Revised on 2017/11/07 to reflect on new learning and to be less glib. Thank you to the people who commented on this post for giving me a better understanding of the situation.
So if you’re an aficionado of Japanese media, you probably know that the anime industry is in danger of dying. The manga industry is not faring so well either. You can look up ‘anime industry dying’ or ‘why good anime is hard to make’ or ‘manga industry dying’ to get more info, but basically, while anime and manga for niche markets (mainly the otaku fandom) is doing fine, anime and manga for a broader audience is not.
To be honest, I think there are a lot of reasons for this.
The major reason I feel that it’s not doing very well overseas is because anime, manga, and related merchandise is ungodly expensive. A lot of anime fans are college students and teenagers; in other words, people who aren’t exactly rolling around in money. Because of shipping costs a lot of products cost a lot more than a similarly boxed DVD set for a western cartoon. I also feel that anime is not properly released in DVD and Blu Ray format. I once saw a Blu Ray box set for the first half of Attack on Titan season one that cost almost $100, and a DVD set for the first few episodes of Kill La Kill that cost almost $90. Yes, really. You can see why not a lot of people are flocking to buy physical copies of anime like that.
A lot of anime (and manga) can be extremely long, which would deter a lot of more casual fans from watching or buying the whole thing. Sometimes people can’t get the entire series if the English language distributor loses the rights or goes bankrupt. (And, again, it’s expensive if a series go on for so long.)
The biggest reason why anime has trouble is the lack of audience appeal. Clash of culture and values, outlandish stories and visuals, and growing amount of anime fetishistic images and stories is contributing to a lack of worldwide interest. Anime is growing a negative reputation for its sexualized and bordering on pedophilic depictions of women and girls, a very serious problem that is affecting the industry. Aside from that, anime is seen more as a novelty, not as widely commercialized like Marvel or DC, so you usually end up with either the fetish anime or something that was based on a hit manga series.
There’s also the factor of creators and animators working in awful conditions. I know the Japanese manga industry is extremely cutthroat; creators are under strict deadlines and have to rush out a manga chapter once a week, and their stories can live or die depending on sales and editors. I can only imagine what it would be like for anime.
My main point of the original version of this post was that anime and manga needs to be more AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE, and widely AVAILABLE. I would not be surprised if the future of anime ends up being solely online. But, as some of my commentators have pointed out to me (and I thank them for that), there also needs to be some serious reforms on how anime is commercialized, marketed, and made.
And with that, I think I sufficiently corrected this post. I originally wrote it out of frustration and confusion (I want to support good anime but can’t financially do so all the time), but after learning more about the problem and from some important comments, I had to rewrite this post because it was getting too many views.
As for how anime (and manga) can be saved? Well, I would say go out and find good quality anime (and completely boycott crappy fanservice anime) and support it however you can. Show the creators that we want to see (and support) anime that values quality and artistic freedom over anime that shows panty shots of girls or has a plot on a boy having the hots for his sister.