HighWire: [Footnotes] Sequalization and Dependence

Something has been worrying me lately about the anime industry. Well, actually something has been bothering me for a while, even before I first mentioned it when I did my reaction to the news that the the Selector Infected WIXOSS franchise would be getting a new movie in the form of Selected Destructed WIXOSS. You can go to that post and read all about my thoughts about it, but for time's sake, let's just say I wasn't too happy about it. You don't need to know anything about the two seasons of WIXOSS(though if you haven't seen them I thoroughly recommend it) besides from this: the story... was over. Finito. And now, the franchise is likely to be blown wide open once again all Madoka Magica Rebellion style. But all of this returns to a worrying trend of anime lately, one I want to talk about in depth today. That is, as the years go by, it seems like the industry has been getting more and more reliant on the fact that whatever they produce seem entitled to multiple installment, revisions, and the such. That... is not a good thing.

So, hello people of "The Wired", my name is Quan, and welcome to a new Footnotes. Today, we'll be talking about the culture of "sequalization"(and yes, I know that's not a real word), why it's harmful, and what you and I can do about it. Now let's begin.

Well, the first thing I should probably do is to make sure this isn't all a total figment of my imagination. So, I took a look down my Hummingbird chart of my recently completed anime(which yes, you can follow me at by navigating to the link below, thanks for asking(please help me, I have a family)), and singled out the the most recent 25 additions. I wanted to see how many of those 25 were a "completed story", or in other words, anime with a definite beginning, middle and end, which were also not movies, second seasons/third seasons, spin-offs or the like. The total... was three. The first was Captain Earth, an original mecha anime by Bones, followed by Charlotte, the newest Key anime adaption, as well as Gakkou Gurashi: a moe-zombie mash-up that while had an ending, will likely get a second season in the future. So, let's explain that using math. Out of my 25 most recently watched anime, over 80% of them were incomplete, unfinished stories. That is a ridiculous percentage, that's almost saying every 8 out of 10 you watch will be either an incomplete story or in someway affiliated with an existing franchise that was established earlier.
But hey, maybe that's just me. I like to think I try as many new kinds of anime, but maybe I've recently snuggled myself into a comfort zone of my favorite franchise, unable to try new series unless I can trace their origin to over 5 years ago. We need something more substantial. Let's take a look at this currently airing Fall 2015 season, and let's see for ourselves how many of the anime TV series were unaffiliated with a franchise. So, using anichart.com/fall-15(and you can confirm for yourself my tallies), I counted that out of the 40 anime TV series that aired this fall, 20 of them were either sequels, spin-offs, or simply new iterations of existing franchises like Gundam or Pokemon. But it doesn't end there. Who knows how how many of those 20 will either end inconclusively, or get a new addition to the franchise in the future.

Snapshot of the Fall 2015 anime season as according to anichart.com

Despite how I come across, I'm not completely ignorant. I don't have as much knowledge about the process and politics of creating and producing anime over in Japan as I really should, but I at least do realize that the anime industry is not exactly the most independent entity. Many, many anime are adaptions of either manga of light novels, and it's fact that both sides of the creative team will often work in tandem with each-other, which mostly can either be attributed to the fact that anime is often a way to sponsor the source-material, or that the original creators want to have a big say in how their work will be adapted into a new medium. For instance, take Fullmetal Alchemist: possibly one of the most popular and well-received shounen anime to ever be released(perhaps only rivaled by Madhouse's 2011 adaption of Hunter x Hunter). Originally, the manga by Hiromu Arakawa was first adapted by studio Bones in 2003 into anime format, where the studio was allowed to give their own conclusion to the story, as the manga itself had still not been completed. Now, fast forward 6 years where studio Bones launched a second adaption of the manga, this time titled Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, a 64 episode-epic that this time would adapt Arakawa's original story, beginning to end, and more or less, is considered one of the greatest anime of all time(which of course means I haven't seen it). The new anime series finished it run of episodes on July 3rd, 2010, which, amazingly, was only less than a month after Arakawa's manga finished its own run, a run that had lasted almost a decade. This is actually quite incredible, I can not imagine the amount of communication that must transpired between the studio and Arakawa for both mediums to finish within mere weeks of one another after the anime series ran for over a year and the manga nearly exactly nine. And while that is an example that is quite uplifting and amazing, sometimes anime, at least as far as the narrative is concerned can suffer from being so intrinsically tied to the source material.

