I’ve been hesitant to talk about it because most of what is coming my way is rumor-mongering.
I’ve sometimes defended Crunchyroll on this blog because I like what they do, mostly, but I’m becoming increasingly displeased and am beginning to share the same distaste for Crunchy that colors much of my Twitter feed.
First, there’s Crunchy’s longstanding failure to update its player, which is still running on the security nightmare that is Flash while the rest of the internet has moved to HTML5.
Then there is High Guardian Spice. It’s not so much that Crunchyroll wanted to follow other streaming services in creating dubious original content, but that it rolled it out in the most obnoxious way possible, failing to advertise the show itself but instead virtue-signalling about the sex of the staff working on it. On top of that, further checking reveals that the cartoon is based on somebody’s Tumblr comic, and that the characters are the standard smorgasbord of “diversity,” meaning everyone in the story thinks, talks, and even looks the same. Naturally, Crunchy caught flack for this, and naturally, their response was to accuse fans of various phobias and isms, which only increases my displeasure.
More recently in the same vein, Crunchyroll is now getting accused of manipulating translations to match American political fixations. This is an issue Funimation had in spades, most infamously with Prison School and Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, but has taken steps to correct (by firing its freelancers). I don’t know for sure if Crunchy is actually doing this, but given what we saw of their staff in the High Guardian Spice ad, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t true. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the religion of social justice (for it is a religion) suffers nothing beside itself, so we are almost certainly going to see more and more politically incorrect gender-benders out of Japan being forced through a Gender Studies mold when translated into English. (Ten years ago, if you had told I would be defending Japanese animated traps against the charge of being transgendered, I would have responded 1) that you’re crazy and 2) that I don’t know what those words mean, yet here we are.)
And the huge deal that was Crunchyroll’s partnership with Funimation? Yeah, it’s over. The casualties, according to random people on my social media feeds, amount to 250 series being taken off Crunchy, including several I was looking forward to watching. Rumors have flown all over the place about what led to this, but the official explanation is that it has to do with Funimation’s acquisition by Sony. Some claim that this is Funimation’s rebuke to Crunchy’s rollout of High Guardian Spice, but I suspect that’s wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, Sony, which now owns Funimation, has made a bad reputation for itself with weebs because it is in the habit of heavily censoring eroge games. Personally, I don’t mind if hentai addicts are unable to get their drug, but I am nonetheless against censorship on principle: If they can censor hentai, they can easily move from there to censoring other things—such as anything that doesn’t accord with the social justice cult. If Sony doesn’t want T&A in its video games, then it shouldn’t port the games, not port censored versions. Telling an artist you don’t want his work is fine, but taking his work and changing it to suit yourself is extremely disrespectful. (Ten years ago, if you had said that I would be criticizing the censorship of pornographic video games, I again would have told you you’re crazy, but hey.)
Crunchy was for a while more-or-less the only game in town, but that’s starting to change. Amazon Strike didn’t get off the ground, and Netflix is too busy navel-gazing, but HIDIVE, which is now on VRV, is starting to look like a good alternative for anime streaming—though VRV is closely related to Crunchyroll and was created by some of the same people, so we’ll see what this means in the long run.
I will not be surprised if Crunchyroll goes the way of Tokyopop in a few years. We’ll see. If it does, it might take VRV with it.
I can’t justify more than one streaming service at a time given the pace at which I watch shows and my income. I’m currently on Amazon Prime (mostly because of interest in Made in Abyss), but once I’ve had my way with everything that looks interesting on Amazon, I may make the switch. I notice, for example, that HIDIVE has A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, though only in the dub, and that’s one I’ve wanted to see. In fact, it also has Made in Abyss.
UPDATE: As a reader informs me, Crunchyroll actually has updated its player. I guess I haven’t been on their site in a while. However, a few tests indicate that the new player doesn’t work with ad-blockers.
