Otakuism

IOSYS has a new flash out. Not as catchy as ” Ein, Zwei, Guten Morgen! “, but still one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen. Someone must be on crack over there. Maybe this would make sense if I ever played Touhou.

Well, Haruhi is now officially licensed. No surprise there. Turns out my prediction was wrong. Instead of Funimation, the relatively unknown Kadokawa USA got the show, with distribution by Bandai to help. This actually makes sense, as Kadokawa Shoten publishes the Haruhi novels in Japan, so why not distribute it’s own show?

I love the whole viral market campaign Kadokawa has used to publicize this announcement. Instead of some dry convention announcement, Kadokawa went right to the fans and let them figure it out. It’s amazing how focused the viral campaign seemed to be, not on normal fans in America, but to those hardcore ones who were already very familiar with Haruhi, had watched the fansubs, read the novel translations, etc. In fact, if it wasn’t for those hardcore fans, who would of really understood the announcement?

A lot of thanks to the work of pKjd and DarkMirage. Without their tirelessly going over the sourcecode and translating the text, we’d all still be confused. This whole thing was aimed right at the heart of the fandom, and relyed on the blogosphere to spread it. I like that. I like a company that targets the fanbase it already has, instead of going after casual fans who have never even heard of Haruhiism. I would love to see more stuff like this in the future, but this is probably a once in lifetime kind of thing. I can’t see any American companies pulling this off, understanding the fanbase this well. Can’t wait to see what Kadokawa has planned for Haruhi in the future.

In other news, the Rebellion continues.