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[Reelya]

Harems seem to spell death for any anime that shows even a hint of potential.

Money > creativity. When a writer gets popular for a manga/LN there's no guarantee they'll get popular again with a new work, so they endlessly perpetuate the old one and studios keep churning it out.
IMO it's more a symptom of how Japan treats the profession.

It's how everyone everywhere treats every profession. Considering throwing in your day job, and going for a job in an entirely different field, in which you have no experience, where there is a high level of competition to get in. It's not something people should do very often, or lightly. It's a big risk, because you're risking your entire livelihood, and if it fails: you may, or may not, be able to go back to your old job.

Why do we expect writers to be any different? If you write a long-running popular series, you're extremely lucky to have a hit and be able to put food on the table. Most manga authors don't make a living off it. If you toss a popular series in the bin, well you've basically quit your day job on the off-chance that whatever you dream up next will sell better than everyone else who's trying to get published.

Really, when we demand or expect manga artists to constantly come up with new series and not keep doing the same one while they're still popular, we're basically telling them to "starve for their art": for our sake, not theirs.

~~~

EDIT EDIT: I edited out a comment about how most of the long-running harem stuff comes from e.g. manga sources and not anime studios. It's very much tied into the nature of manga etc publishing being a serialized format. Edited back in to link with Frumple's reply.

[Frumple]

It's arguably even more endemic to LNs and webnovels and whatnot than manga, though...

That said, anime originals period are pretty rare, near as I've ever noticed. Most of 'em start off as manga or LNs or somethin', so harem ones in particular being pretty rare is... not exactly surprising?

Though looking around it definitely looks like there's a fair bit more than Tenchi. Most seem less well known, and just about the only list I've found for anime originals (harem or otherwise) is on TVTropes (so bugger linking it; google'll find it for you if you want to look), but there's a fair number of harem shows on the list in any case.

E:... though I see in the time I wrote that you edited your post to be something entirely different, so... disregard, I guess?

[Reelya]

Actually, with myanimelist's new season charts I was surprised by the number of anime originals that actually get made. Look at this season for example.

http://myanimelist.net/anime/season

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress
Kiznaiver
Mayoiga
Endride (anime + a game later in the year)
Uchuu Patrol Luluco
Kuromukuro
High School Fleet
Macross Δ
Concrete Revolutio S2
Kagewani: Shou

Those are 10 originals, out of the top 40 most-watched shows of the season. So, about 1 in 4 animes made in the current day are completely anime-original/anime-first. This same analysis seems to hold for other seasons I've looked at in the past.

That's a lot more healthy than people generally give them credit for. Perhaps it might be a myth that they're so rare. Maybe because the main time people highlight "anime original" shows is in articles/statements about how "anime is dying". 10 all-original shows per season seems pretty healthy to me however. Maybe if this number does actually decline it will be a good barometer of industry heath.

[Orange Wizard]

It's how everyone everywhere treats every profession. Considering throwing in your day job, and going for a job in an entirely different field, in which you have no experience, where there is a high level of competition to get in. It's not something people should do very often, or lightly. It's a big risk, because you're risking your entire livelihood, and if it fails: you may, or may not, be able to go back to your old job.

I don't think that's an entirely fair comparison. People have favourite authors and so on, who are recognised as a person who writes popular stuff.
Even in the employment analogy, it's more like moving from, say, store manager to logistics. There's a lot of transferable skills, and doing well writing one thing should be a decent indication that the person should be at least decent at writing another.
Obviously this is just me doing armchair commentary (and if someone is more knowledgeable please speak up), but as far as I can tell, Japan doesn't do the whole FROM THE MAKERS OF X in marketing things, but rather relies on the thing itself. Which in theory is fine, but in practise it's quite punishing for people trying to get their foot in the door.

Actually, with myanimelist's new season charts I was surprised by the number of anime originals that actually get made. Look at this season for example.

I was going to say about that, actually. We've got loads of big originals this season.

