At Yume Animation, every employee spent the lunch break staring at the second-week performance reports for the winter season. No one said much. Faces that had once been accustomed to the easy confidence of back-to-back victories now carried a weight that was difficult to hide.
AD's ratings had not changed much compared with the previous week. The second episode had entered Fuko's arc, and the arrival of that adorable, slightly airheaded female character - so endearing that it was almost impossible to dislike her - had helped stabilize the show. This week, AD recorded a 5.16 rating.
The problem was that, although its ratings had remained almost the same, its position among the winter season's new anime had fallen to third place.
In first place was The Demon of Time, with 5.23. In second was Crimson Scales, with 5.19. Just behind AD, The Mystery of the Black Detective stood at 5.03, Steins;Gate ranked fifth with 5.01, and Sea of Clouds followed in sixth with 4.97.
Judging by Sea of Clouds' word of mouth, its ratings were likely to rise even further next week.
Steins;Gate, on the other hand, seemed destined to drop.
And AD, despite being stable for now, was only temporarily safe. No one knew when Sea of Clouds or The Mystery of the Black Detective might suddenly surge and catch up.
Over the past two years, the employees had grown used to seeing Yume Animation's productions dominate their season. Re:Zero had earned Sora the Best Anime Kantoku award for two consecutive years, with its peak rating breaking past 6 points. 5 Centimeters per Second had been the biggest box-office success of the previous summer season, grossing more than 1.3 billion yen and ranking seventh on Japan's annual box-office chart.
Results like those naturally bred a certain pride. To many people inside the company, Sora already carried the aura of someone invincible in the animation world, as though it were only a matter of time before he became the industry's undisputed number one.
But now, with Tokyo's four major television networks investing heavily this season and bringing famous Kantokus and veteran screenwriters back into the field, everyone finally realized something.
Those old names in the Japanese animation industry, the ones who had seemed half-retired and far removed from the spotlight, still possessed terrifying strength.
Everyone in the company knew that the second half of Steins;Gate was explosive. Once the story reached the right point, it was almost divine.
Even so, an uncomfortable doubt hovered in the back of everyone's mind: would enough viewers really be willing to hold on until then?
If things continued like this, perhaps the most Kantoku Sora could achieve was to have AD compete for a top-three rating position across the winter and spring seasons.
In the worst-case scenario, Steins;Gate might collapse completely during the winter season because of its slow-burn pacing, its popularity falling beyond recovery. Then, no matter how brilliant the second half was, it might already be too late to save it.
The employees kept sighing.
And Sumire, who was now essentially the company's second-in-command, was not doing much better.
The unknown was precisely what frightened people the most.
Steins;Gate had received an enormous investment and carried sky-high expectations. Seeing it fall to fourth place in only its second week of broadcast was difficult to accept calmly, no matter how many times Sora tried to reassure her.
If its rating dropped below 5 points, Steins;Gate would have a very real chance of ending in the red.
"Relax a little."
Sora saw Sumire searching for related news online again, only to end up so angered by his internet haters that even the tips of her ears turned red. He could not help but smile.
"Sora… are you really one hundred percent certain that Steins;Gate can turn its ratings around once the story starts gaining momentum in episode twelve?" Sumire asked, closing her laptop after hesitating for several seconds.
"I'm not," he replied calmly.
Although he had the data from his previous life as reference, that life was that life. This Japan was this Japan.
A reference, in the end, was only a reference.
"But even if what you're worried about really happens, even if Steins;Gate loses a lot of heat in the middle of its run and can't pull its ratings back up near the end, so what?" Sora smiled. "The Yume Animation we built together is no longer the tiny company from three years ago, the kind that could go bankrupt from the failure of a single short animation."
"I know. It's just…" Sumire bit her lip, fell silent for a moment, then spoke in a low voice. "I don't want to see you lose. I don't want to see those internet haters laughing at you, or the media treating you like a joke. What if, at this year's Tokyo Anime Festival, you lose the Best Kantoku award?"
Hearing that, Sora froze for a moment. Then he looked at Sumire seriously.
The stubbornness in her eyes, that silent refusal to accept defeat, touched something inside him.
She wanted it perhaps ten times more than he himself did - to see Sora achieve something unprecedented in the history of Japanese animation: winning the Best Anime Kantoku award three years in a row.
In the history of the industry, only three people had ever won that award for two consecutive years. One of them was Sora. Another was Masaru Kyo, the Kantoku of The Demon of Time, who was competing directly against him this season. The last had died long ago, belonging to an almost archaeological era of animation.
But if Sora could win it three years in a row…
"I'm sorry," he said.
Sumire looked at him.
"My attitude really was a little too casual. Steins;Gate isn't just my work. You're in it too. So is the effort of hundreds of people in this company."
He paused, and his tone became firmer.
"Although I think that scenario is unlikely, deep down I still believe Steins;Gate will dominate Japan's anime market in the first half of the year. But if that small possibility really does happen, if Steins;Gate's ratings truly fall short of expectations… then in the second half of the year, I promise we'll win everything back. The annual Best Kantoku award will still be ours."
"The second half of the year?" Sumire was taken aback. "The company doesn't have any projects planned for the second half."
"Not yet," Sora said, smiling casually. "But it will soon."
He raised one finger.
