Crunchyroll Clean Out

Y’know, there’s something vaguely annoying for those who want to live a proper life and also finish all those anime before they’re announced to disappear off Crunchyroll…

I did have the series Hanasaku Iroha on my PTW at some point in time, but then axed it. Then this announcement told me I should watch it before it disappears entirely…and so I ended up watching Tono to Issho instead and staying up until 1:30 am as a result.

…Ah, good times.

Silly anecdote aside, I thought Hanasaku Iroha was somewhat popular in comparison to other anime I’ve seen get the boot from the service (with the exception of the Funiroll split, where a lot of anime I could’ve watched suddenly disappeared).

So, why is anime suddenly leaving Crunchyroll good or bad?

Note: I’m only focussing on their anime because that’s largely what they are known for and that’s largely what’s accessible. My experience with their manga reader might change, since I mostly used it before the conversion from Flash.

Well, I’m a pretty slow watcher with a normal life, with the caveat that if I power through one show for an entire day (like I did with Ga Rei Zero), I’ll be close to burnout afterwards. However, the announcement meant I had to watch 12 episodes of Ga Rei Zero, then either 1) take a break for the rest of the day then squash 26 episodes of Hanasaku Iroha into 4 days or 2) immediately proceed to Hanasaku Iroha and watch it over 5 days (due to American timezones potentially giving me an extra day). Somehow, plans for family days kept popping up within that small span of time, which combined with how Hanasaku Iroha wasn’t quite working out for me, meant I had to drop it.

Certainly, Hanasaku Iroha wasn’t a high priority on my PTW – I did say I cut it from my PTW as it never seemed to be catering for me in the first place – but it existed there before the time I started watching extensively. Depending on how you see this quandary, this could mean it was my fault I didn’t watch it before it went or didn’t purchase it…but it’s not licensed in my region outside Crunchyroll’s connection with NIS America, so the latter doesn’t apply anyway.

If I touched on the “bad” before, then the “ultra bad” is how Crunchyroll can sometimes claim entire series by literally making claims on everything without passing down rights to series to sublicensors in the process or alternatively striking deals with anime licensors but only in North America, meaning there’s all sorts of region-locked messes. Although my particular region doesn’t have that many problems – especially if I used a VPN to access anime legally exclusive to North America, like I did with Sakamoto Desu Ga back in the day – this becomes particularly problematic for regions like parts of Europe and Africa, and especially for China (which tends to be an exception for basically every anime bar Urahara). I’ve noticed Raistlin in particular complain (?) about how most anime isn’t available in his region or how slow it can be for the licensing to come over. Bringing it back to how this might affect myself though, it can mean once it’s off Crunchyroll, it’s gone forever – no discs, no rights, no nothing.

Additionally, there’s a “pro” in that the shows that leave the Crunchyroll catalogue tend to be:

• old (in comparison to the year they leave, e.g. Wanna Be the Strongest in the World! – aka SekaTsuyo – was about 5 years old when it left in 2017)
• distributed to other licensors already if possible, in a bid to appease as many fans worldwide (notably, I knew SekaTsuyo was already on my local streaming service by the time it left)
• rare (as in, nobody really cares about them anymore once they leave, but in that sense they’re good for adding anime list entries other people might not have heard of)

Sidebar: There’s also the “con” of Sentai Filmworks only producing DVDs for shows that previously had them, thus leaving me – someone without a Blu-Ray player – out of the loop for Houseki no Kuni discs (for one example), but this post is meant to focus on Crunchyroll…

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Anyways, Tono to Issho is a pretty terrible show and it’s 48 minutes for 2 seasons (1 minute x 12 episodes for the first and 3 minutes x 12 episodes for the second), so you didn’t miss out on anything there. Otherwise, do you guys think Crunchyroll is doing a good service by giving out sudden alerts for when shows are leaving, or only announcing shows in its news section?