When he asks the audience whether or not they download fansubs illegally, a majority of them raise their hand to say yes. He assures them that it’s okay to admit to doing so, but he just wants to hear their reasons. One-by-one, fans talk about why they do it, giving reasons like “I can’t afford to buy”, “the show in unlicensed over here”, or “I don’t want the show to be spoiled by all my friends who have already watched it.” Greg listens to each one, jots it on a list, and addresses each point for as long as time will allow him. But the audience is so eager to talk the most of the points will not get covered in the two hour limit.

The only stipulation he has when it comes to audience participation is that everyone treats each other with respect and hold back any unnecessary bashing and name calling. It’s a taboo subject to be speaking about so publicly like this, and it causes some very emotional and spiteful reactions from both sides when it’s being argued about. As expected, the actor is dissected, taunted, and harshly mocked by his critics on the internet in the days that follow this panel. But for the next two hours, this audience of otaku listens to the actor’s message and feel safe enough to speak out openly about their own views and doubts on the subject. And when it’s all over, most of them leave the room vowing never to download illegally again.

I got to have a interview with Ayres prior to the panel to discuss his views on illegal downloading, the people who take part in it, and the people who are damaged by it. In attending these panels and talking to the participants, I learned just why his message has such a huge impact on the community all together, in both positive and negative ways.

An Old-School Otaku

Unlike most voice actors in the industry, Ayres grew up as a hardcore otaku. As a skater living in Houston in the early 90’s, he and his friends would become extremely bored during the summertime when the weather made it too hot to go outside. To pass the time, one of his friends introduced the others these “dirty cartoon” shows he had on VHS, complete with extreme violence, adult language, and girls with very big boobs. Teenage boys being teenage boys, the group became very interested in this new medium.

Because the options were limit prior to the internet, pirated VHS tapes were traded among the small otaku community. He distinctly remembers watching Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as just a raw video with a written translated script in hand. But since the video had been transfer to a several tapes prior to his viewing, the picture quality had been very degraded. “You couldn’t even tell if [the main female character] was wearing a skirt or shorts,” he recalls.

This lead to his interest in legally collecting anime on Laserdisc. Not only did the new format provide a much better picture and audio experience, but it was also the cheapest way of getting anime at the time. He could either pay around $70 for an entire OVA or series on high quality Laserdisc, or spend $50 on a two-episode VHS tape which ran the risk of degradation. The choice was obvious, and he and his friends would search around specialty shops for any imported anime Laserdiscs they could find. It was always a risky investment, and sometimes it never fully paid off:

“I remembered that Humanoid had a sexy robot on the cover. That was it. For 80 bucks, we were going to get that. So you can imagine the shock, horror, and disgust of six teenage boys find that there was no sexy robot anywhere within that show.”

But the occasional $80 disappointment never stopped the young otakus from buying anything and everything. Eventually, Ayres saved up enough money to buy a tricked-out Laserdisc player that would automatically flip over the disc after it was finished playing each 30-minute side. He was very serious about the medium and about his collection.

Because he grew up as such a huge anime fan, he jumped at the chance to join the anime industry. Ayres took a huge step back from his career as an IT professional to get into voice acting. He went from a stable $60k/year job to making less money than a woman who greets customers as Wal Mart - “and at least she’s got health insurance!”

Even if the anime industry survives its current slump, he knows that his lifestyle will ultimately lead him having to leave his voice acting gig for a higher paying job sooner than later. But while he still has an inside view of how the business is running, he uses his current position to spread his message on the dangers of fansubbing and illegal downloading to the current generation of otaku while he still can.

The Problem With Fansubs

“Fans in general are not buying DVDs. They haven’t been buying DVDs for the last three years.” He does acknowledge that poor executive decisions do attribute to poor DVD sales, such as the long time it takes to release a show, or a poor choice to go with one series over another. However, these issues are not the major reason why the industry has gone into a slump, as Ayres has witnessed first-hand.

“Simply, my friends are all anime fans. I watched what my friends were doing. At the point where bittorrenting and filesharing for anime fans became a big deal, suddenly my friends who have these growing libraries just stopped buying things. And they’d start getting into other things, like J-rock and putting in all this money into importing Miyavi CDs, but not a single new anime title.”

He saw the trend all over. Fans could now just get their fix for free so easily on the internet. And after they stole one series, there’s no incentive to purchase the DVD and no punishment for stealing, which makes the viewer ready to just steal something else.

This community of online file sharing has even overstepped the boundaries of unlicensed material to blatantly rip official American DVD release and post that online, dubs and all. He recalls a fan complimenting him for his dub work on the show Beck, only to ruin it by mentioning how he downloaded the show off of bittorrent.

“American fans, very specifically, have a very strange sense of entitlement to anime. You’re not entitled to anything in this life, except for maybe the air you breath.”

But even beyond the series he has worked on, he feels the pain of the Japanese creators who are always effected by piracy even at just the fansub level, but are often too scared and timid to speak out about it. He talks about how Shinichi Watanabe, a highly charismatic anime director known as “Nabeshin” to many, took a huge risk at speaking up for his fellow creators, only to be criticized from the fansubbing community.

“I mean, it’s Nabeshin! Never was there a nicer guy; never was there a guy who created more funny moments in anime. And yet, very seriously, he spoke to an audience of fans and at a very uncomfortable pace for him. He was very worried that he was going to get crucified for what he did. He was very worried to speak out on his own behalf!

“And even after he did it, people still said, ‘F*** the Japanese! Screw Watanabe! I never liked his shows anyway.’ I never thought I would live to see the day that an anime fan would say, ‘F*** the Japanese!’ I mean, what kind of anime fan is that?”

His message is simple at its core: if you enjoy the work that someone has created for you, then you have to be sure that you compensate the artist for it. “I find the money for the things I like, and I had good parents who taught me not to steal.” If you can’t afford to buy it, then turn to alternative legal solutions, such as libraries, convention screening, legal streaming series (like Adult Swim video and Gonzo’s newest initiative), or just borrow shows from your friends. In those situations, having to pay the full price for something that will be shared by a few is way better than paying nothing for something that is being shared by everyone.

But there is one major point that the two of us did not agree on, and it is the reason why I have personally downloaded fansubs for the past few years. Thanks to copy protection and the DMCA, it is illegal to watch any unlicensed show in the USA, even if one purchases it with his or her own money. This was not an issue when he was a teenager. He was able to easily import Laserdiscs without breaking any copyright law.

However, Ayres saw this as a non-issue even in today’s world:

“That’s an issue that I don’t even address, because if you’re doing the footwork to getting a region-free player and you are spending money to buy [region 2 DVDs] from a legitimate source in Japan, then the money is going back to Japan and I could care less.” He tells me that for unlicensed show or shows that been canceled in America, such as Kodacha, this type of importing is the only option that you have legally watch these shows.

“But it’s not legal!” I interrupt him.

“Then it’s the only ethical way to watch these shows,” he fires back. “Look, I don’t have a problem about being above-the-law. You can take a look at me and you can tell that I’ve probably broken a number of laws in my day. It’s about doing what helps this industry out.”

So what’s the solution to the fansub problem?

According to Ayres, it’s all in education, which is why he goes to these convention and insists on hosting these panels on the subject. Along with this, he’s aware of PSA’s being put together to go out to the community and a complete documentary being produced in America and Japan. These initiatives are taking a while to get done, but he strongly feels that educating the audience on the damages of fansubbing is the critical component to fixing the problem.

And as I saw first hand at AnimeNEXT, this education actually works.

The Audience is Listening

At one of Ayres’s Voice Acting Q&A panels on the Friday of the convention, anime fan Steve gets on the mic:

“First off, Greg, I just wanted to say that because of your blog on MySpace, I have sworn off of fansubs as my New Years resolution for this year.” Steve is met with applause from the audience, and a great amount of gratitude from Ayres and the other voice actors on the stage. But Steve’s story echos that of a lot of other fans who I talked to at the convention that weekend.

