>>37000027I want to preface this by saying that I haven't been holding back on shitting on Cover, as I'm becoming increasingly convinced they have no idea what they're doing and all of their success outside of Japan has been due to sheer, dumb luck.
That said, this shit really is hard. Especially when you're talking about something like content creation, where there aren't any guarantees or hard and fast rules, and success depends entirely on what the fanbase thinks, and even they have no idea what they really want sometimes. For things that come from a foreign culture, like anime (or kpop, BBC TV shows, Latin pop music, Bollywood, *anything*), it's really hard. On the one hand, you do have to fit it to local tastes. On the other hand, the reason people outside the country like it in the first place is that it's foreign and exotic. If you do it right, you end up like k-pop, which manages to be big in the west, in the Philippines, and even fucking India. If you do it wrong, you end up like 4kids, where people celebrate your demise and treat you like Hitler reincarnate.
Cover was right in that HoloEN can't be totally like HoloJP. What they went wrong with was what needed to change to suit local tastes and what needed to stay the same. The meta needed to stay the same, the content needed to change.
In a deep sense, "Could You Please RIP" and a lot of Mori's early songs were an example doing it right. IRyS's original songs were an example of doing it wrong. The former was an example of making western content feel like a western version of weeb music, the latter is just shoehorning JP shit into a context where it doesn't work.
That said, even typing that, I realize that it's not immediately intuitive at first glance. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you expand to international audiences by making them feel like stuff they already like can count as "otaku" media too, not trying to take the super niche shit that filters newcomers and force it to fit into the new country. People who want the original can always just watch JP/listen to Vocaloid/watch fansubs. You want to make normalfags feel like otaku culture isn't that different from what they already like.
And to keep it from just being watered down into normie nonsense, the strategy isn't to gatekeep, because that never works in the long run. You don't want to have gatekeepers, you want to be careful about where you *put* the gate so that the people you don't want get filtered naturally.
