[Saturn Beaver]

Originally Posted by Triple_R

I very strongly disagree with you here, and am a bit surprised to read you say this, LS.

NGE is the best selling anime of all-time, and it has plenty of character development and storyline.

Most (if not all) of the Gundam animes also have plenty of character development and storyline, and they sell extremely well too.

Code Geass had a very complex storyline, and loads of character development, and it sold very well.

Nanoha A's had excellent character development, and simple but solid storylines, and it sold well.

Bakemonogatari had a tight overarching plot, several solid arcs, and mostly smooth character development. It sold quite well.

Ditto for Clannad and Clannad: After Story.

And I could go on and on and on here. The vast majority of well-selling animes have good character development, and intriguing storylines.


Sure, but good marketing is not mutually exclusive with good drama, and we shouldn't pretend that it is.


No it's not. A good quality anime will get you more viewers and buyers than a poor quality one, all else being equal.

Now that I think about it, this is a bit off-topic, so I put in a spoiler box (besides, it 's a bit long, not more than usual though). I don't know if any continuing discussion should be done here, or at least it needs to tie in more to Ore Imo somehow.

Spoiler for reply:

Ehh, I can see Last Sinner's point here. The way I see it, marketing is not so much as in advertising or promoting your show or anything (it's important, yes, but not the most), but to correctly identify the current market's tastes and fit your product accordingly. As such, sometimes a product can be written very well in its genre, but that type itself isn't what the general public wants.

As such, just taking your list as an example, while I agree that those are good quality anime with huge sales, but it's also has wide demographic appeal. They got the basics down like good animation and all that, there's good action for the hot-blooded fans, good romance subtext between good looking boys and girls for fans of both gender, and for those that wants it, there's great plot and character developments as well. And thus, compared to similar things that's executed less well, the better one will perhaps sell more, but that wasn't the comparison here. Often, there's good quality stuff but they're either in one of the less popular genre (sport, like Cross Game) or is more controversial/bizarre than your usual anime. And while they're popular with their own fans, often making it a cult classic, sometimes even then it just sell less than things geared more to suit people's tastes, even if the quality is not as great.

Therefore, the studio being a business, sometime opt for the latter rather than the former. After all, what business wants more is more profit, if great quality can gets more profit is fine, but most of the time they won't trade profit just for better quality. I mean, great is called great because it stand out compared to the rest (otherwise it'll simply be average) and it's hard to achieve. As such, rather than scrapping less-than-great work in order to rework it to be better, it's much easier to just adjust it to fit the audience's taste better, as often the difference in sales isn't that great to warrant the extra effort anyway. And yeah, love it or hate it, jthat's just how businesses operate - not just in anime or even in media, but pretty much anything commercial.

Originally Posted by Triple_R

Ok, let's back up here a bit.

Ore no Imouto had a lot of drama in its first five episodes. It took itself and it's characters and it's narrative fairly seriously at that point. It was clearly selling itself, in part, as having gripping drama (you honestly found nothing the least bit dramatic or intense about Kyousuke's confrontation with his father, or about the various confrontations between Ayase and Kirino?).

Really, I can understand where Reckoner is coming from. If an anime presents itself as having a lot of drama and storyline-focus for the first five episodes, then that will create a certain level of expectation in the minds of many viewers for what to expect of the anime going forward.

It's great that Ore no Imouto does comedy well, but after doing a lot of drama in the first five episodes, I don't think we should fault folks for expecting this anime to continue to deliver on that (which honestly I don't think it has).

I completely agree with you at this point. Taking myself as an example, I come in the series blind and based on the first 5 ep, I'm thinking of this as a serious drama as well. Not that it'll be completely dark or anything, as there'll be some comedy here and there as well, but this is something that I can take seriously. If someone behaving strangely, there's a good reason behind it unlike in regular comedy (don't think too much about it/that's what makes it funny lol).

And really, it's because of this that I found myself not enjoying episodes after ep 5, or finding Kirino really insufferable. So yeah, I agree that thinking of it more as a comedy is perhaps more suitable for enjoying it, although I suspect we'll be having some more drama moments as well near the end of the season to act as a finale.