I suspect that with the consolidation of players in the anime streaming and merchandise spaces in the west, we will see western values increasingly pushed into the medium, as many voices are unified into fewer bigger ones with increasing financial influence.
I'm not particularly excited for this as the big players have already demonstrated themselves to be conservative and censorious when it suits in other areas. I think we're on the edge of the hollywood-ization of the medium. Crunchyroll has already been apparently involved in the production of a bunch of programmes, and was directly responsible for High Guardian Spice, which I think few people have anything nice to say about.
That might be true if "western values" (whatever that's supposed to mean) were a primary determining factor in what anime Westerners chose to watch, and if it were still the 1990s when things like cigarettes, guns and LGBT relationships were routinely cut out of anime for Western release. But looking at the MyAnimeList page for Summer 2022 anime[0] I don't see signs of the "hollywoodization" you're talking about. The selling point for these services is immediacy, not censorship.
Right, but immediacy is already solved. The streaming side is solved by platforms already, and the translation side is solved by having a sweatshop of translators and maybe eventually algorithms to help, too. We've had immediacy for some time now, already.
Moving on, I don't think you will see changes prominently on anichart or MAL anytime soon; the point is that it's gradual and more subtle than that. Crunchyroll was already involved with 60 productions apparently. Conceptually, in a hypothetical "worst case", they could have been influencing artistic choices for each of those programs. We do know they did one: High Guardian Spice is a particularly explicit example of an anime deliberately constructed to western progressive specifications. A lot of people are rather unkind about it, but that's really immaterial; what it really is is a clumsy first attempt at end-to-end control of the anime pipeline from script, to production, to distribution. They didn't find a winning formula with it, but they'll keep trying because there's too much money on the table.
So, I do think that this change in tone is imminently about to happen. Weatern values have already been injected in other forms in localized content too, e.g. in our uptightness about certain types of expressions of sexuality (e.g. that which is perceived to be pervy; e.g, the infilling of "boob-windows" and covering of midriffs in localized games), and with activist translators who deliberately whitewash phrases they find problematic and also who select progressive translation choices over neutral ones.
The bottom line to me is that the money men have zero interest in the integrity of the mediums in which they dabble. As you note, there's precedent; in the 90's, it was 4kids dubs which routinely butchered shows, sometimes extremely. The nature of the interference will change with the standards of the day, but the fundamentals don't.
I think the point GP made is that it doesn't matter what anime Westerners choose to watch, it matters what anime the fewer number of players want to license.
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I personally don't think that will be an issue because I don't see Netflix turning down an anime that Crunchyroll refuses to carry...
I didn't realize there was an anime adaption of that; I read the first few chapters of the manga a while ago and my impression was that it was a "sex comedy" that was neither sexy nor funny; does it get better?
In addition; Per wikipedia, Tokyo MX and SUN both canceled their airing of it as well, so it's not strictly western sensibilities that it is failing.
At the moment the extent of it is mostly that sometimes dubs or subtitles are changed by overeager translators trying to leave their mark, in the process changing the meaning or intent of the dialog. Rough examples that come to mind are changing jokes that can potentially be interpreted as sexist or even less justifiable cases of changing dialog for the sake of adding in meme language like "sus". There are also cases of trying to get rid of features of japanese like honorifics because of the samewhat strange assumption that western audiences can't be expected to understand them, despite them being pretty normal to the anime community. Personally I also miss the approach that older fan subtitles used to have of including TL notes for things that don't necessarily translate cleanly, it was a nice way to respect the original material.
For now, it doesn't really have too much of an effect since Crunchyroll and Netflix's subtitles already don't really have a good reputation. But it's certainly a sign that if they could get away with it, they'd definitely do more.
> sometimes dubs or subtitles are changed by overeager translators trying to leave their mark, in the process changing the meaning or intent of the dialog.
This is a meme that has mostly been spread by people who don't really speak Japanese, but have picked up a few words and are convinced they know better than bilingual professional translators.
