that ain't niponjin they're speaking!

Though maybe I'm overly harsh on it. People seemed to love the Blue Archive anime, but I dropped it on the first episode. And that was even with the great JP seiyuu work buffing it. And the vastly superior character design to whatever this is.

I will never learn Chinese because doing so would lead to me having to listen to Chinese more.

Also, if they aren't actual Call Girls I will be immensely disappointed.

>>3281
>actual Call Girls
I would try and bear with the Chinese for as long as possible if this were the premise.

I wish I knew better Chinese at times simply because of how good Bilibili is.

Feels like anime with Chinese dub. Maybe because that's how chinese sounds like, or maybe the VAs just suck, but the VA feels soulless.

>>3284
>the VA feels soulless
Well she is Chinese...

Despite growing up watching even more chinkshit (hk action movies) than anime, I still find the language more annoying than Japanese.

>>3278
Not sure how I feel about this. One of the appealing aspects of anime is how it reflects Japanese culture. This just seems to be China copying Japanese culture. It doesn't feel authentic, and I can't imagine it reflecting Chinese society at all. Very weird.

>>3286
I think I read it before, but there's some sort of objective superiority to Japanese as a spoken language in comparison to other languages, especially Chinese. Don't remember what it is, but apparently French has it too.

The voice actors do a decent job of making Chinese sound more like "anime Japanese", but it still has those sudden stops and starts that make it unpleasant. There's a lot of skill there to prevent my ears from immediately bleeding when listening to Chinese. That must have taken years of listening to Japanese to mimic its patterns and stuff, so that's kind of impressive in the Chinese mimicry way. (Do they have a +10 racial bonus to this stuff?)
I have to give them credit for advancing pretty far in their anime imitation. Much like the rest of the world Japan used China for oursourcing stuff so the techniques were observed and copied as with every other industry. Anime has not only been outsourced to Korea for a while now but recently a mixmash of various Asian countries and even Indian outsourcing as well. Sometimes Westerners on twitter post scenes they planned out, too. Anime's identity is still Japanese, but it's a bit of a mess. I strongly object to Chinese or Korean stuff being on a site made for Japanese things like MAL or whatever.

The very thorough and widespread copying of Japanese 2D stuff is just so... eh. Why? What's the point of just copying it so much that there is no original input at all? I can understand with gacha because it's an evil, manipulative gambling service with great profit margins, but not animation. I don't think animation is a very lucrative business, the animators are stressed to hell and margins are slim. That's why there's so much outsourcing. I guess there's a cultural victory to be had in saying "We, China, made this", but... can you actually call it Chinese? The ideal goal of this is for people to be fooled into thinking it's Japanese. It's not like it's a Chinese spin on anime, it's just copypasted. You're not allowed to have creative input because then the copy shatters into a million pieces. Creation without creativity is devoid of purpose. I don't understand.

still better than SoloLeveling

>>3290
At the very least one could say that Solo Levelling was very Korean. The merits of being that quite questionable...

>00:25
You can't really do the "my pace girl who talks in a calm pace", when she's rapping faster than Eminem in Chinese.
Also, reminds me of the Chinese ads I see in some of the JAVs I download heh

>>3286
I feel like it's the tones that make Chinese sound so 'off' as a language, when coming from most other backgrounds. As far as Japanese goes, the simple syllable structure (ie. words tend to have lots of vowels and no complex consonant clusters) and lack of any weird consonants help make it sound decent to foreigners. Korean, for its part, sounds reasonably similar to Japanese.

>>3294
no, Korean sucks as well. I was watching True Beauty's animation after watching the drama dubbed and my ears were bleeding. The fortis and lenis consonants are the worst offenders, but the vowel system is also ugly as hell.

The Chinese was actually done quite well in that, it sounded very anime like. Though I don't like the Language much, I find it hard to differentiate sounds but I have that same issue with French as well.

