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This Week in Anime - Does Social Media Ruin Everything?

There's really no reason why they can't move the online release date up to after the theater weekend or something.

and those that can't have to survive spoilers(and people who like to spoil on purpose) for two weeks is a big "fudge you" to those fans.

A lot of fans are going to have the time of their lives seeing TADC in the theater. I'm not going to be one of them, but I'm happy for the people who get to see it, and I'm happy that Glitch has reached such a remarkable level of success. If this theatrical showing sells as well as expected, it could fund two or three entire new series. Anyone who cares about animation should be excited for that.

Social media itself doesn't suck it's just the fact a lot of people in the world suck that makes it bad by consequence of having to interact with people on social media. Social media has been a great tool to connect people around the world and encounter all kinds of novel and new things but it also gives anyone and everyone a voice. The reality we live in now with how necessary it is to our jobs if we're in the creative field make it invaluable. As an artist myself I've gotten plenty of hate and had the wonderful honor of becoming public enemy #1 of a certain fandom recently for daring to make slightly suggestive art of the female character and it's been really fun watching people making callout videos of me that get millions of views trying to rally people to "take me down" to "protect the fandom". I can't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all and don't really feel the 'harassment' myself but that is just my own feelings and I'm sure other people take it a lot more personally. I just can't take them seriously at all and simply call them stupid and ignore them.

I find it more tolerable to stick to the Japanese side of social media since they generally lack the people who are responsible for all these cases of harassment being brought up. Not that Japanese fans don't have their own issues or controversies but all the cases here are clearly western fans imposing their own cultural or political ideas onto Japanese artist. Unfortunately it's become more common for Japanese mangaka, especially the younger ones, to be more exposed and involved with their overseas audience which leads to this kind of stuff. It's easy to understand why many manga choose to remain as anonymous as possible.

I find it more tolerable to stick to the Japanese side of social media since they generally lack the people who are responsible for all these cases of harassment being brought up. Not that Japanese fans don't have their own issues or controversies but all the cases here are clearly western fans imposing their own cultural or political ideas onto Japanese artist. Unfortunately it's become more common for Japanese mangaka, especially the younger ones, to be more exposed and involved with their overseas audience which leads to this kind of stuff. It's easy to understand why many manga choose to remain as anonymous as possible.

So stay off of Twitter for two weeks. It'll make your life better, I promise

Social media itself doesn't suck it's just the fact a lot of people in the world suck that makes it bad by consequence of having to interact with people on social media. Social media has been a great tool to connect people around the world and encounter all kinds of novel and new things but it also gives anyone and everyone a voice. The reality we live in now with how necessary it is to our jobs if we're in the creative field make it invaluable. As an artist myself I've gotten plenty of hate and had the wonderful honor of becoming public enemy #1 of a certain fandom recently for daring to make slightly suggestive art of the female character and it's been really fun watching people making callout videos of me that get millions of views trying to rally people to "take me down" to "protect the fandom". I can't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all and don't really feel the 'harassment' myself but that is just my own feelings and I'm sure other people take it a lot more personally. I just can't take them seriously at all and simply call them stupid and ignore them.

I find it more tolerable to stick to the Japanese side of social media since they generally lack the people who are responsible for all these cases of harassment being brought up. Not that Japanese fans don't have their own issues or controversies but all the cases here are clearly western fans imposing their own cultural or political ideas onto Japanese artist. Unfortunately it's become more common for Japanese mangaka, especially the younger ones, to be more exposed and involved with their overseas audience which leads to this kind of stuff. It's easy to understand why many manga choose to remain as anonymous as possible.

In regards to the social media necessity: it is necessary for many of them to survive, a lot of times a viral tweet about their series or image may be the difference between continuing or be cancelled. For example, Miyazaki Asuka (author of 人としてつき合えたら, 'if we could speak like people') often relies on their series's snapshots posted on X and the discussion that surges that allows many people to discover it and have the sales bump they need to continue the series. Another author, Mitsunori Zaki (author of ナースの取扱説明書, 'Nurse report'), was lucky that before the first volume went to sale he posted the third chapter on X (about sexual harassment to nurses) which went viral and had a newfound attention that gave the series a huge initial bump that now it's settled. There are series that win or fall regardless of that, but it's a huge tool in the current panorama, which is also why it's hard for them to move out of X since it's where most people are and in others like bsky there are very few. They have it tough.

Hard to take any of this seriously when it’s so intentionally vague and full of buzzwords, and also starts with the lie that you’re an “artist” when your post history reveals all you’ve done is use AI. Ironically revealing the exact kind of person that poisons social media and any discussions around it.

Hard to take any of this seriously when it’s so intentionally vague and full of buzzwords, and also starts with the lie that you’re an “artist” when your post history reveals all you’ve done is use AI. Ironically revealing the exact kind of person that poisons social media and any discussions around it.

I'm sorry to have to reveal to you that Japan has plenty of homegrown online harassment, particularly if you're a performer or artist, and does not need to depend on us gaijin to corrupt their purity.

I fully acknowledge the fact that I'm a Certified Internet Boomer at this point, but man, I just cannot fathom getting into an anime or manga series solely by virtue of a social media post blowing up. Maybe I'm just weird (entirely possible!), but pure visual style is probably the element I put the least amount of emphasis on when deciding what to watch. What does get me interested are the impressions and reviews of people who know what they're talking about, like here on ANN for instance.

That's more of a side topic though. What really floors me is the idea that any professionally-published author should be expected to be out there on social media self-promoting as the deciding factor between their work's success and failure. Like, isn't that a huge part of their publisher's responsibilities, what with their dedicated marketing departments and budgets and such? If their publisher isn't pulling their weight in that regard, then maybe it's time to find a new one who offers those benefits. Because if you're doing all of the legwork yourself, at that point you almost might as well be self-publishing online.

Syundei has confirmed she will be removing content that offended westerners from her work going forward and has made a personal request to the anime staff of Ganbare Nakamura-kun to tone down even more content in the anime going forward so as to make more people comfortable watching it.

ATastySub wrote:

Hard to take any of this seriously when it’s so intentionally vague and full of buzzwords, and also starts with the lie that you’re an “artist” when your post history reveals all you’ve done is use AI. Ironically revealing the exact kind of person that poisons social media and any discussions around it.

I would say that the people harassing and threatening people are the ones who poison social media not the people who just post AI artwork. I really hope we're not already at the point where people hate AI so much they think harassment is the moral high ground of the two. Personally I would gladly trade the puritans who harass artists for creating problematic art for more AI artist accounts.

Anyway, it's unfortunate what happened to Syundei, Urana, and the other examples. I disagree with the column writers attempt at deflecting responsibility by stating it's ok to hate and bash media and authors so long as you don't @ the creators directly though. That stuff still creates a toxic environment and discussion and it will inevitable boil over to them in the end. We've seen what hateful language and rhetoric creates and how it emboldens the more crazy people in society into doing it themselves so perpetuating the behavior of calling an author a pedophile, sexist, anti-LGBT, or other labels because they made a work you didn't like is still bad even if you avoid doing it to their face directly. Someone who reads your piece will inevitably do so because you put forth the idea that whatever insult you made must be a fact. Just something for people to think about the next time someone is tempted to insult a creator which is unfortunately quite common in the anime fandom.