[Midonin]

With more and more series getting licensed before they even hit the air, there's one element I've been looking into. Even if the people who choose to get their anime through subtitled streaming, and I hope a lot of people do, even if they were never into anime, there's a lot they have to look at. The art design and color palette a series uses is immediately visible, but Funi/Sentai/etc. don't have control over that, they're not the ones who make it.

What they do have control over is how they write the premise. Most of the time, the premise is accurate to the events in the series, but compared to the Japanese writeup, I wonder if they come across as trying too hard to fit the series into an American marketing perspective.

I know that Sentai's writeup for Mashiro-iro Symphony gave off the wrong tone entirely.

Originally Posted by Mashiro-iro Symphony

Watch it boys: if you're trying to get in, these girls will make sure you stay out! Poor Shingo. As soon as life starts becoming normal, his coed school, Kagamidai, begins the process of merging with Yuihime, an all girls private academy. Not only that, but Shingo's also been picked to be part of a group of test males who will be transferred into a Yuihime classroom. Suddenly, he is surrounded by the enemy, no ammo in sight, and with literally no man power to back him up. How will Shingo survive this death trap of feisty females? Will he learn to coexist, or will he just get his eyes scratched out? Find out in Mashiroiro Symphony ~ The Color of Lovers!

But even if they're accurate to what happens in the show, there's a tendency to go overboard on the puns. Now, I like puns. Wordplay is one of my favorite things in the world. And even for series that make use of extensive wordplay metaphors in the actual program, it's entirely possible to go overboard. Like this one for Upotte!

Originally Posted by Upotte!

Kiss kiss, bang bang! The arms race takes on a startling new development when the arms come with heads, legs and very feminine bodies attached! It’s going to be difficult for newly recruited human instructor Genkoku to adjust to working with a living arsenal of high caliber cuties with tricky names like FNC (Funko,) M 16A4 (Sixteen,) L85A1 (El,) and SG 550 (Sig,) especially since many have hair triggers and there’s no bulletproof vest that can stop a really determined coed! Get ready for explosive situations, armor piercing rounds, cheap shots galore and one VERY shell shocked homeroom instructor in UPOTTE!

But I'm not solely picking on Sentai here. I appreciate the work they do in releasing many more obscure series. But Funi can sometimes fall into the exact same trap as I mentioned above. Like this writeup for B Gata H Kei.

Originally Posted by B Gata H Kei

OMG! There’s this girl at school, Yamada, who wants to make like a hundred sex friends. She totally thinks she can devirginize one hundred different boys! Can you believe that? That’s like every boy in the school. Who does she think she is? I heard from my friend’s neighbor’s cousin’s lab partner that Yamada’s never even been kissed. Oh. My. God. I would totally die. That’s like burn all your makeup and shave off your eyebrows embarrassing. I can’t even think about it. Today at lunch I saw Yamada flirting, like for reals flirting, with that geek Kosuda. You know the guy. Photography club, no muscles, boring face, kind of reminds you of a black-and-white movie. Super lame. If Yamada can’t even make the sex with him, she’ll never score a hundred cherry boys. She needs to take like Sex Ed or something because I heard she can’t give it away!

The idea's clever, but reading it is tougher.

Here's another series they released recently, Steins;Gate. It reads like a stream of consciousness from "Kyouma", similar in style to the writeup above, but is much easier to parse through.

Originally Posted by Steins;Gate

The microwave is a time machine. Okarin proved it. The self-anointed mad scientist nuked bananas into some gelatinous version of the future. Or maybe it was the past. Doesn’t matter. No one thought he could do it, but he did it anyway. He sent text messages through time to people he knew. To his friends. Some of them female. Pretty. He should have been more careful. He should have stopped. Tampering with the time-space continuum attracts unwelcome attention. Clandestine organizations of nefarious origins take notice. SERN. Always watching. Okarin knows; he can feel their eyes. That’s why he started the top secret Future Gadget Lab. To stop them. You should join. We get to wear lab coats, and it’s dangerous. Danger is exciting because it’s deadly. The microwave is a time machine.

I'm not making any judgments on the above series themselves - that's up to each individual person to decide. I'm simply wondering how much of an effect these writeups have. There are other sources for fans to find out what a series' content is like - namely, other fans - but are the people who write these marketing copies trying too hard, or are they on the right track towards catching the eyes of casual fans?