Just Culture #12: The Legend of Vox Machina in Review
... and the future of entertainment.
Just Culture brings you reviews and thoughts from all spectrums of culture in a timely and untimely fashion.
The Legend of Vox Machina is a three-season anime series on Amazon Prime with an 8.4 IMDB rating at the time of writing, a 100% tomato meter (I haven’t seen that before), and a 94% popcorn meter. That’s stellar reviews, and for good reason.
I watched the first episodes and got hooked because they reminded me of the Airbender series I had previously watched—the same vibe but with much more gore and sexual content. However, it’s as witty, the storyline is good dialog, and the characters are deep, as much as they are entertaining combo. The bosses are bossy and don’t go down without a trick or insight that is true to the character's journeys.
Only after the first season did I start to investigate the origins and production; I was and wasn’t surprised to learn it’s a spinout from the popular YouTube channel produced by Critical Role.
It’s people-watching role-playing live by voice actors, and this comment says all about its popularity.
It has its audience captured in complete lockdown; someone goes through 8 years’ worth of content, and we’re talking 123 episodes times four hours each. The most popular podcasts in the world don’t have fans trying to do this.
The beauty of Vox Machina is that it has game-like features, and at best, it feels like you’re watching a role-playing video game with only the movie sequences. Regardless of the show's quality, it provides an excellent example of what the feature of entertainment might entail. When YouTube channels produce this kind of loyal following, translating the content into series with the help of AI will allow for extraordinary value generation from existing audiences.
The time from idea to series will become a future reality without “the traditional industry” at play. It won’t be long before we see the rise of a “Unity for Media,” an engine that can create AI-generated entertainment the way Unity works as a platform tool to develop games.
We’re just getting started with AI-generated entertainment content. I predict that the industry will only grow because of this, and more money will funnel directly to content creators as Substack enables written content creators to monetize their audiences directly because technology will allow creators to create, find, and reach directly without consolidated publishing power backing “new IP ventures.” Creating a growing market for direct media investment in a way tech startups created a premise for Venture Capital as we know it today.
What do you think? Will we see more capitalization of existing audiences of different media domains with the help of AI, or will we have completely new media due to this leap in technological capabilities? Did I miss a perspective or an argument to consider?
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