Here’s the usual infodump post of initial numbers for the series whose June amazon ranks I’ll be tracking, gathered from this list of upcoming releases. As before, May data is still being collected and will be posted when that’s done in about a week.
The commercial impact of anime goes well beyond its disk sales. Manga may sell to more people, but anime is extremely visible, airing on TV (albeit often late at night) and propagating around the internet at a very rapid pace. This visibility very often can lead to an increased strength of the franchise in general, propping up sales of print material, figures, and any various other related goods. Sometimes, anyway. 2013 was no exception, and saw a number of manga adaptations have anywhere from minimal to explosive effects on the sales of their source material.
I collected the manga sales history, including thresholds for series which charted sporadically, on this doc, and plotted it below. Note that these sales are not total, but the total number reported in a roughly fixed time period. Comparing sales tail length is a whole other issue, and I’m trying as much as possible to compare like figures.
One important difference from similar breakdowns of 2011/2012 series is that here I’ve opted to use the total sales from a series’ first 2 weeks of release (the highest reported total in that time interval), to attempt to minimize the effects of a bad split in creating artificial variations. It’s still an issue either way, but the difference between 9 and 14 days is a lot less than the difference between 2 and 7 days.
Two important series-specific notes prior to the plots. First, Maoyu is plotted here, in the manga section, because the manga charts more consistently than the light novel did and, more importantly, has available data from both before and after the anime aired (the LN ended just prior to 2013). Second, I can’t parse impact for series that don’t have at least one volume which released after the anime began to air. I thus will not be covering Servant x Service here, though there is data available. I will cover it in an addendum post come September when volume 4 has been out for 2 weeks.
I believe that 20 minutes of time is valuable because I could use that time trying out any number of known amazing anime or manga I have yet to get to. Why persevere when Space Adventure Cobra is waiting right there with an arm cannon, fine wine, and sexy bodies that save the universe? Consequentially, I’m not too attached to the idea that I need to finish any particular anime. If I’m 99% sure I’m not getting anything desirable out of the remaining episodes of the show, that’s grounds for a drop. This is a post about the Spring 2013 anime which showed potential at one point, but didn’t make it past the finish line. This is not a post about first-episode drops, which I covered earlier this season, or didn’t-watch shows.
Arata Kangatari didn’t really fix its terminology problems this week, but the dull monologues this episode explaining what in the whoozits a Hayagami is were plentifully offset by the key scene establishing the Shinshou as – so far – the best villains of the Spring 2013 season.
If the anime blogoshpere were a field of corn, and each post that summarized the spring 2013 season were a corn husk, then you could stand in the middle of it and toss a match in any direction, and end up with something on the order of 10 gallons of popcorn. And some third degree burns. Um.
So, what I mean to say is this; seasonal anime preview posts are really a saturated field. But we like anime, and we want to cover it, too. Thus, we labored hard to find a hipster angle, and we found it; instead of putting up a dime a dozen post, we’re putting a dozen dimes on the post. In simpler terms, we’re taking mad bets on the upcoming Spring 2013 lineup, Vegas-style!
The Spring 2013 Season is still a few weeks away, but that doesn’t mean companies aren’t going to try to get a leg up on the competition by getting stuff out early. In some cases they’re just digging their own grave, but there’s plenty of great shows I would never have watched save for an early airdate and a snazzy intro.
Animetics 