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[Cruxador]

Also ... people who download entire shows benefit from the reviews and ratings.

What? Who watches a show to the end if they don't like it just
because it's highly rated?

I don't even understand what point you're making here ... the point I'm making is extremely simple to understand.

Myanimelist's viewer numbers right after a season is complete (which is the season we're talking about, which ended a few days ago), are almost entirely made up of those who watched it while airing, e.g. those who decided to go in blind and watch simulcasts without the benefit of pre-existing reviews or ratings.

However, your nyaa.si data is entirely made up of people who downloaded complete shows after they finished.

Oh, I see the confusion. This isn't for whole-season downloads, this is for single-episode downloads, just for the last episode specifically. I intentionally omitted entire season torrents. It's possible that some people downloaded a whole season but did it one episode at a time, but there's no reason it would be more likely here than on MAL. While some people may have started late based on hype, there's no effective way that I know of to get numbers on that. I could do it for the next season by taking the first episode downloads for each show as soon as its second episode comes out and then looking at ranking or percentage changes compared to final episode numbers, but realistically I'm probably not going to put that effort in.

And for the record, your data only shows what torrents were downloaded, they don't tell you whether the person watched the whole show or not, just that they downloaded it.

Part of this stems from the above misunderstanding, but it's true that I have no way of knowing if a show has been watched. I'm inferring that people watched the episodes prior to that one, but I can't verify the information. Technically I don't even know if these people downloaded earlier episodes. On the other hand, MAL ratings also don't require the show to be completed, and have no way of ensuring that people don't lie or willfully rate things in poor faith. It's the sort of thing that does probably happen on occasion, but we assume it probably doesn't happen enough to throw off results.

Additionally, myanimelist is an aggregate measure, because it is used by people who watch anime by all of the different means, whether that's airing simulcasts, torrenting whole shows, kissanime, crunchyroll or TV / Netflix. People who use all these services also use myanimelist. So it's almost certain to be more representative of the "typical viewer" than data from any single one of those sources.

This is the main point that I disagree with, though. It's an aggregate, but that doesn't make it unbiased. It's merely differently biased. It's biased towards the kind of people that use a site like MAL. What kind of person is that? Maybe they're more casual viewers. Maybe they're just more given to keeping things formally organized. I suspect that at the very least, it leans towards people who stream anime, since if you don't stream, your anime must be organized in some manner of file structure which obviates some of the purpose of MAL. But it's not like I've done research on this.

My conclusion was that many more people were downloading a show with low ratings than one with high ratings. In fact more people downloaded the fairly low rated Knights and Magic than any new show except for Abyss. The point is that ballroom isn't a kiddie-ish as Knights and Magic, so if you're claiming that myanimelist users on average are noticeably more plebbish, vulgar or childish, what-have-you, then you'd need to explain that difference.

But, this is circular. The rating you're talking about was issued by the same people who you're using it to defend. If the people of MAL have unsophisticated tastes, then they'll highly rate anime that caters to those unsophisticated tastes. So you're merely saying "MAL users prefer things that MAL users like".

My main point however is that you seem to have no primary source for the whole "myanimelist users are plebs" thing other than your own prejudice. if it's a fact you must have sources you can point to that suggest it's a fact and not pure spite. "superior anime fans keep all the knowledge in their head" is all you've come up with, and it's frankly the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time as a rationale.

I don't think spite is a fair characterization, but it is a prejudice that you've largely illustrated to be without much valid foundation. You may have noticed I didn't contest a lot of your points. This isn't because I've somehow ceased to be argumentative, but simply because you said things against which I could levy no legitimate argument. In short, you've more or less convinced me on this point, though of course I'll still contest whatever details I find to be contestable.

I don't think there's no legitimacy to the notion that people who are well immersed in something are less likely to need a system to manage it, though. Who, for example, needs a ticker to tell them which episode they've watched through when they watch each episode the week it comes out, and talk to other people about that episode online?  It's only a more casual viewing pattern that needs those things. And who needs to list anime they've seen in the first place, when they've seen an appreciable fraction of all the anime that's come out in the last several years, and heard second hand about much of the rest? The distinction between unseen and unremembered fades from relevance then, so why artificially delineate it? And who needs a rating system to tell them which anime to watch if they try everything in the genres they like as it comes out each season?
I think these kinds of perspective differences are more than enough to imply a difference between the general population and the subset thereof that MAL captures.

