The Zabuza arc wrapping up meant Naruto's plot was now on the rails.
Unlike Bleach, which had felt episodic in its early stretch, Naruto's first major arc had set every one of its fans alight.
Before this, Naruto held a small edge on Bleach in reception. After tonight's episode, that edge had widened.
Bleach was a strong work in Rei's eyes, but its plot only built real momentum in the middle stretch, especially once the high-tier villain Aizen entered the picture.
The early Hollow hunts, and the later infiltration of the Soul Society with the duels against Ikkaku and Renji, ran a touch slow.
But Naruto fans tonight had their focus pulled in a direction Rei hadn't seen coming.
"I refuse. Haku is a girl. She has to be a girl~"
"This episode wrecked me. The one flaw is making Haku male. A perfectly good romance, and now what am I supposed to do with my feelings?"
"Shirogane-sensei has a twisted sense of humor!"
"From the preview, Chunin Exams are starting next episode. Is Naruto's pace really this fast?"
"From the ranks in the story, Naruto's main path is laid out clean. Genin, Chunin, Special Jonin, Jonin, Hokage. Which means Naruto has to climb the ladder one rung at a time. Genin exam, Chunin exam, then Jonin exam, right?"
"I saw the material on Shirogane-sensei's official site. Jonin have 'fodder' and 'elite' tiers too. Even inside Jonin there's a gap. Kakashi is already in the elite category."
"The system looks simple but it gets layered when you sit with it. How many episodes will the Chunin Exams arc run? Can it close inside twenty? Will Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura be promoted to Chunin by around episode fifty?"
"Doubtful. Sasuke aside, Naruto's baseline without the Nine-Tails boost is the floor of Genin. Can he clear the Chunin Exams in that state?"
"He'll grow into it. Naruto's setup is a bit odd to me. He's the perennial dead-last with no talent on paper. But in the actual plot, he picks up Shadow Clone Jutsu with no trouble, and in his rivalry with the genius Sasuke he's pouring in more sweat but he isn't losing by much."
"Be honest, if a guy can keep pace with the genius Sasuke through effort alone, can you really call his talent dead-last? The actual dead weight in this arc is Sakura. She's set dressing. Low floor, low ceiling. Shirogane-sensei is going to have to force a power-up on her later to keep her in step with the other two."
"Naruto's popularity is climbing way too fast. It's only been on air four or five months and my elementary school son is talking about the plot with his classmates every day."
"Same. My son drew a Sharingan on paper and stuck it to his eyelid, then sat there blinking at me to show off his Sharingan."
"I don't get it. Bleach is good too, so why has Naruto, which started later, overtaken it?"
"Slow burn maybe? At this point you still can't tell which work is stronger. Demon Slayer started way behind One-Punch Man and ended up passing it. If Bleach's heat hasn't picked up by next year, then we can say Naruto is the stronger of the two."
For the past two months, every Wednesday and Thursday had been a battlefield between Naruto fans and Bleach fans.
This week, the Bleach side had stayed quiet. They might resent the comparison, but they weren't blind.
The closing stretch of the Land of Waves arc this week had hit on every front: music, visuals, atmosphere, character. A storm of discussion was the natural result.
Late at night, Rei was still at home reading through the online reactions.
After a long stretch, he let out a breath.
Only now could he loosen his grip. With long-runners like Bleach and Naruto, the hardest stretch is the opening.
If the early reception is soft or the marketing falls short, the show can fail to land.
In Rei's previous life, there were long-running anime that never broke through to the wider community.
Things like D.Gray-man or Black Clover. Rei rated the odds of Bleach or Naruto failing as small, but seeing both works clear the early hurdle and post strong market response was a separate relief.
"Now comes the long serialization and the slow build of popularity."
Rei looked out at the neon lights past the window, a touch sentimental.
He was only twenty-five, but the road he'd traveled since arriving in this world felt long.
And.
He had a wife now, and their child would arrive this month.
"What am I doing." Rei tapped his own cheek. "The road still runs long. I have plenty of works left to bring into this world. I can't ease up."
November rolled in.
On the 6th, Rei lived through the most nervous day of his entire transmigrated life. He didn't check a single piece of information about his work the whole day. He waited outside the delivery room for his child to arrive.
