when Ritsuko times out

So after a two week hiatus, I go to Crunchyroll to resume my Legend of Galactic Heroes (no other anime holds my interest even after two weeks of not watching it, not even Code Geass) and find that it’s totally changed.

Some people say it’s selling out. Most people are just going with the flow, if the forums are any indication. But what I thought, as soon as I clicked on the Galaxy Express 999 and it said ‘not available in your region’ was that this is a big step backwards as a whole and defeats the whole point of making Crunchyroll a website that streams anime.

The artificial measures to get people to pay CR weren’t even this bad. After all, I never watched Naruto/Gintama, and with that many episodes, I wouldn’t mind being merely one week behind. The anime index, with its annoying habit of not telling you which titles have no videos available, was very forgettable once I found a series to watch. And if push came to shove, I could always download it from elsewhere.

Which is what I’m getting at here: it’s much easier to navigate away from CR to, say, lolipower or Tokyotosho and download the latest episode than walk home from the local DVD store and then go to lolipower or Tokyotosho. Thanks to its new affiliation with more established entities, CR now has many of the drawbacks of physical media distribution, such as shitty artificial mechanisms to prevent Ethiopians from watching your videos (what the hell is the point of regions anyway, especially online), waiting a few days to watch an episode of a popular series (which can only be bad news for CR’s popularity), the fact that you have to (ahem) pay, and now, with their brave move of removing all user-uploaded videos, very few choices. Okay so the last one can be somewhat mitigated – with time in the order of a few years, if common sense is to be relied upon. But I find it unlikely that studios (some of which don’t even exist anymore, or have gone out of the animation field) would want to, perhaps, dig up some of their older classics for CR. I mean, why the fuck? Give me one good reason to not ignore this email from some website I’ve never heard about.

LoGH might stand a chance of coming back within 2 weeks – unlike most anime from the 80s, there actually is an official website – but even if it does, I’m gonna download from lolipower instead. Oh, and Kimagure Orange Road? Hmm… don’t get your hopes up. Miyuki? hmmm… you can win a free account on my blog if Miyuki comes back within the year. Lupin III TV? hah… don’t even think of it.

So there you have it. Bye Crunchyroll! It was fun while it lasted.