If that's an error, Wikipedia has it too:

> Haruhi Suzumiya (Japanese: 涼宮ハルヒ, Hepburn: Suzumiya Haruhi) is a Japanese light novel series written by Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Noizi Ito.

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Haruhi_Suzumiya_light_...

But apparently there's a Manga version too?

Never read it. Is it any good?

FTA:

> Riot’s Valorant was one of the most accessible entries into tactical first person shooters.

I mean, Valorant probably has some anime design influence, but in the grand scheme of things it's waaaay on the minimal side and has no place in an article like this.

But also...

> So many things are wrong with this article but I’ll start with Haruhi Suzumiya being a ‘light novel’

Haruhi was a light novel?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Haruhi_Suzumiya_light_...

It's true that Anime is a broad field, but the vast majority of works is heavily shaped by Japanese idiosyncrasies and themes, which also means that, barring singular exceptions, anime is not really something for everyone. Conversely, the non-Western storytelling, themes, and character/interaction stereotypes are what many are drawn to (but still only a small minority of the population). I therefore don't see it "eating the world" in the sense of becoming completely mainstream. It's arguably not even mainstream in Japan itself.

However, to me this is a good thing, in terms of cultural diversity. Trying to adapt anime to more mainstream tastes in the name of global profit would do it a disservice.

There's something to be said about Waifu lists transcending anime genres / subgenres. I would say compared to 70s-90s anime landscape, stylisitically anime / east asian animation has converged a lot. At least mainstream stuff - we've nearly reached peak moe, there's still seasonable optimizations / stylistic tweaks here and there - but IMO it's fair to suggest convergence in waifu/husbando aesthetic has driven and is driving a lot of growth, and it's fair to put everything under umbrella for extrapolating market trends. I feel animes' ability to make fans horny and the increasing culture around anime fandom (now) unabashedly wanking over their affection/fondness over random constructed characters across genres is... potent.

Jobless Reincarnation is simultaneously trashy and also prestige drama. I feel like you could have picked almost any other harem show and been better off for your example lol

Even the aesthetic/art style varies tremendously - i.e. even the "big eyes" thing so often correlated with anime art isn't universal either.

Can you have "Western" anime? Some hardcore otakus scoff at the idea. If you made an animated version of Star Wars - is that anime? Is Avatar: The Last Airbender an anime?

"Chinese anime" or "Korean anime"? Again, some would scoff at the idea. But what is all that Hoyoverse stuff? Or all those Korean webtoons (though that's really more comparable with manga - and the korean word "manhwa" uses the exact same Chinese characters as "manga").

"It's not like cartoons in the USA that fall under the rough set of same humor or writers"

Such a hysterically bad take that it calls into question your entire point.

Quick list of cartoons that have an incredible variety, both in terms of animation quality, sophistication of humor, and target demographic:

- Steven universe

- Bojack Horseman

- adventure time

- helluva boss

- Invincible

And this is just within the last decade. Want me to go farther back?

- Animaniacs (the original series)

- Spaceghost Coast to Coast

- Justice League

- Ugly Americans

I'm also excluding for the most part animated comedies, such as Futurama, South Park, the entire Adult Swim lineup of the late 90s / early 2000s.

Right, this article is lumping together a bunch of different things that are maybe loosely related because of anime as a style.

The unstated thesis might just be surprise that this once-nerdy stuff has become mainstream at all and therefore has investment potential that was heretofore unrecognized.

outside of the actual pornography, more and more of anime is just emotional pornography for people with attachment troubles.

it can be a great art form. even some of the emotional pornography can have artistic merit (recently: Frieren). but increasingly, despite diversity in genre and visual presentation, all anime just tries to push the same emotional buttons of loneliness, belonging, connection, in a very heavy-handed way that is more about provoking the emotions in the body than about artistic expression.

not everyone has those buttons, which is why anime fans are a devoted minority, and why it seems like lonely, traumatized, and marginalized people are drawn to it.

The Solo Leveling anime adapts a Korean Manhwa, so maybe not the best example here. Not that there is any shortage of male wish fulfilment in original Japanese works.

I like that about Anime. I think part of my it and Manga have such a broad spectrum is because it is relatively cheap to produce - meaning the companies bankrolling production are less risk averse, and as a result lots more weird ideas get to be tried.

You do not have to watch too much of it to get the sense that writers are just going nuts tossing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Endless remixing of ideas from what came before, and outside influences.

Example: Legend of Black Heaven, which featured a middle aged retired rockstar guitar player working as a software engineer, who is tracked down by aliens to get him to use his guitar playing as a weapon in an intergalactic war. Sure, why not? Is it good? Debatable. Have you seen anything like it before? Unlikely.