I actually want more cartoons like this, I think more cultures should make their own animelikes. It enables more variation and means that we will be able to see anime made from their cultural lens and it also would also mean that the Chinese market in this case would have their own anime like media to consume and so take pressure off of the Japanese industry. I particularly want the west to make their own cartoons for this reasons, the sooner the west makes their own "anime" and leaves real anime alone the better.

>>3302
It's hard to find an audience for it.
Most anime fans aren't going to be interested unless it gives them exactly what anime does.
Most non-anime fans aren't suddenly going to get hyped for animation just because it is locally produced.
And finding source material, that both translates well to animation and has an established fanbase who would be interested in watching a cartoon adaption, is not as straightforward in most countries as it is with Japan.
And, even if you can get people to watch it, most countries (even just looking at their anime fandoms) don't have the happy-to-spend attitude that Japanese otaku do, so turning a profit would be hard.

The end result is that foreign producers take the 'conservative' approach: make something that the established anime fanbase would watch; stick to spin-offs of established franchises and/or clone successful anime formulas; don't take any risks.

>>3306
I actually think their is an audience for it. Avatar the Last Airbender is incredibly popular and Arcane seems to have done fairly well, I think people in the west actually do want it they just don't have anybody giving it to them.

Source material is an issue though, the problem with the comic book industry is that it seems to me to mostly be made up of huge IPs paying other people to kick their dead horses as much as they can. There is little room for individuals to make their own worlds like they do in Japan with Manga and LNs. I think the comic book industry would need some kind of reform to make it more in line with Japan. But I don't know what things are like In China. Korea does seem to have a Manga like industry though.

I also think that westerners do actually spend a lot on merchandise. They spend huge amounts on Starwars and Marvel Merch and on Funko pops and whatever.

>>3307
>They spend huge amounts on Starwars and Marvel Merch and on Funko pops and whatever.
Yeah, and those are decades-old cultural sensations which get plenty of money from other sources anyway. Who in the West is splurging on merch for trashy single-season tv series? Let alone buying stupidly-overpriced BDs for them, or tickets for recap movies with only a couple of minutes of new content.
Western fanbases spend plenty, but their spending only serves to feed the media giants, not to promote the creation of new series in the way that otaku spending patterns do in Japan. And I am comparing 'Western fanbases' to otaku, yet fundamentally the comparison is not valid: people identify as 'Marvel fans' or as 'Star Wars fans', which already gives the phenomenon I am talking about. And that is taken up by producers. ATLA is popular? Well just make more of it, and milk the fans for cash for decades, rather than trying to replicate its success. After all, far more of those fans are going to get on board for that than for some new Nickelodeon cartoon that they've not heard of before, no matter how good it might be.

>>3309
>Yeah, and those are decades-old cultural sensations which get plenty of money from other sources anyway.
>ATLA is popular? Well just make more of it, and milk the fans for cash for decades, rather than trying to replicate its success
That's true. But that's related to my point about the comic industry and kicking dead horses. Western media is dominated by large corporate run franchises rather than the individual worlds written by mangaka. If it had an industry more like the manga industry it would have a greater pool of IPs to draw from and would not have to rely on huge established IPs like it does.

>Who in the West is splurging on merch for trashy single-season tv series?
It's hard to say because they don't have the industry in the first place. I think it would be worth looking into how much merch Arcane sold but then Arcane is a property of League of Legends whihc kind of goes back to your first point(though I guess a lot of anime is based on large video games as well).

You probably are right to a degree though. I think the reason it's so easy to milk Otaku is because if an anime has a cute girl in it they will buy merch of that girl even if that girl isn;t form a huge IP. A cute girl is a cute girl. I myself do this.
I don't know if the west can really replicate that as the west seems to be more interested in Sci-fi, video games and superheroes than cute girls.
But then a cartoon doesn't need merch to be viable, it can make money through the same means normal TV shows do. And not all anime sells much merch either, I know that because I will often watch an anime, look for merch for it but not find any. So I don't think merch sales are everything.

