Junko seems to have become by far and away the most popular of the characters, though. She even has 50% more images than Sakura, who's in second place.
Junko seems to have become by far and away the most popular of the characters, though. She even has 50% more images than Sakura, who's in second place.
Then again, you're judging her popularity by results on danbooru.
Then again, you're judging her popularity by results on danbooru.
OK, but it's hard to get the whole Internet. Pixiv has it at 379 for Junko versus 340 for Sakura (and 244 for Ai, who's in third), which is closer, but still a clear lead.
Yes, in art. Not in popularity. Sakura is still way more known than Junko. If you use danbooru and art websites as judges for the characters popularity, you get a Prof. K situation where characters seem less popular than they really are.
Tapper said:
The comments for each episode on Crunchyroll heavily favor Tae.
Well, that's still a questionable method of defining "popularity", much less judging it. (And in the case of comments, do you even have numbers, or just an impression?) Tae is "popular" (to comment on) because she's the biggest comic relief character, even above Tatsumi, who also gets comments (especially "Nice Bird" because it's such a non-sequitor), but that doesn't necessarily mean they're the commentor's favorite (except maybe in that moment), or that those who don't comment hold the same views.
I don't know who prof. K is, but is simply being more widely recognized (if you can even accurately measure that) the same as popularity?
Again, there's not all that great a way to get a measure of "true" popularity from the Internet as a whole, but looking at preponderance of fanart can give you one look at it. Touhou or KanColle characters will typically have a pretty direct correlation between amount of fanworks and popularity in general, as less-represented characters are often straight-up forgotten in favor of the girls that appear all the time like Reimu or Kaga or Hibiki. (Although those series are a special case in that their fandoms expand outside the original works, and therefore how well-known a character is actually is more directly correlated to fanworks to start with.)