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You may have seen some of those "Support the Industry" videos on You Tube where fans show the DVDs and other official merchandise they bought. The point is to show how they support the industry and also encourage others to support the industry that produces the entertainment we all love.
I've decided to do the same here. At the end of each month, I'll do a little post summing up what I did to support the industry in that month.
In May 2012, I made many more DVD purchases than usual, so please don't take the following as something you're going to see here every month. ;)
I'd been meaning to buy both seasons of Gundam 00 for a while, and just happened to pull the trigger this month. Both sets were fairly cheap at Right Stuf.
I also got good pricing on Junjou Romantica, seasons 1 and 2. One set I bought from Right Stuf, the other from Amazon (which had a lower price).
While I was on Crunchyroll one evening, they advertised a special: the entire series of Gakuen Heaven for the ridiculous price of $8.92. I ordered it, but it hasn't arrived yet. So you get to see a professional pic of it, instead of one of my horrendous dim-and-slightly-blurry pics. ;)
I attended Fanime 2012, so of course my registration fee and all expenses I incurred while at the convention went toward supporting the industry.
While at the con I registered for Yaoi Con 2012, so there went another $45 in support of what I love.
In the Dealer's Hall, after thinking about it for a bit, I bought the following DVD box set:
Nighthead Genesis is kind of an odd series. I'd already seen it and had been thinking about rewatching it when I saw it on the Media Blasters table. It was on sale for $25, so I bought it. When I'm through rewatching it, I'll post a review on this blog.
Also in the Dealer's Hall, I picked up four yaoi novels at Digital Manga's booth at a fire sale price - three bucks apiece.
And as I do each month, I paid for my Crunchyroll subscription, which provides about 75 percent of my total entertainment - a steal at $6.95 per month.
Finally, the intangibles - the ways I supported the industry that didn't involve money.
In May 2012, I wrote a number of posts for this blog (Neo-Shonen Fujoshi). I commented on articles at Anime News Network and on episodes at Crunchyroll, engaging with my fellow anime fans and thus providing free content for both sites.
As an editor, I worked on the English language adaptation of Ai no Kusabi, vol. 7, for Digital Manga, Inc. It's a yaoi novel that will be released later this year.
I watched numerous episodes on Crunchyroll, including episodes of currently-airing series (Naruto Shippuuden, Hiiro no Kakera, Shirokuma Cafe, Tsuritama, Folktales from Japan, Kids on the Slope) and past series (Natsume Yuujincho and rewatching some favorite episodes of Gintama). I believe the creators get a little money for each view.
I started rewatching Peacemaker Kurogane on Funimation's You Tube channel. I don't know if my views there result in any royalties to the creators, but at least they should register as a vote of some kind so Funimation knows fans are out there watching it.
That's all I can think of at the moment. It was a big month with the DVD buys and an anime convention so June will probably be a softer month, but we'll see. :)
Fanime was held this past weekend at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. It was my first time back at the convention in a few years. The crowds seemed just as big and I think a pretty good time was had by all.
The front of the convention center was a huge pile of dirt as it's currently undergoing renovations, leaving only a small concrete plaza area for cosplayers to congregate in. I'm not much into cosplay photos, but I did take a few:
The Naruto gathering was predictably huge:
Thursday night, the con got hit by a power outage in the convention center during registration. For once I didn't pick up my badge on Day Zero - I arrived on Friday instead - so I missed the experience of standing in line for five hours only to be told that my registration couldn't be processed, as some fans went through on Thursday evening. I did however have the experience of standing in line for three hours on Friday afternoon to pick up my badge, only to find once I'd gotten to the head of the line that a total of eight people were processing badges - with over 1,000 people in the pre-reg line for hours. No, this didn't make any sense to me either. ;)
That aside, I had a good time at the con. I didn't go to too many panels, but there were a few interesting ones. At the Viz panel the company was pushing Shonen Jump Alpha, their digital magazine, pretty hard. Digital Manga, Inc. held two panels, one on their new imprint and one on Yaoi Con. At their first panel, I ran into fellow editor Daniella Orihuela-Gruber and we sat together to hear DMI's Ben and Kwame discuss the company's new imprint, Platinum Manga, which is bringing classic manga in translation to the English language market. The imprint's first two manga releases were both Osamu Tezuka works, Swallowing the Earth and Barbara, and both were crowdfunded via Kickstarter. Their next manga will also be a Tezuka book, but they weren't authorized to release the name of the title yet at the panel.
