We need more Normie Accessible Anime on the Mainstream Streaming Sites

It bugs me that there isn't exactly a great correlation between which Anime I think are the best entry level Anime for people new to Anime and which Anime are on the major not primarily Anime focused Streaming Sites.

This is partly brought on by how there's about to be less Anime on these sites in general.

It was just announced that a bunch of those are leaving Hulu at the end of August.

One of those is Steins;Gate. Now I have described Steins;Gate as the most Normie friendly SciADV show so it being the only one of them on Hulu does make some sense.  But Robotics;Notes is a very close second, and to the right people it's probably the one they'd like most.  For one example I like to describe it as the most Spielbergian Anime.

Of shows on the list of ones about to leave, Rosario + Vampire is the one I definitely raise an eyebrow at for having put on a Mainstream site to begin with.  Even I struggle to get into that show though I do like some of what it does.

Fortunately Spy x Family isn't leaving, that's a show I'd recommend to any Normie who likes Mr & Mrs Smith.

But Hulu's catalog of Anime does include some random Isekai and Harem shows and not always what I consider the best of them.

School Rumble is a show I'm very fond of but is kind of right on the line of how Normie friendly it might be, perhaps it's pretty okay since the earliest episodes are lighter on the Otaku stuff.  Not only is it leaving Hulu but it's not on any other Stremaing site.

Going back to my old thesis about Levels of Normie accessibility, I'd prioritize getting both the A and B level shows on these sites if I had any influence on the decision making.  C level ones could be good to throw in. But I wouldn't remove anything already on there, last thing we need now is any show's accessibility decreasing.  But as far as getting more shows on any Streaming Sites I'd save the E and D level shows for CR, HIDIVE and RetroCrush.

But maybe I personally am overthinking this stuff too much.  Maybe a show stuffed to the brim with Fanservice and Otaku Culture meta in-jokes could still win a complete Newbie over simply by being good.  I have after all argued against the idea that Continuity Lock Out really matters.

The thing is a lot of people think Anime is only made up of 2 or 3 kinds of shows and 2 kinds of movies, show tie ins and Ghibli, and that OVAs are just for Edgelord violence porn and Hentai.  I want more of the shows that will subvert those assumptions to be easier to find.

Durarara is a great B Level show so I'm glad it's on Hulu.  But I want shows like Noir and Witch Hunter Robin on there too.

Update: Somehow when I first wrote this I missed that Railgun is also among those leaving Hulu at the end of August, yet Index will still be there (only season 1 though).  But that's the opposite of how it should be, as I've explained on this blog before Railgun is far more normie friendly show of that franchise.

November Update: Code Geass and a bunch more are gone from Hulu too now. 

Yuno Gasai and the Yandere timeline

Yuno Gasai from the Anime/Manga Mirai Nikki aka Future Diary is the single most well known Yandere, or at least she was when I fully joined the Anime Community in the mid to late 2010s, so much so that Gigguk’s Yandere video could make a Joke out of pretending she’s the only one who matters.

But unlike most characters who have become virtually synonymous with their Archetype she is not the first or even the first really popular one, or even really among the first.  I would dare say by the time of her creation the Yandere was already becoming an overplayed Cliche.

Now when I started researching this thesis I was shocked how much older Mirai Nikki’s source material is, I’m not used to popular Manga taking over 5 years to get an Anime.  But it was still not old enough to destroy this premise.  It started publication on January 26th 2006.

Now I’m someone who is fairly strict in how I even define a Yandere, I talked about elements of it in a post I made earlier this year.  So for example the character from Shuffle who some call a Yandere (I’ve heard she’s more of one in the Anime then in the original VN) I’m iffy on counting.  But if we count her then Shuffle’s Anime ended on January 6th 2006.

Amelie Doree has a video on the 2003 Visual Novel Cross Channel, from it I can conclude it has a character who can be considered a Yandere.

Most of Higurashi was released by the end of 2005 including the two most Yandere relevant chapters.  Getting back to the relative strictness with how I define a Yandere, Sonozaki I consider a Yandere even if atypical in some ways, while Ryugu is not a Yandere, when she acts Crazy it has nothing to do with romance, apparently she's considered a Yangire a term I know less about.

The original School Days Visual Novel was released in 2005.  And in my opinion Kotonoha is still the best Yandere.

The first Durarara Light Novel came out in 2004 and the second came out in 2005.  They feature even by my strictest definition multiple Yanderes.  And if you loosen the definition it might just be possible to argue this is a saga where (almost) everyone is a Yandere.

And that’s the key to my thesis really, it is particularly the role Yandere plays in Durarara that even in these early novels makes it feel like it’s already a cliche, like the author is on a Meta level trying to say something about how overused this cliche is.

