This Week in Anime

Market Manipulation

Lucas
Coop, I'm so glad we're talking about this today. Mostly because it's our obligation to use our platform to act as responsible stewards of this space, but also because I sold US$20,000 in Pokémon cards for my fiancée's grandmother last year, and that experience nearly broke me psychologically and irreparably damaged my sense of nostalgic whimsy.

I did! I traveled to collectables conventions to source buyer information, cold called collectables content creators and resellers, let a strange man into my apartment so that he could weigh each pack individually, then drove an hour on a work day to buy some of the packs BACK from him after he had the gall to suggest that he overpaid when he was the one who made the offer that my partner and I agreed to and asked for a refund.

While the Pokémon brand, company, and fandom are too big to be entirely defined by one group of people, Pokémon TCG grifters are a blight upon this space and have turned a children's card game into an exercise of the greater fool theory, while forever tainting a piece of media that's deeply meaningful to me.

While we're never going to be able to get these greedy sociopaths out of the Pokémon TCG scene, I wanna do everything in my power to keep these sweaty losers from running the same playbook in the anime/manga collectables community.

Agreed. That kind of tribalism isn't productive, and as anime has become more popular and ubiquitous, the idea of people being "tourists" is counterintuitive when, like, just about everyone under the age of 50 nowadays has heard of Dragon Ball, One Piece, Sailor Moon and other big titles.

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.

This has been happening in the world of high end art for generations, but recently cropped up in video games just before the pandemic when trusted voices and pundits noted how strange it was that fairly common retro games like Super Mario Bros were selling at auction for much more than what they should be. Pokémon cards and other TCGs were especially vulnerable to this grift as the blindbox nature of how they're distributed creates even more speculation, and now we're seeing people try to inflate the cost of fairly ubiquitous manga for their own gain.

Listen, I bailed on TikTok after the company flipped its servers off for half a day and then thanked the current admin when they flipped them back on in a shameless attempt to curry favor with a wannabe autocrat. However, even just a couple of years ago, I remember how put off I was by the manga tokers showing off their collections that filled entire rooms of their house. There's nothing enviable about that level of excess, and it kind of cheapens the work in that kind of collection in my eyes.

As someone who has read A LOT of manga, having "the most" of something doesn't make you any kind of authority on it. It's way more important and rewarding to actually engage with the community around this media, or turn your familiarity with it into analysis or other kinds of experiences and insights that can help you grow as a person. Having a personal library filled with manga can be a consequence of being active in and caring deeply about this space, but it shouldn't be anyone's principal goal.

If I'm a collector of anything, I think it's video games. Though that's not really a thing I'm doing with any kind of intention, and more a consequence of how I grew up with the medium. While anime and manga were largely mediums I got into through the internet, as there was no way for me to purchase either in my incredibly small hometown, there was a GameStop one town over, and it was fairly easy for me to get physical discs/cartridges there. Between that habit-forming opportunity and me having WAY more friends inclined to borrow a game than anime or manga, I accidentally ended up with a bit of a collection over time.

I know this statement might come across as contradictory, considering how often you and I preach anti-piracy sentiments in this column, but folks need to engage with hobbies and art through a lens other than consumerism. I know how cool it can be to own a piece of history or how good it can feel to have people praise your collection, but hobbies need to be more than just a way to spend your money or, in the case of the grifters who motivated this column, a way to make a quick buck.

That's a contradiction that I've always found funny in our community. With all of this media being imported to us in the US, the growing availability of Japanese entertainment here is a clear consequence of people thinking it's profitable to release these works here. However, basically all of the communal infrastructure that the current anime fandom is built on was made back when this market was nearly nonexistent, and those involved had to be in this space for the love of the game.

The fact that the anime fan community existed well before anyone could make big bucks off of it makes me hopeful that we can resist these opportunistic grifters. Just about anyone in a position of authority in this space is acutely aware of this industry's financial realities, and a scam like this can only go so far without buy-in from established and beloved voices.

The thing about the greater fool theory that powered the NFT bubble and countless other meritless markets is that, if no one else is buying, the people who tried to get this off the ground end up as the clowns. Anyone can put a manga that people have heard of in a plastic case, slap an arbitrary number on it to say that it's valuable, and then claim it's worth something like twenty or forty grand, but it's only actually worth that much once someone cuts them a check.

Everyone I know in this space with that kind of money to burn is doing WAY cooler stuff with it, which makes me hopeful that this is going to be a fad adjacent to the anime community for a minute, but never reach the impressive and vibrant heights of the actual anime community.