“I think there are a lot of well-meaning fans who are just excited and passionate about what they watch,” explains Ayres when he talks about his audience. “I think that a lot of them, still to this day, have no idea that they are helping to destroy the thing that they say they love the most.”

With his otaku upbringing, brightly colored hair dye, childish voice, and overall crazy attitude, the young convention attendees identify themselves with the voice actor. They look at him as just another anime fan who has landed a dream job working for the industry. “I meet kids everyday who want to be voice actors, animator, producers, music people - they just always want to get involved in the industry.” Ayres has turned into a role model to to his audience, and it’s with this kind of respect and admiration that they all listens to with an open mind. This is the only type of fan that he directs his campaign to, because they are the only ones will listen.

He has already recognized that many of his biggest critics, the ones we tend to find blogging in the fansub community, are already lost causes in his campaign and makes no effort to persuade them otherwise. These folks are already so close minded about the world around them that they cannot sympathize with the industry and community behind it. He can see their introverted personality being so blatantly displayed when he goes to anime cons.

“I’m heading out to AX next week, and that’s just such a frustrating thing. It’s the big industry hubbub, and yet every corner you turn, there’s just some person with their laptop out watching some crappy fansub. It’s like, dude! You’re at the largest Expo around. You’re at the largest place anime fans can meet, and yet you’re still very anti-social and just glued to your fansub of D. Gray-man.”

These fans will never change their ideology, and become very angry and rude when the voice actor tells them that what they are doing is wrong. Ayres, as well, becomes very angry when talking about their lack of respect for him and the Japanese artists, as mentioned earlier in his story about Nabeshin.

He believes that fansubbers should be using their talents to actually get a paying gig, instead of just doing it for 15 minutes of fame on Youtube. “If you’re so good at what you do, why don’t you get a job at Viz and get paid to do translation? Why don’t you prove yourself in the professional world?” Until they can make a positive difference in the industry without leeching off of the works of others, Ayres believes that they have no right to complain about his message or the fans who listen to him.

Fortunately for him and the audience at the panel, these type of fans save their complaining and insults to the safe harbor of the internet later in the day. “The biggest wussies will always draw their swords on the internet,” he warns, and sure enough, they keep quiet during those two hours. They are well aware that they are hated minority in a room, and they use that as their excuse later on as to why their opinions were never heard that day. They call Ayres all kinds of obscenities, and accuse everyone (including myself) of being nothing more than ass-kissers to him.

It’s not ass-kissing, though. It’s respect. It’s a respect that Ayres had as a teenage boy to the folks who created the “dirty cartoons” that he enjoyed so much with his buddies. It’s a respect he has towards Japanese creators like Nabeshin, whose livelihood is currently threatened by piracy and illegal downloads. It’s a respect that the young convention goers have for Ayres because he is the one of them who made it into the industry that they also respect. And it’s a respect I have as a blogger towards a man who says what he feels is right, even though he will be severely blasted by those who have lost their respect long ago.

———————-

My work on this essay had me seriously thinking about my own reason for illegal downloading. I have made it well aware to my readers in the past that I know that people who were downloading fansubs were screwing over the industry for not buying the DVD, and that they should be ashamed of it. But I was using the reasoning of DRM and DMCA to justify downloading unlicensed series. Ayres’s immediate dismissal of the issue made me realize that my petty reason was just that - petty. I had no right to be stealing purely out of spite for unfair copyright laws. I was being completely hypocritical.

Looking at my computer, I see a queue of ToLOVEru and Kanokon episodes piled up over weeks of neglect.  True, they are both great series, but I’m honestly getting sick of sitting in front of my computer to watch these heavily compressed downloads. And in order to get to just these two series, I had to check out countless others only to discover that they were not worth my time at all. I’m burnt out on this stuff.

For the past month or so, I’ve been enjoying watching everything on my big screen HDTV. Even a standard DVD looks amazing when upconverted to 1080p. Thanks to Netflix, I was getting myself acquainted with licensed shows like School Rumble, This Ugly Yet Beautiful World, and Emma: A Victorian Romance. These are all series that I have been completely overlooking because I was too busy downloading crap off of bittorrent.

That is why this fansub queue has gone unwatched for so long…

(-_-) . . .

I delete the fansub queue from my hard drive, lay down on my couch, and finish watching This Ugly Yet Beautiful World.

I will not be a hypocrite anymore. From this point on, this anime blogger is going 100% legit and legal.

Actually, the whole thing started with me noticing a “Fan Subbing” panel in the conventions schedule being hosted by Ayres. Wait, a voice actor talking about fanssubbing? This sounded like something I would write about, and it would probably make for a good story on my site. Since the schedule didn’t list any more details on the panel, I emailed my press contact asking for more information. I said that I was considering possibly holding an interview with the voice actor if he was really there to talk about the controversial subject.

Within a couple of hours, Trisha Sebastian, AnimeNEXT’s Director of Publicity, emailed me back:

“I’ve forwarded the details of your request to our guest liaison who will ask Greg if he would like to do the interview.”

o_O! Whoa, a private interview already?!? No, no, no! I was just curious about the panel. I didn’t want to commit to anything just yet.

But Trisha responded to my doubts and reassured me that the panel was just as I thought it was going to be. She sent me a complete summary of the panel from a past convention, a link to Ayres’s MySpace blog, and a link to a post I made in my blog several years ago which she said represented the over all tone of the panel. I was very impressed. Not only did she know everything I was looking for, she even did her homework about my little site and cited something I wrote a while ago. So I agreed to have the interview.

Clearly something was going to be very different about going to an anime convention this time around…

I remember day one of Anime Boston in 2004. It was the first 3-day convention I went to, and it was at the height of the huge boom in the anime industry. Looking down the list of panels for the first day, it wasn’t the biggest names in  the business, but I was still drooling over every one of them that I was about to see.

“Ooh, first we can go to Media Blasters panel. They are the ones who are about to put out the Invader Zim boxset. Then we can check out FUNimation’s panel on licensing, they do Dragonball Z. They got another panel tomorrow, so they might not make any announcements today, but you never know. Oh, and then there’s Broccoli! They did FLCL…”

My girlfriend at the time did not seem quite as enthusiastic as I was about all the industry panels. She was more excited over seeing cosplay for the first time and wanted to see more about this new side of anime fandom for her. But she humored me and tagged along for my geeky interest in the business side of anime and manga.

At that FUNimation panel the next day, a slightly older girl sat next to me. Pale skin and and long jet black hair, she fit the profile of any anime fangirl. Without me saying anything, she proudly declared to me, “I’m press,” and held up her press badge. She appeared to be witting for some publication that I had never heard of before, more then likely some kind of “fan-zine” or something of the sort. But her behavior lacked any kind of professionalism or sophistication you’d expect from any reporter.

FUNimation’s big announcement that day was the very popular “Kodacha” series, which was met with a large applause from the audience. Afterward, they passed out toy mallets and played the show’s opening theme song. The “Press” girl next to me, completely beside herself since the word “Kodacha” was mentioned, got up and danced like a raving lunatic. This left my own female companion to stare at me with the look of “Dear God, what the hell is going on?” on her face.

The press badge, while officially issued to her, was clearly just this girl’s cosplay for the convention. An anime fangirl pretending to be a professional journalist.

I continued to go to all the industry panels at every anime convention I’ve gone to since then, dragging along any girlfriends, regular friends, or anyone who would humor me enough to go to these somewhat boring panels. After a while, I had my blog set up and attempted to get my own press badge, only to be denied one every time. But I still went to these panels for the purpose of blogging about them, and I quietly sat with all the press. I began recognizing familiar faces through out the years, like Mikhail Koulikov of Anime News Network, Deb Aoki of manga.about.com, and Brigid of MangaBlog.

