If people were paid fairly, most productions would be untenable. There would be just a few anime per year instead of many.

But also, how would the popular ones come to be? Every new property would be a huge gamble.

As an anime and manga fan, I actually want that to happen. Pay the animators what they deserve. Give them good working conditions.

People just have to accept that means the industry will shrink dramatically. So many things will just never get made.

That also means far fewer people will get to become animators. They’ll have to find some other job as competition for the jobs that remain will be sky high.

And that competition is what brings down the wages in the first place. There are just so many people that want those jobs.

The amount of money that goes into the industry is not static. The original linked article specifically cites cases in which members of the production committee (often toy companies like Good Smile[0]) decided to deliberately take less money because they didn't want their control diluted. They're only able to do this because they can fleece animators into working longer for less money rather than having to get more capital in the project.

As for animators having to find new work... good? The current situation is one in which animators pursue their passions, and then have their passions completely take over their life and crush their soul. If they quit en masse, that would be backpressure against productions that want animators to fall on their swords, and production committees that want shit done cheaply.

[0] Who, incidentally, funded Hiroyuki Nishimura's[1] buyout of 4chan in exchange for all those J-List ads the site had.

[1] Former operator of 2channel who got pushed out in an incredibly sketchy way by his website host.

Isn’t this a paternalistic point of view? Why do you know better than the animators who are accepting these jobs? Who are you to tell them that their career choice is wrong?

Unless you want to say that getting paid a minimum wage paternalistic?

Second, of course increased costs of production lead to consequences for end users or people who buy the content. We see that all of the time in every industry.

This is very much not true for worker salaries. For one thing, workers can not easily hop from area of expertise to area of expertise like capital can — and workers oftentimes lack the ability to take the high risk that might comes with quitting a job in search of another or attempting to switch career paths.

The natural state is for owners to drive down worker compensation until it's essentially slave labor. In a "competitive" world for owners, competing means driving down costs which means an across-the-board destruction of worker benefits.

We have some protections in this country (thank you, unions!) and full-stop rules against slavery that prevent us from actually seeing this, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't happen.

And trust me: People in financial power would absolutely grind workers down to a penny an hour and still claim it's "fair pay" if they could. They'd say "well, if it wasn't fair pay people wouldn't do it" while making sure the entirety of society was arranged to prevent people from leaving their jobs.

Uh, last I checked, capital is not capable of hopping from area of expertise to area of expertise. A GPU cannot decide to become a burger flipping robot (much to the dismay of some crypto investors).

A investor can quickly move capital from one industry to another, but the worker cannot.

Predictions of dire consequences rarely pan out. Fast food employees in Seattle are earning $15-20/+ per hour and prices did not double - in fact they're not significantly higher than in neighboring counties with lower wages. It turns out that labor costs are only a small fraction of overall costs.

If a job needs doing by a human at all, then that human does indeed deserve a reasonable baseline which allows them to exist and even do so with reasonable dignity.

As time goes on and jobs are done by machines, and there are fewer and fewer jobs that require a human, then the output and ownership of those machines simply should one way or another be distributed enough to have the same effect.

All they have to do to earn that is not be being a criminal right at that moment.

And this extends to people who can't do anything obviously productive too. Even a sick old grandma doing nothing but telling stories to kids for one hour a week is productive, and we have no excuse not to provide for even the ones who can't even do that.

Because even if "the Earth is a life boat", we don't exist in an environment of hardship with fixed and insufficient resources where there just isn't enough food and building material and energy to go around.

There simply is no excuse for the way we treat some people. They didn't do anything wrong enough to deserve it, and it is not forced by physical limits.

Talking about what value someone provides to earn their existence is just a way to rationalize taking advantage of others. None of this equates to "I will be forced to spend 20 years learning medicine to give my time away for free to bums!" But even if it did, why is that a bad thing exactly? Because it's what, like slavery? You mean, slavery is bad after all?

Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.

