Quote from: Dirk RemmeckeBut then, Pokemon did outsell Magic the Gathering by an order of magnitude...

How about the long tail? magic is stable, how about Pokemon?

And honestly, the Pokemon TV-show has more in common with Chuck the Beaver than with sexy-underage-girl-badass-warrior-nuns or the dreaded daiclaive bishonen, aesthetically speaking.

Quote from: Dirk RemmeckeOf course there are 30+ fatbeard otakus in the scene, and the anime fan scene has its share of lawncrappers (just like any other hobby has its share of obsessive weirdos). But the majority of manga readers in Germany are a) girls and b) teens.

I wonder how true that statement is for the US, though...

Quote from: Pierce InverarityI wonder how true that statement is for the US, though...

In the Boston area, it's kids in their teens through twenties, of either sex. The fandom falls off sharply after thirty. I can't answer for the rest of the US. The coasts (East, West, Gulf) are culturally very different, both from the center and from each other. I'm not an anime/manga fan - I'm waaaay too old - but my son Klaxon (20) is. Thus I've at least been exposed to the phenomenon. I actually really like two anime - Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - am indifferent to some, and am utterly confused by most... I suspect it is inverse proportion to how Manga-esque the art style is, at least for initial reactions.

-clash

Harry Potter?
LotR-Movies?

They seemed to do pretty well without.

Quote from: SettembriniHarry Potter?
LotR-Movies?

They seemed to do pretty well without.

Fish!

-clash

I'll ask my GM. He's now an editor at vizmedia. Hopefully he knows his target audience.

My uneducated guess: manga &c. is by now such a complex and finely segmented culture that it caters to the whole range from 13-year-olds to lawncrapp0rs. And that the ratio of those two audiences varies by country, as does their overlap in turn with gamers.

I got into anime in my early 20's, and now that I'm in my 30s I find myself far more selective with my purchases. Many of my friends are anime fans, and they tend to be in their mid twenties. As far as I know, none of us are fans because of the big titted cartoons.

That said, I treat my fandom as I do most things I am fond of, just one of many things I enjoy, not the focus of my existance.  I am utterly unconcerned with the presence, or abscence, of anime style artwork in other media.  Looking objectively, if its good, interesting 'art' then I like it, if its crappy and selling itself purely on fanwankery then I probably don't like it. Its that simple.

Spike pretty much said what I was going to say, except that I was in my late teens, and now I'm 23, and was the media relations officer for my college's club for a while. (Brantai spent some time as the Pres.)

There are a few lawncrappers that I know, but I don't personally deal with any of the older ones (though I won't argue their existence, ala the Comic Shop Guy from the Simpsons). Mostly, I just have nothing to do with lawn-crappers, if I can help it. So my experience is of a bunch of 20-somethings and younger that share my tastes.

And, really, my tastes range more in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror/drama. Things like Naruto or InuYasha, which are very popular with young boys and girls don't interest with me at all. I find myself having little or nothing in common with their fans.

It's true that there's more diversity in anime/manga style than someone might think at first glance, but surely Sett is pointing specifically to the sub-style of, e.g., Inuyasha and Full Metal Alchemist rather than Ghibli stuff or Cowboy Bebop.

That said it's slightly incorrect IMO to confound FMA/Inuyasha with the soft (?)-hentai stuff, I don't even know the names of the series, but I am referring to stuff like this. That certainly has a connection to the infamous Exalted Savant and Sorcerer cover--however, it probably comes from the same confusion with which we started this thread:i.e., mixing up hentai with anime/manga-in-general.

In other words I would not expect products aimed at young teens to take that route, and I don't think there needs to be a slippery slope. Instead I believe what we have here is a generational change in perception of style. For kids today, "manga style" means action & fun, it's simply replacing the older cartoon styles of GI Joe, Superfriends, etc. It does not mean "foreign", which it does to older folks who in turn associate the latter with the conspicuous presence of hentai in Japanese comic/cartoon production & fandom.