Now that I’m out of school, have a decent income, and have two weeks paid vacation time, I can go to even more conventions than before. And now that my blog has its own domain name, a consistent release schedule, and far more traffic than ever before, I figured I had a better chance of being taken seriously when it comes to writing about anime. I reapplied for press badges and much to my joy, I was accepted each and every time.

I walk towards the Meadowlands Expo Center completely lost as to what to do first. I immediately look for a staff member.

“Oh, um… I’m Press,” I manage to squeeze out, feeling completely unnatural, “where can I go to check in?” The staff escorted me to an office upstairs, where I finally got to meet Trisha in person. We talked a little about when I would be having my Ayres interview, and then we exchanged materials. I handed her two of my business cards, which contained a full-color picture of my blog’s mascot with the words “Scott VonSchilling - Writer, Website Operator” written on it. In return, she handed me a packet of press releases for the convention and my very own press badge.

For the first time ever, I became a cosplayer at an anime convention. With this badge, I was an anime fanboy pretending to be a professional journalist.

But I tried to play my part well. iPhone in hand, I ventured all over the convention to “report” on anything I can find notable. Cosplay of internet memes, Haruhi dance workshop, fangirls cooing over Kirby, a kid playing video game theme songs on his keyboard… all the little pieces of the otaku fandom that I have come to love through out my years of convention going. It was great to be able to walk freely around the convention to get the best view of the environment.

Of course, I wished that my equipment worked better and that I was able to report more while I was there, but overall I think it was a very successful experiment. I’m already working on ways to improve my “live blogging” method for next time.

I finally met up with my fellow bloggers at the Del Rey panel Friday night. I had already met Japanator’s Dick McVengeance at the Lolita and Maid Fashion event two weeks ago, but this was the first time I met Gia from the a geek by any other name blog. I have come to respect these two bloggers and their websites so much over the past couple of months, and it was great to be with other people just as geeky about these industry panels as I was. No more having to convince people to tag along and humor me. I was finally with my peers.

Trisha, the publicity person I mentioned earlier, noticed my live blogging coverage and was really digging it. She joined our crew for drinks that night, and we all hit it off pretty well. The four of us sat down on Saturday afternoon and recorded a fun episode of the Japanator’s Podtiod-san podcast. It was so much easier to record a show with everyone in the same room than it was a month earlier when I did the show over Skype.

But besides for the great story and the awesome people I hung around with, there was a certain ego trip about people I didn’t even know recognizing my name, my website, or just simply showing some respect because of the badge. I felt this the most right before the Greg Ayres fansub panel. I had set up my laptop and mic, and was reviewing my notes from the interview I conducted with him earlier that morning.

“Hey, are you press?” asked several of the folks around me. I told them yes, handed out my business card, and explained to them that I was doing a piece on Ayres and his views on the subject. They all instantly spilled out any information and opinions they had, thinking that they would get their names written on some notable website. I was flattered, but ultimately just focused on the business at hand.

I was joined by Evan Minto, a kid from the Ani-Gamers blog who was also cosplaying as press for the first time. He was even more excited over this new gig than I was, practically dancing in his seat. I could totally understand his excitement, but kept a cool persona to put up with the act.

Through out Ayres panel, the voice actor said a few things like “in the interview I had earlier” or “I was just telling someone about…”  At one point, Evan leans over to me and asks, “Is he talking about you?”

“Yeah…” I tell him.

“Wow, that’s awesome!”

Actually, yeah, it was pretty awesome. (^_^)

The whole weekend was an awesome time for me, possibly one of the best conventions I’ve ever been to. It was great to have an actual story in mind for the convention, and being able to have the right connections to make it happen. It was nice to be able to walk around the convention freely to chronicle my appreciation for the subculture I’m somehow a part of. And I had a blast hanging out with Dick, Gia, Trisha, and Evan, and look froward to meeting more of the Japanator crew at Otakon in a couple of months.

If you’re going to be at Otakon, New York Anime Fest, or the Portland Anime Conference this year, be sure to look for me and say, “hi!” I shouldn’t be that hard to miss. I’ll be right there in the front row of all the industry panels.

I will just be the anime fanboy blogger cosplaying as a professional journalist. (^_^)

Maid Machinegun is the diary of Aaliyah Kominami, an eighteen-year-old girl working at a maid cosplay café in Akihabara. Through out the book, she writes about the interesting characters who work at and patronize the café, her run-in with a very harsh otaku critic, her experience at Japan’s largest comic convention, and a love/hate relationship between her and a male co-worker. She has made it her personal goal to become the world’s best maid, and attempts to do so with each and every “master” and “mistress” she serves along the way.

The heart of Maid Machinegun is in the first person narration of the story. In this supposed autobiography, Aaliyah takes her everyday life and tells it as if she was in a comic book or TV show. She dissects the personalities of all the people in her life and turns them into simple anime characterizations. She portrays her boss as a heartless drill sergeant, one of her coworkers as the loving older sister type, and another coworker - arguably the most interesting of the bunch - as a satanic nut job.

Yeah, um, so, Ruruka-san is this . . . really unique person. A mysterious paranoid. Kind of out there, if you know what I mean. Okay, she’s an unstable nut who definitely belongs in a mental asylum. […] Her hobby is catching cockroaches with chopsticks and then chasing after the children in her neighborhood with it. […] Even the wristband she never takes off and the mysterious white pills in her purse are all part of her “persona” — I hope.

She sets up little episodes within each chapter and finishes them all off with either a comedic punchline or a dramatic cliffhanger. It is so creative and entertaining that you could easily imagine this book being turned into some kind of gag manga or a live-action comedy sketch. I’m surprised we have yet to see her story being adapted into other forms of media by now.

Aaliyah also interjects her imagination into the story at random moments. If the scene turns too serious, she will come up with the most ridiculous thing to say, but tells it in the same straight-faced tone as she would with any other normal part of the story. This creates some of the most hilarious moments in the novel. In one scene, she consoles a young female customer whose mother just scolded her for drawing boys’ love (BL) manga:

But despite my helplessness, Miss Masami continued to explain her predicament.

“Mother yelled at me and said, ‘Stop drawing sleazy manga!’ I . . . I don’t know what to do.”

Long, long ago, while I sat on my father’s lap, he told me, “Aaliyah, you need to be extremely careful when dealing with BL manga. Girls who love BL have so much passion for it, that passion will suck them in and destroy everything in sight, like a powerful Megiddo flame.”

But this kind of creativity can also be a fatal flaw to many readers. At certain points of the story, Aaliyah just completely lets her imagination run wild and transposes her friends into a world filled with ridiculous militaristic manga clichés, hence the “machinegun” aspect of the story. These particular over-the-top scenes completely blend into the overall plot and completely change an otherwise “realistic” story about working in a cosplay cafe. Many readers might feel betrayed at these moments, but I found it to be just another look as to how the author finds her creativity in a profession based completely on pretending and imagination.

Yet behind all the exaggerations, flights of fancy, and manga clichés is an incredible wit and analytical insight into the Akihabara and Japanese otaku culture. This girl might look and act like a subservient simpleton on the outside, but the reader can see that she’s got quite a brain on her. In one scene, she visits a tsundere cafe and provides a play-by-play commentary on her waitress’s performance:

[…] Her hesitant speech and mannerisms were so adorable. She lead us to a table in the far corner and said, “I guess I have to show you to your table . . . b-but I’m doing this because it’s my job, that’s all. Here, sit in this corner and shut up. You better take your time [she said in a tiny voice] and enjoy yourselves.”

The dere finally came out in the end! Folks, this is what we call a true tsundere! I’m stoked! I’m moved to tears! I had a hard time hiding in my smile. When Kiriya-san and I sat down, the waitress brought us some water and said, “I give water to all the customers, okay? You guys aren’t special or anything. C’mon, stop staring and give me your order already.”

