[HN Gopher] Anime retailer Right Stuf has been acquired by Sony/...
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Anime retailer Right Stuf has been acquired by Sony/Aniplex
Author : davidhaymond
Score : 36 points
Date : 2022-08-04 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rightstufanime.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rightstufanime.com)
| dragontamer wrote:
| Hmm.
|
| A lot of my favorite anime still come in from Hidive / Sentai
| Filmworks. I really enjoyed "Ya Boy Kongming" for example. And
| Sentai Filmworks are the current owners of When they Cry (2006)
| and Fate/Stay (2006).
|
| I'm definitely worried about consolidation wiping out the
| competition. Then again, I hope people can give Hidive / Ya Boy
| Kongming a try. Its basically an idol anime crossed with Chinese
| Romance-of-the-Three-Kingdoms / Zhuge Liang as the manager, and
| my favorite anime this year so far. Give the first episode a try,
| there's ~3 songs in there. If the songs match your musical
| tastes, you'll probably enjoy the show. And yes, that's a Liu Bei
| reference. (Liu Bei visits Zhuge Liang 3 times before the young
| tactician agrees to join Liu Bei's cause. This parallel's young
| Eiko's journey as an idol, as she sings three times before Zhuge
| Liang is convinced to help her). Its actually an excellent mix of
| subtle Three Kingdoms stories with a good idol anime.
|
| Crunchyroll/Funimation merging, and Sony/Aniplex all being
| involved here is convenient for sure, I like a lot of what they
| do. But anime has a lot of niches, and one mega-company will
| inevitably have blind spots over time. Most of my favorites are
| in Crunchyroll / Funimation and even Aniplex (Ex: Oddtaxi,
| Madoka, Dragonball Z/Super).
| ihuman wrote:
| Hidive and Sentai Filmworks aren't independent, either. AMC
| Networks (the channel, not the movie theater) bought them about
| half a year ago.
| davidhaymond wrote:
| Ya Boy Kongming looks fantastic and I absolutely plan on
| subscribing to HIDIVE later this year. I have a lot of Sentai
| Blu-rays and I hope they continue to license good shows.
| superchroma wrote:
| I suspect that with the consolidation of players in the anime
| streaming and merchandise spaces in the west, we will see western
| values increasingly pushed into the medium, as many voices are
| unified into fewer bigger ones with increasing financial
| influence.
|
| I'm not particularly excited for this as the big players have
| already demonstrated themselves to be conservative and censorious
| when it suits in other areas. I think we're on the edge of the
| hollywood-ization of the medium. Crunchyroll has already been
| apparently involved in the production of a bunch of programmes,
| and was directly responsible for High Guardian Spice, which I
| think few people have anything nice to say about.
| _notathrowaway wrote:
| I don't buy it. For better or worse Japanese studios have
| proved time and time again to not really care about the west.
| Just look at how expensive and hard it is to import their
| (usually not localized) stuff. Japan lives in its own isolation
| bubble and western values are of no concern to most Japanese
| people.
| antonymy wrote:
| Netflix and other streaming platforms have made inroads into
| anime production committees, but you are correct in that so
| far very little overall impact is seen in the industry. The
| Japanese domestic market is still the chief driver of demand
| for new anime, and success overseas doesn't seem to really
| inspire a response from most of the anime industry. I
| wouldn't say they're "isolated", since the market has been
| penetrated by the west, it's more like they're indifferent to
| western money.
|
| I think Aniplex is in a position to change this, but the
| difficulty is going to be luring the studios since money
| doesn't seem to have as big an impact as one would expect.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| That seems rather out of touch? The vast majority of TV
| broadcast anime series every season are licensed for
| simulcast by streaming services in North America and that has
| been the case for several years now. At a casual glance at
| the TV tab of
| https://myanimelist.net/anime/season/2022/spring , I think at
| least 2/3 are licensed by western streaming services. There's
| enough revenue that they can't afford not to care.