It wasn't until a flushed baby girl was carried out that Rei let go of the breath he'd been holding.
She was healthy and small and cute. Rei, who as a rule didn't take to children, found himself smiling with warmth he didn't try to suppress.
Hina. That was the name Miyu had picked.
The reason for a name this simple was that Miyu's own name had too many strokes and had given her trouble as a child. She wanted her daughter to have something easier.
"Even so, I hope she doesn't end up thinking it sounds plain when she's older." Rei kept checking back with his wife, still weak in the hospital bed, about whether she had locked the name in.
"It's locked. If she complains about it later, I'll give her a spanking." Miyu's voice was thin, but the spirit behind it was full. Her eyes folded into crescents as she looked at the baby in Rei's arms.
"By the time she's in kindergarten or elementary school, your Naruto and Bleach and the rest will have been on air for three or four years with a giant back catalog. She'll have it easy," Miyu said. "Unlike me, suffering through one episode a week. When I ask you about future plot, you always say you don't do spoilers and won't tell me a thing."
"Spoilers are the most tasteless thing in the world. Of course I'm not doing that. That said, Naruto and Bleach are a bit too violent. A girl might not take to them. Since she's a daughter, I want to launch a family and romance anime in a few years so you can watch it with her."
"What work?"
"It's called Clannad. It's a story built around family and romance," Rei said with a small laugh.
"Just hearing that foreign name throws me off." Miyu pulled a face, her usual playful jab. "Also, it sounds like you don't actually want our child watching those two shows of yours."
"It's not that I don't want her to. It's, well. I'm probably overthinking it."
Rei thought back to his previous life, where his elementary school nephew used to play Naruto mobile games all day and would cover one eye and yell "Amaterasu!" at him.
In terms of cultural pull on kids, Naruto was a god-tier anime in his previous life.
Rei had watched Naruto as a child, and once he grew up he found the next generation not only watching the anime but also playing the mobile games.
"Cough, cough." Rei coughed twice and chased the daydream out of his head.
"All right, I'm going to need a few days of rest." Miyu drew a slow breath and looked at Rei with a smile. "As the father, you'll be busy for a while."
After his daughter was born, daily life for Rei now included her care.
The private nurses had left one after another once Miyu's recovery was on track, and two nannies had moved in.
Even so, after wrapping his animation work, Rei would still tend to Hina himself.
For Rei, his calm and fixed routine had been overturned.
The Japanese animation market, on the other hand, did not slow down a single beat. Shirogane Animation and Illumination Animation kept rolling.
With the quality of the works themselves clearing every standard, and with Rei's heavy marketing spend behind them, Naruto and Bleach performed at the top of the charts in Japan and across overseas markets.
Naruto moved into the Chunin Exams arc, and the Konoha 11 began arriving in sequence. Rock Lee, Neji, Tenten, Ino, Shikamaru.
Gaara and Temari also landed with weight on the audience.
Bleach, in parallel, hit its stride.
The earlier fights had been against Ikkaku, Renji, and others. The combat sequences were flashy and full of blood, but the audience knew those opponents were minor characters.
Gotei 13 was self-explanatory. Thirteen squads meant thirteen captains.
Ichigo Kurosaki had charged into the Soul Society to rescue Rukia. What was the point of him only ever fighting small fry?
The plot moved in the direction the fans wanted.
The first captain Ichigo squared off against was the classic Bleach character, Kenpachi Zaraki.
From the opening exchange, Kenpachi caught Ichigo's massive sword on his bare chest without a scratch. The recoil tore Ichigo's hand open instead. Bleach fans froze.
Was the gap between Ichigo and a captain that wide?
Of course, Kenpachi Zaraki was a famous "sandbagger" in Bleach.
In Rei's previous life, even though Ichigo did beat Kenpachi in this fight, plenty of fans scoffed at his strength and called it plot-mandated. If Kenpachi had eased off the brake a fraction less, Ichigo was getting one-shot.
Once Bleach moved into the duel between protagonist and Kenpachi, Bleach's heat and ratings overtook Naruto, which was in the written portion of the Chunin Exams.
The whole animation market understood the picture now.
Between these two works, which one was more popular came down to whether the currently airing arc was at a climax.
