Crunchyroll Needs To Adapt Or It Will Die

Crunchyroll is a streaming subscription service and content host which brings anime and manga to desperate and lonely weebs like myself, although my weeb power level hasn't quite gone up in a long time.

If you live anywhere other than Japan and you like anime, I'd wager a guess that your main anime source is Crunchyroll (or like, Netflix's paltry selection), or pirating. Not trying to out anyone, but the only other option is expensive imports or bootlegs and I doubt anyone is really doing that.

Now I like Crunchyroll. I like the idea that for an affordable price you can stream seasons of anime and get it at a decent quality with decent subs, and the upload schedule is fair. However, Crunchyroll might have the worst user experience out of all the streaming services I use and honestly, that doesn't bode well. The more I use it, the more feature bare it seems. And that's led me to one conclusion;

Crunchyroll needs to adapt, or it will die.

Any software solution has two parts, the back end and the front end. Back end is the hardcore mechanical stuff, such as the netcode and videoplayback and generally Crunchyroll does alright with that. Crunchyroll works, but it's the front end, the bells and whistles, the user interface that really lets the service down.

For starters, there are web 1.0 sites that are more visually appealing than this eyesore of trying to pass itself off as a design. Websites nowadays look a lot more like applications than interactive word documents and that's just the start of the problems with Crunchyroll.

Here's what Crunchyroll could use:

1. Animated Thumbnails

2. Trailers

3. Original Content

4. A Cleaner Interface

5. Curated suggestions of content on the home page

6. Animations, please, for the love of god, add animations to this website

7. Larger fonts

8. Skip Intro Button

9. Autoplay (At least moving to the next episode of the thing you're watching after 5 seconds)

10. A Continue Watching Tab

11. Dark Mode, Jesus please.

That's just all off the back of my head from different, better video streaming services. I couldn't believe this stuff was missing when it's clearly not that difficult to implement.

But this article is a dime a fucking dozen, everyone has gripes with Crunchyroll for different reasons and I'm not the first asshole to suggest it. Maybe use some of that massive marketing budget that hasn't built up the audience you've wanted.

What I wanna say is that I like anime, I want it to get to more people, I want more people to have access to a good service to use it.

It cannot be that hard to implement that. It just cannot.

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Evangelion; Shinji, DON'T Get In The Robot (Unless You Want To)

Alright you pathetic soon to be Fanta Orange offspring of Lilith, I watched Evangelion a while back and I have thoughts and opinions and you're going to hear them as sure as Shinji gets in the goddamn robot.

*deep inhale*

So like one method I like to use to understand and establish theme is abstraction, the other being personification. So like, if you had to explain the narrative without the trappings of the diegetic jargon to someone who knows nothing about the work, what would you say it's about, what happens in the story? If the work was a person, what is that person's view on things? So I'm going to use that framework to say Evangelion is actually about the military complex and the emotionally abusive nature of adults in power. Strap in, bitches, we're about to get into our robot moms, and it's gonna be a long ride.

Also spoiler alert but like, fuck it, none of us even understand Eva anyway so like, you only live once, might as well read on.

So Evangelion is about a 14 year old boy named Shinji who is estranged from his cold and distant father who emotionally blackmails him into piloting a monstrous weapon of mass destruction. This WMD operates on the principal that any damage it takes inflicts sympathetic pain onto the pilot and the better you are at piloting it, the more painful it is to use. There's a war going on between two factions with opposing loyalties and goals but ultimately they're actually cut from the same cloth. Shinji's first bout with the enemy leaves him with excruciating pain but he ultimately succeeds. But because he was untrained and underqualified, he causes some collateral damage, and this prompts one of his classmates to punch the shit out of his tiny baby boy face and he goes to live with a stranger who is his handler that plays at being his surrogate mother.
Shinji fights on and the trauma gets so bad that he attempts to run and escape the life. He doesn't get too far or even leaves for very long before the military brings him back to continue his government approved torture sessions.