> adding in meme language like "sus"
I remember seeing this example making the rounds -- IIRC, it was a translation of the word きょどる, which is a slang term that was coined fairly recently (90s). It's a contraction of 挙動不審, which means roughly "acting/moving suspiciously as though you're trying to hide something". So not only does it accurately convey the meaning, but turning a slang Japanese term into a non-slang English translation would be less faithful to the original intent.
Of course, the anime fans who complained about the translation don't know this, because the word isn't in any of their Japanese-English dictionary sites, and they can't read well enough to just Google it. On top of that, many of them have gotten so accustomed to stilted translations that they think the stiltedness is somehow a reflection of the original Japanese dialogue itself, and therefore any translations that sound more natural in English must be somehow "inauthentic".
And certain anime fans are absolutely convinced that "progressive" values are entirely unheard of in Japan, and therefore could only have been introduced by "Western influence". So they will seize on any shred of evidence that seems to support this narrative, no matter how flimsy.
So you're saying "bilingual professional translators" are doing a better job when they translate the Dragon Maid common yuri trope line "But we're both girls..." into a strong statement the human protagonist is straight and as I recall would never be interested in dragons? When Jamie Marchi who made that change for the dub admits to it: https://archive.ph/0XeRq This was a major change to the entire tone of the relationship that was going to develop between the two main characters of the work.
You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century. But claiming our complaints about major and minor changes to works by Crunchyroll, the entity which officially bought Right Stuff Inc. are bogus do not stand up to examination.
And needless to say there's a lot more where the above came from. For another major corporate example see Seven Seas which just can't stop censoring and altering the work of the "bilingual professional translators" who are native Japanese speakers they hire and credit who are not at all happy about it, for doing that silently and without consulting them reflects on their professionalism.
Without knowing the context, I would tentatively agree that your example seems more like a mistranslation. Nevertheless, in my experience those tend to be the exception rather than the rule. I've seen a lot more cases of subtitles (both professional and fansubs) erring by being overly stiff and literal than the opposite.
> You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century.
Well, "sus" has been on Urban Dictionary for about 20 years, and Wiktionary has a citation from 1972, so it's not like it's some radically new term that is likely to come and go in a short period of time. Besides, plenty of creative works use language that becomes dated over time, and that doesn't make them bad.
"Without knowing the context, I would tentatively agree that your example seems more like a mistranslation."
What does the context matter when the person who made the change, not mistranslation, freely admits to it!
How can you claim to be an authority about these issues when you're not aware of what may be the single worst example of it, and have no interest in investigating this when it's brought to your attention?
I think this comment reflects a bunch of differences in our perspectives that I don't really feel inclined to spend a lot of time unpacking.
Suffice it to say that in my opinion, context always matters (which also means I'm hesitant to read anything nefarious into a single tweet snipped from a conversation), and I reject the idea that a "change" and a "mistranslation" are categorically different things, rather than points on a continuum. And if you're implying that anyone who has knowledge relevant to this subject must automatically be outraged enough to "investigate", then I disagree with that too.
I don't buy it. For better or worse Japanese studios have proved time and time again to not really care about the west. Just look at how expensive and hard it is to import their (usually not localized) stuff.
Japan lives in its own isolation bubble and western values are of no concern to most Japanese people.
That seems rather out of touch? The vast majority of TV broadcast anime series every season are licensed for simulcast by streaming services in North America and that has been the case for several years now. At a casual glance at the TV tab of https://myanimelist.net/anime/season/2022/spring , I think at least 2/3 are licensed by western streaming services. There's enough revenue that they can't afford not to care.
To date I've only seen smaller budget, little fish studios churn out woke propaganda that performs poorly. In the past, they were the same small-time studios that produced knock-off Gundam, 3d render shounen, unremarkable isekai anime #59, etc.
