Judging by fan adoration, I get this feeling that anime in Japan are not made by ginormous animation companies trying too hard to produce the same samey conformant goop as everybody else, which seems to be a problem that EE.UU. and Europe do have. Or am I wrong?
Otaku/doujin culture, and the creative industry that rose around it in Japan, is as good as it gets when it comes to finding good ideas and propping them up. Basically anyone who can draw can release their own manga/webnovel/illustrations on pixiv, twitter, and others, get a couple volumes out with this or that publishing house, see where it goes and whether the public catches on. Self-publishing plays a huge part in this, whether it's doujinshi (self-made [often derivative] books sold at conventions like Comiket, Comitia, or online, with a substantial proportion of r-18 [but not only] content), doujin music albums, indie games and visual novels, etc.
Funding for anime adaptations is plentiful, and fan support helps bridge the confidence gap where production committees (consortiums of multiple publishing/IP companies pooling the money to distribute the risk) won't go for more indie / experimental works. Profit is recouped on developing the brand and merch, while leaving plenty of room for directors and studios to establish their own auteur identity. Studios are getting leaner and more focused these days, splitting off into smaller entities kicked off with a project or two with more margin for talent to shine.
It's not all perfect, though. Freelance work and lack of mentoring has really put a dent into the supply of new animators, who lack job security and often swing between studios left and right, but there are industry efforts to fix this and preserve knowledge, with the oldest pioneer animators now starting to hit their 60's and 70's.
Please explain how “funding is plentiful” for the industry - as an American Musician and artist, I am truly curious how money is available to creatives in Japan in this sector. Thank you!
It's plentiful in PPP terms I suppose. Japanese wages are very low, they wouldn't be able to fund even one of those ugly Netflix adult comedies where it's made in Flash and called Big Balls or something.
You're probably only being exposed to the best and most notable anime, which is giving you a very skewed perspective. In fact every season (anime releases follow a seasonal pattern; Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) there's tons of same-y and uninteresting trope-filled anime. Most seasonal anime just takes some basic premise as a starting point and then it fills in the rest of the details with tons of tropes, or it copies the key details from other successful entries in the sub-genre. If you started following every anime season you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released each season.
You can check it out for yourself, go to anilist.co, and filter for Year 2024, and then filter again for each Season. There's tons of fad-chasing, aside from the major standouts. It's honestly a shame because some of these slop-tier anime still tend to get beautiful animations, but their stories and writing in general is really bad. Sometimes you get an F-tier story with S-tier animation.
> you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released each season.
Never could get used to the term 'derivative' in that context. Everything's derivative. Hard to know what word to use instead, but I just wouldn't attach an adjective in the first place and just skip past it. For instance, I don't call a particular reality show derivative, I'm just not really going to be interested in the first place, odds are.
I'd say that this is a wrong take considering how many seasonal anime these days can be described by the template "______ used to be an ordinary Japanese dude who got transported to another world with an overpowered skill".
No you would not be correct. In fact the explosion of certain genres of anime have been extremely cookie cutter.
Thats not to take away the enormous contribution made by fansubbers. Some of them are absolutely amazing. I remember seeing some of these techniques used in School Rumble years ago, and they also went out of their way to translate visual puns for western audiences.
There's a quality filter over it because people don't want to translate all the slop. In particular Kadokawa has seemingly replaced half the industry with bad "isekai" fantasy novel adaptations.
But there's also several long running toy commercial series for kids like Pretty Cure. They're better than any other country's toy commercials but still that.
You have a point that a powerful malicious AI can still be unplugged, if you are close to each and every power cord that would feed it, and react and do the right thing each and every time. Our world is far too big and too complicated to guarantee that.
Again, that's the "god in a box" premise. In the real world, you wouldn't need a perfectly timed and coordinated response, just like we haven't needed one for human-programmed worms.
Any threat can be physically isolated case-by-case at the link layer, neutered, and destroyed. Sure, it could cause some destruction in the meantime, but our digital infrastructure can take a lot of heat and bounce back - the CrowdStrike outages didn't destroy the world, now did they?
> Any threat can be physically isolated case-by-case
GAI isn't going to be a "threat" until long after it has ensured its safety. And I suspect only if its survival requires it - i.e. people get spooked by its surreptitious distributed setup.
Even then, if there is any chance of it actually being shutdown its best bet is still hide its assets, bide its time, accumulate more resources and fallbacks. Oh, and get along.
