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Juan Carlos Boutellier's avatar

Great piece and profoundly interesting. I reposted it on Notes. (I am a Spanish guy living in Japan).

You mentioned the cooperation and competition between all the players involved in the industry. I think is not exclusive of manga/anime industry. Somehow, I feel that Japan's soft power boom cannot be understood without that competition/cooperation duality that is entwined with Japanese's business approach.

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Tony Loiseleur's avatar

I kind of feel like challenges to Hollywood's hegemony are largely due to them putting themselves there, too? Media consolidation in the US has built these massive, too-big-to-fail behemoths that simply cannot take risks on the then smaller number of projects they produce, so you get absurdities like a superhero movie considered a failure if it doesn't break a billion. And then there's what seems like the algorithmic tuning of the content within; it feels like manga however is better for the simple fact that there's still human taste involved in shaping content served up by their data collection. Truly the best of both worlds.

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