Anime & Donghua

A-1 upped their game in the last 5-6 years. Before that they had quality issues across shows. Now they mostly have production issues like with Nier.

They also take a lot of projects which makes gap between seasons too big. 86 suffers from it and Solo Leveling will too afaik because they don't have slots.

Atleast they're making ORV. Although I'll be incredibly mad if it doesn't get the same treatment as SL.

It also makes sense to adapt Solo Leveling. It's the most popular manhwa and pulled millions of people into reading manhwa(including me). And it definitely has opened the gates for other manhwa to be adapted by Japanese studios.

They are known making mid tier adaptions and butchering the source material.

I wanted to call this unfair because the JC Staff stuff I've personally seen has almost always been good enough to finish, but looking back on it I can only really call Azumanga Daioh a favorite, and the rest has been... Yeah, middle-tier, but not necessarily "butchering", right?

From a strictly animation perspective JC Staff are middle-tier as well, but mid-tier animation is perfectly serviceable for certain genres, just not OPM.

I do kind of wonder if there's some larger influence with the wave of "Cool Korea" media in the past several years, which is a very deliberate effort. Like, I'm not saying the RoK directly funded the production of Solo Leveling, but I do wonder if there's more to it all. I'm also not assigning a moral value to this, it's sort of whatever beyond the baseline abusiveness of the idol industry, which I don't think is much better in Japan.

The trick I think is to foster it at every level.

Consider for example how the UK excels in sports despite being a small country. It fosters sports at every level, before school, in school, outside school, etc.

If we look at "Cool Japan" a notable element of the entire culture that they export comes from manga. Where do manga artists come from? They're fostered by manga clubs in schools, which are adequately funded by the school club funds, with a teacher offering insight and leadership to the club where necessary. The same can be said for music clubs, photography clubs, art clubs, etc. The foundational pillar of Cool Japan is putting state funds into creating people with an interest in these things, some of which will go on eventually to become creators without ever really realising the state did anything.

I don't know about the RoK, but I would guess that they're doing something to fund the production of people who are interested in becoming idols, and they're doing some things with their manhwa to foster the creation of more people interested in it.

There's also just the use of media to push it. Sometimes good art exists but never gets anywhere because it has no visibility. Use of media can bridge this gap by pushing to expose it.

Side note: Personally I think socialist states should reconsider investment in sports and consider using the investment in cultural products instead. I think it has higher impact, and I would argue that sports foster individualist competition rather than collectivist cooperation. All of that investment in competitive sport could instead be turbo charging Cool China or Cool Cuba or whatever.

Like, I'm not saying the RoK directly funded the production of Solo Leveling, but I do wonder if there's more to it all.

Subsidizing it to try to shift some of their animation industry from just quietly being the backbone of the broader animation industry to having their own original series does seem plausible. I almost wonder if there's not something similar going on with the Chinese animation industry, with how absolutely gorgeous things like To Be Hero X (which looks better than Solo Leveling and is also very well written with like an actual story and characters and themes, when Solo Leveling has none of those things) are.

Jojo has lots of problems and I think it's reasonable to find Phantom Blood almost all lame (aside from Dio being funny sometimes), but I would still compare it positively to OPM.

I just remember seeing people praise OPM season one as being a standout in the way jojo was in terms of creativity and how fight scenes played out. I don't think that actually holds up fully, but I do get why someone would argue that it was closer to something like jojo than to the generic shonen slop of the 00s.

That's seriously such a good panel. Iconic even after being retconned.