Does the Winter Get More Romance Anime Titles Than Other Seasons?

There seems to be something unique about the atmosphere surrounding each anime season, particularly in recent years, in which Fall has seen the arrival of the most highly anticipated titles of each year on platforms like Crunchyroll. Trends within anime come and go, but over the past few years, it has become increasingly apparent that the Winter anime season is the time when we are sent on the most parallel world journeys on average.

Are such observations just due to confirmation bias, or can we safely say certain seasons see more of a certain kind of show than others? More specifically, does the Winter anime season get more romance titles than Spring, Summer and Fall? Using information from MyAnimeList, let’s investigate whether this observation has borne any weight in the last five years.

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Laying Out the Investigation’s Parameters

Number of Romance Titles Vs Total Number of Titles

To start, we’ll need a lot of raw data. To keep things from getting too complicated, we’ll just focus on anime released in the past five years, so any anime from 2020 until Winter 2025, and to make it even simpler, the investigation will only be conducted on TV anime, so OVA and theatrical releases won’t count. An anime only belongs to the season in which its first episode aired, and assuming sequel seasons don’t run immediately after each other, they will also be counted.

The raw data in question is the counting of the number of titles in each season, starting from Winter 2020, and comparing that count to the number of out-and-out romance titles–so anime where romance is the main focus. From there, we will determine the percentage of “romance concentration” for each of the seasons from Winter 2020 until now, and then further determine the average “romance concentration” for each season over the past five years for the final comparison.

The Data: Total Number of Titles Each Season From Winter 2020

Determining Each Season’s Romance Anime Concentration

The table below consists of information taken from MyAnimeList.net, and, as mentioned previously, only illustrates the number of romance anime titles that aired on television, not OVAs or film releases.

The table above offers a breakdown of the number of romance anime titles per season from Winter 2020, and what it shows us is particularly interesting. The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on animation production (not to mention every facet of life) shows, with the figures from 2020 being much lower than in subsequent years. 2020 also offered the lowest concentration of romance anime within the investigation’s parameters. The concentration of romance anime per year increased slightly between 2020 and 2022, but saw a dramatic increase from 2023 that can also be chalked up to an increase in the total number of new anime titles released in 2023 and beyond.

What Does This Mean?

And the Winner Is…

In trying to see which season sees the highest concentration of romance anime per season overall, which, by the way, is not the Winter, but Spring, often closely followed by the Summer. There was only one year in the period under investigation that actually saw a significant concentration of romance anime, which was last year (2024), but it was slightly edged out of the top spot by the Spring. If anything, the Spring season is the time to expect a relatively huge haul of romance anime titles. Since we have a fair number of anime titles announced for Spring and Summer 2025, we could run a preliminary calculation of the numbers and see if Spring could end up the season with the highest concentration of romance anime by the year’s end.

• Spring 2025 – 40 total titles scheduled* | 8 expected romance anime = 20% romance anime
• Summer 2025 – 16 scheduled* | 2 expected romance anime = 12.5%

*subject to change because we don’t have the full schedules yet, but even as it stands, Spring 2025 already has a high concentration of romance anime. What could improve this investigation is if the figures were normalized first so that the main aspect taken into account isn’t the average percentage of romance titles, because that figure is affected heavily by the overall number of anime. Seasons with more titles, like the Fall, which generally has the highest number of new titles, have a higher likelihood of having more romance anime titles, thus skewing the data. What this offers us, however, is a chance to determine if the observation that some seasons get more of a certain kind of show than others carries any weight–which it apparently does.

What Reason Could There Be For the Spring’s Romantic Saturation?

“The Springtime of One’s Youth”

There are so many aspects that go into the eventual scheduling and airing of a television programme, and animation production itself that could delay a title’s premiere, but let’s assume that every anime title comes out exactly on schedule, then the Spring anime winning out on concentration of romance anime is something that can (at least more often than not) be a direct consequence of a belief that the Spring is the best season to air such a show. If that is the case, then what reason could there be that Spring is the best possible time for any production committee to drop their new romance anime? Well, it could be related to the sentiment behind the adage “adolescence is the springtime of one’s youth”, which is a metaphor that describes the boundless energy, potential and the budding of romantic connection for the first time in a very delicate but supposedly exciting time in one’s life.

The vast majority of romance anime feature characters who are still teenagers in high school, or young adults, and this period in their youth is one that older characters often fondly look back on as they observe the youngsters living their lives and finding their way. The “springtime” often refers to the blossoming of romance, or one’s very first love, not to mention the fact that the season of spring has always carried positive connotations because it’s the period of warmth after the cold winter, but more so because the spring also marks the beginning of the school year, which is always significant for the teenage protagonists who are often the subject of romance anime.