アニ・ノート

The most surprising thing about Akazukin is how it overflows with creepy themes, for a decidely children’s anime. A primary character who uses Uberman Schedule in order to have a better control over consequences of a childhood psychological trauma is even a mild example.

Now let’s turn away from the naive analysis that presumes the upstanding competition model towards the seedy underbelly of fansubbing and claims that Hatsuyuki used gg’s scripts. Funny how the minion of gg forgets to mention that Hatsuyuki’s Kampfer was obviously superior to their own speedsub (while also available officially in legacy formats). Would not fit the narrative?

ACTUALLY. What I am driving here is that even if Hatsuyuki used gg’s scripts, they a) produced a better sub, b) delivered it late. Isn’t it the trade-off that gg embedded into their mode of operation? They are speedsubbers in order to grab the impatient, the vast majority who do not care about quality. I don’t see how they have any ground for complaints how someone cleaned up their errors. It’s not like they made the anime, so their ownership claims are laughable (albeit technically perhaps they may be right, due to warped IP laws), and we ought to thank Hatsuyuki for their efforts (again, even assuming the claims in the linked post to be true).

UPDATE: Omo says, and hopefuly I correctly expand his thought beyond 140 characters, that if Hatsuyuki used gg’s script, they should’ve credited gg; therefore, gg is entitled to the outrage. It’s a persuasive argument that reduces the whole issue to the investigation of the veracity. Did they or did they not? Meanwhile, no matter the outcome, attention is shifted away from gg’s decisions, trade-offs, and whining. Also, away from the lack of explicit license.

Steven compares translations line by line and comes to the following conclusion:

Obviously I prefer Chihiro’s translation [over Ayako's]. Both translators seem technically competent, but Chihiro’s translator is a better writer.

I used to turn in circles where discourses like “chihiro subs are gay they’re too simple and isn’t even close to the meaning” were the norm, but it didn’t prevent me from following K-ON (completely) and Sekirei (largely, before I went raw) on Chihiro subs. Way to go guys, keep it up.

Only yesterday Omo was talking about about Crunchyroll, Hulu, et al, and naturally he didn’t mention ANN: they never were a player, even though they tried (the most interesting part of their video site was the trailers). Today, they opened streaming of Bamboo Blade. Omo’s caution about doing streaming on the side still applies, and I don’t see ANN challenging Crunchyroll any time soon, but let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

Via Don, comes yet another list of shows that the “we” would “absolutely love to see come over” (limited to the past decade for some reason).

The point worth remembering, there’s no absolute rank. If I were to read the list:

5. Michiko to Hatchin – gangsta chic in 3rd world shithole? Awesome, count me out. Thanks for not licensing, Funi!

4. Kemonozume – could be vaguely interesting, but I don’t expect much, and the histogram tops at 2.5.

3. Twin Spica – very nice and is on my to-see list, even though apparently it presumes a government space program.

2. Windy Tales – I rate the opening episodes, symbolism, and art very highly, but the bulk of the anime is a decided meh. For that reason I only bought the first DVD, which saves money nicely without losing anything for me. Hardly a material to license, honestly.

1. Dennou Coil – hugely overrated, IMHO. I created a category for it back when categories were scarce, but my interest petered out around the festival episode. Don is a fan, good for him.

So, not much of a match with what I want. By the way, attempts to gather the interest systematically were made. For example, a thread at AoD forums tracks how interest in licensing grows and wanes among the hardcore demographic. Mahoraba is still clinging to the top 5 there, and ef (the good half) handily beats Dennou Coil.

This is of course relevant only for poor sobs who do not have access to server logs, but for quite a while Technorati provided a list of reactions to posts. Amazingly, they did a much better job at it than the mighty Google. In fact, Google’s results were useless (and still are). No wonder, Wordpress included Technorati’s results into the dashboard by default. Then, in the middle of 2009, WP switched to Google (many bloggers noticed that references became thin) and Technorati removed references altogether, when they rolled a site redesign.

