A lot of stuff came out Thursday, and I don’t have a ton of time, so I watched the first 4 minutes of everything and decided to forego Pupa, Strange+, Mahou Sensou, and Z/X Ignition for varying degrees of spot check failure. The other two new shows did impress, and will be joining my weekly slate alongside The Show That Deserves The Jormungand Soundtrack and Takahiro Omori Unchained.
To some extent, I’ve always been cogniscent of the fact that I’ve gravitated towards of a variety of indicators for the success of anime, rather than just word of mouth, because I have idiosyncratic tastes and using said variety of indicators helps illustrate that the case for or against many shows isn’t as clear-cut as many narrative-spinners would have you believe.
For the record, If there’s a worse anime blogger than Rick Reilly is a sports columnist, I’ve never met them. But I’ve read too many terrible columns by sanctimonious 70-year-old baseball writers about how Yasiel Puig has zero class and too many terrible columns by sanctimonious anime bloggers about how Kill La Kill is somehow “saving” an anime* industry that isn’t actually dying or lacking for fresh content not to see a lot of similarities between the two groups. I’m not saying that all writers who take a critical perspective on anime are like this, but far too many of them are more interested in grinding an axe against a genre rather than actually having a serious discussion about it.
But something hit me after I read this recent Andrew Sharp piece (he’s also the writer of the #hotsportstake series that mocks the aforementioned type of writing) about the appeal of bandwagoning on playoff football teams. One of his criteria that jumped out at me; “Does this team piss off Phil Simms and Jim Nantz?” I hadn’t thought about it for a while, but the Rex Ryan Jets were some of my favorite bandwagons for that very reason (plus the fact that those Jets played a defense best described as a shower of linebacker-shaped meteors backed by Darelle Revis eclipsing the sun). While my appreciation of a show is maximum when a show is great, my enjoyment of a show in a holistic sense is more of a 60-20-20 combination of 3 factors:
1. How much I enjoy it.
2. How well it performs commercially, usually in disk sales but potentially in other categories. It has to at least be a lock argument for having had break even sales.
3. The presence of a persistent group of (for lack of a better word) haters. Not just people who sort-of dislike and avoid it, but people who can’t resist taking paragraph-long potshots at it any time it gets mentioned.
This means that, as good as Attack on Titan was, it’s not a max-entertainment bandwagon. No one of any consequence particularly hates the show, and it’s just done really well. By contrast, Girls und Panzer was a near-perfect bandwagon show, putting up megahit numbers in the face of a number of vocal and hilariously ineffectual critics (it would be on my shortlist already if I weren’t currently watching it). There is really nothing sweeter in fandom than watching a show pile up vocal critics and subsequently both be good and sell well in spite of them. This post contains my personal shortlist of series I’ve had the privilege of being a fan of long enough to watch them do the Shaq thing and dunk all over the place.
To clarify before I actually get to the list, I don’t believe it’s a bad thing to hold any particular set of opinions. I do believe it’s a bad thing to constantly spend time talking scrap about stuff you don’t enjoy, and more generally about the way things are, rather than actually doing something about it. If you’re so upset about the majority of anime that get made nowadays, put up and post links to the BDs of the series you do like on your blog, or just buy them yourself. It’s trivially easy to use amazon for that sort of thing in this day and age.
That said, here are my personal bandwagon favorites of the past several years:
Since Tuesday was mainly a day where I compiled LN sales charts, I’m lumping the one show of consequence that aired yesterday with Wednesday’s slate post.
The sales levels of anime adaptated from manga are basically a crapshoot. Not so much Light Novels. Though I still haven’t compiled at the 2012 data, but one particular bit of information popped out of the 2011 sample that it deserves its own individual mention. It’s best described as 2 rules of thumb:
1. No LN series that had at least one week where a volume sold 20,000 copies in that week (disregarding cumulative totals) that went on to sell less than 4000 disks per volume. Only one (Mayo Chiki) sold less than 5000.
2. No LN series without at least one week where a volume sold 20,000 copies sold more than 4000 disks per volume. Only one (Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka?) sold over 3000.
Weekly Oricon rankings of Light Novels, continued from the 2012 post. Based on just what I saw copy-pasting these lists together, there’s a pretty favorable case to be made that Mahouka Kouko no Rettousai will sell more than anything else in 2014. More on that when I actually get around to using these for the purpose I compiled them for.
Weekly Oricon rankings of Light Novels, continued from the 2011 post.
Weekly LN rankings from 2011, continued from the 2010 post. This is where the sample starts getting interesting for the purpose of determining the effects of LN sales on the popularity of an anime (and subsequent effects of the anime’s popularity on LN sales), since we have a solid baseline or thresholds for comparison from previous years for everything that got an adaptation this year.
Same as for 2009, but for 2010. This year sees multiple series (BakaTest, Durarara, and OreImo) scoring huge sales resurgences soon after their anime aired, taking up 5+ spaces on the weekly charts with old volumes. It helps to have a chart threshold that’s below 10k. This phenomenon also happens on the manga charts, but far less frequently and to a much lesser degree for series not named Blue Exorcist or Attack on Titan.
Oh, and a quick fyi; the reason why there are different list sizes for different weeks is because these are taken from the LNs that charted on the overall novel rankings, and their numbers can vary by week.
I noted in my 2014 “questions” post that I wanted to do a breakdown of Light Novel sales as compared to the reception of anime adaptations. I also noted that myanimelist kept the data, but in weekly posts that were archived on myanimelist’s news forum, a place so organized that 2009 threads will often be bumped up to 2011, with a search function that only displays a max of 30 or so posts and adds about 20 seconds to the collection of every datapoint by pointing you to the last post made in each thread. This is no fault of dtshyk, Snowical, and symbv, the mal news people who have done a straight up excellent job of keeping LN (and manga) data on a weekly basis for nearly 5 years now. Many thanks to them for keeping the data archived in a retrievable and easy to understand format.
Since I don’t have much else in terms of data to crunch until February ends, I decided to see what I could do with that. After taking down data for 3 of the 16 series in my 2011 sample, I realized that individually going through the forums and looking for the release weeks was inefficient as all get out, so I decided to just make a master text file for each year’s worth of data and wash my hands of people bumping a post 2 years into the future to point out how happy they were that Katekyoshi Hitman Reborn was on the manga list. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make these collections available as I finish them. As far as I’ve searched, there’s no other English-language site that archives these data in a convenient format. And if there is, well, redundancy is always nice.
If you just judged Monday’s slate by their pictures and plot summaries, the day was a bit less ambitious in terms of scope than anything out this weekend. But a lot of times it doesn’t take far-reaching ambition to make serviceable entertainment, just a staff that cares about their product.
Animetics 