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When Too Many Horses Spoils the Broth

When Too Many Horses Spoils the Broth

Stephanie Liu
September 26, 2025

Welcome to “Siliconera Speaks Up,” our newsletter for the site! This’ll be a summary of the past month’s anime or gaming news, a little reminder of things to come, and our insight on what games you should pick up next. Without further ado, let’s get into it!

Speak Up Sesh

Hello again to yet another “Siliconera Speaks Up” newsletter! The weather is getting colder and the decor is getting spookier as we chug ever closer to the end of 2025. Man, uh, what a year it’s been, huh?

This year marks the announcement of the anime adaptation of Steel Ball Run, or Part 7 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Hooray! I’ve been looking forward to a Part 7 anime for a long time now. It, along with Parts 4 and 5, are some of my favorites from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and so I’m super excited to see the gallopin’ adventures of Johnny and Gyro in the Steel Ball Run race.

Funny how the announcement came out in the same year that Umamusume: Pretty Derby launched its global servers. If only we were in the Year of the Horse right now! Things would have been perfect. 2026, when Steel Ball Run will start airing, will be the Year of the Horse, though, so prepare for some horsing around about that on the Internet.

Well, hopefully we’ll see people horsing around about it. Compared to the weekly discussions that spawned on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr every “JoJo Friday” during the first five seasons of the show, Stone Ocean didn’t generate nearly as much buzz. We can talk about the quality of the adaptation and the story all we want, but it’s impossible to deny that the release schedule had a part to play in that lack of discussion.

For reference, Stone Ocean dropped in batches. Fans got to watch, like, twelve episodes at once before waiting a bit for Netflix to drop the next portion of the show. While this was great for fans who didn’t have to wait every week anymore, this was absolutely killer on the longevity of Internet discussion. A lot of enjoyment of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure came from the weekly memes and jokes that would spawn from each episode. Some weak, one-off jokes gained plenty of notes and survived only because the joke was specific to the new episode we all just watched. Anticipation would build up as we excitedly waited for fan-favorite scenes like the Mafia Dance in Vento Aureo.

This weekly hype applies to shows other than JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, as well as to shows without a source material to reference when curious about future events. Theories were crafted about what would happen in Puella Magi Madoka Magica as we tuned in every week. In my slice-of-life anime recommendation article, I straight up called Mayoiga stupid. Well, I still had a good time watching Mayoiga, because online forums would roast it and I’d laugh at the jokes every week. It kept me going back to that dumpster fire of an anime because I wanted to stay in the loop. And yes, people were making theories about the show, too.

Those aren’t experiences you can get from a show that forces everyone to marathon it. A show dropping with all the episodes available to watch is great for the average binger and more offline anime fan. But I don’t know. There’s something about participating in the weekly discussions, jokes, and theory-crafting that adds another layer of community and enjoyment to anime that you just can’t get from the kind of schedule that Stone Ocean had. So, I’m really hoping that Netflix will learn from its mistakes and just release Steel Ball Run weekly.

Upcoming Releases

Ghost of Yotei - October 2 (PS5)
Digimon Story: Time Strangers - October 3 (PS5, Xbox Series X, PC)
Pokemon Legends: Z-A - October 16 (Switch, Switch 2)
Ninja Gaiden 4 - October 20 (PS5, Xbox Series X, PC)
Once Upon a Katamari - PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch, PC)

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