle) is that they tend to miss the point in one way or another, resulting in a product that might have many of the outward characteristics but ultimately misses the mark.
In my opinion Avatar is actually pretty close. I've seen clips from various animated productions from France that also seem to capture a similar spirit.
Jobless Reincarnation is simultaneously trashy and also prestige drama. I feel like you could have picked almost any other harem show and been better off for your example lol
I'm not sure i agree. Yes there are exceptions, but they tend to be few and far between, and fairly niche themselves.
Most american animation seems to be: stuff aimed at young children (pixar type shows), super hero adjacent stuff, or adult commedy (like south park). A few exceptions here and there but on the whole there just isn't that much variety.
Sure but have you watched anime? Id say american cartoons are still very niche, the same way comic books are mostly about super heros compared to mangas or french BDs
You are underestimating the sheer amount of Anime produced every year. You probably get as much variety in a single year as a decade of western animation.
I like that about Anime. I think part of my it and Manga have such a broad spectrum is because it is relatively cheap to produce - meaning the companies bankrolling production are less risk averse, and as a result lots more weird ideas get to be tried.
You do not have to watch too much of it to get the sense that writers are just going nuts tossing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Endless remixing of ideas from what came before, and outside influences.
Example: Legend of Black Heaven, which featured a middle aged retired rockstar guitar player working as a software engineer, who is tracked down by aliens to get him to use his guitar playing as a weapon in an intergalactic war. Sure, why not? Is it good? Debatable. Have you seen anything like it before? Unlikely.
Legend of Black Heaven is one of my all-time favorites.
I think he's a middle manager, not an engineer. His title is "Section Manager" and I only remember this because the Japanese title of the show is Kacho Ouji, which translates to Section Manager Ouji or Section Manager Prince if you translate his name
Right, this article is lumping together a bunch of different things that are maybe loosely related because of anime as a style.
The unstated thesis might just be surprise that this once-nerdy stuff has become mainstream at all and therefore has investment potential that was heretofore unrecognized.
It also can't be overlooked that the anime style is both highly flexible and also very easy to reproduce. Like I remember it being old hat to see books on "how to draw anime" when I was a kid, and anime didn't have nearly the presence it did in the west as it does now.
I'm genuinely not trying to be a shithead or anything, it's just a style that lends itself well to industrialization and specialized tooling to speed up the process of creating. Unless you get into highly stylized executions, if you as a company just want to turn out a perfectly average and forgettable anime, you can do so at scale pretty easily, and the glut of artists looking for work means you don't have to pay a lot for the labor either.
I have nothing against this but frankly as a creative it is slightly demoralizing to see just more and more consolidation and mechanization in industry. There's so little that feels genuinely creative anymore, and it feels like year over year the art people produce is crushed harder and harder into pre-made molds that do well on content algorithms.
The Solo Leveling anime adapts a Korean Manhwa, so maybe not the best example here. Not that there is any shortage of male wish fulfilment in original Japanese works.
Shite, I wasn't expecting bad sentiment on Solo Levelling. I love games and this series touches me so differently. But unlike the parent comment, I have watched may be 4-5 anime series in total because I generally don't like anime, they look all same to me.
Serious question, do Korean web comics count as Manhwa? I mean, the difference in media makes it a very different art form. (Although, in the case of Solo Leveling, it started as a web novel)
Though the most popular anime by far around the world is shonen. Which caters to the typical male teen/pre-teen audience, but also adults and is typically characterized by action, typical underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world.
E.g. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, etc.
Everyone likes a good retelling of “A Hero’s Journey”.
That’s why properties like Star Wars rose to prominence as well:
> underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world
You are mixing together under anime shows which are produced in Japan from manga or from light novels with shows produced in South Korea from manhwas. They don’t have much in common. Even the art style is different. It’s a bit like mixing together European comics and American ones. It doesn’t make much sense.
outside of the actual pornography, more and more of anime is just emotional pornography for people with attachment troubles.
it can be a great art form. even some of the emotional pornography can have artistic merit (recently: Frieren). but increasingly, despite diversity in genre and visual presentation, all anime just tries to push the same emotional buttons of loneliness, belonging, connection, in a very heavy-handed way that is more about provoking the emotions in the body than about artistic expression.
not everyone has those buttons, which is why anime fans are a devoted minority, and why it seems like lonely, traumatized, and marginalized people are drawn to it.
Mass-produced media always recycles the same thematic stories.
Western cartoons aimed at kids recycled the "power of being yourself" to death. Ask my tweens about the shows they've watched, and they'll pick apart how repetitive the story beats are between them.
The beats that anime is recycling may be different, but all of them get tiresome and feel pandering.
It's a bit social commentary (not very heavy but you can feel it). But I don't think it's about loneliness or relations much at all (I guess the Walrus and the Nurse Llama have a bit of a romantic fling but I don't consider it a major part of the show).
I'd say one of the major villains is someone who has fallen into the stereotypical gachapon gamer / whale / hikkomori type shut-in that sounds like you'd enjoy him as a villain.
So rather than catering to that demographic, OddTaxi skewers it by clearly marking that character as villainous.
It's just a solid Film Noir murder mystery, except the main character is the Taxi Driver with damn near perfect memory and facial recognition rather than a proper detective. It takes some time and discussions with various people around town to figure out the murder plot, but I was quite satisfied by it.
It's a dry show with a lot of talking. The bulk of the show is just the Walrus / Protagonist picking up customers around town, talking with them for 5 minutes and dropping them off.
But it's those discussions alone that leads him to the murder plot. It's really fun to see how everyone around town was so close to the murderer.
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I agree with you that there's a genre of anime that celebrates or dramatizes the Hikkomori / shut-in type (ex: Re:Zero, Jobless Reincarnation). But at this point, the Hikkomori is a stock character, just one tool to tell a story.
There's a lot of different uses of the "emotionally stunted Hikkomori" (ex: Anohana is the Hikkomori who through the drama of a Ghost coming back to talk with him, he gets pulled out of it and emotionally heals).
But anime and anime culture is above all, about stock characters that are borrowed, remixed, and turned into something new in the next story. The emotionally-stunted Hikkomori can become the hero in Re:Zero, the antagonist of OddTaxi, or a source of Comedy in Devil is a Part-Timer.
