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This Week in Anime
The Anime Community's Leak Culture

by Nicholas Dupree & Steve Jones,

Over the last week, a major leak seemed to stem from compromised files at Iyuno, which led to the first season of the Ranma 1/2 reboot and Terminator Zero, as well as multiple episodes of DAN DA DAN and the Gekijōban Mononoke: Karakasa movie appearing online. Nick and Steve discuss the recent leaks and how they connect to the anime community's larger culture of speedscans and other leaked announcements.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Steve
Nick, that recent CrowdStrike fiasco really affected me. As you know, I am the guy in charge of all anime distribution ever, so keeping everything safe and secure is my number one priority. Luckily, I've just found a new cybersecurity expert to lead my IT department, and I've got a good feeling about her.
Nick
Well Steve, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you better hire a good plumber, order a bulk shipment of adult diapers, and purchase the copyright for "Ievan Polka" because the anime world has a big ol' leak problem.
So yeah, in case any of you have been living under a rock for the past week (and hey, if you have been, I get it), there is a big and ongoing breach that has spewed several major titles onto the shadier side of the interwebs, well ahead of their scheduled release dates. It's a hot mess.
It's not the first time an anime episode has leaked before its due date, but I'm pressed to think of a time when this much stuff was released. An entire season of that Ranma reboot is just out there, months before it was meant to be seen by anyone willing to hurt their eyes by watching something in 360p with half a dozen watermarks and timecodes. Several somebodies at some important companies have been tearing out their hair this week, lemme tell ya.
Leaks are nothing new, but the volume of this one seems unprecedented. And by virtue of it being an ongoing story, the details aren't fully clear yet. The connective tissue seems to be that these are all Netflix licenses handled by the localization company Iyuno, and both have released vague statements confirming their awareness of the issue. Was this an inside job or an outside hacker? It's too early to say. Hell, we may never know. It's been ten years since that massive Sony hack, and nobody's been prosecuted.
There are many questions about the "How" that we may never know. Most big companies are super cagey about their IT security, and unless a lawsuit forces them, I doubt Netflix will ever outwardly admit what happened. So instead, it may be more productive to ask, "Why?" As in, why would somebody go to the trouble of all this, and why would others want to sip up these leaks like they're drinking out of those little bottles you put in hamster cages?
So, to a degree, I get it. Way back in 2012, when the third Rebuild of Evangelion film came out, I was dying to see it. I'd been waiting three years. There was no word of a stateside release on the horizon. I might have gone looking for a crappy camrip to see what ol' Hideaki Anno had cooked up for that one. I was impatient. However, the anime scene in 2012 was a far cry from 2024.
I will also cop to watching a camrip of Madoka Rebellion back in the day. At least with movies, there's the factor of lengthy waits for overseas releases—not to mention the often unpredictable screening availabilities when they did arrive. Yet I think there's a marked difference between watching a bootleg copy of a thing released in some official fashion and hunting down a purposefully low-quality version of something that nobody has had the chance to see yet.
True. Impatience is certainly a unifying factor for readers/viewers seeking extralegal means of finding something. However, the methods and motivating factors for the leakers are pretty different. I mean, we all know that every new anime episode gets ripped onto pirate sites the minute those streams go live. That doesn't make headlines because it's rampant and easy to do. On the other hand, leaking stuff ahead of time requires more effort for a riskier proposition with lower-quality results.

I mean, I could not tell you the last time I watched an anime episode in 640x360 resolution. That's barbaric.