That is when I stopped paying attention to that little site with laughable ambitions. Discarding the only thing that you do better than Google takes some unorthodox thinking!

Not sure what made me look, but I found that references are back, to some extent. See the screencap:

Unfortunately, they cull the links, only including sites they themselves recognize, and rank. So, no chance for me to see links from Kaedrin, Bugfox, etc. Nonetheless, the result is still better than Google, which tells us what poor job Google is doing.

And when we say “streamed anime”, we mean “Crunchyroll”. Because:

[O]nly Crunchyroll is a real player in simulcasting. Their only serious competition is Funimation and Viz, and let’s just say Funi have only one or two shows that I wanted to follow and Viz has zero, and couldn’t even follow those shows via simulcasting because it was not available due to Funi’s immature delivery platform. I ended up following only one other simulcast title this year not using Crunchyroll, and that is Shikabane Hime on Hulu.

[...] At the end of the day, it feels like Funimation and Viz are trying to do that simulcasting thing on the side. And the results show that.

Emphasis mine. And now, I’m going to invoke Cato again and proclaim that I really, really, want Crunchyroll to think about expanding DTO offerings. Omo himself admits it would be nicer:

Is CR’s streaming delivery experience superior or inferior than what I was experiencing before via traditional digisubs? It’s clearly inferior, I think, but it’s also good enough for someone who can’t be bothered to keep track of what is out where and by whom when, and want it on demand, at least as long as it’s on a networked, flash-capable computer. Presumably I think that describes far most of us. I mean, it’s just a little bit worse off than Hulu.

Mind, I’m not against streaming in all cases (even though I know that Flash is evil; I would be against Theora to the same extent). Right now I’m watching Akazukin, which is a terrific show for small children, which I have no intention of ever watching again. And so, streaming it is all right, even if screencapping is a major pain. In fact, I would not want to shell out $2 per episode of that, so everyone wins with streaming. Nonetheless, in general the heavy emphasis on streaming makes me sad. It’s not the new world I wanted to live in.

I’m especially sad that there’s no way to “buy up into ownership” in the current situation. When compared to a regular fan, one could say that I roll in money. My profeciency in spoken Japanese is where essentially I can go in armed with a pause button and my Wordtank. So, I could easily import DVDs and BDs. But even so, for how long? Once studios see that they can capture everyone with streaming, I expect them to stop printing ownership tokens entirely.

When Kampfer opened, a few people blogged that it “was like a stupid [version of] Ranma” — a very natural misconception, given what they knew about the premise. But even so I knew we will not see another Ranma again. Anime changed too much. As I wrote in the little teatrise on the topic, back then even the basic concepts such as “harem” and “tsundere” were not well understood by the creators. And no matter how good it becomes, Kampfer will not run for 7 seasons.

One good thing came out of Kampfer’s success though: I am willing to keep an open mind about an anime adaptataion of “Oto x Maho”.

Now that I learned to pick them up, I hear them all the time. For example, Kurumi says “おどろかせちゃった”, or “made you startled” – odoro-ka (neg.base) + se (because odoroku is an -u type), and the shortening of shimau, I think. Indeed it’s more common than passive.

BTW, Kurumi is starting to lose her cool. She knows that she’s screwed.

Sekirei and Kampfer are almost entirely unlike each other, except for the very broad conformance to the genre of “fanservice comedy”… and for one more thing: both had half-hearted endings for the season, which can serve as a springboard for sequels, if money is forthcoming (in case of Sekirei, this hope has already realized).

The dissimilarity of the two is actually rather striking. Perhaps I’m just approaching them from the position of a stereotypical hater: breasts? check! harem? check! So same! To be sure, there are some rather vague and high level similarities. The villains are in control in both settings, for one, and heroes rebel (some of them, anyway). Both series flirt uncomfortably with the SDB’s “dead girl” classification. But just about every detail is different otherwise (e.g. Natsuru has the powers, while Minato does not, the slavery present or absent, etc.).

I like Kampfer’s character art way more though. The Rushina factor is more sensible in it.