12 Moments of Anime #6: The year I thought Crunchyroll would dominate the anime scene

This was ori­gin­ally going to be the first post I wrote in regards to this 12 moments of anime pro­ject. I decided to save it for later because I wanted to start off these posts with some­thing happy and uncontroversial. Crunchyroll can cer­tainly spark of some heart­felt com­ments and they have done before, even when I’ve only briefly men­tioned them in the middle of a post. How­ever devot­ing an entire post to my sup­port of legal streaming…this should be interesting.

The most sig­ni­fic­ant devel­op­ment of the year for anime out­side of Japan. Yes, that would be Crunchyroll. The almost sim­ul­tan­eous sub­titled streams of anime cur­rently air­ing in Japan. Do you real­ise how big of a deal this is? First you take con­trol of Crunchyroll, which is sig­ni­fic­ant for a vast array of reas­ons. If you’ve ever glanced at the for­ums of CR you’ll notice how juven­ile they are. Dur­ing the days of illegal CR the main demo­graphic that vis­ited the site would be those who didn’t under­stand how to down­load anime. Speak­ing on behalf of the You­tube gen­er­a­tion, I had numer­ous false starts try­ing to fig­ure out Bit­torent. Nobody told me how in a lan­guage that wasn’t full of tech­nical jar­gon. It’s far easier to stream and that is exactly what CR provided. Soon it turned into an entire com­munity where mil­lions watched their anime. But instead of tak­ing it down, CR turned legal and in the begin­ning of Janu­ary took down all its illegal con­tent and became the anime stream­ing site on the web. The kids who don’t know anime without CR are now integ­rated into a legal com­munity. The next gen­er­a­tion of anime fans (‘gen­er­a­tion’ in anime fan terms mean­ing about 5 years) would grow up in a world where watch­ing legal streams was the norm.

And yet…and yet…and yet.…

People did not join. Region restric­tions, which plagued any­one out­side of North Amer­ica, were also pre­val­ent on CR. The video streams are a little bit sus­pect and people like their anime down­loaded. Much to my per­sonal sur­prise, CR did not have any­where near the effect I thought it would on the anime world. Here was a plan to do exactly what anime fans had cried out for. Cheap online anime and people just aren’t buy­ing into it as much as I thought they would. Even this sea­son where CR got their hands on about half the air­ing anime, I saw more anim­os­ity than delight. In fact, con­trary to my earlier beliefs, the new gen­er­a­tion of anime fans were most cer­tainly not grow­ing up know­ing about CR and watch­ing there being the norm. Part of this I think is down to a slight level of unpro­fes­sion­al­ism on CR’s part. It still has that juven­ile audi­ence and break­ing from that mold is prov­ing dif­fi­cult. Oth­ers jus­tify not watch­ing CR because of the dodgy qual­ity of it’s releases, say­ing they would buy the DVD, even though a lot of these series will never get a DVD release. But lets face it, one of the main reason is because a huge pro­por­tion of anime fans cringe at the pos­sib­il­ity of money get­ting involved.

Hence my #12 moment in anime of 2009 was this Octo­ber. Even though I was delighted at the idea of legal stream­ing myself, it cer­tainly took me a long time to jump on the band­wagon. First my excuse was that they didn’t have the epis­odes of Gintama I was on uploaded yet, but they even­tu­ally caught up. Next was because the region restric­tions. But CR made a genu­ine effort at tack­ling them (unlike fuck­ing ANN who don’t seem to real­ise that there are coun­tries out­side of North Amer­ica). My final weak excuse was that they had noth­ing apart from Gintama worth watch­ing. Up comes the Autumn Sea­son and BOOM, half the anime air­ing are avail­able on CR. So one of my favour­ite 12 moments in anime this year was the day I finally got myself Crunchyroll mem­ber­ship. Best anime pur­chase I’ve ever made. All Hail Gintoki~!