Tower of God changed the game this year thanks to the groundbreaking partnership between Crunchyroll and Webtoon in order to make it into an animation. Whether you love, hate, or don’t care about the series at all, it’s an undeniable historic shift and has opened the gates to a whole new land of source material. Right now we’re over halfway through the season, and it’s clear that Tower of God has gotten a lot of attention. According to the site AniChart, it is the second most popular anime this season with their users, falling only behind Love Is War Season 2 which isn’t exactly a fair comparison as Love Is War has already had time to build up a fanbase of watchers with the first season.
Now what’s interesting is I thought this was going to be a test run. Make a popular Webtoon into an anime, see if anybody cares, and then go from there. However, I saw while looking into it that Crunchyroll said fuck if they like it, we’re making more of these bitches already. As early as February they were talking about making The God Of Highschool and Noblesse into animes. As a non-Webtoon boy I’ve never heard of either of those before, but last month Kinky and I checked out the trailer for The God of Highschool to see if it looked interesting. Needless to say after seeing the trailer, that shit is definitely going on my watch list. Those fist fights were looking a little too clean to miss out on, and I’m a slut for anime action. You can peep it for yourself below.
As far as Noblesse, I know nothing about it except that it got an OVA or something one time and then everyone forgot about it. According to the announcements earlier this year there is now a full season of anime in production so if anybody is a fan then rejoice. I’ll have to wait and see more to make a decision on if I’ll watch it...who am I kidding, the art looks interesting, the title is cool, I’m probably going to at least try to watch this shit anyway.
Like I'm not gonna at least try this shit.
Regardless of looking at any of these individual works, I’m surprised that Crunchyroll pulled the gun all at once on Webtoons. I would figure when trying something new for the first time you’d stick to one production and see how it goes. After all, I’ve seen some backlash here and there already with the usual argument of “guys this isn’t even from a manga, it’s not real anime don’t watch this garbage”. But I suppose they were confident and wanted to start making shit ASAP. Considering Tower of God’s success so far, that appears to have been the right move. One thing is certain, Webtoons are here to stay this year. And it’s my guess that they will soon become a permanent part of seasonal anime unless some drastic change occurs.
Are Webtoons the new hotness? Should we expect Webtoons to become a prominent source of anime? Is making Webtoons just a trend that will die out? Draw your conclusions and post your comic answer in the comments below! (I tried okay, sometimes these ending puns don’t work out.)
