Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirarakim
I get what you are saying here & I think that is a fair comparison but then the question is where are all the mainstream titles?
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I think you probably sort of answered your own question as you went on in your post, and I sort of addressed it in mine a bit as well. If there were an appetite for mainstream shows, there's certainly nothing stopping anyone from going for it. I think there's a bit of a misconception or over-simplification that late-night anime comes
at the expense of mainstream works, but I don't think they're ever really in competition. When the only timeslots easily available are between midnight and 4am, you're going to make shows that appeal to the sort of audiences that will watch even in those timeslots. At other parts of the day, you have to compete with every other form of media and entertainment vying for people's attention. There certainly are a number of anime airing both in primetime and morning slots these days, but except for a few big names (like Gundam and the mainstream shounen shows), these are rarely discussed in the context of anime.
And secondly, I honestly wonder just how many of these titles there ever were at a time in the past. Is this partly just a selection bias? I mean, if you can think of 2 or 3 really good broad-appealing shows each year in the 80s/90s, you can probably still think of 2 or 3 such shows every year even now (maybe more). Yes, there's more "other stuff" so perhaps the percentage seems lower, but again you have to consider that all the late-night stuff would likely never have aired on regular TV otherwise (in many cases it's paid-for like infomercials). I honestly don't know if there's ever been a market for dozens of different mainstream-targetted anime at once, because how many people (edit to clarify: in the mainstream, not just anime fans) do you really think would choose anime over live-action drama and the other content choices available to them?
So yeah... in a strange sort of way, again because of the way that the niche is being lumped with the mainstream in our minds these days, you might even say that "shows with mainstream appeal" is actually a
niche within hardcore anime fandom.
