I saw this really great post today….

I mean, what am I reading in this very blog, but an anime out of Japan where the main character is a middle-school girl who is trying to convince everyone the merits of wearing sexy underwear?

Am I reading this crap right??

I’m really beginning to consider whether not only to get out of anime fandom completely, but start to actually alert authorities as to some of the stuff coming over here!

This is child porn!! Strike Witches too, and Funimation licensed this garbage!

This is why some people are turning against anime, and moe in particular. The envelope is being pushed, and, with that, so are the behaviors of the fandom.

Frankly, it’s disgusting, and all goes back to that this stuff is cheap to make in a market where it’s more desireable to rip it off from the Internet.

I can blame them for having shitty taste in what they like though.

“And if the fanbase for those sort of shows isn’t sufficiently large to support the production costs anymore, why should they keep being produced anyway?”

They shouldn’t. This is exactly what fans of these shows are worried about and why they may view moe as ‘killing the industry’ or at least, the aspects of the industry that interest them.

“Otaku” aren’t just a “purchasing force”, they’re fans with their own priorities and tastes. Why should they buy shows that they’re not as interested in out of some desire to “support the sustainability and creativity of the industry”? Buying anime is a hobby, not an obligation. I guess this is more to say, isn’t it our job as fellow customers to support those sorts of shows with our own money so that the industry doesn’t have to be so dependent only on “otaku” to survive? You can’t blame the fans for buying what they like; after all, anime is expensive, and you only collect the things you really want to own. The system would work fine if enough people with varied tastes would keep buying the shows they enjoyed. So the question really is more about why fans of these other apparently “under-represented” genres aren’t supporting the shows they like to the same extent. And if the fanbase for those sort of shows isn’t sufficiently large to support the production costs anymore, why should they keep being produced anyway? Sometimes things just go out of style. That being said, I tend to think it’s all cyclical, so there’s always the possibility of a revival of certain genres in years to come. It all depends on what people are interested in.

“If that’s true, you can say that bishoujo is sustaining the industry rather than killing it.”

Oh I absolutely agree in the short term. In the difficult situation the industry is in, being able to produce these kind of shows that are low risk and can pretty much be counted on to turn a solid profit is very beneficial. Without a doubt it is these shows are playing a major role in sustaining the industry. Again though, my concern lies with how ‘sustaining’ really is the word. In the long term things are only going to continue to shrink unless the industry keeps creating plenty of shows like the ones from the 80’s and 90’s that brought people into the fandom in the first place. Now as you said, the industry still is producing a decent amount of this stuff. (It’s argue is a fair bit less and on average on a lot cheaper budget than in the past though). In any case though, the concern is not so much that otaku are buying all moe shows but rather that they are not buying the other stuff. I’m certainly willing to live and let live if they can do both. If not though and the core fandom isn’t really supporting the more creative titles then we definitely have a problem. The less profitable this stuff is the less we’ll see.

“I think the blame lies with the fans rather than the industry for engineering a certain type of fan.”

Oh don’t worry. I place plenty of blame on the fans.

Then computers and the Internet came around (bringing outsourcing with them) and drove the cost of producing anime way down. It also increased the direct access production companies had to their customers, and sped up the “feedback cycle”. So now, rather than making shows that appeal to as broad an audience as possible in the “hope” of achieving a good “conversion rate”, it now becomes possible to build a show precisely around what the customers want to buy. Because of the dramatically lower costs, you can forgo the “broad audience” idea entirely (no need to make money off ads) and rely entirely on merchandise sales. That whole concept wouldn’t have even been feasible back in the day, but is now rather commonplace. Combined with a powerful and effective marketing strategy (after all, merchandising is the whole point for these shows), it gives the impression that these niche shows dominate the market, even though the TV ratings tell an entirely different story. This new sort of anime follows the “anime as late-night infomercials” model, which is entirely separate from the old “prime-time” way of thinking.

So I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the actual customer base for anime (in terms of buying anime merchandise) has always been a rather small niche market, but it’s only recently that they’ve been able to afford to design entire shows to serve only that demographic. If we want to see a return to more broadly-targeted shows that think outside the “niche”, you’d have to return to a model where the TV networks and mainstream advertisers are more in control of the production process and providing more of the investment (since their approach is also “appeal to millions, sell to a few”). And to do that, they’d need to be convinced that anime is more appealing than whatever else they’re currently airing in prime-time to pull in the ratings.

In the end, that whole broad-reach advertising model is slowly falling by the wayside as more and more of the media market shifts to the Internet and more targeted approaches. In fact, the successful show Hetalia Axis Powers ended up forgoing TV entirely and relied instead only on streaming to the Internet and to mobile phones; it’s one of the top-selling anime series on DVD in Japan this year. The idea of building shows to reach a specific niche audience and using inexpensive production techniques and delivery vehicles to make reaching that small audience still worth your while is basically what “new media” is all about. Perhaps anime was just a bit ahead of its time.