Frieren seems to cover a lot of Hikkomori Tropes (emotionally stunted character who is suddenly learning how to deal with emotions as she interacts with humans). So I think you're right in that she's seemingly related to the trope. I don't think I thought of her like that before but it seems to match up more-and-more that I think of it. She has all the markings of a Hikkomori in terms of attitude and even story progression (Himmel had to convince her to get up and try)
I wouldn't say that that's a recent trend in anime at all, but rather a side effect of following what's coming out at any given time. In other words, recency bias.
If you dig through the older stuff for just the gems, you'll be ignoring a mountain of "emotional pornography" shows from the past that are largely ignored today because they weren't especially good art.
I have a feeling the industry will sink a lot deeper a lot faster now that a16z has got their eyes on this goose, salivating at the thought of squeezing ""value"" out of what remains of it.
>salivating at the thought of squeezing ""value"" out of what remains of it
I'm amused at their assumption that they can squeeze tighter than the currently existing notoriously abusive segment of the market.
Also, the way they talk about exploiting parasocail relationships, I'm assuming their next big announcement will be funding a startup that is a call center to handle texting on behalf of onlyfans creators.
I thought the same thing as soon as they wrote the statement about the value of the market being $50B. That private equity is remarking on its market size means they are definitely sizing up how to squeeze it. A16z has no shame and it shows here.
Given that certain portion of the anime fan crowd is somewhat socially vulnerable, a private equity firm stepping into this space will no doubt create some predatory scenarios.
It's a breath of fresh air watching anime adaptations that actually love and respect the original author's work like dungeon meshi.
Meanwhile western fantasy adaptations seem to be full of arrogant showrunners that think their vision is better: wheel of time, the Witcher, House of the dragon (to an extent). George RR Martin even publicly criticised HBO for this recently.
Anime has had no shortage of adaptations disrespectful of the original. Most of the time it's due to not having enough source material like HBO GoT, which somehow sent Fullmetal Alchemist to 1920s Germany in the first adaptation's movie. But sometimes you get people like Bokurano's director who straight up said he hated the manga.
Fullmetal Alchemist and its movie are both excellent, though, even though they it's vastly different from the source (and of course, the more faithful adaption in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood).
I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy is also quite good, even though it does stray quite a bit from the books, omissions aside.
It's really hard to make good media and I haven't found any reliable indicators hinting at whether an adaptation will be good or not. I found The Hobbit trilogy to be laborious despite having Peter Jackson at the helm of it as well. Though in that case, maybe the source material itself is the issue.
Right. And anime tends to stick very closely to the manga which inspired it, because, commercially, it's often a vehicle designed to increase the sales of that manga.
Take Dungeon Meshi, for instance: The anime only covered about half of the material of the manga. So if you liked the show and you want to know how the story ends, you've got to pick up the books. If the showrunners changed important plot points, finishing the story might not be so easy...
The Dungeon Meshi anime probably made some money on its own account, but there are a lot of marginal anime series that aren't really designed to make money, but are intended to increase awareness/sales of various manga properties.
The anime following manga orthodoxy is a relatively recent thing, especially compared to earlier 90's adaptations. Compare Sailor Moon, Helsing, etc, where they deviated so far that both of them got subsequent "re-do" animes that tried to more explicitly follow the manga.
I would argue that reinterpretations/taking liberties aren't always a bad thing. I went back and watched the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure OVA from the 90's that compressed/deviated the Stardust Crusaders arc considerably, especially compared to the more recent anime, which follows the manga panels to a 't'. I would argue the OVA holds up very well and makes some necessary edits for the sake of the pacing. Plus, the OVA staff clearly did their research, because OVA Egypt feels way more authentic than anime Egypt (which looked like your stereotypical mishmash of Middle East/India).
Watched a few episodes of dunmeshi before binge-reading the manga, and I was surprised/impressed that the anime is essentially a shot-for-shot recreation of the manga. I assume they used manga panels as the storyboards, which speaks to how good Ryoko Kui is at visual framing, timing beats for action sequences and jokes, etc.
That's extremely common, it's been happening for ages. You can see it in things like Naruto, too.
That's because they made it at a rate of an episode per week, and in parallel with the source material. That doesn't give time for anything very fancy, so it's mostly a panel by panel adaptation. Plus some filler in the mix, because a chapter usually doesn't have enough meat in it to last a whole episode. It's often 2 chapters per episode or so.
And that's why the slow pacing and the awful fillers.
that's the source of some cheesy anime clichés like having every character react and say something while an arrow is still mid-flight - in a manga it makes sense but when animating it makes it feel slow (looking at you Saint Seya)
If you find that you like something that most people don't it's generally best to just leave it alone and be happy you enjoyed it. If you try to delve into why so many people don't like the thing you like then either they will manage to convince you the thing you like is actually bad, which doesn't benefit you, or you'll start to question whether or not your taste in media is bad, which doesn't benefit you.
The Witcher books are great. A refreshing take on fantasy from an entirely different set of folklore, and the English translation was done so well that you can't even tell.
I also played the games (which take place after the books) and loved them - although despite having a great story, the first game was really rough. Witcher 3 is in my top 10 games of all time, and it rewards you for playing all three by letting you carry over your saves and seeing your impact on the world. I hear they're remaking the first game as well as a fourth, so there's a lot to look forward to there.
I'm surprised to hear that. I've genuinely never held so much disdain for a TV show (season 1) in my life. But when season 2 hit I was too apathetic to even bother watching.
They made so many changes (mostly shit) that it was hard to even see it as an adaptation. The official statement (mental gymnastics) was that it's "another turning of the wheel".
That's because the gap between comic books and animation is one of the smallest between mediums. Not that it doesn't take creativity to adapt a manga into anime, but there is a template for a very faithful adaptation that is available to you.
If you're turning a prose novel into a tv show, you have to basically create everything from scratch. You can set it in the world of the novel and basically follow the plot, but the pacing is impossible to translate directly, and you don't have any of the visuals.
>be full of arrogant showrunners that think their vision is better
Most just want to have their own take on whatever they're adapting and I think that's preferable because whether good or bad, at the very least they're adding something new.