Take Spice and Wolf. Spice and Wolf is mostly-considered a classic of the anime medium first released in 2008, based off of the light novels by Isuna Hasekura and illustrations drawn by Jū Ayakura, a calming romp through the world of economics as we follow peddler Kraft Lawrence and wise wolf god Holo as they travel across the land to return Holo to her long-unseen native land. The aforementioned first season animated by IMAGIN in 2008 was a critical success due to its smooth story-telling and likable, complex characters, and eventually studio Brains Base picked up the torch, releasing a second season of the anime in 2009. The problem is what came after that, or to be more precise, what did not come after that. If you have read my Top 5 Wishlist Anime countdown you probably know the story from here, but as an anime adaption that mostly existed to promote the original light novels, a problem for it arose as fans of the anime adaption clamored to see a third season. See, the light novels had actually finished, achieving an admirable run of 17 novels over the course of five years from 2006 to 2011, and ever since, the anime has been left in a sort of limbo. With no material left for the anime to promote, it just sort of stopped on a rage-inducing cliffhanger, much to the dismay of me and anime fans everywhere. And four years later, there's no word on a season 3, and unfortunately, even if we did by some miracle get a third season, it likely wouldn't provide a satisfying ending for the franchise either. As far as my research could tell me specifically(because unfortunately, I haven't read the light novels), two seasons of the shows covered only about the first three or four light novels, which means if kept at the most optimistic pace without skipping parts of the story, it would over take eight goddamn seasons of Spice and Wolf for the narrative to be fully adapted. That is insane. So much so that I wonder if the anime series has even supposed to have an ending when production started due to just how much there was to adapt.
That's what I really don't like. I don't like that the narratives of so much anime are often in the hands of their source material, because anime, as a medium, should have the ability to tell a complete story regardless of the politics of how the germ of the original idea came into being. Too often we are stuck with anime that lack any sort of conclusive endings, and the anime that do get multiple seasons is often either adapting the stupidly long narrative the anime is based on, or expanding an already completed story for the sake of money money money.

The original Japanese cover for the first
Spice and Wolf LN.

I know the conversation of this blog post has sort of evolved from the the repeated beating of dead horses of various franchise to something perhaps a little more fundamental to how anime has sort of come into form as medium since its inception, so I want to get back on point for a little while. Just so there is no misunderstandings, I am not saying that anime shouldn't adapt material into a new form or should be kept to one singular season. Definitely not; hell, almost all of my favorite anime of adaptions of one thing or another. What I am saying is that I feel that is important for anime as a medium to give itself its own identity, in form of more of an emphasis on anime originals, and it's sort of up to us the fans to support the anime that are entirely original products. Luckily, at least from my observation, there was been progress of that in the last few years, after all, there are many original anime to choose from in this Fall 2015 anime season, and there have been plenty throughout the year, like Plastic Memories, which I found interesting enough that I even did a review on it. The future I most want for the anime industry, and well, all the mediums that I care about, is a sort of web of interconnected ideas and inspiration, that while don't relay on one another and dictate the path that the others take, and can communicate concepts to one another with efficiency and understanding. Where the well of new stories drawn from the kaleidoscope of thought will never run dry, and there will be no need to dish out the same tired new installments, same ideas, same stories. The anime industry is where I've always looked for something different and something untouched, and while the medium itself is still overflowing with cliches, I honestly believe it to still be the most interesting variety of them. That's a preconception I hope will be never torn down. That's something I hope I won't need to seriously worry about in the future; that the next generation will still be told, "have an idea? Well then, write it down somewhere. You don't know what it might grow into."

Goodbye for now guys.

Navigate Elsewhere