Crunchyroll’s Removed Comments Section Is a Huge Insult to Anime Fans

So Crunchyroll has completely removed the comments section from each anime and episode that goes up, which has effectively killed off a really cool community space. Was it perfect? No, but Thanos snapping it out of existence wasn’t the answer.

What Was Lost in the Crunchyroll Comments

Crunchyroll comments have been around for a staggeringly long time. You could go to just about any anime on the site and scroll through pages upon pages of fans talking about the episode, the series, and also a bunch of irrelevant stuff because it was a comment section.

We’re not saying that it was fine art or anything, but the shared space was amazing when a new anime hit. If you weren’t 100% sure whether or not an anime was for you, there were often people chatting about the pros and cons of the manga it was based on, and whether or not the adaptation was good.

There were people talking about how good specific fights were, or recommending other anime with a similar feeling, or by the same author or team. All of this is gone now. Literally years and probably millions of comments erased in an instant because of a few idiots pretending to be anime fans.

Why Did Crunchyroll Remove the Comments Section?

The official reason, according to Crunchyroll, is that the company “prioritizes creating a safe and respectful community environment.” Which means they need to “remove all existing user-generated content, including comments, across all our platforms and experiences.” This is the company line, but it comes in hot on the heels of a particular anime’s release.

Twilight Out of Focus debuted on July 4th; yay for freedom and also the fact that the Tories got kicked out of power in the UK, you go, girls. Twilight Out of Focus is about an all-boys school and a film club within, where three tales of romance start to bloom. It’s a sweet anime, and given how many romance anime there are every single season, there shouldn’t be a problem. In fact, if you look at the average rating, you’ll notice that it’s sitting at 4.1/5, which is pretty darn good.

However, expanding on the score reveals that, while 76% of reviews are five stars, there’s an alarming number of one-star reviews: 22% in total. Sure, there’s a spattering of four, three, and one-star reviews too, but they’re incredibly negligible. At the time of writing, the number of reviews is 7,677, which means that while 5,835 of those are five-star, something’s really upset the 1,689 people who gave it a one-star review.

If your guess was homophobia or bigotry, then congratulations; you’re correct. While the comments may be gone, a YouTuber called Geoff Thew took some screenshots of the negative reviews where people get really angry about the whole manly romance thing.

It’s pathetic, right? It’s also super weird because Yuri on Ice is one of the most beloved anime going, and that show is gay as hell. It’s almost like there’s a bunch of posers infiltrating the anime community to make a big fuss where there simply isn’t one, and now they’ve ruined a perfectly good comment section with their nonsense.

What Should They Have Done Instead?

Now, while we understand why this happened and why Crunchyroll did what they did, surely the actual answer to this very stupid problem is moderation? Obviously, moderating every single comment section is a big task, but it’s got to be worth the effort in order to keep the comments section alive.

The ideal is that Crunchyroll hires some people to moderate the comments section and just delete user accounts if they violate the terms and put hateful stuff in for no reason. We like that idea a lot, although the T&Cs might have to change to avoid legal problems. However, if it turns out that it was too expensive, then just bring in better reporting tools and let us sort it out ourselves. Anime fans are used to having to keep out the fools anyway, so there’d be no real change of pace here.

Either way, we’d like the comments back, please. Jumping into the comments to find out that everyone’s watching the same trashy anime as us is a big part of the appeal, and the loss of it is a real shame, especially given how long some of those comment sections have been around for. We just want to know we’re not alone in watching That Time I Got Turned Into A Pancake In A Delicious Dungeon And Obliterated Everything With My Maple Syrup-Based Skills Harem.