The nostalgia and fanbase driven reproduction of the same stuff over and over adds nothing, it's just fanservice. If I want The Witcher the game I can just play the actual game, if I want GRRM I should read his books. Adaptions in which authors take liberties have much more potential to be interesting. King famously hated Kubrick's The Shining, Garland took a lot of liberties with Annihilation and Starship Troopers was straight up subversion and satire of the book and Heinlein's worldview.
Given that we're in the age of maximally non-offensive Disney and comic book adaptions that just refuse to die and with so few genuinely novel media out there to begin with, I'm in favor of people at least taking some risks with adaptions.
But if you wan to have your own vision, why don't you just create your own world to do that in?
If I took Fahrenheit 451 and adapt the story so that the state executes Guy Montag because my vision is that hate speech is dangerous, it's not Fahrenheit 451 anymore.
Take the most recent Dune movies as an example; In the books, Paul spends so much time becoming Fremen and trying to resist the prophecy as well as endlessly worrying about a space jihad, only taking the water of life when he was not able to predict that Gurney would try and kill his mother.
In the new vision "Let the Jihad begin!"
The first is the story of a reluctant hero who is trying to keep his family alive and cherish the love of the desert people who adopted him.
The second portrays a mother and son who scheme to use those around them to further their end goal of power and revenge.
If I enjoy eating Oreo cookies and I buy an ice cream that is labeled "Oreo Ice Cream" but when I taste it, it is Strawberry Jam flavor, I am not going to be writing a review that praises the product designer for their bold vision. I will be taking the product back for a refund.
The biggest issue with divergent adaptations in my opinion is that there aren't many that are middling or on par with the original. They tend to either be good, uplifting the source material into something greater, or not well thought out and somewhere between bad and awful, and it's easier to fall in the latter of those two buckets than the former.
There are so many stories of the insane hours that animators in Japan have to deal with. Part of that is the "normal" toxic overwork culture in Japan, but animation seems to be one of the biggest perpetrators.
Because people care about and are invested in the art they make. It makes them easier to exploit "because they should feel privileged to have the job they want." People who work in creative industries all over the world face this issue.
Who gets to define whether someone is ‘exploited’ or not?
There are artists who would rather be paid even less, but given more creative freedom and control over the final product, (deciding on dubs, script changes, etc…) Especially in anime production.
It happens anywhere that people will basically work for free if they can. Even where you have guilds and unions that try to set a certain floor--e.g. with films in the US--it's only somewhat effective in that the floors are fairly low and people will still wait tables to try to get their big break.
similar story for video games. common area being that both industries tend to have significant amount of passionate creators that would happy work this way.
maybe it starts to make more sense why the gaming arm of a16z wrote this. besides the overlap, there seems to be many things that work similarly between the two industries.
I know that this is a website for startups, but looking at art that people enjoy and put their soul into and thinking "how can I extract profit from this" I think is actually close to a mental illness.
I understand that commodification is inevitable (and yes anime is already a soulless business), but goddamn if it doesn't look like some form of neurosis. It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.
Your comment made me think of a blog written by Marc Andreessen at the beginning of Covid.
>It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.
He writes from the perspective of, "How are we having so many shortages during this global pandemic? We used to BUILD things, goddammit!" And now, fewer than 5 years later, a16z says:
> Yet, we believe that anime is just getting started – today, new technologies and business models are accelerating a once niche industry to even greater heights.
To the extent that anyone in power in tech claims to believe in the greater good, they are full of shit, a16z very much included. It's fun for CEOs and VCs to make grand proclamations about what's wrong in the world. But at the end of the day, they only care about making money.
Or maybe anime is one of those "new industries" Marc Andreessen said he was so excited about?
That's what I found so dystopian about web3. It seemed they were trying to financialize everything, declaring they were making payments frictionless while inserting themselves into every new financial stream they were trying to create.
As for a16z, andreeson's 30k word moronic Randian rant speaks for itself. People obsessed with optimization should not be involved in public policy.
> People obsessed with optimization should not be involved in public policy.
I mean, they should. It would be cool if we could optimize public policy. Optimize means make as effective as possible, right? They should just not be so laser-focused on one metric that they're blind to the side effects created by optimizing for it.
You may be right, but it is hardly unique to either startups or to anime. The fine art world is full of artists who put their soul into their work, and galleries who try to profit from it. In an ideal world, both sides get value from working together despite being at odds philosophically, but in reality there is certainly some misalignment of incentives.
Creators who don't want their work to be monopolized by commercial interests can always use something like Creative Commons noncommercial licenses. But I think most creators will choose the path that pays the most money, not the path that gives the most freedom. See YouTube vs PeerTube.
Look at the top world leaders, so called captains of business. Cold stone heartless sociopaths, every single one of them. Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos, Schmidt and so on and on.
For a second imagine what environment they went through, what battles they had to fight for decades and keep being on top. You can't be a normal balanced person with good friendly personality and achieve any of that. Even if you start at absolutely stellar lucky place, you will end up as say Stallman (respect to that guy, but you can see life path vs Jobs difference mainly due to character).
The fact that such people are celebrated and imitated and there is a lot of strive to replicate their success path is normal. Why - as per J. Peterson (topic on its own, but his psychological stuff I still respect) there is cca 1:20 sociopaths and 1:100 psychopaths in general population. Do the numbers, they are not nice but then you can understand whats happening in this world and politics much better. HN isn't representative of general population, that ratio is much worse although smart folks like that know when to be quiet and just watch/read.
I am not trying to scorn those folks, at their best they do move whole society further, and we desperately need that now. But they are overall not good people, sort of necessary evil IMHO.
> Look at the top world leaders, so called captains of business. Cold stone heartless sociopaths, every single one of them. Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos, Schmidt and so on and on.
It might be a natural consequence of reaching those positions. While their rise often comes with harsh decision-making and the development of certain traits, it's not just luck or randomness. Gates, Jobs, and others possess(ed) unique talents and vision that propelled them forward. Their abilities, whether in technology, leadership, or understanding markets, are rare, and that's a critical part of the equation. Of course, such talent, combined with navigating cutthroat environments, shapes the person in ways that we don't like. Let’s not forget politicians in this discussion, as they add layers to the same dynamic. It may simply be the way things work, at least until we shift (or not) toward something else.