Though the most popular anime by far around the world is shonen. Which caters to the typical male teen/pre-teen audience, but also adults and is typically characterized by action, typical underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world.

E.g. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, etc.

You are mixing together under anime shows which are produced in Japan from manga or from light novels with shows produced in South Korea from manhwas. They don’t have much in common. Even the art style is different. It’s a bit like mixing together European comics and American ones. It doesn’t make much sense.

Exactly. Anime is really a medium, not a genre.

It also can't be overlooked that the anime style is both highly flexible and also very easy to reproduce. Like I remember it being old hat to see books on "how to draw anime" when I was a kid, and anime didn't have nearly the presence it did in the west as it does now.

I'm genuinely not trying to be a shithead or anything, it's just a style that lends itself well to industrialization and specialized tooling to speed up the process of creating. Unless you get into highly stylized executions, if you as a company just want to turn out a perfectly average and forgettable anime, you can do so at scale pretty easily, and the glut of artists looking for work means you don't have to pay a lot for the labor either.

I have nothing against this but frankly as a creative it is slightly demoralizing to see just more and more consolidation and mechanization in industry. There's so little that feels genuinely creative anymore, and it feels like year over year the art people produce is crushed harder and harder into pre-made molds that do well on content algorithms.

Maybe nobody else gives a shit.

It's disgusting to claim that Western "Cartoons" fall under a "rough set of same humor or writers". It is just as varied, and frankly as good if not better than eastern Anime.

You obviously didn't watch enough varied western cartoons. The following are just a small sample of different, highly varied western studios/artists.

1. Don Bluth

2. Hanna-Barbera

3. Pixar

4. Bill Kroyer

5. Ralph Bakshi

6. Mike Judge

7. Genndy Tartakovsky

8. Vivienne Medrano

9. Jerry Rees

>salivating at the thought of squeezing ""value"" out of what remains of it

I'm amused at their assumption that they can squeeze tighter than the currently existing notoriously abusive segment of the market.

Also, the way they talk about exploiting parasocail relationships, I'm assuming their next big announcement will be funding a startup that is a call center to handle texting on behalf of onlyfans creators.

I thought the same thing as soon as they wrote the statement about the value of the market being $50B. That private equity is remarking on its market size means they are definitely sizing up how to squeeze it. A16z has no shame and it shows here.

Ya, my first reaction was I'm not taking advice from a16z on what's "eating the world".

2 of their listed categories are also shamelessly AI focused, so you can really see them lining up the investor-catnip.

Would be nice if VC’s would go destroy something of theirs for once, and leave everyone else out of it.

I doubt it. Anime is popular because people like it. A16z is incapable of producing something people like.

Right. Between crypto shilling and this, A16Z is about extracting profit, and not about principled value creation or problem solving.

I can see the globohomo corporate memphis images being replaced with globohomo anime characters

Anime has had no shortage of adaptations disrespectful of the original. Most of the time it's due to not having enough source material like HBO GoT, which somehow sent Fullmetal Alchemist to 1920s Germany in the first adaptation's movie. But sometimes you get people like Bokurano's director who straight up said he hated the manga.

Right. And anime tends to stick very closely to the manga which inspired it, because, commercially, it's often a vehicle designed to increase the sales of that manga.

Take Dungeon Meshi, for instance: The anime only covered about half of the material of the manga. So if you liked the show and you want to know how the story ends, you've got to pick up the books. If the showrunners changed important plot points, finishing the story might not be so easy...

The Dungeon Meshi anime probably made some money on its own account, but there are a lot of marginal anime series that aren't really designed to make money, but are intended to increase awareness/sales of various manga properties.

Watched a few episodes of dunmeshi before binge-reading the manga, and I was surprised/impressed that the anime is essentially a shot-for-shot recreation of the manga. I assume they used manga panels as the storyboards, which speaks to how good Ryoko Kui is at visual framing, timing beats for action sequences and jokes, etc.

That's because the gap between comic books and animation is one of the smallest between mediums. Not that it doesn't take creativity to adapt a manga into anime, but there is a template for a very faithful adaptation that is available to you.

If you're turning a prose novel into a tv show, you have to basically create everything from scratch. You can set it in the world of the novel and basically follow the plot, but the pacing is impossible to translate directly, and you don't have any of the visuals.

I loved the first two seasons of Wheel of Time (and also loved the books growing up) - what is wrong with it?