[Pencil_Art]

Made in Abyss is a good show, but it's a kid's show

I don't really know if it's fair to classify Made in Abyss as a kids' show, considering the rampant child labor, bleeding from every orifice, disfiguring mutations, and human experimentation present in the plot. Apparently it is worse in the manga, but I haven't managed to read that yet. While the plot is fairly simple, I don't know if I would be comfortable showing that to my hypothetical 8 year old child, even if it is (and it is) a good series.

[Reelya]

Oh, I see the confusion. This isn't for whole-season downloads, this is for single-episode downloads, just for the last episode specifically.

That's a little different, however the argument is largely the same. myanimelist is counting anyone who started a show, vs your nyaa.si results measuring how many people finished the show.  First episode numbers would be a more meaningful comparison. However I came across a new data set to compare:

https://myanimelist.net/topanime.php
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls075012092/

Here are the "best" (in terms of user-defined scores) animes according to both myanimelist and imdb users. While myanimelist includes shows such as Legend of The Galactic Heroes, Rakugo, Made in Abyss, Your Lie In April, Mushishi, and Hajime no Ippo among the best, imdb users highly rated shows such as Elfen Lied, Bleach, and Naruto. There's overlap (e.g. LOGH isn't on the IMDB list since so few IMDB people watched that)... however the differences are the telling ones: Elfen Lied, Bleach, and Naruto aren't even top-500 on myanimelist. Also notice that the high-rated anime on IMDB are in fact the very same types that have high-sales in American manga charts.

So, I'd argue that imdb ratings and nytime manga sales are a sample of the true "mainstream" American consumer. myanimelist is a window onto that as well, however it's biased towards the non-casual end, not the other way around.

@Flying Dice As for the sales charts figures, I think you have a good argument if limited to DVDs and other merch. However, i'd still argue that manga sales are a good measure. Manga are a fairly standardized commodity in terms of production and localization costs, pricing, and amount of content per unit. You can get pretty much any genre in America, however shonen battles and boobs are the big market leaders. If the cause is just that they translate too many shonen & harem ones and not enough of the other ones, then in fact that should bias the market the other way: sales spread out thinly across the shonen market with high sales for the few seinen ones that you can get, because of unmet demand.

[Cruxador]

Made in Abyss is a good show, but it's a kid's show

I don't really know if it's fair to classify Made in Abyss as a kids' show, considering the rampant child labor, bleeding from every orifice, disfiguring mutations, and human experimentation present in the plot. Apparently it is worse in the manga, but I haven't managed to read that yet. While the plot is fairly simple, I don't know if I would be comfortable showing that to my hypothetical 8 year old child, even if it is (and it is) a good series.

I wouldn't show it to kids either, but I assume cultural differences are a factor here. I haven't double-checked, but Reelya usually has a very good grip of target demographics, and it's not rare for it to be a bit different than what I'd expect.

myanimelist is counting anyone who started a show, vs your nyaa.si results measuring how many people finished the show.  First episode numbers would be a more meaningful comparison

I'm not really sure how you figure. Starting a show will pick up everyone who downloaded the first episode, yes, but picking something up and dropping it after three episodes really doesn't count for anything. The fact that MAL captures these numbers would be a point against it, in my opinion, not a benefit.

So, I'd argue that imdb ratings and nytime manga sales are a sample of the true "mainstream" American consumer. myanimelist is a window onto that as well, however it's biased towards the non-casual end, not the other way around.

It could be that I'm just looking from a perspective biased further from the norm than I expected.

[Reelya]

I'm not really sure how you figure. Starting a show will pick up everyone who downloaded the first episode, yes, but picking something up and dropping it after three episodes really doesn't count for anything. The fact that MAL captures these numbers would be a point against it, in my opinion, not a benefit.

Well it comes down to what you're claiming to be comparing when you look at nyaa.si downloads vs myanimelist entries.

