It finally clicked for me. Hollywood gets ahold of a popular franchise like The Witcher and seemingly uses it as a medium to educate rather than entertain. They try to flip the script and push a message, often straying far from the source material.
Anime, on the other hand, usually has the manga releasing weekly or monthly. The fanbase is essentially “voting with their wallet” on which series they want to see adapted. When a studio picks it up, they just adapt it pretty faithfully. You get exactly what you paid for—the story you already love, just animated. It’s refreshing to watch a medium where the priority is giving the people what they actually want.
Anime exists to sell the manga which has much stronger profit.
In the US they are trying to sell the adaptation itself. The fact that that adaptation usually sucks speaks to American companies not loving the anime but looking at dollar signs.
This is the same reason all the D&D movies suck ass.
Also if you are paying for a streaming service, no matter how many times you watch something it will still go away because its not voting with dollars per show, they are experimenting with how much they can not pay for in licensing before you quit.
So you’re saying “go woke go broke”?
No, not at all. All art has a message or belief (usually progressive, at that), anime is created in a conservative hellscape and so usually simply has ideas you already internalized and take for granted (freedom from oppressive systems, equality, etc etc). I won’t make assumptions about you, but many idiots and tourists often also just ignore the message of Japanese works and claim it’s ‘apolitical’ or whatever fake standard they pretend to have.
The reason eastern media tends to be better is because it usually has less fingers in the pie. Most of the best anime, manga, and even games can ultimately be attributed to a single person’s vision, either because they had a hand in every production based on their creation or because the studies stayed true to their vision as a rule. That isn’t the case with Western entertainment, Spider-Man has been recycled through dozens of different authors with even more interpretations, it is not the vision of any single person anymore. Not to mention design by committee nonsense that makes up the biggest names in Western media
I really do think Western media is more likely to hit you over the head with it’s message than Japanese media though.
That’s just not true.
P4 was so painfully obvious about it’s messages of tolerance and feminism that some people thought it was even more progressive than it was intended to be (making naoto out to be trans instead of the message it intended: acceptance of women in all areas of life). Wonder Egg literally had someone fight a physical manifestation of transphobia that was threatening to ‘cut it off’ when talking to a trans girl just to make it so obvious it’s impossible for those stupid people i mentioned before to ignore it. Killing slimes for 300 years is entirely based off of being anti-work culture. I haven’t watched One piece but it’s apparently obvious in it’s message against authoritarianism, just to point out a big one. Anti-homophobia messages tend to be said out right in long running shows or yuri/yaoi shows. Nothing gets more brow beat-y and obvious than anti-war and anti-violence stories in eastern media.
Or maybe anime storytelling is untapped creative ground that Western production does not cover. In other words, familiarity breeds contempt.
What did the witcher tv series try to educate us about? havent seen it.
I dunno. I watched the Witcher season one adaptation and thought it was pretty good. I don’t remember any “education” or overt political messaging.
Seems like bog standard conservative chud hot take to me. But I could be wrong.
I’m trying to be nice about it since this isn’t a political community and i don’t want to cause problems with the mods here, but yes you are correct. This stems entirely from media illiteracy.
‘Voting with your wallet’ is an odd way of putting it though.
I’m no expert on manga publishing by any means, but you still have to get noticed by the industry before getting published. The difference I suspect has more to do with artists being able to present an individual, cohesive vision, and ‘trialling’ manga being relatively cheap and low-risk for the publisher when it’s just a way to pad out a magazine which will sell regardless. Meaning there’s more original, creative ideas presented to the audience, but it’s not really a consumer issue until it consequently reaches a certain level of popularity.
You’re probably right on the faithful adaptation though, the manga basically gives the producers a storyboard to work off of. Hollywood suffers from the exact opposite issue to being ideological I think, they’re often produced by committee without a cohesive vision. A show’s good because of a clear, purposeful narrative, which hinges on the author’s messaging.
Now thats a showerthought
