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[Neonivek]

Of course the MMO is made up. I was pointing out that it's a thing referenced from outside anime and not an original idea.

I know. I just couldn't spell it and my spellchecker wouldn't correct me because I pronounce it "Yagistral" of which I know the first three letters are Ygg

[Reelya]

Studio Manglobe filed for bankruptcy, according to tweets by their animation director (which since got deleted, but I'm guessing he spilled the beans). Makers of series such as Samurai Champloo, Ergo Proxy and this season's Gangsta. They make a lot of "dark and gritty" style anime. That sort of answers people who go "why do anime studios make so many harems/magical girls/slice of life shows, and throw cute girls in everything, when they could be animating life and death robot battles with manly men?". Well they could do that, except then there would be even less of those serious anime out there because the people who want to make that stuff would have already gone broke. And you don't have to have too many money-losing series in a row before nobody is willing to fund your next series, no matter how cool it sounds.

Also in news, Magi is getting another TV anime, though it's from the prequel Sinbad manga.
http://myanimelist.net/news/42406568

[Hawkfrost]

Well, it's a sort of catch-22; If all you make is ecchi and magical girl stuff you drive off most potential for a foreign market success, which further reinforces the Western idea that anime is gross stuff for perverts and children, making it less likely for it to be accepted here.

And I know they don't care about the foreign market, but if they want to make anime viable in the long term they might have to, similar to what's happening in the Japanese game industry right now.
You can only pander to a certain type of otaku for so long before that becomes the only demographic that has anything to do with the products you create.

[Leafsnail]

Ecchi shows do just fine in the west.

[Flying Dice]

More fine than in Japan, going by the data that was posted the last time this came up.

[Reelya]

At least for manga it's definitely true. The more ecchi the better it sells in America. Highschool DxD and Monster Musume new volumes both usually hit the top 5 in the nytimes manga bestsellers. But they don't even blip on the charts in Japan.

Going off Amazon best-sellers, it's not so clear to see, since there are several pages of old Ghibli movies and tons of One Piece/Naruto/Fairy Tail DVDs and old 1990s stuff that everyone knows.

But even then you have some interesting stuff. Both released seasons boxsets of Highschool DxD have outsold any single Neon Genesis Evangelion-related thing. Yup, more Americans want "magical boobie highschool" in their DVD collection than want the new Evangelion movies.

[Orange Wizard]

... which makes the whole creepy otaku stereotype hold more water than I suppose any of us would like.

[Frumple]

Not... really? People just like porny stuff, kinda' in general. Most folks, it seems to more or less be a plus, even if a fair amount won't really admit it. Lewd stuff just taps into the same market that makes straight up porn one of the highest grossing entertainment markets in the world, even with the massively huge amount of free stuff floating around.

More seriously, if my own experience with anime has been any indication, most of the folks fitting that creepy otaku stereotype definitely aren't buying anime off amazon or generating stats for nytime's bestselling lists, heh. They're acquiring their fix through other venues.

[Flying Dice]

Honestly, though, I sort of wonder why people would spend money on terrible ecchi to be endlessly blueballed while suffering through sub-par writing when they can literally get to free porn in all of thirty seconds. It's like, if I was gonna perv out over pure 2D waifu4laifu shit, I wouldn't waste all that money on it. :V

[Neonivek]

Honestly, though, I sort of wonder why people would spend money on terrible ecchi to be endlessly blueballed while suffering through sub-par writing when they can literally get to free porn in all of thirty seconds. It's like, if I was gonna perv out over pure 2D waifu4laifu shit, I wouldn't waste all that money on it. :V

Having watched a reviewer of terrible ecchi titles (and he isn't a comedy one) who unironically loved them and considered them great animes...

Think of it like people whose favorite cake is Birthday cake. It is just sugar flavored, yet that is enough to satisfy them.

So, if you watch enough Ecchi you will notice it has certain other elements kind of cheap romance, maybe a song here and there, usually with a high amount of sappiness.

If I could still find the guy (he was... a Blip reviewer) I'd link you... but that is quite impossible now.

[Orange Wizard]

Spoiler: Obligatory xkcd (click to show/hide)

[Reelya]

Honestly, though, I sort of wonder why people would spend money on terrible ecchi to be endlessly blueballed while suffering through sub-par writing when they can literally get to free porn in all of thirty seconds. It's like, if I was gonna perv out over pure2D waifu4laifu shit, I wouldn't waste all that money on it. :V

Well, I think if someone keeps going back to that material when they certainly do have accessible porn, you have to assume that it's providing some element to them that they're not actually getting through the porn. We can argue about what those elements are and say those elements don't work for us as individuals, but it's a basic truism that people go for media that fulfills some need or interest. Maybe straight up sex scenes isn't what it's all about, it might be related to how sometimes seeing less skin can be sexier than seeing a complete nude. By the same argument as above you might ask why bother with a strip tease when they can just stand there nude for the entire thing.

[Flying Dice]

Honestly, though, I sort of wonder why people would spend money on terrible ecchi to be endlessly blueballed while suffering through sub-par writing when they can literally get to free porn in all of thirty seconds. It's like, if I was gonna perv out over pure2D waifu4laifu shit, I wouldn't waste all that money on it. :V

Well, I think if someone keeps going back to that material when they certainly do have accessible porn, you have to assume that it's providing some element to them that they're not actually getting through the porn. We can argue about what those elements are and say those elements don't work for us as individuals, but it's a basic truism that people go for media that fulfills some need or interest. Maybe straight up sex scenes isn't what it's all about, it might be related to how sometimes seeing less skin can be sexier than seeing a complete nude. By the same argument as above you might ask why bother with a strip tease when they can just stand there nude for the entire thing.

I was being sorta facetious there. The real answer, I suspect, is partially that, and partially down to how a lot of the ecchi series double as the shitty faceless SI protagonist series. It's probably as much about imagining themselves in that situation as anything else, for much the same reason as why shitty SI adventure series are so popular.

[Mattk50]

The ONE thing I find interesting beyond anything else is that Yaggistrl (dang, well whatever) the MMO he plays seems like an absolutely terrible pay to win game... with rampant Player Killing and excessive elitism.

I can honestly see why everyone abandoned that MMO in spite being really cool with what you can do.

Shitty pay to win and power scaling issues aside, rampant player killing and the elitism that results isnt necessarily a bad thing. It can be extremely fun but the mindset is very different from most video games, find persistent people to play with who can handle loss in a game and you can go very far. There are only a few games that really take it all the way to full open world pvp unfortunatley, and most of them have other problems like bugs and balancing due to the small dev team and niche audience. And then there are the permadeath mmos.

[Neonivek]

The implication isn't that there is pernadeath.

Heck even NPCs don't die permanently (they just need to be resurrected with a cost equal to their power)

But the sheer loops you have to go through not to be PKed are kind of extreme. The main character has TONS of scrolls he carries around just for that purpose.