As per usual, your boy was browsing through the wonderful world of Twitter when once again I stumbled upon something very interesting. A youtuber/twitter Anime news guy by the name of YonkouProductions was sharing his thoughts on the state of anime journalism. Curious, I began retracing his tweets which led me to a video of YouTuber by the name of ThePedanticRomantic who made a very detailed video expressing his thoughts on Anime Journalism and why he believes it to be broken. I thought I’d discuss it and share my own viewpoints on the matter.
So from my understanding of his video, ThePedanticRomantic talks about how anime journalism focuses more on providing news info, PR statements and updates as opposed to discussing the aspect of the anime industry in a critical and investigative manner. He criticized that because big anime outlets are so close to these Japanese companies, they have become somewhat corporate themselves and are unable to provide fair criticism on various topics.
You never tend to hear about the shady business practices aspects or the mistreating of employees like you would with the gaming journalism over here in the west. Essentially it’s difficult to get those internal connections that would allow anime journalist to create deep, detailed posts. Adding to the fact that there’s that pesky language barrier and you have yourself an impregnable wall of information.
I read the tweets watched the video and for the most past, I agreed with what ThePedanticRomantic said in the video and YonkouProductions tweets, and I understand why it came to be this way. As someone who’s a fan of anime, I’ve actually never thought of the anime industry in the same way, or at the very least in the same degree as I do with gaming industry. Aside from gaming, anime is a major part of my life, yet I know next to nothing about what really goes on overseas. We have all these big anime sites that have the access to language, and maybe even a few connection, but instead of hearing important criticism about some of the things that go on over there, we instead get the PR and marketing stuff. And honesly, there’s no one to blame here.
We as a fan base are more interested in having our consumerism validated! We honestly don’t care, and that’s the bottom line. Which isn’t bad per se, but it would be nice to learn more from an industry we are all invested in. And I wanna try and change that too, little by little if I can!
Now, I won’t front and act like I cared about what happens over there. Shit, all I do over here on my blog is just talk about the anime that interest me, review them or give them a first impression and that’s it. When I did talk about anything anime industry related, it’s mostly about Crunchyroll and some of the choices they’ve made and piracy. That’s why I’ve decided to start focusing more on the industry itself and start learning. I won’t suddenly become this know-it-all guy, but small by small, I’ll start to discuss certain aspect I wouldn’t normally cover before. I think that’s the best way to learn. Of course, if I somehow have Japaneses readers who have juicy intels and can send it info my way, that would also help!
Now, YonkouProductions has mentioned two people already doing the good work, @SakugaBlog & @Yuyucow so I’ll leave their Twitter handle here too. Let me know your thoughts on this topic. I’m glad I stumbled upon this video!
