I can only look at the numbers with bemusement. At this rate there will only be 20 great anime franchises that aired this year, less than the 'height of the epidemic' in 2020 which still managed to produce 24.
Kanojo mo Kanojo will replace Planetarian in my rankings in a month, but since Planetarian aired something this year as well that doesn't shift the amount of great anime that's come out in 2021 at all.
After that there's the new Love Live! Superstar anime -- but it's not even certain if that will be great. Not all Pretty Cure seasons are great, so whenever you shift your cast and reboot there's no guarantee it will work no matter how famous or talented the staff. If we assume it is great that gets us to 17 franchises.
Next there's Luminous Witches, a Strike Witch spinoff with, you guessed it, an entirely new cast. There's no guarantee it will be great either, but let's say it is -- that gets us to 18.
Yuuki Yuuna S3 airs this fall so that gets us to 19 if everything else goes well.
Let's say there's some surprisingly good series I never heard of that happens sometime this summer or fall -- that gets us to 20, if everything works out perfectly.
None of the movies airing in Japan will come out in English in 2021. Actually half of the franchises of 2021 are movies that aired in 2020 in Japan, so we're already leaning on past momentum as is.
It's even worse than it looks -- of the 20 great shows that might air this year, only a handful are of decent length -- Edens Zero, Boku no Hero Academia S5, Tropical Rouge Precure and Kimetsu no Yaiba (assuming S2 really does air this fall.)
The rest are 12 ep cours or one-off movies/ovas. You would think One Piece would contribute something but the fansub group that makes the series watchable by cutting out the filler has only produced three Wano episodes so far this year. Let's say they release three more eps by the end of the year, great, in that case One Piece has contributed a whopping 6 episodes to anime betterment.
The last time a year produced 20 or fewer notable releases was 2005. I think 2021 will be a better year in anime than 2005 but even that is debatable. After all 2005 had more long running series and Nanoha A's. . . Oh well, let's say it's better than 2005. It's still the worst year in anime since 2005, even worse than 2020 was.
There are two explanations for this -- Covid-19 is still messing with Japan this year as well as last year, or anime is in collapse mode and it's only going to get worse every year from here on, with Covid being besides the point. It's hard to say which is the case until Japan stops going into lockdowns and states of emergency every other week.
It's still not clear if the Tokyo Olympics will even happen. Covid ruined the 2020 Olympics and it's just as large a threat in 2021 as 2020, so why would they host the games this time? The same logic requires the same response. If the Olympics are canceled 2021 will officially suck. They're pretty much the only good thing about this year.
I have no idea how Covid is doing this, but no visual novel of note has been translated this entire year. I'm reading stuff like To Heart2 (finished the Konomi route, who I of course chose first) and Fate/Hollow Ataraxia from decades ago because the visual novel industry has completely dropped the ball. This has never happened before. Last year had great releases like Senren * Banka and Summer Pockets. Before then there was stuff like Rewrite, Dracu Riot, Sanoba Witch, Da Capo III, Majikoi, there was always something cooking. This time nothing.
Even manga translations are slowing down and sputtering out. Kitakubu, Zettai Karen Children, Lucky Star, Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card-hen. . . stuff like this used to be updated regularly but now it's radio silence.
Light novel translations have kept up a steady pace, which seems to be the year's only bright spot.
There's only been 1 great new movie released all year, Mortal Kombat (2021). Even it wasn't as good as the original.
Video games are mysteriously nowhere to be seen -- like the highly anticipated Tales of Arise and FF 7 Remake Part 2, all of which have been delayed and delayed. It's impossible to even get your hands on a PS5 which is needed to play all these games.
We're halfway through the year, everything seems trapped in molasses. Is it a giant coincidence? Is it Covid-19? What is going on here? Anime used to regularly produce 40 great series a year. It wasn't that long ago, all the way from 2011-2017 it was the norm. Now we're down to half that. So what will it be in 2022? 10 series?
I can't tell if this is a temporary blip, which for some strange reason affects Japanese creators and American translators equally, due to the pandemic, or if we're at the edge of the century of doom I've been warning about for a long time now. It could be that reality has simply caught up with us -- the damage caused by our sins becoming steadily more visible via a continuously lowering output of good things. What if Covid-19 isn't coincidental but part of this downward trend though? People don't design bioweapons and then leak them into the world, whether accidentally or purposefully, unless they're already steeped in evil to begin with. And America funded this research even if it was done in China, it's just as much our sin as theirs. In that case asking whether covid is to blame for this wretched year or not is completely missing the point. Covid is part and parcel of a complete societal collapse on all fronts. For the same reason marriage and children no longer happen, now there's random bioweapons being released in the world and everyone is too fat for their immune systems to fend them off anymore. All of that is one united problem.
It's like asking whether South Africa has a water shortage problem due to the breakdown in law and order, the electric grid and the road network. South Africa doesn't have a set of discrete random coincidental problems, it has a civilizational problem that causes all the others. The initial premise of its entire existence is the problem.
It used to be that no matter how awful the rest of the world was Japan could operate fine so it didn't make much difference. But even Japan couldn't escape the evil of the rest of the world's Covid decisions. There's no escape anymore.
If 2022 has the same output as 2021 or God forbid even lower, even after Covid has been completely vaccinated against and stamped out, then we'll know for sure. I figured the End Days were still 80 years away but at this rate. . .
Another explanation is that my own cynicism is to blame. Artists can claim that they're outputting as much as ever but I'm just not enjoying it anymore. But that's nonsense. I love anime as much as ever when it's good. Uma Musume S2 blew me away. I'm open to new experiences, there just aren't any.
Or I suppose you could make the 'low hanging fruit' argument. Since all the best tales have already happened, it's difficult for new worthwhile stories to be told on any front. But that shouldn't apply to translations of old works. If all the low hanging fruit has been exhausted, why don't we focus on all that 'low hanging fruit' then and translate old series like Guyver, Major, Zettai Karen Children and Lucky Star? This would seem like the ideal time to redouble our translating efforts. Instead less is translated from the past than before.
Let's hope this is a Covid blip, because if it isn't it's going to be a long, extremely dull descent into darkness from here on.
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