UlasanAnime.com – It’s widely acknowledged that the “golden age” of anime in the mid-2000s, and a significant factor in the rise of platforms like YouTube and Nico Nico Douga, was the ability to watch anime as a shared experience. Specifically, people gravitated towards Nico Nico Douga for its comments, facilitated by a floating comment system that overlaid text onto the video. This was often hilarious.
It’s interesting to note that 2005 marked the year sites like YouTube began gaining significant public traction. It was a novel concept; people uploaded various videos and shared links with friends. The social context that shaped the overall notion of social media on the internet was something still being figured out. However, as we see today, there’s likely little room left for a system like Nico Nico’s famous overlay text. YouTube eventually adopted a similar overlay technology for annotations, which also serves ads, but it wasn’t quite the same.
To muse on this further: with Nico Nico launching a US portal featuring simulcast anime content, will we ever be able to “recreate” a similar experience? The idea of “anime being more fun when watched with others” for certain shows? I’m uncertain, but I’m leaning towards no. Perhaps the moment has passed. Maybe Western audiences no longer appreciate anime in that viewing context, and perhaps those who do are more preoccupied with repeating memes than offering insightful, interesting, and funny comments that accompany watching anime in that setting. After all, who genuinely enjoys reading YouTube comments?
Yet, one might think a Pachinko anime would provide excellent content for people to critique. So, I tried it. And it somewhat worked; actively commenting on it made watching it a little more bearable, though pausing to type was a bit of a hassle. However, even the best voice acting talent couldn’t salvage something like Twin Angel: Twinkle Paradise.
I simply hope this doesn’t deter them from distributing t-shirts at conventions to everyone. Or from bringing over their trademarked animated GIFs (I noticed they were adorning the blog section of the site…)
The other day, I also managed to watch Blood-C on Nico Nico. The results were partly what I feared, but also partly promising. A few well-timed screenshots made it much more amusing, while there were also many instances of repetitive, nonsensical memes that didn’t truly fit. This viewing experience was notably different from my others (R-15 and Twin Angel) because I waited nearly a week to watch Blood-C, and it’s likely their highest-profile anime stream. The other two… well, their streams were sparse. You can find those streams on Nico Nico’s channel page.
This, in essence, is a completely different experience even when compared to their Atlantis launch live stream last week, which I watched for about 30 minutes. That stream looked quite decent… And it’s not that memes are inherently problematic; it’s about how they are utilized.
PS. Is it just me, or does the way text scrolls in English need adjustment? Or is my reading bandwidth strained having to simultaneously read the subtitles and the scrolling comments? Perhaps both? I find it much easier to read short comments as they remain on screen longer, whereas long comments zip across the screen incredibly fast. And similar to Twitter, it’s much more likely that one would need to write longer comments in English than in Japanese. This necessitates some adjustments on Nico Nico’s part.
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