mbanu wrote:
There is a missing step here, I think. For certain styles of anime, an audience needs to be built in general before a paying audience can be grown from it. This was a big problem with anime in 90s Japan, especially pre-Evangelion. You had a certain group of dedicated fans who liked what they liked and would pay for a certain type of show, and even then, they only had the resources to support so many shows per season. You had a larger cultural aversion to otaku due to associations with Miyazaki the serial killer and Aum Shinrikyo discouraging Japanese people from joining anime fandom; there wasn't really much of an alternate market. So in practice, creators who wanted to make shows other than a certain type found that they really couldn't -- with a fixed number of otaku with fixed tastes, there was just no way to make it work practically. Distributing fansubs of these niche shows to areas where people had never heard of Miyazaki the serial killer or Aum Shinrikyo, who weren't familiar with the established tastes of Japanese fandom, was seen as one of the only ways to build an alternate market that might one day eventually pay. (Some directors even gave their informal support of fansubs for this very reason.)
I'm not sure I agree with some of this: If we're looking at anime from between 1987/88 and 1995/96, anime produced in Japan ran a large stylistic, genre and demographic gamut. The OAV and limited run market was alive and well with products directed towards that sweet otaku market (GunBuster) and more experimental/art-house productions (Angel's Egg or Robot Carnival). Not to mention more pop culture directed shows broadcast on TV; everything was still on an upswing.
Aum Shinrikyo, while using animation as a recruiting tool, I think 'discouraging joining anime fandom' was a way distant second-place worry to "I hope they don't gas the subway again." Likewise, while there's a heavy stigma from the Miyazaki case on these weird, lone otaku folk, I don't think there was a significant change in anime production that reflected that for several years around that. It might have cooled Akihabara off a little bit and there might have been a hit to the hentai manga and OAV markets but that's different than say, the PM's Office (or
I don't know, governor of Tokyo) says we have to step in and regulate the cartoons and comics or we'll "delete all the animes".
If there was any mass event in Japan that curtailed anime production in the 1990s towards only what sells - it was most likely the contractions after the economic bubble of the 1980s burst. When things are contracting domestically, it doesn't hurt to explore foreign markets for future sales, even if that means you have to give away a few proverbial pies. But even the bubble bursting, Aum, and Miyazaki cannot compare to what I think the real shrinking of anime to the otaku market was: the mid 2000s until probably the mid 2010s.
So, I'm not discounting what individual directors may have stated - they very well could have stated that. Maybe they did have projects lined up that were directly affected. But I think that's narrow, inside-baseball look at what can be attributed to other macro-forces when trying to broad brush an industry in a specific time.
mbanu wrote:
The subtitlers themselves are a bit easier to explain, I think. Often these are a subset of fansubbers that I don't think have a formal name, but would more accurately be called "fansetters". They are the folks who really enjoy all the unexpected stuff you can do typeset-wise with modern subtitling software when you aren't restricted by legacy hardware requirements. In practice most commercial subtitling ignores all this stuff because they don't believe there is a market for "deluxe" subtitles beyond those that will play in a DVD player or TV streaming device, justifying the cost of having an extra set of subtitles. So the fansetters release these deluxe packages to try to get people excited for these types of subtitles and maybe generate enough demand for a commercial release that has them.
I like the term "fansetter". Generally, I do not like fansetter's or their fans. Back during arguments in the mid 2000s about whether fansubs had a place in fandom any longer, fansetters and their fans were routinely in the camp of never buying anything that didn't have these features. A good-looking, clean transfer, with accurate and well composed scripts was a lost sale because the girl with the purple hair didn't have purple subtitles. And, because of hardware requirements and limitations, no company was going to release those subtitle options because people who rightfully paid for them wouldn't be able to use them - which is probably a worse PR nightmare than the lost sale because there are only three colors of subtitle scripts used.
Now, I don't know necessarily if streaming an app from my FireTV has the same limitations as a DVD in a hardware player does but I still don't know that the additional work on alternate typesets is worth it when you have a subscription model similar to most apps/sites (Hulu, CrunchyRoll, etc.)
Akage wrote:
There's a lot more translated anime out there that you might think if you're willing to consider translations not in English.
There's always a risk using a source in Language B translated from Language A to get something into Language C. The risks could be greater, depending on the culture of Language B, if it's a commercial release versus a fansub, etc. Admittedly, my interest with non-English translations only go so far as comparing those versions with their Japanese lineage or the occasional watching of something I am already familiar with in German (the only other language I have any competency with outside of English or Japanese).