== Netflix versus the discourse (on Anitwitter and elsewhere)

I usually think of myself as someone who watches anime as a pretty
solitary activity. It's not really true, as I've understood for some
time (for instance, [[I know I face the tacit pressure of conformity
ConformityTacitPressure]]), but most of the time I can not really be
conscious of the social side of my watching; it's just sort of there,
as something that happens. This year, Netflix provided an interesting
reminder of that social side.

With a weekly show, there's always a current episode, the most recent
episode that aired and then became available here, and that's what
most people are watching and reacting to and talking about. While the
discussion is generally at its most intense the day the episode becomes
available, not everyone watches it or reacts to it right away. And
even if you watch it later in the week (as I often do for some shows),
there's still people to talk to about it or read current reactions to
it in various places. This whole environment enables a discourse that
is focused on that episode; it's the obvious thing about the show to
talk about, to react to, and to frame a discussion around.

Netflix shows did not work this way. Netflix released most or all
of the anime shows it funded this year in the same way that it
releases other TV series, which is to say all at once, with every
episode immediately available. In particular, it released *Devilman
Crybaby* that way, with all episodes available January 5th. Some
people burned through the entire show in the next day or two; some
people burned through it in a week; some people took [[much longer
https://twitter.com/cks_anime/status/970481821912887296]]. One of the
results was to distinctly attenuate the discussion about *Devilman
Crybaby*, because people who wanted to talk about it lacked the common
ground of a 'current episode'. If you were an early watcher, you might
avoid discussing things because of spoilers, or have only limited other
early watchers you could talk about things with. If you were a later
watcher, you might have to carefully not look at early discussion in
order to avoid spoilers and in any case your current episode might be
old news to a lot of people.

(And even if you didn't deliberately avoid spoilers, you had to go find
old discussions, or have them already bookmarked and saved; they weren't
on top of Anitwitter, feed readers, Animenano, and so on.)

I don't know if this lack of fan buzz hurt or even helped *Devilman
Crybaby*, either to get more viewers or to get people to think about the
show more independently than they might have in the discourse's usual echo
chamber. I do know that it made my own experience of *Devilman Crybaby*
feel distinctly different from watching weekly shows, and I likely didn't
discuss it half as much as I would have done if it was a normal show.

(Also, of course, the experience of burning through something as intense
as *Devilman Crybaby* over a short period of time is definitely different
than it would have been seeing it at a one episode a week pace. I don't
know if a forced weekly pace would have made *Devilman Crybaby* more or
less powerful, but it certainly would have made things feel different.)

I suspect that Netflix's mass episode drop also lead to less blog
entries and so on about *Devilman Crybaby* than there would otherwise
have been. Certainly I expect it led to less episode by episode
analysis, because there really wasn't much point unless you wanted
to do a close reading of the whole show or record your reactions and
thoughts on an episode by episode basis. But with that said, [[Shin
Mecha Guignol did a very interesting series of articles on each episode
https://shinmechaguignol.com/tag/devilman/]].

I also watched Netflix's *B - The Beginning* and some of *A.I.C.O. -
Incarnation*, each of which was made available all at once and each of
which didn't get too much discussion that I saw, but with both of them
I think there are what you could politely call other factors at work
as well. *Violet Evergarden* is an odd case, because it was available
week by week everywhere except in the US, where it was available all
at once at the end of its weekly run; as a result, I experienced it
week by week as a normal [[Winter 2018 show Winter2018Retrospective]].

(This is part of the [[12 Days of Anime 2018
https://perpetualmorning.wordpress.com/2018/11/20/12-days-of-anime-2018/]].)