Wave after wave of tsundere action continued. I never imagined the tsundere play to be so perfectly choreographed. I’ve heard about little sister cafés and BL cafés, but these specialized-character cafés might become mainstream someday.

Unlike their release of the Train Man novel last year, Del Rey does a fantastic English adaptation of Maid Machinegun thanks to the translation by Anastasia Moreno. The text flows nicely with very few interruptions. If she is unable to translate a Japanese word or idea, like “tsundere” in the passage above, she puts it in italics and writes up a translation note at the back of the book. She also doesn’t make the author sound too cute or annoying, but includes enough emoticons and LOL’s to make the text feel authentic. The book feels like it was written by an college-aged American anime fangirl, which makes it the perfect adaptation for an English-speaking otaku reader.

This release is not without its faults, however, and it comes in something as simple as the spelling of the author’s name. I’m sure by now some of you have already felt the same thing that CalAggie and I both felt when we first read the name of the author. For those who don’t know, Aaliyah was the name of a very popular R&B singer from the late 90’s. Shortly before 9/11, she died in a very tragic plane crash. True, it did happen almost 7 years ago, but it’s still recent enough to put a downer on this lighthearted story.

There’s also the issue of having “Aaliyah”, a very African name, looking completely out of place in a story about Japanese people in Japan. In few the sketches of the main character at the beginning of the book, you can see that her name is written as “Ariya” in hiragana on her name tag. This is how she writes it in the original text. “Ariya” just feels more Japanese, and would have probably worked better in this adaptation rather than the writing it with the African spelling. After all, that is why Viz Media chooses to keep the name “Kira” instead of changing it to “Killer” in their Death Note translations.

But this minor criticism still should not stop you from checking out one of the best light novels available in English right now. Thanks to its imaginative and witty narration, Maid Machinegun is a fantastic read from start to finish. If you are interested in Akihabara, maid cafés, cosplay, or just Japanese otaku culture in general, you will not be disappointed.

[…] Regarding your dissatisfaction about the use of the name Aaliyah vice Ariya… it wasn’t up to me, the lowly translator. (T_T) The author’s name on the Japanese company (Boiled Eggs) webpage stated “Aaliyah Kominami” so I honored their choice of spelling, and the Del Rey editors probably honored my choice. Here are some links in Japanese:

http://www.boiledeggs.com/maid/aboutaaliyah.html

http://www.boiledeggs.com/maid/maidinfo.html

[…]

I do agree with the sad connotations of the name Aaliyah, but my guess is that the Japanese author probably didn’t expect the novel to make it to the States, nor were they aware of the deceased R&B singer. Or maybe they wanted to be associated with her intentionally. Who knows?

There’s also a minor spoiler reason why the name “Aaliyah” needed to be used towards the end of the story. I missed the spelling when I was looking at the boiled eggs prior to writing the review, so I can understand her choice with going with that spelling through out the entire novel.

Thanks for the clarification, Ana! (^_^)

For those of you new to the manga scene, let me give you a bit of a history lesson:

Tokyopop made the US manga industry.

In the pre-Tokyopop days of the 90’s and early 2000’s, companies like VIZ, Dark Horse, and ComicsOne released manga flipped, expensive, and heavily Americanized. As the selection and availability was very limited, manga was very hard to come by. You’d probably see only see a shelf of these books at your local bookstore. Tokyopop started off like this, but then they decided to start a line of, as they put it, “100% Authentic” manga. This meant that they would release their books unflipped, leave the sound effects untranslated, and sell at a third less than the standard price point at the time.

The line was fortunate enough to launch with two titles that had already established a huge fanbase in America because of their popular anime versions. Cowboy Bebop was becoming huge through Cartoon Network and the new Adult Swim lineup, and Love Hina was becoming a star through the budding fansub community. But Tokyopop allowed fans of these series to introduce themselves to the manga version and become totally hooked into the unique experience of reading manga.

The “100% Authentic” changes brought out a completely new novelty of the medium specifically to the American audience. Readers had to train themselves to read the book from right to left, and found it amazing that they could actually comprehend a storyline by reading in such a ridiculous way. Having sound effect written in the Japanese language with its illegible characters added an exotic mystery to the books. Leaving in words like “ronin” and “senpai” to the text taught the new readers a little about a culture completely unlike their own.

Tokyopop’s “100% Authentic” line and its novel appeal was the greatest thing to have ever - and probably will ever - happen to manga in America. It jump-started interest in the medium and grew the market exponentially within years. Tokyopop had also set the new standard in manga publishing. Pretty much every company has imitated their “100% Authentic” strategy since then. I’m sure many of today’s manga readers have probably never seen a “flipped” manga book before.

So what was the turning point for Tokyopop? When did they stop becoming the trend setters and started being left behind in the market?

I would have to say it was when they lost their partnership with Kodansha. The Japanese company teamed up with Random House to create the new Del Rey manga label, which left its properties unavailable to other publishers in the US. Two of the most popular titles for Tokyopop during their “100% Authentic” revolution were Chobits and Love Hina, which were both titles that they obtained through Kodansha. When they lost Kodansha, they lost CLAMP and Ken Akamatsu. Not surprisingly, Del Rey skyrocketed to the top thanks to releasing the latest series from those two artist.

Negima, Tsubasa, and xxxHolic all launched for Del Rey in May 2004. At that point, Tokyopop had two volumes of its experimental Raising Stars of Manga out with the third shortly on the way. Riasing Stars was a competition for American amateur artists to submit their 20-page stories to Tokyopop for a cash prize and a chance to get their entry published. The first contest had such a good response that they made it into a semi-annual event.

These competitions set the framework for Tokyopop’s newest strategy to establish dominance in the now crowded manga market. In January 2005, eight months after the launch of Del Rey, the first prize winner of the 2nd Raising Star competition, a cute comic called Peach Fuzz, was released into a complete graphic novel with a 3-volume deal already signed. Peach Fuzz was the first in the new line of OEL comics from Tokyopop, which the company decided to dedicate most of its time and resources into promoting and growing.

It was the beginning of the end for the once great publisher.

Now let me just say that just because a manga is created by a Westerner for a Western audience does not mean that it is a bad comic. The aforementioned Fred Gallagher and Bryan Lee O’Malley both produce two phenomenal series. I’m even planning on writing a post about Scott Pilgrim in the near future because it’s so good. Even looking at Tokyopop’s OEL titles, you will find a fantastic gem called Dramacon by Svetlana Chmakova. These series are light years beyond most Japanese manga, and they should not be overlooked simply because they’re not Japanese.

Unfortunately, OEL manga is just not all that popular. OEL manga is only going to appeal to those already interested in Japanese manga, which is a very small niche market to begin with. You are not going to be going outside of that demographic because the black-and-white nature of the comics aren’t going to appeal to fans of more traditional American comics. However, many fans of Japanese manga do not like OEL titles because they lack those exotic novelties that made Tokyopop huge in that “!00% Authentic” revolution.

So if you have a niche of a niche, that’s going to be a very limited market that you are aiming for. Unfortunately, that was the only market that Tokyopop was devoting itself to.

If you have attended any Tokyopop convention panels since the release of Peach Fuzz, you will notice that most of presentation is dedicated to them hyping up their OEL releases. At their New York Anime Festival panel last year, the company showed off how they were going to bring these titles into various new media, including cell phone integrations, drama CDs with full soundtrack and voice acting, and CGI created video episodes.

“Looking at all these promotion videos and projects you’ve been doing with your OEL titles,” interrupts a reporter during the presentation, “it appears that you are dedicating a lot of time and resources to this. Isn’t that a huge financial risk?”

The Tokyopop industry rep sweats a little in his seat. “Yes, but we are expecting it to pay off in the long run.”

It did not pay off.

