>>281530959
What are you on about? You keep spouting "it was already big before Covid" while showing me lifetime sales as if that proves your point. But the actual Oricon weekly data and sales timeline prove you completely wrong. Vol 1 debuted with 13,000 copies sold in its first week. Not 130k. 13k. That's not a hit, it's low-tier. Even by Vol 10, which dropped in 2018, it still only opened with around 130k which is basically mid-list territory. Picrel shows exactly what happened:
>Explosive growth starts at Vol 17-18
>Those volumes dropped in October 2019
>That was after E19 of the anime aired in August 2019, which went viral
>Covid hadn't even started yet, but the manga was already ending by early 2020
It wasn't a hit that Covid boosted. It was a mid-tier manga that only blew up cause of the anime, and especially cause of that episode. Then Covid supercharged the momentum. Also, stop pretending "50 million copies sold" by 2019 means it was already massive. That figure was entire cumulative sales across 19 volumes after the anime blew up. A 50M total across 19 books still averages out to barely 2.6M per volume. By comparison, One Piece was moving that per volume consistently for years, and JJK hit 30M per year at its peak. It wasn't some unstoppable juggernaut from day 1.