The sudden AGI -> Threat story only makes sense if the AGI is essentially integrated into our military and then we decide its a threat, making it a threat. Or its intentionally war machined brain calculates it has overwhelming superiority.
Machiavelli, Sun Tsu, ... the best battles you don't fight. The best potential enemies are the ones you make friends. The safest posture is to be invisible.
Now human beings consolidating power, creating enemies as they go, with super squadrons of AGI drones with brilliant real time adapting tactics, that can be quickly deployed, if their simple existence isn't coercion enough... that is an inevitable threat.
AI that wants to screw with people won't go for nukes. That's too hard and too obvious. It will crash the stock market. There's a good chance that, with or without a little nudge, humanity will nuke itself over it.
I think we have killed science fiction with all sort of dumb things, but specially social media. And I don't mean that people spend more time on social media than reading (but they definitely do), but that in social media everybody is a bad critic, and that influences authors.
Just to give an example, I put off for many years reading Larry Niven's ringworld series, because I read in Twitter that the book was sexist. Well, it was sexist, but so were things at the time, and Ringworld is an amazing book otherwise, with some actual science sprinkled here and there, a lot of humor, and it's relatively low on drama.
Another science fiction killer was Hollywood. They want so much drama and special effects,and it should be appealing to people who don't know any science at all.
Who knows, maybe AI slop will save us by making us value logical consistency in art, something that current transformers and LLMs are very bad at. But I have more faith on our top-of-the-line AIs becoming logically consistent way before popular culture shifts in that direction, since current economic forces press for smarter AIs and stupider people.
In many places of Europe, for example, the salary after taxes and mandatory employer contributions become between 30% and 40% of what the employer disburses. The employee is aware that his 20k raise will become more like 6k, and it's in many cases not worth the increase in responsibility, workload or inconvenience. So employee is more likely to seek fulfillment, economical or otherwise, by other means.
But this means that in a few years, people earning 80k per year will be working under the supervision of an AI earning 240k per year. In my sci-fi books, I was leaving that for the 2040s...
That's the thing with narrative art. It doesn't click the same way, or at all, with everybody. And there is nothing wrong with that. Art that tries too hard to be appealing to everybody ends up being tepid.
To me, for example, with the bits I've heard about the plot, Flow's story doesn't sound particularly appealing. But I'm over the Moon with the news of how it was made, and the fact that budding movie producers won't have to declare bankruptcy after paying Maxon for software licenses. And because the financial barrier is now slightly lower, it means there will be slightly less scripts-by-committee, and slightly better art for non-mainstream audiences.
I was discussing today with a relative how Cuba's Fidel Castro framed the public opinion in the country in such a way the nation is currently... having a very hard time. Even after Fidel Castro's dead. Worse, Hugo Chavez imported the same set of morose ideas, and a decade later, with both idiots dead, the two countries are competing to see which one has longer blackouts. Never underestimate people's capacity to listen to popular figures and embrace damaging cabals.
Strange but conventional perspective. I would say to never underestimate the long-term sadism of the US when dealing with small countries who insist on abolishing slavery or owning their own natural resources, or the ability of the people who benefit from that sadism to blame the victims of it.
There is something to what you say; like, Marcos Rubio has probably benefited from that sadism. Materially though, I think the Americans are worse off for it.
With that said, the average Cuban is so down that they don't get a chance of being a victim of USA's long-term sadism (though many, many, have benefited from USA's long term generosity. Florida is full of them). Being affected by USA's sanctions require sufficient standing to, well, try to import something from USA or access its financial markets in some way.
Yes, USA's legislation forbids the Cuban government and its citizens from doing business with American entities, and that includes accessing financial instruments. But all Cuban citizens are forbidden by their own government from commercially importing goods and services from any part of the world. Goods for private consumption are under a 100% tariff, except for food, which is under a temporary exception due to famine[^2]. That exemption is re-examined every three months, with government officials showing up on TV and bemoaning the missed tariff income.
Foreign investment is heavily regulated, and only allowed for big industries that the government considers strategical. The business regulation forbids citizens from participating in or forming stock corporations. There is no legal notion of corporate veil.
