As we begin the month of December, the time for celebrating the joyous Christmas season and the end of the year, it seems only fitting that we also take a moment to celebrate some of those memorable anime moments from throughout the year – moments of laughter, moments of tears, moments of shock and awe, and above all moments of pure, unadulterated epic win.

Thus, in recognition of this most festive time, over the course of the next 12 days we will be highlighting some our of favorite series from the past year at their very best. Feel free to sing along, and to share your own favorite moments from each series in turn.

On the first day of Christmas my true love (anime) gave to me…

A cruise on a nice boat for free!

School Days took the visual novel adaptation concept and turned it completely on its head. Pun unintentional… >_>

Regardless of whether you liked or disliked the direction the series went, between the furor surrounding the canceled episode and resulting Nice Boat footage, and then the carnage of the actual final scenes, it’s pretty clear that School Days left its mark. If you saw my comparisons of different anime popularity on Google Trace, or if you pay any attention to either of the major anime blog aggregators, you know that the Nice Boat meme dominated the online anime scene during those last couple weeks.

For better or for worse, the nice boats are here to stay.

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After reading this article, I was inspired to see if I could find anything cool regarding anime related search terms. Rather than performing more generalized comparisons, however, I decided to look up specific shows to see if I could learn anything interesting about them. Read on for the results.

In keeping with Google’s tradition of hiding specific details about their search information, the graphs produced by Google Trends have no y-axis, and there’s no way of know exactly how many searches for a given term are performed. Rather, what the tool is useful for is comparing two or more search queries to see which is more popular, as well as observing general trends for a single search over time.

For example, above is a simple search for Darker than Black. The search term popped onto the radar shortly before the show began airing in Spring ‘07, with an initial peak of interest at the beginning which quickly subsided, and then gradually grew toward a second peak at the finale of the series.

Overlaying Lucky Star onto the chart shows a similar trend, although since that search term is more generic it also has some non-anime related traffic.

Adding School Days into the mix demonstrates very clearly the show’s strong internet popularity, with a huge spike at the end for the last episodes.

OK, so maybe you’re thinking, “Well that’s great, 0rion, but obviously not all of those searches are anime related. How do you know that sudden surge in queries wasn’t caused by something else?”

Not to worry, the cause of that sudden spike is quite easily explained if you just take a look at the next graph:

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No further explanation needed.

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So which was the most popular new show of this year? According to Google Trends, CLAYMORE is head and shoulders above the rest of competition, surpassing even the whole Nice Boat fiasco.

This is hardly surprising, however, as the shonen market is by far the biggest anime demographic, and CLAYMORE is admittely one of the more interesting new offerings to come out of that genre.

Gurren Lagann, somewhat surprisingly, was pretty low in the Google Power Rankings. Since it’s a pretty easy to mispell name, I also tried combining together all the possible variations and spellings to get a more accurate composite total, but even that showed a fairly minimal increase.

The graph for Haruhi also presents a few unusual details.

As we’ve seen, a show’s searches will generally peak when the final episode airs (mid 2006 here), and then gradually decline over time. Haruhi, however, shows continuing strong popularity all the way to the present.

The secret behind this trend is revealed when we overlay Lucky Star onto the graph. Take a look at the close correlation between the two shows. Finally the shocking proof of what we’ve suspected all along:

Lucky Star == Haruhi!

Seems like all those Haruhivertisements in Lucky Star really paid off for KyoAni.

Speaking of popularity spikes, this one is just comical. The number of searches for Code Geass increases steadily as the series grows in popularity and WTF factor…and then abruptly drops as the show goes on hiatus for three months, followed by a sudden XBOX sized spike as the final cliffhanger episodes air.

If you’re wondering just which anime is the hottest thing on the internet right now…well, I’m afraid it’s not Haruhi.

The big name Shonen Jump series pretty much dominate the search rankings; a show like Haruhi is barely even a blip by comparison.

Naruto is an absolute juggernaut, and after extensive testing and comparison I was unable to find any other anime that can even come close to its disgustingly huge level of popularity. Note the particularly large increase in early 2007 as the Shippuden arc of the show begins.

Forget other anime, Naruto has surpassed the number of searches for ESPN and even for the supremely popular U.S. television drama 24!

Anyway, this is just a random sampling of interesting search data I stumbled across while messing with Google Trace. Obviously none of this is designed to really be statistically sound research; it’s mostly just for kicks.

So what other interesting anime or otaku related information do you think can be gleaned from search comparison? If you find something cool, be sure to let me know.

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I didn’t enjoy it at all.

You know, it’s funny…after all the build up, all the delays, all the bloggers flaming away at Makoto with the heat of a thousand internets, when I finally got to see the long awaited moment – it didn’t make me happy at all.

Watching the cast slowly spiral out of control throughout the series, and then finally crash and burn at the end, was like watching an impending train wreck. You knew it was going to be horrible, but you couldn’t pull your eyes away from it.

And while I wasn’t part of the torch-bearing mob vociferously calling for Makoto’s head, I certainly was not hoping for a Good End to the show either. Now that I’ve been able to witness Makoto receive his just comeuppance, however, it really struck me what a tragedy this show is.

Of course, it’s awfully hard to feel any kind of sympathy for Makoto…or any of the cast, for that matter. But as the series of flashbacks showed the happier days of the past, before this whole messy situation got started, I couldn’t help but think that it was a very deeply unfortunate outcome. Plenty of people make really stupid mistakes when they’re young and lacking in maturity. Even the events of School Days are not that far removed from the reality of some people.

Perhaps the reason why I didn’t like the series that much was exactly because it was a bit too real. Your standard harem romcom tries to keep things somewhat plausible, but it intentionally stretches your suspension of disbelief so that you don’t take it too seriously either. Instead of being my usual dose of blissful evening escapism, School Days reminded me of all the Bad Stuff™ in the real world that I usually don’t like to think about when I’m watching anime.

So in the end, as much as I was looking forward to this episode, I really couldn’t get into it.

With one key exception: the ending was tremendous. Nice Boat lol!

*sigh* I’m gonna go watch a couple episodes of Hidamari Sketch to get my genki back.

I recommend you do the same. Even if you didn’t watch School Days. You know, just on principle.

School Days is depressing, so here’s some Yoshinoya-sensei.

And yes, I do really like to start sentences with conjunctions.

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Finally when I had something to look forward to…eagerly camping Tokyo Tosho, hitting F5 over and over again, gleefully envisioning the long awaited scene in which Makoto finally gets his just desserts…

Some little girl in Japan had to go all Higurashi on her dad, resulting in the final episode of School Days getting pulled, and now I have nothing to watch.

According to the rumors over at Anime Diet, otaku were lining up in front of TV stations across Japan to protest this highly questionable decision. Of course, in reality the otaku were all huddled in their basements, flaming away on their message board of choice, but it’s still fun to watch people get trolled.

Oh well. On the plus side, that was a really nice boat. Some of the scenes kind of made me want to watch ARIA. Which I think I will; its healing vibe is balm for my stab-deprived soul.

In addition, this pretty much guarantees that what’s eventually coming is indeed the glorious BAD END, so I guess I can’t complain too much.

* sigh *

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