Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Sophmore Slump
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malvarez1
Posts: 2357 |
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With Tiger & Bunny 2, it doesn’t help that the second season was just much weaker in general.
As a rule, I’m not against a sequel that takes years to come out; I’ll take that over a sequel never coming out, or in most cases, a remake. In a way, now that nostalgia is such a huge money maker, I kind of feel like we’ll be seeing that more often. |
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Piglet the Grate
 Posts: 1162 Location: North America |
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How could TWIA leave out Kimi ni Todoke from the discussion?
Season 1: October 6, 2009, to March 30, 2010 Season 2: January 4 to March 30, 2011 Season 3: Chibi recap and 5 hour-long episodes dumped at once on August 1, 2024 Saw little (apparent) interest in "Season 3" despite the love from many of the first two anime seasons and/or the manga. |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4738 Location: New York |
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This is very timely with the apparent news that Solo Leveling Season 3 is not coming out any time soon as the studio has several other projects to do.
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mdo7
 Posts: 7112 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Regarding Tiger & Bunny, I was hoping that the mainstream popularity success of My Hero Academia would give that anime title a big crossover from MHA fans but alas it didn't translate although I haven't watched Season 2, so I can't give my thought on how season 2 looked. People have asked in the past why did My Hero Academia succeed when Tiger & Bunny didn't despite both of them had similar premise.
Regarding sequels, for me it can be a hit or miss just like live-action movies (ie: The Godfather Part 2, Terminator 2: Judgement Day). That's all I have to say. |
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gsilver
Posts: 671 |
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The 13 years between the first DVD of Trigun and Badlands Rumble were not particularly good for it.
If the movie came out maybe 5 years earlier and also got localized in a timely fashion, it would have been a much bigger deal. The new Trigun at least is more-or-less its own thing and doesn't rely on nostalgia from the original. Then again, I don't think that the new Trigun series is considered a hit, either. |
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Rinhime
Posts: 1 |
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I believe the Lycoreco issue is a good example of how most studios are booked multiple years in advance at the moment, so even if something unexpected explodes in popularity like that it is tough to just be like "ok lets just make some more" when there are other things in the pipeline.
That doesn't really apply to something like Solo Leveling that is much more a predictable thing (although given how so many of the other manwha adaptations have been maybe they wanted to temper their expectations? That or they're planning on working on season 3 and probably 4 and 2 cours takes more planning) |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4772 |
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Saw some of this first hand. I showed a friend Devil is a Part Timer, and he really liked it. Fast forward to me mentioning we could watch season 2 now, and it was met with a "Maybe later." One that sticks out to me is Full Metal Panic 4. It was downright shocking to me that it was happening, and considering it has been years since then, I'm guessing it landed with a thud.
I do think the long gaps tend to torpedo the interest. People find other things they like more, they forget what happened years ago and don't feel like rewatching, etc. I'm not sure what the answer is. You can't be sure that the first thing will be a hit, so production committees wait and see. That leaves studios having to take on other projects to pay the bills, and everyone can be booked up for years. Then it's wait for an opening, try to find someone else, or just let it languish. Production committees are cautious enough that they don't tend to do multi-season orders for anything that isn't a known performer, and I doubt if they would plunk down enough extra for a studio to do something like make a winter anime and also keep an opening for season 2 in the fall. I don't know if Part-Timer 3 was as much a sign that 2 did something right, or if the production committee thought there was still enough interest to warrant committing to more than just season 2. I know that it's a separate season, but a relatively quick turnaround makes me think wheels were turning well before 2 wrapped. |
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meiam
Posts: 3495 |
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I think a big aspect is that often, when there's these long pause in an adaptation, its because the material left to be adapted is much much much weaker, and the production committee can tell, so they just call it quit rather than keep going (devil is a part timer is the perfect example of this). Later on they might be low on other stuff to adapt, or the people involved in making the decision left and you have people who weren't involved and are unaware of the decrease in quality coming up. So they release a long awaited sequel, to a collective shrug.
There's also a lot of element why show work, and coming out the right time is very important, a decade later, and the time might not be right anymore.
I remember tiger and bunny being a very mild success, borderline embarrassing one considering how heavy (relatively speaking for the time) the advertisement for it was. So I was a bit confused at the column talking about it like it was a mega success, but that link contextualize it much closer to what I remember from the time. I think it was just a mega success in the niche/small fujoshi communities, and the fandom at large just didn't care that much for it. |
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1556 |
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Takeshi Nogami has been turning out LycoReco and John Wick, LycoReco and Black Lagoon doujins…. why not Lupin as well as City Hunter?
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Eilavel
Posts: 180 |
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Wasn't Double Decker! Doug & Kirill a same-universe follow up to Tiger and Bunny? I wouldn't actually know as I found Tiger and Bunny dull. Double Decker was too good to forget though, "Don't think, Feel So Good!"
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 485 |
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Tiger & Bunny wasn't crushed by time alone. It debuted in 2011, before the first Avengers movie had even come out. We were in the superhero boom. T&B 2 came out when superheroes were starting to enter a slump. It was 2022, Marvel was entering their post-Endgame flop, plus by that time, My Hero Academia had been eating up all the superhero stuff for years (at that point the manga was 8 years old and the anime was 5 seasons deep) on the Japan front.
