Streaming: Autumn 2017 anime first impressions

Whew. There are a lot of heavy-hitting sequels this season, and also quite a few cases of series changing streaming services in between seasons, so putting this first impressions post has taken absolutely ages. Shoukoku No Altair, Ballroom He Youkoso are both continuing from the Summer season and on top of that my schedule is already pre-filled with a staggering number of follow-ups to beloved titles, which means that anything brand new has a harder job than usual to get my attention. I also decided to try out a HIDIVE subscription since it isn't all that pricey and they snagged a couple of titles I wanted to see; the lack of apps is still disappointing. I can't get the service running on any of my usual devices at all. Please hurry up with a solution, HIDIVE, or stop enforcing exclusivity!

I don't have much time to moan about the state of streaming in the UK this time, partly because I want to go and clear New Danganronpa V3 as soon as I finish this post and partly because actually, we're in a very fortunate position now. Animax UK is as good as dead, Viewster gave up on simulcasting, and the US anime distributors finally remembered that we exist. If HIDIVE sorted out the app issue and Netflix would just stop blocking legal simulcasting from titles which would otherwise have appeared on Crunchyroll, everything would be close to perfect.

So with all of that said and done, I'll move on to the first impressions of all of the new anime content!

Streaming: Summer 2017 anime first impressions

Wow. Crunchyroll nearly completely wiped out when it came to licensing high quality titles this season; if I wasn't already subscribed for a year I'd have seriously considered taking a break if they hadn't snagged Jigoku Shoujo. It's not a strong season to begin with - the majority of titles are 'ok' rather than 'unmissable' - but it's the first where Crunchyroll's dominance in the UK has started to show major cracks. The main culprits are Amazon Prime, who have grabbed some high quality titles once again, and Sentai's new venture HIDIVE. Netflix are also sitting on the sidelines, singlehandedly justifying piracy for many viewers by withholding all international access for anything they touch and treating the anime community like a mindless cash cow. Screw Netflix.

Amazon's anime push is nothing new for this season, but Sentai's relaunch is actively frustrating. To draw attention to their homegrown service they have stopped allowing other anime sites to show their content, which means that none of their shows can be viewed on half my devices and there are no apps whatsoever since the new site is still in beta. In addition, the billing/trial system is poorly described and confusing. Even though their support team is friendly and responsive, by now we've all gone through this many times before with overly ambitious new site launches in legal streaming and it's never fun.

Manga Entertainment's Jerome accidentally hit the nail on the head in one of his characteristic Twitter rants recently when he said, "Isn't that weird? Usually consumers see monopolisation as a bad thing, but anime fans r screaming out for 1 source for everything."

In my mind, there's a simple explanation. Competition is important. The ideal anime streaming market would have sites like Crunchyroll, Netflix, Amazon, Funimation and HIDIVE all streaming every show, worldwide, with subtitles in multiple languages. If Netflix wants to push this stupid enforced 'box set' marathon model, let them do so. If HIDIVE think they are best positioned for providing a unified streaming-and-physical service to the US and English-majority regions, let them. If Crunchyroll think a completely free service on a delay is worth more to fans on a budget while Viewster think fans deserve day-and-date with adverts, fine. The customers can pick which site they find easiest to use, and everyone has legal access to as much anime as possible. The best sites will get the most customers and the anime industry will get feedback on what works best, without all of the lies, exaggerations and excuses.

What we have now is not competition. It's the opposite. As a fan, I don't want to watch some random shounen anime on my platform of choice, so I have to follow the shows I want to watch to the platforms where they end up even if it destroys my viewing experience, as it can easily do when a service is poorly run (Animax UK, I'm talking about you). Fans can't afford to subscribe to half a dozen different platforms to watch half a dozen different shows. Fans can't afford new computers just to have something which works to stream through a certain badly-written website. Fans can't afford to spend hours each week trying to piece together the puzzle of working out which site has the show they want to see for their region (if anyone has it at all) and which language options are available where. It's even worse for casual or new fans, who have no real investment in the industry to encourage them to put up with all of this disorganisation.

