Welp, don’t know how this is going to be, but it’ll be fun for a day, so of course I’ll join in, and encourage those with Twitter accounts to do the same…and that is to implore some companies in the US to license Chihayafuru.
Just a quick reminder: Chihayafuru, an anime based off Yuki Suetsugu’s manga series in Kodansha’s Be Love magazine in Japan, told the story of a girl who became enamored with the game of Karuta, then soon became a story about her and her team competing against hundreds of Karuta players across Japan. Let’s just say I loved it. So you’d expect I’d be incredibly hard on Season 2 if it managed to be a step down from Season 1. Well, maybe not so much. So the point is, Chihayafuru’s awesome and you should go watch it.
…But wouldn’t be nice if we could have it physically? Well, that’s where the fun begins. Kory Cerjak’s a pretty big Chihayafuru fan, but of course, he could only watch the series online. Why not have it physically? This idea got in his head while he was listening to the OSMcast that talked about the series. Well, maybe. “As it usually goes on Twitter,” said Kory as he interacted with the people on that podcast (Basil the Moderator, Jess of Momocon, and Ink of Ani-Gamers), “discussion started and I said, half-jokingly, that we should make a Twitter group. I followed that up, again half-jokingly, that we should have a call out to licensors that there are still fans out there for the show who would pay good money for a physical release of the series.”
It stopped being a joke when Ink and Corey, or the guy who came up with the idea to have Mizusawa and Hokuo T-shirts, sent Kory a list of people who participated in the campaign.
There were 91 people.
“I couldn’t back out at that point.”
So he took to Twitter to message those people (I was one of them) about The Day of The Impassionate Plea. What exactly is that? Basically, it’s getting all these Twitter people to, as Kory put it, “do a little good-natured prodding of the industry folk” (List of US Anime Companies likely to license this anime: Sentai, Funimation, NIS America, RightStuf on their Lucky Penny/Nozomi line) and tell them how much they love Chihayafuru and that they’re interested in a physical release.
My response? Well, that was to basically share this with you.
So remember, February 12 (Wed) is the day. Feel free to go tweet at them your wish to get the series licensed. Now if you don’t have a Twitter…well…
…You’ll work something out I guess!
(Addendum: While I was working on this, now a change petition is going out. Infer what you want from that!)