This Week in Anime - Top of the Bookwalker Charts

7 months ago 36

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Lucas and Chris explore BookWalker's rankings of their top titles and attempt to make it make sense.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

Chris
Lucas, we must stay relevant here at TWIA in the new year! Fortunately, I have an idea. Bookwalker released their top sellers for 2025, so all we need to do is see what's selling and cater to that! Let's just see what we've got to work with here...

I no longer have an idea.

Lucas
Hey now, Chris! I don't want our audience to get the wrong idea! We here at This Week in Anime would NEVER use smutty fiction with provocative titles/covers to entice more readers to scroll through this column!

No sir!

No way!

The power of sales analytics is still going to make for a more respectable beginning to the year than how we rang in 2025 with a column all about incest, no matter how many boobs and niche fetishes those numbers are surrounded by.

Which is to say, now that we've drawn all the perverts in, it's time to lock the doors behind them and treat them to some raw, hardcore data analysis.

How do I keep missing out on all the topics that would let me talk about Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?! It's despicable that I haven't been able to talk about this premiere work of Oedipal fiction!

But, to today's main point, I have been having a delightful time digging through BookWalker's much more interesting version of a year-end wrap, and seeing what's been doing well for them across a variety of categories!

Unsurprisingly, overtly titillating titles performed well for the platform this year, but even that trend sparks conversation as much of 2025 was defined by censorship efforts for this kind of more adult and sexually explicit material.

"Sex sells" is an old and extremely true adage. Fanservicey titles have always been reliable sellers in the manga and anime sector—it's why series like Beheneko and Otaku NEET Kunoichi are sharing space with standbys like Food Wars! and (of all things) Elfen Lied among Sentai's latest slate of physical Blu-ray pre-orders.

And while saucy games were famously hit hard in 2025, with platforms like Steam, Itch, and even DLsite culling content (often by inexplicable standards), and libraries were, as linked, under fire for carrying books, I think BookWalker's numbers speak to the difficulty of the powers that be to censor everything. That is, we've got a lot of digital platforms for reading text and pictures, to say nothing of physical releases put out through retail stores. It's enough that even zealous paypros and censorious activist groups have to pick their battles and can't catch everything (yet).

Never mind that increased scrutiny might only drive up interest in this kind of material, like some sorta sexy Streisand Effect.

I'm sorry, I'm just now finding out that not only did Beheneko get a Blu-ray, it got a steelbook edition Blu-ray!!! We should start calling the folks at Sentai Captain Ahab because they know when whales are about!

See, we're already learning so much about what modern anime fan wants: elves bangin' cats.

And you make a strong point about this more risqué material seemingly surging despite, or potentially because of, these conditions. I was motivated by these developments and previous reporting to reach out to adult content publishers to pen a "State of Hentai Publishing" article last year, and I couldn't find enough people willing to go on the record to make it happen. One potential source flat-out expressed that they don't want to be quoted in this kind of piece right now, because they're worried about catching heat. While this is disappointing from a journalistic perspective, it does inspire confidence that these trusted smut peddlers have some sense of how to best navigate this increasingly delicate situation.

It gives me a lot of respect for what they continue to do, even as I'm appalled at the state of the world that relegates them to being unable to freely discuss it. Also, makes me even more impressed that something like OceanVeil decided to try a hentai streaming platform in the Year of Nobody's Lord 2025, even continuing to expand their offerings (including simulcasts!).

It's a lesson that would-be censors should've learned with dirty magazines generations ago: You can try as hard as you want to hide this stuff, people can and will search it out and find it, regardless.

All that to say that, yeah, it'd be neat to see what other 18+ publishers had to say about their own analytics and what audiences were perking up for, but absent that it still goes a long way to explain why readers are still coming out for something with a title like Betrayed by the Hero, I Formed a MILF Party with His Mom!

Absolutely! The other conventional wisdom proved by a look at these sales rankings is that it is WAY easier to sell manga/LNs in English-speaking territories if the work has already been adapted into an anime.

Of the top 10 overall sellers on BookWalker last year, all but two of them have anime adaptations, with a few having anime seasons that dropped just last year!