The Yaoi Con panel, held later that day, was a bit different from the usual. Yaoi Con is now owned by DMI and after ten years in San Francisco, DMI chose to move the con permanently to the Los Angeles area. Fanime is in the Bay Area of course, so there were some in the audience who questioned the move, citing the increased expense for local fans to attend and also a concern about LA's perceived lack of tolerance toward LGBT people. (Actually Long Beach, the con's new home, has a long-established LGBT community, something many outside LA aren't aware of.) The DMI staff addressed the questions adequately, I thought, but in my view there will be some attrition the first year in LA no matter what DMI does or doesn't do. Some will make a point of not attending on principle. The second year in LA will be more indicative of whether the con will survive the transition or not.
At the panel, DMI also announced Yaoi Con's guest of honor for 2012 - Uki Ogasawara, the mangaka of Black Sun, a gorgeous two-volume manga, which gives me the excuse to post the cover art here (did I mention the art is GORGEOUS?):
As an aside, Fanime teamed up this year with a sister convention, Clockwork Alchemy, held at one of the official con hotels. Since it was free (registration for one got you into the other), I went to take a look.
I've been a fan of speculative and genre fiction forever - science fiction, fantasy, horror. It's rare when I come across a niche area of speculative fiction/art where my reaction is, "I don't get this," but steampunk is one of those niches. I don't understand the appeal of an alternate-history Victorian England with futuristic machines; I just don't. Others find it wonderful, which is great for them. There's room for everything in speculative genres.
Besides not getting the appeal - which is just my personal preference, or rather non-preference - steampunk, or to be more carefully accurate, the Clockwork Alchemy convention, was very noticeably and almost exclusively attended and staffed by Caucasians. Especially coming off the shuttle bus from Fanime - which, like all anime conventions in California, is gloriously mixed with an eyeball estimate of about 70 percent non-whites (Asians, Blacks, Latinos, Pacific Islanders) and 30
percent Caucasians, the contrast was jarring - and not particularly welcoming.
So I zeroed in on the one person of color I saw at the convention - writer/artist Elizabeth Watasin, a Thai-American:
Elizabeth is the author of The Dark Victorian: Risen, a steampunk novel. We had a brief but engaging discussion on steampunk and its fans. To read more about Elizabeth and her work, you can visit her blog here: http://www.a-girlstudio.com.
To finish up about Clockwork Alchemy - I'm not suggesting a convention about a science-fiction Victorian England should have as multicultural a fanbase as anime - although there's no reason why that shouldn't be the case either. And it's a leap from seeing a fanbase that appeared to be all white to assuming this means... anything. It's just that the contrast with Fanime was so stark that I couldn't have been the only person who noticed it. I don't know if steampunk simply doesn't attract a wider fanbase or what it might be - but I was quite happy to return to Fanime after my brief side trip to Clockwork Alchemy.
Back at Fanime, I went to two Hetalia fan panels. Hetalia fans have a rep for being out of control - which is true. That's what I like about them. ;)
Hetalia fans tend to be young and female, and they do a lot of shrieking about the bishonen male countries that comprise the cast of Hetalia when they're at conventions. Think hormones mixed with endorphins - lots of hormones mixed with lots of endorphins, with maybe a sugar high or two thrown in. I could tell you what the two panels were called and were supposedly about, but all Hetalia panels are the same. A group of Hetalia fans cosplaying as their favorite countries sits on stage while fangirls line up to ask questions of each country. The result is a lot of country-on-country bashing and suggestive humor, and again - much, much shrieking.
Anthropologists have researched the coming-of-age rituals that young males go through. In all seriousness, I think Hetalia fandom is a kind of similar ritual for certain female anime fans. Sitting in the audience, I found myself thinking, where does all that wildness disappear to? Before a subdued adulthood closes in on them, let them be Hetalia fans. No, really, I mean it. That energy has to go somewhere.
