2013-02-27, 13:55 | Link #21 |
blinded by blood
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The lack of good hard sci-fi is something that bothers me considerably, but softer sci-fi doesn't seem to be slowing down much. I can't speak for anime, really--I've become so frustrated with the medium that I haven't been paying attention to new releases--but the gaming industry has been churning out loads and loads of sci-fi titles.
The Mass Effect series is ridiculously popular, and it draws heavily from 70s and 80s sci-fi tropes. I don't think I'm growing out of anime so much as I simply dislike the state of the industry currently. Japan never managed to crawl completely out of their economic implosion and it's showing quite visibly in the number of otakubait shows that are released every year--and this keeps rising. I miss the wide breadth of genre and theme that pervaded anime throughout the earlier years--it seems that every other show these days is another moe-infused fanservice fest with little actual substance. Oh, I understand why this happens--these kind of stories are cheap and easy to write and by their nature lend themselves to simpler art direction and don't contain budget-draining battle scenes and setpieces. They're gobbled up by the hardcore otaku population in Japan and are really well-suited to selling lots and lots of licensed merchandise. It's just depressing. What happened to the shows like Planetes, Starship Operators, Eve no Jikan, Noein, Dennou Coil? The simple answer is that discerning fans are more expensive to please, so the industry ignores us in favor of the more gullible, more easily amused "moe" fans. The MMO industry has this same issue right now, hence the massive prevalence of the free-to-play with microtransactions model. The oldschool MMO gamers who prefer to pay a subscription fee to guarantee content updates, bugfixes and excellent customer support are being ditched in favor of the fickle, game-hopping, gullible F2P crowd. The current model disincentivizes fostering loyalty in the customer base and promotes a revolving-door playerbase where folks sign up, play for a while, spend some money on the item mall, and then get bored and quit so that the bandwidth and server resources are thusly freed up for the next F2P kiddy. This kind of "fast food entertainment" mentality is not restricted to social and multiplayer gaming alone. It's spread throughout film, literature and... yes, even anime and manga.
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2013-02-27, 14:33 | Link #22 | ||||
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For OVAs, there's Code Geass Akito and Gundam Unicorn. For ongoing TV shows, there's Gyrozetter, Robotic;Notes and AKB0048. Really, you can include Vividred Operation as well. There's pretty much a mini-Renaissance going on for mecha anime. Quote:
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2013-02-27, 14:54 | Link #23 | |||
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AKB0048 is more of an idol show than a mecha show. Quote:
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2013-02-27, 15:16 | Link #24 | ||||
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2013-02-27, 16:13 | Link #26 | |||||||
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At their cores though, these genres are designed to satisfy the empowerment urge. Quote:
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2013-02-27, 16:33 | Link #27 | |||
Me at work
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I know on a whole the lengh of animes has gotten shorter,but there's still a few shows that come out in this day and age that are 1 cour that I figure would be a 3-6 episode OVA if they came out 15 years ago. Quote:
The only difference is in the old days otakus liked their females older and in space rather than younger and in highschool.
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2013-02-27, 17:43 | Link #28 | |
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2013-02-27, 18:08 | Link #29 | |
Love Yourself
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Northeast USA
Age: 38
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Good to know about Steins;Gate; I'll keep that in mind if and when I return to it.
