It was late December.
At school, the names Airi and Shiori Takahashi were appearing in Haruto's ears with increasing frequency. After all, they were the Twin Stars of Minamijo Third High. Two students from the same school, debuting in the same year, and after a year of intense competition, they were now both competing on the prestigious national stage of the Ascent of New Gods selection.
If both of them achieved outstanding results and were scouted by major publishing houses in Tokyo or Osaka, the narrative would be incredibly romantic in its own right. Shiori Takahashi leading the way while Airi chased relentlessly from behind created a sense of fated rivalry straight out of a novel.
However, on this day, the destined showdown that the fans at school and across Minamijo had imagined took an unexpected turn.
The premiere of the Anohana anime was less than twenty days away, officially set for January 10th. By this time, KyoAni Studios had already released numerous production details, including the opening and ending themes, the voice cast, and character design sheets.
All of this information was readily available on their official website.
The most shocking detail, however, was the credit for the ending theme, Secret Base: What You Gave Me. Over the past two days, the fan bases of both authors had been in an uproar over the announcement.
Even in the classroom, groups of girls spent their morning breaks debating the news.
"Wait, this song was actually a collaboration between Shiori Takahashi and Airi?"
"Are they really that close? They actually got together to write the ending theme for Anohana?"
"Since when did those two know how to compose music on top of writing novels?"
"Is there anyone in our school with that kind of talent? Anyone can try to write a story, but composing a song? That's on a different level. The anime hasn't aired yet, so we don't know if the music is actually good. I don't think there are many students here who understand music theory. I've heard of maybe twenty or thirty people, and most of them just play instruments at an average level. Composing is miles beyond that."
"Could it be Reina? She's a brilliant pianist and won first place in the high school competition."
One girl immediately thought of the top-ranked student as soon as the topic of music came up.
"Oh, please. She's just a bookworm. She can probably play a piece mechanically if you give her the sheet music, but do you really think she has the soul for original composition? Besides, you're basically implying she's either Shiori Takahashi or Airi. There's no way."
Someone immediately countered with a voice full of envy. The most common thing ordinary people said about high achievers was that they were "all brains and no talent." While Reina was popular, she was also the target of significant jealousy.
"Honestly, she probably only gets good grades because her family spends a fortune on private tutors. People call her a 'talented girl,' but it's just because she has expensive teachers for music and art. Anyone with those resources could be just as good. Original creation requires raw genius, and she definitely doesn't have that."
"Exactly. All those boys love to put her on a pedestal, but I've never seen anything impressive about her. Her father is the only one who's actually powerful."
Haruto, who had been listening to this, finally reached his limit. He looked up and frowned at the group of girls nearby.
"You guys are being really loud. You don't even know Reina, so why are you acting like you understand her life so well?"
"What's it to you? Go back to sleep," one of the girls replied, stunned into an embarrassed anger.
"Your voices are so loud that they're disturbing my nap. Besides, you sound so bitter that it's actually making me laugh," Haruto said with a smirk.
"What do you care if we talk about her? Is she your dream goddess or something? Does it hurt your feelings to hear the truth?"
The girls rolled their eyes at Haruto and noticed several other classmates sitting up and watching the confrontation. Not wanting to make a scene and embarrass themselves further, they stopped arguing.
"Whoa, Haruto. You're pretty fired up today. That's not like you at all," a few of his male friends said, leaning over to talk to him.
"It's nothing. They were just being loud. Everyone is stressed with exams and trying to catch some sleep during break. I was just giving them a reminder."
In reality, Haruto's reason for intervening was simple. Reina had helped him with his music and was currently working on his illustrations and posters. He had benefited from her help twice now. No matter how distant he usually acted, he considered her a friend and couldn't stand listening to people spread malicious rumors about her.
"So this is the kind of environment she lives in," Haruto sighed to himself. Being a genius wasn't as easy as it looked.
He wondered if his identity as Shiori Takahashi were ever exposed, would he be subjected to the same kind of petty backstabbing and jealousy? Haruto shook his head slightly.
December flew by, and January arrived.
The first half of the month was dominated by final exams. The testing lasted three days, and the results were posted shortly after. Haruto ranked 965th in the entire grade, placing him in the bottom twenty-one students. Before he started writing novels, he usually ranked in the six or seven hundreds, but having spent so much energy on his work, his grades had plummeted.
He felt a genuine sense of disappointment.
However, there was another reason for his frustration.
Reina had taken first place in all six subjects, maintaining her position as the top student in the school. Haruto found her academic stamina to be monstrous. She had maintained a daily writing pace of thousands of words for a long time and still held onto her ranking. It was absurd.
We're both high school authors, so how is she this strong?
The final winter break of Haruto's high school career officially began. During this period, two major events were on his mind. First, the promotional campaign for the Anohana anime was in full swing, with the premiere set for Wednesday, January 10th, at 8:00 PM. Second, the marketing for the Ascent of New Gods competition had officially launched.
Unlike the regional scale of Crimson Maple Literature, the Ascent of New Gods magazine was backed by the joint efforts of the Big Seven publishers, meaning the promotion reached all prefectures across Japan. The first issue was scheduled for release on Sunday, January 14th.