Anyone who tagged a show on myanimelist is someone who has seen (or plans to) at least one episode. And anyone who downloads episode 1 is also someone who's seen at least 1 episode. With both samples they may have watched more than 1 episode, but it's not actually relevant because there's no disconnect in meaning of the two the measures: both are merely counting the number of people who at least started a show. And then those two data sets can be compared and you can see if the tastes of the two groups differ significantly, e.g. we can easily infer if one group likes different genres to another group: are people picking up classy-looking shows or trashy-looking stuff?

However your existing comparison: "myanimelist vs final-episode" was inherently a flawed comparison for the same reason: it measures two different things "people who started a show" vs "people who finished a show". Since more people are likely to drop bad shows, the "people who finished a show" sample data is by necessity going to be biased towards better shows compared to the "people who started a show" sample.

The thing is, that's what the myanimelist total numbers are referencing - everyone who's touched the show. It's a measure of the overall community interest in any show. That's not a "point" against myanimelist, it's just what data there is. You can still infer plenty from shows people start. If one group picks up LOGH and another group picks up Rosario to Vampire, that's not "flawed" because we don't know how many finished each show, it would tell us everything we needed to know.

It could be that I'm just looking from a perspective biased further from the norm than I expected.

Probably ... the norm is usually much worse than you believe.

[Cruxador]

However your existing comparison

I wasn't doing it purely to make an equivalent comparison though, but to bring up a measure that would be independently useful. Not perfectly useful, but still as useful as reasonably possible.

it would tell us everything we needed to know.

I mean, depends what kind of conclusions you're trying to draw.

[Flying Dice]

@Flying Dice As for the sales charts figures, I think you have a good argument if limited to DVDs and other merch. However, i'd still argue that manga sales are a good measure. Manga are a fairly standardized commodity in terms of production and localization costs, pricing, and amount of content per unit. You can get pretty much any genre in America, however shonen battles and boobs are the big market leaders. If the cause is just that they translate too many shonen & harem ones and not enough of the other ones, then in fact that should bias the market the other way: sales spread out thinly across the shonen market with high sales for the few seinen ones that you can get, because of unmet demand.

Except that a lot more "niche" adult-oriented (non-pornographic) series make it across as manga than as anime. Like all of the historical dramas produced by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, you see those pretty regularly anywhere that doesn't exclusively cater to the teen demographic; if you read comments and reviews you'll find people talking about how they needed their reading glasses because of the small size &c. shit. That is, concerns of an adult audience that's on the far side of middle age.

It's a pretty natural thing, too, given that a trial import of the first few volumes of a manga is a much lower risk than making an anime adaption or translating it. There's also the aspect that the overall cost of purchasing an entire series is much more expensive with manga than anime-a short series of anime is about one season, $20-30ish. A short manga series is ~10 volumes, or ~$80 at $8 per. So there's more incentive to read scanlations than watch fansubs (even without considering that scanlations don't have the same quality loss issue as video or that translating text on static images is easier than the limited video editing necessary for subs), but at the same time the cost of entry into a manga is much lower once you've decided to buy it, because the lowest degree of per-unit cost is markedly smaller (one volume vs. one season).

I'll take this from a certain popular scanlation site's "most popular" list. That is, the most-viewed series.

The top 30: Very heavily combat/adventure-shonen. Not the battle-harem bullshit, just the Big Three, Hunter X Hunter, AoT, Gintama, Assassination Classroom, &c. A couple shonen school life stories. A couple shonen romcoms. Two shoujo romance/SoL stories. Two seinen (OPM and a seinen mystery/school life series). Only two with the 'ecchi' tag. Only one with the 'harem' tag, and that was Hayate the Combat Butler.

31-60: Some seinen (Berserk, Gantz, &c.). Quite a bit of shoujo romance with one or two smutty ones. A couple more shonen action series. A sports series. One shonen romance. A josei romcom. Two of the better-known harem-ecchi trash (R+V II, Highschool DxD).

61-90: A whole lot more shoujo romances and romcoms of various sorts, with one or two shonen romances thrown in. A couple sports series. A mystery series. Three trashy ecchi series, one shoujo harem series (and if anyone thinks those don't exist, you really don't pay attention).

91-120: A bunch more shoujo romances. A couple sports series, a shonen romance, a couple shonen action series. A gen-audiences mystery/romance. A non-romance shoujo series. A yaoi romance. Two trashy ecchi/harem series. Plus Negima, but it's a disservice to just call that haremtrash and walk away.