There are just plenty of loopholes and a lot of off the clock overtime that complicates things. Not just in anime but most of the Japanese workforce. That's a whole other topic to discuss, though.

>Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.

A minimum wage doesn't guarantee "a particular wage". It only guarantees that if an exchange of money for labor occurs, that the price paid will meet the minimum. However, it doesn't guarantee that the transaction will occur, and if you're unemployed your "wage" is arguably $0.

Is there any problem with reading comprehension on HN these days? The GP says that there is no "right to any particular career." and you answer that by a blanket statement regarding "ANY RIGHTS". Well done

They should learn to be hard workers, saving all the penies they can, never be sick, and some day if they don't die before it, living the dream of being their own boss.

That can't happen by definition unless you get rid of inequality altogether, or engage in shenanigans like defining them as "contractors".

Where the line that separates goodwill custody of the commons like roads, public education, enforcing contracts and laws and "interference"?

Every time politicians decide to do good somewhere they do bad everywhere. It's not that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent (although many are) is just that free markets are the ultimate resource allocation tool and government intervention is necessarily inefficient and make us poorer.

I'm fascinated - does this hold under all conditions? Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?

> It would be a great start with governments committed to not spending more than they earn and printing money to cover the deficit

Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states

Maybe not.

> Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?

I don't think we should base our choice of economical system in the eventuality of an all-out war. Regardless of what I think in the event of an all-out war government will try to appropriate the resources it wants and gear the economy towards its needs because it can. A free market always efficiently allocate resources however I imagine the goals of the economical agents would be closer to preventing the destruction of wealth and human life than winning a war at all costs but this is context dependent.

Ukraine is an example where people from all over the world on their own volition contributed to the war effort in ways beyond what state violence could achieve. And Russia is the opposite example, top-down and dysfunctional.

> Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states.

People should have the freedom to use whatever they want as exchange medium. I don't know what is best but the current system with unsustainable growing debt do more harm than occasional adversarial nation-states could.

That is one hell of a hand wave.

To say nothing of the lack of other regulations making it to where even with proper payment transparency one has no clue if an employer has a corporate culture that in many states would constitute an abusive pattern in a domestic partnership yet most of those same states have at best some limited carve-outs to do anything about it.

The entertainment industry in particular seems to be really good at exploiting folks, but in IT there is still a sort of elephant in the room; So many of us who read and post want to be the sorts of folks with vested-FAANG security cushions, however we know through self or colleagues plenty of cases where many shops will have a huge uphill battle to make a huge impacting change and the result is a nice review; in the extreme cases the reward/value is in multiple orders of magnitude.

And maybe that would be OK if it wasn't for the other pressures; which is probably something animators deal with too based on general tone and the times the industry tries to cleverly sneak jokes in about the situation.

>Second, of course increased costs of production lead to consequences for end users or people who buy the content. We see that all of the time in every industry.

When possible. The issue is a lot of anime in Japan still relies in broadcast, so it's much harder to increase the cost of entry. Streaming is becoming more popular, but nowhere near as prevalent as the western streaming services.

And physical media... Well, feel free to look up your favorite anime's pricing in Japan. Not only the prices but the fact that they tend to bundle seasonal anime in batches of 2-3 episodes, not an entire seasonal box.

But the topic here is on Japan. They did increase their minimum wage last year, after the pandemic caused inflation in the Japanese economy for the first time in 30 years. Their economic situation is extremely different from the US which exploded (then receded, then kept rising) in those decades.

Similarly, maybe we should have fewer musicians and less music, but at least we have an absence of the slave economy you mention. Maybe the medical profession is doing something right by limiting the flow of the pipeline.

That is how (modern) society works already on a global scale. I am not saying it's good, but it's the way things are.

Every major commodity cobalt, shoes, cellphones etc has large scale automated production. What’s going on is essentially a parallel system where people making almost nothing can barely out complete automation. However, because both are occurring at the same time consumers wouldn’t notice a significant change if 100% of that production was automated.

