Ginme no Majo (Masanori Takumi | Claymore)

This background music track always reminds me Galatea’s deliciously wicked musing as she walked off into the darkness of the forest towards the end of Ep 11. And also when Riful intervened against Jean’s attempt coup de grace against Duff.

The dramatic drum beats right at the start are a great hook, thereafter the strings carried me to the embarking on a new adventure, announced by a triumphant brass section. The stirrings of mystery and conspiracy are heralded by piano keys against a background of bass notes and eerie synthetic animal-like calls. The various sounds come together, moving in and out, building into a crescendo that made such a great background to the above-mentioned scenes.

Yamiyo no Prologue (Kajiura Yuki | Mai HiME)

And BGM that features the pounding of drums. Great big ones. The scene in my mind’s eye when I hear this is from Mai HiME 15 when Mai on Kagutsuchi charging up into the heavens as Artemis’ ray surges downwards.

Salva Nos (Kujiura Yuki | Noir)

"Someone is going to die," says this BGM. The prelude and background for yet another of Kirika’s casually brutally, coarse yet strangely elegant killing sprees. The incongruous combination of doramaz singing in some language that I don’t understand and techno-beats somehow works. Despite all the repetition over the course of the series, this was streets ahead of the watch tune because it heralded action rather than repeated flashbacks.

Foxy Doll (EDISON | Black Lagoon: The Second Barrage)

Fresh from her meeting with Chan of the HK Triads, Balalaika issues orders to the Sergeant. Hotel Moscow goes on the warpath. The rhythm/bass guitar (?) starts off and provides the structure for the whole piece, like Balalaika’s steady, unyielding stride while the drum beats evoke foot falls and the beating of raging hearts. The lead guitar conveys the swagger, an attitude that prevades all that motion. Some serious ass kicking.

M19+20 (Yuki Kujiura | Kara no Kyoukai 3: Remaining Sense of Pain)

I’ve already raved about this previously. Still my favourite piece from the superlative Kara no Kyoukai OSTs that are oh so evilly packaged with the R2 LEs.

Suspense 5 (Tatsuya Nishiwaki | Maria+Holic)

Kiss the yuri girl and make her hive. Bells and choral singing to electric guitars and back but working together as one reflecting Mariya’s Janus-faced nature.

Overall, I’m a bit surprised to find that I do like tunes where there’s a lot going on in the same track. Some might describe this as messy or noisy but I prefer to think of them as moving layers moving in and out of emphasis. Lots of electric guitars and drums help too.

Winamp skin by lildragon07 via The Lunar Abyss.

©2012 hontou ni sou omou?. All Rights Reserved.

With a sprinkling of yurilicious too! :3

I acquired Jo was simply because I love her character design and the yuri factor. Alter Revy conveyed the all round general badassness that Megumi Toyoguchi did so well with her voice in the anime.

The latest addition, Nadie, a Shizuka Itou lead role and yuri one to boot, was a delightful birthday gift from my good brothers Stripey and morit.

Their unifying theme, however, is handguns. (And by coincidence, Alter). Nadie isn’t in double gun mode like Jo or Revy even though her pose was just so John Woo but that’s appropriate too as ‘two hands’ isn’t canonical for our intrepid bounty hunter anyway.

Though I can imagine another set consisting of Meg, Seras Victoria, Gretel, I’m not too big on machine guns… partly, I think, because I had to use one during my NS days back in the ancient times. Since I’m not Rambo, Arnie or one of the above-mentioned machine gun babes, I certainly could not wield it one handed and there was also the issue of the pesky and orz-inducingly heavy base plates

For photo shoots and reviews of the dynamic Nadie figure:
Shino, super rats, valho

And see lu-k for the Jo, Revy and Nadie trio.

©2012 hontou ni sou omou?. All Rights Reserved.

The first shipment was a pre-order, made during the previous RightStuf Bandai sale, for the Haruhi Limited Edition boxsets 2-4 and joins the first Haruhi LE boxset in my anime DVD collection now. The second batch was a panicked order, a few weeks later as GENEON USA announced that they were closing down, for the first season of Black Lagoon, the Kannazuki no Miko and Kamichu! boxsets (with ADV’s 801 TTS Airbats and Bandai’s Onegai Twins also in this shipment).

RightStuf had offered terrific deals via studio sales for both Bandai Entertainment and GENEON USA products. In the case of the former, there were biannual (March and August) sales of up to 40% off for DVDs. For the latter, RightStuf was offering 10 GENEON releases for USD 50 or 25 for USD 100 in June and then a 35% discount for DVDs in August.

