The Old School Otaku Lounge

Yea I saw that on Twitter, so you were the one that wrote the comment?

https://twitter.com/abzeronow/status/714841608416587776

To me, it doesn't surprise me. Funimation has time and time again done shady things to its fans and the company. I think they are way to big for themselves and it is starting to show. I hardly buy Funimation products when it comes to my anime collecting, and I always buy from other companies like RightStuf and Discotek anyways. This is just another example of them not really giving a crap about what they do, and I highly doubt they will find the "missing" artwork and apologize for it. I will be surprised if they did that.

I just had a "Funi" felling about this whole Escaflowne kickstarter, and to me it seems that I am right on a few things. If anything, I would wanna be proven wrong on how Funi was gonna handle it.

As neither SakuraCon nor Funimation could even respond with a token "we're investigating the matter"-type response, it's been kicked up the chain. Both Yamada and her animation studio, Studio Wit, have been notified of the theft in Japanese. I still don't expect the sketches to ever be 'found', but I am hoping that the relationship between Studio Wit and Funimation will sour. Most of these US distributors as well as conventions have their own 'glory wall' in their office, full of artwork received from previous guests or from studios whose artwork they license and much of it under the guise of donation for charity.

I am well aware that embezzlement like this happens at conventions all the time; There's the matter of a lovely Haruhi Suzumiya sketch that Noizi Ito drew for the Anime Expo charity auction in 2013 that the convention has yet to 'find'. It just really bothers me when you tell an artist that they'll be helping out a lot of kids with the money they raise, and instead you pocket it because adding two more sketches to the glory wall is more important than the last wish of a child who has been through hospital hell.

What bothers me about the Escaflowne Kickstarter is that they've raised well over 150K past the goal. They could have easily have sat through that charity auction and bid for the artwork using that money to buy those sketches. I would have respected them a lot more for doing that, even if that means that there was no way I could win against them. At this point, for me, it's not about owning the artwork, but rather, doing the right thing. If Funimation opted to make a solid 10K donation to Make-A-Wish to make up for the theft, I'd consider buying from them again. But since they can't even acknowledge that something did occur, like Aniplex, I won't buy anything released under their brand again.