Anyway he meets his fellow child soldiers and becomes something of a war hero through training and continued victories. One of the fellow child soldiers, Asuka, co-habitates with him and his handler. Asuka proceeds to badmouth and verbally abuse him at every opportunity and he takes it because while it's not validation of his inherent worth as a human being it is brutal honesty rather than obfuscation and the drip feedings of praise, which is the second closest thing Shinji feels to friendship.

As more of the enemy is defeated, and the war takes its toll on the children and cities, the WMDs get more and more out of control. One of Shinji's friends is then selected to pilot one of these WMDS and it goes so awfully that the other pilots are forced to face one of their own in armed combat. Shinji is forced into the fight and is ordered to murder his best friend to clean up the military;s mistake. He maintains that there's a better way and in response they take control of his WMD away from him and they all but murder one of only three friends he truly has.

Shinji quits for real and now that he's disposable the military allows this, so he lives as a citizen for a while. He lives out his days, convinced that being the pilot of a WMD is the only thing that gives him worth, but a disgraced member of the military tells him that it's not his ability to affect change for the better, but his willingness to do so that gives him worth. After his old comrades are defeated and wounded, he chooses to take up arms, but this time the trauma and anger causes him and his WMD to commit the unspeakable and he defiles and eats the body of his enemy.

Now so intwined, the border between him and his weapon have blurred. Shinji's friends try in vain for a long stretch of time to seperate him and the machine but their efforts are in vain. This goes on and the one thing that brings him back is the pleading of his surrogate mother.
Back in the frey, one of Shinji's comrades is murdered and replaced with an identical person, and no one notices or cares until far too late.

Finally, Shinji then meets Kaworu, the last child who will be drafted into this to use the WMDs. Kaworu displays a romantic interest in Shinji. They do a back and forth and Kaworu expresses interest only the sides of Shinji that are separate from him as a pilot. Kaworu then explicitly tells Shinji that he has inherent worth, and that his mere existence makes the world a better place. However, Kaworu has loyalties to the other side, and it is through this knowledge that Shinji finds out the enemy has only been variants of him, that they are all human, and that he has been fighting a war for survival on a world that was taken from other beings who were here first.

Kaworu begs Shinji to kill him so that Shinji and his kind may live on, but the inner turmoil of this wrecks Shinji inside. It lingers for an eternity on Shinji holding Kaworu's fate in his hands, and then finally, Shinji succumbs to Kaworu's wishes and kills the one person who told him that he has inherent worth.

Anyway, the next two episodes are various montages and frankly, it's psuedo-psychology mixed with baby's first philosophy class told over montage that gets stale and easy to tune out fast. It basically ends with Shinji learning that his self worth has to come from within and yadda yadda nothing we don't already know.

End of Evangelion is a mess that throws away the entire show's worth of character building so that there can be a dark joke at the expense of Shinji, or rather of Shinji as the audience surrogate. It kind of smacks of Serenity syndrome, and you can kind of tell that this was something made a while after the conclusion of the main story and the creators didn't really have the best handle on it the world anymore. The giveaway here is that when Shinji and Asuka fight the mass-produced Evangelions, they don't experience sympathetic pain but rather full blown injury transferrence. 

End Of Evangelion is stupid.

Still fun to watch despite being psuedo-psychology and esoteric bullshit.

Major Theme 01: Adults in power are emotionally manipulative!

This is pretty easy from the start, Shinji is convinced to pilot the Eva only after being shown that his dad plans to shove a barely conscious still bleeding classmate into the cockpit and Shinji's only courses of action are to allow this woman to die or get in the robot.
On top of that, Misato *constantly* attacks his masculinity and bravery, Shinji's father drip-feeds him praise and dies a sad and ignoble death admitting that he sees himself in his son and that he keeps his distance out of fear of hurting him, because rather than working on himself and his parenting, Gendo would rather try fuck the world.

Major Theme 02: The military is patriarchal!

Misato and Ritsuko at one point go to a military conference and in more ways than one we have a display of the sexism of military leaders. Ritsuko's is talked down upon and the very idea of using Eva units is brought into question. Birthed from Lilith and literally containing the soul of a woman, the Evas are seen as inferior and incompatible with the military and the way it runs.
Major props for Misato's fuck you guys, I'm gonna get in the damn robot myself moment.
Gendo, as the resident military complex also just... Abuses women. He trivializes their pain, he treats them as disposable... Risuko's mother died and he immortalized her in computer form as something reduced literally down to roles which serve him, as a mother, woman, and scientist. 

