PARK CITY, UTAH– The trend in the anime industry has been to make animated series of already-established intellectual properties in order to reach a more dedicated fanbase, but the recent trend in anime has made an even more extreme shift to focusing on making sequels of already-established animated series. The spring 2017 season alone is jam-packed with sequels, such as the ongoing manga adaptations of Attack on Titan 2, My Hero Academia 2, and Naruto 2: Electric Boruto. There’s also a second season adaptation of Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend and the next installment of the Re: franchise – the life of an eccentric Japanese salaryman flashing before his eyes before he kills himself as shown so far in Re:Zero, Re:Life, Re:write, and now Re:Creators.

Many Anime fans are being pushed out of watching seasonal anime because they haven’t watched the original series to all of these sequels. Crunchyroll’s data analytics show that the number of views new anime gets in the first 24 hours an episode is posted is down significantly, and torrent sites are being flooded with angry comments asking why old series aren’t being seeded. Anime Maru was able to catch up with Jeremy Muniz, who said:

It’s really disheartening that the trend in Anime is headed this way. Now, instead of only watching one or two new shows every night and being able to pretend that I have a life afterwards, now I can watch all of the episodes from a series in a few sittings without worrying about falling behind. Now I don’t have an excuse for telling my “friends” who want to hang out at night that I’ve got stuff to do.

Others told us during interviews that they were worried others in the anime community wouldn’t think they were real fans for not seeing the original series, only to find out that it doesn’t matter what you did wrong: everyone in the anime community hates each other regardless.

It is difficult to say whether this trend will taper off as more signs of studios being more creative with their works gain popularity or if there will be more sequels every season until the industry implodes on itself. The only thing that can be said for certain is that Haruhi will never be coming back (until next year when KyoAni runs out of cute girl designs and brings it back).

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