Granted without infrastructure and a skilled workforce you can’t instantly swap to automation, but that’s a different question.

the automate-able industries have done it, leaving behind the ones that aren't as automatable. This is why there's still many developing countries that export cheap labour. You can think of those as the "underpaid" class.

Not necessarily bad, since i believe they are not being forced under lock and chain in slavery. They are merely economically incentivized.

That’s not to say nobody is making subsistence wages making shoes, just that there’s robots making shoes in another factory. It may not be 1:1 in every niche as a train isn’t a drop in replacement for a long haul trucker, but they are still in competition.

    Income: $100,000/month

    Expenses: $50,000/month

    Payroll:
    Cashier: $290/month
    Cashier: $290/month
    Cashier: $290/month
    Janitor: $290/month
    Security: $290/month
    Manager: $1,000/month
    Owner: $45,000/month

I understand the point you're trying to make, but you'd be better off using real numbers to do it. I've never come across a business owner taking 45% of total income. Competition ensures those kinds of profit levels generally don't exist.

A similar argument was used in favor of perpetuating slavery prior to the civil war.

> People just have to accept that means the industry will shrink dramatically. So many things will just never get made.

I've accepted that. Now let's pay people fairly for their time and skill.

> That also means far fewer people will get to become animators. They’ll have to find some other job as competition for the jobs that remain will be sky high.

The online independent animator community is thriving. If people create something that has appeal, they are able to at least partially subsist from subscriptions and donations. I contribute to several animators' Patreon accounts (though Patreon takes far too much out of it). If there isn't enough appeal, well... I'm sorry. Either everyone agrees to a fair wage based on these market conditions, independent efforts raise money through crowdsourcing, or... people find other ways to sustain themselves. That's just a healthy economy in action.

Perhaps we will see the same with animation; there will be a few well-paid and highly-skilled artists that are automating with a bunch of AI. I doubt that will be the solution to equality though.

Doesn’t really make things much cheaper because the people drawing those in-between frames are already paid peanuts :/

>A similar argument was used in favor of perpetuating slavery prior to the civil war.

I suspect the end result here will actually be fairly comparable to post-slavery agriculture, in that technology will eliminate a lot of these jobs. Tough to imagine that GenAI doesn't have an enormous impact on anime over the next few years.

It depends a lot on the culture there.

1) there are actual labor laws in Japan, so they can't just cut off 90% of their workforce at the snap of the finger

2) there is a much stronger culture of conformity in Japan. So it is much easier to shame a company when getting negative PR in Japan and those complaints can overcome raw profits.

Also, tech wise AI is at least 5 years out from anything animated. What I've seen in motion so far is extremely crude.

I... think you are overestimating that by a lot. We went from nothing to AlphaGo to ChatGPT to Midjourney et al within a few years, with the timespan between each shortening.

Most of the people whom I contribute to are able to work full-time on their passions through donations and make more than they would if they were traditionally employed.

What we have (in some countries) is: 1) Minimum wage: defined as the least amount legal to pay someone. 2) Living wage: loosely defined as the wage needed for minimum living standards for a given region 3) Market wage: What the market determines your value is worth based on supply/demand.

None of these are "fair" and they aren't usualy the same but sometimes can be.

Bollocks. A fair wage is a wage which is agreed upon by employee and employer, and is livable according to local cost of living. Let's not get into a semantic argument.

This is the key insight that OP is missing which makes them incorrectly think that "fair" can never be determined because it is some kind of objective goal post. It's not, it's highly subjective and local.

Yeah, but the thing is people go to see superhero movies and sequels and remakes. And have been for a long time.

When people stop going to superhero movies, they'll stop getting made. Except for Spider-Man; Sony is going to keep rebooting that and doing another series of three movies until they are bought by Disney; if they lose that license by not making a film in time, they'll never get it back.