Major Theme 03: Your worth is inherent and not determined by what you are, or what you do

Self evident but the Kaworu stuff to me is the most powerful. Eva says something else here as well, and this is major theme four.

Major Theme 04: Our empathy, our sensitivity, those are our biggest strengths

Kaworu's reaffirmation that the best parts of Shinji are his sensitivity, and his large fragile heart. His final words even echo something really beautiful, "My life was made meaningful because of you." Our sensitivity, our empathy... It is our connection. And while we might have to guard our fragile hearts, what makes living meaningful is to continue to love and value each other. The pain should not drive is to isolation, only to find ways of coexisting without hurting one another.

I think that, is ultimately what Evangelion is about. I think the show speaks from the experience of a man who was very deeply depressed but I also think it isn't really about living with depression. I think it's about living past depression, living despite pain, and struggling to find a way to coexist without causing others pain.

And also, it's about knowing. Knowing that getting in the robot should ultimately be Shinji's choice, and that yelling at him to get in the robot is selfish and cruel. Man, was ultimately the most cruel angel.
And that, is my thesis.

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Day 08: One Of My Favourite TV Shows

While I wanna save the meat of this for a review I'll do later down the line, 2018's Devilman Crybaby was the anime that got me to come back to anime.

The art style is slick, the soundtrack is a wonderful synthwave trip, the themes are dark and violent but it also doubles as a sports anime.

What can I say, it touched me in all the right places.

And then it dumped me down a rabbit hole of old OVAs, a 70s television adaptation, a decades long manga and a crossover with Go Nagai's Cyborg 009 that's way better than it has any right to be.

If you're a fan of Berserk, this is one anime you shouldn't miss. It can be sexy, violent, crazy, colourful, strange and just a plain old good time.

Until it fucks your emotions up.

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Dragon Ball Evolution

This movie sucked. I'm not going to make any pretenses about that, Dragonball Evolution was a mess, more of a mess than my life is at any given point and that's saying something.

But for all the hate it gets, a lot of people don't remember why it ended up a mess. Because, if anything, Dragon Ball should be one of the most adaptable anime properties of all time.

To clarify, I'm not talking about why the film itself ended up being a mediocre chore of a film where only Justin Chatwin's forehead vein was having any fun. I'm talking about the conceptual flaws, which feed almost directly into the film's major flaws. Before I get into that, I do want to say a couple of things in the film's defense;

1. It's not bad because it varied from the source material.

Plenty of adaptations are actually served better by straying from the source material. Some films can recreate their anime counterpart shot for shot and still come out a hot mess. Some of the changes are, and I loathe actually saying this, actually for the better. I think the more correct argument would be that Dragonball Evolution didn't understand the core appeal of the source material. And yes, I think I am getting too caught up in semantics but if we can't deliver actually helpful critique then we can't ever hope for an improvement.

2. The whitewashing is bad, but it's surprisingly the least flawed aspect of the film

Dragon Ball's universe sits in this weird place where elements of fantasy and sci-fi are ever present, and it takes place both in the past and the future. It's weird and wonderful with characters from all walks of life. Honestly, I kind of wish that the white-washing was the worst part of the movie.

3. There are some surprisingly decent production values

The movie came out in 2009. While the CGI hand farts were out of place, there are plenty of moments where the film shows that there is an at least competent production team at work. Plenty of places where the film shows some of the least convincing and out of place special effects known to man but there are some decent shots.

Now, on to what I think is the biggest problem with not only the concept of Dragonball Evolution but also the Dragon Ball series;

Despite what Akira Toriyama's intentions were, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z (and onwards) are just two different stories.

