The two new episodes of Stardust Crusaders that week did not just deliver more action - they produced an entire new crop of catchphrases, memes, and scenes that already felt bigger than the show itself. Polnareff's almost cursed relationship with bathrooms, justice overflowing from every confrontation, the mocking nicknames for Jotaro, the joke about the "iron Lovers" facing off against the "blacksmith Star Platinum"... all of it spread at an absurd speed. And all anyone had to do was open the pages for the two earlier parts, Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency, in the platform's catalog to see the chain reaction clearly. Those shows, which had once been moving along at a lukewarm pace, suddenly saw their numbers explode, with view counts multiplying several times over in just a few weeks.
It did not take much thought to understand why.
Stardust Crusaders had dragged everything upward with it.
The stronger the JoJo fever became, the more viewers went back to watch from the beginning, whether to understand the universe better or simply to relive the lines that were now being recycled everywhere. And with that, the series' expressions began leaking out of the internet and into real life. Especially in places most vulnerable to collective contagion - schools, colleges, dormitories, hallways crowded with people too young to feel embarrassed - some of those lines had already stopped being anime quotes and started becoming social reflexes.
In one classroom, for example, a class representative was glaring at a boy with the last scraps of patience left in his body.
"How many times have you failed to turn in your homework now? Huh, how many?"
Instead of shrinking back, the boy flashed a smug grin, pointed at his own teeth, and answered as though he had just delivered the greatest line in human history.
"Do you remember how many slices of bread you've eaten in your life?"
The reaction around him was immediate. The boys nearly lost their minds cheering. To anyone outside that circle, it would have sounded like absolute nonsense. But in that particular context, it carried the sacred weight of a perfect reference. And the truth was simple: campuses, classrooms, and packs of young people had always been fertile ground for collective outbreaks of shameless theatricality. One teenager acting dramatic alone was just a teenager. A whole bunch of them feeding off one another turned into an ecosystem.
Of course, there were moments when trying to act like a protagonist came at a price.
During class, a teacher noticed one student was mentally nowhere to be found, drifting through some private universe instead of paying attention. The reprimand came sharp and dry, the kind that cut through the whole room before it had even finished being spoken.
"You there! Stand up and get out of the classroom - "
The boy cut him off, eyes gleaming with the suicidal confidence of someone who believed he was about to live his defining moment.
"Your next line is going to be: 'Stand up and go wait outside as punishment'!"
The teacher completed it on instinct.
"Stand up and go wait outside as punishment..."
Then froze.
For one full second, the shock on his face was so genuine that the entire room erupted in a chorus of shrieks and laughter. The student barely had time to savor his triumph before a piece of chalk shot straight into his forehead. Even so, hearing the class explode around him, he broke into a broad, shameless grin.
It had been worth it.
Elsewhere, however, someone was discovering that going viral did not always come with happiness.
The veteran actor who had played [Lovers] had finally managed to return to the trending lists after a very long time. Years had passed since his last real surge of popularity, and in theory that should have been a relief. But it was not. Not when the role responsible for putting him back in the spotlight was one of the most irritating, repulsive, and deeply punchable characters of the entire season.
The situation became even worse a few days later when he walked into the company and was greeted by the new receptionist, a girl so young she probably barely knew the height of his career.
She looked up at his face, her eyes widening in instant recognition, and blurted out without a trace of malice:
"Oh... so you're the guy Jotaro beat up with all those ORAs, right?"
He nearly burst into tears on the spot.
Fine. Maybe she did not know that old role of his that had once made half the country swoon. But could she not at least remember the iconic character that had turned him into a legend for an entire generation? The cruelty of time was exactly that: the internet no longer revolved around the memories of people who had grown up with those dramas. The center of gravity now belonged to someone else - someone younger, faster, less sentimental. And to that new crowd, he was not a television icon. He was the man Jotaro had beaten senseless.
As if the humiliation still was not enough, the phrase "iron Lovers, blacksmith Star Platinum" also exploded into the trends. And along with it came the most inevitable part of the internet: speculation, conspiracy, and people with far too much time on their hands. They started wondering whether that veteran actor had offended Alex at some point, because frankly, casting him in a role that loathsome felt too personal to be a coincidence.
There were all kinds of comments. Some said it was disrespectful to make such a senior, once-revered actor play someone so contemptible. Others shot back that acting was exactly that kind of job, and no one had the privilege of spending an entire career playing likable people. Someone then pointed out, with acidic humor, that Alex seemed to have managed exactly that since debuting. Another replied that it did not matter, and that if the veteran had accepted the role, then playing it properly was the bare minimum expected of a professional. The argument escalated further when the most poisonous theory of all surfaced.