Beyond the ethical and moral debate, someone has to do the work. For example, during the antitrust case against Microsoft, Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems' CEO, was one of Microsoft’s most vocal critics. At that time, I couldn’t help but wonder: would McNealy play the same game if he had the chance? Interestingly, this was also a period when Sun and IBM were reportedly bribing politicians in other parts of the world to stay competitive in the very game they criticized.
It's like The Scorpion and the Frog fable: entities in power often act according to their nature. Microsoft's dominance might have been inevitable, and even McNealy, in a similar position, could have behaved the same. The question is whether this is just the nature of competition at the top, or if there's another way forward.
I'll scorn them. Wherever they're trying to move society to, we'd be better off not following them.
You ever notice how their visions for the future of humanity make THEM ever more powerful and wealthy, and when it comes to discussing the harm their plans do to other people, it's "well, you can't make an omelete, you know..."
I'd also argue we decidedly DON'T need that right now. We are at the start of a genuine climate catastrophe, and these titans of business, these movers of society, in response, they're... Investing at a record pace in technologies that require re-commissioning old power plants to supply them. Brilliant. I'm so glad our future is in their capable hands. /s
To a first approximation, "extract profit from this" means providing goods/services that people are willing to pay money for. If people are willing to pay for more anime content, companions, vtubers, and streaming sites, why is it a "mental illness" to provide that?
>It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.
At least for old growth forests you could argue that it's mispriced because it's providing biodiversity/carbon sequestration which can't be sold on the market. Meanwhile the benefits provided by anime accrue solely to its consumers. What's the problem with getting them to pay for it?
>To a first approximation, "extract profit from this" means providing goods/services that people are willing to pay money for.
This is too generous, particularly with regards to a16z coming into an already existing market. In reality, it's more akin to taking something that already exists in a form that people enjoy and are already willing to pay for, and both bastardizing and cannibalizing it into something of lesser quality just so that you can have additional excuses to charge more money for things that you never used to charge money for before.
"Nice thing you have there, be a shame if we fucked it up so that we could make more money off of it," is a mental illness.
> "extract profit from this" means providing goods/services that people are willing to pay money for
This is definitely not accurate: a functioning market drives profits toward zero. Therefore "extract profit" is always synonymous with "break the market" i.e. monopolize through regulatory capture, trade secrets, network effects, proprietary protocols, or whatever else.
To quote Mr Thiel [to a venture capitalist, at least] "monopoly is the condition of every successful business".
Fwiw it might be fair to say extracting revenue means providing something people are willing to pay for. Not profit though.
> AI is deepening the previously parasocial relationships we had with our favorite anime characters from passive linear media, into powerful new, interactive relationships.
I truly can't believe they had the gall to publish this article. The more of the article I read the more I felt like I was reading their strategy for preying on the weak and unfortunate.
And they called it “our favourite anime characters”, as if we’re supposed to believe the blood-sucking money-addicted pariahs at a16z are fans.
The whole article reads like a book report from Steve Buscemi’s “how do you do, fellow kids” character, with a few choice phrases from a “most popular anime quotes” buzzfeed article. I cringed.
It is unsurprising that both “contributors” have “web3” listed as one of their focus.
It is truly shameless - and they are this shameless because they can be, and may even be rewarded for it. AI "companions", if left unchecked, will be as harmful as addictive drugs, enabling companies to suck everything from some people.
But that future is coming regardless if VCs bet on it or not.
I'm not defending the article and agree with you that it's despicable, but the only thing successful VC firms know how to do is to bet on companies that will make them money. It's clear that a future where AI companions exist is coming, and it will be a huge industry, so it's only logical that they would latch on to it and promote it in the only way they know how.
As for AI companions themselves, sure. They will be addicting and harmful, but technology is already that. Yet loneliness is a worldwide epidemic, and I reckon that AI has the potential to also improve the quality of life for many people. This in turn will lead us to even lower birth rates, but that seems inescapable as well. The next 50 years will be interesting, to say the least.
(2) Mixed feelings about lumping all gacha games under the "anime" umbrella based on art style, especially when so many gachas are original properties (Genshin Impact et al) or spinoffs of non-gacha games (Fire Emblem Heroes, Pokemon Masters). I get why they're drawing the association, so maybe I'm just being a purist for no reason, but in my head it's only an anime if it's an animated show or movie!
ETA: Or how some gacha series get popular enough to have bona fide anime spinoffs—I think both Fate and Granblue fall under that category?
2 - I think it's a distinction worth making. Genshin Impact is not anime. That doesn't make it bad by any means, but it does mean that maybe what they're arguing isn't true. Anime is relatively strong now, but I don't think it is either at its peak of popularity (anecdotally, I see more people wearing demon slayer gear than I did bleach gear, but old school DBZ shirts are still most popular) nor at levels that can be described as "eating the world". Of course, the more vaguely East Asian styled cartoons you throw into a pile and squint at, the bigger it looks.
That Chinese RPG game is not anime-based, but definitely anime-styled (probably to appeal to audience of anime viewers or maybe just because anime-styled characters look better than realistic ones).
Similar reaction to seeing FF lumped in there. FF7 in particular might travel in some of the tropes, but I feel like it was pulled in to bolster the game side rather than being a true exemplar.
On a semi-related note: A16Z, stay the hell away from Square Enix.
Fate/SN was originally a porno before it became a non-prono anime before it became Fate/Grand Order.
Fate/ is one of the weirdest meta-stories of all time. The evolution of that universe is utterly fascinating to me, more so than the actual story today.
The gist is that Nasu always wanted to create a Comic book style shared universe, and that Nasu sees himself as a Stan Lee or George Lucas type who is in charge of a community of writers rather than just writing one singular plot.
Calling FSN a porno because it has sex scenes is like calling Wolf of Wall Street a porno just because it has sex scenes. It's extremely reductive and entirely inaccurate. There's like literally 3 or 4 h-scenes in the entire novel, and collectively they all probably make up less than a few percent of the text/screentime.
> Fate/ is one of the weirdest meta-stories of all time.
That reminds me of a not-really-description I read once about Homestuck, basically saying that the many manifestations/spinoffs are too twisty to be worth explaining.
BTW, this comment is not a request for clarification, I'm fine with my ignorance on the franchise itself.