With only three days until the anime premiere on the 10th, Haruto tuned into Tokyo TV7 in the evening. After waiting through several segments, a fifteen-second commercial for Anohana finally appeared.
The designs for Jintan and Menma were slightly different from the illustrations at Crimson Maple, but the entire Super Peace Busters cast made an appearance. A voice-over for the trailer began.
"On that day... she appeared once again beside an ordinary high school boy, Jintan."
"Menma... are you a hallucination?"
An animated boy with a disheveled look stared at a silver-haired girl, his eyes wide with disbelief.
"So! What do you people even know?" Yukiatsu screamed in pain within the forest.
The fifteen-second teaser showed each character for a brief moment, each delivering a line that would be completely incomprehensible to anyone who hadn't read the novel.
It was all about building suspense. Then, the screen went black. The voices of the five voice actors for Jintan, Anaru, Yukiatsu, Tsuruko, and Poppo rang out in unison.
"Found you!"
Then, Menma's voice followed, a girl's tone caught between a laugh and a sob.
"I've been found."
For the Anohana fans in Minamijo, those last two lines were explosive. The emotional weight in the voice actress's response was overwhelming.
Many fans who had finally found peace after finishing the novel months ago were instantly dragged back into the heart-wrenching finale. They were on the verge of tears all over again.
However, for television viewers in other prefectures, the trailer was utterly baffling. Nevertheless, anime fans across Japan began discussing it on AniSphere, the largest online anime forum in the country.
In January, nearly a hundred different anime were being broadcast across the various TV stations of Japan.
Excluding long-running series and sequels, there were about seventy or eighty new adaptations of manga, games, and novels. Anohana didn't particularly stand out in terms of promotion or budget among the new spring releases.
Even though it was only early January, most people believed the battle for the Top Anime of the Season would be between the popular romance manga adaptation My Neighbor Isn't Cool at All!, the high-octane fighting game adaptation Rising Dragon, and the fantasy novel adaptation Mirror World. All three of these had budgets exceeding 1 billion yen and had been promoted for a full six months. They were also being broadcast on massive platforms like Tokyo TV1 and Osaka TV1. Other competing shows simply couldn't compete with those advantages.
Still, because Anohana was airing on Tokyo TV7, it had a decent baseline of viewers. Plus, the number of fans for the original source material was significant.
On the AniSphere forums,
"The Anohana trailer looks pretty solid!"
"The art style is nice."
"Menma's voice actress! I've been a fan of hers for three years. Her 'young girl' voice is so sweet."
"Honestly, I'm more curious about what makes this series so special. I've seen fans of the novel aggressively recommending it at least five times on the ACG forums lately. I'm an anime-only person, I never read novels or manga, so I hope this doesn't disappoint when it airs in three days."
Just like in other worlds, novels, manga, anime, and games were all part of the same 2D culture, but the demographics in Japan were split. People who loved the source material would usually watch the anime adaptation.
Conversely, the vast majority of anime fans would never touch the unadapted novels or games. The audience for anime far outweighed any other category, which is why a successful adaptation can boost the sales of the original work so drastically.
Haruto had a lot of fans, but in reality, the number of anime-only viewers who had merely heard the title Anohana without actually reading it was far larger.
After a few days of heated discussion, the first episode of Anohana premiered. As Haruto and KyoAni had expected, the viewership for the first episode was fairly average. The episode had an average rating of 1.02% and peaked at 1.32%. Compared to the usual traffic on Tokyo TV7, this was middle-of-the-road. Not bad, but certainly not a breakout hit.
While the novel fans contributed to the numbers, every other adaptation had its own fan base doing the same. Furthermore, the works from the big Tokyo and Osaka publishers had far more fans than Anohana to begin with. In that regard, Anohana didn't have a competitive advantage based on its source material's popularity.
That 1.02% rating put Anohana at 27th place among the hundred or so anime airing in January. Even with the benefit of a high-traffic station like TV7, the result was enough to invite ridicule from "professional" anime fans on the forums. The novel fans had spent weeks talking about how amazing the story was, but the first episode seemed underwhelming. New viewers didn't find much to talk about, while the novel fans were busy praising the "perfect adaptation" and how Menma was just as cute as they imagined.
So, was the first episode mediocre because the production team messed up? Or was it actually well-made and simply representative of the source material's quality? The "hardcore" fans had hyped it up so much, yet the anime didn't look like anything special.
Of course, some novel fans tried to explain to the newcomers that the story was a slow burn, but few people were listening. Haruto didn't mind. Neither he nor KyoAni expected the show to be a massive hit right out of the gate. KyoAni was betting on the popularity skyrocketing toward the end so they could make money on licensing, merchandise, and Blu-rays.
Haruto, who would get a cut of those sales on top of boosting his book royalties, remained calm. They were both waiting for the late-game plot to trigger the same surge in popularity that the serialization had enjoyed.
A few more days passed. On January 14th, the first issue of the Ascent of New Gods magazine was officially released.
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