After coming back from the quarantine, you look around and are surprised to see more classmates walking around with anime merchandise on and many also now know about some of the most popular anime around that never would’ve been talked about outside of your group of friends.
Did something happen to cause such a spike of people to watch and catch up with all this anime? Well, that is the case.
Students and staff alike can agree that the quarantine had and still has many hours full of finding new things to watch or do, and some resorted to watching anime as a way to entertain themselves.
“I started watching more,” senior Flynn Korwin said, “figured it was a good way to pass the time.”
Over the course of quarantine, Korwin started watching what they estimate as 3-5 more hours of anime per week. That’s close to more than 12-20 episodes watched per week, not including the intro and the outro of the anime.
Senior Jessie Garcia estimated that she had watched over 20 different anime shows during the quarantine after just starting to watch anime weeks before the quarantine had started.
“Started out with me putting the first episode on through Netflix. I was on a voice chat with my friend at the time, laughing and just taken aback at how ridiculous it was,” Garcia said. “I took my time at first, and pretty soon I was binging it day and night, as summer break gave me that liberty.”
There are many different stories of how anime has entered everyday lives. Some examples are recommendations from friends as well as the general recommendations of the internet.
“I’d always see edits of anime fights and character scenes, and I thought it was cool and it looked very interesting,” Junior Andrew Garcia said.
As popularity has risen, the internet has started posting more into the general public about anime. This includes edits of anime fight scenes, cosplays, fanart, fandubs, and so much more. This spike in social media uploads caused anime to be in the spotlight of apps like TikTok and YouTube more than ever, resulting in many to show interest and become more involved.
As stated before, edits of anime fight scenes were a factor in the rise of popularity for a lot of anime. In a recent look of Crunchyroll, a primary anime provider, numbers have shown that the top ten anime durin quarantine were, in alphabetical order, Black Clover, Boruto, Food Wars, Haikyuu, Hunter x Hunter, JoJos Bizarre Adventure, My Hero Academia, Naruto Shippuden, One Piece, and Tower of God. When looking at this list, all ten of these shows are in the action genre with some hints of internal drama for story purposes.
Not only did this study show the top anime, but an article on the study from comicbook.com showed the average time Crunchyroll subscribers had spent watching anime.
“The site also notes that Q2 saw its subscribers watch 100 minutes of anime per day on average, so you can see why the medium is on the rise.”
There’s no doubt that with this information there’s been a clear rise in popularity for anime and many fans from before now have more people than ever before to finally talk about their favorite shows with.