And as Walter Amos has noted in his excellent panels on Hetalia and history, Hetalia has made history buffs out of many of its fans. If a Hetalia fan reads up on the Austro-Hungarian empire because the marriage of Austria and Hungary is Hetalia canon, can this be a bad thing?
I was a Hetalia fan before I was the copy editor on the three Hetalia manga volumes. I don't shriek at conventions, but I'm still a fan of the Hetalia universe and if you've never read the manga or haven't seen the anime yet (I strongly suggest watching the sub, not dub version - the dub version changes the words too much), you might find it a lot better than you think.
In sum, Fanime was fun this year and I'm glad I went. And maybe next year they'll have more than eight people processing badges on Day 1 - we can hope. ;)
The 2012 edition. ;) Daisuke Ono-san.
Some issues come around again like clockwork in anime.
Take Hiiro no Kakera.
Hiiro no Kakera has a fairly standard premise. Teenage girl Tamaki is sent to live with her grandmother in the countryside. Immediately upon arrival, she is attacked in the forest by strange paranormal creatures. She's rescued by a group of bishonen teenage boys who appear to have paranormal powers themselves.
When she reaches her grandmother's house, she receives some big news. Grandmother informs Tamaki that she has now inherited the mantle of "Tamayori Princess," a role that Grandmother has held for decades. In succeeding episodes, we learn that the Tamayori Princess is responsible for the seals that shield the artifacts that protect the magical sword "Onikirimaru" inside the earth. If she fails, the world will end.
Tamaki isn't alone in this mission, of course: she has the bishonen to help her. But there are enemies as well - Aria Rozenburg, who calls herself "Logos," and her group of evil supporters.
Logos defeats Tamaki's boy band early on, and again - and more severely - in episode 6, where Tamaki is actually forced to bargain for the boys' lives by handing over one of the artifacts.
Tamaki had been told in episode 5 that she must "awaken" to herself - to her own powers as the Tamayori Princess - in order to prevail over Aria and protect the Onikirimaru (and again - save the world in the process). When Tamaki asked how she could awaken her powers, her grandmother didn't specifically tell her how.
This is fine - the hero has to be proactive and figure at least some things out for himself or herself. But what Tamaki does throughout episodes 5-7 is... nothing.
She compliments her grandmother's servant on fixing such nice bentos for lunch, goes to school, has lunch with her bishonen protectors where they talk about Logos and how they can defeat them next time... in short...
... she's passive.
If this was a shonen story, the hero would be practicing thousands of strikes with a wooden sword by himself in the forest and driving his boys into the ground with extra training morning till night. He would definitely be skipping school (school in anime is just the place where you meet up with your friends anyway - it's shown as being useless otherwise). He would be lying awake at night on his futon agonizing over what more he could do, who he could ask for advice, what has he overlooked?
Tamaki frets that she hasn't awakened to her powers yet - but seems paralyzed to do anything about it. We're at episode 7 now, the boys have suffered a brutal defeat and Logos has one of the precious artifacts. If I were Tamaki, my next conversation with my grandmother would go something like this: "Say, Grandma. About this Tamayori Princess thing. My friends are getting killed in battle and time is short. CAN YOU GIVE ME A HINT ALREADY ABOUT WHAT I'M SUPPOSED TO DO TO SAVE THE EARTH? THANK YOU."
I would be going to every temple in the village and asking the priests if they had any information. I would interrogate my bishonen lads about everything they knew about the Tamayori Princess. Etc., etc. Oh, and I'd be training too. Just because I'd have five bishie guys protecting me doesn't mean I couldn't pick up a sword myself and learn some basic moves with it. Anything.
Strangely, what may save Hiiro no Kakera is its length - it's set for 26 episodes. This means the story has time to develop in a number of interesting directions, once Tamaki manages to awaken to her powers - which has to happen sometime soon. One direction might be a romance with her main protector, Takuma.
Takuma is the gruff, taciturn boy who doesn't appear to like Tamaki much at first. So of course, in the world of anime cliches, this means he likes her a lot. ;) It doesn't hurt that he's played by Tomokazu Sugita, whose voice I am seriously in love with now after Gintama. So far Tamaki doesn't treat Takuma any differently from the others, doesn't blush when she speaks with him, etc. So they may not go that way at all. But with 26 episodes there's room to take the story on new paths. And if the art images I've seen are any indication, the characters will undergo some interesting transformations before it's over.
