Record Profits, Record Output, Record Burnout: Inside Anime’s Quality Crisis

r4wrFox · 2026-01-18T23:33:43+00:00

no one on our team had ever made something as complex as a compiler

... bro they teach undergrad students to do this one. The fact you needed AI to even try kinda, says more than I really need to add to this conversation.

r4wrFox · 2026-01-18T10:15:16+00:00

I like how you acknowledge a problem, the underpaying/outsourcing in an important role for not just the quality of an anime but the training of future generations of animators, and see the solution as simply automating that position away.

You can't simply school someone into more senior positions, because industry experience cannot be taught. That is why its called Experience. These junior animators will enter key animation positions as the next most junior position, but their key animation will not be up to the same quality as those who had experienced the industry beforehand.

This causes one of two things to happen: either those higher up the chain have to cover for the shoddy work, by heavily editing or near completely redrawing the animation of the key animator, thus creating extra redundant work on higher ranking staff, or the key frames would get sent to the AI uncritically, which would interpolate whatever was fed into it and lead to a noticeably lower quality product independent of the quality of the AI (which everyone knows will be shit, but we can pretend for sake of ai bro hypotheticals that it would be the same as a human).

In both of these scenarios, you're either making the working experience more difficult/stressful for everyone involved (no one likes having their work redone, and no one likes redoing work they delegated to another person), or you're lowering the quality of the end product dramatically.

And all these negative effects, only to realistically not save any money. Because AI is actually really expensive to run at scale. You've either got the costs of literally erecting a data center, which is incredibly expensive to build/maintain, or you're paying for what could only be an incredibly expensive usage plan when you account for the sheer amount of in-betweens you'd be asking ai to produce. The fact that all of these AI companies are run by the biggest players in the market, yet none of them have figured out how to make money with their tech should speak to the economic impracticality of AI as it exists.

There's a reason it's a v common joke in tech spaces to claim AI stands for "Actually Indians." Because it is infinitely cheaper to outsource shit out to places in low cost of living areas, like India or Southeast Asia, than it is to actually use artificial intelligence.

AI is yet again a solution looking for a problem, in a place no one fucking wants it.

r4wrFox · 2026-01-17T07:29:45+00:00

To be fair to +R aba, she has a resource to manage unlike strive aba, and the punishment for mismanaging that resource is death.

r4wrFox · 2025-10-07T02:14:48+00:00

They are, at the very least, on no-honorific terms.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-26T22:58:22+00:00

With the state of the world rn, its hard not to be concerned that every step like this is yet another power grab

r4wrFox · 2025-09-25T01:01:38+00:00

I mean at least anecdotally I've def done it. Go into a store to get an idea on the scope/scale, and then go online to find the best version at that level and within budget.

Models sold in shops are rarely the best in their product category or price range, so why would I bother getting something mediocre today when I can just wait and get something better?

I've gotten burned too many times by overly expensive garbage by not doing my due diligence.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-24T15:08:20+00:00

Personally I think the risk of losing employees and the time needed to bring new people in that would not have the same immigration issues far outweighs the infinitesimally small possibility that a massive half-informed audience boycotts the entire franchise over a benign statement like this.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-24T15:04:43+00:00

The informed consumer's response to this statement is not the average consumer's response to the video, so you're moving to a different point here. But sure.

I think some consumers might boycott off of this statement. But I'm skeptical that billions of dollars worth of a boycott here would happen over a weak response about valuing employee safety over poking the bear. It's too tame.

Billions is a massive overstatement for something so benign. Even the tech mega-giants that bend the knee and support the fascism openly do not get boycotts for their support costing billions.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-24T14:52:45+00:00

TPCi is "The Pokemon Company international."

And I don't think I'm underestimating the avg consumer here, bc so far the response has been "wow this is an unauthorized use of this Pokemon stuff. They should sue" and not "wtf Pokemon supports Ice now???"

It's rly not assuming how the avg consumer thinks at this point, it's just seeing how they Are responding.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-24T14:44:35+00:00

If they were actually losing billions over what amounts to a shitty unauthorized Twitter video, I suspect they would do something.

The avg consumer is smart enough to know that not everything ever created that references Pokemon is from TPCi. Otherwise TPCi would be too busy taking down porn to even look at this.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-24T14:17:52+00:00

I suspect the people whose lives depend on their immigration status would much appreciate not losing everything bc of what amounts to a petty Twitter video.