So what has Tokyopop been doing with their Japanese titles during this time? Not really much. The only huge seller from the company has been Fruits Basket, which does not come out frequent enough to make the company stand out while VIZ and Del Rey continue to top the sales charts. The company has just been releasing it’s current Japanese catalog volume-by-volume until those series have reached their conclusions. They pick up a couple of small titles here-and-there and have quietly been releasing them. But in my opinion, they have been spending so much time working on OEL material that they have simply not made any huge Japanese acquisitions for years now.

Well, that is with one major exception…

Earlier this year, Tokyopop released an completely unique Japanese title called Manga Sutra. This “guide to getting it on,” as the company puts it, has been a huge hit in Japan for many years and is completely unlike anything out right now in the American market. As I wrote in a piece earlier this year, the title has the potential to make it big in America because of its novelty. However, Tokyopop squashed all hope for it reaching a wide audience by not selling the book at national book chains and hiding it from the general consumer. If you wanted to get the book, you would have to activity look for it online and have it mailed to you.

One of my best friends visited my place recently. My friend has known about my love of manga for as long as I’ve been a manga fan, but he’s never had an interest in it at all. On this visit, he noticed my copy of Manga Sutra sitting on my desk. Intrigue by the title, he picked it up and scanned though the pages.

“Whoa, this is awesome!” he said as he saw the sexy images, detailed diagrams, and interesting statistics on any given page of the large book. After noticing him struggling a little, I explain to him that you have to read the book from right to left, and showed him the diagram that explained how to do so.

“Really? Cool.” After reading through a few pages in this new way, my non-otaku friend closes the book and asks me, “Hey, do you mind if I borrow this?”

***

Tokyopop’s fall from grace has been a painful one for this fan to watch through out the years. They built the manga industry by introducing the novelity of Japanese manga to the American audiance. While OEL was worth experimenting with, it has clearly not caught on no matter how much time or resources the company puts into it. That is why the one mighty company has come crumbling down within the past few weeks. As long as they keep on beating that dead horse of a market, the company might soon become just as hard to find as a $15 flipped manga book.

MediaDefender, along with most of the entertainment industry, assumes that bittorrent can only be used for the purposes of illegal file sharing and piracy. Revision3, on the other hand, used the peer-to-peer technology as a completely legitimate and legal method of distributing their TV shows over the internet, only to be punished for doing so by the entertainment industry it is a part of.

What sickened me the most about this story was looking at the front page of the MediaDefender website and seeing our favorite medium of entertainment being very specifically targeted in their war against bittorrent.

Bittorrent is a vital component of the American otaku culture, and it has become that way for a very good reason:

It is a brilliant form of technology!

One of the biggest problems with distributing video and other large files over the internet is that for every bit of data that someone downloads must in turn be uploaded from the person who is giving it to them. If too many people attempt to download a video off of one server, the server get overwhelmed, the bandwidth gets hogged up, and this can result in really slow download speeds or the server just crapping out on everyone.

With bittorrent, the file is not being hosted by just one server but by the computers of the people downloading the file. Instead of getting your file off of one computer, you get the file off of hundreds of your fellow “peer” computers bit-by-bit at a time. In return, you send other people tiny bits of the file from your own computer. This ensures that there is not just one server being hogged up when a new show hits the web. The workload is being evenly distributed among everyone using it. The diagram below shows this technology in action, as pieces of the video file come from computers around the world collect into your own computer in the center.

Bittorrent is a beautifully designed system of distributing large files to many users without hogging bandwidth and resources. The fansubbing process further utilizes this technology by obtaining an untranslated anime episode, pooling together a team of volunteers to translate the material, and then redistributing the file to the community over the bittorrenting system. It’s fast, efficient, and works perfectly.

Because it is currently the best method of releasing anime and video on a global scale, the use of fansubs is huge in the American otaku community. As much as one tries to fight it, it will not go away until a better technology is invented, and in many ways, it really shouldn’t go away. Unfortunately, the legality of the system is still a cause of concern for the industry and the users, and it is the reason why the system is in the crosshairs of the entertainment industry.

Make no mistakes about it, the technology of bittorrent is not illegal, as you can see by Revision3’s legitimate use of the service. However, the files that you use bittorrent to distribute can be and often are illegal, as is the case with fansubs right now. Even if the series has no American distributor or license holder, downloading unlicensed anime fansubs is still illegal. Why? Because it can and does harm “potential future sales” of the product if or when it becomes available in the US on DVD. But let’s focus on that “if” in that statement. What happens to series that do not become imported?

Let’s take last year’s “Kodomo no Jikan’ as an example. While it was one of the more well written series to have come out in quite some time, it had to deal with a lot of controversy on both sides of the Pacific due to the taboo nature of its plot. First, the production of a US release of the manga was halted before the series ever hit store shelves. When it was adapted into an anime series and aired on Japanese television, it was met with even more controversy and negative press in its own native country.

If the manga was flat-out banned like that in America, then the even more controversial anime is almost certain to never be released over here. So if we wanted to legally watch the show legally in America, how can we?

Buy and import the Japanese DVDs?

Nope. As ridiculous as it sounds, even that’s illegal.

DVDs are “region coded”, which means that they are encrypted with a special password that are meant only to be used on DVD players for a specific country or region. America and Japan fall under different regions, so a Japanese DVD cannot be played on American DVD players and vice-versa. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) states that any unauthorized decryption of copy-protection media, like the region coding on DVDs, is illegal and punishable even if you legally purchased the DVD. “Region Free” DVD players do exist, but they are hacks to break DVD encryption, which makes them illegal under DMCA. That’s the reason why region-free DVD players are only sold on the black market and not at your local Best Buy.

Under the DMCA, there is no legal way possible of ever watching any unlicensed anime show in America, and that is the biggest flaw with this copy-protection system. So we must turn to illegal methods of watching anime because we never know when the opportunity will arise for us to ever watch it legally.

… or in the case of Kodomo no Jikan, if that opportunity will even exist at all…

So if bittorrenting provides the best - and often only - method of receiving anime, how does the anime industry stop illegal file sharing? Well, to quote a bunch of stoners:

Legalize it.

As we can see with the fansubbing community, bittorrent and global distribution is already the direction that the market is going towards. The only thing holding it back is the Japanese companies at the root of the chain. They are reluctant to utilize the technology and go global with their product. They have gone many years on the idea of creating an anime show only for the Japanese market. They spend money to promote the show in Japanese magazines, and they spend money to broadcast the show on Japanese TV. After this, they can finally attempt to make their profit from the series by quickly selling merchandise and DVDs to that Japanese market while the show is still a hot property. Only after this whole process is done in Japan do they even start to think about releasing the show in America.

But with bittorrent and fansubbing, the whole market has changed. They don’t just broadcast a show to Japanese otaku anymore, they broadcast to otaku around the world. And so the only way that they are going to be able to profit off of that global market is to start selling to that global market from the very beginning. Create a show knowing that the Americans are going to watch it via the bittorrent system. Encourage the ratings and hype of the show by advertising to that audience on blogs or other English-language websites. Then start your profit by making merchandise available overseas and begin selling / renting subtitled DVDs while the series is still going on.

This global release strategy is not that unusual of an idea in the entertainment industry. Take Disney’s attitude towards their new Chronicles of Narnia movie. The series has a huge fan base in Japan, so the company spent a lot of work on promoting the film for the Japanese market simultaneously with the American market. The result was that a Japanese subtitle of the film was released into Japanese theaters only a week after it premiered in America. The film has yet to be released in other English-speaking countries like Austrilia or the UK, but it’s already out in Japan. When you know where your market is, that’s where you need to focus your attention.

There is a clear market for brand-new anime in US, and it’s all thanks to the beautifully implemented system of bittorrent and fansubbing. While the technology can be used for illegal purposes, it can also be used for completely legal and legitimate reasons. As long as it works flawlessly - and as long as it’s free of the limits of copy-protection, the DMCA, and other unnecessary restrictions - fansubbing will be there. In order for Japanese companies to adapt to and profit off of this new technology, they must begin treating bittorrent in exactly the same way that many American otaku are treating it:

The new way of broadcasting anime to the world.

