Maybe I’ve been reading the news too much today. I’m not used to having Fridays off, I still need to figure out healthier ways to spend my waking moments. But peoples, I’ve tried long enough to be positive this year. Please let me vent, just a little...
1) The Sony/Funimation/AT&T/Crunchyroll merger is actually quite disappointing to me as a strong believer of free speech. For the first time since 4Kids was in business, there seems to be no way for me to watch anime that isn’t neutered to the point where it insults children in the US, and that is the best-case scenario considering 4Kids at least didn’t go out of their way to make us California progressives look like utter pansies that are somehow convinced that adding anti-patriarchy statements in Kobayashi Dragon Maid will help solve real-life issues like income inequality, rather than just give right-wing media yet another reason to make us look more dangerous to “democracy” than we actually are.
Either way, “Americanizing” anime kind of defeats the purpose of watching something from a culture with different values than our own, and I already have American cartoons if I’m not in the mood for anime. “Just pirate anime!” you may say. That would be a great way to send a message that I don’t want to put up with the American politicization of anime as if I WANT to be anxious about the slow demise of civilized society even when I’m watching TV to recover from my latest panic attack—if sites like 9anime didn’t just borrow from Funimation and Crunchyroll subs and dubs. I don’t know, I can’t see myself watching anime in the near future until it is an escape from reality (or at least Twitter drama) again...
2) Working in retail still sucks, I am not well suited for a customer service job where I have to be social, even to the most homicidal male Karens, I have to do most of my co-worker’s work in addition to my own because they won’t, you know, show up for work, somehow, even in this economy there aren’t any new people being hired to at least split up the workload like in past years, and of course people are still not taking you-know-what seriously and doing the bare minimum of wearing a piece of cloth on their face. Sure, this physical workload well beyond my pay grade has allowed me avoid gaining quarantine weight and even lose about a quarter-inch on my waistline, but at what cost? ...Everything...
I don’t want you to worry about me, these are just sour grapes that have been bugging me—I knew that the needless drama would continue even as genuinely-awful people like Donald Trump lose relevance and power, but I was hoping it wouldn’t affect my actual distractions from you-know-what like anime or video games—I didn’t even get started on what Nintendo’s been up to lately because, if I’m honest, my current “Nintendo” boycott will end in a week or less once I realize that boycotting all entertainment will make it very hard to cope with quarantine if I have nothing to do but look at horrible news all day. Plus, I can still tolerate Nintendo’s shenanigans over Sony making us liberals look more ridiculous than we already do by censoring “anime tiddiez” and ignoring non-Twitter-related actual issues that are more important.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a government that could stop anti-consumer monopolies like the Funimation/Crunchyroll merger and find good bipartisan solutions to other thorny issues so I don’t have to think so hard about “how the sausage is made” and just focus on getting a better job?