/jp/ - Otaku Culture

[Anonymous No.]

Take me back bros

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dxiTuPy9dQ

nostalgia thread?

[Anonymous No.]

https://youtu.be/SyKksAM2pFk
All NND medleys are based

[Anonymous No.]

>>41791800
no you can't go back to Constantinople!
been a long time gone old Constantinople!

[Anonymous No.]

>>41791800
There was something magical about this era. What happened to it?

[Anonymous No.]

>>41797590
The passage of time.

[Anonymous No.]

>>41797590
>What happened to it?
It died and it became corporate.

[Anonymous No.]

>>41797590
Shimo mostly stopped doing OtoMAD's and began drawing. I'd yell at him for being a botefag but he literally only started drawing with them to my knowledge barring a couple 2hu pictures prior which have since either been wiped or reuploaded elsewhere, and basically are just thumbnails for some of his stuff archived on Soundcloud and (I believe) a former Bandcamp. He still does originals and rearranges and they're good, but not really much in the way of medleys let alone with a NND theme. Like how most people didn't try to make these fuck-huge medleys celebrating niconico culture because it's an incredibly grand undertaking and 90% of the time nobody can pick up on the backing tracks that were made.

OtoWakka is probably the most famous recent example of a medley that finally got its due but you can browse tags for original medleys and see just how many hundreds have gone completely unused beyond a backing track, or how many exist and are just objectively shit. The brilliance in the medleys weren't in the songs themselves but how they tied together and were interwoven, and it quickly becomes clear a lot of people either forget that or thought if they slapped together a couple of songs with bad transitions they'd make it even half a big, to the point where ironically the YTPMV scene has mostly overtaken OtoMAD creators when it comes to creating medleys due to their nature of reaching out globally for medley collabs on a practically monthly basis, though I guess calling them two different scenes is a bit of a stretch as they're nearly a single circle on a metaphorical Venn Diagram but I digress.

[Anonymous No.]

>>41797590
People started taking their own shit seriously, with less things being shared purely for silly fun anymore. If it's not done for money, status, or an agenda, it doesn't often get promoted to popularity, since the people who are doing it for those types of things are putting out more effort and are therefore raising their chances of virality by specifically chasing it & just putting out more content to give them more chances. If it IS something that's done purely for fun (like in the old days) and finds success on accident, it DOES wind up a having that quality of genuineness, though the person behind it may then try to latch onto it and capitalize.

If you'll notice, a lot of the old viral content came from many different sources, from people who had one big short-lived content spike like Numa Numa or Boxxy, who then shrunk back into the anonymous masses. Even people with repeat hits like Neil Cicierega or TheWeebl would sink back into the crowd in between their viral art pieces. Now, the people who have the viral hits tend to begin maintaining a constant stream of content that continually gets promoted, so most of the content you see is stemming from (or influenced by!) a much smaller pool of people. This results in a narrower set of viewpoints & less chaotic culture from which people draw their content inspirations & aspirations. The old chaos has even been largely forgotten because most people in the present didn't even experience it, even here on 4chan which was a nexus for creativity on the Web until /pol/ hammered a large population of the site into copies of the same archetypal person, a mass-conformity process that's deadly for any creative community. This shows a narrowing of the breadth of creative basis from the Web of 2010 to the Web of 2020.

On top of that, hosts are enforcing these narrower norms in favor of ad safety for better-guaranteed company profits. Now, if a person is to make a NicoNicoDouga medley, they must be unshaken by the idea that it might get taken down for copyright violations or just never be seen because it's not following any of the ongoing trends that the host directs people toward because they're more lucrative. It used to not even be a question of whether or not the uploader is unshaken by those possibilities, as those used to just be thought of as the default state of things, the base state of things no matter what you put out. People might see it, people might not, and you would've lost nothing either way. Now, if no one sees it, that's suddenly a loss instead of being something you offered without expectation, since now, there IS a weight of expectations for one's content. There are those places where one doesn't really expect a paycheck, but TikToks are largely just made for the expectation of attention, while videos shared over Discord are typically clipped from people who uploaded them elsewhere, both still within this cultural ecosystem where their creative perspective is in a narrower set of viewpoints than were shared at the turn of the 2010s.

Capturing that old energy means circumventing ad-safety/popularity algorithms by either looking specifically for it, having it aggregated for you by OTHER people who looked specifically for it, or doing a cool creative project that gets its traction from being credited to a community rather than a personality (more of a "we" made this than a "he" made this). The latter is how a lot of people think about the old AMVs and NNDs, thinking of them more as products of their communities before actually wondering who made them. The same is even true of our own little community-owned project here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84fOsLdqDAM

[Anonymous No.]

>>41813695
I really don't like these posts about how people just did things because of selfless passion and desired anonymity, because those things are both completely at odds and completely untrue. Even the most known unknown japanese artist with influencing reaching across literally everywhere from VIP to the mainstream, Koronba himself, is still actively working on various games both as a developer and as a composer or even artist in some cases. And this is a man who quite literally changes out of accounts with every other passing season and has done so for nearly a decade now. And all of this ignores those who went from "just an average guy making songs on NND" to "Budoukan VocaP's" or "bands performing songs for popular anime" or "making an entire franchise".

