Quote:
Originally Posted by Sackett
Sum up: Insulting. Lazy. Gratuitous. Creepy. Inserted into shows I want to watch and would like to be able to show my girlfriend without her thinking I'm some kind of pervert.
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Your entire post was interesting, though I'm not going to respond to each point. (I don't totally agree with all the arguments, but I think I see where you're coming from.)
On the one hand, I understand the basic complaint that there are shows with interesting premises but are presented in such a way that deliberately limits or "pigeonholes" their appeal.
That being said, if you think of late-night anime as largely replacing the role of OVAs in the 80s/90s, then I think it sort of makes more sense why it is that way. These are shows that would never have been green-lit if they had to air in prime-time or morning time blocks (and so had to appeal to a much wider audience). In a sense, I guess you might even say these are shows that sometimes deliberately
flaunt their hyper-focus on their target audience to the exclusion of others (and those within that target group may feel rewarded by that, since it provides something they can't find elsewhere).
With that being your criteria, I can't help but think you'd almost be better off to just ignore almost all late-night anime and treat it like the OVA market of old (obscure and only followed by hardcore fans). It's funny because on sites like these all anime gets merged into this giant mega list as if they're all the same just because they're all "Japanese animated TV shows", but I think most of Japan remains rather blissfully unaware of all the stuff that airs in late-night, instead familiar only with mainstream animated movies (like Ghibli), family shows that air in primetime, and maybe whatever their kids watch in the mornings. So basically, it's no different from how Americans treat cartoons; there's awareness of there being some more "adult" cartoons out there, and some of them get some popularity, but most people only pay attention to mainstream animated movies (like Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks), primetime cartoons and "Saturday morning cartoon" stuff, if anything. Most people don't necessarily judge the overall balance of cartoons being produced and argue that "the medium" needs to produce more works for a different audience, but that's sort of the equivalent of what you're saying here with anime. In other words, normally people's exposure is more naturally compartmentalized, whereas we've now broken down these natural barriers.
I think this issue probably stems from the past; in the 80s/90s, being an anime fan had certain connotations based on the limited selection that were popular and being brought over at the time. So even if you were a fairly-broad anime fan, that was still a rather small list, and wouldn't likely have included anything that would be so obscure as to fall into what currently airs as late-night TV. Most of that you could have shown to anyone, if they were interested. Nowadays, anime fans are picking from a much wider repertoire that includes basically anything from Japan, many of which were never designed to be mass-market shows in the first place. And then, having now included the niche market fare in our general selection, people then note that there are more niche shows than there used to be -- which is true because we never paid attention to the ultra-niche stuff before, as it was too obscure!
At the end of the day, I don't think there's anything preventing the players in Japan from funding more shows that air in prime-time or morning timeblocks and thus are aimed at a wider audience, if they see interest is there. While there's some overlap in terms of the companies involved, I think the late-night market largely stands aside the mainstream market, and the former isn't really cannibalizing the latter. Many of the smaller studios we have today wouldn't exist if not for the niche markets, because the market for mainstream animated TV shows just isn't that big. I think it stands to reason that if the niche really wanted to push their content towards the mainstream (as you're advocating here), more shows would simply be mainstream and not part of the niche in the first place (i.e. if they're shows your grandma would watch, they wouldn't air it at 2:00am). Not all TV anime was created equal.