Naruto had Sasuke getting steamrolled by Rock Lee's debut, then the cheating-arc battle of wits during the Chunin Exam written test. Solid material, but not pulse-pumping.
And Bleach.
After the Kenpachi duel came the most important and hot-blooded arc of early Ichigo's run.
Learning the technique only captain-level Soul Reapers can master. Bankai.
Capital kept pouring into the animation circle, and the year-end promotional push for Naruto and Bleach reached an absurd level.
Because the merchandise rollout had been planned, all kinds of products for both anime started hitting shelves in waves.
In Japan's tier-one and tier-two cities, any ACGN fan walking into a shopping district saw Sasuke, Ichigo, Naruto, and Rukia on every surface. Posters on shop windows, walls, the side of buses. Eight or nine out of every ten pedestrians were talking about the plots of the two shows.
Rei, as the creator, cut down on his media appearances. With Hina at home, he pushed back every promotional event that needed out-of-town travel. He was deep in parenting and enjoying every part of it.
The year wound down.
December passed. January arrived.
Shirogane Animation's promotional axis shifted after the new year.
The marketing weight moved off Bleach and Naruto.
The full push moved onto the One Piece anime, premiering in April.
Dream Comic also began preparing in advance.
Originally, Dream Comic had carried twenty regular serialized manga for years.
With Bleach and Naruto on board, that count rose to twenty-two.
Now that One Piece was joining the serialization, the count hit twenty-three.
The price was going up, and the magazine itself had gone from a "brick" to a "monster brick."
Rei had three serialized works each running heavy page counts every week. Roughly a dozen manga assistants worked under him. Aside from the protagonists and villains' expressions in major scenes and the key shots in fights, which Rei drew himself, the rest of the production went to assistants working from his storyboards.
The weekly manuscript output was outright staggering.
On the strength of Rei's output across the past two years, the Hoshimori Group had jumped from third place among the six major manga periodicals to the undisputed top of the industry.
Its rise mirrored Weekly Shonen Jump in Rei's previous life, which had ridden Saint Seiya, Dragon Ball, and Slam Dunk into industry leadership.
Japan's anime fans and media watched April's One Piece premiere closely.
"Of the three series Shirogane-sensei has running, this one has the ugliest art."
"Bleach has the most distinct style, but the plot moves slow. Naruto is the middle ground. One Piece, what is this? Can an anime with a pirate as the protagonist actually be good? Will it even clear censorship?"
"Not this argument again. I can't be bothered to refute it anymore. How many masterpieces does Shirogane-sensei have to put out before he proves himself?"
"The art-style point isn't wrong though."
"You really think Shirogane-sensei can't draw with refined art? The choice to go this way is a creative call tied to the work's tone."
"Bleach, Naruto, One Piece. If One Piece's reception holds in April, I feel like the next ten years in Japan are going to be ruled by these three, the Big Three!"
"You don't even need to 'feel' it. Even if One Piece flops, the next ten years in Japanese anime are locked behind Naruto and Bleach."
"Look, I love long-runners, but Shirogane-sensei can't just sit on these three for the next decade, can he?"
"How would that even happen? Think of it this way. The Big Three are the cornerstone Shirogane-sensei is laying for Shirogane Animation, the stable exposure base. That doesn't mean Shirogane Animation only puts out those three. From the official filings, Shirogane Animation has new projects in development across both animated films and short-cour anime."
"?"
"Is Shirogane-sensei even human? Three long-running manga a week isn't enough? He still has bandwidth left for standard cours?"
"He's a genius. That's all there is to it."
Online, plenty of people calling the Big Three the next decade's overlords were half-joking.
If anything, One Piece was the title most anime fans had the least confidence in.
The art was rough, and the theme wasn't a popular one.
But of the three works, One Piece was the one Rei had zero concern about.
Bleach takes thirty episodes to find its footing. Naruto takes a dozen episodes to lay down its world.
One Piece only needs an episode or two for a viewer to know whether it fits them.
When the show premiered, a wave of people would mock the unusual and "not pretty enough" animation visuals.
But that had happened in Rei's previous life too, and it hadn't dented One Piece's popularity in the slightest.
While he was buried in work, Rei would catch himself drifting on the same thought.
The Big Three.
Three more months, and at last he would see the moment all three competed in the Japanese anime market side by side.