Category: Projects

Otaku Diaries Project, Looking for participants!

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We at Reverse Thieves are looking to do something a little different.

We are proposing a project called the Otaku Diaries. We are looking for people who consider themselves anime fans to participate in an anonymous survey. It will be profiling the lives, loves, and losses of these individuals and how their hobby has related to shaping them. We will also be looking for patterns as well as differences in the cases. We are looking for diverse people who are not afraid to get personal, questions will include topics like prior relationships, profession, and sexuality.

This survey is about a story, not about numbers.

If you are interested here is how it is going to work. Send us an email at otakudiary@gmail.com with a brief description of yourself include your age, sex, and location. No names need be exchanged and your anonymity will be protected, create a separate e-mail account just for this survey if you wish. If you are selected to participate, you will be given a case # to which all your answers will be attributed. After all the data is collected we will be doing several blog posts about the results.

We hope to start at the end of February, depending on the number of responses.

Thanks!

Poll Results: Is CLANNAD actually popular in the U.S.?

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CLANNAD, key

I wouldn’t say I frequent a lot of forums, but I am active in a couple. I can often be found in the anime recommendation section of forums. I can’t go a day without someone/many people suggesting CLANNAD for various reasons, sometimes completely unrelated to the topic at hand. I also see it frequently blogged about, whether it be general praise or following it episode by episode. So after all this, I just kept asking myself was it really that popular? We set out to try and find out.

I can tell you first hand from several online interactions that CLANNAD has a evangelical fan following. You could easily get the idea the Internet that it is this hot show with thousands of very vocal and devoted fans. I remember stumbling on one web review of CLANNAD that called anyone who did not like CLANNAD lame, gay, and without artistic taste which strikes me as a rather extreme reaction. But I feel it is exemplary of the attitude of many of CLANNAD’s die-hard supporters. The question was how much does this translate into an actual fan following in anime fandom. Does a single online supporter translate into something like 100 real life fans or does it translate into two real life fans?

Hypothesis
CLANNAD only appears to be popular because of a vocal minority on the Internet. Our theory is there is no sizable mass of mid-range fans of CLANNAD who love the show but don’t talk about it online. There is also no hidden market outside of the established online fans making it an excellent license for the U.S.

Method
In person, vocalized, polling of anime fans attending New York Anime Festival and Providence Anime Conference. This was done to get the widest variety of people who have varying degrees of knowledge of current titles in Japan. We first asked each person had they ever heard of CLANNAD. We also gave a brief description if people seemed fuzzy on what the show was. If they had heard of it we then asked if they watched any of it, whether it be an episode or a whole season. If they answered in the affirmative, we asked if the liked it. This gave us a good insight into several things. One, how much of a general buzz was there about the show. Was the show popular enough that it is recognizable to a majority of anime fans? Two, how many people then investigated the show due to the buzz. Third, when people finally sat down and watched the show did they enjoy what they watched?

Results

Total polled: 320

Haven’t heard of the anime: 219 (68%)
Heard of the anime: 101 (32%)
Of those who had heard, how many watched any of it: 56 (55%)
Of those who watched, how many disliked it: 27 (48%)
Of those who watched, how many liked it: 29 (52% which is 9% of the total group surveyed)

Conclusions
I think a good question that we didn’t ask of people would have been whether or not they were interested in seeing it if they hadn’t. But unfortunately that is hindsight. And we are only two people (plus Kohaku helped) so getting more people to survey during the allotted period was rather impossible. As our experience was everyone under the sun had seen CLANNAD, these results make that obviously untrue. Though I think these results do translate into a small established fan-base with very proud and fervent supporters, that doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t be interested in it if it comes to the U.S. However, it does seem to suggest similar results as seen with the debacle of the Rozen Maiden license.

The Internet has the proven ability to easily give a misleading perception of what is popular. Rozen Maiden is was a huge phenomenon in Japan and had a large vocal fan following on the Internet in America. So it was easy to assume from the number of people in the U.S. talking about it that it would garner solid U.S. sales among an otaku market like it did in Japan. From everything I have heard Rozen Maiden totally bombed for Geneon when released. Most people who had already watched it passed on buying it and almost no one who was not already a fan picked it up. Looking at the numbers we gathered a similar situation could occur with CLANNAD. The vocal minority of fans who love the show have made it seem like it has a large fan-base but in actuality the number of people who purchase DVDs tends to be smaller than the number of people talking about any show. Only 18% of the people interviewed had taken the time to watch the show when it was available free to them.

Byakuya isn’t the only one getting a piece of Renji’s ass.

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renji, bleach
Spoilers up to the current chapters of Bleach.

