The new week brought two more episodes, and Jotaro's journey with his group pushed forward with the same chaotic energy that had been locking viewers in from the very beginning. After getting through The Moon, Strength, Ebony Devil, and Yellow Temperance, the general feeling among the audience was almost like they had taken a blow straight to the head.
A lot of people ended up slumped in front of their computers, staring blankly at the screen as if their souls had momentarily left their bodies. The reason was simple: the performance by Yellow Temperance's user while pretending to be Kakyoin had been absurdly hypnotic. All it took was closing your eyes for the image to resurface immediately, vivid and inescapable - Kakyoin wrapping his tongue around a cherry and savoring it with that infamous "reoreoreoreo," in a display so bizarre it crossed over into unforgettable.
The worst part was that, with that handsome face on screen, the whole thing felt even more surreal. It was not just funny.
It was disturbingly memorable.
And to the audience's collective despair, the madness was nowhere near over.
After defeating the enemy and boarding the train to leave New Singapore, the tension had finally begun to ease. For a brief moment, the atmosphere inside the carriage almost felt normal. Then, all of a sudden, Kakyoin pointed at the last cherry left on Jotaro's plate.
"JOJO, are you not going to eat that cherry? I know it's a little greedy of me, but it's my favorite fruit. Can I have it?"
"Sure. I don't mind."
Jotaro answered without a second thought, never imagining the social catastrophe he had just approved.
"Thank you~"
And in the very next second, to the absolute shock of the viewers, Kakyoin did not swallow the cherry. He did not bite into it. He did not do anything even remotely normal with it.
He simply started playing with it on top of his tongue.
"Reoreoreo... reoreo..."
Across from him, the corner of Jotaro's eye twitched so violently it looked like a warning sign before total collapse. For one brief instant, it was obvious that he had nearly lost his composure and punched his companion in the face just to restore some dignity to the scene.
And honestly, the audience was not reacting much differently.
So that was it.
It was not some grotesque imitation.
The man himself actually liked doing that.
At the end of the episode, just when viewers were still trying to recover, the camera shifted to the train car next door. There, the little girl played by the young actress was shown curled up around her luggage, asleep against the seat, breathing softly, her expression peaceful as though none of the surrounding chaos had reached her. Between faint breaths, she murmured in her sleep, almost too softly to hear:
"Jo... Jo..."
And then it ended.
That was the week's update.
If Bleach's popularity had exploded through two major peaks - when Sosuke Aizen first revealed his true face, and later when his betrayal became final and undeniable - then Stardust Crusaders was growing in a completely different way. Its popularity did not come from a single detonation. It built gradually, episode after episode, like a flame that seemed small until you suddenly realized it had already spread everywhere around you.
After all, that series was a meme factory.
Every single week, without fail, it produced two or three new moments absurd enough to dominate forums, comment sections, clips, and entire conversations. The week before, it had been "ORA ORA ORA," paired with that chaotic energy of "I beat up teachers, dine and dash, but I'm still a good student." This time, it was the ridiculous rule that Stand users would get visible veins in their noses the second they smelled cigarette smoke, and, of course, the infamous "reoreoreoreo," which had already embedded itself in the collective brain with no intention of ever leaving.
Every episode came with some new brand of insanity.
And once the week's two episodes were over, the movement online was visibly bigger than before. The comments and wave after wave of messages exploded almost instantly, as if everyone needed to share the shock with someone else just to stay sane.
"Man, Kakyoin, can you at least show some respect for that handsome face of yours? Don't use a face like that to do something so cursed!"
"This series is impossible to drop. I'm already dying to see what kind of madness Alex is going to pull next week."
"Joseph still hasn't done anything truly impressive up to this point. Did Alex forget about him?"
"I get that Jotaro is the lead of this part, but did Joseph really have to be nerfed this badly?"
"That little girl is definitely the main heroine, right? It's basically confirmed."
"I honestly thought Emily was going to be the heroine - the school nurse who stole Jotaro's first kiss. What a waste."
"Seriously though... with Alex's current build, and that girl being so tiny... this doesn't end well."
"With that much muscle, I doubt even Emily plus another goddess-level beauty would be enough."
"For the love of God, can you people watch one episode without turning everything into that?"
In the end, the two biggest talking points remained the same: Kakyoin's "reoreoreoreo" and the identity of the future female lead.
To be honest, back when Alex had followed Stardust Crusaders in his previous life, he himself had suspected more than once that the little girl might actually be Jolyne's future mother. That impression became even more deceptive now. Because of censorship approval and production restrictions, he had to cast an actress who was already legally an adult to play a character who, in the original material, looked to be around twelve years old. The result was even more misleading. The image still carried enough innocence to preserve the ambiguity, but without triggering the same formal problems as before.
Within the industry, plenty of people were already treating it as a certainty: the girl was about to blow up.
The logic seemed too straightforward to ignore. Emily, Violet Grant, and the other names who had passed through Alex's productions were enough proof to feed the growing superstition. Little by little, people in the business - and even the public - had turned it into an almost sacred rule.
