I've been watching a lottt of anime lately. Since last year, I've been making my way through the entire Gundam catalog, and so far I've watched 18 (i think?) of the entries, starting from the OG 1979 series. I've also been making my way through some shows I had long put off, like Sonny Boy, and trying to keep up with some of the seasonal releases. In doing so though, I've really had to become enlightened to the current anime streaming ecosystem. I've used Crunchyroll for the better part of a decade at this point, and I was a veteran of the VRV days (god rest her soul), and held a simultaneous Funimation membership before and after that. As you may know, Funimation got bought out by Sony (the owner of CR) in 2021 and it was a huge blow to the anime community, with many feeling that we were heading towards a near monopoly with CR. It has taken 4 years (and counting) since the acquisition of Funimation for the shows hosted there to make their way over to CR. I remember when phase 1 of the shift began, a Twitter user compiled a spreadsheet of all the shows that were nowhere to be streamed, and it was a ridiculous number (something like 1000+ iirc) with some high-profile shows among them (according to this list, it's still nearly 200 shows).

As much as I would hate a total anime monopoly (for reasons I'll especially get into in a bit), I do also hate the need for 5+ subscriptions to watch the shows I want to watch. The infamous legal Pokemon streaming guide comes to mind. I don't wish for anyone to have to navigate the legal streaming realm. And I am the first person to advocate for piracy, but I do understand the convinience behind paying for streaming and that the average person doesn't view piracy as moral. To that I say you need to shake the fear of the pre-movie FBI anti-piracy notices. It will all be okay. Buy a 500GB portable SSD and nyaa.si to your hearts content.

Luckily, HiDive and... Disney and Hulu... and others are keeping the ecosystem from falling into the greedy hands of Sony. You might have seen anime commentators talking about CR's current subtitling dilemma, but if you haven't, the gist is that instead of paying for captioners and using the highly customizable and industry standard AegiSub, a program that has been around and used by companies and freelancers since the beginning of time, they are migrating to a far less versatile AI captioning company based in Israel. How many red flags do we need. You can watch Geoff's more in-depth breakdown(which will touch on stuff I've talked about here), but it raises not only a worse viewing experience, but also accessibilty issues and, due to the AI usage, environmental and ethical concerns that I just can't get into here, and, obviously, there's the elephant in the room.

Even the piracy ecosystem is potentially going to be impacted very soon. Kadokawa and other big industry names just won a lawsuit against Cloudflare for copyright infringement because of piracy sites that were hosted via Cloudflare's services. Now. I have big feelings about this. Much like many others, I became such a big anime fan with no small assistance from KissAnime (and all her totally not legit and safe copycats). I watched so many bad yaoi anime over Skype with my friends during our middle school days, but also shows like Black Butler, Tokyo Ghoul, and... sigh... Hetalia... but the point is that my formative years of being an anime fan with no debit card and minimal income was because of piracy sites. The same goes for the manga side of it. Scanlation groups were and are the backbone of the manga community. Hell, just within the past year we saw Love Bullet go from nearly being cancelled to selling out at Kinokuniyas across the English-speaking sphere, all thanks to people scanning and translating, and hosting it on piracy sites. Scanlations are free advertising for these big corporations. And without them, you can expect a sharp increase in unfortunate mangaka facing cancellation and a sharp decrease in profits for these corporations because there is no way for overseas fans to read works that appeal to them, and keep them from discovering and supporting up and coming mangaka. Not even mentioning old manga that just never received any official translation and are only able to be enjoyed on these sites. Kadokawa and others are shooting themselves in the foot by doing this. I like using piracy as a test run for a lot of things. If I enjoy something enough, I probably will end up buying it at some point. I've done it countless times with games, anime, and manga. With the prices of everything right now, I'm not buying a $12-$16 manga volume for it to sit at the back of my bookshelf forever. That is valuable Wawa hoagie and a drink money. I do use the Shonen Jump and Manga Plus apps, which does provide a cohesive library for most popular titles, that's just what it is: popular titles. Titles that have enough demand to be serialized in other languages, with not much room for any discovery. And yet, back in my peak of reading manga, I could find something new to read from the tumblr scanlation tag every week. I do want to jump back a bit to my "free advertising" statement, beacuse it is disineguous. Scanlators are often volunteers who do what they do out of pure passion; same goes for fansubbers of anime, though fwiw fansubbing is a dying scene. Their work should be viewed and respected because it is tedious work and requires numerous skills. That's also why the AI replacement is so heartbreaking because it's stealing these passion projects away from the dedicated fans, using their work to train the models to make infinitely shitter replacements.

Long gone are the days where fans would record onto VHS tapes and utilize IRC to share their efforts with the meek, but growing, anime community. Those endearing translator notes, as silly as they could be at times, were a display o fthe pure love, pride, and care they put into their work. You can typically rely on new anime to be uploaded and translated on streaming within an hour nowadays, at the cost of poorly formatted, typo-ridden, and even missing, subtitles. Even the content of the shows themselves are being butchered, with censored releases and missing episodes. I hate to be that person (not really), but this is why physical media and pirating are important. Shows can and will be pulled at will, but a DVD and a .mkv file on your hard drive can't. And I mean burn your own DVD or, if possible, purchase it secondhand. I didn't even touch on the CR store and their price gouging, but you are better off making your own physical media. The cost of entry is under $50 with the capability to produce years of entertainment. I'm lucky to have an older brother who grew up during the 90s and 00s and I have been given an impressive amount of anime from those years, but I know not everyone is that lucky. If you're tired of the streaming ecosystem, but genuinely don't know where to start, here are some resources:

• For torrents: Nyaa . si
• Personal favorite client: Deluge
• Personal favorite VPN: ProtonVPN
• For streaming/reading: Wotaku
• For burning/watching: VLC
• Alternatively for MacOS: Burn
• DVD Burner (had this exact one when I first started out)
• DVD-R

Hopefully there will be a day where these companies realize that the whims of investors don't equal the desires of their users. That day is not today though, so do whatever you can to hurt their pockets.