Here's a fun fact, Dragon Ball actually didn't immediately sell very well. It was this weird little story from a guy whose bread and butter was making dirty and smutty gag manga. You can see the influence from Dr Slump (Toriyama's previous work) in practically every chapter. I theorise that the first drafts were probably filled to the brim with a bunch of smutty jokes and some poor editor probably had the unfortunate job of telling Toriyama to get back to the action sequences of the action shonen he was trying to make. As a result, it took a while for Dragon Ball to be brought over to the west. On top of that, the first translation of the anime is a weird bastardization that only lasted about 13 episodes. We wouldn't see a continuation of that translation until years later. This will be important later, I promise.

Conceptually, Dragon Ball is also just an out-there manga. If you didn't already know, Dragon Ball started out as a spoof on a well known Chinese fable called  Journey To The West. Son Goku is actually the Japanese reading of the name Sun Wukong. Goku's staff, the Nyoi-Bo is just Sun Wukong's staff Riyu Jingu Bang with a different name. They both even fly around on clouds! I remember watching a version of Journey To The West on television as a child and I loved Dragon Ball even more finding out this fact later in life. But it just highlights what a little oddity the original Dragon Ball was. It was quirky and smutty and funny but most of all, it was charming. In fact, to further highlight the contrast, the kamehameha wasn't actually Goku's original signature move. That honour actually goes to the Rock, Scissors 'N' Paper (or Jan Ken fist if you have taste), which is either a somewhat clever spoof of fictional techniques used in martial arts movies or just the most obtuse way of saying punch in face, poke in eyes and palm on cheek.


(source)

Now here's the kicker; In Japan, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z aren't two separate entities; They're just one long continuous story. In the west, because of how late in its life Dragon Ball became popular and how niche anime was and how weird manga publishing can be, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were simultaneously brought over as separate entities. The Dragon Ball Z anime also aired at the same time, and the difference is night and day. Dragon Ball Z is practically synonymous with the genre of shonen, and it was prototypical of a lot of the tropes and story beats later manga would then follow. Dragon Ball Z is this fantasy martial arts anime and the stakes are raised dramatically. Sure, it maintains some of Toriyama's signature slump humour but at this point in his career, he was better at writing action shonen than he was at making dirty jokes.

Chances are, you remember a lot more of Dragon Ball Z than you do of Dragon Ball. I remember the community following Dragon Ball Z had in my schoolyard playground. We'd all pretend to be Z fighters and whenever we had access to hair gel we'd spike it up and pretend to be super saiyans and I'm pretty sure every boy born in the 90s has at one point tried to perform a kamehameha. One of your friends had a copy of Budokai on his PS2, and if not, you were that friend. Every Spur and Mike's Kitchen in the country had a dedicated PS2 for playing Budokai Tenkaichi, just so you'd beg your parents to take you there so you can have another go at it. It aired every day at 17:00, right after we all got back from after school day-care. Dragon Ball Z was practically essential in establishing Otaku culture in the west, and was part of the Anime Starter Kit back when I was a yungin' (those dudes who had Saint Seiya as part of their starter kit must feel fucking ancient)

And it makes sense that Dragon Ball Z would be one of the first high budget anime adaptations the west would see.

But here's the only issue; Dragonball Evolution so desperately wants to adapt Dragon Ball Z, but what it's actually adapting is the original Dragon Ball.

And I actually feel sorry for it. If Dragonball Evolution had to start with the plot of Dragon Ball Z, it'd be in medias res. Everyone already knows each other, the characters are all established with backstory and have each all had character arcs. Dragon Ball Z spends most of its exposition time either retconning the original Dragon Ball or introducing new characters. On top of that, major studios and publishers don't seem to trust western audience with foreign material. As a result, showrunners, producers and directors get this weird idea that foreign properties need to be "westernized" in order to make them more relatable to the domestic market, which is a gross misunderstanding of why we even watch anime. So, if you're still with me, Dragonball Evolution is a westernized adaptation of an anime adapting a Japanese adventure/gag manga spoofing a Chinese fable that actually wants to adapt a westernized version of the anime of the Japanese martial arts manga that's the big brother of the adventure/gag manga that spoofs a Chinese fable.

This project was almost destined to fail.