It's always unfortunate hearing commentors thinking "people are tired of Marvel" when seeing low sales for The Marvel's, when the reality is much more boring external factors like Disney+ cannabalizing sales and cinemas still not truly recovering from the pandemic.

Short story is that Marvel licensed Spiderman for cheap with a clause that Sony could keep the license so long as they produced a movie every N years.

>But also, how would the popular ones come to be? Every new property would be a huge gamble.

So give the artists their current meager salaries and bolster it with a percentage of profits?

Seems really easy to fairly compensate the artists.

they want just the upside, not the downside as well.

This further reduces the budget of productions so that all kinds of junk can be produced at rock bottom prices and still have a chance at making money.

And let's be honest, the vast vast majority of anime is utter crap.

If things were different however, anime might end up as a more hit-driven industry the way Hollywood productions (or heck even startups) are.

Companies will find a way to make things work even if labour costs more. Every company and neo liberal says that same thing about regulation, employee wages, tax increases .... Funnily enough when those same regulations/wage increases/taxes come in they do not leave the market ... Strange.

Edit: clarity

Companies can and will adapt.

The way is to move / outsource to where it costs less. There is a reason that iPhones are mostly made in China.

But socialists never think about this stuff. They just pretend there are no downsides to central control of prices.

We have the same problem, "dog hotels" are too expensive. We just pay someone to come to our house a few times a day. A kid we know in the neighborhood, don't tell the government but they charge less than minimum wage! shock

What does Japanese culture think about unionization?

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/t5illb/comment/hz57d...

Also, you seem to be terribly confused by "the company is not making much profit on paper" and "the people in management and running the company are paid plenty." You think management is paid as lowly as the animators?

This is no different from hollywood where studio management make plenty of money and the army of people actually doing the lion's share of the work, especially GFX/SFX, are poorly paid, and accountants make it look like the film barely breaks even.

No, I suspect absolutely everyone with any knowledge of animation knows animators are paid terribly. The article itself has a meme image about the pay.

But part of the compromise that Western animation does to be more productive is that it all looks bad. There's a fake-anime style Superman cartoon on I saw that has the artistic quality of maybe a Japanese elementary schooler. And then Netflix makes animated sex comedies that look like old Flash cartoons.

Amazing show and it has a beautiful style that looks like it's hand drawn and Japanese, but it's actually French made CGI. I suspect that even this industry can be disrupted by technology.

> My Adventures with Superman is an American animated superhero television series based on the DC Comics character Superman. The series is developed by Jake Wyatt, produced by Warner Bros. Animation and animated by Studio Mir in South Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Adventures_with_Superman

I'm not sure how payscales work for Korean outsourcing vs Western animation, though I guess I'd like to know.

South Korea has long been a place to outsource animation to to cut costs. Plenty of Japanese animated works with Korean names in the credits as well.

That's not the entire reason of course, they also have larger budgets.

A bunch of WB properties outsource their animation to Japanese anime studios.

(And coloring. I feel like it's easy to spot American attempts in particular because all the colors are too contrasty and oversaturated, and then they put glowy neon effects on top.)

Note, fake anime in other Asian countries is getting really good these days, and in fact is starting to take over Japan because other countries don't use the Japanese industry strategy of "never change anything and never try to make any money". Was just there and all the ads were for Blue Archive/Azur Lane/Honkai, which are Korean and Chinese.

Exhibit A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_NIMH

Exhibit B. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Egypt

Exhibit C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Into_the_Spider-Ve...

Though I've heard things like Castlevania are good, haven't seen it though.

No amount of legislation or shame articles will change the reality that market forces have profound effects, and these effects are difficult to break. Unions try. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a successful one yet for software, but I’m ignorant of the art world; maybe they have one. But be prepared to receive exactly what the union can give you, and no more.

Well, as a software engineer game development is among the lowest-paying jobs you can have, and you usually don't need any special training to switch to something more remunerative. As an artist, though, there's nothing hugely better you can just switch to without doing a lot of training, which is a tough bargain given how expensive art school can be. Sometimes people successfully pivot to graphic or UI design, which is generally more lucrative, but that's about it.

