Online, a question post had suddenly gained some traction.
"Clannad is over. Will you watch Shido's next anime?"
The replies were all over the place.
"No way! I am not getting wrecked again."
"You could not pay me to watch anything that bastard touches ever again."
"Clannad was incredibly moving. Even though the second half was brutal, I still made it through. If his next anime maintains the same quality, then yeah, I will watch."
"Clannad was a once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece. Maintaining that level is straight-up impossible. And if he cannot match it, what is the point?"
"If he does a different genre, I will think about it. But if it is another tearjerker, I am out."
"Making another tearjerker is exactly when you should keep watching. If he tries a different genre, he has zero experience. He would probably just end up making something mediocre."
"Genre does not matter. What matters is quality. If it is well-made, I will follow it regardless."
...
Inside the luxury villa.
Yuta scrolled through the online posts and muttered, "Not interested in my tearjerker anime? Well, I don't want to make tearjerker anime either, so there."
Clannad season two's final stretch had clearly traumatized a good chunk of the audience.
But audiences on a rampage were genuinely terrifying. Otherwise, Yuta would not have needed to hide out at Seira's place or endure being called "bastard, devil or demon" every day.
No more tearjerkers!
Absolutely no more tearjerkers!
"It's about time I figured out what the next anime should be."
With that thought, he closed the browser, opened a Word document, and started writing down his ideas.
He was on fire that night. The ideas flowed nonstop.
But the next morning when he woke up and read through what he had written: what the hell was any of this?
He deleted everything, ate breakfast, went back to his room, and sat there thinking for most of the day.
By afternoon, he gave in.
"Maybe... I should just make another tearjerker?" The thought popped up, and he was surprised to find himself actually feeling a little excited about it.
Why he felt excited, he could not quite explain.
He pushed the excitement down and started thinking about specifics.
Tearjerker anime came in different varieties: the emotionally moving type, the immersive empathy type, the hardcore devastating type, and so on.
Clannad was the emotionally moving type, and it was the peak of that category.
If he continued in that direction, both KANON and AIR were options, but on closer thought, neither felt right.
Setting AIR aside for the moment, KANON was too similar to Clannad in too many ways. With Clannad as the gold standard, making KANON would just look like retreading old ground and going downhill.
As for AIR, while it had done reasonably well in the other world, Yuta was not confident it would take off in this one.
Besides, plenty of viewers had said they would not watch his next tearjerker. The new anime needed to trick the audience into thinking it was not a tearjerker. If he made AIR, even though the emotional gut-punches did not come until later, viewers would peg it as a tearjerker from the start.
So the new anime needed to meet several conditions.
First, it had to make people cry, but not be obviously a tearjerker. Without seeing the content, viewers should think it was some other genre entirely.
Second, it should be based on an anime from the other world that aired before 2010, ideally before 2008, to avoid the risk of it feeling culturally out of place.
Third, the opening episodes needed to give viewers a positive, exciting experience.
Something that would not make anyone think "tearjerker" and would make them want to keep watching.
And one final thing: the sales had to be high.
In this world, Clannad season one's sales had more or less stabilized.
Across eight volumes, the per-volume average was around thirty-two thousand. If they released a Blu-ray edition in a couple of years, they could probably sell another few thousand on top of that, bringing the total to roughly forty thousand.
Season two only had three volumes out so far, averaging about twenty-eight thousand per volume. The remaining volumes would fluctuate, but probably not by much.
The new anime needed per-volume sales of at least twenty thousand. The drop-off could not be too steep.
Finding something that checked every box was not easy, but Yuta did think of one anime that fit: Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion.
In the other world, it was an original anime produced by Sunrise that had premiered in October 2006.
When it aired, it had been massively popular. Explosively so. Right up there with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya from the same year.
Disc sales had been phenomenal too. Across both seasons, the initial run alone had moved forty to fifty thousand copies. Add in later printings and the cumulative per-volume average hit sixty to seventy thousand, putting it in the all-time top fifteen.
In short, an absolute monster.
It was also the magnum opus of writer Okochi Ichiro. The kind of achievement you could brag about for a lifetime.
Story-wise, it centered on a tragic hero.
The protagonist wanted revenge, but his plans kept falling apart. He wanted to protect his sister, but she rejected everything he stood for. He led the people of Area Eleven in rebellion, only to end up abandoned by everyone.
Once you put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, the suffering hit incredibly hard, producing a powerful tearjerker effect.
But if you only watched the first few episodes, it felt like the most satisfying power fantasy imaginable. The protagonist was a genius strategist who had gained the ability to control anyone's mind, and in the very first arc he took out his half-brother who was also his enemy.
Who would ever guess this was a tearjerker?
For the current Yuta and Starfall, Code Geass was the perfect fit.
There was one serious problem though: the anime was technically a mecha show. Not the hardcore mecha type, since the real selling point was the protagonist's character arc, but mecha nonetheless.
Starfall's track record consisted of Clannad and the terrible Heartbeat House, both slice-of-life. Suddenly pivoting to mecha...
Yuta himself would be fine.
He had vivid memories of the original and could write and draw by reference.
But the rest of Starfall might struggle.
Take Yuzuki for example. She could handle Clannad's design work beautifully, but drawing design sheets for Code Geass? Probably not.
Nobody at Starfall seemed like an obvious fit. At least nobody that came to mind immediately.
As for doing it all himself, he had considered it. But for Code Geass, he would likely still need to handle character design, scripting, directing, and music personally.
Piling mechanical design sheets on top of all that would probably leave him with two or three hours of sleep per night, living full-time at the office.
A day or two of that would be fine. Sustaining it for months? He would drop dead before the first season finished airing, and each season ran at least half a year.
If he was going to make this anime, he absolutely needed to find a high-level key animator who could handle the design work.
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