[Flying Dice]

Still a definite minority, though. It's unfortunate, but the anime industry has dug the same hole as Hollywood, in which the people involved have collectively realized that it's easier, cheaper, and safer to adapt existing popular works and retread familiar ground (or, in the case of generic battle harems, both) than it is to write and produce original work. Thus, relatively little original work is produced, and its natural disadvantage against things with pre-established audiences means that stuff that isn't outstanding tends to underperform, further reinforcing the status quo. Why gamble on an original work when it'll probably result in lower profits than derivative work even if it does well?

So you're left with studios that are willing to take risks and that care about the art at least roughly as much as the bottom line.

[Reelya]

But when was it a majority that were anime-first? Jump back 20 years, and there definitely weren't 10 anime-originals in the Winter of 1996: http://myanimelist.net/anime/season/1996/winter

There are two originals there out of 8. One is a proper anime, the other is a short cartoon for little kids. Going over the entire year of 1996, there were 39 animes that started that year, and you could count about 10 of them as originals if you count all the crappy kids shows too. But I excluded them in my analysis for the current year, which would have brought the 2016 total up to about 30% originals.

Right now, we get about 40 original animes per year, which make up 25% of the shows made. So all types of animes are being produced in much larger numbers, and the percentage of originals is up, not down.

My point is that if there's any "golden age" for the widespread airing of anime-original works, we're probably in it right now, it's just that we don't see that because we look back at the extensive back-catalogue of anime for several decades and pick out a handful of original works as if they're indicative of the industry as a whole. We ask "but where's our NGE, Escaflowne, Cowboy Beebop?" not remembering these began in 1995, 1996 and 1998, and what other anime-original shows can most people name from the latter half of the 1990s? Meanwhile, the first half of the 2010's has around 200 anime-original shows.

Also, since we're immersed in it, we don't see how many great shows have actually come out in the last 5 years. Wait until sometime in the late 2020's and people then will be talking about how many great 2010's shows there were, and how much things have decayed, because they'll have forgotten the bad ones and only remembered the good ones, regardless of how many good shows are actually coming out in the 2020's.

Maybe if we actually took a step back and listed all the best anime-original shows (counting anything that was aired as anime before any other media) from e.g. 2010-2014 and compared that to a list of the greats from e.g. 1995-1999 we'd realize that there's actually much more going on that we realize.

[Neonivek]

I will say that at least sometimes the shows I watch have pretty funny jokes

Been watching Yokai watch and my favorite joke was rather simple

There was a Yokai that had the power to force people to break into long boring stories. So to combat it the hero was trying to summon his own personal Yokai but kept telling a long boring story instead.

This kept happening over and over again so the yokai ran all the way over there from his house, hit the protagonist over the head, and exclaimed "summon me already!".

ehh it was simple but I thought it was funny. The spirit kind of captured the audiences "Just do it already!" at kind of the exact right moment.

---

The thing about Harem is that it doesn't HAVE to be bad.

It is an economic set up and I definitely seen good harems before (HECK Persona 4 is technically a Harem... though it doesn't focus on it, so I don't know if I'd classify it as one).

Yet goodness... It might as well be a sticker of "Prepare for bad" with how it usually turns out.

Yet that isn't just it. It is that no matter WHAT an anime is about, no matter what the main plot it... It can ALWAYS become a tepid stereotypical harem anime.

I watched a anime about a guy who had to do 1000 good deeds for cats, and yes I wanted to watch that, and IT devolved into a harem. I watched a anime about making a manga and IT turned into a harem. I watched an anime about a guy wanting to be the very best like no one ever was... and it turned into a harem (No it wasn't Pokémon... though oddly... I would watch a Pokémon Harem anime)

So forget sticker... Harem is a disease!

[Reelya]

but as far as I can tell, Japan doesn't do the whole FROM THE MAKERS OF X in marketing things, but rather relies on the thing itself.

Nah, I definitely think they do that. I've see manga promoted because of who's writing it: "the exciting new series from XYZ".

