This Week in Anime

Anime Strike Out

Chris
Coop, I know you're still smarting over not seeing the Gundam GQuuuuuuX premiere in theaters, and I'm sure Lucas and Steve bringing it up the other day didn't help. But good news! The anime is already set to officially stream through Amazon when it starts airing next month. Complete with an English dub! I'm sure it was received positively by anime fans all across the internet!

It's probably an odd occurrence to the average onlooker, but was wholly expected by anyone more steeped in English-streaming online anime fandom. In an era where almost every seasonal anime gets licensed, you know a new Gundam show won't get passed over, and it has to stream somewhere.

So what gives? Everyone knows Amazon as the portrait of a villainous megacorp, but it's not like anime fans have a lot of love left for commonplace competitor Crunchyroll these days, either. Why the disappointment? As with motivations in so many Gundam anime, the answer is complex and layered.

Amazon has been no stranger to streaming licensed and original programming for quite some time, as most services have over at least a decade and change. They'd gotten some simulcasts like Scum's Wish and Blue Exorcist, but sought to earnestly throw their hat into the anime ring at the beginning of 2017 with the launch of their Anime Strike channel.

It made sense. Dedicated streamers like Crunchyroll and Funimation had hit their stride around this point, off the back of monster hits like Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia. That meant a new entrant like Anime Strike would have to come out swinging. So naturally, Anime Strike opted for "flailing" instead.

Barely registering a blip is fair when a service is so unpopular that it only lasts a year. For anyone else who didn't register it, I cannot overstate how badly anime fans friggin' hated this thing. Even if they had a desirable show or two each season, nobody would be happy about a double paywall, no matter how much we liked Made in Abyss.

I was at an anime convention the weekend Amazon announced they were killing Anime Strike, and the mood could only be described as jubilant. People going around the floor waving to each other going, "Anime Strike's dead!" "Anime Strike's dead!" like the Same Hat meme.

The translations coming through for titles in Amazon Strike's year-long tenure (many of them through Sentai) were generally acceptable, and their video player was nicer than what Crunchyroll was working with at the time. It was the setup and pricing that annoyed so many fans. Still, even after folding their anime offerings into their general Prime Video service, the stench of Anime Strike seems to follow them even after its corpse is cremated. Those stanky subtitles are just one symptom of that.

I don't know that we ever got to the bottom of what was happening there. Still, it seems to be a result of Amazon experimenting with AI-powered closed-captioning—something Crunchyroll is also doing, and oh boy, are there already several more layers to be uncovered in those tangents.

As a point of comparison, it's worth noting that recent Amazon-exclusive licensed simulcasts, like Magilumiere, seem to have gotten through with more proper translation and subtitling jobs.

So fingers crossed that GQuuuuuuX ends up more like this and less like whatever the hell was happening with ODDTAXI and A Place Further Than The Universe there.

With a lineup like that, GQuuuuuuX will be in good company (not to mention competing with 3.0+1.0 for "Goofiest Subtitle"). That also neatly leads to why this new Gundam went to Amazon for simulcasting: Khara's got a good thing going with them and seeks to maintain it.

Pretty open-and-shut as far as reasoning goes, but still not enough to placate the fans who have other reasons for being frustrated this series wound up there and not on, say, Crunchyroll.

Gundam streaming has been all over the place for a long time, with several not being available at all points. That makes the arrival of X and Age on a platform like Tubi all the more notable, even if the series themselves aren't as much.

You should still check Gundam X out. It's got Meme Doctor and Space Yuffie; it's an underrated good time.

There's a reason a lot of collective eyebrows raised when GQuuuuuuX's U.S. theatrical run was absent any Crunchy branding, even though they'd be the natural expectation after the last Gundam TV series, The Witch From Mercury, streamed there.

Given the issues some companies are taking with Crunchyroll's treatment of their material, the streamer might not be the no-brainer it once was. This is the company that sat on Gridman Universe for a year and a half, so it wasn't that shocking that Bandai and TOHO/GKIDS would opt to just cut out the middleman for something as big a deal as the new Gundam.

It's not like they wouldn't have other options even if the Amazon thing hadn't happened. Bandai has streamed several new Gundam anime (mostly from the Build Fighters subsection) officially through their own Gundam.info YouTube channel. Ironically, given how much chatter I saw about Build Fighters back in the day, that actually might've been better for GQuuuuuuX's word-of-mouth than releasing on Amazon.

Right, this gets into a deeper struggle, in that Crunchyroll, for all its current issues, is still Crunchyroll. Your casual anime-viewing co-workers who mostly just like keeping up with Attack on Titan and Solo Leveling are gonna stick to it and Netflix and aren't even going to think about looking at Amazon's offerings. This goes for a lot of the general online viewing and social media discussion that drives seasonal engagement with new shows like GQuuuuuuX!

I mentioned Magilumiere, an anime based on a well-liked manga with a slam dunk of a concept, but had barely any of the larger public talking about it because it streamed on a service that most people forget even has anime!

Old Netflix, whose "Jail" model practically parallels Anime Strike's hated status, seems to have been inherited by Disney+/Hulu.

This all leads to the biggest reason, I think, why GQuuuuuuX going to Amazon disappointed people. tl;dr: Watching anime by yourself is fun, but watching anime that a lot of other people are having fun watching is even more fun. The mass of weekly chatter around the aforementioned Witch From Mercury was a huge driving factor in that show's success.

I want to reconfirm, as I always must, that I've got no love lost for Crunchyroll myself. It's not like their handling of G-Witch itself was sterling all the way through.

Plus, they still owe me a Dirty Pair Blu-ray set. Still, I can understand the disappointment of those who had so much fun with Suletta Sundays, thinking that the new Gundam series starring a funny little redhead girl might not get the same draw. The hype cycle can make it all too easy to Suletta Forgetta as it is.

It's not something we, as consumers and commentators, have control over when it comes to the promotional whims of these massive megacorporations. But it can help, especially for onlookers, to understand why something seemingly benign as "a show streaming on Amazon" would draw these kinds of annoyed reactions. Though the good news is that GQuuuuuuX's theatrical push here indicates that someone back there gives a shit.

The positive spin I can land on then is that some anime achieve escape velocity from the confines of Amazon to find their audience anyway. Made in Abyss is an excellent example from the Anime Strike days. Anything's possible.

It would also be funny for a Gundam series made by Khara to wind up with the sort of "hidden gem" cred held by Wotakoi there. This means I can look forward to the adventures of Machu and pals either way. Besides, even streaming on Amazon is a more convenient release method than a limited theatrical run.

Just remember, kids, it could always be worse. In an alternate universe, GQuuuuuuX could be streaming on Daisuki.