The three anime of the Big Three carry strong character writing for their male protagonists. The plots and battles built around the male protagonists are always pulse-pumping.
For the writing of the main crews and the major villains, One Piece sits roughly level with Naruto, both well above Bleach.
When it comes to the supporting cast, One Piece runs far past the other two.
Across all of Bleach, the only villains Rei found genuinely convincing and oppressive were a handful of figures like Aizen, Grimmjow, and Ulquiorra. On the protagonist side, the supposedly invincible Old Man Yamamoto had a reputation for never losing, but in practice never won.
The main Bleach crew's strength later drifted into territory where many of them felt like they were padding the numbers.
During Naruto's serialization, plenty of memorable characters came to the fore, the Konoha Rookies and Akatsuki among them.
One Piece carries a wide bench of memorable supporting characters across its early, middle, and late stages, and ten years later, One Piece fans can still call them up just from a name.
On the topic of the One Piece anime, in Rei's previous life, a chunk of the fanbase preferred to read One Piece as an ensemble show. It was common for important characters in different arcs of One Piece to draw popularity close to the male protagonist Luffy. Including Zoro, second-in-command of the Straw Hat Pirates, whose popularity in his previous life's official polls would sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Luffy's.
A simple twenty-minute episode, on broadcast, was enough to break a slice of the online anime fanbase down to tears on the spot.
That night, Zoro-related trending topics ran the top spots across the major anime websites.
This was also the first time One Piece, since launching in Japan, dug into the past of a Straw Hat Pirates member. The praise came in across the board.
In the weeks that followed, all three works in the Big Three slid into a low point in their respective arcs.
In Bleach, Aizen's true identity was exposed and he "ascended" to Hueco Mundo, producing the famous shots and lines that came with hair-gel Aizen and "Admiration is the emotion furthest from understanding." For fifty or sixty episodes, the Bleach plot had been building up, and it was doing so to draw the male protagonist Ichigo Kurosaki into Aizen's scheme, and to build out Aizen as a villain.
The end of the Soul Society arc handed Bleach into a transitional arc.
Naruto was in the same shape. Rock Lee's loss after his hot-blooded fight with Gaara closed out the Chunin Exams preliminaries. The male protagonist, Naruto, was about to enter special training for the final round of the Chunin Exams. Here, the major Naruto character Jiraiya stepped in.
For One Piece, after Zoro's flashback, the bounty-hunter duo Yosaku and Johnny, Zoro's former pals, appeared, and the story moved into the Baratie arc.
Sanji entered the cast, and the major One Piece meme character Gin appeared, but the arc's boss, Don Krieg, came in only through the dialogue of passing characters for now.
The three works, despite the short serialization runs, pulled people into the Big Three fanbase without much friction, on the back of Rei's accumulated reputation across the past decade.
Each of the three was now stacking up a frightening number of fans. The groups overlapped and clashed, and the alignment and opposition of the three factions in online discourse kept rolling.
Shirogane Animation and Illumination Animation's official sites, Dream Comic's site, Rei's account comment section.
Together with the trending topics on the three anime, the fan activity sat at ridiculous levels, well past where Demon Slayer had been at its peak.
"No matter how strong Demon Slayer was, it was always a solo act back then. A competition with one contestant can't reach the theoretical upper limit of hype," Rei said with a smile to Misaki, who was running through data reports.
Rei had lived through the forum wars during the Big Three's peak in his previous life.
In an era before Instagram and TikTok rose, online forums were the largest traffic hub for internet users.
In that era, posts where rival fans of One Piece and Naruto traded blows would routinely make it onto trending topics, and across the top ten forums on the entire net in all categories, One Piece also held a top-ten spot. Inside the ACGN community, the three works sat as the top three in popularity for years on end.
Now in Japan, the same path was opening up as expected.
"If your fans keep arguing this way, won't there be problems? Don't you want to step in as the author and mediate? They're all your fans. Isn't it inappropriate to have them cursing at each other every day?" Misaki blinked, offering a suggestion.
