Yeehaw

I wasn’t taking notes during it, but this is what I remember to the best of my ability; apologies if there are any inaccuracies:

At this point there is more money coming into animanga from overseas markets than from domestic (i.e., Japanese) markets. Companies are aware that for something to get really financially successful, it has to appeal to international audiences.

And most of that overseas money comes from subscriptions to streaming services. Merch / purchase of physical copies / etc make up only a small % of revenue.

Shonen and isekai outperform everything else to a huge extent. So there continue to be lots of these produced.

About half of all recent/current anime views are going to just a few (like, a single digit # of) series. I believe it was: Solo Leveling, Sakamoto Days, Dan Da Dan, Gachiakuta, MHA, and (I think) JJK. Also Solo Leveling by itself gets far more than any other series.

Quote: "Statistically, if your favorite anime from the last year wasn’t one of these, then no one watched your favorite anime"

Note that these are all shonen (except technically Solo Leveling since the original material is manhwa, not manga, but close enough)

Don’t be surprised that these are the series winning awards, even if you don’t think they hold a candle to [insert your favorite anime here] — there’s just so many more people watching these that it’s virtually impossible for any other series to win.

The only series in the recent top 20 that wasn’t shonen demographic or isekai genre was Apothecary Diaries.

Quote: "Thank god for Apothecary Diaries." lol

Crunchyroll has by far the biggest market share of overseas anime viewership, followed by Netflix to a lesser extent. No other providers come close.

The perception among production companies is that Netflix is where people are getting converted from non-anime viewers into anime viewers, and CR is where established anime viewers go.

Average anime watch time among anime viewers on Netflix is 1.5 hours per month, whereas on CR it’s 1.5 hours per day (?!)

Discovery on Netflix is heavily determined by what the Netflix promotes / actively surfaces to users, and that tends to skew towards particular series — likely reinforces that views are going to already-popular series and that new anime viewers are getting funnelled into certain genres.

Netflix doesn't license all that much anime compared to what they could be licensing, so that further skews things. Also, even if a series is licensed to Netflix, if the Netflix algorithm doesn't actively push it to users, no one on Netflix will watch it.

Rating sites such as MyAnimeList tend to be skewed towards a particular type of fan that is not representative of the actual market, and these ratings are meaningless when it comes to actual success metrics. IIRC he said only a few% of very frequent anime watchers actually rate/review things.

He phrased it as "rating things on MAL is not normal behavior" which made me lol

Anime adapted from light novels tends to perform the best compared to anime adapted from other sources (manga, webcomic, games) and original anime. Adaptations from manga is #2; everything else is wayy behind.

Solo Leveling seems like quite an outlier in this regard since anime adaptations from webcomics tend to be among the least popular

The single feature most correlated with success of an isekai was whether the main female character has big breasts and that’s not a joke.

Quote: "If the main female character has big breasts your anime will likely overperform, and if the main female character is a monster girl your anime will likely underperform. Because things aren’t fair."

At one point he was like yes I really do have to go into serious business meetings and present this anime breast data to client companies.

There’s a perception among audiences that pirating animanga that isn’t legally available in your country will prove there’s a demand for it, and lead to it getting licensed in your country, but this isn’t true. Pirating stats don’t actually have much effect on whether stuff gets licensed — because there’s no reliable conversion from people who pirate -> people who will pay to view legally.

Studios get booked for projects 3-4 years out, so stuff for 2029-2030 is getting booked now. There are a lot of reboots/sequels/franchises/reusing-IPs type projects getting booked, just like what western media studios have been doing, because (as with western media) companies want the reliability of IP that is known to be successful rather than the risk of something new.

Archive.org deliver a windfall of lost music.

A visual physics lesson at 80 km/h.

Enthusiasts launched a man from a moving truck in the opposite direction - at the same speed the car was traveling.

spectacularly showed how

relative speed works

Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively "we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer" I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.

And this is going to make a lot of people very angry to hear.

But a lot of y'all on this website are truly deeply genuinely never going to be capable of any kind of real narrative analysis--and I don't mean 'being right all the time' I mean 'meaningfully engaging with the text in any way'--

The match cuts were meticulously designed and put there to communicate something.

The VA's delivery of a line was being directed. Inflection and tone change the meaning of dialogue. This is intentional. There are entire teams of people shaping those choices and deciding which take to use based on what works best for the story.

Information is being revealed in a specific order, on purpose, to craft an emotional arc and guide the audience's understanding.

A character's romantic preferences are only, and SHOULD only be, their primary motivation if the genre is romance. That is why there is a genre called that. Most stories are other genres.

Creators who dislike a character generally give them LESS attention, MORE boring storylines, and LESS screentime.

Sometimes curtains are just blue. But if the shot composition or written narration takes time to HIGHLIGHT, especially more than once, that the curtains are blue, then the blueness of the curtains is by definition narratively important.

"Cite your sources" is not a witch's curse that banishes People With Different Opinions to the shadowrealm of Being Wrong. Someone making points that challenge your perceptions, while including screenshots and explicit examples, cannot be dismissed with "cite your sources" because they are literally doing that. Don't @ me on this one I've seen shit in the wars, y'all.

Failing to understand these things WILL bar you from ever really engaging with or understanding any narrative more complicated than Paw Patrol for the rest of your life.

OP: you guys are never going to be able to meaningfully engage with story and character analysis if you cant understand or aren't willing to even consider the context within writers create their stories and the intention behind characters actions and motivations, which are intentional and complex. Not everything begins and ends with romance and relationships, in fact most stories outside of the romance genre feature more complex themes and motivations than straightforward romance and romantic love. Sorry if that makes you mad.

.... you know I do think there may have been something more significant than romantic attraction motivating this character, who is a violent obsessive stalker. In fact, it could be something a little more... fatal?

"I don't have a choice, I'm just following orders"

"I'll get dishonorably discharged"

Okay at least you wont be killing innocents in the name of imperialism

"I'll go to jail"