Maybe, some said, he had been chosen because he had been getting a little too close to a certain actress.
Maybe Alex had put the man in that role as a warning.
Maybe the whole thing was revenge disguised as casting.
And the moment that suggestion appeared, a new topic exploded across social media the next day: Alex was allegedly unhappy with the veteran's pursuit of the actress and had found a graceful way to retaliate.
When Alex saw it, he went speechless for a few seconds.
The accusation was idiotic.
And yet it was not completely, completely absurd either.
He really did not feel anything that serious for her... right?
Well, maybe a little.
Just a little.
The problem was that, before he had even sorted out his own thoughts, he received a message from Rebeca Verne. And that, by itself, was enough to puzzle him. If the universe were trying to mess with him, it would have made more sense for Emily or some old ex with actual history to reach out. But Rebeca appeared out of nowhere and without any detour, driven by a kind of irritation he only fully understood after a few exchanged lines.
She was not just annoyed by the rumor.
She was annoyed by who the rumor was about.
Years ago, when that actress had first debuted, her team had tried to market her as "the new Rebeca Verne," a more accessible imitation of the same aura. Rebeca had never swallowed that. To her, it had always sounded like a badly packaged knockoff. And now, suddenly, Alex, instead of flirting with the original, was supposedly getting jealous over a counterfeit?
Her pride could not stomach that.
Alex listened to her vent, answered with whatever would calm her down, and after a few minutes managed to lower her guard. He said as naturally as possible that he had no such interest, that the internet was a factory for absurdity, and that half the things circulating there only existed because someone had decided to fill empty space with nonsense. Slowly, Rebeca calmed down. And then, as if the conversation had followed an entirely normal route, she changed the subject and asked for help.
Her mother had selected a few scripts.
She wanted Alex to take a look.
The way she asked already revealed enough insecurity to say more than the words themselves did.
A few seconds later, the files arrived.
The first title that jumped out at him was The Third Way of Love.
Alex fell silent for a moment.
He remembered that project. He remembered the kind of operation that kind of film represented. He also remembered how the wrong choices could corrode someone's image for years before the victim even realized it. That was why he responded without an ounce of delicacy:
"I think your mother should book an appointment with a psychiatrist."
On the other end, Rebeca was immediately offended.
"Why are you insulting my mother?"
Alex rubbed his temple, with no intention whatsoever of softening the truth.
"Because that's how I talk. And because someone has to say it. Does your mother seriously believe you have enough weight in the overseas market to support this kind of gamble? I'll be blunt: without the domestic fanbase that still insists on defending everything you do, with the string of awful decisions she's made for you these past few years, your career should already have collapsed."
His voice did not rise.
It did not need to.
That only made each word feel heavier.
"If you still want to remain standing in this industry, drop that worthless pride of being a 'film actress' and stop treating everything your mother says like a compass. Actually, you'd be better off doing the exact opposite."
Then he hung up.
When the call ended, Alex lifted his eyes toward the freshly completed script on his desk.
Bleach: Thousand-Year Final War.
He had fused two major arcs from the original work into a single narrative block and, after a long consideration, decided to keep that title. The source material had too many flaws to ignore, but it also had enough strength to be rebuilt into something powerful. If handled correctly, it could still become something big.
Beside him, the young assistant watched everything with bright, admiring eyes.
"Boss... you looked so cool just now."
Alex smiled faintly and, without saying anything at first, reached out and lightly pinched her earlobe with an almost lazy, almost intimate gesture. The warm skin, the softness, the way she instantly lost focus... it amused him more than it should have.
"Boss..."
Her gaze turned hazy at once, as though her breathing had stumbled inside her own body.
Alex let go of her ear and returned to business with the easy cruelty of someone who knew exactly what kind of effect he had.
"Tell the Bleach cast to clear their schedules."
She blinked, still slightly dazed.
"Ah... right..."
But the faint disappointment slipped out at the end of her answer. The mood had already gone that far that, for a second, she had truly thought it would end differently.
Chapter 128 - You're Next, Momo
At Rebeca Verne's house, the silence after the call was not merely awkward.
It was almost physical.
Her mother was sitting right beside her, motionless, while the phone remained on the coffee table with speaker mode still on. Rebeca had not even had time to tell Alex she was not alone. The moment she sent over the scripts, her mother had asked her to put him on speaker so they could both hear his opinion of the projects she had chosen for her daughter. She genuinely wanted to know what Alex thought. And, deep down, she truly believed those scripts had potential.
