Post
by lost in thought » Fri Oct 11, 2013 3:23 pm
@ultimateemail5000:
"You know, I just don't get it, like everyone else on this forum. Yeah there is a fanbase out there that doesn't understand. Even if you try explaining it to them, they still don't get it and it really pisses me off in so many directions."
...And like everyone else in this thread, you're contributing to why it's such a sad example of the fanbase. As it's been said many times in this thread, most notably by MarcFBR, it's not that they're failing to understand some fundamental truth that you're trying to impart upon them, as though the unclean masses are fighting against being educated-- it's that they just don't care. They either understand or they don't, and they simply don't care. And why should they? Funimation has offered the audience a perfectly serviceable product for a reasonable price.
"I just don't know why Funimation has the balls to release everything Dragon Ball related in it's right ratio, [...]"
Might be a considered business decision. Nobody but me and like two other people actually gave a good fuck about DragonBall in the first place, and essentially Funimation's been trying to make it work on the coat-tails of Z's success for years now, more likely than not they decided to leave it be and try to catch sales on the upswing.
"[...] but when it comes to Z, they gotta beat a dead horse into the ground so hard that they just slightly beat it just to make it suffer. Damn you Funi, if there was another option that wasn't insane amount of money to throw down for the sries in 4:3 I'd just buy that. But I am stuck with these sets."
I think this about sums this whole thing up pretty well. You're essentially trying to paint yourself as the victim of the cold, unfeeling machinations of a business that is actually trying to go out of its way to hurt you. The problem is, well, they're not out to get you and you're certainly not a victim-- well, a victim of their treatment, anyway. You're just not. Lets be perfectly clear about this, while you and everyone else are desperately looking for reasons to complain, you're ignoring the fact that Funimation has been going out of its way to cater to their core audience for years now, in fact just about everything we know and love today about modern anime, especially modern anime produced by Funimation with now-standard features that emphasize a greater level of fidelity, was probably spurned on very heavily by the core fans who demanded a better product.
The thing is, though, DragonBall Z isn't just 'our' thing, there are two very distinct audiences here which are interested in the product. We're not the only ones interested in it, nor are we the only ones buying it by a long shot, but for damn sure we aren't the ones buying it in the largest numbers either. Rather, we're dwarfed quite dramatically by the casual market everyone seems to despise so vitriolically, that simply wants a passable product at a great price. Despite this, not only does Funi continue to cater to us explicitly with their releases, but implicitly as well with their now ostensibly time honored practices of maintaining features (pretty much across their entire catalog no less) which are both largely only relevant to and appeal only to us. Despite this, and while Funimation could be prioritizing their profits over solidarity with their core fanbase, what did they do following the release of the Orange Bricks? They released Kai and the Dragon Boxes, two products which could but only appeal to us, and despite this we found excuses to bitch. It's been suggested many times in this thread up till now, but you know what those casual fans were doing, though? Ensuring that the Orange Bricks continued to sell like gang-busters, happily purchasing a distinctly inferior product in massive numbers, to the point that a retail giant like Walmart has gone out of their way to cater to them more directly with different packaging options.
But, no, you want a product that's both high quality and cheap, right? That might be the biggest irony of all here. To start with, Kai and the Dragon Box releases were hardly all that expensive for the product being offered to us. But they even took that a step further by starting the Levels sets, which were done both larger and cheaper than their standard half sets. You know what happened there? Nobody bought them. Funimation tried to follow up two releases geared specifically to us with a new releases geared specifically to us, and we didn't fucking buy them. We can make all the excuses we want, but at the end of the day we didn't buy them and now they're going back to an audience that happily took what they had to offer the last time and made it a huge success for them, because not only does that audience exist, it represents big money in a way that we just don't.
At the end of the day, we're the problem here. If you're stuck with anything, you're stuck with a core fanbase which has essentially manufactured its own discontent and the problem is, well, this thread represents a startling lack of self-awareness of that reality to a degree that it's actually rather sad. If we had actually bough the levels sets, had actually been reliable enough to support them with their efforts to produce quality product aimed at us, we wouldn't be here now and these Orange Brick equivalents wouldn't even be a point of discussion. Yet here we are. We're the reason we can't have nice things.
Deal with it.
Forget the stupid lazy and put pressure on it from 