Never read The Witcher or played the games but also really enjoyed the netflix series

>be full of arrogant showrunners that think their vision is better

Most just want to have their own take on whatever they're adapting and I think that's preferable because whether good or bad, at the very least they're adding something new.

The nostalgia and fanbase driven reproduction of the same stuff over and over adds nothing, it's just fanservice. If I want The Witcher the game I can just play the actual game, if I want GRRM I should read his books. Adaptions in which authors take liberties have much more potential to be interesting. King famously hated Kubrick's The Shining, Garland took a lot of liberties with Annihilation and Starship Troopers was straight up subversion and satire of the book and Heinlein's worldview.

Given that we're in the age of maximally non-offensive Disney and comic book adaptions that just refuse to die and with so few genuinely novel media out there to begin with, I'm in favor of people at least taking some risks with adaptions.

Because people care about and are invested in the art they make. It makes them easier to exploit "because they should feel privileged to have the job they want." People who work in creative industries all over the world face this issue.

This is typical of "cool" jobs.

A lot of people grow up as anime fans and want to work with it. With high supply comes lowered prices.

Something similar happens in (cool) computer games programming compared to (dull) regular SWE jobs.

There is some parallel to CG artists around Hollywood, despite Hollywood making vastly more money than anime studios.

That seems to always be the case, doesn't it?

"While there seems to be a lot of money in X, the $people_providing_value are underpaid and highly overworked"

They always let themselves get shafted.

Your comment made me think of a blog written by Marc Andreessen at the beginning of Covid.

>It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.

He writes from the perspective of, "How are we having so many shortages during this global pandemic? We used to BUILD things, goddammit!" And now, fewer than 5 years later, a16z says:

> Yet, we believe that anime is just getting started – today, new technologies and business models are accelerating a once niche industry to even greater heights.

To the extent that anyone in power in tech claims to believe in the greater good, they are full of shit, a16z very much included. It's fun for CEOs and VCs to make grand proclamations about what's wrong in the world. But at the end of the day, they only care about making money.

Or maybe anime is one of those "new industries" Marc Andreessen said he was so excited about?

https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/

That's what I found so dystopian about web3. It seemed they were trying to financialize everything, declaring they were making payments frictionless while inserting themselves into every new financial stream they were trying to create.

As for a16z, andreeson's 30k word moronic Randian rant speaks for itself. People obsessed with optimization should not be involved in public policy.

That's why I like things like the PICO-8 "fantasy console". People making games just for the heck of it, with no objective of a paycheck.

If you make a good one you could always port it and sell it later (Celeste), but that's kinda beside the point.

You may be right, but it is hardly unique to either startups or to anime. The fine art world is full of artists who put their soul into their work, and galleries who try to profit from it. In an ideal world, both sides get value from working together despite being at odds philosophically, but in reality there is certainly some misalignment of incentives.

Creators who don't want their work to be monopolized by commercial interests can always use something like Creative Commons noncommercial licenses. But I think most creators will choose the path that pays the most money, not the path that gives the most freedom. See YouTube vs PeerTube.

Look at the top world leaders, so called captains of business. Cold stone heartless sociopaths, every single one of them. Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos, Schmidt and so on and on.

For a second imagine what environment they went through, what battles they had to fight for decades and keep being on top. You can't be a normal balanced person with good friendly personality and achieve any of that. Even if you start at absolutely stellar lucky place, you will end up as say Stallman (respect to that guy, but you can see life path vs Jobs difference mainly due to character).

The fact that such people are celebrated and imitated and there is a lot of strive to replicate their success path is normal. Why - as per J. Peterson (topic on its own, but his psychological stuff I still respect) there is cca 1:20 sociopaths and 1:100 psychopaths in general population. Do the numbers, they are not nice but then you can understand whats happening in this world and politics much better. HN isn't representative of general population, that ratio is much worse although smart folks like that know when to be quiet and just watch/read.

I am not trying to scorn those folks, at their best they do move whole society further, and we desperately need that now. But they are overall not good people, sort of necessary evil IMHO.

To a first approximation, "extract profit from this" means providing goods/services that people are willing to pay money for. If people are willing to pay for more anime content, companions, vtubers, and streaming sites, why is it a "mental illness" to provide that?

>It's like walking into an old growth forest and seeing the potential for a toothpick factory.

At least for old growth forests you could argue that it's mispriced because it's providing biodiversity/carbon sequestration which can't be sold on the market. Meanwhile the benefits provided by anime accrue solely to its consumers. What's the problem with getting them to pay for it?

And they called it “our favourite anime characters”, as if we’re supposed to believe the blood-sucking money-addicted pariahs at a16z are fans.