If an actor landed an important role in one of Alex's shows, they were guaranteed to rise.
But from Alex's point of view, everyone was overthinking it.
The role had gone to that actress mainly because of practical circumstances. Two other options were still underage. Georgia, on the other hand, looked far too mature to sell the concept of the character. In the end, this had simply been the most fitting choice among a list of imperfect possibilities. And there was one more thing Alex had not ignored: in the past, he had ended up taking a major opportunity from her on another project. Giving her this role now also worked as a quiet form of compensation.
Nothing more than that.
Or at least, that was what he told himself.
Inside the president's office at the production company, Alex let out a long breath and leaned back in his chair.
After ten years of living in that parallel world, his acting had already reached a level few people would dare question. Maybe it was not some transcendent perfection, but it had absolutely been honed into instinct. Even so, it had been a long time since he had felt something this clear, this direct.
Pressure.
Real pressure.
Scattered across the desk were drafts, crossed-out pages, side notes, and character sketches. Alex was working on the script for Bleach: Thousand-Year Decisive War.
In the original version, that arc should have been called something closer to the Battle of Karakura Town. But Alex had already decided that he would not limit the final battlefield to a single city. If he wanted to give Sosuke Aizen and Bleach a truly grand ending, he had to think bigger.
Much bigger.
The problem was that the more he adjusted the script, the more obvious the imbalance became.
Even after using those badges inspired by what Yhwach had used in the blood war to steal the Bankai of five captains, the power gap between the two sides was still ridiculous. On Aizen's side, there were basically only three Espada who were truly relevant in battle, plus Kaname Tosen and Gin Ichimaru. That already felt too thin. And it got even worse when you remembered that Gin was, in practice, a walking time bomb.
On the other side?
It was almost unfair.
Yamamoto and Ichigo Kurosaki were monsters in their own right. Then there were Shunsui Kyoraku and Jushiro Ukitake, whose Bankai had not been taken. In Hueco Mundo, Retsu Unohana and Kenpachi Zaraki were two war machines ready to turn any battlefield into a slaughterhouse. On top of that, Kisuke Urahara, Yoruichi, and Isshin Kurosaki all stood at captain level. The Visoreds entered the field as elite reinforcements, along with a respectable number of lieutenant-class fighters.
And that was without even counting the Zero Squad.
Alex spun his pen between his fingers, staring at the script as if it were a personal enemy.
That was exactly the issue gnawing at him. He still had not decided whether or not he would include the Zero Squad. Because in his mind, after watching the blood war in his previous life, that whole group had the practical value of a badly written promise. Their introduction sold them as something nearly divine. Five people with strength equal to the entire Gotei 13. Mythic weight. Overwhelming prestige. An entrance that felt like the announcement of the end.
And then, once the real fighting started, they went down far too quickly.
So quickly it became ridiculous.
In the end, the impression they left behind was that of an oversized Chad: a mountain of hype, a mountain of posturing, a mountain of impact on arrival... and almost nothing to show for it when things truly got serious. Other than handing the protagonist a power-up, the Zero Squad felt almost completely useless.
Alex pressed two fingers to his temple.
"I still need to strengthen Aizen's side."
At that moment, he felt like he finally understood a little better a choice that had always seemed strange to him before. Maybe that was exactly why, in the original final arc, Yamamoto had never truly gone all out with his most devastating form. It was not a lack of internal logic.
It was stage adjustment.
A raw, almost shameless way of preserving enough room for Ichigo to shine at the peak.
While he was still mentally reorganizing the forces on both sides of the battlefield, the office door opened and Georgia walked in with a few documents in hand. But before she could say anything, her eyes landed on the desk overflowing with scattered pages and sketches.
Her eyes lit up instantly.
"Boss... wait... wow! Is that the script for Bleach's final season? Can I see it?"
Alex raised a hand and lightly tapped her smooth forehead, not hard, more to stop her excitement from running wild than to actually scold her.
"Quit messing around. Tell me what you came here to say."
"Okay..."
She immediately pouted, looking so unfairly wronged that it bordered on offensive. And there was something almost dangerous about that contrast. A woman with the presence of a diva, the body of a mature beauty, and then an expression like that. It was exactly the kind of combination that shattered a man's defenses before he noticed it happening.
But in the very next second, her excitement came rushing back in full force.
"You got nominated for the Golden Globes! They invited you to attend the ceremony in the States!"
Her enthusiasm was so genuine it almost sounded as though the nomination belonged to someone in her own family.
Alex raised an eyebrow, caught off guard.
"Huh? Didn't this year's award go to Cristiano Ronaldo?"
Georgia stared at him for a moment, then let out a sigh heavy with resignation.
"...I'm talking about the Golden Globes from the American press. The film awards. It has absolutely nothing to do with football."
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Additionally, more chapters exclusive content are available on Patreon: https://patreon.com/ImmortalEmperor?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink
- CHRONICLES OF THE ICE SOVEREIGN
-PLAYING ANIME LEGENDS
-THE OTHER WORLD'S ANIMATOR
Join now and help shape the future of the story while enjoying special rewards!