gundamtype0 wrote:The Japanese otakus' purchasing habits haven't really changed since the late '80s. These guys have been paying these exorbitant amounts of money for VHS, LDs, DVDs, and now BDs for more than 15 years with almost no visible signs of changing.
Actually, looking at the anime "field" over the last ten years, I'd say it has been changing.
Anime, over the last ten or fifteen years, has seen decline so endemic that it should be a new textbook example. Mainstream audiences are being discarded in favor of lowest-common-denominator otaku, who are enticed by catering to specific fetishes and the most cynical use of censorship laws to advertise Blu-Rays during the television broadcast.
Of course, the problem of smut -- and that's what a lot of anime has degraded to, these days -- is similar to
Twilight vs. Harlequin bodice-rippers. Harlequin romances gleefully descend into whatever fetish the author's into, which ranges from "turn-off" to "disgusting" depending on how out-of-sync the author is with the reader's personal tastes.
Twilight, if for no other reason than Meyer's idiosyncrasies, doesn't indulge in porn for three whole novels (i.e. the entire phenomenon). This allows the reader's imagination to take control and deliver fantasies most appealing. This, I think, is one of the reasons for
Twilight's success.
Similarly, it's difficult to like
Seikon no Qwaser or
Strike Witches if you don't find what fetishes they're catering to appealing. Of course, mass appeal isn't how these shows were constructed, so they'll push it as far to the envelope as they can to secure dominion over their respective fiefdoms. However, in the big picture, none of these can become a mass-market phoneomenon, and none of them will ever make all that much money, no matter how much they game (e.g.
iDOLM@STER and their Gravure game installments) their audience's pocketbooks with cheap tricks.
Further, even fanboys eventually start to feel burned and drop out. Since most companies have a "Red Ocean" mindset, they'll assume their customers are being taken away by smuttier products instead of dropping away due to disinterest, and will intensify their own smut to seize them back. This, as we've already been seeing, gives Sankaku Complex more material to "report" on and contributes to further decline for reasons I've described above.