Though that number is about to drop down to just one un-adapted series as Reborn as a Space Mercenary has an anime in the works.

No doubt a result of its popularity, such that it broke through even on the English-reading side of things—regardless of how many times I kept confusing its title with I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire! (which, incidentally, is on the list of top light novels and also had a recent anime adaptation).

Aw, jeez, don't tell me space isekai is going to be the next big thing.

That didn't even cross my mind until you just pointed it out, but you're totally right! Swapping the de facto generic fantasy setting for a generic sci-fi one would be enough of a fresh coat of paint to pass for novelty in the isekai scene. Also, as I dig deeper, I realize now that two volumes of Space Mercenary actually cracked the top 50 on BookWalker's overall list; so get ready for Crunchyroll to likely put all their eggs in that basket whenever the anime hits.

We can cross that space bridge when we come to it. The point is you've got a point about most of the popular titles getting bumps from adaptations, even if the notoriety can seem a little askew sometimes.

For instance, BookWalker's #1 manga, my beloved Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro, was last seen on TV back in 2023, with that second season enjoying somewhat understated success. Maybe the online cultural cache Nagatoro carries is just that powerful. Or maybe audiences are just really, really thirsty for niche bullying fetish material (alongside surprisingly sweet romance). Might explain why other "bothersome gal" series like Please Go Home, Miss Akutsu! cracked BookWalker's manga list.

Listen, I'll be the first comp to the Venn diagram of manga readers and people who enjoy being stepped on being closer to a circle than anyone would care to admit, but Nagatoro definitely endures as the premiere bully-bait series. That isn't to say that other series didn't do it first or haven't done it better since, but this is the one that crystallized the micro-genre for a lot of people.

I only even watched the series originally because I was assigned to review it in a Faustian bargain with Lynzee to also get to review SSSS.Dynazenon, and Miss Nagatoro won me over quite handily, so I can attest to her powers of persuasion.

That sort of streak highlights another taboo topic trending in these tough times across these titles: Gushing Over Magical Girls and No Freaking Way can get uniquely spicy, sure, but alongside others like sixth-ranking entry The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All, things are also looking noticeably queer!

I mean, technically, I haven't read Reincarnated as a GIRL, myself, so I can't comment on the gender of it all, but...it's titled Reincarnated as a GIRL! What do you think it's about?

Put your best guesses in the comments, readers! It's actually really cool too see so many queer or otherwise off-beat spicy series keeping pace with these cishet, vanilla, male power fantasies that are stereotypically associated with adult material in the anime sphere. Also, props to Monster Musume for still going strong after, what? Like a decade and change??? Monster fuckers stay winning!

For an incredibly eclectic spread of titles, I'd recommend that folks check out this list's audiobook section. I wasn't really aware that this media type existed underneath the bigger anime umbrella, and this page is such a barrage of "oh yeah, I remember that series!"

Right, anime novel audiobooks are their own cottage industry that makes sense as a take-off if you think about it for a bit. I even gifted a few of the Spice & Wolf ones to my Holo-loving buddy who prefers to enjoy books that way. (obligatory insertion of the original Yen Press Spice & Wolf light novel cover)

The anime connection lets the audio component of these do some cute indulgences, like having Slayers up there be read by Lina Inverse's classic dub actress, Lisa Ortiz! It's a neat way to link the anime and source material together for this side of the world, I think.

You're preaching to the freshly converted! With the recent rise of VTubers, ASMR, and (to wind the conversation back a bit) OceanVeil bringing back hentai dubs, there's never been a better time to capitalize on the sonic dimension of the anime scene, and I'm glad people are capitalizing on it! These kinds of audiobooks are never going to turn into a major market endeavor, but I love seeing this kind of quirky cottage industry rise up and thrive!

I think it also speaks (as it were) to the state of the people in that market in today's world. We're busy. We're constantly working, travelling, and multi-tasking. I may not "get" the appeal of treating visual entertainment as a "second screen" background feature, but I more than understand those putting a novel on their earbuds and having it help them get through the workday.

Maybe you're worried someone might judge you for listening to voice actors read through Bakemonogatari while you're balancing accounts in the office, but in my opinion, that's far more respectable than those who are way too into true crime podcasts.

