wtf was this thread all about?
OK. Facts of life time.
(1) The production values of Japanese anime are at least on par with American animation of comparable purpose. Movies get movie budgets, loads of time and effort, and generally end up pretty well-done. TV gets a much lower budget, not so much time and effort, and often has spotty quality. What was the last american-made cartoon that you watched? Taken a gander at Spongebob? Or the miscellaneous random crap that the Disney channel and Nickelodeon air on a daily basis?
(2) Nearly everything on the internet is a business, and has a business model. If it's got a broad userbase, they're just waiting to figure out how to either mine out the data and sell it, or load it up with ads, or exploit the community to get a portion of them to sign up for a pay service, or they're fishing for donations in the hope that something the owners like will pay for itself. (Incidentally, this includes Gotwoot, which is basically a failed business ... we tried the donations thing for a while, but it didn't work out too well for us ... and if anyone remembers the uda experiment ... ).
(3) Businesses, ALL businesses, are about profit. Some of them don't immediately appear to be ... digg, youtube for example. However, just because there's no apparent business model doesn't mean there's no opportunity for business, and building that opportunity has a LOT of value too.
(4) It is the sworn duty of every corporation to attempt to best serve the interests of its shareholders. The best interests of its shareholders mean both short-term profitability and long-term sustainable growth. In the case of anime, if it saves 10% on the bottom line to do a 10% cheaper job, and it doesn't lose viewers by doing so, then the interests of the show are best served by animating as cheaply as possible. Hence using the cheapest techniques possible for any given TV show, and hence the bad habits of sequence recycling in a lot of shows.
(5) Anime production is generally contracted for a set amount of episodes in advance. The result of this, and of trying to stretch and compress various plot arcs from an already-written story into 13 or 26 22-minute chunks ends up badly pacing a lot of shows at some point. You can find this in a LOT of places -- shows end up being well-suited for 30 episodes and contracted for 24, and the last 5 or 6 feel really rushed, or end up being well-suited for 20 episodes and have to stretch to 26, so the mid-teens will slow down and drag for a while. This is unfortunate, but it's the nature of the beast. This is also present in a lot of the more gimmicky US TV dramas -- a prime example would be the TV show 24. The first season of 24 would have felt complete if it were about 12 episodes long, but then at the end of that first arc it felt like they suddenly realized "oh yeah, there's another 12 episodes to do, well ... let's make some other shit up".
(6) Bad writing abounds EVERYWHERE. No matter where you look. Look at anime, look at American TV, look at literature. There's a freaking LOT of bad writing out there.
(7) Everything is just something else rehashed. Every romance is just a twist on the first romance. Every action series is just a twist on real action, which is just a variation on earlier themes. It's distinctly possible that there's no such thing as an original idea, just a new arrangement of already-existing concepts. So complaining that a shounen action series is like every other shounen action series is like complaining that a romance novel is about every other romance novel, or that today's Wall Street Journal is just like yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Just because it's not totally original doesn't mean there's no value in it to the people who enjoy that sort of thing.
(8) Err, terra's an admin. It's stupid to pick fights with admins.
Eight is enough.
Originally Posted by Lucifus
