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Show Notes
0:00: Happy New Year! Justin and Helen have much to talk about in this episode, so the two hosts get into the conclusion of the possible Sony/KADOKAWA acquisition, which resolved in a way that might’ve been unexpected.
3:33: The two then continue the sharing theme, with TOHO acquiring a 19.7 stake in Orange before moving onto the return of One Piece in April and its new timeslot.
6:48: At the start of the season, with two shows continuing from the summer season J.C. Staff was producing 10 anime of various lengths and formats. This certainly suggested a couple of these would actually have issues airing, but the good news for them is only one had production troubles. The hosts didn’t quite count on it being Danmachi Season 5!
10:42: Frieren is now back on hiatus, while Karino Takatsu’s Marry-Go-Round will go on hiatus but return in March; the 31st Dengeki Novel Prize’s Grand Prize winner Denji Yutai passed away unexpectedly due an unspecified illness, which has KADOKAWA working with Denji’s family to figure out how to handle the release of the winning work.
14:28: The two hosts then discuss the passing of shoujo pioneer Macoto Takahashi, who has been one of the sources of inspiration for many within the demographic and the manga industry with his work.
Licenses
17:11: Yen Press wanted to be one of the few to close the year announcing new titles, so here they are:
- Sword Art Online Unital Ring
- Secrets of the Silent Witch (spin-off) -another- Part 1 (LN)
- Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian
- Isekai Samurai
- The Hitman Stans
- Dara-san of Reiwa
- I Made Friends with the Second Prettiest Girl in My Class
- Convenient Semi-Friend
- The Heroic Tale of the Villainous Prince
- Who Killed the Hero? (LN)
- The Girl Who Wants to Be a Hero and the Girl Who Ought to Be a Hero (LN)
- This Is the Wizard’s Secret Weapon (LN)
- SAILOR ZOMBIE (Digital exclusive)
- Lord of Mysteries (Chinese novel)
20:57: AnimeEigo also announced they’ve licensed Nobody’s Boy Remi, which gets Helen to tell a story about this one; Cross Infinite World announced three new titles that’ll be released on digital platforms soon:
- This Alluring Dark Elf Has the Heart of a Middle-aged Man!
- Love & Magic Academy: Who Cares about the Heroine and Villainess? I Want to Be the Strongest in this Otome Game World
- Dinners with My Darling: How the Former Monster King Ate Her Way to Happiness
Streaming News
23:08: The animated The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim came out in digital format December 27. Normally that’s not a big deal, until you realize the film just came out in theaters December 13!
25:45: A few more anime works got added to Crunchyroll, while Netflix added the 2018 version of Captain Tsubasa.
Main Topic: Fall Anime 2024 Final Impressions
27:12: Justin and Helen discuss what was kind of an unusual Fall 2024 season — some shows they liked for sure, but compared to prior Fall anime seasons, feels slightly weak. The major notable new thing that (temporarily) finished was Dandadan (1:18:13) but sequels sort of highlighted this season, from the good (49:13: Love Live! Superstar!! S3) to the solid (35:02: Appraisal Skill S2) to the still actually great but somehow still annoying at times (37:13: Bleach Part 3) to the sort of bad (55:13: Seirei Gensouki S2)
Weird News
1:27:03: Both hosts are still attempting to figure what the Guinness World Record’s criteria is after they accepted the largest shadow projection of Shadow the Hedgehog before then talking about the Lakers having a One Piece night, continuing the theme of the Straw Hats hanging around Los Angeles for no apparent reason. (There is likely a reason!)
Weird News of 2024
1:30:46: Before moving on to 2025, take a look back at all the weird news that dominated this year in the anime/manga space! There was a great amount of weird! Starting with the fact that after 8 years of podcasting, we finally had a lost episode.
1:31:28: This isn’t actually a new thing — bigger companies buying smaller companies — but everyone was talking about the possibility of a big company acquiring another big company, and for Justin, seeing Sony in talks to acquire KADOKAWA at like almost 2AM at night hit different!