| ihuman wrote:
| They're already proving your point by immediately removing 18+
| items from the store https://www.rightstufanime.com/removed-
| items-faq
| krapp wrote:
| That might be true if "western values" (whatever that's
| supposed to mean) were a primary determining factor in what
| anime Westerners chose to watch, and if it were still the 1990s
| when things like cigarettes, guns and LGBT relationships were
| routinely cut out of anime for Western release. But looking at
| the MyAnimeList page for Summer 2022 anime[0] I don't see signs
| of the "hollywoodization" you're talking about. The selling
| point for these services is immediacy, not censorship.
|
| [0]https://myanimelist.net/anime/season
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think the point GP made is that it doesn't matter what
| anime Westerners choose to watch, it matters what anime the
| fewer number of players want to license.
|
| [edit]
|
| I personally don't think that will be an issue because I
| don't see Netflix turning down an anime that Crunchyroll
| refuses to carry...
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > I don't see Netflix turning down an anime that
| Crunchyroll refuses to carry
|
| Oh hey! I have a litmus test handy! Got a citation for
| Netflix carrying "Ishuzoku Reviewers"?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I didn't realize there was an anime adaption of that; I
| read the first few chapters of the manga a while ago and
| my impression was that it was a "sex comedy" that was
| neither sexy nor funny; does it get better?
|
| In addition; Per wikipedia, Tokyo MX and SUN both
| canceled their airing of it as well, so it's not strictly
| _western_ sensibilities that it is failing.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| At the moment the extent of it is mostly that sometimes dubs
| or subtitles are changed by overeager translators trying to
| leave their mark, in the process changing the meaning or
| intent of the dialog. Rough examples that come to mind are
| changing jokes that can potentially be interpreted as sexist
| or even less justifiable cases of changing dialog for the
| sake of adding in meme language like "sus". There are also
| cases of trying to get rid of features of japanese like
| honorifics because of the samewhat strange assumption that
| western audiences can't be expected to understand them,
| despite them being pretty normal to the anime community.
| Personally I also miss the approach that older fan subtitles
| used to have of including TL notes for things that don't
| necessarily translate cleanly, it was a nice way to respect
| the original material.
|
| For now, it doesn't really have too much of an effect since
| Crunchyroll and Netflix's subtitles already don't really have
| a good reputation. But it's certainly a sign that if they
| could get away with it, they'd definitely do more.
| superchroma wrote:
| Right, but immediacy is already solved. The streaming side is
| solved by platforms already, and the translation side is
| solved by having a sweatshop of translators and maybe
| eventually algorithms to help, too. We've had immediacy for
| some time now, already.
|
| Moving on, I don't think you will see changes prominently on
| anichart or MAL anytime soon; the point is that it's gradual
| and more subtle than that. Crunchyroll was already involved
| with 60 productions apparently. Conceptually, in a
| hypothetical "worst case", they could have been influencing
| artistic choices for each of those programs. We do know they
| did one: High Guardian Spice is a particularly explicit
| example of an anime deliberately constructed to western
| progressive specifications. A lot of people are rather unkind
| about it, but that's really immaterial; what it really is is
| a clumsy first attempt at end-to-end control of the anime
| pipeline from script, to production, to distribution. They
| didn't find a winning formula with it, but they'll keep
| trying because there's too much money on the table.
|
| So, I do think that this change in tone is imminently about
| to happen. Weatern values have already been injected in other
| forms in localized content too, e.g. in our uptightness about
| certain types of expressions of sexuality (e.g. that which is
| perceived to be pervy; e.g, the infilling of "boob-windows"
| and covering of midriffs in localized games), and with
| activist translators who deliberately whitewash phrases they
| find problematic and also who select progressive translation
| choices over neutral ones.
|
| The bottom line to me is that the money men have zero
| interest in the integrity of the mediums in which they
| dabble. As you note, there's precedent; in the 90's, it was
| 4kids dubs which routinely butchered shows, sometimes
| extremely. The nature of the interference will change with
| the standards of the day, but the fundamentals don't.
| quartesixte wrote:
| What might happen is a return of the original Anime market and
| (hopefully) more steady pay for animators.
|
| The Japanese domestic market is dominated mostly by Manga,
| Light Novels, Visual Novel, (and now Gacha games) anyways, with
| Anime mostly being a cherry on-top for those things.
