Kickstarter progress update

A day later, and Kick-Heart has raised more than $40,000 towards its $150,000 funding goal. It is looking very achievable.

There's been a lot of negativity in fan communities about the length of the project (10 minutes) compared to the amount that they are asking for, but in spite of this an increasing number of funders are now in the low donation category; the average bid has decreased markedly from the early figures. This means that the project is working successfully not because of a handful of wealthy otaku acting on their own but because hundreds of people are throwing smaller amounts in the pot.

One discouraging thing that has happened is that unfortunately, some people aren't too good at reading a situation before leaping in and saying things that they probably shouldn't. On the official project Kickstarter comment page, I spotted this odd remark amidst the questions and words of support:

The user's words aren't deliberately malicious in any way and he's even supporting the fundraising drive himself both financially and in his intent. I find it worrying that not only do people like this not see why what they were doing was bad (even though their videos were removed), but also that they chose to broadcast this fact directly where the people who worked so hard to make those commercial anime projects would be reading, rather than try something more productive like spreading awareness of the many legal ways to support Yuasa's work. It's not my intention to single this one guy out as a villain all on his own. This attitude is widespread; it's disappointing that a subset of western fans throughout the industry can remain so blind to how much damage their unintentionally cruel words might do that it never even crosses their mind to consider their words with care.

With the culture of the internet, the English language has come to need an expression equivalent to the Japanese kuuki yomenai.

I wonder how this kind of thing can be wiped out with some education. In this current climate, mass indignation at any kind of intellectual property protection swiftly drowns out any point that wronged creators might try to make about respecting their work.