I've been thinking for a while about how the sub vs dub debate is basically dead and has been for a while, and how it's been superseded by arguing about raws vs TLs, especially as anime as a whole has gotten much more popular, where even among normal people subs are the preferred way to watch a series. I wonder if in the future that this will eventually morph into a dichotomy between CN and JP media, with the latter being viewed as being for plebs, and the former being seen as media for "true otaku".

>>3315
>it's been superseded by arguing about raws vs TLs
Is this really even a debate? What is there to argue about?

>>3315
> I wonder if in the future that this will eventually morph into a dichotomy between CN and JP media, with the latter being viewed as being for plebs, and the former being seen as media for "true otaku".
Japanese for plebs? Surely you mean the former.
But you're right, manhua and manwha is fast growing and eventually so will their animations. The future is Chinese. I'm still sticking to Japanese though, I think it's more beautiful both in sound and writing. Culture too.

>>3317
>The future is Chinese.
I don't have much future for the hope of entertainment in general and people saying stuff like this really cements it...

>>3318
We're dead in the future. Don't worry about it.

>>3316
>Is this really even a debate?
It's not. I don't think anyone would deny that experiencing otaku media in its original language is the superior way to do so. I've just noticed an increase in the amount of hostility towards people who rely on subtitles and translations in recent years.

>>3320
I think that's just the 4chan being 4chan and certain places being downwind of it. Everyone needs to be angry and engage in angsty antagonism with everyone else. I'm quite confident many of the people doing that stuff don't even know Japanese or have any desire to learn it, they're just trolling because it's the cool thing to do, like someone playing as all sides of a console war. Add in some culture war stuff and it's the perform storm of modern internet culture.
I'm sure those horrific Japanese-learning generals are involved, since anything turned into a general will go through virus incubation stages and then burst, leaving its cytoplasm everywhere.

I had to stop watching the moment they started speaking. 2D girls speaking anything other than Japanese will always sound weird to me.

>>3320
If anything I feel like anti-"EOP" elitism has only become tamer, if you look at VN circles where the term originated and propagated. 10 years ago there was legitimately a huge divide between players who could read Japanese and those who couldn't, and people genuinely though a lot of widely acclaimed titles would never get translated, but now Muramasa, Baldr Sky, Subarashiki Hibi, White Album 2 among others all have English translations.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the hostility you mention comes from those low power level, ironic weeaboo types who are always getting butthurt about the latest localization drama nonsense. Like >>3321 says it seems 99% of them (I'm just assuming the 1% must be out there somewhere although I haven't seen it) don't know Japanese, at best they're "learning" it.

It's also become easier than ever to delude yourself into believing you know a language. And that's not even getting into those cognitively impaired people who use machine translation and think they're getting a more accurate result than the official translation, and even try to use MTL output as the basis for their "arguments". May god have mercy on those poor souls.

>>3294
I'd like to plug in the only relevant study I'm aware of on the topic of finding languages beautiful across the board:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2218367120
The strongest predictors are familiarity (+12% rating on average, whereas most language-specific effects are around ±2% at most) and prestige, leading to situations like German being rated lower than phonetically similar languages (namely Icelandic), another factor was the voices themselves having a lower pitch.
>tones
This seemed to be the most cross-linguistically relevant negative effect, which the researchers theorize as having to do with a preference for lower pitch variability that phonemic tones go against, and somehow Chinese speakers were the harshest on it perhaps because it particularly messed with their perception. But you can also see how the language having a male speaker had a considerably stronger negative effect than either pitch or tones, lmao. Most importantly, all of this is on average, but when you check individual preferences there can be some wild fluctuations. Consider the both positive and negative assesments of French in this very thread.

>>3297
>fortis and lenis consonants
I'm not sure what you meant by this because that's typically most of them, but Korean actually has a tripartite division of unaspirated-aspirated-tense.
>the vowel system is also ugly as hell
I don't think this means what you think it means. Their vowel phonemes are simpler than those of Germanic, Slavic, or French.