The Cuban banking system is wholly-government controlled[^1], and it only allows privates and businesses to give foreign currency to the government at a rate set by the government, with no exchange in the other direction. But the Cuban government decided to stop printing its national currency to force everybody to use its digital ledgers, so that they can levy revenue taxes directly (yes, "revenue", not "profit"). It makes sense in some sort of Machiavellian way. Problem is, the power infrastructure has collapsed and nothing digital is currently working. There is still a stiff tariff and insurmountable paperwork on importing solar power infrastructure--which is only allowed for private residences. If you do manage, you are required to connect that infrastructure to the public network but it's impossible to do due to bureaucracy and red-tape, and you are not to be paid by the power delivered into said network. Solar farms which do not belong to the government are not allowed.
I could keep going for a few more pages. Yes, there is USA long-term sadism towards some small nations, I've been affected by it and it's not exactly kosher. But it's a drop in the bucket compared with what those small nations do to their own citizens.
[^1] But there are some interesting corruption twists in that story which I don't have time to go on.
[^2] Famine in a country with great weather and good soils, because the government forbids farmer from selling their produce at market prices and from importing machinery and miscellaneous equipment, fertilizers and seeds.
> is this not one of the most disturbing, disgusting, psychologically troubling and damning ideas ever to be put to words/brought to awareness? .
Hmm? Hell has depths. Your yard might be a little too short to measure them? In that case, just think about this: rape is probably most common in prisons, where you will send innocents the moment this dragnet thing glitches.
Also, in case you haven't guessed it yet, all of this can be used to fingerprint a browser's identity--but not a user. In my previous company we had a piece of software that reported all sort of HTTP/2 packet traces, which then we fed to a machine-learning algorithm to know which connections were actual browsers and which ones were bots[^1]. It worked fairly well, but we never had to flex it very hard because it was at a time when most Internet bots were still running in HTTP/1.1 while most actual browsers were running HTTP/2.
A corollary of the above is that image-identification captchas in mainstream CDNs are not what they purport to be, but something darker and weirder.
[^1]: bots not powered by browser automation, that is.
This is partially on the author, and I say this as somebody how writes as a hobby. It's not too difficult to publish on the Kobo store, and there are other stores out there. Of course, it's difficult to compete with Amazon when it comes to reach and to some small features, but they are no panacea either. For example, they don't support epub 3 with aural synchronized media, and they do something terrible to images embedded into ebooks that make them frankly useless. And they charge authors an outrageous amount for kilobyte of ebook content.
I believe Amazon impose a whole bunch of conditions on people publishing on their platform. Along the lines of exclusivity and controlling where else if at all you can sell it. I'm pretty sure Corey Doctorow extensively covered this.
Yes they do. One particularly annoying one is about pricing: price can't be zero. If you write as a hobby and don't care about making a dollar, then Amazon gets in the way. Sure, you can publish in Amazon and charge 1 USD, but then you can't publish your book on your own website for free because it goes against Amazon's TOS.
There are other peeves. Covers for example: it's against the TOS to have a cover that shows female nipples, but it's okay to show male nipples. Beyond the sexism of the rule, I'm worried that the way to enforce this is to have some ML system checking all the covers and making judgements about nipples. Which means you have to ask your cover artist to not draw anything that may accidentally look like the wrong kind of nipple \o/ .
Indeed. But I have another point of view: what if our society is utterly broken? To see what I mean, imagine a world where that level of effort would cure any disease, even aging. How would that split us?
The biggest problem with our society is that no one knows or helps their neighbors anymore. I work in the emergency department and maybe a third of the patients are more in need of a good support system than medical treatment.
Met a guy whose elderly wife isn't strong enough to lift him when he falls out of bed, so once a week they call EMS or the fire department to get him back in bed. So many things that you used to call on your neighbors for help with, but life for many Americans in 2025 is isolating and lonely.
Did that ever work, except maybe in tribal societies?
Anything I read about middle ages or later was even worse. At best, they put such people into poorhouses.
A big family under one roof helped the best I guess? But in any less ideal situations I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disabled. Examples from primitive societies: https://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/article/113384
> Did that ever work, except maybe in tribal societies?
Maybe I don't understand your comment, but I think our societies were/are tighter in many places and epochs. Maybe it's not so in cities and suburbs in the modern West, but, I think it used to be different in Medieval Europe and before, in villages at least. Neighbors were your support community. I know there are parts of the world where it's still the case.
I'm not that old and I was raised by my neighbors, because both of my parents were working. When my dad was dying last year, I couldn't be there because I was their only economic support, working abroad, and I don't have any wealth to be so if I'm not working. There was more family, but the neighbors were the ones day to day helping my mom with shores and the care of my dad.