I just wish Tamaki and girl heroes like her would get a sense of urgency when, you know, the fate of the world is in their hands. ;)
One of the joys of being an anime fan is falling in love with seiyuu.
Some seiyuu you follow from the first moment you hear them in an anime. Others sneak up on you and you suddenly notice them one day.
Kazuya Nakai was that way for me. I watched both seasons of Sengoku Basara last year, in which he played main character Masamune Date. Sengoku Basara is both a tribute to and a send-up of typical historical samurai anime, featuring over-the-top action and wildly larger than life heroes and villains.
Nakai's Date (pictured above) is the most flamboyant of the good guys. A one-eyed general sporting an eyepatch and wearing six swords - because the usual two just aren't enough ;) - Date has a habit of announcing himself by screaming "I AM THE ONE-EYED DRAGON KING OF OSHU" at the top of his lungs, and when not trying to kill Yukimura Sanada, his rival, leading his troops into battle while shouting out random phrases in English like "ARE YOU READY?" and "LET'S PARTY!!!"
I finally took note of Nakai when I was marathoning Gintama in which he plays Hijikata. In one episode another character makes a snide reference to Nakai's role as Date in Sengoku Basara, and the light bulb went on for me and I recalled him as Date.
Nakai is probably best known for the following role...
... and he recently played another pirate, Jinpachi Nezu, in Brave 10:
He played Mugen in Samurai Champloo, an anime I watched years ago in English dub. I'm now looking forward to rewatching it in Japanese just to hear his voice.
Nakai often plays the hard case, the tough ass character. If you combine One Piece (currently at 547 episodes), Gintama (252 episodes), Brave 10 (12 episodes) and Samurai Champloo (26 episodes), that's 837 episodes of playing a tough ass. That's a lot of tough. ;)
Nakai doesn't change his voice very much from role to role, but he doesn't need to. He's got a great voice, an iconically masculine voice, one of those voices that will always be in demand.
And maybe he's not a hard case in real life. He looks pretty friendly, actually. :)
And then there's Yuuki Kaji.
Yuuki Kaji (or Yuki Kaji - I've seen it both ways) is fated to never play characters who are addressed as "Sensei," "Master" or "Shogun." His high, reedy voice ensures he'll be playing teenage boys when he's 50.
Kaji has one of those distinctive voices that you recognize quickly, if not immediately. It's not just the young sound of his voice - it's the timbre that is all his own. I'm not sure if it's a nasal quality or something else, but hear him in one role and you'll recognize him every time after that. He's the eternal shonen - the boy awakening to becoming a man.
This spring season Kaji is in Accel World. I'm not watching Accel World, but I love the goofy look of the characters:
At 26, Kaji has a long boyhood ahead of him. ;)
If you’ve read any Tokyopop manga books, you’ve seen her name on the credits page. Vy Nguyen was the Managing Editor of Tokyopop, and during her tenure Tokyopop was one of the major publishers of manga in the English language.
I spoke with Vy recently about her time at Tokyopop and where she believes the manga industry is headed in the U.S.
Q: Can you tell me a little about your background?
A: My first real job was with Tokyopop. I started out as a part-time inventory clerk, then became the office administrator, and then I was the managing editor for about four and a half years.
Q: What brought you to Tokyopop?
A: My number one goal was to find a job in a creative environment – whether that was video games, movies, comics, anything in the entertainment industry. Also at the time, I'd just discovered the anime and manga world and thought it was pretty interesting. I saw that Tokyopop was hiring and went for it.
Q: What was the industry like in the U.S. when you first worked at Tokyopop?
A: It was really robust at that time. At the height of its popularity, it was everywhere. If you were the parent of a teenager or young child, most likely your kid was into it. It was doing really well. Even if you weren’t a fan, you definitely knew about it.
Q: What were your duties as managing editor?
A: My biggest duty was managing all the freelancers, mostly translators and rewriters. Much later, the company started outsourcing more things like freelance editing and copy editing. The second part of my job was getting approvals from licensors - cover approvals, credit page approvals. Then my third task was traffic coordinating, in other words, making sure production was flowing smoothly.
Q: How did the industry change during your tenure at Tokyopop?
