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This Week in Anime - Market Manipulation

I do like that, in anime fandom in general, the value is the content, not the object itself.

There's a lot of fanatics for physical media. If the value was in the media itself they'd be fine with digital or streaming alone and simply watching something but you see people who get really upset that there's no physical home media release for shows these days or only shows they dislike get releases while theirs don't. If it was truly about experience the media itself they wouldn't care but there are collectors who do just value the shelf presence and might not even play a game.

That is the future of all physical media in my opinion. Collectors pieces only. Anime DVDs and Blu-Rays have long since been a premium priced thing in Japan and have become even scarcer as physical media dies and people just prefer streaming. Someone more into physical media than me might know which out-of-print releases of anime and manga go for a pretty penny on the after-market. I myself have kind of phased out physical media as well since just watching it on my computer is good enough for me. I'd rather my shelves be dedicated to physical merchandise like figures and props.

The reason old media is valuable is because a lot of people did not have the foresight to value preserving it.

I was wondering just that. There were millions of copies of every magazine. Probably some dusty second-hand bookshop in some part of Japan has that "unique" volumes for 100 yen.

I was gonna say, there is no shortage of tankobon, literally MILLIONS of these things have been printed. Copies of Shonen Jump with the first chapters of Dragon Ball or Naruto are not difficult to find! The only think I can think of is a special cover version of the first volume of Naruto Viz printed, but even then that's pushing it.

Sure, but most of them are reprints. The value (if you care) lies in the first print.

This is why, for me, the column kinda missed the mark, for much the same reason as similar pearl-clutching in the comics and games communities does.

If you just want to read/play the thing, someone will almost always make that possible for a non-collector price, unless it's a wildly niche thing (in which case you can just, you know, do it the...other way). Collectors / grifters (have it whichever way you like) might make a lot of noise on streaming platforms or whatever, but they don't actually "threaten the hobby" or anything like that. They can't, really, because *somebody* owns the IP and can make more of The Thing if enough people want to buy The Thing.

In other words, you don't need to "resist" collectors, as the article puts it. You can just ignore them. They will find some way to demarcate some identifiably-rare subset of physical copies of The Thing as valuable and play out their whole game with them, and you can safely ignore this and buy the non-"valuable" copies of The Thing instead.

This is how it's always been and how it always will be, for centuries. The same mechanics apply to, e.g., book and stamp collecting. Certain stamps are incredibly "valuable" to a stamp collector, but this never made it more expensive to mail a letter. A first edition of The Hobbit is worth a lot, a first folio Shakespeare is worth a lot more, but if you just want to *read* either of those books you can do it for basically nothing.

Now, the big thing people need to know about internet grifters suddenly (supposedly) spending obscene amounts of money on "graded" vintage manga is that the high-end collectables scene has been equal parts a pump-and-dump and money laundering scam for a LONG time. The short of it is that the social popularity of an IP raises the hypothetical value of "rare" merchandise connected to it, meaning something like an old manga volume can both be sold for as much as someone is willing to pay for it while also being worthless for tax purposes. All it takes is one person famous enough saying that a collectable is worth X amount of money, and suddenly, a thing they bought is worth as much as a greater fool is willing to pay for it.

But I have seen people who genuinely enjoy it. Some streamer I watch opens Pokemon cards sometimes and sends them away to get graded. She doesn't sell them or anything she just likes to have them on her shelf. If she gets joy out of having stuff graded and told its good then I guess it's worth it to her. If people do get genuine joy out of the process then to each their own I suppose.