Anime has been popular in the US for a lot longer than many people realize. Sailor Moon’s original DIC dub came out in 1995 and soon joined Dragon Ball Z on Toonami a few years later. And let’s not forget that Speed Racer was a cultural icon as far back as the 1960s. However, American anime fans usually had two options – they could either be satisfied with the small offering of shows that ended up on broadcast TV, or they could pay an often-extortionate amount of money for the home video releases.

Did I say two options? I meant three, because many anime fans felt they were forced to hoist the sails and pirate anime to get their fix. It is something that is baked into the fandom even today, when sites like Crunchyroll give us more legitimate anime than we could ever hope to watch. With so many shows being streamed directly into our homes, it is time to examine anime piracy and ask ourselves why it is still so prevalent. Despite a wealth of legal options for watching anime, one pirate anime website notched more views in October 2024 than Disney+. Media piracy overall is falling in most regions - why is anime a holdout?

I say this with an element of historical perspective under my belt. I got into anime in the 90s and distinctly remember paying Too Damn Much for a bootleg copy of Ninja Scroll that my friends and I would pass around to each other until the tape wore out because it was the only anime we had access to. The reason I pushed my dad to pay for the higher internet speeds wasn’t “for school” like I claimed – I wanted to torrent anime with reckless abandon. I have a friend, bless his virus-riddled PC, who went onto LimeWire, typed “anime” into the search bar, and hit Download All. The stuff he ended up watching would make you cry. Incidentally, he was the best man at my wedding. 

The late '90s and early '00s were a golden age of anime piracy because it was quick, easy, and you never knew what you were going to get. It was a time of fansubs that ranged from wildly inaccurate to weirdly, almost religiously accurate to the original Japanese. The phrase “Just according to keikaku*” as a subtitle in a fansub of Death Note is probably the most famous example of this. Yet, this was seen as the only way to watch most anime if you lived outside of Japan.

(*Note: Keikaku means plan.)

This is all to say that I understand why the pirate mentality runs so deep in the anime community. Heck, even the most popular anime streaming service in the US, Crunchyroll, started as a pirate site where people would host their bootleg copies of anime for other people to watch. However, just like Crunchyroll evolved beyond piracy and is now a legit way to watch so much anime it boggles the mind, I’m eager to see fans do the same. Heck, it has been more than a decade since Crunchyroll was a pirate website - at this point, they have been a legit business for longer than they were a haven of pirates.

It is a habit that is tough to break – you can see it in the comments on a lot of social media posts about anime. “This is why I pirate anime,” people will say, feeling very smug and self-satisfied. And I get it. If there aren’t any legal ways to watch a show in your region or it takes months for that movie to get released with an official localization, I understand the desire to see it early. But there are literally dozens of anime coming out every season – more than is healthy to watch. You can find something else to watch while you wait for the Chainsaw Man movie to come out in your country. 

Of course, there is the financial cost of consuming anime, but that cost is there no matter what media you consume. Love comics? They’re expensive (unless you’re reading digital manga, of course). Video games are getting more expensive right in front of our eyes. Until we throw off the shackles of capitalism, we need to accept that there is a financial cost to doing pretty much anything. But if you can afford to pay for your anime, you should. It is good for the industry and helps us get more anime.

I know that there are people who will pirate anime no matter what anyone says and that is their choice. I’m going to be judgemental about it. Mainly cause I don’t have time. I am just going to say that if I can kick the habit of pirating anime and manga - if even Crunchyroll can go clean - you can probably reevaluate your consuming habits a bit.

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