it gets worse: funi had an option to buy anime outright. but, it was bought digitally, and now CR has said that they’re not going to honor that, so if you bought anything from funi digitally, CR are taking that away from you
This is absolutely insane but the part that I find funny is that there isn’t a community on earth more dedicated to piracy than western anime fans. For ages the only way to even get your hands on anime and manga in the west was piracy. I literally don’t think Crunchyroll could have picked a worse group to try the “we’re a monopoly so we can charge you whatever we want” play on. I doubt there’s a person over the age of 25 who saw that and thought anything other than “welp, okay, piracy it is then!” like honestly the Crunchyroll executives are out of their fucking minds with this one.
What I think a lot of new fans miss is that… there used to be rules.
I have now run anime cons for 20 years. I got into anime in the period where the internet was rising, and legal access to this stuff was sparse, and generally limited to the biggest titles. I bought Fruits Basket on four. Separate. DVDs. I got each ON SALE for around 20.00. I paid EIGHTY PLUS DOLLARS for 4 DVDs of Fruits Basket.
But most of my early access was on blank DVDs with names and episode numbers written clumsily in sharpie. Handed over by friends, traded at con meetings, mailed to me by a friend via media mail. Fansubs and bootlegs, torrented and copied endlessly.
But there used those be a rule. A covenant. Unbreakable. Once a property was licensed, all illegal distribution stopped. Instantly.
The last episode of Fullmetal Alchemist I saw involved Hughes in a phone booth. The series was licensed right after that, and all access stopped. Fansubbers closed their listings, torrents dried up.
Because the end goal was licensing. We wanted nice, physical copies. We wanted professional, properly coded subtitles. We wanted an English Dub cast. We wanted to make anime a viable industry in the West.
So we bought Fruits Basket for eighty goddamn dollars.
So as I reach bitterly for my DVD burner yet again, it’s time to remember. We upheld our part of the bargain. We bought it legally from them. We paid to see this industry grow and thrive.