I think it's more a facet of serialization than it is of treating the writers any differently.

And you see the same thing in Western writers:

- JRR Tolkien. More or less 100% of his fiction output was related to Middle Earth, 1915-1973. A few short pieces that aren't ME-related, but not a whole lot.

- Terry Pratchett, best known for Discworld. Exactly how many Discworld novels has he written, and exactly how well-known are his non-Discworld novels? And his stuff isn't even pressured by serialization yet that one series dwarfs all his other output. 41 Discworld novels, and another ~25 or so Discworld companion volumes. Meanwhile you can count on your fingers all the non-discworld novels he produced since 1986 (I'd count the truckers trilogy and Johnny Maxwell trilogy as 1 book each since they're so short).

- George RR Martin. Since releasing A Game Of Thrones in 1996, he's had a lot of stuff come out (14 things listed from 1996-2015). Guess how many 100% original non-GoT-related things he's published in that time? Exactly ZERO items, when you discount 2 short-story anthologies of previous work, and 2 reworked versions of his old books, with collaborators. So he basically hasn't come up with a completely new idea that's not Westeros related in 20 years.

- JK Rowling: 10 years on the same series, 1997-2007, then she took a 5 year break before writing a new series. Even post 2007, the number of extra Harry Potter-related things she published matches her non-Harry Potter related works.

I can't really see this as any different to a long-running manga author doing the same series for 5, 10, or even 20 years.

[Putnam]

Discworld's a weird example, since the nature of that means he can put most anything in there.

[Reelya]

Plenty of manga authors can do the same, e.g. Excel Saga can have pretty much anything happen in it.

For that matter, we might be cherry picking our manga authors if we only look at e.g. the guys who do things like Naruto and Bleach. How representative are those series anyway? If we go by this season's anime, there are 67 new shows, 57 leftovers from last season. So about 120 shows airing. Out of the ongoing shows there are 6 well-known ongoing "shonen" ones (Naruto, OP, DB, Conan, Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh), which therefore represent a total of 5% of the airing anime. So that 5% of anime is meant to "represent" the entire industry? Hell, there are 10 new anime-originals this season and some left over from last season. So "anime originals" out number the "long running shonen animes" by 2:1.

Similar for manga, there are many more short mangas that long mangas. The guy who writes a single manga for decades might become well-known, but they don't necessarily represent the bulk of the medium's output. I see people in the manga lists who have several dozens of separate series to their name. Maybe all those short mangas aren't as well known as the ones that never end, but there are a lot more of them than the never-ending ones.

e.g. the Excel Saga author ran that from 1996-2011, for 27 volumes worth of serialization. But at the same time, he's published a total of around 10 separate series from 2002-2015, many of which have publishing dates which overlap his old one and those add up to another 36 volumes worth of material. Meanwhile the guys behind Death Note have always run their manga series around 3-4 years, tops, then they go onto something else.

[Cruxador]

The basic structure of a harem implies the writer couldn't think up anything better, so went with that.

That's an extremely biased and (in my opinion) generally inaccurate way to state something that has a grain of truth to it. The harem "format" means that the show isn't looking to set itself apart from the crowd based on complexity of interpersonal relations. But that isn't a choice necessarily made out of sloth or a lack of creativity. And it doesn't denote that the entire premise is unoriginal. Often, it just means that relationships aren't really a focus, and so you've got that basic social structure as a backdrop for something else. Sometimes that means the entire structure fades away, so you might argue that it's not really harem anymore. But there are also cases (recent example: Punchline) where it's clearly a harem, and but the harem layout is mostly there because it's simple and familiar to the audience, and those qualities are necessary for the sort of story that the series is telling. There are also cases (kind of recent example: Haiyore! Nyaruko-san) where a harem structure is prominent but is chosen to underline and contrast more important elements of the show. Neither of those examples necessarily do that much with the structure itself, but it was chosen because being the kind of "default anime format" was useful for what those shows were doing.