For as much as I think the world would be a better place if the opposite were true, most folks are not like me and probably don't spend the bulk of their auditory bandwidth on hobby and politics-oriented podcasts. Especially if you just want a sense of what all the fuss is about or be aware enough of a well-known franchise to hold a conversation about it, audiobooks are a great way to get a general sense of any of these series.

It helps that so many series that have hung on throughout the years did start out as novels, even before the modern Narou/web novel zeitgeist we find ourselves in the grip of. Lord knows I'll take anything that keeps Slayers in the modern conversation.

Now, that does go back to highlight a point about BookWalker's broader reading-based leaderboard. Pretty much all the series there necessarily trend newer. I mean, there are some like Saga of Tanya the Evil and Re:Zero where modern anime watchers would probably consider those airing adaptations ancient, but really we're still dealing with thoroughly modern material here.

That's down to the kind of audience BookWalker caters to, of course; it is their list. But that swings me to curiosity about how 2025 issues of classic manga like Denpa's release of They Were 11! or Peow2's release of Stop!! Hibari-kun! fared, comparatively.

I know! For as much fun as I'm having digging through what BookWalker's published, I'm acutely aware that this is only a small slice of the entire industry. I would KILL for increased transparency on what's selling and where, but unfortunately, those statistics are pretty hard to come by. Even folks whose entire bread and butter is international anime industry analysis, like Animenomics and White Box Entertainment tend to focus on industry disruption or high-level marketplace shifts.

Which isn't me throwing shade, to be clear. A lot of these numbers are proprietary or intentionally obfuscated by major players in this space, which is why even getting a sales ranking roundup from BookWalker feels like a treat that's worth discussing here!

Absolutely! This kind of breakdown is also helpful to me as a critic and pundit in framing my expectations for a series. Like 109k units sold in the US is damn respectable for any series, but I would have thought those numbers would be higher considering how Kagurabachi became a meme the moment the first chapter hit print.

Granted, you then have to contend with the point that these numbers only reflect compiled volumes of those manga sold, and don't speak to however many people are reading and enjoying Kagurabachi week to week through their cheap Shonen Jump subscription (to say nothing of the pirates—and I don't mean the ones in One Piece.)

Like, you look at how Undead Unluck only put up about twice the numbers of Kagurabachi, despite having 20 volumes compared to the latter's 3, and it paints some kind of successful picture for the sick-ass sword series. Not as successful as the multi-millions put up by Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man, but those two series are basically Spiders Georg-ing their way into manga statistics.

God, I knew that SPY x FAMILY had escaped orbit and popped off with more mainstream crowds, but I didn't realize to what extent until I saw these figures! 2.2M units sold compared to DanDaDan's 631k is WILD! Especially considering I, and most critics I know, agree that SxF has floundered in the long run while DDD has only grown stronger after its attention-drawing opening.

But I should also be mindful that none of these series are explicitly in competition with one another, and that these figures make clear that there's enough room for just about everyone in the manga landscape to thrive today.

This is true. Getting hard numbers like this is a good reminder that while critics like us have our glows and gripes, they can't accurately reflect what real audiences are actually coming out for. With that in mind, it is heartening to see a list like BookWalker's showing that isekai isn't totally dominating the scene like I'd worry it would. Even the pure light novel rankings have The Apothecary Diaries at the silver medal spot!

And if a critical nemesis like Solo Leveling is barely clinging to #10 on the list, handily beaten by the likes of the green yuri, maybe that encouragingly speaks to the tastes of light novel, manga, and anime fans being varied enough that we'll keep seeing a strong spread of titles, new and classic, making their way over here.

Further proof that Solo Leveling's "popularity" is mostly the result of a Crunchyroll astroturfing campaign. But it is heartwarming to see that, despite the loudest voices online trying to paint this space a certain way or corporate decision makers trying to leap onto short-sighted trends, the works that do well in this community seem to be as eclectic as the individuals that comprise it. If the manga that popped off in 2025 was this diverse and varied, I'm more excited than ever to see what the medium has in store for us in the year ahead!

Now that's something worth having a party over.