Miyu had begun spending ti at Rei's villa regularly in the weeks after the relationship beca public. Before, she had been careful about how much she asked.
The IP portfolios behind his various works were valued in the hundreds of billions of yen, and there was a specific category of social caution that applied to asking questions about things at that scale, even between people who were close. What if the question landed wrong?
Now she wandered through the villa without that particular concern and looked at whatever she was curious about.
She picked up the Attack on Titan original manga manuscripts from the table beside his desk.
She read for a while.
Then she set them down and looked at Rei with an expression that was sowhere between impressed and unsettled.
"This is the new work? The style change is significant."
"Not that significant," Rei said, continuing to organise the drawings on the table.
"How can you say that? Your previous works were all..." She stopped.
She was thinking about Hikaru no Go, which did not end happily. Five Centiters Per Second, which was purely tragic. Tonight, which operated in the sa register. Hunter x Hunter in its middle and later sections, with the Chira Ant arc and everything it contained. Arcane's specific quality of violence and moral complexity.
Even Demon Slayer, which had presented itself as a hot-blooded shonen series and had then spent its middle and later arcs killing beloved characters, severing limbs, and building toward an emotional devastation that the early episodes had not telegraphed.
Attack on Titan was dark. Against the body of work preceding it, it was not categorically darker.
But the first chapter's specific content was a different matter.
"In the first chapter, the protagonist's mother is directly..." She paused. "Eaten. Can a work that opens this way find an audience? The dia criticism when this goes public is going to be significant."
"It will not find the children's market," Rei said. "Which ans its comrcial ceiling will not be as high as Demon Slayer. This is a known quantity going in."
Miyu understood this. If any work could simply match Demon Slayer's comrcial performance, that would an Demon Slayer had not achieved anything unusual.
But for Shirogane-sensei's new ani to deliberately exclude the children's market from its target audience was a different kind of decision than she had been expecting.
"Don't worry about the dia criticism," Rei said. "If the people writing those articles had reliable judgnt about what would succeed and what would fail, they would be creating ani instead of writing about it."
He set down the drawings he was sorting.
"Titan will probably not be the highest comrcial perforr in my catalogue. But it will likely beco the work with the highest critical reputation of anything I have produced.
The audience it reaches will be deeply invested in a way that broad-audience works cannot quite replicate."
He reached over and rested his hand briefly on her head, which she found mildly condescending and did not object to.
"What you should actually be worried about," he said, "is not whether the dia will criticise Titan's content when it launches."
"What should I be worried about then?"
"That after the Titan manga begins serialisation, your third-place ranking in the journal is going to beco fourth."
Miyu's expression shifted in a specific way that she was unable to entirely control.
In mid-March, the Demon Slayer: Kitsu no Yaiba, Infinity Castle Arc cumulative dostic box office cleared 80 billion yen.
The overseas cumulative total crossed 38 billion yen.
On the sa day, the top trending topic across Japan's ani platforms and forums was not Demon Slayer.
It was the Attack on Titan promotional trailer.
Illumination Production Company, Shirogane Animation, and Ion TV, which had paid 2.6 billion yen to acquire the broadcast rights for the Attack on Titan animation, had jointly released the first full promotional video.
The developnt history of Attack on Titan as a property shared a structural resemblance to Demon Slayer's trajectory in Rei's previous life.
Among the globally significant ani IP properties of Rei's previous life, the works that had benefited most dramatically from the transition to animation were One-Punch Man, Attack on Titan, and Demon Slayer. The three shared a specific structural characteristic: their manga popularity had been aningful but not extraordinary.
In so cases modest enough that the eventual scale of their animated success was not predictable from the serialisation numbers alone. Once animated, each of them had undergone transformations in audience size and tankōbon sales that bore almost no proportional relationship to what the manga stage had suggested was possible.
They also shared sothing else: exceptionally high acceptance across both Eastern and Western ani markets simultaneously, which was a combination that most properties never achieved.
Among the three, Attack on Titan required the most investnt to do correctly. The gap between adequate and excellent production quality was larger for this property than for almost anything else in the dium.
The action design, the Omni-directional Mobility Gear sequences in particular, demanded animation fluency that either looked extraordinary or looked wrong with very little middle ground.
For the sa underlying plot, improving the image quality even moderately produced a dramatically better viewing experience. The production ceiling was high and the floor was punishing.
In Japan, Rei had the resources to aim at the ceiling without compromising.
The first season of Attack on Titan in the Japan version operated at a visual standard that would have been unrecognisable to anyone familiar with the property's original animated adaptation.
The PV trailer, compiled from actual first-season footage, had been released as the promotional opening move.
The response had been imdiate.
"Are those people flying over walls on cables? What is this? What am I watching?"
"The storyboarding. Whoever designed these sequences, the concept of using thin steel cables to move through a city at high speed against opponents this size: that is one of the most visually exciting action concepts I have seen in an ani preview."
"Humans on cables fighting giants several tis their size using nothing but their bodies and blade equipnt. The scale of the size difference being played against the humans' speed and precision. This is a brilliant visual design."
"I have watched the PV four tis. I am not done watching it."
"The art style is dark."
"The art style is appropriate. This is clearly a work in the register of the Chira Ant arc. A dark atmosphere is not a flaw here. It is a design choice that matches the content."
"So of the shots in the trailer are quite graphic."
"Can soone explain the actual world-building? What is this setting? Why are there giant humanoid creatures and why do the humans live in walled cities?"
"The official websites for Illumination Production Company and Shirogane Animation have released extensive setting materials over the past several weeks. Read those. The world-building is elaborate and worth understanding before the premiere."
"One month ago I was sitting outside the cinema after the Infinity Castle arc film unable to process what I had just watched, telling myself I would not be able to engage with another ani for months. I watched this PV trailer and I need the April premiere imdiately. I have learned sothing about myself today."
"Sa situation. I genuinely believed Demon Slayer had reset my capacity for ani for the foreseeable future. This PV changed that within ninety seconds. The fickle nature of being an ani fan is a real phenonon and I am a docunted example of it."
"April. Less than two weeks. Be patient."
"I cannot be patient. The PV shows the action and the scale and then ends. I need the plot. What is the plot. Why does no one understand how frustrating this is."
"Shirogane-sensei. You concluded one story and opened another one in the sa season. You are doing this deliberately."
"He is absolutely doing this deliberately."
"Demon Slayer is still in theatres. Attack on Titan premieres in April. Your Na releases in the sumr. This man has planned the year so that there is never a period where an audience can fully recover before the next thing arrives."
"This is either genius scheduling or a deliberate campaign against the emotional stability of ani fans. Possibly both."
"Both. It is definitely both."
The capacity of Japan's ani fan community to transfer attention from one property to the next, without aningfully reducing the attention already given to the first, had not changed across any version of the world Rei had experienced.
The Demon Slayer discussion volu had not declined. The Attack on Titan discussion volu was building alongside it rather than replacing it.
In the April spring ani season preview coverage, the discussion heat surrounding Attack on Titan had, within days of the PV release, made it the clear dominant topic of the upcoming season.
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