BitTorrent and anime

As promised, here is what every fan should know about BitTorrent and anime. Those of you who download fan-subbed anime and watch it are stealing. Plain and simple. Anime is something worth paying for. And for those unfamiliar with the concept, when I say ‘pay’ I mean with MONEY. It’s that stuff that you get when you work. Of all the things you choose to do with your time you spend part or significantly more of it watching these Japanese cartoons. You like the art, or the stories, or just the funny words that the people say. In any case you enjoy anime. When you watch this stuff and decide to take a pass on paying for it, you are hurting the genre. Let’s recap now. You like anime, and you are hurting it. Every time you talk about some show you downloaded and really like, and guy next to you says… “Hey I’ve never heard of that one, did you torrent that?” And you say “Yeah.”, you’ve essentially taken that thing that you like so much and wiped your butt on it. The dude next to you now figures, “Hey, why don’t I just go find that thing with BitTorrent and wipe my butt on it too? It must be ok if this person here is doing it. Thanks for the idea!” Naturally this leads to more and more butt-wiping. The act itself is brazenly ignorant and deserves censure wherever anime fans see it.

Now some people like to tell me, “But I keep a lookout for when ADV or whoever buys the rights to the anime I am downloading. I always delete my stuff when that happens.” Ok, this idea only has merit if Japan was some kind of utopia where no one had to work, but here’s a update for all you “conscientious downloaders”. They have MONEY in Japan too! Can you believe it?!? People work hard for the anime that gets produced and when they do, they deserve just compensation as well! AMAZING! Your downloads and subsequent refusals to buy causes the value for each subsequent rights-acquisition to drop. The longer it goes on the worse it gets. So incredibly, your bullshit excuses don’t protect you from being a jackass, or protect the firsthand producers of anime in Asia from your larceny.

Now as for the demographics of the offenders. A good part of these downloaders are children and high school students. They either don’t have the money or easy access to retail outlets, and they download anime. They do it for lots of reasons, but in general it’s because children aren’t most thoughtful of persons. They are still hashing out their personal morality and most likely enjoy the idea that they are getting away with something. We have all known the personal satisfaction of feeling like we’ve outwitted someone, even people we’ve never seen a half a world away. It’s the lazy assed absentee parents of these kids who are really to blame for this part of the problem. They can’t be bothered to understand what their kids are doing on the internet, leaving their progeny open to less than moral acts and not to mention the less than moral acts of others.

The people I really have a problem with are you grown adult downloaders. Holding down jobs, having a life and stealing anime. They could pay for it… but then they couldn’t watch as much anime, OR they couldn’t see the newest shows airing in Japan, OR for jeezus christ they would have to get off their fat asses and go to the store. Why use the muscles in your legs when you can keep scarfing Cheetos and breaking wind while getting your anime? Why put in any energy into the economies of the world when you can be a venomous leech, slobbering behind your keyboard, waiting for mommy to cook dinner for you? Yes, why? Why? WHY??

Honestly, telling us that there just isn’t enough anime in America and this terrible lack of product has driven you to download the newest titles from Japan is total bullshit. There are thousands of titles in America now, not to mention that a good selection are on TV and on-demand video services. The notion that downloading is ok if you’re not going to be able to watch everything you want to if you had to pay for it because of whatever financial difficulty is probably the saddest sack of crap I have ever heard. “You know I wish I were making 300% more money than I am now, so that makes it ok to steal just to make sure that I get everything that I feel entitled to, right? I should have it, cause I am a real fan.” That makes just about as much sense as the last 4 episodes of Betterman. Hey I have an idea, why don’t you go steal your food so you can buy some DVDs.

There’s a lot of angst in there but I am pissed. People who buy their anime are essentially paying for the downloader’s hobby. Good fans pay for the product, but the downloader gets it for free. I wish there was a way that anime conventions could tell who bought their discs and who filched their stuff so we could leave the losers to their family cookouts or NASCAR races on FOX for con weekend. This of course is impossible, so I just want to ask all of you BitTorrent, WinMX etc. users who are downloading anime to comment to this post about how grateful you all are to have had your anime hobby signed and paid for by all the idiots dumb enough to give their hard earned cash for it. Please do so, because everyone who works in the publishing industry in the states, every producer, writer, key animator, artist and composer in Japan, every Korean animator and colorist, and every single person who has ever bought, sold, or retailed anime deserves a big fat thanks, and an apology from you god-damnit. You have cheapened EVERYTHING they have done for the thing you claim to love.

-maguro

P.S: www.deepdiscountdvd.com, www.dvdpricesearch.com