No one in the Japanese anime industry had expected that, after C, Sora's newest work, Attack on Titan, would come out with a story this explosive.
Death in anime was hardly anything new.
But making a mother die in front of her own children like that, then pairing the scene with godlike music and suffocatingly precise animation, was something else entirely.
That night, millions of anime fans across Japan finally understood what it meant to feel physically sick from what they were watching while still desperately wanting the next episode to arrive as soon as possible.
Grotesque, bloody, cruel, with a twisted worldview pushed almost to the breaking point. Nearly every anime fan admitted as much. Yet those same fans also had to acknowledge that the first cour of Attack on Titan was far more gripping than any of them had expected.
The following day, the anime media naturally poured even more fuel onto the fire.
"The first episode of Attack on Titan premieres, and Kantoku Sora once again creates a brand-new genre: the man-eating anime."
"Absolutely shocking. Absolutely unexpected. Who could have imagined that the 'titans' in the title would be such terrifying creatures?"
"Who built those walls? Where did the titans come from? And why did the colossal titan that appeared in the first episode kick through humanity's wall? Weren't titans supposed to be low-intelligence beasts? Then why did one of them display such a deliberate, strategic action?"
"Genius Kantoku Sora shakes the industry with the very first episode of his latest masterpiece. He is still innovating. His creative power has not run dry."
"Millions of overseas fans of Kantoku Sora wait eagerly, hoping his work can be broadcast simultaneously on television networks around the world. One day after Attack on Titan's premiere, pirated mobile-recorded footage is already spreading wildly across illegal foreign websites."
"Does Sora not have a creative bottleneck? Why does he still dare to write stories like this? And why can a plot like the first cour of Attack on Titan attract so many devoted fans?"
At noon, the ratings and audience score for the first episode were released right on schedule.
Everyone knew that Attack on Titan's premiere ratings would be high. The real question was how high Sora's current popularity could push the first broadcast.
The final number was 5.74%.
It was an absurd figure, yet at the same time, it fell perfectly within everyone's expectations.
After all, before this, Sora had already created three overwhelmingly popular anime in a row, each one breaking past the 6% ratings mark. Three years of accumulation had given him a massive fanbase in Japan.
Even if Sora premiered a terrible anime, plenty of people would still tune in to the first episode out of sheer respect.
And this time, the situation was even more obvious.
After its premiere, Attack on Titan received a 9.5 rating online.
There were many people complaining that the anime was bloody, bizarre, and disgusting. But none of that stopped them from liking it, nor did it stop them from surrendering to the sheer force of its worldbuilding.
Why had Attack on Titan become so popular in Sora's previous life?
The reason was simple. Before the story reached the point where the characters finally saw the sea, the work maintained a rarely matched level of excellence: passion, tragedy, music, production quality, and narrative depth, all standing at the very top tier.
Before it had even ended, many people already believed it had the potential to surpass Fullmetal Alchemist.
If the ending had not taken certain turns that deeply irritated the audience, it would undoubtedly have become one of those legendary works enshrined in anime history.
But as far as its opening plot, the expansion of its world, and its portrayal of human nature were concerned, when compared with the anime premiering in the same period in the Japanese industry, Attack on Titan was simply operating in another dimension.
Inside the company, Sora stared for a long time at the comments from fans and media outlets discussing the first episode. Only after a long silence did he finally shift his gaze away from the computer screen.
During these past few years of struggling through the Japanese anime industry, he had gone from anxiously watching weekly data in the beginning to gradually developing a much steadier state of mind.
After all, in the current industry, it was already difficult to find anyone capable of facing him head-on.
Once Attack on Titan premiered, becoming the strongest anime of the season was basically a foregone conclusion. The only question was whether it could surpass C.
As for the 5.74% premiere rating, that merely meant the work had skipped the long popularity-building period his previous titles had needed. It would not take long before Attack on Titan broke past 6% as well.
After he stopped paying attention to the online discourse around the work in Japan, Sora began making one phone call after another.
Attack on Titan was a relatively long anime. In total, it would run somewhere between seventy and eighty episodes, and with Sora's personality, he intended to broadcast it continuously until completion.
That would take more than a year.
During that period, Sora planned to have Attack on Titan begin simultaneous broadcasts in several major countries once the anime reached its middle-to-late stage. Because of this, many company employees had already been sent overseas to negotiate with a number of well-known foreign television networks.
With the achievements Sora had already secured in Japan and the overseas popularity accumulated by his works, he was fully qualified to cooperate with those foreign networks on equal footing.
The only remaining difference lay in the detailed division of profits, which still required careful negotiation.
As for Sora, all he had to do was maintain regular communication with the negotiation teams and make the major decisions.
Within Japan, Yume Animation was also moving constantly.
In the past, the company's main source of profit had been concentrated almost entirely in anime production. But the works created by Sora had already grown into major IPs, and many of them were well suited for games or other derivative products.
The company's operations department had also begun searching throughout Japan for suitable game developers to collaborate with. If those partnerships produced good results, the company would most likely establish its own game development department later on, supporting the operations division's broader IP expansion strategy.
Because of that, Sora's current work inside the company was no longer focused solely on his identity as an anime Kantoku. More and more of his attention was leaning toward company management and operations.
In these two areas, Yumi worked quite well alongside him in running the company. From a young age, she had watched her father manage a business, and that constant exposure had made her very familiar with corporate procedures.
Meanwhile, in the field of anime production, Sumire was gaining more and more prestige among the staff. In fact, a large portion of the episode production for Attack on Titan was already being coordinated by her.
But it was impossible for Sora to completely detach himself from anime production.
After all, things like the script, the tone, and the overall creative style were matters he had to personally step into. He could not simply allow the people beneath him to start making original anime entirely on their own.
