Anime Arc
· 7 min read
Frieren's Creator Chose Health Over the Deadline. The Market Didn't Collapse.
When a massive manga hit pause twice in one year for creator health, no one panicked. That's the shift.
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Not Another
Boring PM
Blog.
Product management through the lens of pop punk, anime and game dev. Building cooler products with more energy and less corporate nonsense.
Break the rules — Build cooler products — Have fun doing it
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Signal
What's moving in anime, metal, J-pop and punk right now. One sharp take. No recap.
Guillaume Broche left Ubisoft in 2020 during COVID lockdowns, founded a 30-person studio in Montpellier, and shipped a turn-based JRPG nobody asked for — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — on April 24, 2025. One year later: 8 million copies sold, 9 Game Awards including Game of the Year (the most wins for a single title in the show’s history), and a knighthood from the French Ministry of Culture under the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The market had declared the genre dead. Broche made the game he grew up wanting to play anyway. The thing worth tracking here isn’t the numbers — it’s that “left a corporate studio because it was safe” is now a biography line on the most decorated game of the year.
Soft Play’s Heavy Jelly hit #3 on the UK Albums Chart in October 2024. Lambrini Girls debuted at #16 in January 2025. Both bands are loud, politically sharp and unmistakably punk — neither has cracked the US market. The difference isn’t the music. The UK still has a functioning breakthrough infrastructure: BBC Radio 6, NME, and a festival circuit that creates shared cultural moments instead of algorithmic micro-niches. American punk isn’t dead. The channel that used to make a punk band a generation’s punk band is.
YOASOBI headline the Hollywood Bowl on August 16 — the anchor of an 8-date North American arena run. A J-pop duo closing a 20,000-cap iconic venue as a solo bill.
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LOVEBITES and HANABIE didn't emerge from bedroom YouTube sessions. They came out of a system. The West hasn't noticed yet.
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Writing a pop-punk song to understand yourself is an unusually honest personality test.
Anime Arc
No Cuts. Eleven Years. Then the Oscar.
· 7 min read
Hayao Miyazaki spent eleven years locked out of the American market rather than let anyone touch his films. Then the Oscar came.
Open Mic
Shigesato Itoi Spent Twelve Years on MOTHER 3. Then He Said: Never Again.
· 7 min read
The ad copywriter who made three games and stopped. Why that restraint matters.
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