I think Manganimatsu's problem is that they don't tend to be personally invested in their releases. I'm not saying they don't put as much work in because I'm sure the team there are all run just as ragged as anyone else and it's not fair to insinuate otherwise, but there's a definite disconnect between what I feel when I'm looking at a Manganimatsu release and an AL one.
The Manga team are salesmen, selling a product to people they are not. They have a firm idea of their target market (and have said as much on many occasions) - geeky, teen-to-twenty-something guys without too much disposable income. The kind of market where adding a couple of extra quid onto a release might not be make or break but actual CEs are a very hard sell. This is abundantly clear in Jerome's anguished complaints about how we ask for something but then don't buy it - he's trying his best to understand 'us', but he isn't going to pretend he's one of us. He genuinely enjoys geeky things but he doesn't 'get' why we don't want BD banners on our art boxes and random chapter stops on our discs; this stuff is Product to him, not his core hobby (and as Sakamoto showed, he doesn't need to obey the same restrictions we do in order to partake). As someone outside his core demographic in pretty much every way, I'm not being targeted and don't buy his releases. I'm not the kind of person who can be swayed by a folded poster and a couple of art cards, but whatever research his team did apparently came up with the idea that as serpantino said, someone out there will see those goodies and believe they're getting a slightly better release.
(I feel a bit sorry for Manganimatsu in this debate; I'm on their side but one of their biggest critics...)
With AL, Andrew successfully comes across as a crazy fan releasing shows he personally likes even when it makes little commercial sense (my apologies to Andrew, but The Tatami Galaxy is one of the best shows ever and I mean it affectionately). They cater to all kinds of demographics willy-nilly instead of shutting more than half the market out with their marketing talk. That personal touch may not rake in much cash, but it does earn a few respect points. Andrew fundamentally knows how to make things fans want because he too lusts after chipboard and an end to glitchy PAL conversions, and that trickles down through the company. If he releases discs with bad chapter stops, we'll all go nuts at him and he'll ensure that they get proper chapter stops; we don't expect to still be moaning about the same thing year in, year out. If his company makes a bad release, he'll take responsibility for it instead of venting about how his own customers are all selfish nutjobs who don't know how easy they have it. If we ask for special editions, he'll say why they don't make sense instead of impotently subtweeting about how fans should **** his ****. I'm a grown up and I don't tend to give my money to people who unreasonably disrespect me, so I've come to view the two companies in very different lights.
Manga doesn't have that same level of freedom or craziness at the top end - it's a more traditional business and functions more as a distributor for other markets than an independent anime company able to put its own content together on a regular basis. Even if Jerome agrees with us on a personal level about some of the persistent Manga failures, it would appear that he's unable to make a business case for catering to our requests over just blindly continuing with the way things are currently done and turning a profit. That's probably not his fault. I think Manga fill an important niche in the UK because someone has to get Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh! and the like into the eager hands of people collecting those titles, and they flat out have the best distribution at that level. I do just sigh and import when they start sniffing around titles I like, though, because they currently fail to cater to me on so many levels that I've come to believe it's not worth me supporting them.
But at the end of the day I still want My Love Story to do well, because Manganimatsu's narrow demographic focus is something it would be good to break out from, and I genuinely think it's a cracking show. If it wasn't a clone of the US version I already have, I might even have bought a second copy.
R
