Otaku, No Video

I’m  nearly done with Super Robot Wars OG: The Inspector, and man is it a deliriously fun show.

And by that I mean I’m delirious. Due to the vast size of the cast–dozens of main, named pilots–I just can’t keep up with who’s who, and particularly, who’s piloting which mecha. Much less which side they’re on (and we’re up to at least 4 different sides).

But that’s okay, because I know how to watch a super robot show. Super robot shows don’t operate according to the laws of physics, and their plots are usually cheesy.

Super robot shows are about emotion. The characters are pushed to great emotional highs (and lows), and the viewer is pushed around as well. One is supposed to be excited when a giant robot forms its blazing sword, or a new enemy appears. The viewer’s supposed to cheer and laugh and cry.

So, yes, I’m unable to follow the plot closely, or keep track of all the characters. And it’s still great fun.

After my past week of illness, I pulled out my iPad this morning, curled up in a chair, and started catching up on blogs. After reading a WSJ story that made me want to do odd things with my iPhone (but that’s another story), I saw Preventing Anime Burn-Out on Ogiue Maniax. Much as I love that blog, the article left me disappointed, as it used 8 long paragraphs and 788 words to say “watch different anime.” Let’s go a little deeper, shall we?

We all recognize burnout: feeling fed up with a genre or medium. On one extreme, you merely lack the passion you once had; on another, it’s like you can’t even look at the genre any more.

A useful parallel is writer’s block. I’ve found two kinds of writer’s block: Existential Cramps and Laziness. The first is a genuine physiological inability to write: you sit down at a keyboard, your fingers lock, and mind completely blanks. It’s actually fairly rare. The second, more common writer’s block is the kind we’d often get in school when a paper’s due, you haven’t done any research, and you sit down to ”bang something out.” Nothing flows, because you’re unprepared and exhausted. You can write gibberish or bad stuff, but nothing good.

Similarly, there are two kinds of burnout, which I’ll call Full Burnout and Boredom. In the latter, which I think is being addressed in the Ogiue Maniax post above, you just don’t care about the anime you’re currently watching. In that case, sure, watch VOTOMS or Perfect Blue instead.

If you’re suffering from Full Burnout, on the other hand, you’re completely unable to even look at anime. You’re sick of the clichés, the stereotypes, and even the art style.

There are several possible causes of Full Burnout:

It could be that you’ve legitimately exhausted your interest in the medium. We all have interests that come and go; we’ve all had hobbies that lasted for a few weeks or months or years, then faded away.

There’s nothing wrong with being an otaku temporarily. A good friend of mine did this; he went from hardcore anime fan to hardcore movie fan.

It could also be that you need time to process. Our minds need some time to fully absorb ideas, beyond the time spend experiencing them for the first time. We can easily gorge on anime, then find ourselves nauseous.

In that case, my prescription is: Walk away from anime. That Saturday you would have spent watching anime? Take a book to a nearby park. Try meditation. Start working on a novel. Heck, even try some other aspect of fandom: fanfic, AMV creation, role-playing, etc.

We get so wrapped up in Being An Otaku that we forget we’re more than otaku.

I’m intrigued by the different reactions people get when they mention specific anime studios.

Studio Ghibli, of course, gets the most praise…but that can be unfair. Ghibli’s working with high budgets on long-terms projects with plenty of time, headed by folks with decades of experience. More importantly, Ghibli’s animation is about as far away from anime as you can get without aping Disney.

Similarly, Production I.G does for TV what Studio Ghibli does for movies; high production values (and high budgets), combined with high-concept ideas. I.G isn’t making Asobi ni Iku Yo! or K-ON!; it’s making Ghost in the Shell and xXxHoLic. However, rather than revel in anime as anime, their work seems to push anime as close to film as possible.

Kyoto Animation is arguably the most “anime-like” of all the anime studios, producing works targeted directly at the otaku market. Since most of their recent output has consisted of slice-of-life comedies, their animation quality hasn’t needed to be particularly high. Interestingly, they seem to focus on drawing quality, keeping their characters rigorously on-model.

Sunrise has produced massive amounts of animation in its decades of life. The quality varies, but always shows care: even in the dark days of the mid-1990′s, Sunrise paid attention to lighting and mood in its art. The Gundam cash cow has certainly helped keep it afloat.

Studio 4°C is the wild card: strange and inventive, pumping out animated acid trips like Mind Game, Tekkon Kinkreet, and Detroit Metal City. Even their most commercial work, Tweeny Witches, has an odd, dark vibe to its art. You never quite know what they’ll do next, which is something I like.

There are others, of course, as well. That’s one of the wonderful things about this medium; there are so many unexplored crevices.

The Situation

The western anime community lacks A-list bloggers. We have good bloggers, but no blogger is a ”household name” among otaku.

The Pattern

Anime bloggers launch a blog and build an audience for about a year or two, then their output drops off.

A few stick around, but many blog sporadically from that point on. Nobody accelerates into stardom.

That’s not true in other niches. Other niches have big names in blogs (Arianna Huffington in politics, Robert Scoble and others in tech), people who stick with it and build huge audiences. Why don’t we?

The Cause

A blogger will stick around if they can get at least a little money for their efforts. Anime bloggers can’t.