I share your mixed feelings. On the one hand, I like "anime" to refer to something very specific. I think the world is more confusing when terms evolve and redefine too much.
But on the other hand, the Gacha games clearly owe a good deal of their success to the anime elements they copy-pasted, even if the core game mechanics are anime-indifferent.
Over time, these lines will get blurred even more as the market maximizes where those elements can be incorporated. The art and story elements clearly have appeal, and they'll probably get incorporated into more and more into media that's not Japanese-produced TV shows.
And when those non-animes get adapted into true animes because they're obviously such a clean fit, it feels like the similarity needs to be acknowledged with some a broad umbrella word to cover everything. Which might as well be the word "anime"...?
Fate went in the other direction, started as a visual novel and got some very popular anime adaptations, that led to the gacha game being made, which led to some of the especially popular parts of that game's stories being adapted into anime form.
Readit News
It is hard to know because financials aren’t public but it’s not clear to me that Crunchyroll has really addressed the commercial problems anime had in western markets. In the VHS era there was a fight over subtitles vs dubs which was acute because you could not put multiple content tracks on the media, in the DVD age you could.
More fundamentally, dubs cost a lot of money in comparison with subs and were always terrible until the people who made those terrible dubs gained experience and some of them got good. (Though they do their best work for game publishers like Idea Factory and ATLUS who care.) At the time people though subs had a limited market but now subprime anime (and sometimes good anime) gets shoveled onto Tubi and people watch it —- today we’re in the habit of watching movies with subtitles because you can’t make out the dialog on half of the new Hollywood movies anyway.
Since crunchyroll is in the vainglorious subscription racket I can only assume they’re as profitable as Netflix, Disney Plus, Peacock, etc.
The article touches on but doesn’t really stress how it is very rare for an anime to start out as an anime (Precure?) but rather it is the way you know you made it if you made a manga, light novel, visual novel, video game, etc. The economics are brutal and nobody is going to invest in it if the story, characters and settings haven’t been market tested. Of course this leads to problems like you can find out how the anime you like ends if it you look at the source material.
> Riot’s Valorant was one of the most accessible entries into tactical first person shooters.
I mean, Valorant probably has some anime design influence, but in the grand scheme of things it's waaaay on the minimal side and has no place in an article like this.
But also...
> So many things are wrong with this article but I’ll start with Haruhi Suzumiya being a ‘light novel’
Haruhi was a light novel?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Haruhi_Suzumiya_light_...
> Haruhi Suzumiya (Japanese: 涼宮ハルヒ, Hepburn: Suzumiya Haruhi) is a Japanese light novel series written by Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Noizi Ito.
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Haruhi_Suzumiya_light_...
But apparently there's a Manga version too?
Never read it. Is it any good?
Based on context (since the next picture to the right is captioned "text based game" and shows an image from a visual novel Clannad[1], I think), the article just got the terminology wrong.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clannad_(video_game)
I completely bounced off of the Anime, but both the LN and the Anime were wildly popular at the time, to the point where I immediately recognized the cover despite only having seen the first 2-3 episodes of the Anime and never having read the LN.
It was a pivotal anime for a few reasons. One of them was that there was a technological change from producing anime with cels that get photographed on a multiplane camera to drawing the "cels" in a computer and compositing them digitally. Haruhi Suzumiya was not the first to be done with CG compositing but it figured out how anime would look with the new technology. So it looks far ahead of older stuff like Sailor Moon but looks behind something like Accel World or Bleach.
Story-wise it was an advance in postmodernization which was already well developed
https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...
but it used devices such as telling the story out of order and building systematically on tropes that seemed fresh at the time but now seem cynical to me.
Anime includes masterpieces like Spirited Away, trashy harem / male fantasies like Jobless Reincarnation, touching dramas like Anohana, female oriented romances like Fruitsbasket, literally pornography like... Erm... Well you know.
Etc. etc. etc.
It's not fair to compare one anime with another. It's not like cartoons in the USA that fall under the rough set of same humor or writers. Anime is much broader and thus has something for everyone
And anime also has a lot that you'll hate. I personally hate recent male fantasy trends like Solo Leveling for example (despite enjoying Overlord, a male fantasy from yesteryear).
However, to me this is a good thing, in terms of cultural diversity. Trying to adapt anime to more mainstream tastes in the name of global profit would do it a disservice.
Can you have "Western" anime? Some hardcore otakus scoff at the idea. If you made an animated version of Star Wars - is that anime? Is Avatar: The Last Airbender an anime?
"Chinese anime" or "Korean anime"? Again, some would scoff at the idea. But what is all that Hoyoverse stuff? Or all those Korean webtoons (though that's really more comparable with manga - and the korean word "manhwa" uses the exact same Chinese characters as "manga").
The anime community has, for as long as I've been a part of it (13 years or so), decided that anime is "animation made in Japan". This heuristic has actually worked pretty well.
But the lines are increasingly blurred.
- Japanese produced shows are outsourcing some animation to China and Korea, and sometimes taking direct funding and story writing input from the USA.
- Non-Japan produced shows are taking notes on what works, drawing on it for inspiration, and in rare recent cases even outsourcing animation directly to Japan.
- There is a TON of money in gacha games, and the biggest "anime" titles some people may recognize are gacha games, butand the majority of those are run 100% by Chinese companies. Ironically, sometimes sending them over to Japan for the TV adaptation.
Just like food: Italy may have "invented" pizza, but New York pizza is now its own thing.
Rather than "if", here's two instances of that idea I know of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Squad_Isekai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Anime
Edit: And it actually looks like some anime studios did get in on Star Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Visions
I would definitely think that all the French-Japanese and Italo-Japanese coproductions of the 80s somehow qualify as western anime, yes. See for exemple Ulysses 31 and Esteban: Child of the Sun.
Then you have things like Radiant which a “manga” by a French artist in French which was turned into an anime by a Japanese studio.
I guess there probably is animation made in the typically Japanese somewhere. I can’t really help you there because I only read mangas and never watch adaptations (they are always strictly inferior to the material they adapt). So the only Japanese/Korean animation I watch is original content of which there is sadly very little.
