Tag: opinion

I’m a Big Weeb, But I Don’t Like Anime

by macksamson, posted in Miscellaneous

Anime has been a leading force in the influence of Japanese pop culture extending to the rest of the world. I’ve come across a lot of people who view the medium as their lifeblood. But me? I don’t get it. As someone who’s read Japanese comics, played Japanese videogames, listened to Japanese rock bands, and studied Japanese culture, I do not get anime at all. In this article, I’ll illustrate why.

Pick a Streaming Service and Pray

I feel like anime streaming has become a blessing and a curse. While it’s amazing that you can pay a negligible monthly rate to be able to watch hundreds of anime, some of which have simulcasting available, the actual execution is not the best.

The first reason is the anime industry itself. Anime is a quantity-over-quality world. And under the assumption that you are—in fact—sane, you will likely look at the lineup for the next anime season and look forward to one or two (or five on a great season) shows. Since the majority of the anime demographic is teenagers who have no jobs, let’s assume that you can only watch shows from one streaming service for your whole life. If this is the case, you’ll have to be lucky that your one streaming service will air that one show, because you’re not gonna watch the other 90% of crap.

It’s not a fun time. My worst luck was the Winter 2020 season. I was planning on watching five shows- a record for me- and ALL of them ended up on Funimation, while I had Crunchyroll. It wasn’t that big of a deal because I already read their source versions, and the adaptations were likely to be bunk anyway, but it was still sad to see that the one service I used didn’t get a single one of those shows. That’s what anime streaming is. If I know this community, only a small handful of shows get any traction, while thousands of other shows vanish into the ether. 

And the services themselves are debatable in quality. Crunchyroll is more-than-functionable (without bringing up the political upheaval they caused with a thirty second teaser trailer in 2018), while all I know about Funimation is the whole “Kick Vic” incident. I’ve even heard horror stories about how Netflix and Amazon explicitly disrespect anime culture. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that the former doesn’t stream shows until well after they air (well after they have been forgotten in the community), and the latter doesn’t even bother marketing them. A whole fandom died inside in spring (or was it summer?) of 2019, when the epic historical fiction manga, Vinland Saga, got its long awaited adaptation, from a great studio, and got licensed to Amazon. It could’ve been a cultural phenomenon, but no… it might as well have not existed, and Kimetsu no Yaiba blew up instead.

I have no idea why anime streamers are like this, versus manga publishers. Manga publishing has come a long way from when Viz and Tokyopop freakin’ mirrored the manga. I buy material from every major manga publisher in North America equally. They actually care about manga (and market them, too!), and have very high quality translations and whatnot. For argument’s sake, if Kodansha, Yen Press, and Seven Seas joined Viz in launching a subscription service of their whole catalogues, I’d subscribe to all of them in a heartbeat. The combined monthly rate would surely be less than the flat rates I pay, and I would actually use each of them all the time, as opposed to anime streamers, whom you’ll only have the time and sanity for a couple of shows per season.

Money Is VERY Much an Object

It’s no secret that anime is a BIT on the downgrade. Anime studios tend to have big budget issues, sometimes being forced to file for bankruptcy. Animators are notoriously underpaid at these jobs, to the point where being a straight-up salaryman is probably a better option. But money isn’t only affecting real people, it’s affecting the products.

For starters, the chances of an anime finishing are next to nil. A lot of anime, even successful ones with high incentives to continue, end without a follow-up, and my personal assumption is a lack of funding, even for successful ones. That’s just how in the red they are. Even when they do get new seasons, they tend to degrade in quality, like—most famously—One-Punch Man in its second season.

That lack of funding also makes anime artistically hideous. Most of them consist of flat textures and solid colors, with only one basic shader or highlight at a time (if you’re lucky, you’ll see a shader AND a highlight in the same shot). These studios take any semblance of artistic identity that their source material had and makes them all look exactly the same.

