This Week in Anime

Top of the Bookwalker Charts

Chris
Lucas, we must stay relevant here at TWIA in the new year! Fortunately, I have an idea. Bookwalker released their top sellers for 2025, so all we need to do is see what's selling and cater to that! Let's just see what we've got to work with here...

I no longer have an idea.

The power of sales analytics is still going to make for a more respectable beginning to the year than how we rang in 2025 with a column all about incest, no matter how many boobs and niche fetishes those numbers are surrounded by.

Which is to say, now that we've drawn all the perverts in, it's time to lock the doors behind them and treat them to some raw, hardcore data analysis.

"Sex sells" is an old and extremely true adage. Fanservicey titles have always been reliable sellers in the manga and anime sector—it's why series like Beheneko and Otaku NEET Kunoichi are sharing space with standbys like Food Wars and (of all things) Elfen Lied among Sentai's latest slate of physical Blu-ray pre-orders.

And while saucy games were famously hit hard in 2025, with platforms like Steam, Itch, and even DLsite culling content (often by inexplicable standards), and libraries were, as linked, under fire for carrying books, I think Bookwalker's numbers speak to the difficulty of the powers that be to censor everything. That is, we've got a lot of digital platforms for reading text and pictures, to say nothing of physical releases put out through retail stores. It's enough that even zealous paypros and censorious activist groups have to pick their battles and can't catch everything (yet).

Never mind that increased scrutiny might only drive up interest in this kind of material, like some sorta sexy Streisand Effect.

See, we're already learning so much about what modern anime fan wants: elves bangin' cats.

It gives me a lot of respect for what they continue to do, even as I'm appalled at the state of the world that relegates them to being unable to freely discuss it. Also, makes me even more impressed that something like OceanVeil decided to try a hentai streaming platform in the Year of Nobody's Lord 2025, even continuing to expand their offerings (including simulcasts!).

It's a lesson that would-be censors should've learned with dirty magazines generations ago: You can try as hard as you want to hide this stuff, people can and will search it out and find it, regardless.

All that to say that, yeah, it'd be neat to see what other 18+ publishers had to say about their own analytics and what audiences were perking up for, but absent that it still goes a long way to explain why readers are still coming out for something with a title like Betrayed by the Hero, I Formed a MILF Party with His Mom!

No doubt a result of its popularity, such that it broke through even on the English-reading side of things—regardless of how many times I kept confusing its title with I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire (which, incidentally, is on the list of top light novels and also had a recent anime adaptation).

Aw, jeez, don't tell me space isekai is going to be the next big thing.

We can cross that space bridge when we come to it. The point is you've got a point about most of the popular titles getting bumps from adaptations, even if the notoriety can seem a little askew sometimes.

For instance, Bookwalker's #1 manga, my beloved Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro, was last seen on TV back in 2023, with that second season enjoying somewhat understated success. Maybe the online cultural cache Nagatoro carries is just that powerful. Or maybe audiences are just really, really thirsty for niche bullying fetish material (alongside surprisingly sweet romance). Might explain why other "bothersome gal" series like Please Go Home, Miss Akutsu cracked Bookwalker's manga list.

I only even watched the series originally because I was assigned to review it in a Faustian bargain with Lynzee to also get to review SSSS.Dynazenon, and Miss Nagatoro won me over quite handily, so I can attest to her powers of persuasion.

That sort of streak highlights another taboo topic trending in these tough times across these titles: Gushing Over Magical Girls and No Freaking Way can get uniquely spicy, sure, but alongside others like sixth-ranking entry The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All, things are also looking noticeably queer!

I mean, technically, I haven't read Reincarnated as a GIRL, myself, so I can't comment on the gender of it all, but...it's titled Reincarnated as a GIRL! What do you think it's about?

Right, anime novel audiobooks are their own cottage industry that makes sense as a take-off if you think about it for a bit. I even gifted a few of the Spice & Wolf ones to my Holo-loving buddy who prefers to enjoy books that way. (obligatory insertion of the original Yen Press Spice & Wolf light novel cover)

The anime connection lets the audio component of these do some cute indulgences, like having Slayers up there be read by Lina Inverse's classic dub actress, Lisa Ortiz! It's a neat way to link the anime and source material together for this side of the world, I think.

I think it also speaks (as it were) to the state of the people in that market in today's world. We're busy. We're constantly working, travelling, and multi-tasking. I may not "get" the appeal of treating visual entertainment as a "second screen" background feature, but I more than understand those putting a novel on their earbuds and having it help them get through the workday.

Maybe you're worried someone might judge you for listening to voice actors read through Bakemonogatari while you're balancing accounts in the office, but in my opinion, that's far more respectable than those who are way too into true crime podcasts.

It helps that so many series that have hung on throughout the years did start out as novels, even before the modern Narou/web novel zeitgeist we find ourselves in the grip of. Lord knows I'll take anything that keeps Slayers in the modern conversation.

Now, that does go back to highlight a point about Bookwalker's broader reading-based leaderboard. Pretty much all the series there necessarily trend newer. I mean, there are some like Saga of Tanya the Evil and Re: Zero where modern anime watchers would probably consider those airing adaptations ancient, but really we're still dealing with thoroughly modern material here.

That's down to the kind of audience Bookwalker caters to, of course; it is their list. But that swings me to curiosity about how 2025 issues of classic manga like Denpa's release of They Were 11! or Peow2's release of Stop!! Hibari-kun! fared, comparatively.

I'll note that late last year, Viz Media also added sales figures for several of their titles to the Edelweiss platform, which allows MangaAlerts being able to go through and pull some pertinent figures.

So you can go through and see how a classic like Nana put up numbers or get some concrete data on how memetic success story Kagurabachi actually did.

Not quite the granular annual breakdown we got from Bookwalker, but neat to see nonetheless!

Granted, you then have to contend with the point that these numbers only reflect compiled volumes of those manga sold, and don't speak to however many people are reading and enjoying Kagurabachi week to week through their cheap Shonen Jump subscription (to say nothing of the pirates—and I don't mean the ones in One Piece.)

Like, you look at how Undead Unluck only put up about twice the numbers of Kagurabachi, despite having 20 volumes compared to the latter's 3, and it paints some kind of successful picture for the sick-ass sword series. Not as successful as the multi-millions put up by Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man, but those two series are basically Spiders Georg-ing their way into manga statistics.

This is true. Getting hard numbers like this is a good reminder that while critics like us have our glows and gripes, they can't accurately reflect what real audiences are actually coming out for. With that in mind, it is heartening to see a list like Bookwalker's showing that isekai isn't totally dominating the scene like I'd worry it would. Even the pure light novel rankings have The Apothecary Diaries at the silver medal spot!

And if a critical nemesis like Solo Leveling is barely clinging to #10 on the list, handily beaten by the likes of the green yuri, maybe that encouragingly speaks to the tastes of light novel, manga, and anime fans being varied enough that we'll keep seeing a strong spread of titles, new and classic, making their way over here.

Now that's something worth having a party over.

Just...maybe not that kind of party.