"AD. Season two."
"This work has a second season?" Sumire asked, unable to hide her surprise.
In her eyes, the first season's story already seemed complete. The male lead, Takasaki, and the heroine, Nagisa Furukawa, confessed their feelings to each other and ended up together, happy. For romance anime, that was usually where the story ended.
"The second season is where this work truly shines," Sora said.
5 Centimeters per Second had earned him tens of millions of emotional points. Adding that to the millions brought in by Re:Zero's overseas broadcast, along with the simultaneous airing of Steins;Gate, Liar Game, and the first season of AD, it was likely that before the winter season even ended, Sora would be able to gather the two hundred million emotional points needed to exchange for AD's second season.
That would be the true masterpiece he would deliver to Japanese animation that year.
In the first half of the year, Steins;Gate would rely on its almost divine foreshadowing and flawless story structure to reverse its ratings near the end. In the second half, AD season two would make Japanese anime fans cry until there was nothing left, harvesting an absurd number of emotional points while also attempting to refresh the ratings record for an anime created by Sora.
That was the script he had imagined.
It was just a little too embarrassing and childish to say out loud, so it was not exactly easy to explain all of it to Sumire directly.
While Sora and Sumire were still discussing the performance of the company's two anime, over in Japan's television drama industry, Liar Game, the series scripted by Sora, was beginning to explode among drama fans.
Because it was not a production made by his own company, Sora did not pay too much attention to Liar Game's ratings. What truly interested him was the amount of emotional points the work could generate.
But in reality, after the second episode aired, the drama's ratings surged.
It rose to 4.53.
In the first week of the winter drama season, Liar Game had ranked only fifth. Now, it had leapt straight to third place.
The gap between it and the first-place drama, which stood at 4.87, and the second-place drama, which stood at 4.79, no longer seemed so large.
This season, the anime industry was locked in a war between monsters. Four works had already broken past the 5-point rating mark.
In the drama market, however, things were more normal that week. The legal drama Voice of Justice from Aobane TV had a fairly traditional plot, but Japanese viewers liked that kind of story. On top of that, its cast was made up of popular actors, so its ratings remained solid, fluctuating around the 4.8 range.
The real outlier was Liar Game.
Ever since its first episode, the Japanese media had been praising the series almost unanimously.
In the second episode, the heroine, Nao Kanzaki, could not bear the thought of the teacher she had once respected being crushed under a massive debt of ten million yen because of the counter-fraud scheme carried out by her and the male lead, Shinichi Akiyama. The teacher's desperate situation - abandoned by his wife and even cut off by his daughter - weighed too heavily on her.
So Nao returned the ten million yen she had tricked out of him.
At first glance, that choice made the heroine seem a little too saintly. But in the Japanese version, Sora had made small adjustments to her characterization, softening the plot just enough so that the audience would not feel repelled by it.
Besides, Kantoku Masashi Kondo had absolutely nailed the casting. And when it came to television, the audience's moral compass often followed the face on-screen. A saintly girl, yes - but cute, charming, charismatic, the kind of girl who could make viewers fall for her at first sight.
With a protagonist like that, was being too kind really still a problem?
In the second episode, because she had returned the money, Nao was passively dragged, alongside Shinichi Akiyama, into the second round of the Liar Game.
The Minority Decision.
Twenty-two people. Each of them took on a debt of ten million yen from the organizers, bringing together a total of two hundred and twenty million yen.
The twenty-two participants would vote through multiple rounds, always choosing between two options.
In each round, if one option received the majority of votes, everyone who had voted for that option would be eliminated and leave the game carrying a debt of ten million yen.
Only those who, in every round, chose the option selected by the minority could survive.
The majority obeyed the minority.
The mere explanation of those rules already gave Japanese viewers a refreshing sense of novelty.
And among twenty-two people, only one could be the winner.
On top of that, in a game like the Minority Decision, forming alliances was almost useless.
If someone thought the same way as you and voted with you, the two of you could be eliminated together.
It was the kind of game where the audience simply could not imagine how Nao Kanzaki and Shinichi Akiyama, as the protagonists, could defeat every other participant and seize the final prize of two hundred and twenty million yen.
When viewers were willing to watch a work without thinking too much, that already proved the work had succeeded.
But when viewers were willing to put to work that part of their brain they had not used at high speed since graduation, just to think through the rules and plot of a series…
Then it meant that the series was extremely successful.
Even so, the most important moment came at the end of the second episode.
Just when the viewers were already feeling the suffocating despair of that game, Shinichi Akiyama looked directly at the screen, brought a hand to his chin, and with an expression so overwhelmingly confident that it was almost irritating, said to the audience in front of their televisions:
"For this game, I have an infallible winning strategy."
In that instant, the curiosity and competitive spirit of Liar Game's fans were hooked completely.
What infallible strategy?
Why couldn't I think of it?
Sora, are you insulting the intelligence of the viewers?
How dare you end the second episode with the protagonist making that unbearably smug face?
And so, while the anime media were still making sharp, dismissive criticisms of Sora's two new anime that season, the drama media were already praising Liar Game so enthusiastically that even Kantoku Masashi Kondo began to feel a little light-headed.
The entire production team of Liar Game seemed as though they had been injected directly with adrenaline.
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