I don't think "woke propaganda" is a thing in Japan, so it would surprise me if smaller anime studios (which, presumably, have less margin for taking risks) would be "churning out" anything of the sort, as opposed to whatever was most profitable in the domestic market for the least cost. Can you give examples?
Woke propaganda? I haven’t seen an absolute ton of anime, but I’ve got nearly 200 items on my list, and I don’t think I’ve watched anything that could qualify. What are you coming across that I’m not?
I live in Japan and one of the most refreshing things about it is that I have never encountered anything that represents even a faint understanding of what "wokeness" is, so I'm curious who these woke studios could possibly be marketing to, if they exist at all.
Netflix and other streaming platforms have made inroads into anime production committees, but you are correct in that so far very little overall impact is seen in the industry. The Japanese domestic market is still the chief driver of demand for new anime, and success overseas doesn't seem to really inspire a response from most of the anime industry. I wouldn't say they're "isolated", since the market has been penetrated by the west, it's more like they're indifferent to western money.
I think Aniplex is in a position to change this, but the difficulty is going to be luring the studios since money doesn't seem to have as big an impact as one would expect.
What might happen is a return of the original Anime market and (hopefully) more steady pay for animators.
The Japanese domestic market is dominated mostly by Manga, Light Novels, Visual Novel, (and now Gacha games) anyways, with Anime mostly being a cherry on-top for those things. Occasionally there will be a good adaptation or a good original Anime product but the industry’s been suffering a little bit. This new cash infusion might be healthy and allow for enough animators to be paid a livable wage that lets them go off and do crazy adventurous things as they advance in their careers.
The money is definitely trending that way. The Association of Japanese Animators publishes yearly data on industry trends [1], and their data shows a stagnant domestic market and a booming overseas market from 2014 onwards. International revenues overtook domestic in 2020.
However, focusing purely on anime ignores the rest of the creative pipeline. The most popular anime series are based on manga or novels, and even though the western licensing business is growing again, it's still small enough that manga and novels only get published in English if it's already a hit in Japan. That may help keep anime distinctly Japanese even with all this money flowing in from around the world.
Manga is also done by one or (maybe) two people, rather than a committee of like 50+. This means you get a clear vision and individuality shines through.
I hope they never get any real influence and are recognized for the useless gatekeepers they are. Crunchyroll, for example, throws some of the worst Tumblrina translators at pretty much every show I've seen from them. They inject their own loser personality into the characters by completely changing the meaning of their words. Not only does it alienate people who haven't really watched much anime from getting into it, but it also prevents learners from getting good top-down language listening practice. Once it's translated by Funimation, Crunchyroll or Netflix, I don't think I've ever seen it get properly translated by a fansub group. They are a blight that to disappear into obscurity.
It's not just going to be hollywood-ization or western values, this is the flavour of globalism we're getting in most of the world for the current age.
I don't like it, and the only thing I can really do about it is create my own stories and art in my time off when I feel lonely/unheard and share it with the people I'm allowed to be in contact with.
It seems to be enforced by the credit card companies and processors, who likely charge more to process transactions for companies that involve pornography. (Probably due to the spurious chargebacks.)
Nothing to do with transaction risk. Congress and the executive branch have a myriad of ways to harm a large business if they don't get what they want.
Visa's issues with religious fundamentalists started in the Tipper Gore days. During the Bush presidency it was nearly impossible for a porn site to get a US payment processor.
I remember having to slice open part of the catalog to get to the adult section. That must have been 20 years ago now. I'm actually impressed that they managed to survive the transition to streaming.
Sony has been strongly against it for some time. They have previously demanded that game studios like XSEED censor their games to allow a western playstation release (e.g. senran kagura's "intimacy mode") as part of an effort to clean up. A cursory search reveals this had happened to a number of titles. I've seen many examples of Nintendo doing the same.
It's disappointing that Sony et al feel that they have a right to control the user in this way, albeit unsurprising. Fundamentally, consoles aren't open platforms, and principled user rights advocates shouldn't support them.
