Crunchyroll is home to some of the biggest anime series on the planet, including Demon Slayer and Solo Leveling. On the one hand, a streaming service dedicated entirely to anime is a brilliant choice, especially as anime has surged in popularity over the years. On the other hand, Crunchyroll has faced criticism for certain decisions, whether it’s restricting the sale of physical media to certain membership tiers or outright removing series without warning. One major removal reveals a major flaw in Crunchyroll’s approach to streaming anime, underscoring that the service is no longer the premier source for anime it once was.
The removed series is Akame ga Kill!, based on the mangaby Takahiro and Tetsuya Tashiro. Akame ga Kill! begins when protagonist Tatsumi sets out with his friends to become an adventurer so he can help his village thrive. Things take a dark turn when Tatsumi is taken in by nobles who intend to torture and kill him, until he’s saved by the mysterious group of assassins known as Night’s Raid. Tatsumi joins Night’s Raid, fighting a corrupt government while learning that an assassin’s life is constantly fraught with danger. Akame ga Kill! remains an immensely popular anime, yet its removal from Crunchyroll makesit increasingly hard to watch.
‘Akame ga Kill!’ Highlights How Streaming Can Cut Off Anime Access
Akame and Esdeath’s final battle at the climax of ‘Akame ga Kill!’Image via White Fox
What makes Akame ga Kill!‘s removal from Crunchyroll stand out is that Crunchyroll was the last streaming service that featured the entire series. It was originally on Prime Video, Netflix, and HiDIVE, but now the only way fans can get the anime is to buy the complete collection on Blu-ray, which is fairly expensive. By removing these series, streamers are creating a barrier for fans who want to watch classic anime, since most households have switched to streaming services. That barrier is about to get even higher, now that Hulu is folding into Disney+ and Skydance is announcing plans to merge HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single service.
Licensing is another issue. Whenever Crunchyroll picks up an anime series, it also picks up the license to air that series on its platform. If it ever wanted to renew the license to air Akame ga Kill!, it could, but the streamer has increasingly letlicenses run out on certain series. Anime including Black Lagoon, Claymore, and Food Wars have been removed from Crunchyroll’s ranks over the years, leaving fans immensely disappointed. The kicker is that, unlike Netflix or Prime Video, Crunchyroll doesn’t warn viewers when a series becomes unavailable. That means a series you’ve fallen in love with or rediscovered could disappear at any moment — which doesn’t seem like a great way to bring in new fans.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.
The Rings of Power · Prime Video · Since 2022
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
One Piece · Manga since 1997 · Netflix 2023
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.
One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
it.
The Witcher · Netflix · Since 2019
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.
Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
got told wrong.
Percy Jackson · Disney+ · Since 2023
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.
Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
something nobody thought to test for.
The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
‘Akame ga Kill!’ Kicked off a Trend That Crunchyroll Still Relies On
Though Akame ga Kill! might not be the first anime to be removed from Crunchyroll’s library, its removal still marks a profound shift. The series helped kick off the “dark shōnen” trend, where a series often keeps the over-the-top premises and fight scenes that define shōnen anime like Dragon Ball Z while taking a darker turn. Night Raid not only fights battles where they shed buckets of blood, but members of the group also start dying in unexpected ways due to their Teigu, weapons forged from the bodies of mythical beasts. Even the opening narration feels far different from other anime:
“As long as there is human nature, so too must there be malice. As long as there is malice, so too must there be evil. Evil beyond salvation. For those who don’t wield a sword, these vile demons are silenced in the darkness by a group of elite assassins.”
Shows like Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man might not be as popular as they are if Akame ga Kill! hadn’t aired. Given that a large part of Crunchyroll’s popularity comes from dark shōnen shows, removing Akame ga Kill! feels even more short-sighted. A new generation of anime fans will either have to splurge on the Blu-ray or hope it hits another streamer, which doesn’t feel fair in the long run.
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