I wrote two articles about a spring 2023 anime series titled (in English) The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten. The first article, published on February 6, covers my (ultimately well-founded) feeling of deja vu when I heard its main ending theme. The second, published on March 30, is my review of the entire series.
I published the first article after having watched the fifth episode out of twelve. At that time, I had a mixed, inclined toward positive, view of the series. I offered my initial impressions of the series as an aside to the main point of the article – my trying to remember where I had heard the ending song – because I figured that I may as well review the series after giving it space in our virtual pages. Fortunately, I ended up preferring the second half of the series to the first, so my full (and very long) review was positive. Angel Next Door is no masterpiece – I concluded that it would likely be a borderline top-six series in my year-end ranking, and as of November 3, 2023, that assessment is holding up well. But not all reviews need to be of the absolute best that anime has to offer.
While I more or less settled on writing a full review of Angel Next Door as a result of the first theme song article, I developed two alternative motives in the weeks between the first article and my full series review. My first motive had to do with my piece on the theme song performing surprisingly well (it notched an 11th place finish in March 2023). See my quote in the penultimate paragraph of my March 30 review:
I would certainly be interested in seeing another season on Angel Next Door (I believe there will be a second season)…
N.A. Ferrell
I had a hunch that Angel Next Door would receive a second season for two reasons. Firstly, I understood from accounts by those who read the underlying novel series (note I have not read the novels and I have no plan to do so) that the anime was on pace to cover only about half of the extant material. Secondly, it seemed like the series was receiving a decent amount of attention from my limited view (note I am not a part of any anime “communities”).
One may wonder whyever the prospect of a second season would have anything to do with my motivation to expeditiously write a review of the first season. The answer can be found in the most-visited articles sections of my January 2023 and February 2023 month-in-review posts. You will note that my article on hair color in Kimi ni Todoke, the 2009-2011 anime adaptation of a well-known shoujo anime romance series, placed 7th and 8th respectively in our most-visited articles of those months. I published that article in August 2021. While it had performed surprisingly decently for an article about hair color in a single 2009 episode of an anime that last aired in 2011 (43rd place in 2021 and 42nd place in 2022), it had never approached the number of views it received in the first eight weeks of 2023. The surge was not driven by a sudden interest in hair color in Kimi ni Todoke. It was, as I discovered, driven by the announcement that Netflix added the two Kimi ni Todoke seasons from 2009-11 to its lineup. The surprise September 2023 announcement of a third Kimi ni Todoke season slated to air in 2024 did not inspire a similar surge in views, but perhaps I will write a better article to take advantage of that news.
I published the first Angel Next Door article in the midst of our Kimi ni Todoke article surge. For that reason, I came to hold out hope that a review of the Angel Next Door series would have some staying power if it received a second season. Sure enough, a second season for Angel Next Door was confirmed on October 1, 2023, albeit the air date is still up in the air. My review had been doing fairly well before the announcement, so I will venture that the upcoming second season should give it some staying power.
The belated success of my Kimi ni Todoke hair color article was a happy accident (let it be said I did not write that article assuming that anyone would read it). The potential staying power of my Angel Next Door season one review was good planning.
(PS: I wonder if the announcement of a second season of The Dangers In My Heart will lead to a second-wind for my short Leaflet on the height difference between the two parties to the main romance, which unexpectedly posted second and third place finishes in June and July respectively.)