They can make - aka pay for - whatever games they want, but in terms of allowed software, ideally the platform should be an open system instead of one with a hard whitelist. That would be best for user freedom and autonomy. I'm not discussing the online store side of things either, they can run that as they wish, and that can be their whitelist for all I care.
Countries have laws and ratings systems that govern content. We don't need to be subject to the patronizing whims of corporations to boot, creating useless, single-purpose, locked-down hardware and moralizing on our behalf.
Nobody has any obligation to make their platform an open platform, nor any obligation to you besides what they're compelled to do by law and their ethics. Clearly Right Stuf has decided for themselves that the benefits of being bought out by Sony is more valuable to them than maintaining an open platform, and that is their right. You are subject to the patronizing whims of Sony, because you're trying to buy from Sony, and Sony has no obligation to do things that you want just because you feel entitled to it.
If you want an open platform, then please either patron somewhere that wants to be an open platform; lobby governments around the world to mandate that platforms should be open; convince Sony executives that it would be in their interest to make their platform open; or make your own open platform if a suitable one doesn't exist, and try to sustain it with people who want what you want. If enough of those people don't exist, then it should become clear to you that your opinion is yours alone, and that you're entitled to exactly nothing.
Typically the line for consoles for publishing and allowing releases is drawn at AO only games. Nintendo for example Published the M rated Eternal Darkness, and allowed Manhunt 2 to release on the Wii, despite political pushback including from senators through the CCFC. At the same time I don't believe they've ever produced anything M rated.
It's common to joke about the puritanism coming from the major-corporation side of these acquisitions, but in fact Funimation's ex-CEO Gen Fukunaga, years before Funimation was acquired by Sony, himself founded a Christian film studio and hired former Senator Rick Santorum to be CEO [0]. The two companies shared office space [1] and at least one common staff member outside of leadership.
Of the venture, Santorum said in 2013, "This is a tough business, this is something that we’re stepping out, and the Devil for a long, long time has had this, these screens, for his playground and he isn’t going to give it up easily.” [2]
I'm old enough to have ordered anime from their catalog, back when your choices for Anime were driving to a big city that had a specialty store, getting it from a catalog, or copying fansubs on VHS tapes.
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I forgot "random anime tapes that got thrown in the children's section of your pre-blockbuster VHS rental store." as another way to find anime.
A lot of my favorite anime still come in from Hidive / Sentai Filmworks. I really enjoyed "Ya Boy Kongming" for example. And Sentai Filmworks are the current owners of When they Cry (2006) and Fate/Stay (2006).
I'm definitely worried about consolidation wiping out the competition. Then again, I hope people can give Hidive / Ya Boy Kongming a try. Its basically an idol anime crossed with Chinese Romance-of-the-Three-Kingdoms / Zhuge Liang as the manager, and my favorite anime this year so far. Give the first episode a try, there's ~3 songs in there. If the songs match your musical tastes, you'll probably enjoy the show. And yes, that's a Liu Bei reference. (Liu Bei visits Zhuge Liang 3 times before the young tactician agrees to join Liu Bei's cause. This parallel's young Eiko's journey as an idol, as she sings three times before Zhuge Liang is convinced to help her). Its actually an excellent mix of subtle Three Kingdoms stories with a good idol anime.
Crunchyroll/Funimation merging, and Sony/Aniplex all being involved here is convenient for sure, I like a lot of what they do. But anime has a lot of niches, and one mega-company will inevitably have blind spots over time. Most of my favorites are in Crunchyroll / Funimation and even Aniplex (Ex: Oddtaxi, Madoka, Dragonball Z/Super).
Ya Boy Kongming looks fantastic and I absolutely plan on subscribing to HIDIVE later this year. I have a lot of Sentai Blu-rays and I hope they continue to license good shows.
