Cashing In – This Week in Anime

senpai September 6, 2024

0 0 11 minutes read

Chris and Lucas dive into the Sargasso Sea of marketable plastic goodies and the all-consuming monster that is capitalism in the anime world.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Precure, My Dress-Up Darling, Gundam, and Symphogear are currently streaming on Crunchyroll, while Transformers: Armada is available on Tubi. Rebuild of Evangelion is available on Amazon Prime.

Chris

Big news, Lucas! Pretty Cure MaxHeart is at last streaming over on Crunchyroll! It only took nearly twenty years, but I can finally see how the adventures of Natalie Blackstone and Hannah Whitehouse continue!

Even better, I can only presume this means they’ll be bringing over the toys this show is an ostensible commercial for. How long I’ve waited to get my hands on a wailing noisemaker shaped like Mepple.

Lucas

Chris, I’m happy for you! I’m never gonna get in the way of anyone exploring their interests and expressing their passions in a way that’s healthy. Plus, collecting stuff is fun!

That being said, do you ever feel there’s a pressure or expectation to buy as much merch as you can? To fill the holes in our hearts with as many anime trinkets and waifu tchotchkes as possible?

I’m not sure where you would ever get such an idea. It’s not like massive amounts of floor space at anime conventions are given over to dealers’ halls dedicated entirely to hawking merch like that.

And if they were, well, at least they’re stocked with stuff with a bit more variety than rows of Funko Pops.

You’re right. That’s just a dark thought I’m having. Anime conventions would never cede even a single inch to landfill-stuffing merch when they could instead give small and independent artists space to sell their ethically produced wear! This community definitely prioritizes sustainable production and consumption!

Please, they’re pre-selling Nendoroids based on hot new seasonal shows like Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian and Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? Figures I’m sure they know everybody is going to be clamoring for.

I snark, but part of me does empathize with the idea that these are some people’s favorite characters, so getting little SD versions of them is nice. Less nice is the proposition that shelling out for said figures is required to show support for your favorite show.

What? Come on! Spending ballooning amounts of money on figures, posters, and other novelties is the only AND BEST way for anyone to support their favorite anime!

Okay, no. I can’t keep this bit going anymore. Hi ANN readers, I’m Lucas DeRuyter. I’m a registered socialist and I have beef with consumerism and capitalism broadly, but ESPECIALLY with how it manifests in the anime community/industry.

Anime merch has been a part of the industry pretty much since its dawn, inexorably propelling many formative hits. The original Mobile Suit Gundam was famously saved by its model kit sales, with both the show and that merchandising line going on to become pillars of the market.

And I think it’s fair to point out that a huge number of series that introduced fans to anime here in the West, from Pokémon to Digimon to the originally licensed version of Sailor Moon, existed at the behest of hawking merch to impressionable youngsters.

And who can we thank for loosening FCC regulations and allowing children’s television in the US to be filled with barely disguised advertisements? You guessed it, Ronald Reagan!

Don’t get me wrong. I respect the hell out of a franchise like Gundam for realizing that it could make largely uncompromised creative works by carving out a niche audience and building up that community to support the different kinds of Gundam media. But it’s frustrating to me that engaging with this secondary market is now synonymous with the anime fandom.

You’re telling me. Anybody who knows me knows that Transformers as a fandom is a pretty defining part of my life, and it is kinda weird squaring the circle of all my love for its stories and cool collectible toys with its origins in ol’ Ronnie’s unfettered deregulation and a corporation’s naked marketing tactics.

The thing is, with the examples of Gundam or the various Japanese toylines that Hasbro brought over to become Transformers, the art of sellin’ stuff is hardly an exclusively American institution. Major anime series cost money to make, which requires financing, which is why many production committees include figure makers like Good Smile Company.

You make all this money selling waifu action figures and this is what you do with it? Far be it from me to offer financial advice to a company like Good Smile, but it does seem like an odd choice.

What is less odd is the whole idea of merchandise helping to finance anime. I’ve already brought up Gundam, of course, but there are other cases like the old studio Gainax kept afloat through their garage kit sales.

Granted, that whole story is ultimately less one of scrappy survivorship and more of a company with massive mismanagement scraping by however it could while not taking proper care of its creatives. Capitalism, ho!