Plus the already mentioned terrible Netflix drop model and the fact that, as someone already mentioned, T&B 2 just wasn't as good. The sequel didn't just have one mountain (time) to climb to be successful, it had multiple ones. Basically no show had a shot at overcoming that. I do still love Tiger & Bunny. Shame what happened to it. ANYWAY, to move to the broader topic of revivals after a long time, I feel like any anime-original show is damn near doomed to be as popular again it it's gone for like longer than.... let's say 2 years without at least an announcement of a sequel/renewal. Anime fans are fickle creatures and without something to stoke the fires of fandom, they'll just move on... On that note, god Lycoris Recoil was good and I hope it comes back in full and not just those mini-films they've already announced. |
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fathomlessblue
 Posts: 404 Location: Manchester, UK |
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I feel like this is something that can go both ways. There definitely can be an issue where both time and the volume of newer titles can reveal definitely take the shine off titles that maintained excitement for several years. This seems particularly true of original shows, or adaptations based on stories where there isn’t enough material left to build up momentum. Gangsta for example, seemed to do pretty well with western audiences, but with virtually nothing else written beyond the anime’s ending point, interest quickly fizzled, regardless of the collapse of Manglobe.
As for some of the examples mentioned… well I’m slightly biased in thinking Tiger & Bunny was never that impressive, and largely exploded in popularity due to appealing to an under-served audience at a time when the state of seasonal shows was absolutely dire. I get the love, but it definitely felt overshadowed as the decade wore on. Demon Lord on the other hand, seemed to only build up hype as the years went on, which always seemed odd to me, as the series frontloaded all its best ideas in the first five episodes (ie the first novel), and quickly ran out of steam afterwards, resorting to uneven sitcom antics. People complained about the quality of the follow up seasons, but the signs of it stalling existed even in the first. As for Princess Principal… I mean I really liked that show, but both the amount time and format they chose to continue it is pure death to me as a means of maintaining interest. I get why, & clearly it makes money, but I also haven’t given Garupan a shred of thought in the last decade as a result of following a similar business model. If they had just made another sequel I’d be almost certainly still on board with Principal, but my attitude is currently “Well I might rewatch the series when the ovas conclude in 2035...” Even if you like a show in the moment, time & evolving tastes often to show them up to be nowhere as essential as you remember. It’s the Haruhi effect. I sorta liked Kimi ni Todoke back in the day, but now there are so many more recent shoujo titles with far better character writing and certainly pacing, that I think I’d just rather wait for more Skip & Loafer than deal with another glacial season built out of contrivances. Of course exceptions can occur, particularly within niche fandoms that have access to continuing material. I never thought the Yona brigade would last this long, but they’re still around, as vocal as ever. Meanwhile there’s Land of the Lustrous faithful like myself that know just how phenomenal future volumes become, that we can’t give up hoping even when all evidence points to disappointment. Of course at this point, eternal longing & fetishizing pain might be the true mark of a fan. |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 677 |
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I tend to separate out critical success, commercial success, and technical success.
To the premise of the question (which I interpret as loaded towards a question of commercial vs technical) my personal view as a fan is that technical matters more than commercial. If a show is good, it's good. I don't need it to follow a predetermined formula, meet some external metric, or meet some timeline. For a studio, however, (and tangentially a lot of fans out there) that lull between iterations means something. There is little doubt that a series that takes too long to release it's second iteration tends to fare poorly in viewership and commercial sales. Too many fans either forget or no longer care about the series. It cannot capitalize on whatever draw the original had that might have kept people interested. That to me, however, has little to do with the quality of the product. If it's bad, it's not bad because of when it was released, but because of the story it was telling and how it told that story. Animation was bad, characterization was bad, actual narrative was bad, directing was bad, voice acting was bad. Even outside of the time between entries itself, the bad timing of it releasing after something better, oar at the same time as some juggernaut, or after a lot of "copycats" have diminished the impact of the overall story. I feel that, especially nowadays when you can always just remind yourself by re-watching a show once a new season drops, a sequel even a couple decades later shouldn't be that big an impact unless you as a viewer have personal hang-ups that sour your taste for the series, or that viewing option simply isn't available. |
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Divineking
 Posts: 1303 |
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Then you're remembering incorrectly. Viz pushed it to a solid degree over here, but Sunrise infamously had low expectations for it when it first came out, and expected one of their other original works at the time, Sacred Seven to be the big hit, so they were caught off guard when T&B ended selling ridiculously well over there. I'd say that's probably the reason why it took so long to get a sequel, but given that we hadn't yet reached the point where the industry was booked year to year and Sunrise was all about sequels back then, I think they just didn't understand what they had (which might also be why Double Decker failed to recreate the magic despite being marketed as something in the same spirit). Kind of a shame too, because in the gap between seasons, they ended up missing out on the entire Marvel movie craze at it's peak, and had Sunrise been faster about a second season, they probably could have made a franchise out of it. |
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MFrontier
Posts: 15572 |
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I feel like we've kind of seen this with the current season of Hanako-kun where it's been so long since the last season that it's getting slightly less buzz even though the season itself is fantastic.
I think the plan was to adapt the story arc that runs through 2-3. Of course, with the studio and staff change and the quality of the material they were adapting...they may have been better off leaving season 1 a one-hit wonder.
I think it was marketed as being related to Tiger and Bunny but was ultimately just a spiritual successor more than anything else. |
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