100% of things put out publicly are put out with a call for attention, and denying it doesn't make you or any others sound more noble; it's kind of just pretentious at best and, ironically, incredibly narrow at worst. The era's are vastly different in how they process things, but fads of yesteryear are not innately deeper than fads of today, and there's no fault in chasing one to begin with.

[Anonymous No.]

>>41813695

[Anonymous No.]

>>41795461
why are phonenorms like this
crying, this makes me feel physically ill and disgusted

[Anonymous No.]

>>41821251
there's a difference between wanting people to focus on the thing you've put out, and wanting people to focus on you; he's talking about the latter, it seems you took it as the former

[Anonymous No.]

>>41791800

[Anonymous No.]

>>41828357
Eh, while that makes a lot more sense on a second read I'm still not of the camp that the latters all too bad either. I know it's ironic to say on an anonymous imageboard but I get why people would want to use the things they make to make their own brand, even if through others original works, though I agree more than half the time it leads to trash. I think my own point is that it's important for nostalgia not to be changed from looking back on the old times to hating the current times, though admittedly that point is kind of a worthless one to shout because I got anon wrong.

[Anonymous No.]

>>41821251

>Koronba

Someone approaching a working position or project they're interested in and listing viral hits on their resume is substantively different from creating a viral hit and then trying to use that to become famous with the masses.

They specifically mentioned Boxxy, Numa Numa, and old AMVs, even giving an example with the YouTube link they posted. It's kind of just there to be enjoyed. The Numa Numa guy even TRIED to sell out, but the culture wasn't conducive toward it. Hell, you hardly even hear the term "sell out" anymore, with its old definition now referring to someone simply building a brand. Doing it because you liked doing it was beautiful, and doing it because you'd create a marketable brand was selling out. It's no wonder there's been a mental health decline among the people creating content now as opposed to back then; the old guard of creators empirically proved that they would genuinely do it even without any monetary or public brand-building incentive, because those things weren't even known to exist for the things they were doing.

>>41832898

I don't think they ever said that it was actually bad, just that that's what happened to the "something magical" from the post they're replying to.

There are sort of big negative externalities to today's content machine, though, and it's not just that shitty ad-farm & attention-whore content have been democratized. Creative people are now damaging themselves and their art by having it come from a place where they MUST do it rather than ALWAYS coming from a place where they simply WANT TO do it, like how people can love the food at a restaurant but then they work at the restaurant and find that that ruins their enjoyment of their once-beloved food.

People dedicate themselves to content creation now because there's no boss, no schedule, people who have gotten rich doing it, a low skill floor, proximity to people they look up to, and the potential for becoming popular. There are now all these reasons for UNcreative people to join in, as well as reasons for passionate creative people to work overtime just to try peaking their heads above the sea of content instead of just making whatever whenever they enjoy regardless of its public brand-building potential. Marketability is a constraint that isn't actually necessary to making art, but it's a constraint applied much more broadly now than it was before, to the point that those who become best at it face mental health and stress problems that would've been unheard of or downright silly back when the main incentive for people to post was for fun.

It's something you hear echoed from a lot of the artists who've seen both eras, from ZUN's writings to Charlie "Moist Cr1TiKaL" to Bo Burnham, that more people are setting out to create things while disregarding their actual enjoyment of that creation, and it's damaging both the people and the art. There's also this little philosophical thing about how people are losing some authenticity in their identities in favor of building profiles for themselves, but that's its whole thing.

Albeit, there were negatives to the older style, too. The visibility of the content was not a mark of high quality or enjoyability, the people who made good shit posted much less often both because their typical incentive was enjoyment and because they had other shit to do, the non-requirement of marketability meant less people were making tools for content creation and therefore the available tools were more difficult to use and that would soft-limit or even discourage people's art, you had a lot more simple ear rape and irrelevant shock content, your content couldn't always find a community that enjoyed the things you like, and there was little in the way of trust or consistency when trying to find content you might enjoy.

If I was to weigh one era against the other, I'd say that now, there's more enjoyment and less boredom suffered by the averaged-out consumer but less enjoyment and greater suffering in store for the averaged-out creator. It's also sacrificed authentic enjoyment for marketability and exists after people have ruined a lot of jokes by taking them to unreasonable extremes, which are good and bad in their own ways. Beyond nostalgia, what people probably miss is that so much of it was shared initially to simply be enjoyed, and that shows.

[Anonymous No.]

>>41791800
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr3gncRbzX

[Anonymous No.]

>>41791800
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr3gncRbzX4

[Anonymous No.]

>>41791800
https://youtu.be/V_bQNPG2OyE

cirno's perfect math class is still essential viewing after all this time

[Anonymous No.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ZxIED5VJU

[Anonymous No.]

There were never ever enough of these dogfight animations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ1IC-TbH7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLTpJJAraG8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyfIJbdH44c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTT8VyXCiMA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xst8HMVm1ww

I know MinusT has taken up the torch but that doesn't so much fit the theme of taking us back

[Anonymous No.]

>>41791800
I cried

[Anonymous No.]

>>41791800
asuna is in that image.
what an awful aftertaste. my day is ruined.