There's not really anything stopping creative individuals who aren't Japanese from producing anime. The thing that many attempts miss (and I suspect what makes hardcores bristle) is that they tend to miss the point in one way or another, resulting in a product that might have many of the outward characteristics but ultimately misses the mark.
In my opinion Avatar is actually pretty close. I've seen clips from various animated productions from France that also seem to capture a similar spirit.
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agreed. redo of the healer or bastard would fit "trashy male power fantasy" a lot better.
Such a hysterically bad take that it calls into question your entire point.
Quick list of cartoons that have an incredible variety, both in terms of animation quality, sophistication of humor, and target demographic:
- Steven universe
- Bojack Horseman
- adventure time
- helluva boss
- Invincible
And this is just within the last decade. Want me to go farther back?
- Animaniacs (the original series)
- Spaceghost Coast to Coast
- Justice League
- Ugly Americans
I'm also excluding for the most part animated comedies, such as Futurama, South Park, the entire Adult Swim lineup of the late 90s / early 2000s.
Most american animation seems to be: stuff aimed at young children (pixar type shows), super hero adjacent stuff, or adult commedy (like south park). A few exceptions here and there but on the whole there just isn't that much variety.
Around 20 years ago, I tried watching a few US cartoons and comics to get better acquainted with the culture, but they were all pretty bad.
You do not have to watch too much of it to get the sense that writers are just going nuts tossing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Endless remixing of ideas from what came before, and outside influences.
Example: Legend of Black Heaven, which featured a middle aged retired rockstar guitar player working as a software engineer, who is tracked down by aliens to get him to use his guitar playing as a weapon in an intergalactic war. Sure, why not? Is it good? Debatable. Have you seen anything like it before? Unlikely.
I think he's a middle manager, not an engineer. His title is "Section Manager" and I only remember this because the Japanese title of the show is Kacho Ouji, which translates to Section Manager Ouji or Section Manager Prince if you translate his name
The unstated thesis might just be surprise that this once-nerdy stuff has become mainstream at all and therefore has investment potential that was heretofore unrecognized.
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I'm genuinely not trying to be a shithead or anything, it's just a style that lends itself well to industrialization and specialized tooling to speed up the process of creating. Unless you get into highly stylized executions, if you as a company just want to turn out a perfectly average and forgettable anime, you can do so at scale pretty easily, and the glut of artists looking for work means you don't have to pay a lot for the labor either.
I have nothing against this but frankly as a creative it is slightly demoralizing to see just more and more consolidation and mechanization in industry. There's so little that feels genuinely creative anymore, and it feels like year over year the art people produce is crushed harder and harder into pre-made molds that do well on content algorithms.
Maybe nobody else gives a shit.
E.g. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, etc.
That’s why properties like Star Wars rose to prominence as well:
> underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world
it can be a great art form. even some of the emotional pornography can have artistic merit (recently: Frieren). but increasingly, despite diversity in genre and visual presentation, all anime just tries to push the same emotional buttons of loneliness, belonging, connection, in a very heavy-handed way that is more about provoking the emotions in the body than about artistic expression.
not everyone has those buttons, which is why anime fans are a devoted minority, and why it seems like lonely, traumatized, and marginalized people are drawn to it.
Western cartoons aimed at kids recycled the "power of being yourself" to death. Ask my tweens about the shows they've watched, and they'll pick apart how repetitive the story beats are between them.
The beats that anime is recycling may be different, but all of them get tiresome and feel pandering.
It's a bit social commentary (not very heavy but you can feel it). But I don't think it's about loneliness or relations much at all (I guess the Walrus and the Nurse Llama have a bit of a romantic fling but I don't consider it a major part of the show).
I'd say one of the major villains is someone who has fallen into the stereotypical gachapon gamer / whale / hikkomori type shut-in that sounds like you'd enjoy him as a villain.
So rather than catering to that demographic, OddTaxi skewers it by clearly marking that character as villainous.
It's just a solid Film Noir murder mystery, except the main character is the Taxi Driver with damn near perfect memory and facial recognition rather than a proper detective. It takes some time and discussions with various people around town to figure out the murder plot, but I was quite satisfied by it.
It's a dry show with a lot of talking. The bulk of the show is just the Walrus / Protagonist picking up customers around town, talking with them for 5 minutes and dropping them off.
But it's those discussions alone that leads him to the murder plot. It's really fun to see how everyone around town was so close to the murderer.
-------
I agree with you that there's a genre of anime that celebrates or dramatizes the Hikkomori / shut-in type (ex: Re:Zero, Jobless Reincarnation). But at this point, the Hikkomori is a stock character, just one tool to tell a story.
There's a lot of different uses of the "emotionally stunted Hikkomori" (ex: Anohana is the Hikkomori who through the drama of a Ghost coming back to talk with him, he gets pulled out of it and emotionally heals).
But anime and anime culture is above all, about stock characters that are borrowed, remixed, and turned into something new in the next story. The emotionally-stunted Hikkomori can become the hero in Re:Zero, the antagonist of OddTaxi, or a source of Comedy in Devil is a Part-Timer.
Frieren seems to cover a lot of Hikkomori Tropes (emotionally stunted character who is suddenly learning how to deal with emotions as she interacts with humans). So I think you're right in that she's seemingly related to the trope. I don't think I thought of her like that before but it seems to match up more-and-more that I think of it. She has all the markings of a Hikkomori in terms of attitude and even story progression (Himmel had to convince her to get up and try)
If you dig through the older stuff for just the gems, you'll be ignoring a mountain of "emotional pornography" shows from the past that are largely ignored today because they weren't especially good art.
There's a grain of truth here. A huge grain. The US comics were long stunted by the Comics Code of 1954: http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/labeling/comics-code-1954
It had been revised a bunch of times, but arguably it went away only in early 2000-s. Mostly because of the anime/manga influence.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority
An artist with a unique vision and aesthetic. Samurai Jack is one of my favorites.
RIP.
I'm amused at their assumption that they can squeeze tighter than the currently existing notoriously abusive segment of the market.
Also, the way they talk about exploiting parasocail relationships, I'm assuming their next big announcement will be funding a startup that is a call center to handle texting on behalf of onlyfans creators.
Which is to say, a few dollars over $0?
Would be nice if VC’s would go destroy something of theirs for once, and leave everyone else out of it.