Trying to craft a cohesive story in all this would have been a nightmare. It's so obviously jumbled and thrown together with stylistic influences that ranges from Michael Bay's 2007 Transformers to Avatar; The Last Airbender to chinese martial arts b-movies to whatever film Chow Yun-Fat thought he was acting in.

In fact, Chow Yun-Fat (he was Master Roshi if you were too lazy to google) actually acted in a much better adaptation of Journey To The West that manages to be a better Dragon Ball movie than Dragonball Evolution.

If that's not bad enough, in 2008 (one year before Dragonball Evolution was released) a movie called The Forbidden Kingdom came out with a functionally identical set up that loosely adapts Journey To The West, except it doesn't make you hate yourself for wasting an hour and a half of your own life.

Dragonball Evolution didn't need to be as unambiguously awful as it was. When you have a world inhabited by dinosaurs, dragons, anthropomorphic talking animals, cyborg supervillains, super powered aliens, weremonkeys from space, time travelling swordsmen, fighters fusing their physical forms together to become one better fighter... You have to have a certain set of skills to fuck up so badly that all of that becomes uninteresting. AND YOU HIRED CHOW YUN-FAT AND JAMES MARSTERS HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO FUCK THIS UP??? 

With a few changes made at the start, I bet with the same actors, the same production crew but with change out the writer and director for people infinitely more competent at their jobs, and there's an enjoyable film in there. Somewhere. Deep down. Really, really deep down. 

Remove the highschool setting and center Goku and Bulma, then we'd have something more in line with the spirit of the manga. Remember that Goku and Bulma's relationship was one of the most compelling parts of the original Dragon Ball. The city girl and a country boy going on an unlikely journey is a strong set up just from the contrast between the two leads, and their resulting friendship is pretty humanizing and endearing. Change the visual effect used for energy attacks like the kamehameha from wispy smoke to those striking lightbeams, and the film becomes a ton more palatable. Chi-Chi being more of a secret cage-fighter type wasn't the best change in direction either. She's the daughter of the legendary Ox King, one of the scariest freaking dudes alive. Just have her... Be Chi-Chi. How do you guys have more regressive decision making than the author of a manga where a little boy determines the gender of a person the same way Kevin Spacey does? I am also struggling to find the depth added by making this a coming of age highschool romance. Also the cool stuff like a flying cloud and a magic staff that can stretch to any length or taking a rabbit who is also a mob leader and putting him on the literal moon... There's so much fun stuff you could have done and you just left that shit on the cutting room floor!

In the end, I suppose Dragonball Evolution isn't about making a good movie, or even about making a decent Dragon Ball adaptation.

It's about cashing in on a license.

Someone needs to take away Fox's toys from them so they can't fuck up any more licenses OH HI THERE DISNEY.

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Ghost In The Shell's Whitewashing

Scarlett Johansson has made a name for herself as an action heroine. With huge roles like the titular Lucy and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow in several Marvel Cinematic Universe films, she's all but set for a top billing in a major Anime adaptation from director Rupert Sanders. She's capable and has the talent and popularity to drive box office sales.

The issue however comes in when you realize just how difficult it is for Asian-American actors to land leading roles.

To say one thing in the film's defense, it's pretty huge for a blockbuster action film to have a female lead, let alone to be a high budget adaptation of a critically acclaimed Japanese animation.  This brings a lot of diverse culture and ideas to mainstream audiences. And any leading female cast in the type of role that is generally played by men is also a huge win for feminism.

However, Kelly Hu, Sandra Oh, Lucy Liu, Yunjin Kim, Davon Aoki, Rinko Kikuchi , hell, even Kristin Kreuk could have been cast and none of the above would be invalid. It's not like Hollywood is devoid of Asian actors with long careers and star power. And even so, some of the best selling films of all time have had relatively unknown leads.

But here's where it gets tricky yet again; Anime itself has an issue with race. Let's take... Say, Unbreakable Machine Doll as our case study.



Of what ethnicity would you guess this character is? That wavy mostly straight hair, big blue eyes, pale skin, I'd definitely wager he's European, maybe even from a Germanic country. But he's not, this is actually Raishin Akabane, of the very Japanese Akabane clan. To make matters worse, he's voiced by english voice actor Clifford Chapin.