A: I think anime and manga came along at the right time. When people were first exposed to it, they were interested because it was very new and different. Sailor Moon was a huge thing, a lot of people were just really taken by the art style – it wasn’t a style people had seen up to that point. It was new and exciting. I think as the industry grew older, it felt like there wasn’t any innovation. I didn't see any changes happen.
Q: When was this point? In other words, when did the industry hit a point when some innovation would have helped but it didn’t happen?
A: After a couple of years, the novelty kind of wears off. If there’s no innovation, things get stale and people grow out of it. Unless it grows with you, there's a high chance you'll lose interest. But I always felt that anime and manga would pick up new fans, a younger fan base, even though a lot of it was focused toward the more mature crowd. I don't think it changed a whole lot in those six years I was at Tokyopop. It stayed stagnant. When we tried to introduce something new like OEL manga (original English language manga), it was completely rejected by the hardcore anime and manga fans as "not being Japanese enough." I thought this showed a bit of immaturity in the fan base - why wouldn’t you read something just because it wasn’t made in Japan or created by someone of Japanese origin? That didn't make sense to me. I thought a lot of the OEL content was extremely new and different and innovative, yet for some reason the manga fans just totally rejected it. I really don't understand why.
Q: Was it low sales that killed OEL manga?
A: The sales could have been a lot better. We stopped releasing a lot of volumes or delayed releases, but I’m not really sure if it was due to low sales or if it was decided that it wasn't receiving enough traction. But all I can say is that it wasn't received by the manga community as we would have liked.
There were obviously exceptions like Dramacon and Bizenghast that did very well, and maybe others, but for the most part while I was working there I was the most excited about the OEL manga. Every single one that came out, whenever we received the copies in the office, I would read all of them. I thought it was really awesome stuff and wondered why it wasn't being adopted more by the manga community, and the fact that it wasn't being adopted for such petty reasons made me think, if they can't see beyond the Western name and accept the stuff for what it is - a really awesome story, something new and really cool - then I didn't want to be a part of the community at that point.
Q: American graphic novels are obviously popular and have a lot of fans. I would’ve thought that OEL manga had enough similarity to American graphic novels such that whatever differences there were, that the fans would be open to accepting OEL manga anyway and not reject it simply because it didn't resemble its source enough.
A: This may not be directly addressing the question, but I think the reason the anime and manga industry is in the state it's in now is because the fans are kind of stuck. They like what they like; they don't like any change, and when a change is introduced everyone freaks out. The same art styles, the same re-hashed plot lines: they want that, and they don't want anything different and I think that's too bad because if they allowed this hobby of theirs, something they really enjoyed to kind of grow with them, the industry might have adapted and grown too. It's like you've grown up with anime, you want it to stay the same and any kind of change, you totally reject it.
Q: What about the whole digital revolution where folks are now trying to digitize manga and of course, they're streaming anime online. Crunchyroll does simultaneous releases with English subtitles at the same time the episode is released in Japan. What do you think of that whole trend and do you think it will save the industry in the U.S.?
A: I think it's a great trend. People spend so much time on their cell phones, tablets, laptops, on some kind of electronic device, so making your content accessible that way is extremely important. I think Crunchyroll has been successful in providing fans with what they want, updated episodes as they come out in Japan. In the past it was like, something was released in Japan and you'd wait up to a year or a really long time before you could actually enjoy it, unless you were one of those really hardcore fans who would have to go out and buy it. I think anything you can do in this day and age, you have to consider. I think publishing has changed very little. Things like Taschen art books can't be digitized very well but comics are perfect for iPads, so it's something that I think companies should definitely be putting more effort into. And actually some companies have been putting effort into it, realizing that they need to go with it. But I don't think they've figured out the best way to monetize it yet.
Q: From what I understand, the Japanese business model for anime seems to rely heavily on DVD purchases by fans, and the DVD prices in Japan are quite high. They tried to use that model here, but with the advent of streaming anime it hasn't worked. Most fans in the U.S. aren't going to spend hundreds of dollars on one DVD box set for one series. It's impractical. I think U.S. fans want to support the industry both here and in Japan, but we can't quite do it the Japanese way. Do you have any thoughts on this?