Part of the problem with this thinking is the assumption that bishoujo is taking the place of other types of content (rather than increasing the total size of the industry), as if you eliminated all the bishoujo anime tomorrow, the industry would respond with an equal torrent of Cowboy Bebops and Ghost in the Shells or whatever. Really all they’re doing is just catering to the tastes of consumers. When “moe” exploded, the number of anime series followed suit.

I imagine if bishoujo stopped being profitable tomorrow, you’d see a lot less _other_ anime as well since studios will find it more difficult to be profitable. If that’s true, you can say that bishoujo is sustaining the industry rather than killing it. If interest in bishoujo/moe goes away, then that’s the way it has to be. If former hardcore fans evolve into some new type of fan, the anime industry will respond by adapting the new sensibilities and stories of the fandom’s indie comics & games & whatnot. Otherwise it was not meant to be.

The anime industry strikes me as relatively organic since much of it is fandom-derived, or at least derived from the much much larger and more diverse manga industry. If you hate moe/bishoujo anime with a vengeance, I think the blame lies with the fans rather than the industry for engineering a certain type of fan. If every _commercial_ anime/manga/game/figure studio burned down to the ground tomorrow, moe/bishoujo (along with everything else) will live on in the fandom’s indie output.

Saying that bishoujo/moe is some out-of-nowhere fan-atrophying fad that swooped down upon a previously vibrant anime industry, pushed a lot of other fan-generating content aside, and will eventually collapse and take Japan’s cultural affinity for iconic/symbolic storytelling (read: their “manga culture”) down with it, is too specific a scenario to assume without a lot of backup

GATS: the world of music is endlessly diverse and, with the advent of cheap home studios and internet distribution, highly accessible to both artists and listeners. It’s absurd to sum up the music industry with American Idol. That’s just one phenomenon in an endless sea that’s becoming increasingly difficult to quantify. There’s no “domination” occurring– the music world is too big for that. Hollywood film is much more production-heavy of course, but I don’t feel that it’s “dominated” by summer blockbusters since lots of other films (of varying scale, appeal and quality) are constantly being produced as well.

American-animated features are blockbuster-dominated though, I’ll give you that. The appeal of animation in US culture is too limited to support anything else I think.

ikillchicken: What you’ve said is too general and abstract. “You’re an idiot for calling idiots idiots”? Okay. All I’m saying is: if you can’t find what you’re looking for in the output of a diverse industry, the problem lies with you simply not caring enough to find it. Blaming the most visible thing for the lack of whatever it is that fits your particular taste is a waste of effort and totally dishonest– yet this kind of sentiment is all too common. Moe killing/harming/dominating the anime industry or whatever is just another one of those things.

“arguments like ‘trend X is killing Y artform!’ usually say more about the ignorance and laziness of the people saying it than it does about the artistic landscape itself.”

Arguments like this say more about the ignorance and laziness of the people saying it as well. After all, what is it but lazy to simply call the opposition names to make up for the weakness in your own argument. An argument that belies a complete ignorance of what people’s actual concerns with moe are. The only people who look at a couple moe anime and declare all of anime to be ruined are idiots. Pointing to them is equivalent to pointing to the man in birch-wood pants, chained to a tree and declaring all environmentalism stupid.

“Mature industries like commercial film, music and animation are too diverse to simply sum up with some notion of a single trend “taking over”. ”

Disagree there. Commercial film’s dominated by hack directors who are given insane budgets to present sappy bs like “Dances with Smurfs”; music’s dominated by talentless ugly fucks who get play because they cater to people who consider American Idol to be a form of art; and [American] animation is dominated by uninspired Shrek-like fairy tales and talking animals.

It’s like condemning the entirety of the world’s current musical output by taking one listen at _Soulja Boy_ and arriving at the assumption that everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket. It’s like looking at the Hollywood special effects blockbusters that inevitably roll around every summer and assuming that there are no good films being made anymore.

That’s just ignorance and laziness. If you _really_ cared about finding sophisticated works, you would be finding them in abundance and not arriving at the conclusion that such things are not made anymore. If you _really_ cared about finding non-moe works and “progressive” animation, you’d be spending more time actually watching them rather than being a hyperbolic doomsayer in the fandom.

Mature industries like commercial film, music and animation are too diverse to simply sum up with some notion of a single trend “taking over”. The things that happen to be the most visible are only a few trees in the forest, so to speak… especially in the case of moe since its appeal is rather niche IMO. It’s just iconic, recognizable and heavily merchandised so you happen to “see” it everywhere.

If you want to know what’s “killing” the anime industry if anything, it’s more about the mundane stuff (business practices, hiring/management, etc.) than it is about what’s visible to the consumer.