And this is an unnervingly common practice. Because of how hyper stylized Japanese animation is, mangaka and animation studios often have trouble designing Japanese characters as... Well, Japanese looking.

Unbreakable Machine Doll is my favourite case though. Look at the other cast of characters in the show and apart from vocal ques (I'll admit Lisette has a really pleasant Irish voice in the English Dub) and their names, I couldn't tell you their country of origin.

One of the many reasons so many western cartoonists opt to use anthropomorphic animals as their characters is that there are only so many different ways to draw a human face. I mean, Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Felix The Cat, Garfield, Snoopy, Hobbes, Sonic... Half of these characters would be unremarkable as humans.

Anime gets around this unfortunate handicap with it's unique visual design quirks and stylization. Light Yagami is as recognizable as Bugs Bunny from that sinister look in his eyes to his ridiculously perfect hair and that eerie smirk that he wears on his face.

(The face one makes when they take a potato chip, and eats it)

 So it's perfectly natural for a medium to struggle to represent the subtleties of human ethnicity through it's abstract design when the phrase exaggerated subtleties is in itself an oxymoron.

What about when it does?


(Soichi from Detroit Metal City)

(Nakai from Bakuman)


(Afro from Afro Samurai)

(Balalaika from Black Lagoon)

Conversely, a Nicktoons show called Kappa Mikey managed to solve this ethnic incoherence by matching two extremely different visual designs together, and a lot of the humour of the show comes from the cultural differences of Mikey versus his Japanese cast members. I remember a whole lot of laughs coming from the spoofs of popular shonen tropes and just the silly situations the characters find themselves in.



What I'm saying is, it's possible to to both stylize and communicate ideas through creative design. And this is probably where the issue itself was born. Add to the fact that most popular anime protagonists are fair skinned males with European facial features and one might reach the startling conclusion that anime has kind of... Whitewashed itself. Don't believe me? Here's a picture of the Shonen Jump Ultimate Stars roster.



In a recent video published by That Japanese Man Yuta we see that most of the randomly chosen Japanese citizens on the street are perfectly fine with the casting. And while a handful of folks on the street don't represent an entire ethnic group, we can safely assume that to a lot of the general public, this is just a non-issue. Even the creator of Ghost In The Shell has supported and approved Scarlett Johansson's casting. While that makes for a separate discussion on whether or not a creator necessarily knows what's best for their own intellectual property and the adaptations thereof, the crux of the matter is that Scarlett Johansson has been cast, the film has already started production and is likely near finished and this won't be the last time it happens.

In future, I think I'd like to appeal to manga publishers like Shonen Jump, Tokyopop, Tanoshimi and the like to publish works with more ethnic diversity and racial themes. I'd also like to appeal to mangaka to create more protagonists that aren't the default harem attracting fair skinned Mary Sue Sasuke Uchihas in favour of more ethnically diverse heroes.

And finally, I'd like to appeal to anyone who likes anime to stop shitting a brick and screaming for the death of SJWs whenever anyone raises a legitimate concern about the state of the industry. Feminism, black activism, LGTBQ activism and political correctness are not going to kill your grandmother and take your toys. And to everyone else, it's okay to not go watch Ghost In The Shell because it did take a great anime and plaster a white face on it like the Kardashians claiming to have invented braids, but it looks to be a good film and to be honest, it might end up being the closest thing we ever get to a truly great major Hollywood adaptation of an anime, and if you can stomach ScaJo's face, it might be worth watching (I'd wait until the Rotten Tomatoes scores come out though).

Otherwise, there are plenty of live action adaptations from Japan that do their source material justice. I quite liked the second Death Note live adaptation because it ended in a better way than the anime did. So find a copy or stream it, grab popcorn and remember, the subtitles don't bite.

But fuck that Light Turner bullshit. That shit should get it's own theme song. Like fucking, Light Turner was an average kid that no one understands, his dad and the investigation unit always giving him commands. Gloom and doom up in his room, appearing instantly, is a magic shinigami giving him a book and in reality Ryuk's his god of death, odd god of death.

Fuck dat noise.

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