The whole article reads like a book report from Steve Buscemi’s “how do you do, fellow kids” character, with a few choice phrases from a “most popular anime quotes” buzzfeed article. I cringed.

It is unsurprising that both “contributors” have “web3” listed as one of their focus.

You are right to be horrified but what is the use in maintaining the pretense that we are not strip-mining our citizens of their attention?

It is truly shameless - and they are this shameless because they can be, and may even be rewarded for it. AI "companions", if left unchecked, will be as harmful as addictive drugs, enabling companies to suck everything from some people.

> AI is deepening the parasocial relationships

Fixed.

2 - I think it's a distinction worth making. Genshin Impact is not anime. That doesn't make it bad by any means, but it does mean that maybe what they're arguing isn't true. Anime is relatively strong now, but I don't think it is either at its peak of popularity (anecdotally, I see more people wearing demon slayer gear than I did bleach gear, but old school DBZ shirts are still most popular) nor at levels that can be described as "eating the world". Of course, the more vaguely East Asian styled cartoons you throw into a pile and squint at, the bigger it looks.

Fate/SN was originally a porno before it became a non-prono anime before it became Fate/Grand Order.

Fate/ is one of the weirdest meta-stories of all time. The evolution of that universe is utterly fascinating to me, more so than the actual story today.

The gist is that Nasu always wanted to create a Comic book style shared universe, and that Nasu sees himself as a Stan Lee or George Lucas type who is in charge of a community of writers rather than just writing one singular plot.

> a16z has a games division?

They got into games during their Web3/Blockchain/Metaverse phase so you're forgiven for not noticing given that hype train went absolutely nowhere.

Now they're all about AI being the next big thing in games, because of course they are.

Also the Gachas:

- Arknights - Azur Lane - Kancolle

Just off the top of my head.

I share your mixed feelings. On the one hand, I like "anime" to refer to something very specific. I think the world is more confusing when terms evolve and redefine too much.

But on the other hand, the Gacha games clearly owe a good deal of their success to the anime elements they copy-pasted, even if the core game mechanics are anime-indifferent.

Over time, these lines will get blurred even more as the market maximizes where those elements can be incorporated. The art and story elements clearly have appeal, and they'll probably get incorporated into more and more into media that's not Japanese-produced TV shows.

And when those non-animes get adapted into true animes because they're obviously such a clean fit, it feels like the similarity needs to be acknowledged with some a broad umbrella word to cover everything. Which might as well be the word "anime"...?

Fate went in the other direction, started as a visual novel and got some very popular anime adaptations, that led to the gacha game being made, which led to some of the especially popular parts of that game's stories being adapted into anime form.

You're not the target audience of this blueprint for decontextualization into maximally fungible product.

It's early days yet. Still plenty of time to get used to reminding yourself of that.

they do, they also keep emailing me and I never signed up for it. and they won't let me unsubscribe. it's wierd.

That cynical bent you mention along with a takeover of dark/gritty aesthetic, with both being positioned as more "realistic" or "mature" and thus preferable has made western TV somewhat exhausting to me too.

The "iyashikei" subgenre is specially nice for that. I'd really like to see what a western tv take on iyashikei would look like.

There's a lot of good stuff from China - Mo Dao Zu Shi, Thousand Autumns, Fairies Album, All Saints Street, Forty Millenniums of Cultivation, Fog Hill of Five Elements, Psychic Princess, Fei Ren Zai, Fabulous Beasts, No Choice but to Betray Earth, etc. There is of course a lot of mediocre and garbage stuff as well, but the tropes are far less annoying and thanks to Chinese censorship there's far less pandering and it's much more tasteful on average than Japanese anime.

Produced by the same 5-6 companies regurgitating the same stories and content I've already experienced and telling me I'm wrong for preferring the original.

I've been into anime for over a decade and for fans of animation, it's a wealth of unique stories and characters tailored to any demographic. Like action, romance, slice of life, etc., there are stories for you most with unique voices from artists and creators doing it out of passion rather than just another writing gig.

I think the manga format is really effective at letting new stories reach audiences. US media companies need to realize that funding authors/artists to test run their new stories as cheap comics and increasing funding to the 1/20 that gain traction is a great way to incubate the new talent that the industry desperately needs.

American comic books are incredibly stagnant and have been so for the past 20 years. Not a single new character with any cultural relevancy (besides reboots of old characters) has been made in the last 20-odd years. Meanwhile, series like Attack on Titan, Chainsaw Man, and Jujutsu Kaisen have become million dollar global franchises in the last decade. The manga => anime => cultural zeitgeist pipeline has produced tons of recent compelling series.

