Too Short

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LadySesshy

Lapis Lunaris
Sep 8, 2020
8
3
0
39
#1
I’ve been a fan of the fandom for years but I’ve always wondered something. Why is the fandom so short? Both the manga and the classic anime is very short. 200 episodes really isn’t that much content and 12 volumes of the manga isn’t that much to read. I wonder why the author made the fandom so short. I would of liked to see the characters all finish school and see Usagi and Mamoru get married but the fandom just ends while she’s still in school. oh well, maybe now that the Sailor Moon’s getting a lot of attention by fans perhaps they’ll at least add more to the classic series since it’s not strongly based on the manga, but highly unlikely anything will be done. They’re not going to take an old 1990s anime and add a new season to it when the animation is outdated with the times. Guess I’m just stuck with fanfiction or trying to find someone who’s made a fan animation, though every time I see a fan made series it’s been abandoned and hasn’t been worked on in years. This is why I haven’t watched the classic series in years cause I was so disappointed with how short it is. What’s not short to me in an anime is at least 500 episodes.
 
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Nadia

Aurorae Lunares
Jun 30, 2010
1,831
1,331
1,665
www.smcx.me
#4
I’ve been a fan of the fandom for years but I’ve always wondered something. Why is the fandom so short? Both the manga and the classic anime is very short. 200 episodes really isn’t that much content and 12 volumes of the manga isn’t that much to read. I wonder why the author made the fandom so short. I would of liked to see the characters all finish school and see Usagi and Mamoru get married but the fandom just ends while she’s still in school. oh well, maybe now that the Sailor Moon’s getting a lot of attention by fans perhaps they’ll at least add more to the classic series since it’s not strongly based on the manga, but highly unlikely anything will be done. They’re not going to take an old 1990s anime and add a new season to it when the animation is outdated with the times. Guess I’m just stuck with fanfiction or trying to find someone who’s made a fan animation, though every time I see a fan made series it’s been abandoned and hasn’t been worked on in years. This is why I haven’t watched the classic series in years cause I was so disappointed with how short it is. What’s not short to me in an anime is at least 500 episodes.
You are addressing two different issues in this post.

The first issue you are addressing is why Sailor Moon is such a short series. Taking your opinion at face value, it is short because of ratings. Generally TV shows stay on air as long as the ratings justify the production cost, although in the case of kids cartoons, merchandise sales also play a factor. Sailor Moon had good ratings for three seasons, but they plummeted during the last two seasons. Therefore it was no longer produced. It doesn't matter if those in charge have more stories to tell (and judging by Naoko Takeuchi's ideas, I'm not sure she had more stories). Once the viewership wanes, the show ends.

The second issue you are addressing is why fan-made series are frequently abandoned. The answer is a combination of a lack of resources and the precarious nature of fan projects themselves.

If you, even if you were not an artist, tried to draw a single image of Sailor Moon, you would find the process time consuming. If you're a beginner, it might take days. If you're a pro, you could do a headshot in a couple of hours or even less. The point is that just drawing a still image takes time.

Now remember that animation is just a series of drawings, one after the other. Also, note that anime is animated at 12 frames per second.

If it takes someone an hour to draw a frame, it would take 12 hours for a second of animation. A minute of animation would take 720 hours worth of work. That means 1 month of work without sleep or breaks. Yes, I know there are plenty of "cheats" animation uses, but when accounting for other parts than just merely drawing the frames, I'm severely undercounting the amount of man hours spent.

This is why animation studios like Toei have teams of people specialized in the creation of animated elements. But even those people have to be paid. Production studios pay for dozens and hundreds of people to get together to make episodes.

By contrast, most fan projects are labors of love made by, at most, a handful of people. For every ten people who watch Sailor Moon, only a very small minority will even entertain the idea of a fan project (the vast majority watch the material as is, then move on). Then, of those, only a sliver will actually make steps towards making a fan animation. Of those, only even a tinier sliver will find other people determined enough to make a fan animation to create a team of people dedicated to do this. For free. Over time.

And that last part is also critical. Animated series episodes have to be churned out on a constant basis, so each episode can't take that long to make. The standard length of time it takes to make an animated episode is a month. Hence why there are multiple teams that work on series. Animators work on a series over several months...then move on.

Fan efforts, though take longer; if a team could even release a full-length Sailor Moon fan episode at an average of once a month, it would be the most efficient fan series ever. People are doing this on their free time, not as a job. The problem is people change and grow apart over time, and ideas also evolve over time. Even if the team believes in the project, after working with each other for a while, people sometimes grow apart and people's visions diverge. After a while, people simply get tired of it; would you want to spend ten years of your life on a fan project? Most people won't, and the few people who would are so inflexible to the point of being impossible to work with.

But let's say you beat the odds. You and your friends are able to complete your project. Now imagine if all your work can get shut down with a copyright notice. You can spend hundreds of hours on something, only for the series to simply disappear from existence.

You can see why few fan projects ever complete.

200 episodes is short?!

To who, One Piece fans?
Actually the original poster is using a 500 episode count as a metric. According to Wikipedia, Sailor Moon currently ranks 62nd in the longest running anime. It is in the top 100, which is an achievement, but there are plenty of shows that are longer.

While 200 episodes is a long-runner when it comes to many anime which are 12 episodes long...it's not really that long, either. These are 200 half-hour episodes. Basically the same length of a 100 episode hour-long drama series. One could easily binge the old anime in a month if one were so inclined.

The manga itself is even more sparse in comparison. The revised manga is 60 chapters. There are plenty of anime with more manga chapters that have fewer epsiodess.
 
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