Hidive's catalogue is definitely smaller compared to its competition but especially if you are after slice of life type shows, it has pretty good coverage. (I used to have both Crunchyroll and Hidive, but dropped Crunchyroll when they raised their price.)
Honestly for some reason, I'm finding myself watching less and less anime anyways and instead I'm bit more inclined pursuing different activities. (I used to watch at least 5 each season, but only anime I'm watching this season is Made in Abyss...)
Here you're saying the founders and owners of Right Stuff Inc. should have very limited rights to cash out, to turn their illiquid shares of their company into money. My father used to have a subspecialty in this, it's very hard for typical private companies, so much so he'd generally get a 1/3 cut for accomplishing it.
One very real alternative is just shutting down when the founder get too old to run it.
The market for buying small companies like Right Stuff Inc. is small and very particular and peculiar.
To sell it to anyone else but a large or giant company like Sony/Crunchyroll is going to be hard as I said. For what we as consumers would like you'd need to find another otaku or group of them who are wealthy and/or trustworthy enough to pay in installments out of ongoing gross profits, and you'd have to trust their business sense.
You'd want someone like my father to do some of the footwork and all of deal making to avoid distractions from running the business and lowering its value. Or you have to find an interested big player of which there just aren't very many. And here this clearly fits in with Sony's previous actions in America like buying Funimation and Crunchyroll, but unfortunately they're likely one of the worst case buyers.
From the viewpoint of the owners, Wikipedia says Shawne Kleckner who's still with it is 50 and the company was founded in 1987, 35 years is a long time to be running a company. Wven if it started out as a shell to buy and resell telescopes, pretty soon they started bringing the classic Astro Boy to the direct to home market and in due course became a competitive general mail order reseller as well as localizer. When TokyoPop nuked their reselling arm after Y2K they became the highest profile one as far as I know, not counting increasingly untrustworthy Amazon. Which Right Stuff regularly also uses as a platform while doing their own fulfillment.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI'm not particularly excited for this as the big players have already demonstrated themselves to be conservative and censorious when it suits in other areas. I think we're on the edge of the hollywood-ization of the medium. Crunchyroll has already been apparently involved in the production of a bunch of programmes, and was directly responsible for High Guardian Spice, which I think few people have anything nice to say about.
[0]https://myanimelist.net/anime/season
Moving on, I don't think you will see changes prominently on anichart or MAL anytime soon; the point is that it's gradual and more subtle than that. Crunchyroll was already involved with 60 productions apparently. Conceptually, in a hypothetical "worst case", they could have been influencing artistic choices for each of those programs. We do know they did one: High Guardian Spice is a particularly explicit example of an anime deliberately constructed to western progressive specifications. A lot of people are rather unkind about it, but that's really immaterial; what it really is is a clumsy first attempt at end-to-end control of the anime pipeline from script, to production, to distribution. They didn't find a winning formula with it, but they'll keep trying because there's too much money on the table.
So, I do think that this change in tone is imminently about to happen. Weatern values have already been injected in other forms in localized content too, e.g. in our uptightness about certain types of expressions of sexuality (e.g. that which is perceived to be pervy; e.g, the infilling of "boob-windows" and covering of midriffs in localized games), and with activist translators who deliberately whitewash phrases they find problematic and also who select progressive translation choices over neutral ones.
The bottom line to me is that the money men have zero interest in the integrity of the mediums in which they dabble. As you note, there's precedent; in the 90's, it was 4kids dubs which routinely butchered shows, sometimes extremely. The nature of the interference will change with the standards of the day, but the fundamentals don't.
[edit]
I personally don't think that will be an issue because I don't see Netflix turning down an anime that Crunchyroll refuses to carry...
Oh hey! I have a litmus test handy! Got a citation for Netflix carrying "Ishuzoku Reviewers"?
In addition; Per wikipedia, Tokyo MX and SUN both canceled their airing of it as well, so it's not strictly western sensibilities that it is failing.
