The Glass-Half-Empty Department Chimes In
May. 11th, 2010 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn my latest "quarterly reviews" of the anime I've been watching, I've enthused a bit about the baseball anime Cross Game. Part of that may have been because I grew to think of the series as a sovereign counterexample against fulminations that all anime is somehow "grotesque," pitched to tiny yet creepy demographics... although, of course, there are other things I like about it as well. With all of that, though, there was the ambiguous feeling that I was watching it without compensating its creators, but it seemed unlikely that it would be licensed for distribution in North America. After all, it's a sports anime, and one refrain to sports anime getting licensed over here seems to be lamentations that it just didn't sell after all.
When I heard that the Cross Game manga the anime was made from had been licensed by Viz, that did get my attention; it seemed somehow "good enough." Then, though, just a few days ago someone happened to notice a graphic attached to an online update from Viz about them streaming the anime... the one problem was that in the context of the anime message board I learned the news from, people have grown very suspicious about Viz's efforts to release anime. (They also tend to be very suspicious about Viz's manga releases as well, although perhaps some have unbent a little of late...) Complaints about bits of music being left out keep cropping up, and in a sort of "bad cooking, and such small portions!" followup, Viz can let releases just sort of trail off into limbo. (Every so often, though, I start wondering if this is just Viz staying in business by being ruthless enough to not chase "fans"...)
However, I can at least begin to wonder about how opinions get shaped. It had seemed to me before that Cross Game getting licensed over here would be an impressive surprise, and people on that very board have been interested about other series getting streamed, if through other services. Perhaps I can at least hope the unthinkable happens again.
When I heard that the Cross Game manga the anime was made from had been licensed by Viz, that did get my attention; it seemed somehow "good enough." Then, though, just a few days ago someone happened to notice a graphic attached to an online update from Viz about them streaming the anime... the one problem was that in the context of the anime message board I learned the news from, people have grown very suspicious about Viz's efforts to release anime. (They also tend to be very suspicious about Viz's manga releases as well, although perhaps some have unbent a little of late...) Complaints about bits of music being left out keep cropping up, and in a sort of "bad cooking, and such small portions!" followup, Viz can let releases just sort of trail off into limbo. (Every so often, though, I start wondering if this is just Viz staying in business by being ruthless enough to not chase "fans"...)
However, I can at least begin to wonder about how opinions get shaped. It had seemed to me before that Cross Game getting licensed over here would be an impressive surprise, and people on that very board have been interested about other series getting streamed, if through other services. Perhaps I can at least hope the unthinkable happens again.