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.
Up to this point, this season is batting a thousand in my book; everything I’ve watched up to this point has merited at least 2 more episodes on my own more or less arbitrary scale.* In many ways, it’s already fulfilled its “five fun shows with a genre spread” quota and is already looking for bonus points. The first of which will be coming from Sunday’s lineup, which included a slightly-larger-than-bite-size comedy, a mid-major occult show, and a pair of shows, one original and one via Comic Earth Star, drawing from Japan’s most famous general. All of them were varying degrees of promising, so I’m pretty set for the weekend this Winter.
When we made a countdown podcast hyping the upcoming season, we offhandedly decided not to note that our three top series were coming out on the same day, joining an excellent pair of sports series in what has classically been the first or second most stacked day of the week. Straight dope, the past 24 hours had the potential to be pretty great. The keyword there is always “potential”; rarely does the entire slate of shows with upside pan out, and even those with very favorable preseason outlooks can disappoint. However, this time, things went on a bit different bent than usual. Seitokai Yakuindomo Confirmed Using Steroids got straight-up obnoxious with Suzu’s head. Robot Girls Z was twice as long as we previously thought. And Ian Sinclair was, in fact, Space Dandy. Which is now a 2-cour project. Since Arpeggio’s v1 sales numbers neatly edged out 10k, I’ve got an unbreakable three-way tie for favorite news of the weekend. Let’s break it down.
The Winter 2014 season has had a couple of preaired episodes at this point. It’s 2 or 3, by my count, depending on how you count adorable short Pupipo (shorts kind of exist in another dimension unless they’re Teekyu or Poyopoyo good, and this is solid not quite there). The main attractions to the undercard bout, though, are the hotly-anticipated-by-me Witchcraft Works and the no-expectations-going-in, might-not-have-watched-if-not-for-the-sparse-field-at-the-time Buddy Complex.
You knew it was coming. Shinichiro Watanabe’s return is Number One on the Unstoppable Hype Machine as it comes to a (surprising) stop for the season.
Animetics 