For now, it doesn't really have too much of an effect since Crunchyroll and Netflix's subtitles already don't really have a good reputation. But it's certainly a sign that if they could get away with it, they'd definitely do more.
This is a meme that has mostly been spread by people who don't really speak Japanese, but have picked up a few words and are convinced they know better than bilingual professional translators.
> adding in meme language like "sus"
I remember seeing this example making the rounds -- IIRC, it was a translation of the word きょどる, which is a slang term that was coined fairly recently (90s). It's a contraction of 挙動不審, which means roughly "acting/moving suspiciously as though you're trying to hide something". So not only does it accurately convey the meaning, but turning a slang Japanese term into a non-slang English translation would be less faithful to the original intent.
Of course, the anime fans who complained about the translation don't know this, because the word isn't in any of their Japanese-English dictionary sites, and they can't read well enough to just Google it. On top of that, many of them have gotten so accustomed to stilted translations that they think the stiltedness is somehow a reflection of the original Japanese dialogue itself, and therefore any translations that sound more natural in English must be somehow "inauthentic".
And certain anime fans are absolutely convinced that "progressive" values are entirely unheard of in Japan, and therefore could only have been introduced by "Western influence". So they will seize on any shred of evidence that seems to support this narrative, no matter how flimsy.
You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century. But claiming our complaints about major and minor changes to works by Crunchyroll, the entity which officially bought Right Stuff Inc. are bogus do not stand up to examination.
And needless to say there's a lot more where the above came from. For another major corporate example see Seven Seas which just can't stop censoring and altering the work of the "bilingual professional translators" who are native Japanese speakers they hire and credit who are not at all happy about it, for doing that silently and without consulting them reflects on their professionalism.
> You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century.
Well, "sus" has been on Urban Dictionary for about 20 years, and Wiktionary has a citation from 1972, so it's not like it's some radically new term that is likely to come and go in a short period of time. Besides, plenty of creative works use language that becomes dated over time, and that doesn't make them bad.
What does the context matter when the person who made the change, not mistranslation, freely admits to it!
How can you claim to be an authority about these issues when you're not aware of what may be the single worst example of it, and have no interest in investigating this when it's brought to your attention?
Suffice it to say that in my opinion, context always matters (which also means I'm hesitant to read anything nefarious into a single tweet snipped from a conversation), and I reject the idea that a "change" and a "mistranslation" are categorically different things, rather than points on a continuum. And if you're implying that anyone who has knowledge relevant to this subject must automatically be outraged enough to "investigate", then I disagree with that too.
I think Aniplex is in a position to change this, but the difficulty is going to be luring the studios since money doesn't seem to have as big an impact as one would expect.
The Japanese domestic market is dominated mostly by Manga, Light Novels, Visual Novel, (and now Gacha games) anyways, with Anime mostly being a cherry on-top for those things. Occasionally there will be a good adaptation or a good original Anime product but the industry’s been suffering a little bit. This new cash infusion might be healthy and allow for enough animators to be paid a livable wage that lets them go off and do crazy adventurous things as they advance in their careers.
However, focusing purely on anime ignores the rest of the creative pipeline. The most popular anime series are based on manga or novels, and even though the western licensing business is growing again, it's still small enough that manga and novels only get published in English if it's already a hit in Japan. That may help keep anime distinctly Japanese even with all this money flowing in from around the world.
[1] https://aja.gr.jp/english/japan-anime-data
I don't like it, and the only thing I can really do about it is create my own stories and art in my time off when I feel lonely/unheard and share it with the people I'm allowed to be in contact with.
I'm usually active in spacebattles, at least the old-style fanfic writers do still output gems now and then. Like Worm and some others.
Visa's issues with religious fundamentalists started in the Tipper Gore days. During the Bush presidency it was nearly impossible for a porn site to get a US payment processor.
Every government does this.
Who are an unofficial arm of the US government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
Apparently they're also targeting extreme violence too, which I hadn't heard about. https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/playstation-censorship...
