RANT: Of Course It's Not Popular; You're Not Advertising!

So yes, this blog has indeed been dead since August, but I'm going to pick it up and try again. For this entry, I am going to rant. My rant shall be about American anime companies' attitudes about the series they're selling and why it's completely stupid the way they're expecting it to work. It's probably something you've heard already, but I still feel like saying it.

As I'm sure everyone is well aware of, Naruto and Bleach are extremely popular. These series are ones that almost every anime fan has seen or read at least some of, so naturally they are big sellers for Viz, one of the industry's big name companies. Because of that, Viz naturally markets the hell out of those two titles. Also, they constantly talk about wanting to find "the next Naruto or Bleach". This is where the problem lies.

The reason why Naruto and Bleach are so incredibly popular is because everyone knows about them. They're on TV, they were extremely popular in Japan and online as fansubs and scanlations, and Viz advertises them everywhere. It has nothing to do with the two series' quality.

The problem is that the anime and manga companies expect "the next Naruto or Bleach" to just knock on their door without them doing a thing. Honestly, they probably already have what could be their next big title licensed and being released right now, but because no one knows about it, no one's buying it. An example of this would be D. Grayman. It has a lot of what fans want, but it's just not marketed heavily, so no one knows it exists. The same goes for a lot of shonen titles, and Host Club could EASILY be "the next Fruits Basket", which is also searched for like the Holy Grail.

Even without a series being big enough to replace Naruto, Bleach, Fruits Basket, and the like, a lot of series don't do well at all when they really could, and it's usually because no one knows these series exist unless they watched the fansubs or read the scans, which is another problem, since those fans have already seen the title. ADV wonders why Princess Tutu was a flop for them. I think it's pretty obvious; unless someone sees it at the local Suncoast or Best Buy, they probably didn't know it existed. I'm a big fan of anime, especially somewhat obscure stuff, and I'd never heard of Princess Tutu at all until it was shown at my anime club. I never saw an ad for it anywhere, so that really didn't help. It's like ADV figured they could just put it out and do nothing and it would make back its cost in under a year, then when it flopped they just figured "Well, I guess no one wanted THAT show". Uh, no, maybe no one KNEW what it WAS?

I just find this completely ridiculous.