"Come on. The best move for me as the author is to play blind and not see these arguments. The moment I step in, I'll get kicked out of my own authorship by the fanbase in minutes, and they'll even hit me with 'Shirogane is just a cartoonist, what does he know about the Big Three?'" Rei chuckled.
He had transmigrated to a different world, but the temper and the sharp mouths of the ACGN community were exactly the same.
Rei looked at the hesitation in Misaki's face and gave her one more reassurance.
"Don't worry. You don't need to hire keyboard troops to nudge fans onto the path of truth, kindness, and beauty. Since the old days, there's been no second place in martial arts. The stronger one shows after the fight, so there's no dispute to be had. And there's no first place in literature. No matter how much you argue, no result comes out.
The debate among these three fanbases over which work is stronger or weaker will run until the works conclude, and past that too. There's no stopping it. If problems crop up later because of the arguments, that's on me, not you."
"Since you say so, I'll stop worrying about it." Misaki took Rei's view, nodded, and moved on to the other items on her list.
"The company's game department, set up under a year and a half ago, has expanded heavily at your request. We've been pulling in industry figures from the top seven game companies in Japan with high-salary offers.
Within the next two months, the game department should hit a solid scale. At the same time, the mobile and PC game projects for the three anime are about to enter formal development." Misaki looked at Rei.
"Running this many projects in parallel, plus the work with the official departments for game publication approvals, needs an investment of at least two hundred billion yen. This doesn't count the global promotion and distribution costs after the games launch. It's the largest investment action since the company was founded."
Putting that much money behind the initial build of a single game department is considered a heavy move inside the Japanese industry.
"Understood," Rei said. "The money the company has brought in over the past years more than covers these costs. And these investments will return well past anything we can imagine in the years ahead. So don't worry about the spend. As long as the need is real and the figure is reasonable, I'll approve it."
"It's the gaming industry. It's a field we don't know. Caution is the better posture." Misaki took a moment and circled back.
"Don't worry. I'm not so shallow that the current results make me complacent. I'm confident, not arrogant," Rei said.
Rei's confidence came from the big data of his previous life. He wasn't groping his way across the river. He was walking forward in steady steps, following the path the IP adaptations had taken in his previous life, sidestepping the pitfalls.
Rei understood Misaki's caution, but he couldn't take it to heart in the same way she did.
Misaki sat with it for a moment and let the topic go.
Her initial thought had been to have Rei try a handful of low-cost Big Three games first, to test the waters and keep the company from losing too much if its own R&D in the game space fell short.
Since Rei didn't have the patience for that approach, it was move forward. She wasn't the type to be afraid of the unknown.
"One more week. The Weathering With You film releases at the end of July in the summer slot. Are you, recently..."
"I can make the time." Rei smiled. "Hina is babbling now and gets along well with Miyu and the nanny. I can run the pre-release promotion for Weathering With You with the company in full."
"Then I'll have my team draw up the schedule."
"Thanks, Misaki."
Rei and Misaki sat both at the family level and as partners in Shirogane Animation's development. If you measured the hours they spent together each day, it might not be far behind the time Rei spent with Miyu. Plenty of decisions didn't need to be talked through in full. There was a working understanding between them.
The very next day, Shirogane Animation launched its global promotional plan for Weathering With You ahead of release.
After more than a year, Rei had a new animated film coming out, and the topic ran across Japan's film industry.
Having moved through the Demon Slayer films, Your Name, Spirited Away, and other blockbusters, Rei's current standing in Japan's film industry, on achievements alone, sat at or near the top of his generation. He needed a bit more time, or some kind of early-death mythology, to be promoted to the legendary-creator tier in Japan.
By the time Weathering With You released, the entire Japanese film industry was treating it as the headliner.
Going by the current calendar, no films with budgets over six billion yen were releasing in Japan during the two weeks after Weathering With You. A cluster of low-budget romances and animated films at budgets in the tens of millions to a few hundred million yen were releasing in waves, with the Weathering With You trailer making it clear the film was a romance.