It's disappointing that Sony et al feel that they have a right to control the user in this way, albeit unsurprising. Fundamentally, consoles aren't open platforms, and principled user rights advocates shouldn't support them.
Do they have to produce content they don’t want to have a hand in making?
Countries have laws and ratings systems that govern content. We don't need to be subject to the patronizing whims of corporations to boot, creating useless, single-purpose, locked-down hardware and moralizing on our behalf.
If you want an open platform, then please either patron somewhere that wants to be an open platform; lobby governments around the world to mandate that platforms should be open; convince Sony executives that it would be in their interest to make their platform open; or make your own open platform if a suitable one doesn't exist, and try to sustain it with people who want what you want. If enough of those people don't exist, then it should become clear to you that your opinion is yours alone, and that you're entitled to exactly nothing.
Of the venture, Santorum said in 2013, "This is a tough business, this is something that we’re stepping out, and the Devil for a long, long time has had this, these screens, for his playground and he isn’t going to give it up easily.” [2]
[0] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2014-01-24 (second Q&A)
[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2013/08/02/rick-santorum-chr...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R63yutg7cjo
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I forgot "random anime tapes that got thrown in the children's section of your pre-blockbuster VHS rental store." as another way to find anime.
A lot of my favorite anime still come in from Hidive / Sentai Filmworks. I really enjoyed "Ya Boy Kongming" for example. And Sentai Filmworks are the current owners of When they Cry (2006) and Fate/Stay (2006).
I'm definitely worried about consolidation wiping out the competition. Then again, I hope people can give Hidive / Ya Boy Kongming a try. Its basically an idol anime crossed with Chinese Romance-of-the-Three-Kingdoms / Zhuge Liang as the manager, and my favorite anime this year so far. Give the first episode a try, there's ~3 songs in there. If the songs match your musical tastes, you'll probably enjoy the show. And yes, that's a Liu Bei reference. (Liu Bei visits Zhuge Liang 3 times before the young tactician agrees to join Liu Bei's cause. This parallel's young Eiko's journey as an idol, as she sings three times before Zhuge Liang is convinced to help her). Its actually an excellent mix of subtle Three Kingdoms stories with a good idol anime.
Crunchyroll/Funimation merging, and Sony/Aniplex all being involved here is convenient for sure, I like a lot of what they do. But anime has a lot of niches, and one mega-company will inevitably have blind spots over time. Most of my favorites are in Crunchyroll / Funimation and even Aniplex (Ex: Oddtaxi, Madoka, Dragonball Z/Super).
Honestly for some reason, I'm finding myself watching less and less anime anyways and instead I'm bit more inclined pursuing different activities. (I used to watch at least 5 each season, but only anime I'm watching this season is Made in Abyss...)
One very real alternative is just shutting down when the founder get too old to run it.
To sell it to anyone else but a large or giant company like Sony/Crunchyroll is going to be hard as I said. For what we as consumers would like you'd need to find another otaku or group of them who are wealthy and/or trustworthy enough to pay in installments out of ongoing gross profits, and you'd have to trust their business sense.
You'd want someone like my father to do some of the footwork and all of deal making to avoid distractions from running the business and lowering its value. Or you have to find an interested big player of which there just aren't very many. And here this clearly fits in with Sony's previous actions in America like buying Funimation and Crunchyroll, but unfortunately they're likely one of the worst case buyers.
From the viewpoint of the owners, Wikipedia says Shawne Kleckner who's still with it is 50 and the company was founded in 1987, 35 years is a long time to be running a company. Wven if it started out as a shell to buy and resell telescopes, pretty soon they started bringing the classic Astro Boy to the direct to home market and in due course became a competitive general mail order reseller as well as localizer. When TokyoPop nuked their reselling arm after Y2K they became the highest profile one as far as I know, not counting increasingly untrustworthy Amazon. Which Right Stuff regularly also uses as a platform while doing their own fulfillment.