At the end the day, the successful ip solely depends the talent of the author. An army of marvel machines is not gonna produce attack on titan written and drawn(with some help) by a single person.

Another example is one punch man. The source material is just some draft uploaded by some random guy.

Nothing can topple the talent yet

Opposite experience. Here in the US, I've heard a lot more people watching anime than when I was a kid. Especially modern ones such as Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, etc.

Could certainly be a US thing, but I've found the tech crowd and the anime otaku crowd to overlap a lot. Ditto for science fiction.

Same here in the UK. Not a single sniff of anything anime at all in my day to day life, but I am bombarded by all sorts of other shite (Marvel and other comic-based movies etc) on billboards and the like. I've never seen it pushed to the top on any of the UK streaming services.

I know nothing of anime nor manga, apart from recognising the style. Never watched it - looks like kid stuff TBH.

The US and France are the highest consumers of Anime content from what I recall

How old are you? Because people talk about it all the time.

Demon Slayer is incredibly popular with younger people.

I am trying to produce an anime / webtoon with an AI assisted studio. Would love to chat more about your stories that scream to be brought into the world! (X @zhizdev)

The best story telling in anime doesn't come from anything close to Ghibli - at least not modern Ghibli.

If you want high concept, good, unique stories, it's going to take you to some much more indie sutff. Serial Experiments Lain, The Tatami Galaxy, Perfect Blue (and everything that director made), Ghost in the Shell (the first movie), Akira, and a bunch of other weird 80s/90s anime films you likely wouldn't even consider.

> I spend most of my time writing and researching live-action anime

What do you mean by live-action anime? This reads to me as contradiction in terms. Anime is a term of art for CJK animation, especially Japanese animation.

Is this your day-job? That's impressive. Did you cry on the travesty of Netflix Cowboy Bebop?

Do you actually remember the TV season of Evangelion? Especially the last episodes seem they have finished the budget. I'm sure the films are better, but I still have to watch them.

Mr. Fry could have said that about anything, not just AI.

No question, especially when you have only two major players distributing most anime in Sony and Netflix.

I enjoyed the good old days from the 1980s to the 2000s when it was actually more creative and good quality not to mention that there were more competition at that time period.

No doubt that it would be best for fans if a16z stayed far away from anime, but you're wrong about quality declining. There's a ton of great stuff from recent times: Vinland Saga, Ranking of Kings, Chainsaw Man, Dr. Stone...

There's always been trash anime, but it feels like there's some very original work being produced.

100% this. I'm glad I'm not the only one. The article is definetely written for someone that is not in the hobby and looking for a place to park money for more enshitification of a platform that already was, pretty much unrecognizable from a decade ago.

Like a lot of things, I think it can also be hard to remember how much effort it took to get into it.

Most anime’s pretty off-putting if you don’t know how to “read” it—you have to get used to all three of: quirks of the medium (e.g. how emotions are expressed visually, confused Engrish intro songs); cultural differences between your culture and Japan’s; and a pile of tropes that are very common in anime but less common elsewhere, which you can use as a way to understand the genre of what you’re watching and how it’s supposed to be read.

It’s why Cowboy Bebop is such a popular gateway anime: Ed aside (and even there, only sometimes) there’s minimal reliance on alien-to-Westerners visual expression, the genre is entirely familiar and uses familiar tropes and archetypes, and it’s culturally hardly any more Japanese than Blade Runner. (Plus, I mean, it’s good—but so are a bunch of others that do not work well as gateway anime)

Also buying out streaming players such as Crunchyroll.

There's a lot of great anime being produced today. Have you watched Vinland Saga or Chainsaw Man?

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” — C S Lewis

I think this is directly related to https://anime.com – a new product from the Azuki team (NFT collection)

It was announced about a week ago. Surprised no one mentioned it yet.

yeah but we don't want the crypto bs guys shifting their attention to anime.

I never got the hype either. I tried watching Attack on Titan and it feels like it's aimed at young adults. All the characters just state out loud exactly how they're feeling about everything. The setting is interesting but I just can't take any of it seriously when the dialog is so childish.

So much of it is written for <21s.

Exceptions exist, but the average level of plot / characterization / dialog is terrible by adult standards.

It's exactly like other media (TV, movies, books), most of it is uninteresting but from time to time there's a jewel.

I watched it when I was younger

Yeah, it hits different when you start at 35.

Congrats on becoming an elitist.

I too have never been able to get into it. The aesthetic just does nothing for me. Not sure why, just not my thing.