I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

GOD BLESS YOU, ZAC BERTSCHY!

The anime series Fullmetal Alchemist has been licensed by Funimation Productions, Ltd., about the only domestic anime licensor which does both edited TV dubs for "kidvid" syndication and bilingual uncut DVD releases for the anime purist niche market. (The other kidvid syndicators, if they decide to release an uncut version at all, release them through other companies like ADV or Geneon (formerly Pioneer).) As usual, some of the... shall we say, less pragmatic elements of anime fandom are shreiking to high hell about this because it's been licensed by FUNimation and FUNi is TEH DEVIL because of what FUNi did to Dragonball Z to make it suitable for the general childrens' audience in North America, even if every other series FUNi has licensed is available uncut on DVD, and FUNi's now releasing uncut DVD versions of the earlier stuff they edited. (Thanks to shoiryu for giving the link over at Fandom Wank.)

Stepping into the fray, Zac Bertschy, Anime News Network's semi-retired "Answer Man", wrote a brilliant post entitled "Sick of the entitlement kiddies", making fun of the sort of fans who think they are entitled to uncut versions of their favourite shows and also complain when a show is licensed by anyone so that fansubs theoretically stop being available (the point addressed by Thesis 15 of the 95 Theses Against Fandumb, "Nobody owes you versions of your favorite shows presented in a manner according to your exacting specifications. Lack of availability of such versions does not give you the right to steal, either.").

Zac would probably get angry at me if I cut-and-pasted the entire post without his permission, and I'm already pushing it with the title of this entry (heh heh), so I'll just post the 2½ paragraphs with the gist of his point.

1. Every time FUNimation licenses something, every 15-year old militant anime "fan" comes crawling out of the woodwork to complain en masse on message boards across the internet. They coalesce in huge, festering piles of misinformed, illogical hatred and proceed to spew their venom all over everything, usually for a few weeks.

2. Then they go away.

I think it's important to remember #2 and also remind ourselves (I myself am guilty of doing this) to not feed the trolls. Arguing with them is a fool's errand, as I have discovered countless times; they refuse to listen to reason. They've been indoctrinated into a blind sort of hatred, and, as I stated before, they do go away after a relatively short period of time.

His 2 points are right on the money... well, they go back to their own boards when they realize it's futile to whine about such things at ANN... but I don't know if I can avoid "feeding the trolls" since baiting them is ever so much fun.

Zac is also on a roll today with this other post spoofing the sort of fans which make certain Japanese children's cartoons, violent by North American kidvid standards but still children's cartoons, out to be more "adult" and "dark" then they actually are. He's done 8 posts over the Fullmetal Alchemist brouhaha, pushing his post count up to a magic 777. ;)

EDIT: Incidentally, Fullmetal Alchemist is one of the trinity of shows whose licensing by FUNimation will set off a cavalcade of whining by the anti-FUNi fanboy factions, the other two being Naruto and One Piece, both of which, I expect, will be licensed by FUNi by the end of the summer. From what I've read, while I'd give all of them a chance if they showed up on YTV or Teletoon, none of them are quite my bag, though Naruto yaoi doujinshi, which is only beginning to flood the yaoi pages, is infinitely more pleasing on the eye than the scourge of Digimon yaoi doujinshi (WTF?) and is less monotonous than Gundam Wing yaoi doujinshi. Also regarding FUNi and licensing, I had previously made this "out on a limb" prediction over at ANN: "Toei wants to consolidate future North American releases and rereleases of Sailor Moon through a single company, which is why they aren't renewing the rights with ADV and Geneon/Pioneer, and their new distributor shall be FUNi, who will also announce a subtitled-only release of Sailor Stars (too problematic for North American TV) starting this fall."

"Full Metal Alchemist", just for the Google searches.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:53 PM