Season 2 announced

Well, when a sequel is announced as soon as the first season ends, it means that they were both planned from the start. Basically the same as split cours, even if it will be called "season 2".

I'm not surprised because anyone who'd bother making an anime adaptation of a complete manga will adapt it until the end (even if it means cutting and/or rushing content to fit the story in 1-2 cours). Most anime adaptions are incomplete because they adapt ongoing source materials.

yes, I mean that the possibilities were either a split 50 episodes series or fitting the whole story in 25, depending on how much is the budget. Adapting half of the story and leaving it incomplete wasn't an option.

It makes sense for manga that aren't super long. A first season could have been made in 2016 or 2017, but in that case the odds of getting a complete adaptation would have been much lower.

@Nirinbo So, the author's decision was actually a smart move? I won't say that I'm a huge fan of this franchise since I was introduced to it quite late, but given its quality and popularity, I wouldn't mind seeing the full story eventually.

@RobertBobert we can say it's a smart move because the producers believed in the project enough to fund a properly paced adaptation: 50 episodes for a non-shounen adaptation is not something that happens very often. We can say that the gamble paid off.

On the other hand, if producers had decided differently, we would have gotten an extremely rushed adaptation. Rather than this, I'd have preferred an incomplete good adaptation, but this could happen only when the manga was still far from finished.

@Nirinbo Such things have long seemed interesting to me in our time. Because we're actually going back to long 40+ shows, albeit with more pronounced divisions into seasons. I've heard that "timeless" shows like Detective Conan and Pokemon are also formally divided into seasons, but that was more of a fan categorization than an official section. For example, I noticed that Kimetsu no Yaiba and MHA treat their seasons as part of one overall anime.

@RobertBobert I'm not sure this also applies to long running anime that are guaranteed to go on for a very long time like Conan and One Piece, but it's true that most long running anime (like the currently airing Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh) are divided into small one cour arcs: they can't be sure that the show will be renewed forever, so they plan it one cour at a time.

What you said about Demon Slayer and MHA makes sense, since every season of these anime are part of one big continuous project that never stops. Conversely, AoT was handled differently: the first season came out in 2013 (project 1); then, since the sequels weren't planned from the start, it took 4 years to start another project and make s2 and s3 (project 2); finally MAPPA took care of the rest (project 3) because Wit didn't want to make another season so soon.

@Nirinbo So, technically, when a very popular show continues to receive expected seasons, it is one ongoing project, as opposed to if the producers created one season, and then another 2-3 years later? I didn't know about this because I thought a "project" referred to the entire adaptation as a whole, and not each season individually.

Well, I’m not entirely familiar with Conan’s cuisine, I just managed to read on the DC wiki that the division of the show into seasons is conditional. But I've heard that at least the original Pokémon was divided into season arcs based on the regions and leagues that Ash and his friends visited. But I don't know if this was due to ease of categorization or based on game mechanics. For example, the official website counts several shows, including the first one, as multiple separate seasons, while other shows are counted as one season. At the same time, considering all these titles to be seasons of one big Pokemon anime. https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/seasons

@RobertBobert yes: if you know for sure that you're going to make multiple seasons one right after another, you'll want to keep the same core staff and they might start working on the new season while the currently airing one isn't even done yet. Unplanned sequels require more years because the staff has been freed once the first season ends: they might be working on something else and it's not guaranteed you'll be able to reassemble the same team.

@Nirinbo Is this why the involved staff outside the VA changes so frequently between seasons?

@RobertBobert yep. the longer the gap between seasons, the harder it is to keep the same staff. One Punch Man is a famous example of that.

@Nirinbo I've heard that sometimes the break was so long that even successful shows suddenly lost popularity and profitability due to the fact that people managed to forget about the show during this time. But one way or another, returning to the announcement of the second season of DM, it turns out that the staff will be completely the same?

@RobertBobert if the second season will come out next year, they already started working on it. However, someone pointed out that it might come out in 2026, considering that 2025 should be for Panty & Stocking s2. In any case I do expect that the staff will mostly be the same.

@Nirinbo Does Trigger produce even fewer shows per year than White Fox and Kyoani?

@RobertBobert Excluding very short anime, Trigger doesn't release more than one anime series per year. 2024 DM, 2023 Gridman+Dynazenon movies, 2022 Edgerunners, 2021 Dynazenon, 2020 BNA, 2019 Promare, 2018 Gridman, 2017 LWA, 2016 Kiznaiver, 2015 Ninja Slayer, 2014 InoBato, 2013 KLK.

@Nirinbo Do they work that long on one show compared to other studios?

@RobertBobert I don't know exactly, I think it's just a matter of quality over quantity. If you want to release more anime per year like MAPPA or J.C Staff, you'll need more employees (=more fixed costs) and/or more outsourcing (=uncertain quality).

@Nirinbo That is, a nod to Kyoani or White Fox doesn’t work here because of the different “weight category”?

@RobertBobert Kyoani also definitely focuses on quality over quantity. I'm not sure about White Fox since it doesn't seem to be as good as it used to be during its first few years (for example Steins;Gate 0 and Goblin Slayer both released in 2018, resulting in S;G 0 not being as well crafted as the original S;G).

@Nirinbo I'm just used to the fact that these studios can afford at least 2-3 full-fledged shows a year. Even if one of them is a movie. Also, could the creation of Bind be justified because they wanted to relieve their schedule without losing property?

@RobertBobert Studio Bind was created because Mushoku Tensei was a passion project that required a long term committment, something that White Fox couldn't guarantee. The only way to guarantee that is if the person leading said passion project is also the president of the animation studio (then for some reason they put more effort into Onimai than into MT s2...)

@Nirinbo That is, with less passion, White Fox could have taken on the project themselves instead of creating a separate studio?

@RobertBobert If this weren't a passion project, White Fox could have taken it and they would have adapted the whole story in one go, with a lot of rushing and cutting to make the whole story fit in the least amount of episodes as possible.

@Nirinbo Does Mushoku story allow for this? As far as I understand, they need atleast several seasons to cover everything.

@RobertBobert nothing is impossible. Of course, adapting the entirety of Mushoku Tensei in like 3 cours would be a rushed mess, a cheap cashgrab. The opposite of a passion project.

I wonder who will voice Winged Lion.