Wolverine Publicity/Anime and Manga

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Examples of Wolverine Publicity in Anime and Manga include:

  • For Ah! My Goddess this is the norm. with the main character Keiichi rarely making the cover page.
  • Most of the promotional art for A Certain Magical Index features Mikoto in a rather notable way, as if she formed a Power Trio with main characters Touma and Index. In reality, she only makes bit appearances on various episodes, the only notable ones being an Arc about her (Which she shares with one of her clones and Accelerator, with the clone having similar screentime and more Character Development) and A Day in the Limelight Ship Tease episode later on the season. Komoe and Kaori have as much importance than her if not more (At least in the anime first season), but they get very few appearances in the official art and tend to share them with Mikoto, despite never meeting in the anime (Stiyl, being a guy in a Fundamentally Female Cast, was never in the running, even if he's more relevant than any girl). This goes even more so for her roommate Kuroko, who is in most of the aforementioned art, but only gets 2-3 minor appearances with Mikoto and a Barack Obama gag, yet outdoes in appearances everyone else on the series but Mikoto and actual heroine Index.
    • Mikoto and Kuroko are also the focus of the artwork of the A Certain Scientific Railgun anime, their spin-off series', but at least there's it's justified: They're The Hero and The Lancer. Uiharu and Saten complete the Four-Girl Ensemble, but the artwork always makes them seem less important for some reason.
    • The second anime season took the same route as the first, with Mikoto (Kuroko too, but less so this time) being shoved in on nearly every official artwork, but she's only been a secondary character on Kuroko's arc, helped a little on the final arc and got another Ship Tease date, but she was never the main focus at any time. All her other appearances are Ship Tease cameos (Generally made up for the anime at that) with no relevance to the current arc. Oddly enough, official art is more likely to come out when she is around, so they have an excuse to stick her in pics every time, even if the arc has like 5-6 important girls. Meanwhile, more important or relevant characters get one or two pictures tops and barely any cameos (With one exception marked below). Remember, this is after Mikoto got her already mentioned Spin-Off with her on the lead and lots of artwork focused on her. At this point she may as well be the Index equivalent of Wolverine.
      • That one exception would be Itsuwa. She's had a grand total of three appearances, one in a mob with no lines, and two short ones where she gives the main guy a hot towel. Truly important things, which is why she appears the most in official art after Mikoto, Kuroko and Index. Nevermind the two arcs with Itsuwa had WAY more important girls (Mostly Agnese and Orsola), Itsuwa gets all the art. Subverted in that she becomes more important on later novels, but that's hardly a justification to have her appear so much now, when she hasn't done a single thing, while the girls who actually do stuff get ignored. Funnily, there's a picture of her with Mikoto. They've never met, and on most of Itsuwa's screentime she was on a different continent than Mikoto.
        • The preview for the second season also featured three of the four members of God's Right Seat, Vento, Terra and Aqua, which seems to imply that they had originally intended to go as far as volume 16, but apparently didn't get there. As a result, only Vento plays a role and Aqua puts on a brief appearance in the second-to-last episode, but otherwise...
    • Most openings and endings also emphasize Mikoto (Again, to Power Trio levels). The second season openings also highlights Accelerator (who has little screentime on the anime but is loved by the fans), as well as throwing in a Uiharu cameo, even though she's a very minor character on Index, but since she's a main on Railgun, there we go.
    • All in all, this is par per the course for J.C.Staff, which loves Pandering to the Base to Crippling Overspecialization and promotes the 1-2 most popular females while ignoring everyone else. Only that's usually the lead girl (Such as Shana or Louise), not a secondary character with little to no relevance on over half the arcs, making Mikoto's case stand out the most.
  • Nearly all of the promotional art for Ergo Proxy solely features supporting protagonist Re-l Mayer, indicating that she is the main character. And, to the marketing team's credit, the first few episodes certainly make it look this way. However, once the series kicks into high gear, it becomes obvious that the true protagonist is the comparatively unassuming Vincent Law.
  • When the Wild Swans movie was dubbed into Italian, the dubbers tried to cash in on the popularity of the Heidi anime by claiming that the princess was Heidi, even calling the movie, "Heidi Becomes a Princess."
  • This happens in the Gundam franchise, with none other than Char Aznable. The first opening credits sequence for Gundam ZZ features Char opposite the main character, and yet he never appears in the series.
    • Char's sister Sayla appears on the cover of the Laserdisc boxset for the second half of Zeta Gundam, but she only appears in one episode, with no speaking parts at that.
  • In the Lyrical Nanoha franchise, whenever official art comes out and it's not from the manga spinoffs Vivid or Force, there's a 95% chance it'll be from the third season Striker S, which came after a 10-year Time Skip that radically changed the appearance of Nanoha and Fate, the main girls, plus introduced a lot of new characters and got rid of several others. While this made sense back in 2007-2008, when Striker S had just aired and was the Cool New Thing, nowadays we've had a movie set on the first season and a manga of said movie, with a second movie announced covering A's, the second season (Both set before the big Time Skip), plus two Video Game adaptations set on A's (Though the second one has Vivid characters, but it's still mainly an A's game). Yet still all the art will depict Nanoha and Fate post-Time Skip (and often alongside their adopted daughter Vivio), or otherwise a character in their Striker S period, except a little bit to adveritse the movies, but that's the oddity and not the default.
    • Not to mention Nanoha and Fate still get a fair deal of art even on the pics of said spin-offs, where they aren't the main characters. Hell, they still have far more artwork than the rest of the metaseries' cast, which is pretty bad as it's formed by Loads and Loads of Characters.
    • This is mostly the magazine NyanType's fault though, as them running Force apparently justifies having 2-3 Nanoha pics every month, while the actually airing animes get one, tops.
  • Unusually, Nel's adult form from Bleach is featured heavily on manga covers and anime openings, despite only appearing in a few chapters and not really accomplishing anything important.
  • Fanwork example: Every Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai doujinshi features Sena in any shape or way. Every single one. While most do it because they're focused on her, it's rather jarring see a book about Yozora with her on the cover and all the plot being about her, yet the first three pages being Sena love just because. Or having her on the cover with Yozora yet not appear even once inside the thing. While she may be popular, this is a little annoying to non-fans of her, as other "Ensemble Darkhorse" characters, using the term loosely here, don't do this kind of stuff, it's just Sena.
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