Piracy is flourishing because of this baffling parody of the spirit of competition, where the services with the most money grab all of the best shows and lock them away from potential viewers. For most of these sites the distributors aren't being paid based on the number of viewers, they're being paid based on how exclusive their contract is. Distributors like Jerome are incentivised to give exclusivity contracts to each service (or not stream at all, thanks Jerome), and thus we end up in a situation where almost every single title this season is exclusive to one streaming service in the UK. The services don't even specialise in anime genres, so one season you'll have to go to Amazon Prime for your mature, female-orientated entertainment and the next that stuff will be on Crunchyroll instead and Amazon Prime only has action fantasy shows. The cheapest way to subscribe is via annual subscription, but to subscribe to each and every streaming site costs several times more than most fans' anime budgets. Ironically, this current interpration of 'competition' is probably crippling the spending power of Jerome's own physical anime buyers more than he realises.

In short, anime streaming is still a huge mess and the distributors are completely to blame. But as I love anime and hate piracy, I'm forced to put up with it and can't do anything about it other than complain.

So let's switch topics and talk about my first impressions of this latest batch of anime. On top of the titles I liked from the selection below, I'm still streaming Boku No Hero Academia, Nobunaga No Shinobi and Sakura Quest from previous seasons. Crunchyroll's lineup page still has a blank slot which I'm guessing will be filled later in the season too.

Streaming: Spring 2016 anime final impressions

I have to start this post with a brief rant, unfortunately. I complained in my first impressions that Sakamoto Desu Ga? (Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto) - which happened to be one of the shows I most wanted to see - was unavailable to us in the UK. At the time I blamed Sentai for only picking up US rights even though they serve UK customers on their streaming site, but it turns out the real reason is much more dumb and depressing.

Manga Entertainment are one of the biggest (and oldest) anime companies in the UK. At the MCM Comic Con event at the end of May they formally announced that the rights for Sakamoto Desu Ga? (Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto) lay with them. The head of the company, Jerome Mazandarani, went on Twitter to explain that he had the streaming rights but deliberately refused to make it available here because he wasn't offered enough money to allow the simulcast sites to show it (the amount he indicated was $150 per episode - which actually sounds quite generous given the size of the UK streaming market).

You would think that turning down a free offer of cash of any amount sounds crazy, but it makes sense when you understand that the staff at Manga are furiously conservative and believe that allowing viewers to watch anime legally makes it impossible to sell on home video. This puts them in a weird position where they don't want to allow people on low incomes to have legal access to anime (streaming is much cheaper than buying DVDs) but they also hit out at the companies who support fans by offering premium editions on disc and free simulcasts for those who can't afford the disc releases until prices come down. I personally think that Manga UK's business model is completely unsustainable, but if they want to lose goodwill and the benefits of the advertising potential simulcasting offers then there's nothing I can do to stop them.

However, in one final twist of the knife, footage emerged from the Manga panel at the event which showed Jerome telling the audience how he'd recently watched the latest episode on Crunchyroll (via a VPN or proxy of some kind, because it's not available in the UK thanks to him). He's worried about legal streamers reducing his sales, yet not pirates or those who watch streams from other countries to evade barriers he created?

Screw you, Manga UK. You're the reason I'm not buying your discs, not Crunchyroll.

With that off my chest, here's what I thought of the spring anime season shows that I followed. Funimation Now and Crunchyroll combined to satisfy all of my requirements this season, making it easier than ever before to stay up to date on all of the shows I wanted to watch (other than Sakamoto Desu Ga?). Both services publish a schedule and release episodes punctually with warnings of any service interruptions to allow fans to plan ahead, and for the first time I was able to finish the season when it actually ended because nothing was held back for weeks in this country. I suppose I should be disappointed that Funimation Now delayed the launch of their console apps but I'm honestly so frustrated about Manga and other UK-specific concerns that nothing else seems all that important.

First and foremost, the post-season ranking.

1. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
2. Joker Game
3. Kiznaiver

Hey, my prediction was quite accurate this time! There were a lot of average titles and very few gems, but JoJo, Kiznaver and Joker Game were definitely the most interesting shows I most looked forward to watching each week. JoJo is continuing on into the summer season, thankfully. Morikubo Showtaro has been my favourite thing about the episodes to date.

Fourth place isn't that bad, Atsushi...

Thoughts about Diabolik Lovers

The text below contains spoilers for the Diabolik Lovers anime and the first game in the series.

Streaming: Autumn 2013 anime final impressions

What a roller-coaster of a season - and that's just the industry developments rather than the anime itself!

