One of the things you have to remember about Japan is that the anime is the commercial and not the product. You have to pay the network to air your show and once you have aired that commercial, your money comes from selling the 70 dollar 2 episode DVDs and the typical tidal wave of related merchandise. Fansubs don't bug Japan like they do the West as to them fansubbing is actually someone doing there advertising for free and paying for the translations themselves. To the West, fansubbers are letting people see the product without sitting through all the addvetisements people are paying them to run.
As the shows are the ads to Japan, shows have to follow the attention getting rules of advertising rather than ones the shows in the West have to follow. In the West, the point of the show is to get people to sit down long enough and be involved enough that they sit through your commericals, as they wait for the shows. The more viewers your show can consistantly gather, the more likely that a large number of people are going to stay through the commericals... which means the advertising time during the episode is worth more. In Japan the more people your program (ad) can get to buy your episodes (and merchentise) the more you make off it... the ad slots during your ad are the channel's revenune generators. Granted the models are bleeding into each other a bit. For instance, feel free to correct me if you have more info, in America we only get the opertunity to buy seasons of shows from America after the anime sales from the late 90s. Before that it was basically only movies.
This matters because as anime is a commerical and not a sneaky trick to get people to sit through your sponsers ads, the tend towards following the rules of advertising: 1) Sex sells: pile on the fanservice Your audience of people willing to shell out 35 bucks an episode determine what fanservice counts as. 2) Do something attetion getting: Awesome fight scenes, Utter Crack, Gorn, etc.. 3) Know your audience: If all that is selling right now is loli, Moe blob, and EPIC! awesomeness with a budget... remember fanboys willing to shell out 35 dollars and episode are paying for this and EPIC! is the expensive option. 4) That which is forgot goes away.
Point four brings us to the point of this essay (ignoring killing the dreaded first page of a thread)... the opener to your average anime is designed to get fanboys to buy the first two episode disk and finance your anime. Unless your dealing with say, Gantz, useful first episodes tend to be too slow to really garner the interest they need to survive. So you take a trick from Berserk and do an episode from the future... the series is then a vehicle to get to that point. You toss in something interesting enough at the end of the first episode that sets the tone for the series and basically forces people to remember it long enough to tune in for the second episode (Ranma 1/2). Or you can pander to a bit of type casting and set off a fanboy blitz... Like Familar of Zero.
It does get much better as a series (particularly towards the end of season 1)... but you have to remember that Louis is the social Omega at the school. If she was a chicken (poultry type) she'd have been near dead from beatings and stress by now. So she gets to the point in her life there is finally going to be someone lower on the food chain then her... and gets a mouthy random that doesn't follow orders and fights her more than most of the campus combined. This brings us into the territory of one of the most common cause of fanfiction: its almost good, but some things need major tweeking. Nothing results in fanfiction quite like good world building and plot points and execution that just bugs people.
Did I mention did thread page one, die?
As the shows are the ads to Japan, shows have to follow the attention getting rules of advertising rather than ones the shows in the West have to follow. In the West, the point of the show is to get people to sit down long enough and be involved enough that they sit through your commericals, as they wait for the shows. The more viewers your show can consistantly gather, the more likely that a large number of people are going to stay through the commericals... which means the advertising time during the episode is worth more. In Japan the more people your program (ad) can get to buy your episodes (and merchentise) the more you make off it... the ad slots during your ad are the channel's revenune generators. Granted the models are bleeding into each other a bit. For instance, feel free to correct me if you have more info, in America we only get the opertunity to buy seasons of shows from America after the anime sales from the late 90s. Before that it was basically only movies.
This matters because as anime is a commerical and not a sneaky trick to get people to sit through your sponsers ads, the tend towards following the rules of advertising: 1) Sex sells: pile on the fanservice Your audience of people willing to shell out 35 bucks an episode determine what fanservice counts as. 2) Do something attetion getting: Awesome fight scenes, Utter Crack, Gorn, etc.. 3) Know your audience: If all that is selling right now is loli, Moe blob, and EPIC! awesomeness with a budget... remember fanboys willing to shell out 35 dollars and episode are paying for this and EPIC! is the expensive option. 4) That which is forgot goes away.
Point four brings us to the point of this essay (ignoring killing the dreaded first page of a thread)... the opener to your average anime is designed to get fanboys to buy the first two episode disk and finance your anime. Unless your dealing with say, Gantz, useful first episodes tend to be too slow to really garner the interest they need to survive. So you take a trick from Berserk and do an episode from the future... the series is then a vehicle to get to that point. You toss in something interesting enough at the end of the first episode that sets the tone for the series and basically forces people to remember it long enough to tune in for the second episode (Ranma 1/2). Or you can pander to a bit of type casting and set off a fanboy blitz... Like Familar of Zero.
It does get much better as a series (particularly towards the end of season 1)... but you have to remember that Louis is the social Omega at the school. If she was a chicken (poultry type) she'd have been near dead from beatings and stress by now. So she gets to the point in her life there is finally going to be someone lower on the food chain then her... and gets a mouthy random that doesn't follow orders and fights her more than most of the campus combined. This brings us into the territory of one of the most common cause of fanfiction: its almost good, but some things need major tweeking. Nothing results in fanfiction quite like good world building and plot points and execution that just bugs people.
Did I mention did thread page one, die?