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.

Hall of shame: Persona

After the positive buzz that Production I.G.'s forward-thinking Kickstarter project is generating, I think it's time I brought up this topic I've been meaning to write about for a while.

Persona.

My personal history with the Persona series is complicated. I played the early games on my Japanese Playstation when they originally came out, but didn't keep up with the more recent games and gradually drifted onto other things. Meanwhile, it was these later games which dramatically increased the fanbase for the games overseas. With Persona 4 receiving a popular television adaptation recently, as well as news that the highly entertaining fighting game, Persona 4 Arena, would be released close to simultaneously worldwide, it looked like a great time to get back into the series and catch up on what I'd been missing for the last few years.

Unfortunately, the companies in charge of bringing fans the Persona brand have recently been responsible for some shockingly poor decisions, and as a result not only am I not buying either the Persona 4 anime at all now, but I'm also not buying Persona 4 Arena, ever. I feel so strongly about this that I'm not touching anything else in the Persona series, and should another Atlus game come along which I want to play, I'll have think long and hard about whether I really want to support such a dreadful company.

The first problem is with the game. Persona 4 Arena has become infamous as the first (and to date, only) Playstation 3 game which utilises region locking to prevent potential customers from playing a version of the game from a region other than the one they live in - or more accurately, from a region other than their Playstation 3 comes from, as some of us have imported consoles. The reasons given are very simple: they wish to price the US edition significantly lower than the Japanese edition but force everyone to buy their local version to maximise potential profits.

Setting aside the extremely dubious morality of this underlying reason, there are several obvious problems with this. If the US version is being region locked, that makes perfect sense - Atlus want to wring more money from Japanese customers by preventing them from importing. But what I don't understand at all is why the Japanese version is being region locked as well. If anyone imports that, they're choosing to pay a significant premium to do so. There seems to be no logical reason for Atlus' actions.

I would have absolutely no problem with what they were doing if they region locked only the US edition of Persona 4 Arena. I would have switched my preorder to the Japanese edition and paid a little more to willingly receive the best possible version of the game. However, Atlus doesn't care about pleasing their customers. Atlus cares about pleasing their investors, even if the way they go about it makes no sense.

Adding insult to injury, anyone outside of those two regions is completely out of luck. While a European edition of Persona 4 Arena was previously announced for a slightly delayed release, the release date came and went with only a vague announcement that the game had been put back. It will probably eventually come out, but by the time it does the world will have moved on. We're not allowed to import it from elsewhere, so nobody's getting any money from Europe at all for Persona 4 Arena any time soon. And when it comes out months later, and flops, the only conclusion the companies will draw is that European people aren't interested in Japanese games so there's no point catering for us. Great.

I for one won't be buying the European release at all, because I'm now boycotting anything that has the word 'Persona' anywhere near it. Also, the idea of releasing something months (or years) later in one territory for reasons of self-serving corporate politics is outdated and distasteful - we speak English in the UK and the game's already fully translated and mastered. The only reason we're not playing it is that some genius in an office somewhere decided to go out of their way to treat their customers poorly.

So, the Persona game series is dead to me. At least, I thought, I have the US Blu-Ray of the anime adaptation of Persona 4 on order to tide me over and introduce me to the later characters from the games.

However, the Persona team's acute case of xenophobia soon struck again. A few weeks after the Persona 4 Arena news, it was suddenly announced that the US Blu-Ray release of the anime would be gutted. The original voice track would be removed entirely, leaving fans with a choice to either buy the series on DVD instead, with its significantly lower quality picture and sound, or to buy the Blu-Ray but only have access to the English dub rather than the original voice track.

Presented with those options, I cancelled my preorder immediately. While some individuals may be able to tolerate or even enjoy cheaply made English dubs of unenthusiastic-sounding Americans talking over the original animation and pronouncing one another's names incorrectly at random, I've long found that for me removing the original audio completely destroys the point of watching something.

The US distributor was very apologetic about the disappointing release, explaining that it was an order directly from Japan and not something they had done by choice. As Persona is a popular title and the gaming crowd it will cross over to are used to playing with the dubbed edition, it's likely that some people will still buy the crippled Blu-Rays.

Back to Europe. Europe is in a different Blu-Ray region to the US and Japan, so the blinkered Japanese companies believe that nobody will ever figure out that it's cheaper to buy the European edition and a European Blu-Ray player than it is to buy the Japanese Blu-Rays. A different distributor is handling the Blu-Ray edition of the Persona 4 anime over here, and accordingly they've confirmed that there shouldn't be any problem including the Japanese voices with their edition. Of course, it's not out yet, so it remains to be seen whether this will actually happen, or whether the release will be ruined in another creative new way instead.

I'm tired of this. If Atlus wants to charge more in Japan, that's perfectly fine. I actually don't mind paying. Sadly, they didn't bother putting English subtitles on the more expensive Japanese discs, even though those subtitles already existed for the streaming version of the show, so for most of us overseas importing the deluxe Japanese Blu-Ray discs was never an option.

As long as this production team continues to treat overseas fans as though they are fools, providing us with no decent way to buy their products in order to drain as much profit as possible from their Japanese and American markets, I will not be touching their offerings. Their behaviour gives us major delays, and crippled releases, and blocks us from participating based on the country we live in rather than how much we're willing to pay. No alternatives are provided for fans who want a higher quality option: Atlus simply wants its customers to fall in line, to accept disappointment after disappointment, and to continue to do as we're told, happily paying to be treated this way.

I'm done with you, Atlus, and I'm done with Persona. My money is going to companies which treat their customers with respect, no matter where they live.

Kickstarter progress update

A day later, and Kick-Heart has raised more than $40,000 towards its $150,000 funding goal. It is looking very achievable.

There's been a lot of negativity in fan communities about the length of the project (10 minutes) compared to the amount that they are asking for, but in spite of this an increasing number of funders are now in the low donation category; the average bid has decreased markedly from the early figures. This means that the project is working successfully not because of a handful of wealthy otaku acting on their own but because hundreds of people are throwing smaller amounts in the pot.

One discouraging thing that has happened is that unfortunately, some people aren't too good at reading a situation before leaping in and saying things that they probably shouldn't. On the official project Kickstarter comment page, I spotted this odd remark amidst the questions and words of support:

The user's words aren't deliberately malicious in any way and he's even supporting the fundraising drive himself both financially and in his intent. I find it worrying that not only do people like this not see why what they were doing was bad (even though their videos were removed), but also that they chose to broadcast this fact directly where the people who worked so hard to make those commercial anime projects would be reading, rather than try something more productive like spreading awareness of the many legal ways to support Yuasa's work. It's not my intention to single this one guy out as a villain all on his own. This attitude is widespread; it's disappointing that a subset of western fans throughout the industry can remain so blind to how much damage their unintentionally cruel words might do that it never even crosses their mind to consider their words with care.

With the culture of the internet, the English language has come to need an expression equivalent to the Japanese kuuki yomenai.

I wonder how this kind of thing can be wiped out with some education. In this current climate, mass indignation at any kind of intellectual property protection swiftly drowns out any point that wronged creators might try to make about respecting their work.