Why Anime Should Never Become Mainstream

in #anime6 years ago (edited)

death-note.jpg
image credit :-uproxx

You need to look no further than the gaming industry to realise how taking this hobby/passion of computer geeks to the wider mainstream audience ruined gaming with all those endless DLCs, microtransactions including pay to win, pre-order bullshit, forever early access and early access scams.

Games being sold on digital platforms like Steam costing as much as in retail, despite the fact that selling on digital platforms cut almost all costs related to distribution in retail and the corporations still want you to pay more to play your games online. Releasing unfinished games is industry standard now, let that sink in.

And you know why this has happened ? Popularisation!

When the majority of your customers are "filthy casuals" as the gamers call them, who had played Call of Duty or FIFA sometimes with his friends when he was little and now wants to get back to playing some cool new games just because everybody else is doing it, corporations are going to cater to those people more because they don't have any expectations from their game but to be just "cool". They don't care about the mechanics, story, gameplay as long as it's good enough. This has resulted in the oversaturation of gaming with hundreds of stale games and sequels which just come and go by. Just like Hollywood.

This is going to happen to anime if it went mainstream, whether you may believe it or not. When you compare anime to Western cartoons, there are differences between almost all aspects like art style, narrative, characters, writing and most of all the cultural differences. These cultural differences makes anime unique but many of the things which are okay in Japan will be grounds for censorship because animation is still considered something for children by general Americans.

Most anime is still catered to the Japanese weebs and I am saying this because anime is not mainstream in Japan either. It's just accepted as a medium of entertainment. The average Japanese watches anime as a child and when he/she grows up, just watches some blockbusters like Your Name.

Anyway, so what's going to happen is the big corporations would want to conquer this rising new niche (yes, it will be new to them because all those corporate heads are rich jocks) and they will apply all the standard industry practices of Hollywood and TV. They will buy all big studios (or those they can), they would take away their artistic freedom and would hand down guidelines to create shows based on their market analysis of what's popular at the time, imagine shitty high school animes but taking place in an American high school with all the cliché dramas.

That's not all, they would fire your favourite voice actors and replace them with celebrities and these replacements would be chosen solely based on their popularity. Your favourite studios like Madhouse, Kyoto Animation etc will be converted into basically Marvel. No one would produce anime like Serial experiments Lain (If you want to know more about SEL, check out Digibro's collection of video analysis , but Watch It after you watch the whole anime legally or illegaly, I don't care and it's just 13 episodes long. I guarantee that your mind will be blown! ) or Deathnote or Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Not to mention the forced political correctness of the regressive left. All the leading charachters had to be dark skinned Muslim LGBTQblahblahblahblahblah and they cannot have personalities, each charachter will be a one dimentional ethnic stereotype, just like SJW marvel .

You might say that lots of good games are being made like Witcher 3 and Horizon Zero Dawn by independent or very pro-comsumer game studios like CD Projekt Red. But they had to fight with publishers a lot to stay alive. Watch this wonderful video to know their struggle.

What makes anime anime will be deleted because that's not what the general audience in the West wants. That's why the Hollywood remake of Ghost in the Shell was so bad, not because of "whitewashing", you cannot whitewash a cyborg body with someone else's brain, I mean she was literally manufactured and they showed the whole process in the opening scene of anime version of the film.

Anyway, so they basically dumed it down, changed things just to get a PG-13 rating and westernised it. So what will happen with anime if it went mainstream is what basically 4kids does to anime right now. Let that sink in.

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Nice article vote me too

Done, but you need to improve your English. :-)