Why do we expect writers to be any different? If you write a long-running popular series, you're extremely lucky to have a hit and be able to put food on the table. Most manga authors don't make a living off it. If you toss a popular series in the bin, well you've basically quit your day job on the off-chance that whatever you dream up next will sell better than everyone else who's trying to get published.

Really, when we demand or expect manga artists to constantly come up with new series and not keep doing the same one while they're still popular, we're basically telling them to "starve for their art": for our sake, not theirs.

I'd like to point out ONE's livelihood though. He got lucky with OPM, but he still has at least one other series going at all times. Most of them don't take off, hardly anyone has heard of Old Man of the Underworld, but he is seeing modest success with Psycho Mob 100, and when that ends he'll probably see modest success with something else. And all of his one-shots are published just fine. So it is possible to have a big hit, and perpetuate it and make money, but also experiment with new things. Of course, ONE is anomalous for a lot of reasons, and getting a following without selling a lot of the risk to a manga publisher as he did would have been impossible until very recently, but it does show that the kind of reticence we see in the market in general isn't necessarily financially mandatory any more.

- JRR Tolkien. More or less 100% of his fiction output was related to Middle Earth, 1915-1973. A few short pieces that aren't ME-related, but not a whole lot.

Tolkien wasn't exactly a professional author in the traditional sense, though, and it's more that the "middle earth" label encompassed all his stuff than that it was all fit into the same narrative.

- Terry Pratchett, best known for Discworld. Exactly how many Discworld novels has he written, and exactly how well-known are his non-Discworld novels? And his stuff isn't even pressured by serialization yet that one series dwarfs all his other output. 41 Discworld novels, and another ~25 or so Discworld companion volumes. Meanwhile you can count on your fingers all the non-discworld novels he produced since 1986 (I'd count the truckers trilogy and Johnny Maxwell trilogy as 1 book each since they're so short).

Similar to Tolkien, he used one setting for most anything that would fit. But calling them all one series is not really accurate. The Discworld franchise is composed of several series that are only marginally interrelated, and each have their own tone, cast, and themes. It's not like he just stuck with Rincewind for all of those 41 books.

- George RR Martin. Since releasing A Game Of Thrones in 1996, he's had a lot of stuff come out (14 things listed from 1996-2015). Guess how many 100% original non-GoT-related things he's published in that time? Exactly ZERO items, when you discount 2 short-story anthologies of previous work, and 2 reworked versions of his old books, with collaborators. So he basically hasn't come up with a completely new idea that's not Westeros related in 20 years.

This is example fits your paradigm, but I would argue that GRRM is more anomalous among fantasy authors than most others who could be named.

- JK Rowling: 10 years on the same series, 1997-2007, then she took a 5 year break before writing a new series. Even post 2007, the number of extra Harry Potter-related things she published matches her non-Harry Potter related works.

She isn't seeing comparable success with other things, but she's clearly putting a lot more work into non-HP stuff at this point, and the little tie-ins she does do satisfy the income requirement but don't constitute a significant part of her output, aside, maybe, from the play.

And I can easily come up with another example that directly parallels ONE but in a western context. Consider the Dresden Files. Far more famous among Butcher's works than Codex Alera or this new Cinder Spires thing, but that doesn't stop him from writing them in rotation with the Dresden Files books.

For that matter, we might be cherry picking our manga authors if we only look at e.g. the guys who do things like Naruto and Bleach. How representative are those series anyway?

If we're counting by raw number of series, of course they're not representative. It would make more sense to count by market share.

e.g. the Excel Saga author ran that from 1996-2011, for 27 volumes worth of serialization. But at the same time, he's published a total of around 10 separate series from 2002-2015, many of which have publishing dates which overlap his old one and those add up to another 36 volumes worth of material. Meanwhile the guys behind Death Note have always run their manga series around 3-4 years, tops, then they go onto something else.

Seems like over the course of the discussion you came around to my point before I said anything. Now I feel dumb for typing all that already. Although I'm not entirely sure what the point was, or if there even was one to begin with. I suppose it's worthwhile to analyze and discuss the styles of authors in the industry anyway.