121-150: A romance/mystery. A bunch more shoujo romances, mostly romcoms. A couple yaoi romances. A seinen action series. A josei romance/ecchi series and a seinen romance/ecchi series. A sci-fi drama. A comedy. A dark comedy. Two ecchi/harem trash series.

For the record, it's one of the most popular and long-standing scanlation sites, and doesn't take down licensed series. The overwhelming bulk of the most popular 150 are shoujo romances of various sorts, though the top places are held by the big-name long-running shonen adventures (likely because those cater to mixed demographics a bit better than shoujo romances). Out of that 150, only ~12-15 are harem/ecchi trash, and few of those are near the top of the list.

What this really says is that the most popular stuff are series which are fairly straightforward, targeted at the 8-16 brackets, but which (largely because of differences in cultural opinions as to what's acceptable material for children) have enough mature themes and content to appeal to mass market audiences of late teens and 20-30 somethings as basic entertainment that doesn't take much thought.

It also seems to confirm that the bulk of the battle-harem softcore porn bullshit stems from the LN market, and is expressly made to appeal to otaku types-the more general LCD appeal is already saturated by shonen action and shoujo romance. Overlap in popularity is mostly, I suspect, because haremshit series superficially resemble shonen action series and the primary target audience of males 12-16 aren't going to be turned away by T&A or shitty marty stu author/audience insert characters.

So no, manga is not a good indicator of the popularity of haremshit series. It's quite the opposite, very few manga of that stripe are popular, and those that are are ones where it's a side dish to other elements, as with titles like Negima and Highschool DxD. I mean, we've already talked about this, how most haremshit anime are LN/WN adaptions.

[Reelya]

Sure you have that from the scanlation site, but the question needs to be asked then - exactly why does Monster Musume, and previously Highschool DXD, sell so many damn physical copies in the USA? Each of the three volumes of Monster Musume released in 2016 topped the US sales charts the week it was released. Somebody is buying those, and damn consistently, so it's definitely not a fluke - more people are buying those in the weeks they are released than any other series.

Let me demonstrate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manga_Best_Sellers_of_2016

you had Akame ga Kill! top 2 weeks, Monster Musume top 3 weeks, No Game No Life top 1 week.

So harem/ecchi series topped the #1  position in the sales chart about 1 week out of 4 in the USA last year. that's ... not something you can just brush off as an unrepresentative fluke. If you then dig down into the top 10 for each week, you'd find that harem series were also appearing somewhere in the 2-10 positions most weeks. I mean, you can argue from the scanlation data, but it's clear that tons of people are buying harem manga.

Same in 2015. Harem/ecchi series (Akame ga Kill / Monster Musume) topped sales 5 weeks that year. Basically, this is consistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manga_Best_Sellers_of_2015

Same in 2014. Dragonar Academy, Monster Musume, Rosario to Vampire and No Game no Life all topped weekly sales, total of 6 weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manga_Best_Sellers_of_2014

[Flying Dice]

As before: the most likely to consistently buy up physical copies on release and associated merch are diehard fans willing to drop major cash on it. IE otaku types, the same sort of people that have rooms full of figurines and walls covered in hundreds of volumes of manga. It's a goddamn expensive hobby to have, and your average reader is probably going to buy up one series as it releases, at most, if they buy manga at all.

And, even less charitably: it's a lot harder to masturbate to something when you're trying to balance a laptop as opposed to a small book.

Sales numbers only indicate the choices of people likely to repeatedly spend money on series they like as opposed to overall popularity, which is much better indicated by the popularity of things when they're essentially free (i.e. fan translations, network TV airings, &c.).

[Reelya]

Sure, but then you'd still need to factor in that this otaku stuff isn't actually the big seller in Japan. Japanese manga are about $5 and the American ones are about $8 according to you, right? So it's not like the stuff is massively expensive. That definitely says something different about how the two cultures engage with this stuff. Japan isn't suffering from that same issue that skews readership figures.

Also the market doesn't cater to people who leech, it's geared towards those who spend money. So at the very least this suggests that they're going to want to heavily market this harem/ecchi crap in America, and not those other series.

