These days anime is seeping into everything, everywhere and damn do I mean everything. To start off I’ll immediately come clean: I’m into audio products, specifically headphones. It can be quite an expensive hobby if you aren’t careful, but lately I’ve been pretty satisfied with my collection and have resisted multiple close calls of snatching up another headphone on ebay. However, I may be facing my toughest challenge yet. You see there’s a company that makes earbuds of all things, but sort of advertises them using anime girls. They recently re-released one of their earbuds with a few upgrades and new icy, snowy aesthetic. I’ll post some example images below so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about.
Promotional Art.
The product, with the new snow paintjob.
Now even though that promotional art is looking clean as hell to me and I’m very tempted to drop the money and buy it, I’m just not very into earbuds these days. Not so much for comfort reasons, but after you wear a good headphone that does a good job of making elements in the music sound spacious and separated, it can be hard to go back to the earbud life. Alas, it appears I won’t be safe for much longer. Supposed leaks from the company’s discord (which by the way what a fucking 2022 concept) indicated that they may be making a headphone with of course a cute anime girl attached. If that shit turns out to be true, I’m afraid my wallet is getting emptied on sight. I want to be mad because it’s blatant marketing tactics to get me to buy a product I don’t really need, but like…I want a pair of good anime headphones. That’d be sick as fuck. So far this is all sounding like a me problem, so let’s change perspective. Because I used to think it was a me problem until Kinky showed me waifu cups.
Waifu cups are essentially what they sound like: cups you can use to drink liquids with waifus on them. You see we all have a demon or two, and Kinky’s is energy drinks. He wastes money on that shit like I waste money on headphones aka a good bit of dough. Well one of the brands that makes energy formulas, Gamer Supps, had the horribly ingenious idea of slapping waifu art on some cups and then selling them alongside their energy supplements. Smart. However, then they took it one step further: the cups are fucking collectibles. You can only buy them when they drop at certain times while supplies last. Hot damn you better believe they sell out too. My personal favorite cup, Varsity, is currently on ebay for the small price of $300. For a damn cup. They took the most basic shit ever, and turned it into a whole market just by slapping hot anime girls on cups. And my question is: what’s next?
Listen I'm down, but not $300 down. Praying for a re-run.
Now that weebs are an international powerhouse and anime is popping off like never before, companies have noticed how to take advantage of us and entice us to buy their shit. This isn’t always a bad thing, hell the company that’s selling those waifu earbuds is known for their reputable sound quality that disrupted the industry first, and the waifu shit second. As long as the product is actually well constructed and performs as intended, I don’t see the issue of slapping anime shit on there. At least it doesn’t feel half as scummy as when the product is dogshit. At this point I’m proud to say that anime art will not be the SOLE reason I buy a product but it may push me over the edge if I already had an interest in it.Have you noticed anime leaking into your other hobbies? Have you seen an anime product that seems to have come out of nowhere, like an anime golf club or anime drumset? Does having anime art on a product persuade you to buy it? Lock up your wallet, freeze your accounts, and make smart financial decisions in the comments below!