If he did that, Yume Animation would lose much of its top-tier competitiveness in Japan and become no different from the production companies that depended on partnerships with the four major television networks.
As he thought about the company's future direction, Sora gradually felt even more clearly that the road ahead was still long.
If his goal were only to become a top anime creator, he had already carved his name into the history of the Japanese anime industry.
But if he wanted to build a world-class 2D entertainment company, then Yume Animation had only just begun.
A few days passed quickly.
The new anime from the four major television networks this season had improved somewhat compared with the previous two years.
Back then, the premiere ratings for new anime from the major networks generally hovered around 4.4% to 4.5%. But after competing with Sora for two years, the new anime premiering this season had already risen to the 4.8% and 4.9% range.
Creators in any world were not stupid.
If Sora's works were what the industry favored, then they simply had to imitate Sora's works.
Across Japan, there were already productions clearly inspired by the styles of Re:Zero, Steins;Gate, Your Name, and C.
As for the drama side, the live-action adaptation of AD managed, without any major danger, to take first place in its premiere week with a 5.13% rating.
Although it was a live-action adaptation of C, fully inheriting the popularity of the anime's fanbase was impossible. The reason was simple. Many anime fans, the moment they saw that the casting did not match the image of C in their minds, would decisively change the channel. They would not allow a live-action drama to ruin the anime that existed in their memories.
Not every live-action adaptation could be like Gintama or Rurouni Kenshin, finding actors who fit the style of the original manga characters so well that there was almost no backlash.
Still, debuting with ratings above 5% was already enough to leave Southern Alliance TV fully satisfied.
After all, it was also the highest premiere rating among all dramas of the season.
With that, after three years of collaboration with Sora, Southern Alliance TV had also achieved something remarkable within the Japanese television industry.
This season, both in dramas and anime, its productions ranked first in premiere ratings among works airing in the same period.
The four major networks, especially Seiun TV and Aobane TV, were the biggest victims of Southern Alliance TV's rise.
But at this point, there was nothing they could do. In commercial competition, when one's strength was insufficient, the only option was to wait for the opponent to make a mistake.
But did Sora look like someone who would make mistakes?
If they could not beat him through ability and wanted to try some crooked path instead, they could not even find an opening. He did not have so much as an ex-girlfriend. Even if they wanted to spend money bribing a former partner to come forward with accusations about his poor character, improper conduct, or some moral flaw, there was no suitable candidate to be found.
Besides, playing with connections, behind-the-scenes pressure, and underhanded tricks was not that simple either. Southern Alliance TV was not stupid enough to stand still and wait to fall into their trap.
He was a true anomaly. He made so much money, yet lived as if he had no worldly desires, devoting himself only to anime production.
How could someone like that exist in this world?
A few days later, the broadcast date for the second episode of Attack on Titan arrived.
After the first episode revealed the foundations of its world, the anime's reputation began spreading at a speed no one could properly understand.
In the first week of April, even if one added together the discussion surrounding every new anime airing on hundreds of large and small television stations across Japan, the total heat might barely equal that generated by a single work: Attack on Titan.
On NatsuYume, a group of fans were passionately discussing the story's future developments.
"So what exactly is the point of the protagonist, Eren? He's just a kid who can't do anything except scream in helpless rage. Is he really suitable as the main character?"
"If no one can beat the titans, then it's normal that Eren can't beat them either. The problem is, if he doesn't have the strength, then at least intelligence should make up for it. But the protagonist's intelligence also looks worrying. He acts way too impulsively. The way Attack on Titan portrays those monsters is genuinely excellent, but I have a hard time imagining what this protagonist can actually accomplish in a world like this."
"You can't really blame Eren either. He's just an ordinary person. His mother was about to be eaten by a titan. It's normal for him to lose control. Honestly, if I were in his situation and my mother was about to be devoured, I doubt I'd be able to just run away either."
"Not everyone is an absolutely rational machine. Do you really think a boy who watches his mother get killed without reacting, calmly calculating success rates, losses, and benefits in his head, would be suitable as a protagonist?"
"Why are shounen protagonists always written as either naturally dense, impulsive, or kind of lacking in intelligence? Because if the protagonist were a smart egoist, then in that kind of world he would just quietly watch everyone else die while surviving on his own. That kind of anime would be closer to reality, but it definitely wouldn't be fun to watch."
"Exactly. I don't even understand what the people criticizing the protagonist's personality all week are trying to say. What do you want? For him to activate some overpowered cheat ability and, as a boy barely in his teens, beat a fifteen-meter titan in hand-to-hand combat? Is that what you imagine an excellent anime to be?"
Once a work became popular, all kinds of opinions naturally appeared.
In Sora's previous life, Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece had enormous fanbases, but they also had huge numbers of people saying they were not good.
The same principle applied to Attack on Titan in Japan.
In the first episode, the world was fascinating, and the grotesque elements were certainly attention-grabbing. But the plot itself did not give the audience a feeling of satisfaction.
The reason many people continued to the second episode was purely because of the shocking hook of titans eating humans.
A story could certainly begin by suppressing the audience before rising later.
But viewers could not yet sense how, in the second episode, the protagonist Eren was supposed to rise.
In fact, many of them could not even understand why this boy deserved to be the protagonist in a world like that.
Watching his mother get eaten by a titan, then screaming in powerless fury.
That protagonist's performance really seemed to confirm the old saying:
"If I were in his place, I could do that too."
Of course, everyone knew that with Sora's creative level, the work would surely reveal even more interesting developments in its world later on.
But at this early stage, driven along by the rhythm set by the haters, the public debate surrounding Attack on Titan was far from small.