Now, to be up front about everything, I don’t know who this guy is. By his own admission, he doesn’t know a whole lot about anime. Nonetheless, I find his analysis of Crunchyroll’s trainwreck of a promotion for its new, original animated series to be largely insightful.
One of his lines here I absolutely love: “That’s what your whole career has been about? I thought you were an animator.”
Some of those opposing Crunchyroll’s project are, I think, wrong-headed. For example, I follow the account @animeoutsiders on Twitter; they claim to have insider knowledge (which they may or may not actually have) of Crunchyroll, and accuse the company of doing something ingenuous by creating its own animation studio and producing original animation, rather than throwing money at Japanese studios.
I think this argument is ill-founded, and will ultimately prove detrimental to those who oppose the incursion of “social justice” into the anime community. Crunchyroll is a company. As such, it is out to make money. It has no particular obligation to do any particular thing with its profits, any more than any other company has. Although I agree with those who say that Crunchyroll desperately needs to update its service (it’s still running a Flash player long after YouTube and other major video-streaming sites have switched to HTML5), I simply cannot agree with those who claim Crunchyroll has some obligation to throw money—beyond that required by its contracts—at Japanese animators, as if Japanese animators are impoverished beggars and Crunchyroll is an almsgiver.
Crunchyroll, like I or anyone else who makes money, can do what it likes with its revenue. I am free to buy groceries or luxury goods with my income, just as Crunchyroll is. If anything, Crunchyroll, as a corporate entity, has fewer ethical obligations than I have: morality requires me, as an individual person, to be both temperate and magnanimous with my money. It is less clear if a corporation has the same obligations.
That being said, I expect High Guardian Spice to crash and burn because it is obviously an ill-conceived project for which Crunchyroll has hired people based on their social justice points rather than their skills. In the promotional video, they chose to focus on the percentage of women in the crew rather than on the plot and characters of the cartoony show. On top of that, every displayed member of said crew has the same appearance, an obese woman with garishly dyed hair.
When this show inevitably fails, the company will no doubt blame fans rather than its own bad choices, much as Sony blamed the audience for the poor performance of the all-girl Ghostbusters and Disney has blamed fans for declining enthusiasm for woke Star Wars.
In other words, although Crunchy can do what it likes with its moneys, it is making bad choices. And it will learn nothing from these bad choices, because it will find someone else to blame.