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2013-02-27, 19:52 | Link #30 | ||||
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I don't think that Sci-Fi, in a broader sense, has declined. At least not in sheer quantity. Like I wrote in a previous post on this thread, I think that Sci-Fi is still reasonably popular. But Sci-Fi has shifted based on how the real world itself has changed over the past couple of decades. Steins;Gate and Psycho-Pass are good examples of this. Neither of these shows has a mecha in it. Neither of them have androids or robots or AIs as major cast members. The sci-fi elements of these shows are visually subtle. Sci-Fi used to make people think of things like Robocop, the Terminator, big mechanical monsters roaming about, and large fancy spaceships with intricate high-tech details all over its exterior. This sort of industrialist and "heavy machinery" sci-fi has largely faded away, because it never fully panned out in reality itself. Yes, you could say that VRO is a "Mecha" show that substitutes the actual mecha for slightly armored protagonists wielding mechanical weapons. But even if so, that in itself says something about where sci-fi is going in the world of anime. It's slowly going away from the classic giant humanoid mecha, and the fancy schmancy spaceship. If you just like general Sci-Fi, then this isn't necessarily a problem. But if you like mecha, then it could be a problem for you. So I sympathize with what some other people have wrote on this thread about mecha. I think there was a time when millions upon millions of young boys all around the world (including Japan, perhaps especially Japan) dreamed about building and/or piloting big, high-tech machines. And that helped fuel the Sci-Fi shows of the era, both in live-action and animation. But times have changed. It's a nuanced thing, and it is hard to put it into words, as Bri said. But let's just say that I think the "nerd" of today is not as much into robotics, engineering, and outer space exploration as the "nerd" of the 70s and 80s was. This probably includes otakus as well. Quote:
I mean, Code Geass was huge. NGE was huge. TTGL wasn't as big as either of those two, but it was still a very popular show that was widely talked about in the anime fandom and sold well on DVDs/Blu-Rays. Quote:
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And personally, I think you might be broadening the definition of mecha to the point where it's indistinguishable from generic Sci-Fi. If that is what happens to the genre definition for mecha, then mecha really is dead or on life support. Just think of what's happened to "Slice of Life"... Even if your right, and to be fair, these can be very significant differences for some people.
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2013-02-27, 20:14 | Link #31 |
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I recall reading something about how the target demographic (AGE was meant to compete with tokusatsu for the 6 to 12 year old market) couldn't connect with the show as things like space colonies were beyond their imagination. Something inside just died a little when I read that. I guess that is what is like to grow old and out of touch
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2013-02-28, 00:01 | Link #32 | ||||||||
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The fact remains that there are quite a few mecha shows on right now, there were quite a few in 2012, and there are looking to be quite a few later this year. Quote:
Mecha shows, especially the traditional ones, don't have all that much relationship to science fiction. It just so happens that there are some prominent shows that combined the two. Quote:
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There's also Kingdom and maybe the Berserk films as well. They may look awful, but they're definitely trying something new.
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2013-02-28, 00:32 | Link #33 | |||||
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That is the core of a "mecha as primary genre" show - Giant humanoid mechas being piloted by humans. Arguing that Vividred is a "traditional mecha show" when it doesn't even have that core honestly seems a bit absurd to me. You put all this importance on a bunch of secondary tropes while basically ignoring the very core of what makes mecha mecha. Quote:
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Sheer quantity of mecha shows doesn't achieve that alone, particularly when the quantity of anime shows in general is up in recent years, and particularly when some of the shows you listed are arguably not even mecha shows. But even if you really have sheer quantity on your side, the fact that none of these shows is having a major Nisemonogatari/SAO-level impact means that the genre itself can't be that popular right now. If something is enjoying a renaissance, then that means it's popular. It should be "trending", in Twitter-speak. I don't see mecha "trending" right now. Quote:
If nothing else, Gundam Age's lack of success may well signify that the current kid generation in Japan is not interested in mecha.
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Last edited by Triple_R; 2013-02-28 at 00:45. |
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2013-02-28, 01:36 | Link #34 | ||
勇者
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Tesla Leicht Institute
Age: 34
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2013-02-28, 01:37 | Link #35 | |
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I cursed the blasted granpa. Sorry... just my opinion.. and the series is just.. well.. MHO... |
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2013-02-28, 02:35 | Link #36 |
Gamilas Falls
Join Date: Feb 2008
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Age: 46
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Gundam Unicorn is doing extremely well in sales. I don't think anything caught it in 2012 in individual disc sales. Yamato 2199 doesn't even try to compete with that, and it hold high sales in 2012 as well. Yamato 2199 is coming out the same way, but faster, having completed 14 episodes since April of 2012 (4 Chapters) with the end likely coming out in the Fall (probably before the last Gundam Unicorn episode). Plus Yamato 2199 will be on TV stating in April for a 26 episode series that will also end in the Fall.