All that and I still have a hunch none of these is where the Yandere trend began.  It’s difficult to research because characters who technically qualify have always existed, with some even suggesting the first Anime Yandere was a character from Uresei Yatsura or something like that.  And Gaijin Goomba of course wants to connect it to some pre-modern Japanese Folk Tale.

But when I ask who the first Yandere is I mean the beginning of this trend in Otaku oriented Visual Novels and Light Novels of the early 2000s which may have actually began in the mid to late 90s.  There may not be a definitive single first one, but I get the sense that even the oldest of the ones I’ve discussed above were already part of a trend.

But let’s return to the mystery of why Yuno Gasai was able to steal the spotlight from all these predecessors.  Is it because she’s the best?  I already said I consider someone else the best.  But this is one of those tropes where so many people want to argue why the one they like is the only one who was written with a complex Psychological profile that makes their insanity not truly only about the person they are romantically fixated on, but the truth is they were all written with depth.

Maybe why Yuno overshadows the rest is because of the Anime adaptation, because of how well she was performed by Tomosa Murata and later in the English Dub Brina Palencia?  

Glass Reflection I remember said in his Future Diary review that he didn’t like Brina as Yuno and that ticked me off.  One of Brina’s unique talents is to sound vocally more "normal" then most Anime characters even while still having an eccentric personality.  And for the Bipolar quality that a good Yandere is supposed to have that kind of voice is actually perfect.  

Cross Channel still doesn’t have an Anime, but besides that all those Pre-Yuno Yandere also made their Anime debut before her.  

Mirai Nikki started airing in the Fall of 2011.  School Days technically was an Anime in its source material but got its TV Anime in 2007.  Higurashi had its Yandere Arcs in its first season in 2006.  And both of the first two Durarara LNs were covered in the first season of its Anime in the first half of 2010.

And they all had good VAs who did a great job bringing their character's Insanity to life.

It honestly might be more that Yuno was the LAST notable Yandere as far as actual Japanese media goes.  The shows that copy everything else about Future Diary make their female lead very much not a Yandere. Instead for the terminally online the Yandere has been kept alive by a perpetually in-development American Indie Video Game and ASMR videos.  And maybe there's some V-Tubers who's gimmick is that they're a Yandere I wouldn't know.

So when Anitube as we currently know it started Yuno was the freshest Yandere in everyone’s memory.  And for plenty of newer Anime fans she may have been the only Yandere recent enough for them to have seen in action.

DC Animated projects I’ve seen recently.

 As much as I present myself as Enthusiastic about becoming an Anime Zealot I do sometimes feel some guilt for how much I’ve semi Abandoned by older Nerdy interests.  But I haven’t abandoned them entirely.

The Crisis on Infinite Earths Trilogy is fine but I still feel disappointed.  I was fine with the first film not really leaving the Tomorrow Verse much at all.  But I was hoping by the end there would be more from prior Animated DC Universes than just some token cameos.

But even with the token cameos at the end I was disappointed by how few.  Why no love for the Fleischer Shorts? The actual birth of DC in Animation and very important to the history of Animation beyond that.  Or The Batman and Batman The Brave and The Bold which have more vibrant fan bases then the DCAMU verse.

And all the DCAU got was Batman and The Joker (and a Batman Beyond who may or may not actually be the same Terry).  What about the STAS cast who were also stables?  Or Static Shock which is important to the history of Black representation in the Superhero Genre?

I still haven’t seen much of My Adventures With Superman.  I want to change that but I remain cynical of Western Cartoons trying to pass as Anime.

Meanwhile Suicide Squad Isekai is vindicating the optimism I had for it from it’s inception.

Batman The Caped Crusader I wound up liking a lot, and I kinda went in biased against it, feeling very cynical about the implication of Timm saying he wanted to go further then BTAS ever could.  It turns out that really wasn’t anything to be worked up about and all the episodes are pretty great.

That said, I do have some criticisms.  But rest assured nothing that a certain type of whiner is going to complain about bothered me.  I consider one of the literary ancestors of The Penguin to be Casper Gutman of The Maltese Falcon.  And of the 3 movie adaptations made of that novel, the 1935 film Satan met a Lady already had a woman play Gutman’s role.  So the way I see it the possibility of a Lady Penguin was always on the table.

I kinda hope Barbara Gordon as a Defense Attorney leads to them bringing back a certain forgotten Barbara storyline of the 70s.

I’m glad they went the uniquely nuanced route they did with Harvey Dent, I just……

Spoiler Warning.

…I wish they hadn't killed him off.

With Harvey Dent so much of the discourse is about his origin story and then attempts to Redeem him that may or may not succeed.  Which is all interesting but I’m tired of him actually being an effective Supervillain getting skipped over.