Not only were the brothers able to make the cartoonish antics of anime and comics into a feature film, but they were actually successful in making it look incredible instead of just looking completely stupid. The film had enough of that Hollywood shine to it to make the outlandish seem possible.

No matter how easy Hollywood makes it look, that is not something that can be done so easily.

One of the most appealing aspects in anime and comic are that they do not conform to the laws of nature and reality. It’s not that unusual to find all sorts of fanciful ideals like those physic defying battle scenarios being portrayed in the mediums. In fact, it is often harder to find anything actually realistic in anime. Even the character designs themselves break all notions of reality, from the spiky multi-colored hair, to the eyes that occupy three-quarters of the character’s face, to the middle school girls with the D-cup breast size.

Seeing these types of things in real life simply looks ridiculous, and as you can see from this photo of the AFI music video “Girls Not Grey,” it could be quite disturbing at times. Anime and comics are meant to be escapes from the real world, which is why the medium is best left in the world of imagination and not merged into the world of reality.

But the Japanese movie and television industry has built a global reputation over the past few decades on taking such fanciful concepts and ideas and then rendering them in live action. What’s worse is that they have to do it under a very low budget, especially when compared to Hollywood blockbusters. Some iconic images of this genre include the battling rubber-suited monster films like Godzilla, or the spandex ninja “super sentai” shows like Ultraman and Power Rangers. This cheesiness has earned Japanese live-action television and cinema a cult following in the American audience, but when it’s used for adapting anime on to the big screen, it has produced some of the biggest eye-sores ever seen.

In 2004, Evangelion creator Hideki Anno created a live-action adaption of the classic anime series Cutie Honey. Anno grew up with a fondness for sentai and other Japanese live-action series, so when he went to work on the adaptation, he incorporated the same look and feel into the film. The result was something that just looked too cheesy and stupid to be watchable. Don’t believe me? Just watch the first three minutes of this clip from the film:

The ridiculous costumes, poorly rendered special effects, unrealistic action sequences, over-acting… this was an epic failure of a film. Granted, I’m sure that there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor going on with this film, but honestly, it just looks too horrible to even appreciate any kind of commentary it has to offer on the medium.

The next year, Japan came out with another comic book adaptation for the comedy series Cromartie High School. The surreal cast of this comic translated into real life to a dude in a cardboard robot costume, several men jumping around in monkey suits, and a very buff Japanese man who looked absolutely nothing like Queen singer Freddie Mercury. It was completely low-budgeted and tacky… but it actually worked. The original material was just as zany and stupid as the movie that the humor did translate well. It would still be too ridiculous to ever appeal to anyone who wasn’t familiar with the comic, but in this case, the Japanese cheesiness actually worked for an adaptation.

The amazing thing is that these corny films came out only a couple of years ago, right in the middle of a time that Hollywood was having a golden age of comic adaptions. Thanks to The Matrix, a new era of film making began that ushered in many highly successful comic adaptions with that new Hollywood shine, starting with the X-Men movie in 2000. Two years later, a Spiderman adaptation opened to high critical reviews and became the highest-grossing opening weekend for any film up until the point. In the years that followed, numerous squeals to those films and new comic book properties were all been made into live-action films. Past comic-to-movie franchises, such as Superman and Batman, had been revived to have that new Hollywood shine to them. It’s a trend that has going strong these past 8 years, and it shows no signs of slowing down, as you can see with this summer’s release of Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk. While not all of them have been as well received by fans and critics, mostly all of them have done very well at the box office.

So why are Japanese films still missing out on this shine? Is it simply just an issue of budget or is it some kind of cultural lock that filmmakers refuse to break from? That is what was on my mind when I went to the national screening of the 2007 film Death Note last week. One of the series’s main character, a floating Shinigami (death god), was going to be artificially rendered in computer graphics (CG). Looking at pictures of the film, I feared the worse. The character looked like a giant puppet. So I went into the film expecting it to be just as cheesy and ridiculous as Cutie Honey and Cromartie High School.

Much to my surprise, however, the film looked fantastic. The CG character didn’t just look like a puppet. Sure, a lot of the time his movements where static or jerky, but in the few scenes that he played a predominate role in, a lot of detail was given to his movements and facial expressions. And at one particular scene when the Shinigami threw a temper tantrum on the ceiling of the hero’s room, the audience laugh and applauded, a sign of accepting him as an actual living character in the movie.

The CG character had personality, and that’s exactly what the Hollywood shine is all about. When you can make special effects look realistic and give artificial characters a believable soul, then you can successful adapt comics and anime into live-action movies. Death Note was a clear sign that the Japanese were finally understanding this. But no matter how much the Japanese improve, Hollywood is still one step in front of them, and once again, it was because of the Wachowski brothers.

The brothers’ recent adaptation of the classic anime series Speed Racer disregarded all attempts of toning down any anime elements to it. The film was shot in scene-for-scene exactly like an anime movie would play out, but with real-life actors and an unlimited amount of shine and polish. The most used of these anime motifs was that the background image often never showed the background of the scene, but rather displayed colors, lines, and separate images in conjunction with the character’s inner monologue in the foreground of the shot.

Did it work? Depends on who you ask. The film received completely polar opposite reactions of either loving the unique style or hating it with a passion. Personally, I loved every minute of it. The anime style presented an innovated new form of narrative that allowed the viewer to get the background story of a scene as it was going on. Time and storyline shifted all over the place, but the visuals only highlighted the key points that needed the most attention from the viewer. The result was a completely engrossing experience as the viewer gives in to the fictitious world of real-life people doing completely unrealistic things. Speed Racer was anime adapted into live-action, and it was amazing.

Which finally brings me to the upcoming Hollywood adaption of the comic Dragonball. On paper, this looks like a bad idea. In fact, it looks like a horrible idea. If you turn to the internet, you will rarely find anyone actually supporting this film. Instead, people count down the days until the worst movie in the world drops a bomb into the box office. But that is because we think about all the ridiculous, cartoonish antics of the original comic and anime series. We imagine mid-air battle sequences, glowing auras of yellow, and men shooting out balls of energy with their hands.

But take a look at who’s making it - 20th Century Fox. That means big budget, which means detail in special effects, which mean that it will have that Hollywood shine, which ultimately means that it’s going to be a pretty freaking awesome flick!

All of those ridiculous Dragonball things have already been before in Hollywood. How about Neo’s final mid-air battle Agent Smith? Or X-Men’s Storm shifting weather and lightning around her body. Or even Iron Man shooting out balls of electricity to his opponents? If there is there anyone who can handle such a crazy adaption, it is most certainly Hollywood, so we really shouldn’t have much to worry about.

Since the turn of the century, Hollywood has proven again-and-again that it knows how to adapt comics and anime into live-action movies. The Japanese movie industry has been a little late to the party, but even they are begining to create some great looking films that make the ridiculous look believable. It is with this recent track record that I firmly believe that we still have a lot of great live-action anime films to look forward to in the future, no matter how stupid they might sound right now.

No, I’m not putting on a concert… or starting a dorama adaptation… AA the Live is a Twitter aggregate for the anime blogging community. Users can visit the site to see what the Otakusphere is thinking about right now. It’s like a smaller version of Anime Nano, or an Anime Nano Nano, if you will.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro-blogging tool. The concept is simple - just post a small message that’s no more then 140 characters and it will show up on all your friend’s “Twitter feeds.” You can send updates via the website, cell phone text messages, AIM window, or any of the countless websites and applications built around the service. Its addictive simplicity has made Twitter one of the hottest new websites out there right now.

Why Should the Otakusphere use Twitter and AA the Live?

Because it’s makes it easy to get your word out onto the internets!