Take my case for example. I get a few thousand visitors a month, and I make about $1 a month through ads. Even if I saw 100,000 visitors a month–the generally agreed-upon number at which you’ve “arrived” as a blogger–at this rate I’d only make $20 or $30 a month. And that’s a huge distance away, considering I’ve already been blogging for over a year and I’ve posted over 200 articles.

Anime blogs can’t get great advertisers. Anime fans don’t buy DVDs, and they buy merchandise sporadically from different vendors. A few companies advertise, but it’s nowhere near the level of other niches. Why should they? Advertising won’t work for them.

So the spiral continues: bloggers can’t make significant money, so they hit an output ceiling. Other interests develop. Perhaps they move to Twitter, or perhaps they move on from anime. Combine the lack of income and the harsh reality of Internet Asperger’s–to which otaku are particularly prone–and there are few reasons to stick around.

Note: This is not a complaint about my situation, nor a suggestion that I’m going to stop blogging. I’m not discouraged yet. I’m just identifying what appears to me as a common pattern.

(Updated: Ed Sizemore pointed out on Twitter: “I’m wondering if podcasts more than blogs serve that function. They wouldn’t have been big on my radar, but I notice all the Otaku USA people started out as podcasters. Also a lot of popular panels at cons are run by podcasters. That’s when I started noticing podcasters more.”)

4Hero © mzajojo on DeviantArt

I think we all know about scanlation sites — websites that provide translated manga for free. Most fans turn a blind eye to scanlation sites; yes, they’re illegal, but they’re also convenient. And they’re fan-run, anyway.

So, at what point does a site cross the line from fan-run into a commercial endeavor?

I ask because I’ve noticed several scanlation sites explode with advertisements lately. How much money are these scanlation sites making off of other people’s work, anyway?

Meanwhile, a Japanese 18-year-old was arrested for uploading manga, and making over US $3,000 from it within a few months. These weren’t scanlations; the (alleged) perpetrator linked to Japanese files he’d posted to MegaUpload. However, the basic setup is the same as a scanlators’: a website offering free manga with ad support.

The primary reason that I turn a blind eye to scanlations and other free manga sites? I assume they’re operated by fans who aren’t making significant money off their endeavor.  Moreover, if I like a manga enough to read more than a few pages online, I’ll buy it (as I did with Dance in the Vampire Bund).

So I assume that these ads are going to pay for server costs. But are they?

I wonder now.

Wish Upon the Pleiades © Subaru, Gainax

Here’s how much the Japanese appreciate the importance of the English-speaking audience: Subaru and Gainax added English subs to their Subaru-themed magical girl anime shorts, Wish Upon the Pleiades, one day after the videos were originally released.

These are basically ads. And they’re magical girl stories. Given away for free.

And someone between the two companies thinks it’s important to let non-Japanese see them.

This wasn’t fansubbed. Somebody had to pay money for this.

Someone believes that a magical girl anime will sell Subarus to non-Japanese.

Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off the floor.

During last Saturday’s Otaku News Live!, the panel remarked that the winter 2011 season has essentially no duds so far.

There are a few titles we didn’t like–I won’t be watching Freezing or Beelzebub–but there’s no Tantei Opera Milky Holmes or Tono no Issho or Musashi Gundoh or Examurai Sengoku.

And there are quite a few interesting shows, including Fractale, Hourou Musukou — Wandering Son, Madoka Magica, Gosick, and Yumekui Merry, with Mai no Mahou to Katei no Hi coming in February.

That’s pretty amazing.

© http://fatazma.blog.com/

sdshamel at Ogiue Maniax recently released a post at ”asiascape vistas.” I’d never heard of asiascape vistas before; it appears to be a collective blog made by otaku in academia. Cool!

Anyway, the post concerns Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist, and the creation of comics for a mostly illiterate adult audience. When comics came into their own as a mass medium in the early 20th century, illiteracy remained high, so newspapers relied on political cartoons to communicate their primary talking points.

Political cartoons require skill at distillation. The artist takes a complex point and reduces it to a few visual cues. This, indeed, is the problem with political cartoons, as complex points suffer when simplified. Complex problems aren’t that simple. But I digress.

American comics quickly became focused on the mass market: kids, teens, and adults were all served by such fare as Krazy Kat, Flash Gordon and Blondie. Japan followed a similar trend, with shounen for boys and comedies like Sazae-san for families.

But each industry’s distribution changed, and this changed their style. Besides newspapers, American comics were published in short comic books, while manga was collected into akahon–cheap, thick magazines, essentially. American kids would buy a 15-page comic for 25 cents, while Japanese kids would pay far less for a book that included several manga stories (as well as short fiction and other appealing materials).

Because each akahon contained so much content to be read at once, the format prioritized quick reading. Pages were laid out for extremely rapid comprehension. The black-and-white nature of the medium (color was just too expensive for these things) helped this further.  Simple, white backgrounds draw the reader’s eye straight to dialogue balloons and facial expressions. As someone once said “In American comics, a panel is a sentence. In manga, a panel is a word.”

So, manga exists somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between talkier American comics and the extreme distillation of political cartoons. This is one of the medium’s best traits.