Back in late April, I was taking a look at some available numbers which may indicated casual interest in a show, including myanimelist statistics, for the disk sales and print bumps of series aired in the latter half of 2013. In order to get the mal values, I pulled them from the site a couple of days before I posted the relevant articles. One of the comments on this article raised a very legitimate question; how did I know that these values were consistent with the ones a series had in midseason, around the time we would hope to use them to predict print boosts and disk sales before they happened. That was a key assumption – that series’ relative popularity and ratings would remain constant after the end of the season. This turns out to be a bit of an oversimplification, especially for older seasons of anime where things have had more time to change.

Using fantasy anime league data, I was able to go back and look at both the popularity and ratings a show had at the end of a season (i.e. prior to the beginning of the next season). Many seasons of data are available, but I have chosen to focus on 4: Fall 2013, Spring 2013, Fall 2012, and Spring 2012. Note that Summer/Winter seasons are not tracked by fal. This post focuses on my analysis of the evolution of the popularity numbers (collected here) as compared with values taken in late July, 2014. Namely, I want to know if series exhibit significant postseason changes relative to their peers and, if so, which series do so most prominently. I’m still playing with ratings data, and will address those in a separate post later.

Note that Kyoukai no Kanata and Kill La Kill were excluded from the Fall 2013 fal season for understandable competitive balance reasons. Their exclusion is nonetheless somewhat frustrating, as they would have been interesting to look at through this context.

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