Ironically, game dev at a medium or large studio is actually one of the more stable and lucrative careers in the art world, unlike software development where it's the opposite.

> To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a successful one yet for software, but I’m ignorant of the art world; maybe they have one.

Yes, animators in L.A. at many major studios (e.g. Disney) are unionized, and as a result they're among the best jobs you can get in that field. They still work long hours, but you can earn six-figure compensation with good benefits if you specialize in the right things (generally the more technical you are, the better off you are).

(Source: lots of friends in that industry.)

People need to stop being so naive as to accept poorly paid jobs because they think the subject matter is 'funner'. Game Devs are the first example I thought of here.

If you love games, that's great.. but why not go work in literally any other software dev work for maybe 2x the pay and/or 1/2 the hours.

As Don Draper said 'That's what the money is for'.

Plenty more money and time to buy & play games.

1. Work is still half your waking life for decades. Why not attempt to make it quality work instead of a slog if you can help it?

2. Less money =/= barely afford rent. I was still making $160k at my last role with 7YOE, so we're not talking "can barely pay rent". I'm a single 20's male with no car or school payments to make, and pretty low maintenance hobbies (hiking, games, art). Even in a high CoL area, doubling my salary won't necessarily double my QoL.

3. Gamedev is still a craft, so the more time you spend honing it the better a dev you become (generally). Even if I chose to leave gamedev as hobby work on the side, it reduces my ability to progress.

4. Gamedev works on similar "it's who you know" logic. And the best way to connect with fellow devs in a meaningful matter is to be in the industry. If you have aspirations to open your own studio one day these connections and portfolio is priceless for selling yourself to others.

5. Playing a game is very different from making one. Just because you like playing games doesn't mean you will enjoying making one yourself. The opposite can be true as well. Gamedev digs into domains like graphics, physics, UI/UX, and even psychology in applied ways that challenge engineers, even ones who rarely play games. A graphics programmer is a wizard who will be snatched by many industries if they open up, but if you wanna home your craft, you don't have too many other places for such specific work. Games, 3d animation, GPUs, and a few research labs (often looking for PhDs though).

The thing is that gamedev is one of the few industries you reliably hear people bully 60/80/100 hour weeks outside of say - medicine, law, finance. Or startups where you grind for a couple years hoping the lottery ticket of your equity pays off.

However, it does not pay anything near medicine, law, or finance wages. Nor do you get equity like a startup. And the labor practices of game studios in terms of benefits, layoffs, etc have always sounded far worse.

If the ROI is worth it for you, great (and $160k ain't bad to be fair, I've heard lower than that in gamedev). People just need to go into it with eyes wide open though and not foreclose their options early (by overly focussing on gamedev niche coursework in college for example).

Why? If I was really passionate about something, I would not mind low pay. For me, the blocker is that I'm not quite so passionate about anything. I suspect a lot of people think they're passionate about games but really are just addicted.

You see a lot of hobbyists elbow into paid work, to the detriment of people actually making a living of it. It puts a ceiling on what people are willing to pay for the typical work - engagement, wedding, headshot photography for example.

Photojournalism is a bit of a weird case because, in my opinion at least, its always been populated by nepobabies and other sorts who weren't commanding proper living wages because they didn't really have to.

From a different perspective: teachers. From most absolute criteria, teaching is a horrible profession. Significant credential requirements, lousy pay, hard hours, dealing with occasional rotten child/parent. Yet millions agree to do it because they want to impact the next generation.

I think a lot of people go into it because they have a comfortable middle/upper-middle class suburban upbringing, reasonably bright (but not like super high achievement focused), without any specific areas of interest (STEM), and teachers play an outsize role in their life as far as non-family adults. Teachers being an uncreative lot, suggest to them - hey, why not pursue teaching.

