Forum - View topicAnswerman - The Changing Tides [2015-04-03]
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Temuthril
Posts: 45 |
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This is a quite cheap hurdle to fix. http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Black-Digital-Audio-Theater/dp/B000MQOMZG/ One end to PC, other to TV, done. |
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Gilles Poitras
Posts: 476 Location: Oakland California |
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For those of you interested in actual LGBT culture in post war Japan I highly recommend the works of the Australian anthropologist Mark McLelland. I discovered these while researching Japanese gay culture for a fellow I knew who moved to Japan and was having trouble adjusting. My first response was "Hey, I'm not Japanese or gay how can I explain something like this to you?" Then I started looking for materials for him.
McLelland, Mark J. and Romit Dasgupta, eds Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2005 McLelland, Mark Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan During the American Occupation New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 McLelland, Mark J. Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan Richmond: Curzon, 2000 McLelland, Mark J. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005 McLelland, Mark J., Suganuma Katsuhiko and James Welker. eds Queer Voices from Japan Lanham: Lexinton Books, 2007 His latest co-edited book is: Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1706 |
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Sacto0562
Posts: 288 |
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I think in short, the decision by TV Tokyo to invest in Crunchyroll in 2009 suddenly put an end to a huge fraction of the fansub community because set the trend for a large fraction of anime to be simulcast here in the USA almost the same time it aired in Japan by legal streaming. Between Crunchyroll and Funimation's own streaming service, only a relatively small number of anime shows are not legally streamed in the USA.
Indeed, I personally think the Sailor Moon Crystal project would never have happened if foreign legal streaming of each episode wasn't available. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13550 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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It's interesting to think that the Tower of Druaga season and Blassreiter, the 1st 2 legal simulcasts, just turned 7 years old.
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5914 |
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I'd scoff at the same argument too it CN hadn't pulled Mobile Suit Gundam off the block then randomly brought it back during it's New Year's Evil marathon.
It's also a step down from the daily/nightly airings of anime both Toonami & Adult Swim used to have back in the days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jao0qbOYXjY Maybe not the characters (in general) or the subject matter (in general) but MGM's and Tex Avery's cartoons along with cartoons from other American studios at the time featured material that could be considered stereotypical and offensive to certain groups. |
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kpk
 Posts: 484 |
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How about shows like No. 6 or Shinsekai Yori where the main characters are gay or bi are no one in these shows make a big deal out of it?
And it's a big epic shows, not "gay" shows if you know what I mean. They don't revolve around the fact that they are gay and make it all about it like in yaoi and yuri and there is a story in these show. Good story. |
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lebrel
Posts: 374 |
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I think you're wrong. There's been a couple of academic surveys of English-speaking BL fans, and they report that as a group fans have higher rates of support for gay rights than the general US population. I don't think similar formal studies have been done in Japan, but anecdotally I hear that the same is true. Of course, this is probably due in part to the fact, mentioned upthread, that yaoi's target audience (young women) are the demographic that is most likely to support gay rights in any case. But there are some interviews with Japnese fans and creators talking about how exposure to BL made them aware of gay rights issues and things like that. As to the "realism" of BL, well, the men in het shoujo aren't realistic either. Girl's romance manga, whether it's shoujo / josei or BL, is in the business of selling fantasy men designed to be maximally appealing to the audience, not of being documentaries. ============================================
For things like No 6 (The Betrayal Knows My Name, Silver Diamond, Devils and Realist, etc. etc.) it's the fact that they're *not* actually BL, and therefore can get published in larger shoujo magazines and potentially made into mainstream anime, that allows them to be "big epic shows". If the relationships were made more overt, they'd be relegated to the niche magazines and wouldn't have the scope for that kind of story; there's only a handful of BL magazines that can support serialized stories of more than a few volumes in length, so being upfront about the characters being a gay couple would mean the story would have to be shorter and the romance would probably end up being a bigger plot element purely because the non-romance plot would have to be scaled way back. {Merged serial posts. ~nobahn} |
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Vanadise
 Posts: 492 |
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As another older otaku, I find this complaint to be rather strange, because you certainly can watch streamed anime on a huge TV with surround sound. A few other people have pointed out that you can get an HDMI cable and run it from your computer to your TV... which works perfectly adequately if your computer is close enough to your TV and you don't mind a bit of setup every time you watch something. But practically every device you plug into your TV nowadays can play streaming video, too. You can buy, say, a Roku fairly cheaply, plug it into your TV, and use that to watch shows off of Crunchyroll or Funimation, among many other services. A Playstation 3 also works perfectly well, and you get access to a huge library of video games to go with it. And actually, one of the great things about the ubiquity of streaming anime is that I don't have to be at my TV to watch it. If somebody else is using the TV, or if it's late at night and everybody else in the house is asleep, I can put on my headphones and use my computer. Alternately, if I'm away from home and I'm killing time in a waiting room or an airport terminal, I can watch there, too. Sure, it'd be preferable to watch everything on the big screen, but with all of the other demands of real life, sometimes you just can't fit that in. The only things I miss about having to buy blu-rays or DVDs to watch anything is all of the neat extras that came with them, like outtakes and "behind the scenes" videos. It seems like the big streaming sites don't really care about things like that. The Berserk outtakes may remain the best of all time... |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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The idea that streaming video is to "watch on your computer!" pretty much went out with the 00's. Nowadays, the entire TV industry is about streaming set-top boxes (including PS3 and X-Box), and it's pretty much solved the bug that's been needling anime since it arrived in the US, namely where in the obscure forgotten corners to find it on disk. Let alone where to rent the disks, which was darn near impossible in the late 90's. I enjoy watching CR on tablet, but occasionally I'll spring for the Premium subscription to watch on the bigscreen set through the PS3 app. I'm as much a disk-over-streaming supporter as any--and anime fans know better than anyone the importance of keeping a show on disk before someone takes it away--but then or now, there's so much disposable hit-or-miss out there, you have to rent/stream before you know what you get into. |
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consignia
 Posts: 392 |
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Shin Sekai Yori does make a big deal of the main characters' sexuality. Society forces them to homosexual in early youth, then heterosexual in their late youth/adulthood to condition them into lives regardless of what they actually were. It's quite an important theme throughout the story. |
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Maokun
Posts: 53 |
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Man, I understand the necessity of this era to come to an end but the phrasing of that sentence made me nostalgic. I look forward to telling my children all about this incredible times when fans united out of sheer love for a medium and released otherwise unavailable entertainment from the East into the West. (Obviously, that will bore them to tears).
