Letters

Funny how everything achieves balance. Last month I was nearly smothered in email, so of course this month I got barely any at all.

You mention Hanamaru Weekly. I love that site, I love all the manga they have there... I'm very attached to several of the artists there, especially the husband and wife team of Denjiro and Tsugumi (I was lucky enough to win a signed copy of Tsugumi's Hanamaru Angels book ^-^ )... I will dearly miss the recently folded Chibi-Pop Manga magazine, which was closely affiliated with Hanamaru Weekly.

Buuut I just have to point out, because you didn't make it clear, that they often go for months and months without a single update. There hadn't been regular updates for probably almost a year until the second series of Maidroids began recently.

Just wanted to say.

- Tim Hodge timhodge@rocketmail.com
http://www.geocities.com/boruto_kuranko/eatman

Damn. Chibi-Pop's bit the dust? Why am I always the last to know about these things? It would explain why I hadn't seen an issue in so long. I'm gonna miss Fubuki, the Female Ninja. That was my favorite.

Has it been a while since we last looked up anime reviews? As a reviewer of anime myself, I've been finding a dearth of really good sites, and now is the time to really gear up (especially given the untimely passing of Anime Cafe's Nagatomi Akio in April, who is sorely missed).

I know I'm not the one to speak - after all, THEM Anime Reviews has not been updated since March due to server lockout and life just simply getting in the way. Not only that, but my wife and I are currently working on a local science-fiction convention to boot! (As well as the full-time job and Christi working on her degree and all.)

Things have changed since July 1997 in the Anime Reviewing field...maybe you could give it a second look. If anything, so we know who the competition is ^_~

Carlos and Christina Ross themreviews@AnimeLovers.zzn.com
THEM Anime Reviews
Editors-in-Chief

Believe me, anime reviews is one subject I will eventually get back to. Someday.

I was wondering if you'd ever think about re-reviewing the gundam wing sites, especially since the series just played in America. Many new sites have sprung up. Also, in the review, I felt several quite excellent sites, namely the GW Archive, weren't looked at, which puzzled me a bit. Do you check out every link on the pages or ignore ones with pop up windows or something? I'm not sure... somehow I remember, in a previous column, you having said that sites with pop up windows and excessive java would be ignored... Anyway, just a question. Thanks!

Joyce Tsai ktsai@Princeton.EDU

I'm not sure to which site you're referring, as I can't find any site on the Turnpike named simply "The Gundam Wing Archive". There are many reasons why a site might not show up. Maybe I thought the design too ugly or the content not sufficiently impressive. Maybe I didn't cover that particular sub-category. I often skip fan-fiction sites and image archives when I'm covering a topic with a huge number of sites. Or maybe I just had enough sites already. As I've said before, if a site doesn't appear in Last Exit, that's not a condemnation. My goal is to point out good sites to visit, not to be a comprehensive listing of every worthwhile site for a given topic.

A long letter on the piracy topic:

I would've to disagree with you on this one.

If anything, those anime whole episodes put up are usually in .ra or .asf format. Those that I found are jerky, prone to crash my com and unable to show in full screen. Even for mpeg format, usually the quality is not very good. While it satisfy your need to know what happen next, it will never be able to replace owning the discs themselves. Some even have their OP ED and the extra video footage cut to reduce file size.

For my case, why do I like these sites? It is because where I live in Southeast Asia, it is very rare and hard to get the real thing itself. Most common anime you can find on the street will be popular series (SM, DBZ...) that may have been pirated 'n' times. There are no specific release for this region. I mostly have to rely on shops importing surplus from Hong Kong if I decided to bare my wallet. Rather than buying the pirated vcd copies (and make the pirates rich) I would watch the anime first. Determine if it's worth the kind of money I am about to shell out to import them. If they're not worth it, well, no profit lost. I'm not going to buy it anyway. I am not stabbing anyone here.

If I buy the anime and found out that it's a major disappointment, then I would feel that someone has stabbed me there...... Making me spend money on things I don't like.

Being an anime fan in country where there is no effort from anyone to market anime here, a-not-very-rich-one and a student (not earning enough for the lessons I attend daily yet) I find that this makes the most economic sense.

If there are people who downloaded those episodes, decided to watch for free, then don't want to buy the real tapes, then I believe they are not anime fans, and you won't make a cent out of them anyway. They are not really that interested in that anime to really spend money...

This reminds me of an argument by Microsoft claiming how much money they lost because of piracy. But that figure is bloated because they did not rule out those people who would NOT have used their software (thereby decreasing their market share and power) if only pricey originals are available.

Just because people don't pay for something free doesn't mean they will pay when the thing can only be bought and the f is taken out.

Furthermore, those sites posting episodes are almost here today gone tomorrow. There is no real threat of mass piracy. And they don't profit from such sites. Especially not when all the sweat and labour to create that site gone to the sewer the moment it is closed down (which is quite frequent). Nope, I don't run such sites and I don't know people who do. Just looking at it from the perspective of someone who made homepages before.

You said, "Well, the way I see it, a true fan is supposed to be a friend to the creator. To put it another way, a true fan shows his or her appreciation for the creator in some way." If the creator makes me regret I paid cash for his work, he's better off without my support.

I do not believe any of this web content can replace anything that we might have wanted. Be it pictures from art gallery, anime episodes, even mangas. They could never replace the real thing in terms of quality. (and bragging rights) Again, if 600k jpgs (whether it contains the whole artbook or not) can replace an artbook, that guy does not have any intentions to part with his money for that artbook after all.