A: I think that with the sheer number of anime series that come out - I mean, I think that business model only works with a small number of people, and if you're relying on that small a number of people to buy your stuff, you'll go out of business very quickly. You still have to supplement that with cheaper offerings so that fans can still enjoy it, but at a reasonable price. You have to offer things that are more accessible if you want to stay in business.
Q: How can U.S. and other fans outside of Japan support the industry?
A: That's really simple to answer: Buy the stuff that you like. Don't pirate it off the Internet. That's probably the biggest and easiest way to help. It wouldn’t just keep manga publishing in business, but it would also have a ripple effect and would show the companies in Japan and the creators there that, hey, you know what? Your stuff is really cool and it's doing really well, people are buying it. They can't tell that if you just go online and download it or read it. They have no idea, so yeah. Buy the stuff.
Q: Do you think digital distribution of manga is feasible and that it will work and be adopted by U.S. fans?
A: I think it can work, once it’s been proven to work and has been established. I don’t think hard copies of books will ever die. They’re going to have to find a middle ground to support both. You’ve mentioned to me previously that you tried one of the online digital manga platforms and found the interface clunky and not user-friendly.
Q: Yeah.
A: That’s going to have to be worked out. They’ll have to try new things, stick with the things that work and get rid of the things that don’t.
Q: Do you see the popularity of iPads and tablets to be part of that whole process?
A: Yes. I think actually phones more than tablets. When you’re outside and you look around, you’ll always find someone messing around with their phone. I think right now that tablets are more of a luxury item; not everyone has a tablet. A lot of people are trying to figure out how to get that stuff to work on their phone. But right now, I think short little stories that are cheap and that you can read on your phone, like when you’re waiting in line, that could be explored.
Q: What did you enjoy most about working at Tokyopop?
A: I really enjoyed the people I worked with. It was a creative environment and I credit Tokyopop with giving me a career. After I got out of college I was sort of bumping around, trying to figure out what I was going to do. I learned a lot of skills that translate really well to other industries, and for that I’ll always be appreciative of Tokyopop. I really grew in my six years there.
Q: I know you’re a big gamer girl and I understand that you now work in the video game industry. What is that like?
A: It’s great. I’ve been playing video games since I was five years old, starting with a Nintendo, and I’ve never stopped. In my free time, there’s two things that I do: one of them is read, and the other is play video games. So being able to work in the video game industry is extremely exciting because I’m really invested in the product, and as a gamer I want to create the best game that anyone ever played - because I know how exciting it is for me to buy a game and just be totally blown away by it. It consumes you for hundreds of hours, and that’s not an exaggeration. I’ve played a game for hundreds of hours, running around exploring the world, and it’s really fulfilling to be on the other side of that and see first-hand what it takes to get a game to that point. So that to me is really exciting.
Q: Last question. At this point, where do you see the manga industry going? I am very concerned about the long-term success and even in the short term, the survival of the industry in the U.S. As a manga fan, I’m concerned and I’m wondering in your experience at Tokyopop, being there in the heyday of manga popularity in the U.S. and then seeing it decline – where do you think the industry is heading and what do you think could save it?
A: I do think it’s going to survive. I just don’t know in what capacity. I think there’s always going to be manga and anime and there will be people reading and watching it. But in terms of what will make it survive, people are going to have to make better and smarter decisions about how to move forward with distribution and marketing, what to do and not to do. I think that’s extremely important. There’s money to made, but it’s figuring out how are you going to make that money. Digital distribution will probably get bigger. I think it’s like the music industry, which for a while there was in a crazy spot and people didn’t know what was going to happen and the record companies were freaking out. The music industry is more stable now. The record companies thought people weren’t going to buy music, but music survived. There’s a pretty solid business model now as to how people buy their music. It’s clear how it’s done, there’s no confusion.
I think with manga they just need to figure out what the business model for digital is going to be. To an extent I think the companies need to work together, the industry as a whole, to figure it out and get it right. Otherwise, the consequence will be that manga goes away. People will just pirate the hell out of it. I don’t think anime will ever go away because video is a lot easier. You’ve got Hulu, Netflix, Crunchyroll and they’re all established. With manga, I’m not so sure. I think it will take collaboration and a lot of effort and innovation to make it work.
Q: Thank you, Vy, for your time.
A: Thank you.