Both offered excellent value for money. Yet I only took Bandai’s bait. The GENEON 10 for 25 offer just seemed too cumbersome, and I was mildly put off by the 5% differential with Bandai later. Somehow I imagined that they would, one day, match Bandai’s offer. And besides I was also waiting for Black Lagoon and Black Lagoon: The Second Barrage to be released as a thinpak boxset before consolidating a humungous order under a sale that never came. In the end, I ended up paying full price for the GENEON order, the blow softened by the grace of RightStuf’s GotAnime? membership discount. While Bandai got a lower profit margin from my purchase, they had succeeded in repeatedly overcoming my not inconsiderable powers of procrastination rather too easily for my wallet’s liking.

Of course, Bandai had an advantage because of how much I was caught up in the Haruhi craze. But, with a speedy release, they did not just manage to ride the craze in just a nick of time but also actively fanned it further. I absolutely loved the antics of the ASOS Brigade and the moment Patricia Lee, channelling the Divinity of Haruhi Herself, said: ‘I’m cool with fans who download the series but please buy the DVD when it comes out.’ Cute girl, with divine power, saying please oh so nicely oh melting cannot resist I obey my master! GENEON’s marketing did not quite manage to capture my attention in the same way. But at least they did send out a bunch of threatening but legally dubious letters tarring its most likely customers with U R T3H CRIMINALZ.

It’s strongly contested and still uncertain if downloaders are indeed an anime distributor’s most likely customers but, as others have pointed out, who spends extra cash to buy Limited Edition goods of series that they’ve never seen before? The LE is a necessary marketing tool for Japanese distributors since most Japanese anime makes its debut on TV or cable and can be easily recorded by its viewers. Fansubbers and BitTorrent reproduce this effect in markets outside Japan by effectively making anime ‘free to air’. The marketing question then becomes how to induce fans who have the AVIs (or increasingly MKVs) to buy The Real Thing.

LE stuff, with their special packaging and assorted undownloadable goodies like mini-pencilboards, iron-ons, physical chara song CDs, pillow cases etc., helps to reduce the substitution effect of fansubs by increasing the otaku utility of the DVD (and its assorted goodies) relative to the fansub. This is not to claim that LEs are a marketing silver bullet. In my case, I’ll probably sit out the Lucky Star LEs and wait for the thinpak boxset. Unless they are giving out the chara Nendriods with the animal ears. orz

The previous two paragraphs were predicated on the assumption that fansubs and DVDs are competing with each for market share. Generally this assumption leads to another one: that the zero marginal cost of fansubs represent a threat to the DVD market share and an existential threat to the anime DVD industry. Yet downloaders still buy DVDs. Anime distributors often dismiss this as an abnormality or aberration, arguing that their sales would be higher if they weren’t being cannibalized by fansubs. This is certainly logical, based on the assumptions above, and can be supported by empirical facts – I haven’t bought everything that I downloaded and there are fans who have never bought a single DVD at all. In the world of music, it’s been reported that only 38% of those who download Radiohead’s latest album were prepared to pay for it. But turning this argument on its head, it could be said that 38% of downloaders paid for it despite them being under absolutely no legal obligation to do so.

Then there is the argument that downloading can have (but not always so) market creating effects, i.e. people becoming customers because they downloaded a product, as reported by this piece of research by the Canadian Intellectual Property Policy Directorate.

Leaving aside the moral economy of fandom (which I believe can be a powerful marketing tool if correctly tapped into), my top reasons for buying DVDs include (1) rewatching in higher quality, (2) backup against disastrous HDD failure, (3) improving my fair use defence for retaining fansubs on HDD. Certainly I can’t think of an anime DVD that I’ve bought where I haven’t seen the fansub first. It’s quite likely that if the noose grows too tight and I give up on downloading fansubs, my purchases of anime DVDs will stop too.

But one little animeblogger isn’t really much evidence of the market creation effects of fansubs (N=1 is waaay below any N-size confidence level). However if we can market ourselves to the anime distributors as well as Bandai has marketed to me, perhaps the relationship can become somewhat less confrontational and the discourse less shrill. I feel (and hope that) it will be helpful for fandom’s image if animebloggers like ourselves post more about our purchases, particularly of DVDs. I realize that some animebloggers see this as the swaggering of ‘epenis’, bragging, boasting etc. Certainly sometimes it is true, but posting about purchases is not intrinsically an obnoxious act – after all, tjhan claims that most animebloggers are docile grazers, generally a nice, genial lot.

Anime distributors may not like us much, but they will certainly like our spending dollars and evidence of our dollars being spent on their goodies. Lo and behold, the otaku yen has even induced the townsfolk of Washinomiya to, at least, hide their misgivings and roll out the welcome mat to the A(kihabara)-Boys.

One day, by the AWESOME power of the Church of Moyism, we will not have live in fear of yet another witch hunt. In the meantime, RightStuf is having a 30% sale until 2 Dec!

©2012 hontou ni sou omou?. All Rights Reserved.