But what’s worse is the actual animation itself… or lack thereof. Most of the time, any given shot in an anime consists of just the mouth opening and closing at regular intervals. And sometimes, you’ll have a thirty+ second long shot of nothing moving at all. It’s also common to see flashbacks to something that happened earlier in the same episode. There are some moments of excellent animation, but they are exceedingly rare (although I heard that Mob Psycho 100’s second season is surprisingly consistent), and to me, not enough of a payoff. Also, pretty much every anime I’ve seen feels like they’re all directed by the same person.

A lot of people are used to these quirks, but I can’t stand it. And honestly, you can blame me for being a filthy normie on this one. I’ve grown up with Disney my whole life. Disney has an incredible eye for detail (at least when they actually TRY), and I’ve gained a habit of appreciating all of those details. Their characters emote and express themselves in ways that feel alive and give them substance. They have had multiple characters on-screen, all animated and emoting simultaneously. Thanks to my autistic logic, I’ve gained a habit of looking for those same details in animated mediums. And anime, naturally, completely lacks those details. Anime feels dead and empty without those subtle gestures of emotion. Even when something emotional happens, the eyes end up being the only things that animate. I don’t need these details in manga, since it’s a still-image medium and they have entirely different ways to convey moods than anime. But nope, when something’s animated, I need fluid animation and expressive faces or else I am not engaged. And for the record, I do know about Kyoto Animation, but all I’ve come across from them are sappy love stories that I have no interest in.

Feature Films are Great… Good Luck Seeing Them

Most of my complaints have been regarding TV anime; feature films are another story entirely. With less hours of content to produce, no deadline to produce it, and more money to produce it with, anime feature films are where all the talent in the industry has gone. Many anime enthusiasts know famous directors like Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, and the more recent Makoto Shinkai, director of Your Name and Weathering With You. 

I’ve only seen a few anime movies: Spirited Away, Summer Wars, and The Tale of Princess Kaguya among others. They were all great (well, not so much Summer Wars because it was just a boring family drama disguised as The Matrix, but that’s an argument for another day), and they gave me a light of hope for the industry. I’d love to watch more movies and write about them.

The problem is that seeing them is a bit tricky. A lot of them are available on streaming, but not on anime streaming services. They’re all stretched thin across a lot of “normie” streaming services, from Netflix to HBOMax. As much as I complained about anime streaming before, these other apps are an entirely different rabbit hole. I’m not someone who likes Western shows, and it’s not worth paying for an amount of movies I can only count on my fingers. 

“Well, just buy them, you cheapo,” you say. I just looked on Amazon and GKids’, and one anime movie costs about $20 USD each. “That’s not so ba—” That’s for one movie. There are a lot of anime movies out there, and building a collection would easily inhibit my ability to cover the usual material I cover on this blog. As much as I want to see more anime movies, I’m not a movie guy, therefore anime movies are of low priority.

My one sole hope is in events like GKids’ Ghiblifest, or actual anime premieres themselves. I only need to pay $8 USD to watch them once, which is all I’d have time for anyway. But there’s still a drawback: the distribution. I was able to watch Kaguya in a theater that was a stone’s throw from my house. However, when Weathering With You came out, I was tempted to watch it because I was low on post material for January and I thought, “Eh… why not? I think the movie’ll be stupid, but I just don’t hate myself enough.” Regardless of whether or not I would’ve liked it, I was still butthurt that the closest theater for THAT was forty minutes away from my house, and since I would’ve seen the subbed version like a true weeb, I would’ve been up until midnight when I got back home! That’s a no-go for someone who had to be awake at five in the morning to be able to report to his full-time job that’s paying for his blogging career.

Man, if only there was a place to RENT movies. If I didn’t like it, I could just bring it back tomorrow, and no money will have been wasted. It could’ve been called “Movies That Are Expected to Make a Lot of Money in the Box Office” or something. Oh well, an idea so ridiculous couldn’t possibly exist!

Conclusion

Watching anime is tough. Really tough. Much tougher than reading manga. Anime is more affordable, but you get what you’re paying for: low-budget, cheaply made, overly-abundant crap. A haystack of BS that you need to scour in order to find the needle. Then when that anime season is over, you lather, rinse and repeat with the next season. To me, it’s a nightmare, and that’s why I bowed out of it. 