True and funny story, I — who’s fairly minimalist in all of my hobbies — rushed to pre-order one of the first official Chainsaw Man figures via Good Smile, waited what felt like a year for it to ship, and then like three weeks after it arrived that news story dropped! Now all I can think about when I look at the little guy is how my purchase helped keep the lights on at 4chan.

Yeaaaaaaah~ I know weird Evangelion ad campaigns are/were a meme for a good while, but the waifu-ification of characters like Asuka and Rei via merch always rubbed me the wrong way. Especially considering how much of their stories focus on reaffirming their identities on their own terms and escaping objectification.

But maybe I’m the fool for thinking that capitalism would pay mind to silly little details like major themes and plot points?

I think that sort of ship sailed the instant the “War Is Bad” anime made bank and became a franchise off the back of model kits of its cool robots. That said, as someone who is…decidedly less minimalist when it comes to picking up merch of my favorite series, I don’t think the dissonance has to be that deep. Especially in the case of Evangelion, knowing what a merch nerd Hideaki Anno himself is. And now he himself has gotten merch’d in the form of a Nendoroid based on his character from his wife’s manga, because it’s weird how these things work out.

Like there’s something to be said about the character of Mari being introduced into Rebuild of Evangelion seeming at first a cynical decision because producers thought they needed a new Evangelion waifu to sell goods of, only for her to be a thematic lynchpin of the entire new project.

Lmao, I’ll never forget the day the Anno interview dropped where he more or less said that Mari’s based on his wife, and suddenly her presence in Rebuild clicked into place for the entire Eva fandom.

This means all those figures they moved off her were literal waifu figures. See, merch can be thematically appropriate!

A broken clock can be right twice a day and all that, lol. I guess my gripes about consumerism in anime largely come from the space feeling pretty approachable and cheap when I came to it in the mid and late oughts. I could watch all the popular series I wanted for free on Toonami (thanks to my parents paying for cable) and I was fortunate enough to live near a public library with a surprising amount manga.

Nowadays people need to juggle a couple of subscriptions to keep up with even mainstream releases and those sites are bombarding them with hyper-specific merch ads all the while. I know there’s never been a super ideal way to produce or consume art in the entire course of human history, but it feels like this space backslid in the past few decades.

Is that fair, or have I finally reached anime elder status???

I actually would argue that that perception is something of a mirage. Yeah, you could watch some shows via cable (the original subscription service!) but unless you were savvy enough to figure out 00’s-era filesharing or wait for the time period when shows were being uploaded in three parts to YouTube, if you wanted to seek out new anime to watch, you were paying for it.

Yes, back in the day, the anime merch you were mostly spending money on was the anime itself.

As the time in the space went on you would see more crossover of home video releases with physical merch, seemingly to sweeten the deal as uncouth unpaid-for online viewing options of anime became more prevalent. Did anybody need that like a cheap replica of Haruhi Suzumiya’s hairband? I don’t know, but Bandai sure seemed to think it would move the needle.

I’d love to pay directly for anime! Needless promotional inserts and all!

Just writing someone a check so I can experience the art they made seems like a better system than paying a third party for access to a platform where there’s a bunch of anime I don’t want to watch with a fraction of that subscription fee going towards the people whose art I do like.

It’s great that streaming giants like Crunchyroll and Netflix have played a critical role in making anime more accessible and broadening this community as a result, but with physical media releases becoming increasingly rare for new titles, I can’t help but feel like the economics of this hobby are becoming needlessly convoluted and precarious.

Steve and I touched on this in our Kickstarter conversation last week, but it’s been interesting to watch anime on home video go from the primary form of saleable anime fandom to being a boutique merchandising niche of its own. Collecting Lupin the 3rd discs from Discotek is just as much of a passion play as buying Lupin figures. Now, there is the further question of how much of the money made off of media sales is seen by the actual artists behind the anime, especially for older shows, versus how much goes to licensors and rights-holders.

Given what we’ve heard about how much studios like MAPPA pay their animators, it doesn’t seem like a ton of those economics are trickling down to the artists. Would that be better if not for the surprisingly low Blu-ray sales of ostensible hits like Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen? Sadly, probably not!

Ironically, I think the rise of theatrical releases becoming a part of anime adaptations for popular series like Demon Slayer, Haikyu!!, and Chainsaw Man ties directly into the drop-off in physical media availability and sales. In the streaming era, it’s one of the few remaining popular avenues to make direct revenue off of a new release.