See, I have already moved into streaming because it is the most convenient form of paying for content I enjoy. It is still not the perfect way I'd rather have, though. I have not yet moved (and probably will never do) into the mentality of thinking of the Internet as an infallible constant. Case in point, this connection just recovered from a 2-hour gap in which it was unavailable. What did I do? I played games and watched things that I had already downloaded (legally in the case of the games, not so much for the latter). Owning these files allowed me to access them during a time they would have otherwise been unavailable for me online. I see no problem with "stockpiling" and kind of resent it being talked of as some kind of old-fashioned oddity. I guess that I'll also get to bore my kids with tales of the days when we humans used to own and collect stuff. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Yeah, that's what I've always been fearful of when it comes to consuming media digitally--even if you buy it to download it, you don't actually own it. The content producers can modify it or even take it from you without asking you first. Whereas if I get it on a physical medium, it's mine to keep for as long as I want. Viz's Shonen Jump, for instance, will edit content retroactively. I wouldn't know what might get edited though, and there's no real way of preserving the manga as it was originally released in English short of screencapping every page. And if Amazon can withdraw everybody's copy of 1984 from every digital reading device, nothing stops any anime distribution company or digital streaming service from saying "you're done" and making a series lost forever.
Well, nowadays you have these games where you have to always be online to play, so when you lose your Internet, you won't be able to play those games. I hope it doesn't become the norm. It's an extremely heavyhanded DRM technique. |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23752 |
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From Justin's column:
Are there any hard figures to back this up? It's obvious to anybody following anime that legal streaming has come on like gangbusters in the last five years, but I didn't think the revenues it generated were even close to revenue from physical releases. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
According to animenewsnetwork.com/daily-briefs/2014-11-23/crunchyroll-streaming-service-has-400000-paid-subscribers-listed/.81360, CR earns about $2,780,000 per month in subscription revenues, or $33.4 million per year. If an average physical release retails for $50, that's the equivalent of selling just under 670,000 units each year. R1 sales figures are notoriously difficult to obtain, but that seems like a lot of unit volume to me. Do R1 licensors really sell half a million or more units each year? If we reduce the average price to $25 (see below), we would need annual sales of 1.3 million units to equal Crunchyroll's subscription revenues. This calculation obviously leaves out all the streaming revenue earned by the other licensors like Funimation, Sentai, Daisuki, etc., both via their own services, and from sub-licensing to Hulu, Crackle, etc. If Crunchyroll alone earns $33 million per year from subscriptions, all these other sources could earn another $10 million or more collectively. Crunchyroll's advertising revenues from non-premium viewers are not included here either. For curiosity's sake, I took a look at the Amazon entry for Funimation's Eden of the East (TV) release, a show with good buzz when it aired but never likely to be a blockbuster. It ranks #14,079 in Movies & TV; of course Amazon doesn't tell us what that rank translates to in terms of sales. However there are 111 customer reviews for this series. If we can guess the fraction of customers that post reviews, we could estimate Amazon's sales of this series. If it's one-in-ten, then Amazon sold 1,100 copies of Eden of the East; at one-in-twenty, 2,200. However the current price of Eden is just $24, half the $50 I first estimated above. If we use $25 as the average per-unit price, sales would need to reach 1.3 million units to equal Crunchyroll's annual subscription revenues. |
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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Those numbers are all distilled down so much they're basically meaningless; you're not looking at profit/loss from anyone, just trying to divine what total income is, which still wouldn't be accurate. Crunchyroll also has a store, and they sublicense home video rights out to other companies. No matter how you slice it, trying to determine who's making more money from the available information is impossible, and the speculation ultimately winds up being totally pointless. If you cited these numbers in an argument, they're missing so much information as to be meaningless.
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