I'd say that modern audiences have better standards for even their pirated entertainment, but the other night, I scrolled onto a TikTok account that was just bootleg uploads of movies cut up into 5-minute chunks and paired with gameplay footage of Subway Surfer. If people are willing to microdose Avengers Endgame at the size of a matchbook on their phone, I suppose they can tolerate 2009 YouTube levels of video encoding.
Nobody tell David Lynch; he's got enough going on right now (as I link to a YouTube video from 2008 encoded in 240p)
Also, I remember what it was like being a teenager on summer break. There are roughly 200 episodes of Naruto in my memory banks thanks to long-deleted uploads cut into three chunks because YouTube hadn't allowed videos longer than 10 minutes. Still, I feel like with the sheer breadth of media being fired at us from all angles, we don't also need some jackass with a water pistol squirting out LimeWire uploads of DAN DA DAN.
That's the thing! Anime viewers have already won! We have same-day streaming for almost all seasonal titles. The occasional straggler is still more likely to get picked up than not (hello, Girls Band Cry). Plenty of anime movies get wide theatrical releases nowadays, and even the more obscure ones tend to get a limited run before they're added to the usual online suspects. It has never been easier to watch as much anime as you want. It's arguably too easy. There's too much!
So, funny thing about that. You're familiar with the Shonen Jump app, yeah?
Yep, I pay two bucks monthly to enjoy a hearty chuckle at Chainsaw Man every Tuesday—a fair exchange, IMO.
So that service has existed in some fashion for over a decade, but ever since late 2018, it has been the best deal for anyone looking to read anything published in Shonen Jump. Every single title being published in that magazine right now is simulpubbed, day-and-date, and the latest three chapters of every series are available for god damn free.

That's not all it releases; MangaPlus also has that lineup in even more territories. The important part here is the simulpub. If you're caught up on a series, you can theoretically read it to the very end of its run—possibly years down the line—without spending a dime.

Now, would you believe me when I tell you there's a contingent of online fans who insist this is still not fast or available enough?

