The broadcast of the first episode of one-punch man ended.
For the vast majority of Rei's fans who were watching on Capital TV Station, they only snapped back to reality when the ending theme began to play.
This anime…
"This is so interesting!"
"He got stronger, and he went bald. It's genuinely hilarious."
"The combat in this anime is incredibly smooth! The production quality is insane. Illumination? I've never even heard of them. Why are they so low-key?"
"This company has actually contributed famous scenes to many anime. Their production strength is very solid."
"But here's the funny part. That January disaster, Glow Under the Blood Moon, the one with the weird title and chaotic plot, that was also their work!"
"Huh? That flop was made by Illumination? How can they produce both that and one-punch man?"
"Exactly. More than 70% of the production staff are the same for both projects. The real difference is the scriptwriter. The scriptwriter for one-punch man is Teacher Shirogane."
"Honestly, I started watching just to support Teacher Shirogane, but after finishing the episode, I'm completely hooked. Saitama is way too funny."
"Especially Vaccine Man. His design was so cool! I really thought he was the final boss, and then Saitama just erased him with one punch. The contrast is insane."
"And the giant brothers! The older brother gets casually crushed by the younger one's giant form, like swatting a mosquito. My stomach hurts from laughing."
"The dream Subterranean King too! That absurdly powerful boss came out of nowhere. I was thinking, 'Wait, isn't the protagonist supposed to be invincible?' I thought the character setting was about to collapse in episode one, but it turns out he's so strong that he can only imagine an equal opponent in his dreams. Hahaha!"
"The best part is that after waking up, he rushes out excitedly to fight the real Subterranean King, and still finishes it with one punch!"
"How did Teacher Shirogane even come up with something like this? I've watched countless battle anime, but I've never seen one done this way. A bald man who's invincible from the start, has no real opponents, and can only experience passion through dreams, this protagonist is weirdly lovable."
"Saitama isn't old, though. He looks like he's around thirty."
"But he's bald."
"He went bald because he trained to become strong! And he's only in his twenties!"
"But he's bald."
"He's the strongest man in the anime's world!"
"But he's bald."
"No matter how strong he is, at least I have something he'll never have, thick hair!"
"Do you people have something against bald folks?"
"I'm following this for sure. I wasn't optimistic about one-punch man at first, but the first episode was completely my thing. If only Teacher Shirogane had given it a more exciting title. This is the first real surprise of October for me. I hope tomorrow night's fourth season of burning sin can match this level!"
"True. The title one-punch man isn't very appealing. If it were called something like One Punch Blows Everyone's Heads Off, I would've clicked instantly!"
After ten o'clock that night, nearly all major animation forums and websites in the country were flooded with discussions about one-punch man.
It was Friday, and at least ten new anime premiered across different TV stations throughout the evening.
But no matter which platform it was, discussions about one-punch man overwhelmingly dominated the front pages.
Some anime require slow buildup.
One-punch man didn't.
Its appeal was immediate.
If you liked the first episode, you were clearly its target audience. If you didn't, chances were you wouldn't enjoy what followed either.
Because this anime lacked the promotional backing that hikaru no go once received from Hoshimori Group, it didn't secure an especially favorable time slot, even though it aired on Capital TV Station.
However…
The following day, when the TV Station released the premiere ratings for one-punch man, the media outlets that had previously criticized Rei collectively fell silent.
The opening rating was 3.62%. The highest instantaneous rating reached 4.56%.
The average rating for the full episode was 4.23%.
Even on major stations like Capital TV Station and Ion Television Station, most prime-time programs struggle to exceed 4%.
For the 9:30 PM slot, the average rating of premieres on Capital TV Station over the past year was only 3.85%.
Judging from the opening curve, peak value, and average rating, one-punch man's growth trend was clearly far above the norm.
The 3.62% opening proved the strength of Shirogane's core fanbase.
