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Originally Posted by Triple_R
I also think that Nanoha could be mainstreamed with some edits, and pitching it at a young female audience.
A lot of the all-girls shows aimed at otakus could conceivably be pitched to young female audiences if marketed well and maybe edited slightly. It's not hard for me to see where teenage girls could like something like K-On!, for example.
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Well, this goes back to the point raised earlier, that when people are talking about "mainstream" here they're mostly talking about shows aimed at adults. If you're talking about making anime more popular by aiming them at children (or bringing over kids' shows), then there's already a long history of this, and it still happens today.
Personally, as I said before, I'm still somewhat sceptical that there's a whole ton of shows that are good candidates for this sort of market shift, and that these shows really have that much more potential to find space in that crowded market than in the collector one they're already in. (In the end it's not different: just because a show exists that could be marketed at a certain broader demographic doesn't mean that you can actually pull it off.)
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Originally Posted by creb
Most, if not all, long term western fans come to accept things like panty shots of 12 year old girls is "normal" and if we're not into such things, have become good at ignoring it. But, to a neophyte, it can be quite jarring. It may not be fair to tar an entire industry with one brush, but when people are new to something, that's exactly what they tend to do.
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Well, it's specific content that needs to go mainstream, not "the anime medium" (or however you want to describe it). For example, (even though this goes back to a "mainstream with kids" example), a show like Pokemon was popular because it was Pokemon. Likewise with things like Yugioh and others. The association with this broader category we call "anime" really doesn't matter, nor does its apparent distinction from "cartoons". The fact that it's animated in Japan isn't the selling point, it's the broad appeal of the content.
So in the end, it doesn't matter so much what stereotypes Western fans may have of "anime" because the mainstream just has to accept the specific product, not everything it's associated with.
This still doesn't bypass how incredibly hard it is to get someone to give a "serious adult animated show" a chance when it's so outside the norm generally speaking. It doesn't really matter whether it's animated in Japan, North America, Europe, or wherever else in that sense. Animated shows aimed at kids (that have a little hook for adults) are much more common (but still not what's being called "mainstream" in the context of this thread).