Some notes:

• Who told Mark Andreesen about the overlap between possible AI ~~suckers~~ customers and weebs? Are we going to get a16z's next hot take - "Furries are eating the world?"

• I'm sure most of the audience here can fill in their own 700+ word rant about the breadth of anime as a visual style, so I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. However, unlike the older trends of assuming that whichever shonen is currently most popular (the kids still like at least one Dragonball, right?) is representative or dismissing anything with the relevant aesthetic as "some weeb shit I won't like", here the writers manage a much more impressive feat. They acknowledge the breadth of what anime contains, but completely fail to ask the basic question: "why do people like this?" Similar to the original prompts for this kind of rant, they're assuming the art style and Japanese cultural background are the primary reasons why anyone connects with anything anime, and then expand from that premise. I'm pretty sure this is a root cause of why the whole article feels like it was written by goddamn martians.

• Are vTubers playing existing characters a thing? What little I've seen isn't linked to existing stories (that's what humans call "IP") but rather focus on original characters who have their own shit going on. Even ignoring the attempt to shove genAI into everything (as though everyone is going to want to make their own vTuber avatar and stream it someday?) this seems like assuming that the people going to watch the finals of the local Battle of the Bands are going in the hope of getting an autograph from Kurt fucking Cobain.

• There has been some criticism of gacha games as being monstrously exploitative and basically gambling targeted at kids and/or teens, but consider just how much money it makes. These people are ghouls.

• Going back to the genAI we set aside two bullet points up, I do think anime has a unique property there. It simultaneously has a much stronger visual identity than many other aesthetics, including photorealism, but also has a massive number of scrapable examples to train off of. The more consistent style makes it easier to replicate statistically and what visual abberation you still get is less likely to fall deep into the uncanny valley. The outputs I've seen from even older anime genAI were better than their contemporaries, but still pretty easy to pick out. Something about shading or gradient or something, probably because since anime is drawn rather than captured like a photo there's no detail that's fully incidental. GenAI, of course, has no actual purpose and so all details in every output are incidental. That gives the output a weird unfocused quality I think?

In conclusion, I'm starting to suspect that VCs don't have souls and/or don't interact with any human being outside of potential partners-in-somehow-not-crime or potential victims.