The 4.56% peak demonstrated its ability to attract casual viewers.
More importantly, in just one night after the premiere, over 100,000 users on OpinionHub, the country's most professional rating platform for anime, games, comics, films, TV dramas, music, and esports, gave one-punch man an opening score of 9.2.
This stunned the entire animation industry.
On OpinionHub, a score above 8 is considered excellent. A score above 9 represents extremely high praise.
People may lie online for profit.
But big data does not lie.
By Saturday afternoon, public opinion in the animation industry had completely flipped.
[The first independently scripted anime by genius manga artist Shirogane receives widespread acclaim]
[With hundreds of thousands of ratings, what is the appeal of one-punch man, currently ranked first this season on OpinionHub?]
[The first episode of one-punch man achieves explosive success. Why is an anime starring a bald man so popular?]
[A true genius remains a genius. Even without heavy promotion, one-punch man achieved outstanding ratings, proving that Shirogane's rise was never dependent on Hoshimori Group, contrary to online accusations]
[One-punch man: an outstanding work that perfectly balances comedy and action]
Rei looked at the comments from the media and fans online regarding one-punch man.
His expression was as calm as ever, but more importantly, the sense of anxiety he had been holding inside finally subsided.
Thankfully, just as he had imagined, anime audiences in this Japan also liked this type of work.
Picking up his phone, Rei saw a stream of long, excited messages sent by Himari. It was obvious that Himari was currently extremely thrilled.
Rei simply replied with a few short sentences.
Scrolling further, he saw congratulatory messages from the sisters Miyu and Misaki.
After that came messages from the director and producer of the Hikaru no go anime, collaborators he had worked with before.
After all, both of them had been paying close attention to one-punch man and had even helped introduce the anime to Capital TV Station to secure a broadcast opportunity.
Of course, the Hikaru no go anime was not finished yet. With its fourth season set to premiere in a few months, they naturally hoped that Shirogane, the original author, would achieve even greater success. That way, the fourth season of Hikaru no go could also benefit from the traffic generated by fans of Rei's other works.
After replying to everyone one by one, Rei finally let out a long breath.
When he recalled hunter x hunter and one-punch man a few months ago, besides excitement, what he felt most strongly was nervousness.
There were simply too many examples of excellent works failing due to unprofessional management.
Rei had also been afraid that he might mess up these two masterpieces.
But now, he finally had a solid start.
Over the past few weeks, hunter x hunter's vote count had been only twenty to thirty thousand votes behind source war chronicle, which currently ranked first in the Hoshimori Group journal.
At this pace, it would likely overtake it within a month.
As for one-punch man, its premiere reception had been explosive. Although the ratings could not yet be called record-breaking, they were outstanding for that time slot.
If the series continued to air and its popularity expanded further, the ratings would only keep rising.
Now that the first episode of one-punch man had premiered, Rei's attention naturally shifted to burning sin Season 4, the work anime fans had already crowned as the presumptive seasonal overlord before its broadcast.
Rei searched for information about it on his phone's browser.
"All right," he murmured. "Let's see how many weeks it takes for one-punch man to catch up to you."
That evening, the first episode of burning sin Season 4 officially premiered.
It had been a year and a half since the third season aired, and fans had been waiting impatiently for a long time.
Still, before the premiere, some fans couldn't help feeling a trace of unease.
After all, with Shirogane's fans and Shinji's fans having argued so fiercely online in recent weeks, no one wanted to lose face.
No one believed that one-punch man's first-episode ratings would surpass those of burning sin Season 4.
However, anyone with clear judgment knew that, given the reputation of one-punch man's first episode, its ratings were bound to surge in the following weeks.
The real question was, how high would that surge go?
Would it threaten burning sin?
With these concerns in mind, the more rational burning sin fans welcomed the premiere at 8:00 PM on Imperial Capital Television Station.
The next day, Sunday, the viewership data for the first episode of burning sin was released.
