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Introducing Anime Now

While ANN mainly shows the latest anime news, Anime-Now seems to go into detail on explaining much of the culture behind the shows in various interest articles. I honestly enjoyed reading some of them, such as how the actual town of Oarai is benefiting from the Girls und Panzer series.

Honestly too, I take issue with the basic premise here as well. The explicitly stated assumption underlying Anime Now's approach is that there are just too many sites dedicated to "tearing anime apart". Unless there are sites out there that literally exist to tell people that anime is bad and shouldn't be watched, I can only interpret this as a rather pejorative way of saying that most anime sites out there engage in actual criticism.

This whole Anime Now thing seems super problematic to me. I've read the forum comment by their editor trying to justify their site. One can split hairs over who is directly calling the shots. I don't see anyone denying two key things though: 1) This is directly funded by Anime Consortium Japan. 2) This is designed to provide purely positive coverage of their products. In my view, that makes this advertising in everything but name. Sure, you can claim their editorial content is real, high quality material and not just fluff and you can claim it is sincerely produced despite their funding and purpose. All that may be true. But there is no getting around that a massive conflict of interest still exists.