I am one of those freeloaders. But I do support creator of series that are worth my support. I like Sailormoon. Therefore, I buy the original Japanese version manga. I don't understand much what they're saying. So I bought the original translated Hong Kong version. I bought those SD characters. I bought the star-shaped music box. I imported tapes from Hong Kong. I bought so many other merchandises that my parents thought that their son is suffering from girl-attention-deficit disorder. Et cetera.

The reason for the previous paragraph is not to gloat. I simply want to show that even though I cross the line (drawn by other people) many times. I do not cross my own line. And putting up of free goodies on the web whether it's images, clips or full episodes does not affect the survival of anime industry. The anime fan themselves does. If they are not anime fan, then we cannot include them into the equation.

I worked my ass off 12 hours a day (from 10 pm to 10 am) 7 days a week 31/30 days a month (no boasting, just pure overtime and night shift that pays a lot more) except for public holiday during term breaks (the previous 2) to support my habit. There are weeks gone by when I didn't see the sun, eat out of 24-hours cafeteria, didn't see my friends and missed out on vacation plans. I think, if that does not qualify me to be real selective on how or what to spend on, well, .......

"grth qan" vrth@hotmail.com

You make some good points, especially about how difficult it is to find anime in some parts of the world. The more letters I read like this, the more I'm glad I live in the US. And I certainly have no problem with tiny, crappy-looking digital versions of anime being distributed. You're right, they replace nothing. However, at an anime club meeting last year, the president ran a fansub he'd downloaded in RealVideo format. Even blown up on the projection screen, the image quality was only marginally worse than VHS. So there is a danger of internet-distributed digital video files being good enough to replace the need to buy a tape.

Also, I have to take severe issue with your argument that someone who is unable or unwilling to buy a product should feel no guilt pirating it. That's one of the oldest arguments, and I'm sorry, but it's crap. Anime is not a right. You don't have the right to steal it just because you can't afford it. Claiming that no sales are lost because the pirates wouldn't have purchased copies anyway is a fallacy, because there's no way to know precisely how many will buy copies until they have no choice but to do so. How'd you like to live in a world where you spend good money for a product, but your neighbor gets it for free, because he claims he doesn't really want it? There's something wrong with that picture.

And another letter on the heckling issue. This is in reply to last month's letter from the reader who walked out of a showing of X due to heckling.

I laughed at X in theaters. I really did. I guess I can understand how the laughing would not be to appreciated after so looking forward to seeing an intense, mature movie, but the thing is that the X dub theatrical release was just done so BADLY that I, and other longtime anime fans around me, could not help laughing. The others around I refer to were the crew from the fan produced cable access anime fan show World of Anime. I just happened to have the luck of going to the theater at the same time they did.

Their site is at http://worldofanime.otaking.org and they have a review for the X movie in RealAudio. It's a review I agree with completely. I like X and think it's cool, though CLAMP's art style was a little unsettling to me when I first saw it several years ago. I too was looking forward to seeing what the movie was like. I was prepared for the covoluted and extremely rushed and compressed storyline. One has to expect that sort of thing when you have a movie that is essentially half based on filler when the manga has not provided an ending to follow. But I was not prepared for just how hilariously BAD the dubbing would be. Sometimes it would be the voice actor's bad, unconvincing delivery. Sometimes it would be the script writer/translator's awful choice of syntax or dialog. Usually it was both, but the result would be fits of laughter at the absurdity of it all.

It was unbelievable how hard that movie made me laugh. In the back of my mind though, I was thinking "What the HELL happened?!?" Manga video had showed so much promise with Perfect Blue. I enjoyed Perfect Blue very much. They did a great job on the dubbing and translation of script. Why did X turn out to be such a farce?

I laughed hardest at what was supposed to be a tearful, highly emotional end scene followed by X Japan's terrific ballad song Forever Love (Trent, if you've never heard that song before and you walked out of the theater, you really deprived yourself). I mean, poor Kamui had just **CENSORED SPOILER HERE** but the way MANGA Entertainment and the voice actor delivered the last line... (and WHAT a line it was!) I was pounding the seat. There was an uproar of laughter in the theater.

My point is, Trent and Ryan, while agree with you on the annoying fans who are extremely rude at the most inappropriate times while screening anime, X the dub movie was nothing to be dissappointed about not seeing all the way through without audience noise. It was handled THAT badly. Perfect Blue was great. Mononoke Hime was great. The Japanese X movie was cool if you go for that kind of movie. The X dub by MANGA Entertainment was NOT. They sapped the power and feeling from it, drained the LIFE from it. The result was something so horribly ridiculous one could not help laughing. In fact, another audience member told the World of Anime people that they enjoyed their MST3K style comments more than the movie itself.

Conrad Seeto cdseeto@ucdavis.edu

This may not be the answer you expected, but I can't support your actions. What you did was unbelievably rude. So the dubbing sucked. So what? LEAVE THE THEATER! Ask for your money back, find another way to spend two hours, just leave the other viewers alone. You had no right to impose your condemnation of that movie on the rest of the audience. I will guarantee you this: somewhere in that theater, there was at least one individual sitting in angry silence, upset that his trip to the movies had been ruined, wishing all of you would shut the @#$% up.

As for the reviewers' alleged comments that they preferred the impromptu MST3K act to the anime, there went any trace of my respect for them. All I can hope is that they're never next to me in the theater. One more reason for me never to enter a video room.

By the way: I take it you liked Perfect Blue? The Katsucon hecklers didn't. That's why they made fun of the film. I take it you would have been upset listening to them heckle? How can you then, with a clear conscience, do the same thing to another movie?

The bottom line: Everyone in a movie theater should keep their mouths shut. The people around you are paying customers, and they didn't pay to listen to you.