The Unbearable Lightness of Schadenfreude

[krpalmer]

At times, I seem too good at cutting things off. Just as memorable kerfuffles about individual manga volumes being edited seem to have left me unwilling to buy anything at all from some manga companies, so too has the thought of buying any anime DVDs, for about twice the MSRP and half the content as DVDs from other companies, from Bandai Visual (who confusingly have almost the same name as the anime company Bandai Entertainment, one of those "other companies"), vanished from my mind. The whole argument that you get the very highest visual quality for those prices somehow feels like a red herring to me; I keep thinking "if it costs that much to squeeze more quality out of animation on DVD, there's something very wrong with the format..." I've tried to keep telling myself not to feel bad about it all the same, to get used to the fact that there seem to be enough people around willing to shell out those prices to keep them afloat, and to conclude that I don't actually need any single anime title in particular... and then, today, I noticed news that Bandai Visual is going to be delaying its latest releases. No doubt the joke will be on me when they wind up, as the initial tea-leaf reading seems to be wondering, deciding to release exclusively on Blu-ray at $80 MSRP a disc, of course.