Exclusive Insanity

I have an issue with Funimation.

I've recently become a sort of collector of anime sets - I like to buy box sets of anime I like on DVD. ADV is my favorite for this because they make those nice thinpak sets. Other companies have made similar, neat little sets that I can store easily and use for access to all of my favorite episodes in any particular series.

Funimation has been pissing me off recently because they don't seem to understand the concept of 'compact'. They released four box sets for Fullmetal Alchemist, which would basically take up about three quarters of the space that the complete set of DVDs takes up. It could have easily been just one or two box sets instead, because FMA is not that huge of a series. I suspect Funimation just likes the idea of squeezing as much money as they can from the many, many fans of this series more than providing convenience for those of us who don't have much shelf space.

Two other series I really would like to purchase, Mushishi and Utawarerumono, have been fully released on DVD (with cardboard "artboxes" included at ridiculous extra costs) by Funimation, but no box sets have been listed yet. I'm starting to think there won't be any, and this pisses me off to the point where I don't even want to buy the series from them. And now Funimation is releasing Shuffle, to which I respond with 'goddamnit!' because that means I won't get a neat little box set for it either.

It isn't about saving money. I'd gladly pay the same amount for the box set that I would for the whole set of DVDs. It's about convenience. I collect box sets, not individual DVDs, because the less space the series takes up on my shelf, the more I have for other series.

I like to support the official licensors of anime (that way they'll bring more anime over), but I'm at the point of looking for bootleg sets of the sub/dub for Funimation's series because they fail so utterly at providing me with what I want.