The Ten Count anime countdown that began on October 28, 2022, had ended… 4 hours before it counted down to the actual announcement!
The epilogue is (suspenseful music playing in the background):
The much-anticipated Ten Count anime adaptation of the eponymous yaoi manga series by Rihito Takarai has finally been announced! The Ten Count anime film will premiere in 2023 but we’ll have to wait for the exact premiere date to be revealed at a later date.
Meanwhile, a brand-new key visual is here and the main staff and cast have been revealed.
Take a look at the first official Ten Count key visual:
The first official key visual for the Ten Count anime adaptation was revealed on October 28, 2022. Pic credit: Rihito Takarai/Shinshokan
East Fish Studio and SynergySP will be producing the anime. Sou Toyama (Street Fighter II) is directing the anime film, while Tomomi Shimazaki is in charge of character design.
The two main characters Tadaomi Shirotani and Riku Kurose will be voiced by Shinnosuke Tachibana and Tomoaki Maeno, respectively.
When the countdown appeared, the Ten Count anime Twitter explicitly stated that a “Ten Count animation adaptation (is) coming,” leaving no doubt about what the manga fans were counting down to.
Nevertheless, many fans were looking forward to the official announcement, impatience not being the least significant factor.
The “finally” used above refers to the fact that a Ten Count anime adaptation was originally announced over four years ago, more precisely on March 26, 2018, when the final volume of the Ten Count manga was published.
At the time, it was announced that a Ten Count anime would premiere in 2020, whereupon a teaser trailer and a key visual were revealed. Both have vanished into thin air since, as the Ten Count production committee announced on December 28, 2020, that the anime would be postponed to an unspecified date due to them reconsidering its format.
Note that Ten Count is a yaoi title (BL with explicit content). The anime adaptation will likely be transformed into a shounen-ai (BL without explicit content) release — the pattern commonly administered to all commercial yaoi manga adaptations.
This has been demonstrated on numerous occasions. In fact, many shounen-ai anime adaptations of yaoi manga, light novels, and video games have attained a cult following. Notable examples include Junjou Romantica, Dakaichi: I’m Being Harassed By the Sexiest Man of the Year, Togainu no Chi, DRAMAtical Murder, Sekaiichi Hatsukoi (The World’s Greatest First Love: The Case of Ritsu Onodera), Ai no Kusabi, and others.
With the success of Given and Sasaki and Miyano, the shounen-ai genre seems to be attracting an additional following, so the timing of the Ten Count anime announcement comes as no surprise.
About the Ten Count manga series
Ten Count is a manga series by Rihito Takarai that was serialized in Shinshokan’s monthly BL manga magazine Dear+ from 2013 to 2017. The individual chapters have been collected into six tankōbon volumes.
Viz Media has licensed Ten Count for an English-language release and is publishing the chapters under its SuBLime boys-love imprint. The title is also available digitally.
The series was quite successful for a yaoi title; it ranked first in the Nationwide Bookstore Employees’ Recommended BL Comics twice: once in 2014 and again in 2015.
In addition to the upcoming anime adaptation, Ten Count also inspired two video games in the past:
- Ten Count: Another Days (Ameba) — launched on March 22, 2018, for Ameba users and ended services on November 29, 2019
- Ten Count for App React (iOS/Android) — launched on January 7, 2019, and ended services on June 30, 2020
The plot of the series focuses on Tadaomi Shirotani, who suffers from OCD that manifests as severe mysophobia. Upon meeting psychotherapist Riku Kurose, Tadaomi begins a therapy that will see him listing ten actions he is unable to perform. Riku claims that Tadaomi will be cured once he manages to complete the items on the list (exposure therapy).
However, Kurose eventually calls off their counseling sessions due to finding himself falling for his patient. The two manage to get over that hurdle but many others are awaiting them in the future.
It will be interesting to see how the Ten Count anime will deal with sensitive parts of the story (which are many and rather explicit). Hopefully, the complex plot won’t be butchered due to censorship and will settle for a Sekaiichi Hatsukoi approach, which nicely depicts the two main characters’ relationship using subtle gestures to hint at what is missing.