In theory teaching should be a good, portable middle class job in that you aren't restricted to 2-3 mega cities like tech or finance or whatever. In practice it doesn't really work out that way. For one thing the certification process varies by state so your degrees are not immediately portable.

Further, in teaching you literally have to wait for someone to retire or die to get a shot. Most of my cohort who went into teaching had to slog it out in bad districts, bad schools, hard/bad roles (ie - special ed) in precarious employment (substitute teaching for years, or non-union/tenure schools like charters).

There is maybe 2 people I know who actually made it teaching back home in their hometown like they intended. The rest eventually found a full time role within 30 miles of where they were willing to live, after 5 years or more bouncing around in precarious employment.

It sounds like you actually have a wildly incorrect view of how unions can and do work. you may want to do some more reading and research. For example, the WGA and SAG unions do not pay based on seniority nor does everyone make the same. They do mandate minimums for certain kinds of work but that’s about it. They also have rules about what the studios can and can’t do.

That being said, it probably does come at the cost of fewer people being able to find employment than the talent pool exists but it’s hard to measure / support that claim considering there’s more actors and writers now than ever before.

Thanks. If you have any references on where specifically to start reading, feel free to drop them here. Otherwise I’ll start at the acronyms you mentioned.

Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074679 are making me think twice, but there must be some catch with unions, or else everyone would do it.

As for rewards, look at how actors, writers, directors etc get paid - the vast majority of those professions you never hear about and only hear about the ones that are making insane amounts of money from it. The union rules also covers things like residuals and stuff but again afaik it’s all about establishing minimums - the exceptional talent can always negotiate a better deal when they are in demand.

Of course, when you make 2 + 2 = 5, there's always a -1 floating out there that someone else has to suffer for. Right now, the animation industry sets the price, so the individual animators take the hit. If the animators unionize, then they can push back on that. The market forces here are that artists cost money, but the production committees and studios don't want to pay for them, so they arrange the industry in such a way as to keep artists out of the picture.

You're implying that being paid by seniority isn't already the case for most of the tech industry. Last time I checked, most job adverts are looking for "X years of experience in Y".

> Or at least, I haven’t seen particularly persuasive evidence that unions can do more than make everyone collectively equal

The work culture in europe is largely based on standardized work contracts, enforced by unions. For example, the entire railway industry in Germany is collectively unionized (~40k members) and is holding negotiations right now, to renew the terms of these standardized contracts.

The goal of a union is not to "make everyone equal", it is to enforce collective bargaining rights. This usually does lead to better employment conditions for everyone involved though.

Only if the market for animation is efficient.

(We had layoffs unrelated to the union and more related to a bad monetization scheme and high costs, during which the union negotiated increased severance and health insurance coverage vs we were initially offered.)

Union successes are definitely growing in tech.

For union members pay, layoffs, etc. are often decided by seniority and not by ability or how hard you work.

Whether or not that's worth it is up to you.

The Film Actors Guild is a union in the art world with pretty significant market power.

Nothing is technically stopping an animator to go and do their own thing. It's just a hugely difficult and expensive undertaking that requires a decent amount of investment. Especially nowadays you could put it on YouTube, but it probably wouldn't be worth their while.

[1] https://youtu.be/BDEIPa9b3OU?t=934

1. Big movie studios have been overproducing content with reduced returns.

2. Business model change to direct-to-consumer (streaming).

3. Regulatory changes (DEI minority interests - Oscars).

4. Technological changes (generative AI).

5. Customer preferences (watch the review on Youtube).

This is a really bad take, I've lived in Tokyo for 6 years. As a western developer (in IT as we say here in Japan), you will most certain improve your quality of life by moving to e.g. Tokyo vs most USA cities. While what you said it's true, there's also other truths:

- As others comment, as a foreigner working in Tokyo with some experience, you can opt to much higher salaries than the local graduates (for so many reasons). It'd be easy to make 6-8M JPY in Japanese companies, and depending on other factors 8-10M JPY is not rare. Since we are in HN, I'm sure many here can even opt for 10M+ JPY.