There are times that you might need to say something, but don’t want to write an entire post on it. It doesn’t take more than 140 characters to say, “This week’s ToLOVEる freaking rocks!” every week, does it? Twitter allows you to say the little things without having to clutter your blog and RSS feeds with it, and AA the Live allows you to see everyone’s Twitter feed in one place.

Another major benefit of Twitter is that it’s live and constantly updating. When there’s an event going on, like an anime convention, you know exactly what’s going on the moment that it happens. I used Twitter to send in live updates and photos from the NYCC last month via my iPhone. When Gia couldn’t get wifi in the panel rooms at ACEN last weekend, she sent in updates to her Twitter account with cell phone text messages.

It’s my goal to have every anime blogger going to Otakon this year to have a Twitter account and to post their thoughts, reactions, and photos live from the convention floor. Thanks to Twitter and AA the Live, you won’t have to carry around a laptop to do live con coverage.

How do I sign up for AA the Live?

First, sign up for Twitter. If you want to upload pictures to your feed, sign up for an account at TwitPic. Then go to this page to submit your twitter user name, customize your feed appearance on AA the Live, and you’re all set. Just Twitter away and it will show up on the page. (^_^)

So hopefully Twitter and AA the Live will be just as addictive to you as it has been to myself in the past week. I’m already planning on adding some new features over the next few weeks, but first we need more feeds and more people updating. Twitter has always had a huge Japanese-speaking otaku community, so let’s get the English-speaking otaku community onto there as well.

It is not a surprise that my rant last week struck some nerves with a couple of readers. Owen over at Cruel Angel Theses wrote the most in-depth dissection I have seen of any of my posts. I don’t think my English teacher even took so much time to criticize my writing! But the point that Owen and many others got wrong with the post was that I do not actually hate the show. In fact, I became a major fanboy for the Tsukasa character and the Lucky Channel segments, which I did mention in the post. But the show was overall very dull and I have very rarely seen anyone really enjoy the show whenever I have seen it screened or shown to friends. Lucky Star, as a show, is neither bad nor all that good. It’s just mediocre.

The point I was trying to make with last week’s post was that despite Lucky Star’s mediocrity, it has gained an insanely huge cult following based only the promise of it was the second coming of Haruhi Suzumiya. I showed this connection happening in Japan with the magazine Comp H and in America with Bandai’s teaser trailer. There was even further news of it last week when ANN reported on an Akiba shop giving away Haruhi / Lucky Star mash-up telephone cards. It is this kind of artificially created hype machine that I was pissed off about, and if you don’t see the connect then you must be living under a rock.

The day after the post went up, I received my package from Amazon, and it did completely change my view and outlook on the series. So this week, I’d like to take a look at the impressive Lucky Star box set that Bandai Entertainment released in the US last week.

Which - and I’m sure this is completely coincidental - is almost exactly like Bandai’s release of that other show a year ago… (>_>)

Some hot “Lucky Star on Haruhi” action

First off, the DVD. I popped in the disc into my PS3, which I primarily use only as a Blu-Ray player. While Lucky Star is not in HD format, the PS3 up-converts the video into 1080p for my 46-inch HDTV. The moment the opening theme song kicks into full swing, I am completely blown away. The show is jaw-dropping beautiful, and I hadn’t even gotten past the first few seconds yet!

In the world in which we watch the majority of our anime downloaded with highly compressed video formats, we often compromise video quality for the convenience and cost of pirating. So after familiarizing myself with watching the series on a small laptop like this…

.. and then suddenly seeing it on the big screen TV like this…

… I was just completely blown away. Besides for the typical artifacts you get with any standard def DVD, the transfer is perfect. Presented in wide screen, the colors are vibrant and bright, and the animation is absolutely solid. Again, I had never considered the show to be so visually stunning before, but the DVD release has proven me wrong. It’s not quite HD, but it’s still very pretty.

Another major hang-up I had about seeing the show in fansubs was the frustration of trying to follow the highly condensed - and often pretty boring - dialog of the series. Due to poor vision, I don’t often read subtitles when watching anime, so I usually end up translating most shows in my head as I watch them. This is pretty mentally exhausting and is the reason why I, unlike most American otaku out there, welcome English dubbing with arms wide open. With a dub, I can focus my attention on the anime artwork and story line without having to bother with translation.

That being said, watching Lucky Star with the dub did eliminate all the frustrations I had with the fansub. I never felt attached to any of the original Japanese voice actresses, so I didn’t have any qualms about letting them go for the new English cast. Ayu Harino did herself a disservice with the unusual voice she did as the lead character, Konata. My guess is that she was trying to do something completely different from her Haruhi voice. Wendee Lee, the most recognizable voice in English dubbing,  does the same thing in English by giving her Konata character a very masculine voice.

The humor translates well into the new language. In the original material, the tsukkomi reactions are given in a very non-aggressive manner, which translates into English as very cynical humor. This works very well, and had me laughing much more often this time around then when I was seeing it fansubbed. The Lucky Channel segments also gains a new life in the dub as the Akira character goes from a moé / yanki split personality in the Japanese version to a cute / total-bitch personality in the English version. The banter between the two Lucky Channel English voice actors gives the segment a much more ad-libbed feel than the original, which results in completely hysterical moments.

The “shooting the breeze” dialogue of the show remains just as boring in English as it was in Japanese, however, something seems even more artificial about the English actresses talking about otaku words and phrases. I was able to pick up on a lot of the obscure references much more easily in the dub. There’s one particular reference to Crayon Shin-chan that I would have never gotten if it weren’t for the excellent vocal work of English cast. Bandai also includes great liner notes inserted with the DVD, which will fill in the gaps to all the things you are bound to miss while watching the show.

Now on to the box. As you can see in the picture earlier in this post, the Lucky Star box is almost exactly like the box Bandai released for that other show last year. However, the little drawer that was in the previous box is removed to make room for the additional number of DVDs in this series. But the art on the box is still fantastic. I particularly enjoyed the clever image on the back of the box of Konata celebrating after reading the headline “ハルヒ二期決定！” on her computer screen.

By the way, that headline translates to “Haruhi Second Season Announced!” in English, which I’m sure is also just a coincidence… (>_>)

The most obvious thing you’ll find when opening the box is the sailor suit t-shirt. Bandai is planning on including such a shirt in all future “special edition” releases of the series in America, including designs of different school uniforms and school bathing suits. I have heard the Bandai reps say a number of times that, “We anticipate seeing a lot of people walking around anime conventions this summer wearing these Lucky Star t-shirts.”

So on that note, I don’t like to post pictures of myself, but if you happen to see this man at any convention wearing this shirt:

You have his permission to kill him on sight, because as you can see in the photo, this t-shirt looks really fucking stupid.

[throws the shirt into the back of his closet, never to see it again]

So the shirt sucks, but all the other extras are good. I was surprised about the cornet shaped screen cleaner. What is it is just a little cornet plushie with a brown cloth inside. What’s clever is that when you pull the brown cloth out of it, it actually looks like chocolate filling being squeezed out of the cornet. I did a double take when I saw this for the first time, and immediately attempted to fold the brown cloth and stuff it back into the plushie to create this illusion again. Kudos to Bandai on that nifty trick.

The CDs are another must-have extra. First up is the CD single to the show’s opening theme song. I have already raved over this song recently, and I even hyped up the single’s B-side the day it came out in Japan almost a year ago. Both songs make this a great disc alone, but we are even given more musical goodness with the Konata character single. The two songs showcase Hirano dropping her stupid character voice to actually sing some cute songs over a playful electronic melody.

So this special edition box set is pretty awesome, but that’s not a surprise. Bandai did do a fantastic job with the release of that other series a year ago, and it just so happens that doing the same thing again will also yield great results. A nice looking art box with a cute trinket and excellent CDs make the premium price worth it for this first DVD. Unfortunately, the t-shirt is a complete dud, and if that’s all that the future special editions of Lucky Star have to look forward to, I would say stick with just getting the regular DVDs to fill up this box. But even the DVDs offer a much better viewing experience then you’ll ever get from fansubs.

