Anime retailer Right Stuf has been acquired by Sony/Aniplex (opens in new tab)

Manga is also done by one or (maybe) two people, rather than a committee of like 50+. This means you get a clear vision and individuality shines through.

Do you have any links for your works/space? I'm interested.

I'm usually active in spacebattles, at least the old-style fanfic writers do still output gems now and then. Like Worm and some others.

That seems rather out of touch? The vast majority of TV broadcast anime series every season are licensed for simulcast by streaming services in North America and that has been the case for several years now. At a casual glance at the TV tab of https://myanimelist.net/anime/season/2022/spring , I think at least 2/3 are licensed by western streaming services. There's enough revenue that they can't afford not to care.

Netflix and other streaming platforms have made inroads into anime production committees, but you are correct in that so far very little overall impact is seen in the industry. The Japanese domestic market is still the chief driver of demand for new anime, and success overseas doesn't seem to really inspire a response from most of the anime industry. I wouldn't say they're "isolated", since the market has been penetrated by the west, it's more like they're indifferent to western money.

I think Aniplex is in a position to change this, but the difficulty is going to be luring the studios since money doesn't seem to have as big an impact as one would expect.

Right, but immediacy is already solved. The streaming side is solved by platforms already, and the translation side is solved by having a sweatshop of translators and maybe eventually algorithms to help, too. We've had immediacy for some time now, already.

Moving on, I don't think you will see changes prominently on anichart or MAL anytime soon; the point is that it's gradual and more subtle than that. Crunchyroll was already involved with 60 productions apparently. Conceptually, in a hypothetical "worst case", they could have been influencing artistic choices for each of those programs. We do know they did one: High Guardian Spice is a particularly explicit example of an anime deliberately constructed to western progressive specifications. A lot of people are rather unkind about it, but that's really immaterial; what it really is is a clumsy first attempt at end-to-end control of the anime pipeline from script, to production, to distribution. They didn't find a winning formula with it, but they'll keep trying because there's too much money on the table.

So, I do think that this change in tone is imminently about to happen. Weatern values have already been injected in other forms in localized content too, e.g. in our uptightness about certain types of expressions of sexuality (e.g. that which is perceived to be pervy; e.g, the infilling of "boob-windows" and covering of midriffs in localized games), and with activist translators who deliberately whitewash phrases they find problematic and also who select progressive translation choices over neutral ones.

The bottom line to me is that the money men have zero interest in the integrity of the mediums in which they dabble. As you note, there's precedent; in the 90's, it was 4kids dubs which routinely butchered shows, sometimes extremely. The nature of the interference will change with the standards of the day, but the fundamentals don't.

At the moment the extent of it is mostly that sometimes dubs or subtitles are changed by overeager translators trying to leave their mark, in the process changing the meaning or intent of the dialog. Rough examples that come to mind are changing jokes that can potentially be interpreted as sexist or even less justifiable cases of changing dialog for the sake of adding in meme language like "sus". There are also cases of trying to get rid of features of japanese like honorifics because of the samewhat strange assumption that western audiences can't be expected to understand them, despite them being pretty normal to the anime community. Personally I also miss the approach that older fan subtitles used to have of including TL notes for things that don't necessarily translate cleanly, it was a nice way to respect the original material.

For now, it doesn't really have too much of an effect since Crunchyroll and Netflix's subtitles already don't really have a good reputation. But it's certainly a sign that if they could get away with it, they'd definitely do more.

I think the point GP made is that it doesn't matter what anime Westerners choose to watch, it matters what anime the fewer number of players want to license.

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I personally don't think that will be an issue because I don't see Netflix turning down an anime that Crunchyroll refuses to carry...

> It's disappointing that Sony et al feel that they have a right to control the user in this way, albeit unsurprising.

Do they have to produce content they don’t want to have a hand in making?

I'm shocked, shocked to find religious extremism as the root cause.

It seems to be enforced by the credit card companies and processors, who likely charge more to process transactions for companies that involve pornography. (Probably due to the spurious chargebacks.)

Sell it to someone.. anyone else..