- If you can, just work remotely for US/EU while living here, or for a branch of a EU/US company, since salaries will be much higher. That is true. That way you can make 10-30M JPY easily, and with that you can live _very_ comfortable. Only issue you might have is how you manage to get a Visa.

For reference, you can live well as a single guy in Tokyo with 4-5M JPY. Lifestyle is different though, so it depends on what you value, e.g. houses ARE smaller, but neighborhoods are walkable and beautiful (highly depends where you come from). If you do want to have your cake and eat to, meaning living in a "very big" house for Japanese standards while having everything else nice from Japan, yeah you'll need to be making 8M+ JPY for sure.

Looking at exchange rates is the wrong way of looking at things since they vary widely in the space of 5 years or so. You need to look at purchasing power in their local currency. Like eating out in japan is WAY cheaper than in Europe for anything comparable.

And looking at the bubble that is programmers salaries is ridiculous as a benchmark, because then it mostly depends on whether there are large actors to drive such salaries up in said countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-ReoBPl4mM

But I think for professions like these, the "they have free will" argument is pretty compelling. If they were being exploited in a low-skill, low-status job, where there are few to no alternatives, sure, definitely an industry that needs worker protections. But no one needs to be an animator at a big anime studio to survive. They're there because they want to be, and many/most/(all?) could find gainful employment in an adjacent industry or field where they'd have better pay.

To me it's similar to game development. Game devs famously get paid poorly (compared to other devs) and work under stressful conditions. They don't have to do that. They can get a job as a web developer, or an embedded developer, or... some other kind of developer, and get paid more, and experience less stress. But they want to build games, so that's what they do.

I'd definitely support all these folks if they wanted to unionize. But I'm not sure I'm convinced legislation is warranted. (Well, except for strengthening and actually enforcing sanctions against union-busting efforts.)

This isn't actually true. Occasionally animators can pivot to UI or graphic design, for example, but often times not. Animation is fairly specialized.

There's no "but their job is cool and they could do something else" caveat that makes someone less worthy of professional advocacy.

There is a surplus of game developers and animators and a league like the NBA for game dev doesn't exist (unless you count working for Valve or other prestigious organizations "the NBA of game development").

The problem is mostly in the small studio space, where a lot of them are freelancers. There are a few studios like KyoAni/PA Works/ufotable that use mostly their own employees and pay better.

As for "mafia-style"... I mean, are we calling Hayao Miyazaki a mob boss now?

[0] Remember back in 2010 when Steve Jobs and Larry Page formed a wage fixing cartel?

There's media companies literally trying to starve out striking workers: https://www.lendingtree.com/personal/medical-debt-statistics...

There's the biggest kind of theft, wage theft: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-u...

On and on, this applies to everyone in every industry.

In 2024, this falsehood deserves to be dispelled. There isn't any evidence for free will, and what we do know about the human brain, physics, and everything else points to the absence of free will—it is just an illusion.

and therefore, you choosing the current best option available to you is not coersion. Therefore, it's free-will.

(Also very high rates of young women reporting doing sex work, though I don't know if that's because of poverty.)

I think I am fairly aware (see profile) and yet most people dont live paycheck to paycheck. the idea that most working class people are just one step away from being thrown in the streets is just a crazy delusion.

As a western metaphor, think of anime studios similar to the VFX industry where many bid based on some anime the committee wants to make. Sometimes studios pitch their own anime, but most can't afford to put down their own money for that arrangement.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-12582-2

And executives getting paid super-well is an American thing. They don't get paid well in Japan either. Nobody does.

With such conditions there will never be an increase to pay. It's just the way things will be in these segments - forever!

would you also make the same augument about industrial automation taking away the work of apprentices?