Yamato 2199's 36,000 average is pretty good for disc sales from what I hear. Meanwhile Gundam Unicorn sports an average in disc sales of over 185,000.
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2013-02-28, 04:01 | Link #37 | ||
Licensed Hunter-a-holic
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That said, even if it's not among the more popular genres currently, I do not think that is any indication that it is not still a major draw point to the hardcore fandom in Japan, especially with this example (there are multipliable reasons for AGE's failure(s) outside of the lack of interest in the mecha genre relative to the older era. Afterall, When Unicorn is the most successful OVA of all time and Code Geass: Akito the Exile manages to bring in a 30K+ recently, it's clear that there is still a great interest in mecha) If you take a look at the number of mecha shows that aired/shown in the last few years, most of them enjoyed a decent-to-good success financially (with a good number of them getting a very mixed reaction to their content). So even if they aren't the titles that sell like hotcakes or are the most talked about, they still manage to attract a fair amount of people who are interested in following these series. And since it's been mentioned here, Vividred and similar shows e.g. Symphogear and the like, even if not traditional mecha anime, still takes a lot of themes and elements from older mecha shows and incorporates them into its narrative and part of it's appeal. So even if they aren't mecha at their core, the fact that a lot of the influences and components that make up that core are from mecha anime shows that traditional mecha is still popular enough to exist across different genres, even if they aren't in the same form as typical mecha anime. I think that there is still an interest in traditional mecha shows, just that there hasn't been a show recently that's been purely mecha to make it break through and become a strong presence again. Even then I think it's one of those mainstay genres that won't go away even if it's having a bit of a slump. Quote:
It's hard to know for certain if such claims were accurate or were they just an attempt to save face after AGE's less than stellar figures came in and the top brass realised that the show was tanking harder than anyone could imagine. I'm tempted to agree that it played some part in kids not being interested in the shows setting (there isn't really that much of an interest in space is in the older days, going by modern trends, I'd think) but I wonder if that would be the case had the marketing part of the project hadn't downplayed the shows existence and eventually abandoned it, or if the creative team behind the project knew what they were doing or had a clear idea of what AGE was meant to be about. And even if interest in traditional mecha had dwindled severely, would that deter interest in AGE if it turned out to be interesting for kids? Trends only show what is the most popular currently, but they are not set in stone and change accordingly to what the viewers is interested in seeing/buying. Especially with a name like Gundam. What I took from Gundam AGE's failure is that you can't just slap the Gundam name on anything and count on brand power as a guaranty for success. Especially not without some sort of plan or idea of what you are trying to achieve or create.
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2013-02-28, 08:34 | Link #38 | ||
Me at work
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Now,I'm no mecha expert but I think part of the issue here is that you are limiting mechas to "huge robots" while that's just one subgenre,just look at a show like Infinite Stratos ,I often here that show called a mecha and the characters don't pilot huge robots.
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2013-02-28, 08:44 | Link #39 | |
Japanese Culture Fan
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Really, I don't think mecha is as much of a genre as it is a story device. The reason that it is called a genre may be is a marketing tactic to attract people who have a thing for watching characters manually pilot massive humanoid robots. |
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2013-02-28, 08:54 | Link #40 | |
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1. How do we define what a mecha is? 2. I'll take something from someone else's playbook about distinguishing between anime where a harem exists and an anime that's about the harem; how do we define a show that has mecha and a show that's about mecha? Edit: Genre qualifier thread ahoy! xD
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Last edited by Akito Kinomoto; 2013-02-28 at 09:24. |
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