Disappointed Blog 06 : Holy Shit Kadokawa

Sorry that I said I'd update a new blog post with Q&A session. That has to wait because this is big and I feel like I really want to say something about it.

The director of the show Kemono Friend, Tatsuki, has tweeted saying it was urgent but he got removed from the team of the show's second season by Kadokawa (probably will be replaced by Kadokawa's director of choice) and he's also disappointed about it.

This caused a huge uprising among Japanese twitter users. The Kadokawa term became trending on twitter over night, and people compared Kadokawa's decision to be even worse than what Konami had done to Kojima.

If you don't know about Kemono Friends, hear me out. It's epic.

Kemono Friends started out as a browser game (like Kantai Collection, Granblue Fantasy, Fate/Grand Order and such) about animals in the "Japari Park" being turned into humanoid form and the player can collect them as friends and bring along to fight the enemies.

The low budget anime was there to promote the game, but it's funny that before the anime even aired its first episode, the game was shut down due to unpopularity.

So the anime became one of the animes that no one cared about. It looks the worst of that season, and its purpose is to promote the game that was already dead and closed. It's all for nothing, but the director Tatsuki still sticked to it as it's his works and he had to deliver. Eventually after some episodes had aired, people began to look at it and was impressed by its unique crappy yet good enough artstyle, and the story that anyone could judge instantly that it's a kids' show, may have contained some deep and dark root of philosophical twist.

The show bursted out from being a nobody-care underdog kids show that looks the worst in the season to straight up best selling anime towards the later episodes. Artists and fans became obsessed and rooted for it in a phenomenon level. Fanarts everywhere. Doujinshis everywhere. Memes everywhere. DVD sells like mad. Director Tatsuki's love in his works really showed how much his team cared for a forgotten project. A wasted piece of indy project had evolved into a gold mine for the company.

That being said, Kadokawa now decided to remove director Tatsuki from the Kemono Friends' second season team. They will replace him with some other director may be for the sake of "making this new director popular by putting him on an already famous project" like Kadokawa always does.

This caused a big outrage on the twitter like I mentioned. Kadokawa's share is now 10% lower and is continuing to go lower.

What I don't understand is Japanese's such low respect to projects' director in general. This is like the director built up his fame from the ground, like literally 0 or even worse considering that the game it's meant to promote was already gone and they did not care about this project as anyone could see how low the budget was. He made it with what he had all the way up to 90 and then Kadokawa just went oh look you leave the rest 10 to us, now move your ass bitch. It's basically taking his beloved child away from him, the original creator.

And this is not the first time this kind of thing happens. I have faced it myself. 

Osawari Island project that I worked on was going so well and suddenly the director got replaced, things got weirder, questionable decisions were made, and less than a year after that the game was shut down.

Circle of Mana had no problem until suddenly they decided to change the director and after that, they released new higher rarity tier gacha characters that basically worth the same value in quality and people got mad, and half a year later the game was shut down.

Granblue Fantasy's rampaging rise in popularity was ongoing and suddenly they decided to change the director and nobody was happy about it. Now its popularity is shaken by the other games and the anime was kinda crappy.

And never forget what happened between Konami and Hideo Kojima.

Like... it's something. You know where this is going, right? Japanese gaming/anime industry has so low respect for directors. The companies can just hammer down decisions to take away the projects that directors made them famous from them and replace with some other dudes that is like their favorite sons so they could profit from directing an already made popular series.

If this similar thing happens to the Western industry without a good explanation, the project would be boycotted. Imagine Jeff Kaplan being removed from Overwatch team and got replaced with someone else without any further good reasoning. That will break the internet.

I ranted about this on my twitter as well. All the artists I know already said something about this on twitter. It's a disaster, and everyone is now hope for the doom of Kadokawa so they learn a lesson from this decision. I decided to post about this to help raising this story an awareness.

So what do you guys think about this happening? I don't think I have that many Kemono Friends' fans as my patron but that doesn't matter. The point is that a company took own of a project a director made famous and paid him no respect.

And if you have questions to ask in my Q&A, leave yours HERE and I will answer them in the next blog.