In the past couple decades, anime has gone from a niche hobby in the West to a sensibility that suffuses large parts of mainstream culture. And yet, at least where coverage of anime is concerned, labor hasn’t quite risen to the forefront in the same way as it has with, for example, film and TV or even video games. Why is that the case, and how does it impact those doing the sometimes literally life-shortening work of breathing life into these series? On the latest episode of Aftermath Hours, we attempt to untie that gnarly knot.
This time around we’re joined by Aftermath’s first-ever regular contributor, Isaiah Colbert, to talk about his specialty: anime. It does not take long for this to spiral into a fittingly multi-part conversation about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but we also manage to at least briefly tackle issues pertaining to labor in the anime and manga industries and fans’ reaction (or lack thereof) to pervasive crunch at major studios.
Then we discuss my big, months-in-the-making report on OTK, a streamer organization headed up by Twitch stars like Asmongold and Mizkif which finds itself facing an uncertain future after years of scandal and streamers, who also own the organization, losing interest. After that, Chris gushes about Blue Prince, a roguelite puzzle game tailor-made for the exact kind of person Chris is. Finally, we answer a reader question about everybody’s favorite completely uncontroversial anime topic: fan service.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can create an official Aftermath anime spinoff – sans crunch!
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Isaiah: [Rafał Jaki, who I interviewed about for a piece about the life and death of his short-lived manga series], mentioned a thing that seemed very no-nonsense to me, but having seen a lot of bigger mangaka like Tatsuki Fujimoto say, like, “I wish I did not draw Chainsaw Man anymore; I wish I just wrote the story,” hearing [Jaki] say “Oh yeah, there’s buffer chapters where we plan chapters weeks in advance, and it’s become this battle of staying ahead of your buffer chapters so that you don’t get swamped,” it adds a whole new dimension to what manga creators have to scale and work against whenever they either get sick or have to go on vacation.
Chris: Even with assistants, it will fucking kill you. There’s Berserk, [whose creator died at 54], and what is it–
Nathan: The creator of Hunter X Hunter, [whose health issues have rendered him unable to write more than a handful of chapters every few years]?
Chris: Yeah. The Berserk thing, I will say, was just very sudden – and also maybe don’t get addicted to gacha games, the real silent killer. But yeah, it takes a toll, which is why I think labor is such an important beat that’s often overlooked by anime fans. A lot of the anime reporting, at least in the English language, is often focused on “Is the anime good or not, who’s doing it, what the timetables are,” and the human cost is very often overlooked.
Like Wit Studio post-Attack on Titan or Mappa post-Jujutsu Kaisen – these are huge crunches. It burns people out. Wit not doing [more] Attack on Titan and giving it up, they thrived after that.
Isaiah: One interesting bit, when I interviewed [Wit president George Wada] about it, I asked what the baton pass to Mappa was about, because a lot of people miss the Wit animation style [on Attack on Titan] of 3D maneuver gear, and he mentioned that there was a demand for how much work they would do that did not align with what they were able to or willing to do. So that’s why they passed the baton, and that’s why Mappa picked it up.
Nathan: And then Mappa, as we’ve seen with Jujutsu Kaisen, is at least on the executive level willing to do a lot of work and burn its people out. It’s that terrible tension of, on one hand, Mappa in particular often produces pretty incredible results – their shows look really good – but the human cost is so high. And I think there’s a greater awareness now of that than there used to be, but it still feels like labor is kind of invisible in anime. An episode drops, and people are like “Yeah, it came out of nowhere, fully formed.” Sprang from the head of Zeus or whatever. Do you think that’s in part, at least in the Western scene, because there’s a disconnect between people who are making stuff and the people who are consuming it, simply on the basis of language barriers if nothing else?
Isaiah: I think – and this will be slightly tangential – part of what I’m worried about is, there’s that instant gratification need for a lot of Western audiences. Take a show like Invincible, where people are seeing [creator] Robert Kirkman say “We want a season every year,” and they’re saying “Yay! I want this stuff now,” but then there’s this very vocal group that’s always getting tomatoes thrown at them, and they’re like “The animation doesn’t seem to be as good as season 1, and that took a while to make.”
I personally am of the mind that creators of shows should take as long as they need. There’s too much stuff to watch anyway. You only get one chance to make a show; I’d rather you make the best version of that show, as opposed to “We got this out as quickly as we can, and the inconsistencies with the quality of the animation are wide, but at least you got the show now.” It’s a weird battle where people want the thing now as opposed to letting them cook.
Nathan: Because the Mappa story was so infamous, do you feel like other anime studios have learned from that? Are they reevaluating because people were like “Man, folks at Mappa burnt out and it obviously impacted the quality of Jujutsu Kaisen season two?” Do you think studios took that to heart, or are they still like “We’re built different. We’ll just do it our way?”
Isaiah: I think it’s more the latter, because there’s other shows like Blue Lock. It was a really cool soccer anime for a season, but then the second season rolled around, and people were like “This looks like a slide show. What happened?” There’s moments where people will have this air of copium and say “Well this looks rough, but hopefully next week the budget will kick in.”