[Reelya]

For the harem thing you cut off the next part where I basically said all the points in your rebuttal:

Some shows stick to a template but still fill it with great writing and ideas. But usually if you're going to that much trouble, you could have thought up a more original premise anyway.

"Usually" just means more often than not. e.g. this could be interpreted as saying > 50% of harems aren't filled with "great writing and ideas" (a no brainer) or that >50% of shows with great writing and ideas wouldn't settle for doing a harem (also a no brainer). I made that point that some do have "great writing and ideas" yet stick to a basic template (obviously implying the harem structure). So I can't see how you could cut that quote out and make a rebuttal which basically rehashes what I wrote.

I'd like to point out ONE's livelihood though

ONE writes webcomics however. He's not in the same boat as the guys with a weekly serialization in Shonen Jump. But what I was talking about there was not the idea of "side projects", it was the expectation that many people have that if someone keeps that one big main series going as long as possible, that there's something wrong with that or it's unusually/specifically a manga issue. My point about that was that it's basically asking someone to abandon the thing that pays their rent and puts food on the table, and that we wouldn't expect that of any other profession.

Yeah, the parallels with Western literature authors aren't as clear. But I'd say a big part of that is related to the medium of standalone novels (longer, bigger purchase), vs LN/Manga (shorter, serialized, cheaper, more frequent).

Probably a better comparison would be to Western comic authors who also produce for syndication/serialization. You don't really see those types of guys cancelling their main series and rebooting something completely new. It's more a case of "that guy who made the such-and-such comic for 45 years", then they hand the same characters over to the next guy. Consider Disney's Duck comics, with their multiple authors over the decades, or Garfield, or Peanuts. That's probably the kind of thing we should be comparing manga too, when deliberating on "how Japan treats it's comic authors".

If we're counting by raw number of series, of course they're not representative. It would make more sense to count by market share.

I think the amount of distinct volumes released per year should be the measure, rather than a sales count. e.g. if they release 1000 different manga volumes a year to pick from, whether or not they're all big sellers doesn't change the fact that the industry took the chance and published all those things.

e.g. for anime, it's the amount of episodes you have to pick from that measures industry diversity, not the viewer count for a particular show. e.g. if there were 5 shonens and 10 shoujo animes airing, yet 90% of viewers only watched the shonens, we couldn't really say that the industry isn't giving shoujo a chance. Similar for manga, "market share" in terms of sales is not a good measure.

Seems like over the course of the discussion you came around to my point before I said anything. the industry anyway.

Well, no there was no change of point. The Excel Saga guy was brought up to support how those "Write only one manga forever" guys aren't really the typical manga author. People who go from series to series are more common, but they're usually not making a great living off it, which is why the "mega saga" guys with the superhits can't be blamed for sticking with one thing.

e.g. Excel Saga was in a monthly serialization. People who are published in monthlies either (1) have a day job and only do manga part time or (2) are successful and have time for side-projects, which includes coming up with new series ideas to make in your off-weeks. So they can launch a new series while still running their old one, they can scale up or down their commitment. Weekly serialization doesn't allow that sort of flexibility, you're full time employed doing the one series, and your entire income is therefore dependent on that one series.

[Furtuka]

Iron Blooded Orphans appeared on a list of recent Toonami aquisitions!

[Cruxador]

For the harem thing you cut off the next part where I basically said all the points in your rebuttal:

Some shows stick to a template but still fill it with great writing and ideas. But usually if you're going to that much trouble, you could have thought up a more original premise anyway. ... I made that point that some do have "great writing and ideas" yet stick to a basic template (obviously implying the harem structure). So I can't see how you could cut that quote out and make a rebuttal which basically rehashes what I wrote.

That's only vaguely related to what I said, though. Filling a template is functionally quite dissimilar to using something as a counterbalance or a backdrop; the former implies that it is the main overarching point of the work while the latter denotes that it serves to accentuate the real focus.