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Meanwhile western fantasy adaptations seem to be full of arrogant showrunners that think their vision is better: wheel of time, the Witcher, House of the dragon (to an extent). George RR Martin even publicly criticised HBO for this recently.
I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy is also quite good, even though it does stray quite a bit from the books, omissions aside.
It's really hard to make good media and I haven't found any reliable indicators hinting at whether an adaptation will be good or not. I found The Hobbit trilogy to be laborious despite having Peter Jackson at the helm of it as well. Though in that case, maybe the source material itself is the issue.
Take Dungeon Meshi, for instance: The anime only covered about half of the material of the manga. So if you liked the show and you want to know how the story ends, you've got to pick up the books. If the showrunners changed important plot points, finishing the story might not be so easy...
The Dungeon Meshi anime probably made some money on its own account, but there are a lot of marginal anime series that aren't really designed to make money, but are intended to increase awareness/sales of various manga properties.
I would argue that reinterpretations/taking liberties aren't always a bad thing. I went back and watched the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure OVA from the 90's that compressed/deviated the Stardust Crusaders arc considerably, especially compared to the more recent anime, which follows the manga panels to a 't'. I would argue the OVA holds up very well and makes some necessary edits for the sake of the pacing. Plus, the OVA staff clearly did their research, because OVA Egypt feels way more authentic than anime Egypt (which looked like your stereotypical mishmash of Middle East/India).
That's because they made it at a rate of an episode per week, and in parallel with the source material. That doesn't give time for anything very fancy, so it's mostly a panel by panel adaptation. Plus some filler in the mix, because a chapter usually doesn't have enough meat in it to last a whole episode. It's often 2 chapters per episode or so.
And that's why the slow pacing and the awful fillers.
Never read The Witcher or played the games but also really enjoyed the netflix series
I also played the games (which take place after the books) and loved them - although despite having a great story, the first game was really rough. Witcher 3 is in my top 10 games of all time, and it rewards you for playing all three by letting you carry over your saves and seeing your impact on the world. I hear they're remaking the first game as well as a fourth, so there's a lot to look forward to there.
They made so many changes (mostly shit) that it was hard to even see it as an adaptation. The official statement (mental gymnastics) was that it's "another turning of the wheel".
If you're turning a prose novel into a tv show, you have to basically create everything from scratch. You can set it in the world of the novel and basically follow the plot, but the pacing is impossible to translate directly, and you don't have any of the visuals.
Most just want to have their own take on whatever they're adapting and I think that's preferable because whether good or bad, at the very least they're adding something new.
The nostalgia and fanbase driven reproduction of the same stuff over and over adds nothing, it's just fanservice. If I want The Witcher the game I can just play the actual game, if I want GRRM I should read his books. Adaptions in which authors take liberties have much more potential to be interesting. King famously hated Kubrick's The Shining, Garland took a lot of liberties with Annihilation and Starship Troopers was straight up subversion and satire of the book and Heinlein's worldview.
Given that we're in the age of maximally non-offensive Disney and comic book adaptions that just refuse to die and with so few genuinely novel media out there to begin with, I'm in favor of people at least taking some risks with adaptions.
If I took Fahrenheit 451 and adapt the story so that the state executes Guy Montag because my vision is that hate speech is dangerous, it's not Fahrenheit 451 anymore.
Take the most recent Dune movies as an example; In the books, Paul spends so much time becoming Fremen and trying to resist the prophecy as well as endlessly worrying about a space jihad, only taking the water of life when he was not able to predict that Gurney would try and kill his mother.
In the new vision "Let the Jihad begin!"
The first is the story of a reluctant hero who is trying to keep his family alive and cherish the love of the desert people who adopted him.
The second portrays a mother and son who scheme to use those around them to further their end goal of power and revenge.
If I enjoy eating Oreo cookies and I buy an ice cream that is labeled "Oreo Ice Cream" but when I taste it, it is Strawberry Jam flavor, I am not going to be writing a review that praises the product designer for their bold vision. I will be taking the product back for a refund.
There are so many stories of the insane hours that animators in Japan have to deal with. Part of that is the "normal" toxic overwork culture in Japan, but animation seems to be one of the biggest perpetrators.
There are artists who would rather be paid even less, but given more creative freedom and control over the final product, (deciding on dubs, script changes, etc…) Especially in anime production.
A lot of people grow up as anime fans and want to work with it. With high supply comes lowered prices.
Something similar happens in (cool) computer games programming compared to (dull) regular SWE jobs.
however, do note that people in anime have a trade union unlike most game devs outside of Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Animation_Creators_As...).
maybe it starts to make more sense why the gaming arm of a16z wrote this. besides the overlap, there seems to be many things that work similarly between the two industries.
"While there seems to be a lot of money in X, the $people_providing_value are underpaid and highly overworked"
They always let themselves get shafted.
I understand that commodification is inevitable (and yes anime is already a soulless business), but goddamn if it doesn't look like some form of neurosis. It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.
>It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.
He writes from the perspective of, "How are we having so many shortages during this global pandemic? We used to BUILD things, goddammit!" And now, fewer than 5 years later, a16z says:
> Yet, we believe that anime is just getting started – today, new technologies and business models are accelerating a once niche industry to even greater heights.
To the extent that anyone in power in tech claims to believe in the greater good, they are full of shit, a16z very much included. It's fun for CEOs and VCs to make grand proclamations about what's wrong in the world. But at the end of the day, they only care about making money.
Or maybe anime is one of those "new industries" Marc Andreessen said he was so excited about?
https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
As for a16z, andreeson's 30k word moronic Randian rant speaks for itself. People obsessed with optimization should not be involved in public policy.
I mean, they should. It would be cool if we could optimize public policy. Optimize means make as effective as possible, right? They should just not be so laser-focused on one metric that they're blind to the side effects created by optimizing for it.
If you make a good one you could always port it and sell it later (Celeste), but that's kinda beside the point.
For a second imagine what environment they went through, what battles they had to fight for decades and keep being on top. You can't be a normal balanced person with good friendly personality and achieve any of that. Even if you start at absolutely stellar lucky place, you will end up as say Stallman (respect to that guy, but you can see life path vs Jobs difference mainly due to character).
