This Week in Anime

Steel Ball to the Wall (This Fall)

Chris
Lucas, you know I'm always here to cover a horse race.

Speaking of scheduling, this is a fortuitous one for when we decided to cover this topic, since if we'd shot for the earlier column recording slot, we wouldn't even have had that official confirmation to consider in the discussion. Real glad I had Lynzee send that bird to Sylvia, letting her know about the schedule.

Regardless, this is worth getting into, both as someone who also enjoyed Steel Ball Run's early premiere and as someone who has his own strong opinions on how Netflix handled the rollout of these steel balls.

You can understand JoJo fans being trepidatious about releases, given how hard the show's been burned in the past by Netflix.

So the good news is that they've confirmed that Steel Ball Run will be released in weekly installments, as chopped-up Jesus intended. The bad news is that said release won't actually be starting until sometime in the fall of this year. The frustrating news is that Netflix was super weird and evasive about making that information clear until after much fan piling on. Roll the clip:

It's a neat point that comes from both of us working in marketing—we understand that when you promote something for an upcoming release, it generally behooves you to give the audience an idea of when that release will be.

I can appreciate the approach from an overhead perspective: releasing the "First Stage" as a cool tease that absolutely wows audiences early, while being clear in that announcement that "Hey, animation takes time, the rest of the show isn't ready yet, but it will be later, which is when we already planned for." It might have worked out well had they promoted it that way the whole time!

Instead, the sheer confusion is what tested a lot of audience members' patience. Promoting the "1st Stage" premiering this season without making clear if that was just a first episode or a full seasonal run. Then waiting weeks to announce the "2nd Stage" without giving any indication of a release date or how many episodes that would be. It felt like needless cageyness, and really makes you wonder what they were aiming for if this was always the "original plan," as said in that statement. What, were they gonna try to shadow drop it like the Sega Saturn?

For what it's worth, I'm down to take Netflix at face value when they say this was always the plan. It's not like premiering an OVA to drum up hype a while before the series proper airs is an unusual maneuver. Fate/strange Fake pulled something similar with Whispers of Dawn like a year and change before the TV series kicked off.

And besides, I'm not opposed to waiting a little while for the series to come out, so long as it's in the name of the finished product being as good as possible. I'm the guy who's been carrying the torch for a decade now, waiting for more Yona of the Dawn!

Then again, sometimes something takes forever even with updates given wherever they can, and what's delivered still isn't up to snuff after all. No, I'm not still bitter about the way Metroid Prime 4 turned out, why would you ask that?

Right, and I think if Steel Ball Run's promos had done like those other prologues and made clear "This is just a single, extra-long episode we're releasing. The rest will be out later in the fall," folks would've been a bit more receptive.

It's not like this was a situation akin to the Dirty Pair Kickstarter, where fans had already paid exorbitant amounts of money and (regardless of how progress was...progressing) felt like they were being strung along with no end in sight. Steel Ball Run allegedly had a plan, but they just weren't telling anybody until they were pressed.

Yeah, this is a good time to bring up that while I've sympathized with the frustration other viewers felt at Netflix's radio silence on the status of Steel Ball Run, that absolutely does not translate to thinking that staff on the series deserve to be harassed and threatened over it. Which, of course, happened because we cannot have nice things.

This is where the old "backlash to the backlash" phenomenon comes in, as I fully believe that a lot of these "fans" were just being petulant about not getting more of their JoJo ASAP, rather than understanding these things operate on schedules and just asking for clarification on what SBR's would be. I get why some onlookers felt the fandom was blowing things out of proportion. I've got no love lost for Netflix's downright weird handling of this whole thing, but that doesn't extend to wishing actual attacks on them.

A selection of toxic fans that make the whole group look bad. It can happen to any series, and particularly seems to occur with Netflix shows. Just ask anyone who followed Voltron: Legendary Defender. Oofa loofa.

At the same time, while I'm a seasonal anime watcher who's always happy to be excited with what I've got (we're getting a new show from the Symphogear team this season! I should require nothing else in life!) I also understand champing at the bit for something in particular, especially if uncertainty is keeping it out of my hands.

Like, I think about when we knew Crunchyroll had Gridman Universe for a year and a half, but they just wouldn't stream it for some reason, with no explanations or scheduling given. It was baffling!

I'm annoyed at myself here, because I can't even claim that people weren't demanding more; they were just asking for clarification on the release schedule—many of them were, quantifiably, demanding more!

That, as you note, sadly, typical fan entitlement makes you wonder if folks would have been able to behave if Netflix had actually been forthcoming with the release plan for Steel Ball Run. Could that have been a factor in why they opted to obscure things at first? Probably not, and if so, it backfired spectacularly, but it all makes it interesting to think about!

Yeah, I personally am not complaining about breaks in between cours. Some previous JoJo parts have had to take breaks, and it wasn't those that dented Stone Ocean, it was the, uh, compromised quality of the production, plus Netflix's then-standard binge release model obliterating any opportunity for recurring audience reactions.

That's another reason the left-hanging feeling after SBR's 1st Stage stings so much. For one glorious Thursday, it felt like the communal spirit of JoJo Fridays had returned, only for everyone to wonder what was up when another episode didn't pop up the next week. Fandom passion is truly a double-edged sword.

Having to wait for all those series-proper signifiers is a large part of what makes this 1st Stage situation feel like a tease, and too unintentional of one given how... bizarrely they strung us along before confirming how the rest of the damn thing was going to release. It sucks because I can absolutely see the vision of an alternate universe where the marketing wasn't botched, and this first taste was properly presented as a sneak peek to whet the appetite of an audience that could be ready for it in the fall. But I guess it wouldn't be JoJo on Netflix if the release went perfectly smoothly.

That said, now that it has started and we do know the plan, I'm absolutely willing to settle in and wait for the next leg of this race to get underway. Maybe instead of harassing staff members, the fandom can while away the time by continuing to place bets on what Steel Ball Run's western music ending theme will be. I feel like America's A Horse With No Name is a little too on-the-nose, but I'm backing it regardless.

You know I'm neck-and-neck with you on that one! Just, Netflix, please, keep the lines of communication open moving forward!

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