I must ask the following question, specifically to the veterans who’ve made anime their life, and have literal hundreds under their belt, to the point where they’ve self-taught themselves fluent Japanese just by watching them with subtitles: What is so appealing about anime? It can’t be just because it was the first medium you were exposed to, because I myself was actually converted from a TV junkie to a book junkie over the course of my life. I dunno, maybe it literally is just because of the aforementioned reason, or maybe I could stop speculating and just let you answer the question in the comments (I really want to know)!

WeebRevues Top Five Japanese Music Artists

by macksamson, posted in Miscellaneous, music

I’ll always love the classic rock of yesteryear more than anything. But over the last several years of my life, I’ve realized the unique greatness of contemporary Japanese music. In this blog I’ll discuss my favorite Japanese music artists.

5) Hysteric Panic

This spot was originally going to ONE OK ROCK. For all intents and purposes, ONE OK ROCK’s members are very talented, and very experimental-two qualities that I seek in bands. However, just going off of the sheer percentage of discography that I loved, Hysteric Panic is way better than them in my book. So why do I like this basically unknown J-thrash band so much?

I love Hysteric Panic because of their energy. They more or less only play thrash, but they’re so darn good at it that I can’t even complain. They also have a wide range of vocals, from a high-pitched, Axl Rose-sounding guy, to a guy who sounds like a constipated alligator. Regardless of if it’s multiple guys or the same guy, this wide range of screams makes Hysteric Panic stand out as a thrash band. Give them a whirl if you love Metallica or others like them!

4) MYTH & ROID

Led by TomH@ck of OxT, MYTH & ROID was originally my favorite Japanese band, and was in 1st on early drafts of this post. Although they are a solid prog-rock band that has more of an identity than most people in the ainsong industry, I realized that I find the artists in the Top 3 more irreplaceable. I don’t know if it’s because MYTH & ROID has way less discography or what, but them’s the brakes.

But hey, they’re still in Top 5 for a reason. MYTH & ROID has managed to craft a distinct style that basically allows them to do whatever they want, as long as they maintain one consistency: MAKE. IT. AWESOME. Out of all the artists on this list, I have always exclaimed “WTF?!” with every song of theirs the first time I heard it.

Recently, I have been exposed to music from the bizarro minds of truly eccentric people, such as DAOKO and Kenshi Yonezu. But at the time, I remember when I threw on Styx Helix because it was a Re:ZERO song, and thought it was a decent techno-chill song. I later noticed that they also did OP 2 of the same show. I put on that song, Paradisus Paradoxim, and it completely blew me away with how different it was. I fell in love with MYTH & ROID right then and there… and then fell slightly less in love with them over time.

While they are no longer my favorite, they are still a great band that stands out from the rest. I recommend giving them a listen if you’re tired of that mainstream crap.

3) Dempagumi.inc

Didn’t expect a pop group, did you? And an IDOL group on top of that?! Well, this entry was originally going to be the jazz-pop duo, ORESAMA. As great as their music is, their record label, Lantis, seems to not want anybody overseas to be able to support their artists, so I basically grew out of them. 

However, one MyAnimeList article helped fill the ORESAMA-shaped hole in my heart: The announcement of Dempagumi.inc member, Mirin Furukawa’s, marriage. I immediately had to know what a band with such a weird name was, and sure ‘nough, they’re on Apple Music! One greatest hits album later, and I found myself- for the first time ever- unironically in love with a pop idol group.

Dempagumi’s gimmick is that they are otaku. A lot of their songs are about Akihabara and… well, I don’t know what else because they’re singing in a language I don’t know very well. Additionally, their singing reaches such outrageous tempos at times that it just HAS to have been artificially sped up in post! 