The backers behind those smaller works weren't trying to fight Weathering With You. They were hoping Shirogane's new release would lift the overall film market's heat. Some moviegoers, after finishing Weathering With You, would go looking for lower-tier substitutes to fill the rest of their cinema appetite.
For the Japanese version of Weathering With You, Rei made his usual minor adjustments.
Makoto Shinkai's Weathering With You and Suzume, on raw power, weren't in the same weight class as Your Name.
But the gap wasn't enough to justify the kind of backlash that hit the two films on release in Rei's previous life. Ninety-nine percent of their plot was fine. The trouble was that every so often, a handful of lines from the protagonists would land awkwardly and out of place.
Creators aren't always the most sensitive when they're making something. What one person finds excellent, others won't accept. Once a film is released, though, it faces tens of millions of moviegoers.
So this circles back to Rei's biggest weapon as a transmigrator.
It wasn't only the original content of these classic works sitting in his head. It was also the reactions of tens of millions of viewers in the global market, after those classics released and serialized, in his previous life.
Any scenes or shots that didn't work were cut outright or reshaped. Awkward lines that read out of place got swapped for their synonyms or were dropped.
By the end of July, on day one of Weathering With You's release, the film posted an absurd summer figure: thirteen-billion yen on opening day, taking the daily box office crown across the Japanese film market.
As Rei had expected, the broad consensus across Japan's anime and film industries was that Weathering With You wasn't as good as Your Name, and on overall performance and quality, it was well behind Spirited Away.
It rated higher than the heavily commercialized Demon Slayer films, though.
None of the Demon Slayer films had carried a complete structure. They were short Demon Slayer anime arcs put up on the big screen.
The bigger note was that the negative reviews on this film were far fewer than what hit it in Rei's previous life. The female lead Hina Amano and male lead Hodaka choosing to let the city flood for the sake of their love still drew criticism from a wave of moral high-ground haters.
Rei's fans were not the easily-swayed type. The argument, put plain, was that the main plot point of flooding Tokyo was not the fault of the leads. The female lead's choice to sacrifice herself for the benefit of the majority was the admirable read.
The male lead's choice to save her and flood half the city in the process also pulled applause from plenty of viewers. Not every person on the internet, every ACGN fan, every film enthusiast, aspires to be a saint or holds themselves to peak-tier moral standards.
Most people cut themselves slack.
A lot of people just want to be ordinary individuals who act on what they feel. The ordinary read is, I don't care about the towering waves. As long as I didn't cause them, I'm not going to sacrifice myself to save a bunch of strangers.
Overall, in this Japan, Weathering With You may not be a masterpiece, but it lands as a quality work among the fans.
Its box office matched the quality. It only cleared ninety billion yen after a month.
September approached. Japan's hottest summer hit.
Illumination Animation and Shirogane Animation were running in order.
The Big Three are the company's most important projects.
But plans for medium-length works like Clannad and Death Note also sit in the company's two-to-three-year operational plan.
For other works like Steins;Gate, beyond the Big Three and the final-chapter Demon Slayer film project, the company's idle production staff had formed a small production team and were moving forward at their own pace. The expectation is to air on schedule about a year from now.
Evening in the company office.
After reading through the reports on the desk, Rei let out a long breath.
"Good. Everything is on track."
Rei no longer sat in the office every week pulling apart each work's data the way he used to.
He checked the data trends every few weeks and put his attention on the online conversation around each work.
The viewership ratings for all three Big Three anime sat right up against the 8% mark.
Every indication was that the ratings for all three would clear 8% by year-end.
The level should hold for a long stretch. As the three anime keep serializing, they keep stacking popularity, the influence keeps widening, and then.
Those accumulated fans become loyal consumers for the various derivative IPs of the Big Three.
"It's a pity. The company's scale could be expanded to produce more works. As a human, I have my limits. If I added more works to the slate, even drawing only the storyboard drafts and providing scripts, the sheer volume would bury me," Rei said to himself in the office.
"In some ways, I envy DIO."
Past the three major anime, Shirogane Animation and Illumination Animation had also begun to slow their growth rate as they reached this point.