The average rating reached 5.13%, and the OpinionHub score was 9.0.
This result perfectly matched everyone's expectations before the premiere.
Both the ratings and the score were undeniably excellent.
Except for one detail.
Among the forty-six anime that premiered during the first weekend of October, burning sin Season 4 had one statistic where it was suppressed.
That was the score.
The 9.2 premiere score of one-punch man, that 0.2 gap, was an insurmountable difference on the strictly graded OpinionHub.
The premiere ratings of one-punch man were, of course, no match for burning sin, which had received full promotional backing from the Monogatari Comic group.
But while the premiere ratings differed, what about the long run?
A new week began.
Rei also had to take time off from school to handle the flood of partners who came knocking after one-punch man's highly acclaimed premiere.
Merchandise suppliers, peripheral manufacturers, and game collaboration proposals arrived one after another.
Rei hadn't established a management company yet, but Misaki was well connected in this field. Several of her friends were professionals who specialized in market evaluation and pricing.
Rei only needed to pay industry-standard compensation, and there were more than enough capable people willing to help him negotiate with partners.
Of course, because one-punch man did not enjoy the backing that Hoshimori Group had provided for hikaru no go, it was inevitable that its merchandise channels, manufacturing costs, profit margins, and promotional reach would fall short of hikaru no go.
But the journey was taken one step at a time, and Rei wasn't anxious.
However, there were others who were.
On Monday, several high-ranking staff members of the Hoshimori Group's editorial department were summoned by even higher management to answer questions regarding one-punch man.
One of their top manga artists had invested his own money to produce an anime and achieved such explosive popularity. This was certainly not something the Hoshimori Group wanted to see.
What if other manga artists followed his example?
More importantly, according to internal records, one-punch man was originally a manga that Shirogane had intended to submit to Dream Comic, but it had been rejected due to group regulations.
Didn't that turn the Hoshimori Group editorial department into a complete laughingstock?
Indeed, colleagues from other manga groups had been mercilessly mocking the Hoshimori Group editorial department in recent weeks for their incompetence.
Suppressing a talent like Shirogane with rigid rules, rejecting a one-punch man manuscript without even reviewing it properly, what purpose did such rules serve if not to be broken?
They had under their roof a manga artist who was young, gifted, immensely popular, and an outright workhorse, someone who produced content like an octopus with unlimited arms.
So many manga artists dragged their feet for months over a single page, yet when Shirogane wanted to serialize more works, he was turned away.
Wasn't that absurd?
Now that things had reached this point, some of the senior figures within Hoshimori Group could only hope that one-punch man's success would stop here.
It was currently ranked fourth in the October autumn anime season in terms of ratings, but… they desperately hoped the plot would collapse later, that the reputation would nosedive, and that the anime would not continue gaining popularity.
Tuesday arrived.
Thanks to Rei's weekly, octopus-like update pace, Hoshimori Group officially released the first collected volume of hunter x hunter, despite the series having been serialized for only four months.
That same week, major media outlets across Japan's manga industry reported on the explosive popularity of hunter x hunter Volume 1.
After all, the Hunter Exam arc had reached a fever pitch.
In the fourth stage of the Hunter Exam, Gon's opponent was none other than Hisoka.
Gon had to survive alone on an isolated island and steal the badge from Hisoka's chest before the exam ended.
With such an overwhelming disparity in strength, this setup dramatically heightened the tension for readers.
This segment was unquestionably the most exciting part of the Hunter Exam arc and also laid crucial groundwork for the later Heavens Arena storyline.
For weeks, readers had been glued to the manga, eagerly anticipating how Gon would perform.
However, the sales data for hunter x hunter Volume 1 would not be compiled until the following week.
As a result, the media could not yet publish articles or analyses based on the collected volume's sales.
And then, a few weeks later, Friday arrived once again.
The broadcast date for the second episode of the one-punch man anime had arrived.