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OTAKU LOUNGE: Anime and Piracy

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that pretty much everyone reading this downloads stuff – and by downloading, I’m referring to both direct downloading via MediaFire, RapidShare and the like, torrenting from places like Demonoid, and streaming via WatchAnimeOn or AnimeCrazy if you’re specifically an anime fan.

And if you don’t do that, all your friends probably are (also, you’re weird). 

With anime especially, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people are under the impression that we do it simply to save money. Anime is an expensive hobby. If I go into a store like JB Hi Fi (the cheapest place here in New Zealand for anime), I can expect to pay about NZ$40 for one DVD – maybe a little less if the DVD has already been out a few years.

That DVD will usually contain four episodes of whatever anime series it is, and I’m well aware that I’m quite lucky to be paying only that much for it – in Japan, people routinely pay roughly the same amount for a DVD containing only two episodes.

The fact of the matter is, a DVD is worth however much someone is willing to pay for it.

Needless to say, not many people are happy spending that amount of money on something unless they know it’s going to be an happy experience, since once you buy anime it can be quite difficult to sell on. Even if you do manage it, you won’t be getting the same amount back that you originally paid for it.

I’m not sure what it’s like in America or Europe, but in New Zealand, anime no longer airs on television other than the very popular and youth-orientated titles like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto – we used to have anime on Cartoon Network’s late-night Adult Swim programming block, but that ended about five years ago.

Granted, New Zealand is small and doesn’t exactly have a thriving anime fanbase, but since Cartoon Network likewise stopped airing anime on the American Toonami programming block back in 2008, I’m guessing that a lot of people around the world are in a similar situation. For the majority of anime titles out there, our only option for sampling before we buy has become the internet.

However, I don’t think that’s the main reason why people watch anime online – I think it comes down to location.

It can be very isolating to be an anime fan if you live in a small country, and one of the main issues is that it can take a long time for anime that’s been officially licensed on DVD to reach you.

Personally speaking, I know that if an anime series is hugely successful in the States, it takes months for it to reach New Zealand. If it’s a series that has gained a smaller amount of commercial success, that time gap widens to a year or more. And if it’s a series that has had little to no success in America, or is otherwise not considered mainstream enough, I consider myself lucky if it ever sees a release in New Zealand at all.

Of course, it’s very possible to buy anime legally from overseas, and I often do.

However, because the shipping costs of getting anything over here usually either equal or outstrip the cost of the anime itself, regardless of which country I’m buying from, then I simply can’t afford to do this no matter how eager I am to support the official release.

The second issue about being an anime fan in a small country is that major events celebrating the hobby are few and far between.

For example, New Zealand has two conventions that the anime industry collaborates with. Of these events, one is not anime-specific and the other gathers a crowd of about one hundred.

Our Armageddon Expo, which is always a lot of fun, is a convention for fans of general science-fiction and fantasy, Western comic books and graphic novels, gaming, and a multitude of other pop culture material.

The anime section of the expo is one of the smaller parts, and while a lot of fun, doesn’t introduce anything new as such to the fan experience.

Our other convention ended up not being held this year at all (I’m guessing this has to do with the number of attendees it garnered for the first two years, although the devastating Christchurch earthquake is probably also a factor). I say these things not to belittle the organisers of the events in any way, but just to point out that a convention on that scale is often not worth people’s time or money. If people had both to spare, we would no doubt very happily travel overseas to AnimeExpo and have a ball.

As it is, we simply don’t have $3000+ dollars up our sleeves to fly there.

 My main point is this: there’s a heap of anime fans out there who enjoy chatting with people about whatever show that aired yesterday, because they want to be a part of a much wider community that could possibly exist wherever they happen to live. Maybe New Zealand is slightly more isolating then a lot of places because of its size and place in relation to the rest of the world, but no static location could ever be as globalising as the internet.

We’re not really looking for ways to pay less for anime than we do or download illegally so that we can snigger about it behind the backs of the guys who sell it to us. More of us than you might think can and do support the official releases… when they eventually get to us.

In fact, at the end of the day it’s not actually about money at all – it’s about feeling like we’re not alone.

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