It's as if the fact that Kurtzman, Elder, and Davis did both juvenile cartoons in MAD as well as adult (well, sort of) stuff for Playboy were to cause readers to think that the use of illustration in their style (or Eisner or Wally Wood) for games was necessarily aimed at an older and somewhat prurient crowd.

We reached several worthwhile conclusions here:

- Manga is a wide field, as diverse as the lable "comic" itself.

- the quality "manga-esque" thereby is worthless in a discussion about the appeal of XYZ to teenagers, unless very specific statements and sub-style differentiations are made

Biased musings to sort it out in a very general way:
At least from my own personal experiences, I see a huge gap between Pokemon, Conan (the little detective, not the Librarian) etc.  DragonballZ, which are aimed at (pre-)teenagers, and what I think of as Otaku/Fanboy/Nerd-bait.

The waters are muddied in the teenage romance area: "Oh My Godess" is cute if consumed by a eleven year old girl, but creepy if adored and collected by, well you know those guys.

What partially triggered the OP was my dissatisfaction with a Paizo product. Paizo is totally a D&D geek company and in no way engaged in bringing in new players IMO. When they make four pre-gen characters, three of which are girls that could all play a role in Dominion Tank Police, I can only see on reason for it. Catering to male D&D-nerds who dig playing a certain-kind-of-manga chicks.

And the shit about "appeal to the young ones" is just throwing smoke grenades.

Sett:

You have to clarify if you are going to point to 'dominion tank police' style anime girls. Masamune Shirow, the artist/writer behind Dominion Tank Police is very well respected for the depth of his work and his dedication to his craft, but is also well known for his "Shirow Girls" which are often held up as the epitome of cheesecake anime girls. Dominion was a more comic story set in a somewhat grim world, but he is also the mastermind behind Ghost in the Shell, which is viewed often as a sort of antithesis of that style of Anime.

Then you pick up his mangas, and despite the cheesecake pinup girls all over the place, you realize that he has a metaphysical underpinning to his works that is on par with Stephen Hawkings grasp of physics, and about as complex to work through.


Which can lead to a wide ranging discussion of cultural variations.  There is the semi-joke comment that if you see a japanese news woman reading about the weather and a man runs up and jerks off all over her face, you don't know if you are watching porn or the actual news.   Their cultural values are different than American cultural values or German cultural values, and it is reflected in their media.  My understanding, for example, is that Sailor Moon was, in the original Japenese Edits, unabashedly aimed at adult audiences.

Well, this would be important, if I wanted to do the source material justice. This is of no concern to me.
Right now, only the American viewpoint is interesting:

What audience are Manga-Cheesecake/Beefcake (Bishonencake?)-esque pictures aimed at in D&D products?

I say: a subset of D&D-fans, not new readers.

I really don't think so, Sett. Wizards had the opportunity to do that long ago; and frankly the average geek is mostly against mixing anime images with his D&D for some reason.  

If they're making it manga-esque in its art styles, its to appeal to the kids.  The stupid Gen X dungeonpunk garbage, that was to appeal to the now-30something geeks.

RPGPundit

To be clear in case my previous post wasn't: I agree with Pundit here.

It's not that anime-styling is attractive to kids the same way that it may be to middle-aged fans--as a specialized otaku taste. Rather, I suspect that for the kids, anime styling is up-to-date--and that's it.

If you see sexualized/fetishized stuff, then that would indeed be aimed at someone other than kids--if not adults, then the same people for whom are concocted video game babes like...consulting web...Chun Li and...Taki.

So...who knows about that particular pre-gen, but the proof of the pudding will be whether you find that sort of stuff in 4e, or if it ends up looking like Full Metal Alchemist/Naruto.

Full Metal Alchemist probably isn't a really great example of the ills afflicting anime at the moment. It's popular, but that's because it's of two things: long running and action-y with good production values. Plus, it seems like it could be pretty gameable.

Actually, Naruto seems pretty gamable, too. I'm not really a fan of either show, either, mostly because it suffers from Series Issues. IE - it's so long, I can't expect to start watching it from the beginning and get to the 'end' at any reasonable juncture. But that's a bonus to kids who just want to watch something after school.