Chainsmoker Cat and Goodbye, Lara Are the Season's Late Bloomers
Anime Data Insight Lab is an analytics arm of Bushiroad, the Tokyo entertainment company behind BanG Dream! and Cardfight!! Vanguard. Its report, published through the Japanese press-release platform PR TIMES, tracked all 73 TV anime of the Summer 2026 season (52 new shows, 21 sequels) across their first four weeks on air. It works from two metrics: a Trend Score built on Google search volume, read as general awareness, and a Fan Score built on X post volume, read as fan enthusiasm. Both are relative values indexed to the season's biggest premiere week.
The retention story belongs to Chainsmoker Cat, the Bibury Animation Studios adaptation of NyanNyanFactory's gag manga about a chain-smoking catgirl living in a squalid apartment. It opened respectably, third among new shows on Trend Score, then kept climbing. Search interest peaked in week 2 at roughly triple its premiere-week level and still sat at 250% in week 4, the best retention of all 73 shows. X posting spiked to 3.6 times its opening-week level. The lab notes that early social chatter was largely disbelief that the show made it onto broadcast TV at all, a premise that only sells itself once people see the actual episodes.
Goodbye, Lara took a different route up. Animation studio Kinema Citrus made the series as its 15th-anniversary original: a mermaid princess named Lara surfaces in present-day Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture. The show premiered a quiet eighth among new titles on Fan Score, then grew every week, reaching 214% of its opening level by week 4, the top fan retention of the season. Per the report, praise for its old-school hand-drawn look and the novelty of dropping a classic fairy tale into Shiga keep feeding reactions and fan art after each episode. Its trend retention is an average 67%, which the lab reads as general awareness that has not yet caught up to the fandom's volume of conversation.
Revival Hype Ignites in Week 1 and Cools Fast
Premiere week belonged to the legacy franchises. Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3 posted the season's top Trend Score, which the lab pegs at 2.2 times what Spring 2026 leader Re:Zero managed in its own premiere week, the biggest launch in the series' history. The new Ghost in the Shell TV series from animation studio Science SARU and the final chapter of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War completed a clear top three: all scored above 40 on the index while fourth place landed at 25 or below. Six of the week-1 top ten were series revivals or spinoffs.
On X, Bleach's final chapter drew the season's biggest Fan Score even though its July 25 late-night premiere left only one week inside the analysis window; its already-high pre-broadcast buzz roughly doubled that week. The new BanG Dream! series and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha EXCEEDS Gun Blaze Vengeance also ranked far higher on Fan Score than on Trend Score, a pattern the lab attributes to series with deep fan communities showing their heat in posts rather than searches.
Four weeks in, the revival premiums had mostly evaporated. Ghost in the Shell held 44% of its trend level and just 29% of its fan level; Nanoha came in at 43% and 30%, both well short of the new-show averages of 57.6% (trend) and 77.0% (fan). The report's explanation: Ghost in the Shell's fan posting jumped roughly 14-fold from its pre-broadcast weekly average into premiere week, years of pent-up anticipation released at once, so the following weeks were always going to look small by comparison. Both shows still ranked in the overall top ten on absolute week-4 Fan Score. The outlier is Mushoku Tensei Season 3 itself, whose week-4 Fan Score came in above its premiere week, the fifth-best fan retention of any show. It paired the season's biggest opening with actual staying power.
A Witch's Life in Mongol Faces the Opposite Test
Among genuinely new IP, the premiere-week winner on both metrics was A Witch's Life in Mongol, Science SARU's second series of the season and an adaptation of Tomato Soup's historical manga about a girl who uses her wits to take revenge on the Mongol Empire, which destroyed her homeland. It scored 24.9 on trend and 41.8 on fan in week 1, second among all new shows behind only Ghost in the Shell, which the report counts as new because its story starts fresh. On the week-1 trend chart it led the manga-based newcomers, ahead of Chainsmoker Cat and Oni no Hanayome.
Its retention runs below the new-show average, but the lab argues that reflects the unusually large opening rather than a collapse: its absolute week-4 levels remain near the top of the new-show field. Whether pre-broadcast anticipation converts into week-to-week conversation is, in the report's framing, the show's question for the back half of the season.
Looking Ahead
The lab says it will revisit these trajectories in a retrospective analysis after the season's finales, watching how far Chainsmoker Cat and Goodbye, Lara can keep scaling and whether A Witch's Life in Mongol sustains its momentum. For international viewers, Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3 is streaming on Crunchyroll in most regions, and Goodbye, Lara is also on Crunchyroll. Chainsmoker Cat's source manga is published in English by Seven Seas. The report's author, lab head Yusuke Onuki, also released a book on the anime business in Japan on August 12, 2026, supervised by Bushiroad president Takaaki Kidani.