| Occasionally there will be a good adaptation or a good original
| Anime product but the industry's been suffering a little bit.
| This new cash infusion might be healthy and allow for enough
| animators to be paid a livable wage that lets them go off and
| do crazy adventurous things as they advance in their careers.
| norwalkbear wrote:
| Monopolies and industry consolidation should be illegal. If only
| Congress would do its job.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm old enough to have ordered anime from their catalog, back
| when your choices for Anime were driving to a big city that had a
| specialty store, getting it from a catalog, or copying fansubs on
| VHS tapes.
|
| [edit]
|
| I forgot "random anime tapes that got thrown in the children's
| section of your pre-blockbuster VHS rental store." as another way
| to find anime.
| teg4n_ wrote:
| Why the hell are they punting erotica to a different store. God I
| hate this major corporation puritan bs.
| revscat wrote:
| It's universal, too. I don't get it.
| trothamel wrote:
| It seems to be enforced by the credit card companies and
| processors, who likely charge more to process transactions
| for companies that involve pornography. (Probably due to the
| spurious chargebacks.)
| qball wrote:
| >It seems to be enforced by the credit card companies and
| processors
|
| Who are an unofficial arm of the US government.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
| [deleted]
| ihuman wrote:
| If that's the case, then why was Right Stuf able to sell it
| before?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Can we make them public utilities too so that they can't
| discriminate?
| HeyItsMatt wrote:
| Nothing to do with transaction risk. Congress and the
| executive branch have a myriad of ways to harm a large
| business if they don't get what they want.
|
| Visa's issues with religious fundamentalists started in the
| Tipper Gore days. During the Bush presidency it was nearly
| impossible for a porn site to get a US payment processor.
| btown wrote:
| It's common to joke about the puritanism coming from the major-
| corporation side of these acquisitions, but in fact
| Funimation's ex-CEO Gen Fukunaga, years before Funimation was
| acquired by Sony, himself founded a Christian film studio and
| hired former Senator Rick Santorum to be CEO [0]. The two
| companies shared office space [1] and at least one common staff
| member outside of leadership.
|
| Of the venture, Santorum said in 2013, "This is a tough
| business, this is something that we're stepping out, and the
| Devil for a long, long time has had this, these screens, for
| his playground and he isn't going to give it up easily." [2]
|
| [0] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2014-01-24
| (second Q&A)
|
| [1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2013/08/02/rick-santorum-
| chr...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R63yutg7cjo
| superchroma wrote:
| Sony has been strongly against it for some time. They have
| previously demanded that game studios like XSEED censor their
| games to allow a western playstation release (e.g. senran
| kagura's "intimacy mode") as part of an effort to clean up. A
| cursory search reveals this had happened to a number of titles.
| I've seen many examples of Nintendo doing the same.
|
| Apparently they're also targeting extreme violence too, which I
| hadn't heard about.
| https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/playstation-censorship...
|
| It's disappointing that Sony et al feel that they have a right
| to control the user in this way, albeit unsurprising.
| Fundamentally, consoles aren't open platforms, and principled
| user rights advocates shouldn't support them.
| lovich wrote:
| > It's disappointing that Sony et al feel that they have a
| right to control the user in this way, albeit unsurprising.
|
| Do they have to produce content they don't want to have a
| hand in making?
| superchroma wrote:
| They can make - aka pay for - whatever games they want, but
| in terms of allowed software, ideally the platform should
| be an open system instead of one with a hard whitelist.
| That would be best for user freedom and autonomy. I'm not
| discussing the online store side of things either, they can
| run that as they wish, and that can be their whitelist for
| all I care.
|
| Countries have laws and ratings systems that govern
| content. We don't need to be subject to the patronizing
| whims of corporations to boot, creating useless, single-
| purpose, locked-down hardware and moralizing on our behalf.
| dymk wrote:
| A hand in distributing, not making
| jandrese wrote:
| I remember having to slice open part of the catalog to get to
| the adult section. That must have been 20 years ago now. I'm
| actually impressed that they managed to survive the transition
| to streaming.
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