Nine of the top ten anime of all time are still growing today. The only top ten anime not receiving more content this year is Clannad, which is a shame, because they still haven't animated Tomoyo After Story and easily could add on to this franchise as well.
Out of the 186 anime that have reached my rankings, only 29 have announced additional content coming our way sometime in the future. Of those 29, nine are in the top ten. Ten are in the top twelve.
This makes a lot of sense. If something's good, you want to keep milking it, because it's artistically rewarding and popular (and thus profitable). Though you'd think that after decades we could have reached the ending of at least one of these top ten shows (we haven't.)
Regardless of how we got here, this means that 2017 is going to feel like a very retro year. Only one show in my top ten, Sword Art Online, began after 2010. All the others date back to the previous decade, and yet these are going to be the top, headline works of 2017. Perhaps not all the shows with announced content will actually air this year, so let's say 25 old series will receive continuations in 2017. Combine that with five older franchises from 2016 or earlier finally being translated in 2017, you're up to 30 shows already that are all blasts from the past.
2016 ended up with 43 different great franchises with something new to celebrate over, of which only 11 had never appeared on my chronology list before. We're looking at something similar for 2017, though probably smaller overall. So instead of 11 new series in 2017, we can expect 6. And instead of 32 old works in 2016, we can only expect 30 in 2017. Still, that's a very large list, that's very heavily leaning on the past.
Exactly how much longer can the anime industry lean on the past to keep moving forward? Won't these stories ever come to their natural conclusions? At some point, surely these franchises will have nothing left to say?
Don't count on it. Out of my top ten series, virtually all of them are open ended. They could all have an additional fifty episodes of content, no problem, so even the additional content we're receiving this year won't nearly exhaust that well. Plus, out of my anime wishlist, the 100 shows I most want to see given new animated content which no one has announced new animated content for, only 15 series haven't been animated before. Which means we can lean on the past for at least 85 more shows.
Don't expect 2017 to be an especially new year. It's going to feel very, very much like the years, even the decades, that have come before it. Everybody will be a familiar face.
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