1:32:41: Lest we forget, Crunchyroll was one of the only (?) official streaming services that had the comment section available for their shows, but they closed it this year. Whether it was the review bombing of another BL title (this time it was Twilight: Out of Focus) or the AI translation accusations for My Deer Friend Nokotan, the remaining fact is you can’t comment on anything on CR anymore.
1:33:23: At some point however, they will have to provide a comment on what happened to David Wald, who claimed that the company “opened his private mail, threw away the letters, and passed out any items to their staff.” Still one of the last things anyone could’ve seen coming from Crunchyroll!
1:35:26: The anime industry has long been in a poor state, with very few anime having great production, or even those that do still having much trouble along the way. So every year we’ll most certainly get a studio that’s in dire straits until there’s a major improvement, and this year’s contender is Yokohama Animation Lab, which had the following happen to them:
- Due to a director change, the anime had to be delayed from Winter to the Spring season.
- Amidst production troubles they had to delay the remaining episodes by 2 weeks, with episodes 9 and 10 with air dates, the remaining episodes with no air date.
- The BD releases had to be delayed from release in Japan by four months.
- The studio they were working with alongside this, Cloud Hearts, apparently no longer exists.
- The final 2 episodes came out just as the year ended.
- Along the way they had to delay an anime from this summer to sometime in 2025 (Sword of the Demon Hunter)
- And they still have Tsuyokute New Saga, which was announced years ago, somewhere in their office. Maybe! Needless to say, a rough year for them.
1:39:00: While Yokohama had overall production troubles, the studio that’ll take the cake for having the wildest production story is Typhoon Graphics and their work on Dahlia in Bloom. After all, learning that due to so much outsourcing that there was a possibility that some scenes were animated in North Korea is a level of weirdness no one could’ve seen coming!
1:43:09: That said, as awful as anime industry production has been, for better or worse, we rarely see cancellations of an anime. This year however, with Yuri on Ice and Ten Count, we somehow got two.
1:45:50: We also rarely hear about the type of manga cancellations Endo and Kobayashi got in the manga industry, but wow did the editorial staff for this series mess up in ways that you would not expect for a professional publisher.
1:49:31: Sometimes there’s just weird news that’s also just despicable, so it was more or less a given that Toru Furuya’s actions would land him here.
1:51:50: There was way too many manga library bans that occurred in the second half of the year, but needless to say, the Sasaki & Miyano ban was indeed the most notable due to the reasons why it was banned in one particular Florida library. (The suggestions on what to replace it with was also hilarious).
1:54:11: Some quick bites of weird news that we just can’t forget — Aniplex of America unexpectedly giving a birthday to Madoka Magica’s Kyoko Sakura; a public publisher tiff that’s going to somehow continue in 2025; and yes, Isekai is now Oxford approved. Amazing.
1:57:49: Love Live! is an interesting franchise that is popular, but in terms of gaming, not so much, as their smartphone game service ended service in Japan March 31. The problem is they announced that a Global version would launch — and then shut down three months later! And did this in one tweet! If anyone understood why they did this, please share with the class!
1:59:19: Finally, after much thinking, the weird news of 2024 had to close with the prevalence of AI essentially everywhere. In the anime space, this has led to much discussion while also having studios actually use it to create their works. So there will be stories like that in the new year. There will also likely be humorous ones too since you can’t rely on AI for everything. See this, this, and especially the Latina character name story that only evolved into learning AI was involved once the author commented about it. You could argue that it’s telling no one told the author about this before it got to publishing, but on the other hand, the scenario did turn out to be really hilarious.
Feel free to send questions or any comments you might have about this week’s episode in the comments section below, to contact at theoasg dot com, or to our Twitter account (@TheOASG). TheOASG wishes everyone a Happy New Year, and hope your 2025 is great!
The podcast will return either at the end of the month or early February.