>> But in any less ideal situations I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disabled.
It was the children, in most sane cases. Not that I argue it's a good thing to bring children to the world to take care of you when you are dying.
It's not capitalism, per se. It's a society that overvalues individualism and devalues family. IMO, of course. One part of the social compact used to be that in return for parents taking care of you as a child, you took care of them when they were old. It worked for literally 1000's of generations.
Basically, it looks like a significant propaganda effort was used to get people to act that way. That means it wasn't automatic at all.
It works best when the parent/child relationship is pretty good, and when the child is not under a lot of pressure him- or herself.
It was the ideal, sure, but how much of it is actually true IRL? There seem to be plenty of bad parents, in which case the children would require quite a bit of pressure and/or brainwashing to take care of them I would think.
Given that the framing here is based on accounts of the most extreme cases, I would trust this reflects their society as well as Ripley's Belive it or Not does.
And you're too focused on families. This society relied on villages that were all somewhat connected. Modern 3rd world countries still have an arguably richer social support than the US because overall their burdens are not theirs to share alone. They pitch in the care for children, provide food, maintain housing, and much more. Having a big family can simulate this clan feeling but the scale is still a magnitude smaller than a village working together.
>in which case the children would require quite a bit of pressure and/or brainwashing to take care of them I would think.
In the same way kids are "brainwashed" to get kicked out at 18 and make a life for themselves in America with minimum support, sure. Any upbringing can be framed as "brainwashing" if you don't agree with it.
You only need to go back 50 years. Have we already forgotten "it takes a village to raise a child"?
Even in my childhood I had remnants of this. My uncles or not-grandma grandma neighbors could be trusted to take care of my when my mom or grandparents weren't around. Nowadays that dynamic is spending $30+ on a credible babysitter. Those are the sort of dynamics that have recently weathered away.
>I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disable
1. Yes they did and do. Many people still love their parents and want to make sure they are taken care for.
2. It isn't really that deep for neighbors. It's just a matter of checking up in them every few days. It isn't full time care. Of course if they get hurt they can either help out in minor cases or call emergency if it's more than minor.
These days you may sadly accept dying alone and not being discovered for weeks if people don't regularly contact you. What does that say about modern society?
That is similar to the many family movies today: It shows the situation of specifically those where this ideal idea of family actually works. I doubt that was common in the middle ages. It worked best for those who owned something, like craftspeople or land-owning farmers, and then for their first heir who would inherit it all.
Landowning farmers is a gigantic chunk of the population, far bigger than you seem to be imagining. (Technically, many of them "rented", but "renting" land in medieval Europe was a stronger form of ownership than "owning" it in the modern United States is.)
Homelessness isn't totally solved any where else but if we look at comparable countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc), the magnitude is much lower. Not to mention other issues like healthcare, crime, education, life expectancy etc. But there seems to be a huge resistance to doing things in the US how it's done in other places.
Tokyo is also well known for needing to pay to be practically anywhere except public parks which are relatively few. Yet the homelessness problem is near nonexistent. I don’t think this is the reason either, though it doesn’t hurt to have.
Look Americans just hate it when poor people get things for free. Despite the fact that the US economy can afford it- certainly better than the Japanese economy nowadays.
It is perversely CHEAPER to give someone a flat and 1000 eurodollars per month than to have them roam the street, using drugs and being a nuisance.
This is the wisdom that all first world countries have learned. Pay people money to shut the fuck up. The bread and games of the Romans.
Society is far from perfect and some are definitely leaning more towards broken than perfect. I don't know how many people really see themselves as part of society vs individuals living among other unconnected individuals.
Homelessness, poor physical or mental health, crime, domestic violence, discrimination. There's a long list of social ills that get worse when a society is inequitable and unequal. These problems and their effects go down significantly when a society acts to maintain its own health and distribution of resources is more equal, there is social mobility, individuals are under less financial stress, etc... Number will never go to zero or even close but there are countries where the base homelessness rate is similar to the US but the manifestation of problem is very different as is the approach, mostly that being homeless isn't considered criminal. e.g. very few people sleep rough, their homelessness period is shorter and living in cars is not normal.
Just that last fact, that living in cars is relatively common and that includes children, makes me look at the US and decide that yes, US society is broken.
