2015 was a focused year for Crimson necessitated by schedule limitations. While we had less content this year, I felt the oneshots and series we did this year were high quality.

First, I want to go over the oneshots that were popular with readers. Here’s a reminder from the previous post:

Top 10 Oneshot Releases (Updated 12/31/2015):

1. Yurayura Yureru
2. Trick or Kiss
3. Akai Ito
4. Million Dollar Man
5. The Boy has a Secret — Cold Blood
6. Chou no Ito
7. Joifo
8. Ibitsu Renaikan
9. One-Day Idol
10. Dare mo Shiranai Heya

The biggest difference between the most read and the least read oneshots is that popular oneshots all contained some sort of romance. All of the popular oneshots had happy endings, though “Trick or Kiss” is debatable depending on whether you think the main relationship is healthy.  Three of the popular oneshots have obsessive male main characters. Three of the oneshots involve tragedy. After that, there aren’t many similarities. The art styles and quality range, although “Yurayura Yureru”, which has by far the “prettiest” art, is on top.

Onto the Crimson Flower group member Favorites:

Zenny:

Favorite series: “Nemurenu Ou ni Sasagu Yogatari”

Favorite Oneshots: “Yurayura, Yureru”, “Santa Claus wa Blue”, and “Hana to Shakutaku

Jade:

Favorite Series: “Hana ni Kamitsuku”

Favorite Oneshots:

“Ibitsu Renaikan”  — Creepy but not as scary as Kaeremasen

“Yurayura Yureru” — Lovely art and cute story

“One Day Idol” — I thought it was cute and lighthearted, and I liked that the mangaka made the two girls full-figured

Silver Lunar:

Favorite Series: “Nemurenu Ou ni Sasagu Yogatari”

Favorite Oneshots:

1- “Chou no Ito”: it was great loved reading and working on it.

2- “One Day Idol”

3- “Million Dollar Man” — I was laughing during the whole thing, so it was memorable in a way.

Ichigo Stars:

Favorite Series: “Koori no Joou”

Favorite Oneshots: “Yurayura Yureru”

Me (Kuroneko003):

Favorite Series: “Kanojo ni Narui Hi” — Because Mamiya is the ideal woman and I love the continuous probing of gender stereotypes.

Favorite Oneshots:

“Dare mo Shiranai Heya”– I like the tragedy of a man who’s lost everything and an angry doll who’s similarly lost everything struggling through grief.

“Yurayura Yureru” — teh pretteh and delicious sexual tension

“Hana to Shakutaku” — It pulled me into its world and I liked that male MC could be any age at any one time and female MC loved him all the same.

What does this mean moving forward to 2016?

As some of you may understand, I use oneshots as experiments to see what people like and don’t like. I don’t change what we release based on what’s popular and unpopular. On the contrary, I feel like I’ve been challenged to find a popular non-romantic oneshot. At the same time,  mangaka and certain themes go on my watch list for more oneshots, meaning that my search scope is expanded.

So that’s that. Please share your 2015 Crimson Flower Favorites in the Comments section.

The next post will be about 2016 plans for CF. Also look out for posts on Lovely Manga about my favorite licensed and unlicensed manga from 2015, as well a general shoujo manga 2015 retrospective and predictions for 2016.