Netflix has the potential to help the Anime Community grow by making a lot of Anime easily available to lots of people who don't currently usually watch it. Because half the Country already has Netflix.
So I don't care about the waiting for binge release stuff since I'm not gonna recommend a show to a Normie till I've seen at least a full season already anyway. And I like that everything they get gets Dubbed pretty quickly.
The only thing that has been keeping Netflix Anime besides Devilman Crybaby from being the potential new entry points they could be, is the people already into Anime not doing their part of that equation.
Kakegurui was talked about by English Language Anime YouTubers when it couldn't be watched legally. Even though one of them is a pretty Anti-Piracy. So they expressed whatever opinions on it they wanted to express when only people who knew how could watch it, complaining about Netflix's release policy while doing so. But then never brought it up again at all when it's Netflix release finally happened last February.
I'm tired of hearing people say Mother's Basement isn't actually on Crunchyroll's Payroll. A traditional Payroll has never been how how one makes money on the Internet. The fact remains it's in his interest for Crunchyroll to keep making money.
And his anti-Piracy videos saying the one exception he allows is if they're not legally selling it to you at all, I find rather disingenuous considering how he clearly counts Netflix shows in that. If I were an anti-Piracy person, I would consider the "not legally selling it you" exception to be totally invalidated if they are promising a legal release in the near future. If it's selfish to to pirate cause you don't wanna add subscriptions to several different sites to the bills you have to pay, it's equally selfish to pirate because you don't wanna wait a mere six months.
So his making mostly negative reviews of Kakegurui while justifying his piracy of it, while at the same time condemning any piracy of the shows Crunchyroll is selling, makes it clear he is effectively their spokesman, officially or not.
Now Kakegurui may not be the best example of a show that could have been Normie accessible.
But the fact remains, these same YouTubers will also complain about how quickly a show loses relevance, and that people don't talk about old Anime enough. Maybe instead of being mad at Netflix for not catering to that problem, you should try to help them be a solution to it.
So if you have something to say about a show Netflix picked up, consider waiting till it's Netflix release to make that Video or Blog Post, it'd make the Analysis more informed if it's not rushed out while the show isn't done airing.
And in the meantime talk about shows already on there, both exclusive and non exclusive. Maybe make some videos dedicated to whichever ones you think would make the best entry points and explaining why.
YouTubers keep complaining about being slaves to what's Trending on YouTube, but if you all worked together you have the ability to decide what's trending also.
I'm a fan of all the YouTubers I was just alluding to, this is a friendly constructive criticism.
The problem is that Western anime community - MAL, r/Anime, Animesuki, blogspots/tumblrs, and Youtube episode review videos - prefers to share their thoughts AS the anime season progresses on a weekly basis. The story hasn't been finished yet. There are questions and mysteries left to be solved. The fun of being in these communities is discussing with other fans our theories on how the series will progress, what direction character arcs will go in, speculating on how the conflict will play out. "Who is Tobi?" "What's in the basement?" Each week, you find hundreds, if not thousands of posts on each week's episode discussion thread, filled with all sorts of clever ideas, crack theories, and neat observations. You see people like Chibi, SunWukong, SxeBlues, Anriku, and Sawyer7mage spending twenty to thirty minutes dissecting a single episode.
ReplyDeleteOnce an anime has finished airing, everyone dropsa brief paragraph on the finale thread or a 5 minute video, and then starts talking about the new currently airing shows. That's that.
Nowadays, you don't see people posting extensive reviews or thoughts on each episode of Aldnoah Zero, SAO, AoT, Madoka, Guren Lagan, or Fate/Zero now that they've been finished for years and the community has already moved on. At most, you will see people such as Arkada or BobSamurai give a brief summary of an old classic that they have just discovered, such as Seirei no Moribito or Rurouni Kenshin, but they will never go in depth about it or more than ten minutes. There is little reason to bother spending your time formulating your thoughts on an episode when there's no one to talk to. Rewatches bring in only a fraction of the number of people who were discussing a show on a weekly basis, and most of the people on a rewatch have already seen it and are simply pointing out the foreshadowing they missed the first time.
Right now, Violet Evergarden is available on Netflix globally... for everyone who isn't American. VE is far and away the most discussed anime series this season, pulling in thousands of upvotes weekly on Reddit and hundreds of posts on MAL and Animesuki forums. Let's not forget the dozens of episode reviews thought come out each week on Youtube. If you're American, you can't participate in the ongoing discussion without spoiling the twists yourself, and by the time you can legally watch the series, there will be no one left to discuss with. Thus, there's only one way to keep up with the conversation...