Paid apprenticeships may even be something the animation industry could consider, but even that would cause a massive reduction in the size of the talent pool they draw from today. What we have now is basically a meat grinder/lottery system where most animators burn out or suffer in poverty and obscurity while a small number get selected to advance, but at least people have an opportunity to develop their skills, show off their work, and develop industry connections

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/165cmc2/sd...

https://old.reddit.com/r/aiArt/comments/17zmx1n/unreleased_1...

s/worse/better

Soon the creators and artists will be able to make full films without studio capital in the mix. This should start happening by the end of the year.

The studio system exists because film and motion media is hard to make. It requires a lot of people, a lot of logistics, and a lot of capital. That's not going to be true for much longer.

Soon the webcomic / fanfiction creator will be able to build their own anime shows and audiences.

Kenshi Yonezu started as the vocaloid producer Hachi, and went on to have numerous hits, including a few anime openings and recently the end credit songs for The Boy and the Heron and Final Fantasy XVI.

Yoasobi had one of the most popular music videos, globally, on YouTube last year and is playing Coachella this year. One half of Yoasobi is the (active) vocaloid producer Ayase. (Hatsune Miku is also on the list for Coachella, as well as a new North America tour...)

Ryo/Supercell has been big for awhile, Giga (who used to work with Reol) just did a Pokemon X Hatsune Miku collab and does work for Hololive songs occasionally...

And that's all before discussing how this will affect monetization. Indies already feel soft capped at $20/work and almost hard capped at $30. Will the same consumers pay those prices for what they feel is "lesser art" now? Indie gamedev can barely break even on $10-20 as is.

Gamedev takes too damned long. You can't experiment and rapidly try new things.

Weekly schedule is usually done for the sake of broadcast channels, which is still a bit more relevant in Japan than over in rhe West.

I would rather there not be an official translation or localization process, but since non Japanese streaming platforms want to constantly expand their business no matter what, the desires of hardcore anime fans will not be respected as normal people outnumber us, so bad subs will continue to be produced.

Or for people who aren't already familiar with the culture. For instance if you're translating a romance novel or otome game (romance game for women) you'd want to localize the body language it describes men using, because what Japanese women like, American women think is offputting and rapey, and a romance story doesn't work as a romance if it turns the reader off.

> Beyond that official translations often don't come with honorific

This is a giveaway you don't speak Japanese. Honorifics are not actually important or meaning-bearing.

(Last week in public in Japan I heard a woman call a boy "Haru-chan", something that supposedly never happens.)

Actually, if audiences expect this it means translators have to start translating some honorifics you don't know into the ones you do. You probably know さん but not 氏 or ちゃま.

As a Japanese man, you are dead wrong.

Using the wrong honorific or inappropriately not using one at all can be tantamount to shouting "fuck you" to someone here in the Anglosphere, an insult and offence of among the highest order.

>I heard a woman call a boy "Haru-chan", something that supposedly never happens.

That is mundane to a fault.

I didn't mean it like that! I meant when they're being used normally and not meant to stand out. They're normal pleasantries and a bit of character voice, and both those things can be represented in English.

America isn't a honorific-heavy society, but there are certainly people who get offended if you don't call them Dr., etc, but this is rarely a plot point in a TV show and I don't think it's used that often in manga/anime either.

Though I don't find it that bad. My English copy of Count of Monte Cristo does have French honorifics (it uses M/Mme instead of Mr/Mrs) and that doesn't look weird. Japanese stories set in Britain also seem to like using British titles like "Milord" although, um, they don't really do it right.

Meanwhile I've seen subtitles for clips of Japanese vtubers where they don't put /enough/ swearing in. First one I ever saw had Pekora saying something was 気狂い, which they definitely didn't translate right. (Means "crazy" but it's a really bad word, kind of like "retarded".)

I can, but believe what you want. I don't have a need to prove it to others.

>Honorifics are not actually important or meaning-bearing.

This is plain wrong as there are scenes where honorifics are significant. Who uses (or doesn't use) which honorific with which people is important. Characters change the honorific they use with each other. Characters talk about what honorifics people are using.