Today, I was looking at my Youtube feed when I saw a thumbnail about Ruri Rocks. Cool show, it was a blast to watch. Since my parsing order goes something a bit like “thumbnail > title > uploader”, I initially dismissed it on the grounds that “some anituber probably doesn’t have anything interesting to say about much of anything”, but then I realized the uploader was Gneiss… cool guy, I also like his stuff, so I went and watched the video.
Cool video, I liked it.
Then I scrolled a bit through the comments and saw this one.
Some of the wording kinda stuck out to me.
a geology anime
there’s anime for everything
I feel like this comes up pretty often, when people say “they made an anime about X” it kinda doesn’t sound the same as when an indie developer releases something called “a game about X” or something. In the former case, it really does feel like “they” is treated as some kind of singular entity. I’ve often seen the term “anime” used as some sort of generic term that designates much more than just “the Ruri Rocks adaptation by studio BIND”. And yet, as another commenter justly pointed out, “an anime about X” doesn’t just magically appear out of nowhere.
- Someone has to be very competent/passionate about something;
- That someone also happens to like drawing;
- That someone also happens to like it enough to try and make a manga;
- That someone is skilled and lucky enough to get it published;
- That someone is skilled and lucky enough for their manga to get traction;
- That someone is lucky enough for an anime adaptation to be proposed;
- The studio is skilled enough, and collaborates with the mangaka well enough for the adaptation to be almost as accurate as the source material;
- Both are skilled and lucky enough for the adaptation to gain traction.
But yeah, I guess that can also be ignored and boiled down to “haha what will the whacky anime industry (<-singular entity) come up with next? They (<-whoever that may be) really do make anime about everything!”.
Sorry for tricking you into a semi-rant article, it’s just something I’ve noticed about the way “anime” gets used as a term, even unconsciously, it often comes up in ways that smudges the conversation and presents the whole industry as a single-minded factory hovering over differnet hobbies to “make an anime out of”, even though hobby anime tends to come from a genuine place of passion. I see this kind of “medium=product” thinking less often with the term “manga”, maybe because it’s easier to associate a single name to any particular work, or maybe because “anime” is the term that people latched onto.
Anyways, that’s all. Off to enjoy my weekend now (got a collab part to work on…)