Though it really shouldn’t be too big of a surprise to anyone, Sekatsuyo‘s first blu-ray bombed with just a little over 1000 blu-ray sales during the week it’s first release debuted.
The one caveat I’d add is that it was still the 6th best selling blu-ray that week when almost nothing sold well. Regardless, most sales happen immediately, and if the entire series finishes around the 10k sales mark, it’s really hard to see ARMS breaking even and not losing money. Maybe a lot of money, with sales numbers that low.
As an ecchi fan, this makes me incredibly sad. ARMS may not make good anime very often, but they have been one of the most steadfast supporters of nude ecchi anime through the years, even when it hasn’t made them much money. And you can’t really blame them for the anime being bad, as some of the hottest ecchi anime ever made were mediocre or worse as anime.
Recently we’ve seen mainstream success (Date A Live, Haganai Next) combined with a host of ecchi sales failures (pretty much everything ecchi that AIC did in 2010 and 2011) drive AIC away from animating nudity the last year or so. If Wizard Barristers keeps things non-nude and sells well, I wonder how long ARMS will stay loyal to an ecchi fanbase that hasn’t returned the love? Or maybe they have, but are just too small a demographic to hit minimal sales requirements.
Prior to the Fall 2013 anime season, the year 2013 was looking alarmingly thin for nude ecchi. There were just three dedicated nude ecchi TV series through the first three quarters of that year (Vividred Operation, Samurai Bride, High School DxD New). A flourish of nude fanservice TV series in the Fall season saved 2013 from being the leanest year for nude ecchi since 2006.
And until that fall season, the notable nude ecchi we did get for TV was all franchise stuff. No new series (I’m counting Vividred Operation as a Strike Witches spin-off), no chances being taken.
And now we are seeing the sales numbers come in for the Fall lineup of shows that actually did take chances on new material, and the results haven’t been pretty. What’s more concerning is just how predictable this outcome has become.
Honestly, I’m concerned about the future of ecchi. It’s become overly stigmatized, and by extension, cool to hate.
When you look at sales numbers across all genres of anime, you can definitely sense evidence of “hivemind” purchasing trends. Shows that sell the best sell EXTREMELY well. Shows like Madoka, Monogatari, and Attack on Titan sell about 20-25 times more copies than the median sales anime series from the same season. That’s nothing against those shows, which all deserve to sell well. But 20-25 times more? It’s potent evidence of just how good it is to be popular when it comes time to make a buck.
On the flip side, stigmatized shows are going to struggle. And at some point in the past, ecchi went from innocent fun to the worst kind of trash in the perception of the anime community.
I loved the decisions that ARMS made with their Sekatsuyo adaptation. They added some fantastic nudity (mostly via specials) to an adaptation of a non-nude source material while keeping the flow and feel of the manga intact. Now, is it a trashy manga and by extension a trashy anime? You bet. But for fanservice fans, honestly I don’t think they could have done much better under the circumstances.
And yet the series bombed (at least so far), because of course it would. It’s trash, and only those who appreciate nudity in anime would be fans of a series like that. And there just aren’t that many of us, or at least, there’s not many of us who will actually buy the product and proudly display it in our anime collections.
I became an anime fan in the mid to late 90s, but I didn’t become an ecchi fan until 2011. Prior to then, I was actually offended by nudity in anime, if you can believe that. I’ve dropped many an anime series in the past because of unwelcome doses of surprise nudity. So when mainstream anime fans bash ecchi and even ecchi fans, I understand.
Yet, it still sucks to see how ecchi has become cool to hate. Gunbuster wasn’t cool to hate. Cutey Honey wasn’t cool to hate. Mahoromatic wasn’t either. I think that cool to hate label didn’t really show up until Girls Bravo and Ikkitousen came around, and though some recent ecchi series have dodged this label (Strike Witches, To Love-Ru, DxD, pretty much anything Hiraku Kaneko does), most have been labeled as trash. Surprise surprise, those ecchi series accepted by the mainstream fanbase sell several times better than the typical nude ecchi series do.
And so, I think 2013 was a bit of a grim forecast for the future, where “franchise” nude ecchi is most of the ecchi we get, and when those franchises run dry, new franchises will be slower to emerge because studios are taking fewer chances on new stuff. And though some companies have stepped up to help fill the void (TNK), seeing companies like AIC and SHAFT trend away from nudity despite the legacy in the genre that they have is concerning as well.
Oh well. Adapt or die. Though nude ecchi titles may not be as great in number as they used to be, there are still things to be thankful for. Like how BD specials have become increasingly direct and unabashed over the past 3 years or so. I don’t see the To Love-Ru phenomenon cooling off any time soon, and the mega-popular Strike Witches brand is TV original, so they can make as many sequels as they want without being tied down by a manga source.
In the end, it’s just the reality of the business. We’ll probably see fewer ecchi titles going forward, and though I’d prefer variety over franchises, the financial success of these franchise series means high animation budgets. I’m more of a “quantity” guy, but so long as the quality keeps getting better, the trade off isn’t all that bad.