EDIT: Ahh btw, I got some data by a fluke about crunchyroll's most popular shows:
http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2017/08/17-1/the-most-popular-summer-simulcasts-of-the-americas
... this is for each nation of the Americas. To be honest, some pretty shitty shows came first in most places, but lots of them have small populations.

Haha, here's a state-by-state breakdown.
http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2016/10/27/feature-crunchyrolls-most-popular-fall-anime-by-state

In Georgia, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, and Virginia, Keijo was the most-watched show of fall 2016.

[Flying Dice]

$8 is definitely a lot. I stopped buying physical books because $8 paperbacks ate up my entertainment money like nothing.

For reference, I'd describe myself as fairly average as far as mostly-fiscally-responsible 20-somethings go, and my average monthly spending on entertainment is ~$10-15. Just following two or three manga series would pretty much null my budget for wants.

On the other point: the market doesn't cater to leeches, but scanlations are not the import market. They're a totally different marketplace, with much broader coverage and wider reach (in particular I'll note that they also cover many more manhua, manhwa, webtoons, and webcomics than licensed translations could hope to), and are not at all linked to traditional market forces.

IOW people translate what they want to translate, which... translates to a very large volume of translations. That includes literally hundreds of series in "niche" markets like josei that would never see the light of day in western stores.

[Cruxador]

Sure you have that from the scanlation site, but the question needs to be asked then - exactly why does Monster Musume, and previously Highschool DXD, sell so many damn physical copies in the USA? Each of the three volumes of Monster Musume released in 2016 topped the US sales charts the week it was released. Somebody is buying those, and damn consistently, so it's definitely not a fluke - more people are buying those in the weeks they are released than any other series.

This likely isn't enough to explain it entirely, but Monster Musume is a bit of a meme series. It was one of the first big things to come up in the monstergirl bubble that followed the success of Monstergirl Quest, but things were toned down enough to still appeal to the mainstream and (unlike, say, Centaur's Worries, which targets an older audience) it's uncomplicated romance. It's definitely teen schlock, but it does it well.

Ahh btw, I got some data by a fluke about crunchyroll's most popular shows:
http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2017/08/17-1/the-most-popular-summer-simulcasts-of-the-americas
... this is for each nation of the Americas. To be honest, some pretty shitty shows came first in most places, but lots of them have small populations.

Haha, here's a state-by-state breakdown.
http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2016/10/27/feature-crunchyrolls-most-popular-fall-anime-by-state

In Georgia, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, and Virginia, Keijo was the most-watched show of fall 2016.

Why are you calling out Keijo? It's definitely a more respectable favorite than a lot of other things on the two lists.

Here's Europe, by the by: http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2017/08/16-1/whats-the-most-popular-summer-anime-in-europe
Shout out to Bosnia and/or Herzegovina for bucking the trends.

[Cruxador]

Opinions on things I've tried out just now:

Black Clover seems like typical shounen so far. Potential to be big, but with one episode, it hasn't done anything yet. I'm seeing tropes played straight and excessive voice acting from the MC. If it doesn't subvert expectations, I won't recommend it highly. That said, it's probably the show that will be hot to make fun of this season, if Dies Irae doesn't surpass it in that.

Ousama game is melodramatic deathfest. The kind of thing that we see fairly often and it plays out pretty much the same each time. From the first episode alone, I wouldn't say it's a particularly excellent example of the genre. Since one episode isn't enough to extrapolate much, I asked manga readers if the series is as shit as it seemed, and responses varied from "yes" to "it's shittier".

Urahara has a nice aesthetic. Pastels, crayon-brush lines and fabric textures. Some unconventional cuts in the videography. Very artsy. Not yet sure if the substance lives up to the style. Speaking of western popularity, this show won't be getting high viewership numbers. But a discerning individual might give it a shot. I was impressed in the first few minutes, but found it to be at once frenetic and slow over time, and as such I grew weary of it before the first episode ended. Seems like a show would have been better on a 12 minute timescale than 24.

Konohana Kitan is very cute. It makes your heart happy to watch, so if that's what you need, watch it. On the other hand, it's set in a hotel/bathhouse so if you hate nudity, that may throw you off. It's not sexualized so far but I already got some shoujo ai type vibes off of it, so it may veer into light yuri territory. You can bet there'll be fans who assure you it already has. As far as content, there is some substance to it but anyway it's cute, so the rest is just details.