At the start of the autumn 2013 season the UK was down to just one active streaming service: Crunchyroll. Daisuki had gradually dropped support for the UK from a large portion of its library, Anime On Demand had silently stopped adding new content and things were looking very gloomy indeed.

It wasn't until after the first few episodes had aired that things suddenly started happening. Anime Limited revealed a partnership with French company Wakanim, bringing Samurai Flamenco and Kill la Kill to UK viewers where we'd lost all hope of a license. Then a few weeks later, Animax launched a service in the UK with some of the missing simulcasts and all of the 'lost' Anime On Demand titles! After having used them both, Wakanim's page seems much easier to use than Animax's - which doesn't list episode numbers and titles clearly in most views, making it frustrating to navigate. Anime Limited is upfront about the schedule for their streams, while Animax is disturbingly similar to Anime On Demand in its belief that the viewers will wait patiently with no information as episodes go up on weird days or experience silent delays (at the time I'm writing this, the last episode of Magi went up eight days ago in the US and it's still missing from Animax's site). Animax's video quality for its free simulcasts is also the least impressive of any site I've used, so with no PS3 or iOS app and the quality issues I'm not tempted to splash out on a subscription. It doesn't even let you view in higher quality or disable the advertisements if you pay. The nail in the coffin is that they don't seem all that interested in taking on constructive criticism; customers have to accept their unusual system or have the simulcasts they've licensed withheld entirely.

Furthermore, the streaming models used by these new sites are going to cause me logistical problems next season as I'm going on holiday and will miss the free streaming window for Magi, Kill la Kill and Samurai Flamenco. Although Wakanim will probably let me catch up without any problems, the only way to catch up with Magi will be to take out a subscription to Animax. As much as I love Magi I'm unwilling to risk paying for a subscription to watch one or two missed episodes with an unreliable player so I'll probably end up dropping the show until the Blu-ray release. I really wish that the UK companies would get these shows on Crunchyroll where I can take advantage of my annual subscription to get the most out of them.

Anyway, for the time being I've managed to cope with having my viewing split across two new fledgling streaming sites and Crunchyroll. Here's a ranking of the shows I've been watching; I expect I'll lose a lot of respect right from the start!

1. Diabolik Lovers
2. Kakumeiki Valvrave
3. Nagi No Asukara

I realise that this isn't the classiest selection I could have made, but those three shows were the most addictive and the ones I looked forward to most each week. Surprisingly Kuroko No Basuke didn't quite make it into third place; suffice it to say it was a close fourth.

Thoughts on why we're probably not getting an English version of Sengoku Basara 4

"I can't wait until it comes out in English!"
"I hope this comes out in the US!"
"I'm gonna get this game as soon as it comes out here!"

Comments like these seem to crop up wherever the new Sengoku Basara 4 trailer is shown. Every time, someone has to break it to the eager fan that the game probably won't be coming to the west, and every time there's surprise and disappointment in their response. It's heartbreaking.

It often feels as though the English-speaking Sengoku Basara community is its own worst enemy. It's necessary to click the following link to read the rest of this post since it's not something everyone wants to hear.

Rumours and misunderstandings: Sengoku Basara 4

As I travel around the Internet I've seen a few signs that fans are setting themselves up for potential disappointments when assumptions that have been taken as fact aren't met when the game is released. It's certainly possible the rumours are true, but until an official source confirms them as fact they should never be treated as anything other than fan gossip - and I mean an official Japanese source. Many of the big English-language gaming websites have been posting fan gossip and mistranslations as fact without making corrections when notified.

I don't want Capcom to be blamed later on for not fulfilling expectations that fans inadvertently made up themselves, so this post is to collect and debunk those rumours. Let's ensure that we keep our expectations in check!

Rumours are in bold.

The game is set during the Muromachi period (or otherwise before the Sengoku period).

This is how the early news releases have been incorrectly translated by a lot of gaming websites. It is simply untrue: even the game's producer KobaP has gone out of his way to clearly, unambiguously confirm that the game starts at the end of the Muromachi period and covers the Sengoku period. This is still Sengoku Basara.

The game is a prequel.

It's an alternate retelling, starting from the beginning. This doesn't mean we'll see earlier versions of all the characters, and nor does it mean we will/won't see any particular characters based on the years they were historically active in the real world. The parallel universe explanation means that the game is free to cover events from all across the Sengoku period.