Speaking of the tempo, Dempagumi’s main musical style is fully caffeinated J-Pop with tons of synthesizers and videogame sound effects. They try to get you hooked by messing with that pattern-recognition area of your brain that made you bee-bop to Gangam Style. What they do is start off with a fast, catchy beat, and then arbitrarily and abruptly shift into a different, faster tune altogether. This is best exemplified in W.W.D., one of my favorite songs from them. Since their style is designed to mess directly with your brain on a nueral level, you can’t not be caught off guard even if you’re expecting it. It’s science! They’ve been around for over ten years, and they still bamboozle me even during their newest songs. The only flaw with Dempagumi is that there are some songs that are a little more mainstream, and while those are nice and la-dee-da, they aren’t the Dempagumi that I love. 

Seriously though, this group should be monopolizing the idol industry! I doubt that any of the members themselves are involved in the creative process of their songs, but whoever is involved… is a freakin’ genius. I highly recommend Dempagumi.inc to anyone who wants a twist to mainstream pop. Start with their greatest hits album: WWD Best Demparyouko, since, like I said, they’ve kind of been active for over ten years…

2) BAND-MAID

This is a band I literally found out of nowhere. Although they’ve grown substantially more popular with their most recent album, I was a fan since summer 2019- snug within the range of “before it was cool.” When I made the life-changing decision of subscribing to Apple Music, one of the first bands I got into was- no, not BAND-MAID- but Passcode. Passocde’s great and all, but in the similar artists tab, I couldn’t help but notice BAND-MAID. And the rest is history.

BAND-MAID, whose claim to fame comes from their maid cafe-like attire, is a hard rock band that skirts the line of metal, and a damn powerful one at that. One distinct feeling I get from their music is not something I ever feel in any other J-Rock bands: Classic Rock. Yeah, I know it’s an oxymoron, but a lot of their stuff reminds me of AC/DC, Van Halen, Dio… basically, all the rock bands of yore that I love. “You only like them because they’re mimicking Western culture, you traitorous lech!” you exclaim. Well… it’s true that they do come off as Western, but they’re excused because they still manage to have some sort of identity, despite how much they emulate those aforementioned artists.

If I have any concern, it’s that I don’t know what direction they’re headed in. Despite the fact that their newest album is objectively their most successful and important one, I feel mixed about it. It sounds a bit… lighter than previous records (I’ve only listened to the first half of it, though). I won’t fault them for trying stuff; in fact, I love it when artists try stuff. But I don’t know if they’re merely trying stuff, or if they’re trying to pander to the masses. If it’s the latter, they’d likely abandon the metal music identity they’ve spent the past five years building. 

But for the time being, BAND-MAID is a ludicrously good group. Apple Music doesn’t have their very first album, but it has everything else. I personally started with their third studio album, Brand-New Maid, but you can honestly start anywhere.

1) nano

It shouldn’t surprise me that Japanese-American singer nano wound up being first on my list. After all, she is one of the few people in the anisong industry who really has a true style that is entirely their own. 

nano generally does very aggressive hard rock and metal tracks, but also throws in electronic, or even in the case of one particular song, combines rock with traditional Japanese instruments. I find her older stuff to be rough around the edges, but from her album, Rock On, and onwards, she’s gotten better and louder. Her albums are one of the best showcases of the evolution of an artist that I’ve ever heard. A lot of credit goes to whoever produces and mixes the music in order to bring out the best of her powerful voice and the instruments that her buddies play.

nano’s music is divided into two distinct types: Regular J-rock that’s used as assets for anime and such, and straight up Western-influenced hard rock. The latter is typically used in albums, as the designated filler songs. However, I find those to be some of the best filler, and often times among nano’s best songs. I recommend going through all of her albums, or at least starting with Rock On and going chronologically from there.

Overall, Japanese music is freakin’ great, and I don’t get why it’s not more popular. I get that the Japanese generally like to keep to themselves, culturally, but most of this stuff is as easily accessible on big-name streaming service as their Korean competitors! It’s… it’s THERE! Well, whatever. Hopefully, this post will raise just a little more awareness for the stuff. I highly recommend you follow these artists, and whoever else you find interesting, on Twitter. Most of the Tweets are in Japanese… but… it takes only two clicks to translate their Tweet… so just follow them already! 

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Honorable Mentions: Passcode, RAISE A SUILEN, Burnout Syndromes, ASCA, ONE OK ROCK