The fact that such people are celebrated and imitated and there is a lot of strive to replicate their success path is normal. Why - as per J. Peterson (topic on its own, but his psychological stuff I still respect) there is cca 1:20 sociopaths and 1:100 psychopaths in general population. Do the numbers, they are not nice but then you can understand whats happening in this world and politics much better. HN isn't representative of general population, that ratio is much worse although smart folks like that know when to be quiet and just watch/read.
I am not trying to scorn those folks, at their best they do move whole society further, and we desperately need that now. But they are overall not good people, sort of necessary evil IMHO.
It might be a natural consequence of reaching those positions. While their rise often comes with harsh decision-making and the development of certain traits, it's not just luck or randomness. Gates, Jobs, and others possess(ed) unique talents and vision that propelled them forward. Their abilities, whether in technology, leadership, or understanding markets, are rare, and that's a critical part of the equation. Of course, such talent, combined with navigating cutthroat environments, shapes the person in ways that we don't like. Let’s not forget politicians in this discussion, as they add layers to the same dynamic. It may simply be the way things work, at least until we shift (or not) toward something else.
Beyond the ethical and moral debate, someone has to do the work. For example, during the antitrust case against Microsoft, Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems' CEO, was one of Microsoft’s most vocal critics. At that time, I couldn’t help but wonder: would McNealy play the same game if he had the chance? Interestingly, this was also a period when Sun and IBM were reportedly bribing politicians in other parts of the world to stay competitive in the very game they criticized.
It's like The Scorpion and the Frog fable: entities in power often act according to their nature. Microsoft's dominance might have been inevitable, and even McNealy, in a similar position, could have behaved the same. The question is whether this is just the nature of competition at the top, or if there's another way forward.
You ever notice how their visions for the future of humanity make THEM ever more powerful and wealthy, and when it comes to discussing the harm their plans do to other people, it's "well, you can't make an omelete, you know..."
I'd also argue we decidedly DON'T need that right now. We are at the start of a genuine climate catastrophe, and these titans of business, these movers of society, in response, they're... Investing at a record pace in technologies that require re-commissioning old power plants to supply them. Brilliant. I'm so glad our future is in their capable hands. /s
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>It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.
At least for old growth forests you could argue that it's mispriced because it's providing biodiversity/carbon sequestration which can't be sold on the market. Meanwhile the benefits provided by anime accrue solely to its consumers. What's the problem with getting them to pay for it?
This is too generous, particularly with regards to a16z coming into an already existing market. In reality, it's more akin to taking something that already exists in a form that people enjoy and are already willing to pay for, and both bastardizing and cannibalizing it into something of lesser quality just so that you can have additional excuses to charge more money for things that you never used to charge money for before.
"Nice thing you have there, be a shame if we fucked it up so that we could make more money off of it," is a mental illness.
This is definitely not accurate: a functioning market drives profits toward zero. Therefore "extract profit" is always synonymous with "break the market" i.e. monopolize through regulatory capture, trade secrets, network effects, proprietary protocols, or whatever else.
To quote Mr Thiel [to a venture capitalist, at least] "monopoly is the condition of every successful business".
Fwiw it might be fair to say extracting revenue means providing something people are willing to pay for. Not profit though.
I truly can't believe they had the gall to publish this article. The more of the article I read the more I felt like I was reading their strategy for preying on the weak and unfortunate.
The whole article reads like a book report from Steve Buscemi’s “how do you do, fellow kids” character, with a few choice phrases from a “most popular anime quotes” buzzfeed article. I cringed.
It is unsurprising that both “contributors” have “web3” listed as one of their focus.
I'm not defending the article and agree with you that it's despicable, but the only thing successful VC firms know how to do is to bet on companies that will make them money. It's clear that a future where AI companions exist is coming, and it will be a huge industry, so it's only logical that they would latch on to it and promote it in the only way they know how.
As for AI companions themselves, sure. They will be addicting and harmful, but technology is already that. Yet loneliness is a worldwide epidemic, and I reckon that AI has the potential to also improve the quality of life for many people. This in turn will lead us to even lower birth rates, but that seems inescapable as well. The next 50 years will be interesting, to say the least.
Fixed.
(2) Mixed feelings about lumping all gacha games under the "anime" umbrella based on art style, especially when so many gachas are original properties (Genshin Impact et al) or spinoffs of non-gacha games (Fire Emblem Heroes, Pokemon Masters). I get why they're drawing the association, so maybe I'm just being a purist for no reason, but in my head it's only an anime if it's an animated show or movie!
ETA: Or how some gacha series get popular enough to have bona fide anime spinoffs—I think both Fate and Granblue fall under that category?
On a semi-related note: A16Z, stay the hell away from Square Enix.
Fate/ is one of the weirdest meta-stories of all time. The evolution of that universe is utterly fascinating to me, more so than the actual story today.
The gist is that Nasu always wanted to create a Comic book style shared universe, and that Nasu sees himself as a Stan Lee or George Lucas type who is in charge of a community of writers rather than just writing one singular plot.
That reminds me of a not-really-description I read once about Homestuck, basically saying that the many manifestations/spinoffs are too twisty to be worth explaining.
BTW, this comment is not a request for clarification, I'm fine with my ignorance on the franchise itself.
They got into games during their Web3/Blockchain/Metaverse phase so you're forgiven for not noticing given that hype train went absolutely nowhere.
Now they're all about AI being the next big thing in games, because of course they are.
- Arknights - Azur Lane - Kancolle
Just off the top of my head.
I share your mixed feelings. On the one hand, I like "anime" to refer to something very specific. I think the world is more confusing when terms evolve and redefine too much.
But on the other hand, the Gacha games clearly owe a good deal of their success to the anime elements they copy-pasted, even if the core game mechanics are anime-indifferent.
Over time, these lines will get blurred even more as the market maximizes where those elements can be incorporated. The art and story elements clearly have appeal, and they'll probably get incorporated into more and more into media that's not Japanese-produced TV shows.
And when those non-animes get adapted into true animes because they're obviously such a clean fit, it feels like the similarity needs to be acknowledged with some a broad umbrella word to cover everything. Which might as well be the word "anime"...?
It's early days yet. Still plenty of time to get used to reminding yourself of that.