And the widespread issues in the Japanese (and growingly global) animation industry also fuel my frustrations. I can’t do anything about these problems other than give people money I like for the art they make, and now that process has been obfuscated more than ever!

That also ties back into the Kickstarter convo, in the way crowd-sourcing, once a reliable way of funding independent artists and their ventures, has been muddied and co-opted. Ironically, often by releases that include some tacked-on merch among the stretch goals. Looking forward to getting my acrylic Dirty Pair lamp before my discs can be shipped to me!

Haha, not to trend too much ground on y’all’s previous convo, but I think that crystalizes my issue with this trend in our community. When a space becomes more defined by the signifiers or aesthetics of its members’ shared identity, rather than the thing that brought the group together in the first place, it signals a loss of communal identity and core values that signal a community’s decline.

Maybe I’m being doom and gloom about this, but I feel like the vibes in the gaming space have been off since the final nail was hammered into E3’s coffin, and I worry that this space is also beginning to think of “anime” as more of a branding for products, than an art form.

Well then, not to make things even more ominous for you, but this is the part where I point out that all we’ve talked about so far has largely been dealing with spending money on physical goods. If you really want to talk about money-spending pressure in the anime industry, then I’ve got to bring up the virtual gambling gacha economy that did so much damage to your beloved gaming scene, that so many of our favorite anime franchises have hitched their wagon to in these modern times.

Ah yes, because why pay for a physical good when you could instead forfeit money for a CHANCE at a virtual representation of a thing/character you like that you will almost certainly lose access to someday?

I don’t care how much someone loves their waifu, don’t gamble for PNGs people!

Look, as someone who’s kept up with BanG Dream! and D4DJ I’m arguably part of the problem, myself. But in my defense, between my own self-control and the multiple reviews of the anime I wrote for this site, I’m confident I’ve made way more money off of those franchises than they did me.

I will admit I find myself marginally conflicted in my role as a consumer here. I love musical multimedia promotional vehicles like BanG Dream! and Love Live!, and franchises like Precure that squarely exist to shout “Buy All Our Playsets and Toys!” I even bought some of the toys!

As I type this I’m wearing a funny Laid-Back Camp shirt I bought.

Haha, I’m sure you’re coming out on top in the long run! Though, I think late-stage capitalism has oppositely hit me; where I can’t enjoy any of my hobbies without figuring out how to turn them into some kind of side hustle.

And to loop us back to the opening of this convo, God only knows how much I’ve spent on explicitly promotional franchises like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon, which I may have never come across if not for their widely popular anime. I don’t regret any of the money I put into either of them—or any of my hobbies for that matter—I just wish that push for additional purchases felt more worthwhile across the landscape or even just stuck to a series where it felt more organic to the brand.

The frustrating reality is that sometimes sales success doesn’t even translate to overall success for your favorite series. Gundam: The Witch From Mercury moved so many model kits that they ran out and had to resort to shelving snacks with the same name as the main mobile suit instead. Bandai still didn’t give the anime more than two parts.

(image credit: https://www.hk01.com/遊戲動漫/824958/水星的魔女風靈高達模型瘋賣-設計師jnthed受小島秀夫力捧後台勁)

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, even if what you’re consuming is a delicious, nutritious tie-in.

The power of fandom can only go so far! For as much as I love Gwitch I think it would have benefited more from a brevity-focused round of script edits than a few extra episodes. I also think that it’s important to remember that a lot of these production decisions are made WAY in advance and that fan purchases or other kinds of fan influence don’t always have as big an impact on creators as some hope they do.

There are some outliers. Apart from the classic Gundam example, my personal favorite Symphogear reportedly earned its follow-up seasons not necessarily off of its viewership or DVD/BD sales, but from those of its tie-in music CDs. But as with all things Symphogear, it’s hardly typical.

That is, there’s nothing wrong with buying a sick Nana Mizuki CD, a pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, or even a light-up transforming roleplay toy. But your wallet will thank you more if it’s from a place of personal appreciation for the material, not some desire to pump cash back into the publisher, and certainly not to try and convince other fans of your nerd cred.

Absolutely! Everyone who cares about anime or any of it’s permeations is welcome in this community, no matter how much or little they put into this hobby. This space is a big tent with no admission fee!

And if anybody does try to start charging, you know I’ll be the first one to put the Pretty Cure Marble Screws to them! Lord knows we don’t need to make this whole system worse.