Sengoku Basara 4 has a confirmed release date.

Blu-ray: Destroying the market for anime on home video

This entire post is a rant. Please skip to the next blog post if you don't like reading this kind of thing.

As the title is ambiguous I want to make it clear that this post is nothing to do with the way that splitting anime releases across two competing formats (DVD and Blu-ray) eats into anime sales. That's something the distributors have to deal with for themselves.

What I'm upset about is something completely avoidable which is killing my desire to buy new anime releases. As a collector, I find it disturbing to find myself skipping series I'd have collected a few years ago. It's not because of lack of interest on my part, nor is it due to streaming, piracy or cost. It's the fact that the anime industry as a whole has become so obsessed with controlling its audience that it's intent on making it as difficult as possible to support anime. The quirks of the Blu-ray format make it a powerful weapon in the anime home video industry's rush to self-destruction.

Two new anime streaming sites launch: Anime Sols and Daisuki

This past week has been tremendously exciting for western anime fans, with the launch of two brand new streaming websites. Both sites have taken completely different approaches to the inherent challenges in providing legal sources of anime online, and both have left me with very mixed feelings already.

Here are my completely biased personal opinions following the launch of the Anime Sols and Daisuki services.

Anime Sols is unusual even in the world of overseas anime streaming; rather than focusing on simulcasts, it's dedicated to streaming forgotten classics. Most interestingly it combines traditional streaming with a pledge system - like the system used on Kickstarter. Fans can pledge money for the series they like the most and any series which receives enough support by the deadline will receive a US (R1) DVD release with English subtitles.

In terms of strategy, Anime Sols is an absolutely brilliant idea. Customers can try the shows before deciding to pledge, cutting out the risk of supporting something they won't like and catering for both fans of streaming physical releases. It's also completely transparent about the realities of organising a physical release for a niche title - empowering hardcore fans of particular shows to support them in a way that's never been done before. Samuel Pinansky, the fan who put Anime Sols together as a labour of love, has been extremely responsive to questions so that he can take the feedback straight to the Japanese rights holders. I have nothing but praise for the way the site is being run.

And yet, I want it to fail.

That doesn't mean I have a personal grudge against Anime Sols or old anime series in general. The site is streaming several shows I'd dearly like to own on DVD and I appreciate the effort that has gone into creating something truly innovative for the community. My problem is that only people living in the US or Canada are allowed to participate in Anime Sols. Foreigners are not only barred from watching the streaming anime at all, they can't even pledge money or earn the rewards offered as incentives. It's not all bad news; the site owner has confirmed that foreigners should at least be able to buy the DVD releases if any of the projects reach their targets - we just can't help make that happen.

I want Anime Sols to fail in its current incarnation for one reason alone: it makes me feel utterly, utterly powerless as a fan. The reasons for the blanket ban on foreign users are complicated, apparently rooted in rights issues where older series have been licensed to companies on terms which wouldn't ever be allowed today. I imagine it's similar to the infamous problems with Harmony Gold and the Macross series. This situation is the fault of the rights holders and their international partners and there's nothing overseas fans or third parties can do about it. Even knowing this, however, doesn't make me feel any better about tolerating such a rotten state of affairs. Websites which go as far as blocking international IPs to break the world up into arbitrary geographical regions make the anime industry weaker.

So please, Americans, enjoy Anime Sols and continue to sponsor physical releases for the best shows. Once again, the millions of English-speaking fans outside your region are completely dependent on your generosity - and believe me, we don't want it to be this way either. I will be the first in line to sing the site's praises if the aggressive region locking issues can be addressed in future.

Daisuki

I wrote a long ramble about Daisuki when the project was first announced so I've been eagerly anticipating the site's debut. The approach that the creators of Daisuki have taken seems to be to provide a legal anime portal where fans can watch anything they like without giving up and resorting to illegal sources, while supporting the series through ads and merchandise sales in the attached store. It will obviously take some time before that ambition can be fully realised, but how are they doing so far?

