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Answerman - Categorization Is Death

I'm not seeing this. Reviewers for big sites like ANN have to cover everything, so they get exposed to the girl stuff and I suppose the cooties-phobia wears off if they ever had that problem. But there are plenty of people on smaller sites and personal blogs and in meatspace, not to mention posters on this forum, who will openly state that they aren't interested in checking out works if they're for girls (or even that they don't need to try them, because they're guaranteed to be bad).

I do agree that if you wander around at random you are more likely to encounter someone complaining about stuff that bothers them in male-targeted media compared to female-targeted media. But this is a factor of 1) more people consume male-targeted media in the first place, regardless of whether they themselves are male or female, so people at large are more likely to talk about male-targeted media, and 2) people are more likely to be irritated by content in works targeted to the opposite gender, and most women consume male-targeted media on a regular basis, and thus have the chance to be irritated by it, whereas most men rarely or never consume female-targeted media.

Within the US anime audience, those kinds of shows are niche. They are quite popular within that niche, but it's still a niche. They are always going to have a smaller potential fanbase than, for instance, an action-driven show.

These shows are also niche (although I'm not sure I'd shove Brothers Conflict in the same bin as Diabolik Lovers). If only a subset of people like a kind of thing, assuming that reviewers are drawn at random from the population, only a subset of reviewers will positively review that kind of thing. Personally, I'd rather watch Diabolik Lovers than Scream And Punch Things Manly Action Time #549, but I know that I'm in a minority on this compared to the average US consumer.

But there are plenty of people on smaller sites and personal blogs and in meatspace, not to mention posters on this forum, who will openly state that they aren't interested in checking out works if they're for girls (or even that they don't need to try them, because they're guaranteed to be bad).

I've heard most of Sentais dubs are pretty terrible, so is them making less dubs really such a bad thing?

lebrel wrote:

But there are plenty of people on smaller sites and personal blogs and in meatspace, not to mention posters on this forum, who will openly state that they aren't interested in checking out works if they're for girls (or even that they don't need to try them, because they're guaranteed to be bad).

That's because most of them ARE bad. Akatsuki no Yona and Ore Monogatari are lovely exceptions, but the usual stuff we've gotten recently are Diabolique Lovers, Brother's Complex, Shounen Hollywood... bottom of the barrel.

Those shows aren't released in the US because the American networks don't want them

The thing about streaming is that the underlying technology is going to change, guaranteed, and I don't think we can trust any service - video or music - to be around in the same form in four or five years.

Properties like The Avengers and Disney shows are so tightly controlled that anything that isn't part of the basic strategy for that show -- anything that deviates from how the people in charge want those properties to be presented and marketed -- is usually nixed. At the very least, it's not taken seriously. The anime market in and of itself is not seen as big enough to bother with.

In today's society (well, Japan's), categorizing manga, LN, and anime IPs by demographics is both outdated (as a lot of IPs try to broaden their reach to other demographics, and not focus on a specific age-range & gender) and appropriate (for it can give a rough - even if at times misguided - idea on the "limitations" places on the content).

I also like the Japanese system in part because it cuts through the "[this demographic] likes this, [that demographic] likes that" arguments....In Western fiction, we are more likely to assume that genre and demographic go together: romance is always for women, thrillers are always for men.