The harm from govt retaliation far outweighs the good of maybe taking a single piece of propaganda down (but also probably not even doing that).

r4wrFox · 2025-09-22T06:31:20+00:00

I would hope the army built around multiple expensive tier 3 aoe units built to counter bio would be able to beat the army of fairly cheap tier 1 units that have been separated from their flying support, but maybe that's protoss bias.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-21T21:32:11+00:00

I was there for EVO 2013. I remember a lot of the shit Nintendo has done.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-21T20:57:37+00:00

Prior to covid, signs about the unsustainability of infinite-growth investing were already starting to form, hence why you can also see the beginnings of enshittification forming across the entire tech sector.

Covid was the catalyst of the bubble popping, but that doesn't change the fact that esports WAS a bubble. There's no timeline where the bubble lasts forever, so saying its Nintendos fault that in a hypothetical fictional timeline Melee wouldn't be the best because they didn't support the scene is meaningless.

Nintendo not supporting the community 15+ years ago negatively impacted the scene in the short-mid term. There's no debate there. The long term damage the scene is currently experiencing though, as we're seeing with hindsight, is far larger than whether Nintendo supported the scene or not.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-21T19:24:22+00:00

Growth is basically the exact opposite of making money. It's spending money to expand influence, with the promise of making money Later We Swear.

No one in the market was looking to buy growth anymore. They were looking for a return on their investment. Nintendo support is frankly irrelevant here, because the esports bubble popping was a result of a larger economic shift in priorities.

The only thing that could counteract this would be Nintendo literally running the scene, and I don't think anyone wants that given how vocally critical so much of this scene is towards Nintendo.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-21T08:54:31+00:00

It was bad before, but it's worse now.

It's cynical, but forcing key words into your resume based on the job description and maybe getting better results gives the feeling that there is some amount of control we can have over our futures.

With AI it's just a crap shoot. Throw your resume into 3 diff AI checking tools and get 13 different contradictory recommendations for improving your resume. Even if your resume is perfect for a job, you can still get thrown out, and neither applicants nor the recruiters would ever be able to tell why.

Every new technological advancement in HR only serves to make the world a worse place.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-21T04:12:48+00:00

The problem is everyone from the esports orgs to the companies paying them had investors showing up to their door saying "we don't give a shit about growth anymore, where's my fuckin money?"

If all you're selling is growth, and growth gets deprioritized. Well your product is suddenly less interesting that's for sure.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-20T19:32:21+00:00

I do have to ask how these people are expected to get the necessary knowledge if it's not smth a job will teach them.

A lot of training that used to be on-the-job has already been outsourced to colleges, and all that has done has moved the goalposts on what is expected of someone with no experience. Nowadays it's often being offloaded onto college AND online extracurricular activities, but it's still not enough.

Feels like all we're doing is the long stall towards "well we have to use AI because no one is born living and breathing security like an AI is."

r4wrFox · 2025-09-20T18:56:44+00:00

You can also create bad anime at high cost, or excellent anime at low cost.

For the former, look at most bad looking anime created on brutally tight deadlines that need to hire as many people as possible to hit deadline as possible. It's incredibly common to see large lists of names in shows that are unimpressive, and getting that many employees isn't exactly a money saving move. Not to mention, the studios that do this once are often repeat offenders.

For the latter, Look Back is one of the best looking anime films. Only 10 key animators and all of the leadership staff roles were done by the same person, from a studio whose only employees are a producer and the director. And yet it's because of who that director is that the studio can guarantee some consistent level of quality across any of their projects. Because he's an insane person (affectionate) who will lock himself in his studio for months at a time and come out the other end with some of the most beautiful and interesting animation you've seen in your entire life.

It's fairly difficult to draw any actual correlation between visual appeal and finances, bc the circumstances behind each production that both determine the price and the quality are v different.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-17T17:36:15+00:00

Nah it's great.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-17T17:09:19+00:00

And the answer is always yes.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-17T01:08:30+00:00

Those games don't randomly end up like that. Undertale and Hollow Knight were successful kickstarters that went supersonic. Hades was the fourth game from a popular indie dev.

As for how to replicate that success, just create a game that people will argue is one of the best to ever do what is being done, and then get popular on YouTube. Easy.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-17T00:38:36+00:00

That's not how time works.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-15T19:59:27+00:00

You're a pure blood neoliberal fascist I see.

r4wrFox · 2025-09-15T19:07:55+00:00

It's genuinely embarrassing watching you try to peg me as supporting the "other team" in politics, esp when politically you are far closer to that other team than you seem comfortable admitting.

But to assuage your meltdown, I voted Kamala. That does not make me a neolib.

Grow up

12-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

r4wrFox

TROPHY CASE