After a two-week delay from its original April date, Daisuki launched this morning with a quirky selection of titles: Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Sword Art Online, Lupin III, Mobile Suit Gundam Seed, Mobile Suit Z Gundam and a series of Prince of Tennis OAVs. Frustratingly only the last three titles are available in the UK. That's just half of their catalogue; disappointing for a global website which is supposed to be reducing the perceived 'need' for piracy among anime fans. Because Madoka Magica and Sword Art Online are newer and more marketable, the site's design uses these series for most of their promotional art even though foreign customers aren't allowed to see the videos.

It's a dreadful shame that Daisuki hasn't been able to solve the problem of certain series being restricted to the US market. Two of the three locked shows come from Aniplex - not Aniplex USA, but the Japanese side. It's a strange situation as the simulcast for Sword Art Online was available to the UK on Crunchyroll. I can't be sure without confirmation from users in other regions, but could it be possible that Sword Art Online has been licensed by a UK company and they've demanded exclusive streaming rights for the region too? That would certainly explain why Puella Magi Madoka Magica is not streaming to us as Manga UK licensed it for home video. If so, my feelings of disappointment extend to Manga UK as well (and to the mystery SAO licensee).

With regards to Lupin III, I don't understand what TMS has against the vast English-speaking world outside America, and I doubt I ever will.

It would be interesting (not to mention helpful) if clicking links to the unavailable shows would take foreign users to the local licensor's company website so that they can watch the series elsewhere or provide the local company with feedback about the lack of a viable streaming industry in their country. This would make Daisuki a useful resource rather than a visible reminder of how fans outside America are often overlooked.

Of the three series available to the UK, I have two of them on home video already and the third is an OAV spin-off for a television series we never got to see here. There's clearly some work to be done before Daisuki is going to be a website I visit regularly for my anime streaming needs.

Looking at things more positively, there's a lot of promise in Daisuki's website design. The video player seems to work well and I was able to watch an episode of Prince of Tennis this morning without any obvious problems. The videos come with an option to toggle the English subtitles off, and it looks as though there's room to add additional languages in future if there's enough demand. They've included a Japanese-style giveaway campaign to attract new customers (the prizes are pretty good), and there's a survey which users can fill in to vote for shows they want to watch on the site. I also like the general aesthetics of the website and the abundance of information that's available in the help section. The store doesn't seem to be online yet.

While fans in the US have been complaining that the titles available for streaming are already present on other websites, I see this as a promising step. Exclusivity is the biggest hurdle to legal streaming after region locking; in the long run, fans don't want to have to pay multiple subscription fees to be able to watch their favourite anime on a bunch of different websites with exclusive content. Getting as many series as possible onto every legal platform can only be beneficial, theoretically preventing companies like FUNimation from sitting on rights in the one region and ruining things for everyone else.

I can't help but notice that One Piece has apparently disappeared from the list of titles since the original press release, instead relegated to a 'Coming Soon' box on the Toei Animation Studio page. With Manga UK now holding the UK rights (and no doubt planning to put it on iTunes and Netflix one day in line with their glacial DVD release schedule), I'm gravely concerned that when it finally makes its appearance on Daisuki, One Piece is going to be locked away from the UK as well. The struggles of streaming - and the assumptions I make in the absence of communication - make me resent the existence of our half-hearted UK anime licensees more than ever before. I would love for there to be more engagement from the UK anime companies to stop this happening - in the absence of that, I'd prefer that Japanese licensors stopped giving UK distributors exclusive streaming rights at all. They are wasting so many opportunities to attract fans away from piracy this way.

As Daisuki does cater for the UK (in a limited way), it's earned a spot in my very exclusive list of recommended links. It's got almost as many series as the lacklustre UK streaming portal Anime On Demand, after all! Let's hope they are able to respond to user feedback swiftly and turn the site into something all anime fans can be proud to use.

Update 17/05/2013: It seems that someone at Daisuki has heard our cries, as Aniplex have unlocked both of their series for UK streaming leaving only content from TMS restricted to the US. I'd be extremely interested to know whether Aniplex's shows (Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Sword Art Online) are now available worldwide outside Japan, or whether they're still limited to certain areas.

This is a big step in the right direction and I have my fingers crossed that TMS will follow suit. More information about which shows are available in particular regions (like that provided by Crunchyroll when they announce new acquisitions) would be very helpful for those of us who travel or have friends overseas.