Lucky Star is not the second coming of Christ or Haruhi, but at least Bandai’s incredible US release makes this boring show much more tolerable than before.

And that’s all I have to say about that. ;-)

Okay, so I might have said some controversial things on this blog before. I’ve lashed out against the fansub community, criticized major anime news organizations, and advocated the right to lolicon. But I don’t think I have ever said anything so blasphemous against the otaku community as what I have to get off my chest this week.

Are you ready? Here we go…

(Takes in a deep breath)

Lucky Star is not the second coming of Christ.

It’s not even a particularly good show.

(Ducks for cover)

Okay, still with me? Good.

Lucky Star is just not a good show. This slice-of-life comedy involves four girls spending most of the time sitting around and shooting the breeze. Their conversation centers around eating pastries, going to dentist, playing video games, watching anime, reading manga, and other mundane aspects of young geek life. It’s like an otaku version of Seinfeld… except without 99% of the funny moments.

Now don’t get me wrong, the show is not necessary terrible. The comedy is completely hit-or-miss, and when the show hits, it hits hard. The scene where Tsukasa attempts to use a cell phone (pictured below) is probably one of the funniest sequences ever to be animated. As is the cosplay cafe scene, which I will mention again later on in this post. And for the most part, the ending “Lucky Channel” sequences, which are completely separate from the main story line, always deliver some great bouts of comedy.

But the laughs come too few and far in between for this 24-episode series. I remember screening the first couple of episodes to my anime club a year ago when they were just starting to come out in Japan. During each episode, the audience sat there in complete silence, laughing for maybe only one or two sequences in the show. There was even a little hint of frustration and anger over the series because the dialog-intensive nature of the show required us to read a lot of subtitles, which ultimately resulted in very few laughs.

But we continued to watch it every week at the anime club. And when school was over, I continued to watch the show for the rest of that summer. And when the series was finally released in America yesterday, I already had my Special Edition box set in the mail from Amazon with overnight delivery included. Why? Because it is the “muthaf*cking second coming of Christ” Lucky Star!

Well, maybe not Christ exactly, but the show is most certainly billed as being the second coming of Haruhi Suzumiya. And in the world of otaku fandom, is there a deity worshiped more than Lady Haruhi?

That’s the one aspect of this whole mess that is completely understandable. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was a good show. It was better then good, it was amazing. A completely original story line with great characters development was the kind of kick in the pants that the otaku community needed after years of having the same old crap being thrown our way. In my opinion, Haruhi Suzumiya was the best thing to happen to anime since Evangelion back in mid-90’s.

Haruhi Suzumiya came out of no where and blew us all away, and the show’s production company, Kyoto Animation, exploited her success with the release of Lucky Star. Such tactics included casting Haruhi’s voice actress, Aya Hirano, as Konata, the new lead character in Lucky Star. Lucky Star also makes many references to Haruhi through out the series. But the “Second coming of Haruhi” tactic that drew me in came from the March 2007 issue of the newly created “Pretty Girls Only” magazine, Comp Heroine.

As you can see, the cover features the two “Heroines” of these shows, Haruhi and Konata, striking a pose together. Inside the magazine, you will find that the first three articles include a lengthy preview of Lucky Star, a “one year anniversary” tribute to Haruhi Suzumiya, and a 4-page photo spread of the fornmentioned voice actress Aya Hirano. One of Hirano’s pictures included a shot of her surrounded by every Haruhi / Lucky Star publication available at the time.

The magazine is clearly trying to show the reader that Haruhi and Lucky Star go hand-and-hand. It sybolizes Haruhi passing the her great torch to Konata for the next leg of the otaku relay. Bandai Entertainment is trying the same tactic in the US by putting a Lucky Star teaser trailer in their Haruhi release that starts off with the message, “If you like watching Haruhi. then you have to see this…” The trailer is the cosplay cafe scene I mentioned before. Along with being one of the only funny moments in the show, this clip is the most obvious Haruhi reference in Lucky Star.

And God, does this “second coming of Haruhi” promise work! It has given birth to one of the biggest hype machines ever in the history of the medium.

I had picked up the Comp Heroine issue a couple of weeks before Lucky Star premiered.  I had not heard anything about the show up until that point, but just the cover alone completely convinced me that if I liked Haruhi, I was going to also like Lucky Star. Lucky Star became my most anticipated series that season, and just like that, I became part of the hype machine. And even after the show premiered and turned out to be pretty boring, I still watched it. It was my obligation as an otaku to love this show.

This hype machine has gotten ahold of the entire otaku community, and it has gotten to the point of insanity by now. Every single issue of Comp Heroine since then has featured Lucky Star on the cover and has had a shit load of Lucky Star posters, post cards, cell phone trinkets, drama CDs, and other junk included. The photo at the top of this entry shows all the Lucky Star crap I got from just three issues of the magazine over the past year!

Now, probably the fact that the original Lucky Star manga runs in Comptiq, to which Comp Heroine spun off of, might have some influence in the matter. But it is the sad truth that Lucky Star is now the symbol of otaku culture.

And in hindsight, it really has no right to be.

In the world of otaku fandom, is there a deity worshiped more than Lady Haruhi? Yes, and unfortunately it is a golden calf by the name of Lucky Star. It’s a shame that this false idol has been getting the spot light this whole time while so many other (much more funnier) series have just simply fallen to the wayside in its wake.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must fulfill my otaku obligation by opening up this Special Edition box set complete with a t-shirt I’ll never wear, CDs I have already heard, and posters that will just get added to that pile of other Lucky Star crap.

Well, at least the theme song is good…

The “Old” Look

One of the biggest problems with the site’s old design was that I was using an image of Yuki from “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” in my header. See, I’m not all that artistic, so I couldn’t possibly create original artwork for the site. So I did the easy thing… find a nice image off of the internet, and copy-paste it onto my site.

But obviously stealing images like that doesn’t look all the professional, and since I’m going to be officially “press” this summer, I better start acting like one. I can’t hand out a business card with a copyrighted Yuki image on it, can I?

Not to mention that those bastards over at ANN also started using the image in their weekly manga review section… So there goes my hopes of making the image my branding.

So I asked the help of my friend Datura to create a completely original image for the site. Dat understands how to push the right buttons to get to the otaku heart, and often exploits them for her own profit. Whenever she needs me to do something for her, she calls me “senpai” and starts talking in the most moé way possible. She’d get me every time with that. So if there was a person I can rely on to appeal to an otaku audience, it would be her. I commissioned her for the new project.

The task was simple - I need a mascot to become the new “face” of the website. I liked the idea of having a girl reading a book, like Yuki did in the old design. I always thought of the book as the actual “Anime Almanac” and Yuki was reading it to learn about American otaku culture. So I wanted to bring out that idea a little more by having the new mascot reading a book with the words “Anime Almanac” written in katakana. Sure, not everyone knows how to read Japanese, but it would be pleasant surprise to those who do.

“What exactly do you want the girl to look like?” she asks.

You know, something moé. The kind of stuff I normally like.

“Oh, so short blue hair and glasses?”

… yes… and maybe cat ears… (>_<)

I’m just too easy to read.

Within days she had sketches ready for me:

All of it looked fantastic. We worked out which sketch worked the best, and she went to work on coloring. The result is the beautiful image you now see in the banner of the site.

I guess that because she is the moé anthropomorphism of the website, she should have some kind of “-tan” name, but quite frankly, I can’t think of any way of making the word “almanac” sound cute. If you can come up with one, let me know. Otherwise, she will only be known as the nameless Anime Almanac mascot.

So thanks to Datura for the wonderful new look of the website. She does work for commossion, so if you need any kind of anime artwork done, please send her an email at inoxiacommissions {at} gmail {dot} com.