Guest editorial by Lothos

Based on the number of Rukia x Renji fan-sites/supporters on forums, plus his standing in  Bleach character popularity polls (consistently in the top 5 until recently), I had to stop and wonder why people like him so much. The more I thought about his character the more I found myself baffled. As far as I can surmise, he just serves as fodder to fill air time/page space to placate the fan-girls who think he’s hot. So he’s Rukia’s buddy from back when they were in Rokungai. Great. That’s apparently so inconsequential that it’s only touched on a couple times in the series. When she’s going to be executed he seems to be pretty much okay with it until Ichigo and friends storm the castle. The more I look back at Renji, the more and more pointless he seems to be and the only reason I can think of why people like him is because he has tattoos and a spiffy haircut. Lets take a look at what exactly he’s ever done throughout the series.

He has never won a fight that mattered, not even his very first fight with Ichigo! Byakuya has to step in to save his bum because Ichigo powers up and almost kills him. [Ch. 55] And that was an essentially untrained Ichigo. His Bankai is weak, it’s just a bigger version of his sword. And not even a bigger cooler version like Komamura has, where a giant samurai is wielding his now gigantic sword and he controls it like the kid in Giant Robo. Nope, it’s just a bigger version of his whip blade thing. He also sucks at Kidou and the only time in memory where he actually puts it to good use is when fighting one of the Espada. During his fight with Szayel Aporro Granz, Espada #8, after basically trying everything against him with no effect he manages to use his Shikai to bind himself to Szayel and sets off a pillar of fire around them. This essential does nothing to Szayel other than make him cough from the smoke, and set him up for Ishida to attack. [Ch. 275] He had to blow himself up in the process to do nothing to the guy but char his clothes. Also, his Shikai has a horrible flaw in that it has a set number of times he can whip it around and then it has to go back to being a (for the most part) normal sword, so against any worthwhile fighter it’s pretty useless. [Ch. 96]

He is the constant “set the stage” character for whoever he happens to be running around with. Be it Ichigo, Ishida, or whoever else. He is so useless that all he can do is try to distract the enemy so someone worthwhile can actually do something to them because his wet noodle of a Zanpakuto was ineffective.  He yells at Ichigo and everyone else all the time about how they’re so dumb or weak, [Ch.54, Ch.95, Ch.141, Ch.292, etc.] when in reality he’s never done anything useful except carry Rukia away AFTER Ichigo busted in to save the day and did some bad-ass shit like take out three vice captains bare-handed before they could even draw their swords. [Ch.152] I’m not a big fan of Ichigo either, but at least he gets stuff done and doesn’t fail at every endeavor.

I also blame Renji for the fact that Chad is constantly getting his butt handed to him. After all, Renji was Chad’s sparring partner. [Ch. 224] Which is unfortunate because Chad actually shows some promise and developed some pretty awesome powers. However, even though Chad tends to be on the losing end of fights (mostly because he seems to get matched up against someone way more powerful than those his friends fight) he does at least win some of the time on his own, so thus he’s better than Renji.

His captain, Byakuya, is also fan-girl fodder, but at least he is a bad-ass mofo who tends to beat the snot out of anyone who gets in his way and look good while doing it. What could Renji do against him? Pretty much nothing as we saw when he squared off against Byakuya during the Soul Society story arc. When Renji finally comes around and decides that Rukia shouldn’t be executed, he is confronted by Byakuya who intends to let the execution go through. Byakuya chides Renji saying he’s just an animal looking up at the moon, but just like that moon his fangs will never touch him. [Ch. 142] After a lot of failed attempts he managed to scrape Byakuya’s hand or something [Ch. 144] and that’s with Byakuya essentially going easy on him while Renji was going all out do or die style. Granted, Byakuya’s a captain and one of the more powerful ones at that, but still, Renji’s one of the few non-captains to have achieved Bankai and all he could manage was a scratch? Weak.

I guess that one thing Renji’s good at is taking a beating, but he’s not even among the best at that. Ichigo and Kenpachi take a hell of a lot more punishment than him and they keep on ticking (most of the time anyway). What I’d LOVE to see in the upcoming chapters is someone from soul society die at the hands of one of the Espada. It’d be great if it was a vice captain, and I think Renji would be a prime candidate. That could be the one thing he’d actually be useful for, breaking the hearts of fan girls everywhere while adding a bit of grittiness to the story. It would also show that Soul Society isn’t invincible. He’s a major enough character that it would have a lasting impact on readers and he is connected to enough characters in the story to push some development in them. C’mon Kubo, make me proud! Extra points if you have Gin/Tousen/Aizen do it.

renji, bleach, byakuya, BL, yaoi, doujinshi