What's more, my main point was that you were being inaccurately harsh in your assumed motivations. In other words, I took issue more with the implied "why" than the "what".

As a side note, that I omitted something doesn't mean that I didn't read it or consider it in my response, I just wasn't responding directly to it because it wasn't relevant to what I was saying.

I'd like to point out ONE's livelihood though

ONE writes webcomics however. He's not in the same boat as the guys with a weekly serialization in Shonen Jump. But what I was talking about there was not the idea of "side projects", it was the expectation that many people have that if someone keeps that one big main series going as long as possible, that there's something wrong with that or it's unusually/specifically a manga issue. My point about that was that it's basically asking someone to abandon the thing that pays their rent and puts food on the table, and that we wouldn't expect that of any other profession.

Yeah, the parallels with Western literature authors aren't as clear. But I'd say a big part of that is related to the medium of standalone novels (longer, bigger purchase), vs LN/Manga (shorter, serialized, cheaper, more frequent).[/quote]In general we agree in this. I'd like to point out, though, that we do expect there to be an endpoint to a western novel series, even if it's far away and takes long time to reach (Wheel of time...) and people who just keep churning shit out (Terry Goodkind) are regarded as hacks, so it's not like this view is unique to manga readers.

Probably a better comparison would be to Western comic authors who also produce for syndication/serialization. You don't really see those types of guys cancelling their main series and rebooting something completely new. It's more a case of "that guy who made the such-and-such comic for 45 years", then they hand the same characters over to the next guy. Consider Disney's Duck comics, with their multiple authors over the decades, or Garfield, or Peanuts. That's probably the kind of thing we should be comparing manga too, when deliberating on "how Japan treats it's comic authors".

I think a better parallel might not be newspaper comics, which are more or less analogous to 4komas, but to the sort of comics published by Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, IDW, and etc. And those comics do that kind of thing all the time. Though popular cape franchises are incredibly long-lived, moreso than anything Japanese, even they get reboots and new series with the same world and characters.

If we're counting by raw number of series, of course they're not representative. It would make more sense to count by market share.

I think the amount of distinct volumes released per year should be the measure, rather than a sales count. e.g. if they release 1000 different manga volumes a year to pick from, whether or not they're all big sellers doesn't change the fact that the industry took the chance and published all those things.

It's a very difficult way to draw a line though, because things are so dissimilar. Like, do we start counting doujins then? Saying that every volume is equally valuable doesn't make sense if one went out to half the manga readers in the country and one went to the two dozen people who bought it from the mangaka at comiket.

e.g. for anime, it's the amount of episodes you have to pick from that measures industry diversity, not the viewer count for a particular show. e.g. if there were 5 shonens and 10 shoujo animes airing, yet 90% of viewers only watched the shonens, we couldn't really say that the industry isn't giving shoujo a chance. Similar for manga, "market share" in terms of sales is not a good measure.

Even if you care only about the content-producers share, it would matter then which of those things is seeing what funding. Inferno Cop doesn't represent 50% of the investment in Evangelion, despite having 50% the number of episodes.

[Reelya]

"template" vs "backdrop" <= isn't this some sort of weird semantic quibbling however? These terms in these sorts of discussions clearly aren't going to have any specific objective meaning.

By a "template" in this context, I was referring to the rough idea of "one guy, X number of girls + situation", nothing more or less. Maybe that's a "backdrop" to you, but a "template" to me. But to me, I'd only use "backdrop" to refer to the setting, e.g. the backdrop is a space station or fantasy world. To me, the "backdrop" is more constraining of content than a story structure/template would be. A "backdrop" implies the painted backdrop of theatre, which sets the time and location, but says nothing about what the story itself will be, whereas a "structure" (or "template", which is a synonym of structure here) sets some parameters and lets the writer fill them in as they please.

Neither term has an objective meaning in this context either way. It's not worth carrying on a conversation if it's going to devolve to nitpicking over semantics though.