There was a lot I left unsaid in the Stubsack comment because of how difficult it is to express the uncanny valley effect I got from reading the a16z blog post. It’s not just the very AI generated sounding prose, or the relatively broad knowledge of multiple forms of Japanese and Japan-inspired media combined with the glaring factual inaccuracies and extremely surface-level understanding of the topic. Even the whole angle of “how can we insert ourselves as a middle man to extract surplus from this” dressed up in a veil of celebratory excitement is par for the course for a private equity firm, but somehow they completely fail to understand anything about anime or video games as a business either.

The only way I can describe how the article reads is this: it’s like if an anime fan gave an introductory presentation about Japanese media, then a business analyst gave a presentation on the size of anime business, revenue of gacha games and market value of Japanese entertainment brands, then an AI bro who knew nothing about either topic but took meticulous notes on both presentations threw them together into a blog post and padded out the word count using GPT.

Edit: Here’s a long-form piece about Japanese cultural capital from someone who does know what he’s talking about, as a palate cleanser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM2VIKfaY0Y