Oh, I believe it. I've seen them in the wild (mostly on Twitter). It still boggles the mind. How much of a gap can there possibly be between a leaked chapter and the official simulpub? How can that sliver of time be worth the trouble?
Ah, but why would I wait until Sunday, when I can read a poorly photocopied version covering the art with crummy filters and the scanlation team's watermark on Thursday? Better yet, I can read somebody else's plot summary of the chapter on Wednesday and save myself the trouble of actually engaging with it at all! Now that's efficiency.
It's like spoiler culture's evil bizarro twin. Lots of people go way overboard in avoiding anything that might resemble a spoiler, and I think that's annoying. However, the contingent of people who seek these leaks just for some gamified sense of victory—for the cheap thrill of being "aware" of the plot as soon as humanly possible—those people are annoying, too. Everyone should be normal about it, like me.
If you get the same level of enjoyment from a chapter of One Piece as reading a context-less paragraph on Reddit, you need to re-examine your relationship with art. It's all I'm saying.
Given how official localizations have become favored windmills for certain online cranks to tilt at, I've seen that slice of the audience gravitate towards these areas as well. After all, quality doesn't matter, so long as you're sticking it to the woke cartel ruining anime and manga with all of their pronouns and natural sentence structure.
Part of me gets it. There was a time when the only way to be up-to-date on Naruto or Bleach was to read speedscans off questionable websites that kept getting taken down and replaced. I distinctly remember when simulpubs started happening. A lot of people didn't even realize they'd been reading chapters days before they were released in Japan. To some extent, piracy is baked into U.S. anime culture, and that will never go away. I also cringe thinking that a contingent of readers has only ever seen smudgy, dogshit-quality versions of Kōhei Horikoshi's art.
No matter how cheap or convenient legal avenues become for any art form, I don't think piracy will ever disappear. I also don't think that's an entirely bad thing. As the anime scene, in particular, has become more corporatized, the shortcomings of that arrangement have also become more visible. Licenses expire. Localization staff is overworked and underpaid. Regional availability can be a bitch. You can't watch Samurai Flamenco anywhere. That's messed up.
Sure, but outside of somebody airdropping the slate of dumpstered movies from Warner Bros. Discovery, I don't think there's much argument that the kind of leaks we got this time are doing much for preservation.
Exactly. You can make a moral argument that it'd be better for someone to leak Coyote vs. Acme than for all of that work to evaporate into a tax write-off for David Zaslav and his obscenely rich cronies. You can't make that same argument about DAN DA DAN, airing this October for the whole world to see.
Especially not when the artists who worked on these shows ask people not to watch the leaks. Like, I know the media churn encourages us to think of media as content that bursts from the ether on its own, but I think the people actually making the damn thing deserve some consideration.
Right, these aren't faceless corporations being hurt. The response from the flesh and blood people who work on these projects is telling. For example, people who have worked on Coyote vs. Acme seem generally frustrated that it's in boardroom limbo. The animators who have worked on these leaked anime are also upset, but conversely, it's because the nature of the leak undermines the blood, sweat, and tears they've put into these shows and films. It's all been unceremoniously dumped in barely watchable quality. I used to complain about Netflix's batch releases (okay, I still complain about them), but at least those weren't covered in pixelated Vaseline, and normal people could watch them at their leisure.
Also, while the anime side of things is safer since Netflix isn't in charge of ordering or producing more seasons, it's worth noting how much that company, in particular, values views in the first week of release. Stuff like this has the potential to actively impede the creation of whatever gets leaked.
Hype cycles aren't something I'm interested in or invested in, but they're a delicate ecosystem. Granted, it's way too early to say what kind of effect, if any, these leaks will have, but they threw a curveball that no one on the production side can be happy about.
If nothing else, it's a lot of stress that nobody wants to handle on top of their regular jobs. I recall wayyyyyy back in the day when ANN briefly hosted anime streams, and an episode of Oreimo was released early by accident. Everyone working here then cites that day as one of the worst they've ever had at the job, and that was just a total accident.
And on a slightly tangential point, I also think, for as much good as piracy can potentially accomplish, people tend to put blinders on and get really indignant about it. Yes, media preservation is good, but piracy is hardly the only or best means of doing so. Just this week, I saw Twitter piling on Justin Sevakis, of all people, for supposedly not valuing anime preservation enough. Justin Sevakis, current CEO of AnimEigo and the guy who authors Discotek's Blu-rays. If you think that guy is the enemy of anime, then you've completely lost the plot.
If we really want to get tangential, I don't really get why people follow "leaker" accounts who will post, "Such and such manga/light novel is getting an anime! Details to follow" every few days. Half the time, those accounts post stuff completely made up, and sorting signals from noise isn't worth it when the result is finding out there's gonna be a Sakamoto Days anime three weeks early.
I suppose the thirst for clout is unslakable for some. Maybe it feels really cool to get hundreds of thousands of followers by telling obvious lies. Couldn't be me. The Lord Himself verifies everything I tweet.

That's also the most cynical possible motivation for the current leak. That someone just wanted to do it for all the glory and admiration that the fine folk of 4chan have to offer.

Honestly, I'm hoping it's for a more personal or petty reason. I would accept "did it for the lulz" over trying to get invisible internet points. It's like robbing an art museum to get Reddit awards. The motivation is more despicable than the actual crime.
Sadly, it's a possibility we may never be able to rule out. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I also don't want to come across as too holier-than-thou for not engaging with these leaks myself. I'm wholly sympathetic to the plight of the animators upset by this fiasco. Still, the primary reason for my avoidance is that I simply do not have time to watch any more anime than I currently do. I'm a grown-ass adult. I have shit to do. I can't be watching postage stamp-sized videos that are half watermarks. I have bills to pay.
I guess this boils down to this: If I'm going to drink, I'm gonna pour water from the faucet into a cup like a normal person rather than stick my head under the sink and drip feed myself from the leaky pipes. If you are seriously interested in anything leaked through this event, at least do yourself a favor and wait until there's a proper, quality version to check out. If for no other reason than you deserve better.
Respect the artists who worked on it, and respect yourself. Even if all you want to do is snarf up slop, you shouldn't settle for anything less than artisanally crafted slop. In at least 720p.
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