All about doujinshi culture and common misconceptions

Instead of finishing my latest meandering review, today's post is a rant! If you don't like that kind of thing please skip it. There'll be more of my usual over-enthusiastic babbling next time.

Doujinshi: a world which is often misunderstood

I felt completely demoralised earlier this week when I clicked a Crunchyroll news story about how some Japanese doujinshi artists are helping others remove unauthorised links to their work from Google search results. The article itself was fine - though I did wonder how well the writer understood what he was talking about when he filled the post with illustrations drawn by someone else without their permission. The problem was that I curiously checked the comments.

A lot of people seem to have strong opinions on doujinshi culture in Japan without having the slightest idea about the realities of the situation there. This isn't the first time I've been exposed to these attitudes and it won't be the last; there was a huge scandal last year when Amazon.com started reselling illegal scans of parody doujinshi (several of which were explicit) on its Kindle store. Amazon weren't responsible directly; they'd been tricked by an unknown party who had acted as an agent and provided the illegal materials. Artists in Japan were appalled when bilingual blogger Komatsu Mikikazu alerted them to the situation, but with many individual creators lacking fluency in English it took some time before the situation was resolved and the material removed.

The biggest fear of many of the artists who were affected by this was never that they might lose revenue from the pirated doujinshi being made available like this, or that the translations might not be good quality, or whatever other reason the bulk of skeptical foreign commentators were suggesting. It was that the creators of the titles that were being parodied would see the works listed and jump to the wrong conclusion about the doujin circles' intentions. It was imperative that the problem be dealt with as quickly as possible, but Amazon's cumbersome complaints process required a physical letter written in English from each artist whose work had been stolen. Many of the artists had long moved on since the time they originally drew those old books, and even being able to understand the foreign complaints instructions was a challenge for non-English speakers. The procedure required them to then write a formal letter to Amazon in the US and wait a week for it to arrive by international mail, then wait a further month while Amazon deliberated the case. This scenario left plenty of time for the problem to escalate even if the artist was fluent in English and dealt with the problem immediately, a situation which terrified the wider doujinshi community with its implications.

What I found additionally disconcerting about the situation then is that most western commentators were only upset that the rights of the scanlators who had made the unauthorised material available in digital form in the first place were being infringed by the unknown person who listed all of the books on Amazon. Very few English-language discussions mentioned the doujin circles' rights anywhere in the debate. I don't disagree that scanning, lettering and translating without permission takes time. However, planning, writing, drawing and printing a whole doujinshi takes a great deal more, not to mention talent. I'm not sure whether this is a xenophobic attitude since fandom on the whole is usually very vocal about protecting the rights of local creators of derivative works. Is it seen as acceptable in some communities to disrespect the work of others if they can't easily complain about it in English?

This idea was reinforced by the comments on the Crunchyroll article today.

I was always taught that two wrongs don't make a right yet it seems that for some people here in the west, they do. Many posters used the rationalisation that the doujinshi are unauthorised parodies, therefore there's no problem with making unauthorised copies of them and spreading them around the Internet without permission. I don't think it's possible to change the minds of those who have already taken a hostile stance, but perhaps if I can gather together everything I know about doujinshi in this post newer fans might stumble upon it one day and understand that the statements parroted by many fans overseas aren't always based upon solid facts.

What are doujinshi?

Doujinshi are fan-made 'books'. The vast majority of these take the form of printed B5 comics drawn by amateur artists, though novels (printed fan fiction) and art books aren't uncommon. Doujinshi are just one part of the doujin scene, which also includes other indie creations such as doujin games, doujin music and doujin goods (fan-made merchandise).

Japanese fans often use the English word 'coterie' in place of 'doujin' to describe the groups of fans which gather together to create a doujin product. As this word isn't commonly used where I'm from, I personally prefer to stick to 'fanzines' or 'fan comics' depending on the situation or just leave the word in Japanese.

The group which created an individual doujinshi is called a 'circle', and it may be made up of several participants or just one person (a 'kojin' circle). Circles with only one member are very common in fandoms with an older demographic, while larger circles often grow from university clubs or close-knit groups of friends.

For the purpose of this blog post I'm focusing mainly on parody doujinshi, the fan comics based on existing manga, anime and games which are best known in the west.

Doujinshi facts and fiction

I'll close this post with a few observations in the hope that they'll help tackle some common misconceptions about the doujinshi environment.