Oct 29, 2013

"Magnolia" is ending November -- Let's Look at it Readership on Crimson Flower/Omari's Sister

According to the Aria website, "Magnolia" is ending in the next issue. I still haven't received the current issue, so that means for us, we have two chapters left.  I don't want to speculate on whether this is a planned ending or not, but I will say, I thought that there were at least 2 or 3 volumes more of story left... or so in my imagination.  Be that as it may, I have been noticing over the past year a rapid drop off in "Magnolia" readership on this blog.  So speaking only for this blog, let's look at some numbers.

First of all, I normalized the data because I don't want to give actual numbers. In this case, throwing out the first chapter (first chapters always have abnormally high readership), I chose to compare readership of each chapter to the chapter that was read the most, Chapter 12. The number for chapter 12 is a bit of an estimate because a chapter of Lily was released in the same post, so I subtracted the average readership of Lily to get that number. But... to give you some perspective on its popular at its height, "Magnolia" readership was about half that "Ouran", our most read series. 

Digging deeper, the series highest plateau was during chapters 8 - 17. Chapter 12 is the Ayato/Sui incestuous shower scene >_>...  Other events during this period include: Nagi struggles with sexy-Ayato fantasies, Sui teaches Ayato archery, some lovely red-hot Ayato and Hugo quality time, Lily introduces Arthur to everyone,  the introduction of the Black Twins, and the beginning of the tea party. The next peak is chapter 20 -- OMG! Alexandra is a DUDE! And... the last gasp at chapter 29 -- Sui, why you leaving hickies on Ayato? Dat's gross! Dat's your brother! It looks like the big slide happened during the chapters that continuously retread the letter from Ayato's mother. Honestly, while translating that, I felt like I was doing half of the previous each chapter. Those chapters were TEDIOUS, and I understand why readers would give up.

Anyhow... that's a peek into the "Magnolia" stats for Crimson Flower/Omari's Sister.  Sadly the same thing is happening to "Pochamani", but at more compressed time scale. But it appears for now to be going strong in Japan, so I don't expect it to end any time soon. If you would like to see stuff like this in the future, let me know. I was a little hesitant to post this because I was worried I'd number-nerd out... Haha! I was tempted to do more analysis... but I think this enough for this forum.

Anyhow, go out there and support "Magnolia" and Naked Ape through purchasing the books and Drama CDs.  Links to purchase are available on the "Magnolia" project page (LINK).  And let's keep our fingers crossed, and hope that "Magnolia" gets an ending it deserves in the last two chapters.

(Thanks, EvilNemesis)