Just Because is very slow-paced, but unlike Urahara, it's not that the time is empty; even when it's moments of silence between characters, it feels better used than that. If you want a peaceful and mellow show, it's a good way to spend 20 minutes.

[Reelya]

On the other point: the market doesn't cater to leeches, but scanlations are not the import market. They're a totally different marketplace, with much broader coverage and wider reach (in particular I'll note that they also cover many more manhua, manhwa, webtoons, and webcomics than licensed translations could hope to), and are not at all linked to traditional market forces.

That is interesting and relevant, however we do need to draw that back to what we were talking about originally: which was whether the western fanbase in general was more or less "plebby" (to use Cruxadors term) that Japan. Sure you showed that the haremshit ones aren't being read in scanlation as much as they are in print. But these do still show marked differences:

- Japanese "in print" sales of harem/ecchi manga aren't actually a big thing, while they are in America. This shows definite differences in the demographic make-up of those willing to put money down for their hobby. If comparing sales figures isn't fair because of factors that affect people willing to buy media, then you need to account for those same factors in both markets. On the face of it, Japanese manga buyers are buying more quality titles than American manga buyers.

And that can't be just put down to import issues: American comic books (the actually popular ones) suffer from the same sort of limited topics as the manga Americans are buying. It doesn't matter how creative your story about a magical battle dude in a leotard is ... if every story you do is about a magical battle dude in a leotard then you're just exploring a limited story space. Oh look, we did one where leotard-dude has an existential crisis. It's such a new frontier.

- the scanlation stuff in the West is dominated at the top by "Big Shonen", and below that by tons of Shoujo, with only a smattering of other genres. The only real difference from the nytimes sales data was ecchi not appearing highly. However, the overall pattern of the data suggests a much more simplistic readership eco-system than in Japan: e.g. western male fans heavily focusing on relatively few "big shonen" titles that are mainly popular from anime, with western female fans heavily focus on shoujo, but reading a wider diversity of titles, so individual titles don't rate as highly. Obviously you get some gender cross-over but it's not dudes reading most of that shoujo.

The image I get from the scanlation figures is very different from the sales figures for Japan which show an even mixture of shonen, seinen and shoujo from the top sellers right down. The types of subject matter are also much simpler: very little except teen-battle-action or teen-romance in the Western popular scanlations, whereas in Japan you also get highly popular slice of life, horror, historical, sports mangas all strongly represented at every level of the sales charts. It's just a more simplistic marketplace in the West no matter which way you look at it.

[Flying Dice]

I think a lot of that can be explained as a simple factor of exposure time. The bulk of anime and manga fans in the West are basically two groups: current children/teens (who for obvious reasons are mostly interested in simple stuff targeted at children/teens); and people who were children/teens in the '80s and '90s when we first had anime and manga popping up in the West to a meaningful degree.

Of that, you've got three groups of now-adults. The ones whose conception of what manga and anime are was heavily shaped by the main stuff that got brought over in those days (which for the most part didn't go beyond still basically shonen/shoujo-y stuff with some more mature elements). They're watching what they grew up with.

The manchildren. These are the ones who are behind the haremshit popularity with non-teen audiences. They grew up with the same stuff as group 1, but as soon as they got access to smutty self-insert garbage they latched on because they're otaku trash with shit taste.

The people who moved on. These are adults who grew up with the same stuff as 1 and 2, but whose interests broadened as they aged. However, a lot of them will still enjoy less complex stuff, particularly when it's associated with nostalgic titles (as with the adult viewership of contemporary Dragonball titles).

Of those, 2 are the most likely to spend a bunch of money on shit, because they want stuff like figurines and Blu-Ray smut scenes & decensorship.

Western viewer/readership as a whole does have (broadly) less mature tastes, but that's because individual outliers aside the age range basically caps out at the mid-30s. Anime and manga in Japan are, even with conservative date estimates, several decades ahead in terms of audience exposure. You've got middle-aged Japanese folks who grew up with anime and manga in volumes that you really don't in the West, so there's naturally a larger market for stuff created for an exclusively adult audience.