Anime Is Booming. So Why Are Animators Living in Poverty?Comments
celebratedrecluse wrote
requires workers to have enough in common to create a sense of shared stake sufficient to countervail the risk of forging an independent studio.
in an environment of media saturation, the factories (studios) take a loss on individual works. only large conglomerates survive in the long term. the result is accumulation of capital. in order for a revolutionary or otherwise immanent process to overtake this trajectory, it require to be larger than the others, or grow faster.
in order to do this, you need some kind of economic rupturing process which is self-propelling. where for it come?
monday wrote
I agree with your analysis, and could be a longshot but I was thinking along the lines of the early content creator community boosted by advertising, and the onlyfans pay-per-view business. Seems that the anime and manga scene have a lot of fanbase already doing unpaid labor and creating art. And I am not wanting to put the weight in the workers of this industry, and I do have the notion that even if this scenario succeeded we still would have underpaid workers.
The current state of cultural / entertainment consumption does not help either. The early freedom conquered with web 2.0 is already domesticated and coopted by the Capital
celebratedrecluse wrote
Perhaps we should delete all of the content on the internet with a mechanical virus, thus swinging the power back to the workers?
ah, it'll never work. lol
d4rk wrote
I'm one of the opinion that animators, not all, are not the cooperative sort, They have a corporatist personality, they have each their own specialty and want it that way, not to mention their uber-desire for copyright. After which as it is hard enough as it is, it needs to get animated and edited, then serialized. The entire thing, even if built from the ground-up is made of individual personalities that would rather it being from the top down and streamlined. Not to mention they decry any idea of offices or common workplaces, even the idea of fellow animators create a cringe feeling filling their esophagi up with gall. They're most likely networked in terms of their works. The only cooperative thing I could see potential in is the editors and actual animators.
d4rk wrote
Natural Resources Paradox all over again.
There's definitely nothing wrong with focusing on one sector, but there is definitely something wrong about those who work in the sector not having a home or enough food to eat.
86944 wrote
Well, this business model explains why we get so many series that abruptly end on a cliffhanger or suffer quality cuts as the season goes on.
What a mess.
moonlune wrote (edited )
AFAIK, the manga world is a little different: mangakas are paid a fixed % of each sold manga (maybe around 1/5th), so their earnings are proportional to their "performance": They'll make a lot of money if they hit gold and get serialized and sell loads mangas.
but that's like drawing a winning lotto ticket.
Yatothagod wrote
The big anime companies just pay them low and a lot of peoples nowdays look animes on illegal sites and this male them be paid even less, they almost Do It for passion and fame that's sad.
monday wrote
If the Animators get together and create a cooperative Studio? Cut the middle man and the exploiters/employers, and even ditch the streaming services to distribute by their own