What she had not expected was to be called mentally unstable so directly.
When Alex made that remark about seeing a psychiatrist, she had nearly interrupted to warn him that she was listening. But she stopped herself just in time. She knew enough about his temper to realize that, if he knew she was there, he might simply insult her even more bluntly. Alex had never seemed especially moved by hierarchy, age, or anyone else's sensitivity. She had seen him lose patience with veterans on set before without giving them the slightest cushion, and that was exactly why, in that moment, she chose to swallow the humiliation in silence.
Rebeca was the first to try to say something.
"Mom, I..."
"Don't listen to him!" her mother cut in, her face darkened by an irritation so visible it almost twisted her expression. "We're taking this movie."
She did not yell.
She did not need to.
The rigidity in her voice said more than enough.
So that was it, she thought. Alex had said her eye for projects was terrible? Fine. She would prove him wrong. She would make her daughter star in a hit and shove the result in his face.
Except this time, Rebeca did not back down.
"I don't want to keep acting in bad productions anymore."
The reply came out louder than she herself intended, as though something long sealed inside her had finally found a crack to escape through. Her mother looked visibly stunned. It was not just what had been said. It was how she had said it - without fear, without hesitation, without that old habit of giving in at the end.
"How can you talk to me like that? You don't trust your mother's judgment?"
But the moment she said it, she met her daughter's eyes.
And holding them for long became impossible.
Because, deep down, she no longer trusted her own judgment either.
A few seconds later, some of the firmness drained out of her posture.
"So what are you planning to do? Sit at home and do nothing? Do you know what this industry is like now? If you stay still, people forget you."
Rebeca picked up her phone again, as though that movement itself was already an answer.
"I'll ask him to recommend something."
Her mother stared at her with an increasingly strange expression, harder and harder to hide. There was something in that attitude that deeply unsettled her, because it reminded her with humiliating clarity of the way so many men in the past had orbited her daughter like obedient satellites, desperate for even the smallest scrap of attention. The difference now was that the positions seemed reversed - and that left her deeply uncomfortable.
Almost ridiculous, she thought.
The man had just humiliated her over speakerphone, and her daughter still intended to run after his opinion again?
Five seconds later, the blow landed.
"He blocked me..."
Rebeca's voice broke at the end.
Her mother went silent.
Silent in an absolute way.
It was almost unbelievable. Her daughter wanted to approach him again, but the other side would not even leave the door open for that much. For a moment, even her anger weakened in the face of the absurdity.
Meanwhile, Alex did not let a single word leak about the quiet summoning of the Bleach cast. Stardust Crusaders was still airing, and he was not stupid enough to steal attention from himself before the right moment. First he would call in the domestic actors, shoot the simpler scenes, and push forward as much as he could. At the same time, he also needed to continue reducing his muscle mass.
After more than a month of adjustment, the results were already beginning to show.
The body that had once looked like a machine built for smashing through walls was returning to a leaner, cleaner line - still strong, but less monstrous. And that simple change was enough to produce a predictable effect: the younger girls who had previously wrinkled their noses at all that muscle started drifting close again, clinging to him as if their earlier rejection had never happened at all.
Alex observed it with quiet contempt and amusement.
Women... no, he corrected himself inwardly with a trace of irony, girls.
When Stardust Crusaders drew near its ending, he would unleash something truly big.
A few days later, on location in Hengdian, Melissa received the new script and froze the instant she read the part that concerned her.
"I... die?"
The question came out hollow, as if her mind were still trying to catch up with what her eyes had just understood.
Alex nodded with complete calm.
"Yes. At this point, Momo no longer has any narrative value."
The coldness with which he said it made more than one person nearby swallow hard.
In Alex's mind, the decision had made sense for a long time. In the original work, he had always found it absurd how often that character survived situations that bordered on ridiculous. She had been badly wounded during one crucial phase of the story, then later been cut down again, and yet still went on existing as if the script itself were afraid to let her go. For someone determined to make Thousand-Year Final War sharper, crueler, and more honest to the idea of real war, someone had to bleed for real.
And the first one onto the altar would be Momo.
Melissa sat there for several seconds without reacting, holding the script as if it had suddenly doubled in weight. It was not exactly sadness - not yet. It was more the shock of realizing that, in this project, Alex truly had no intention of protecting anyone simply because the audience liked them. Around her, the other actors exchanged discreet looks, all gripped by the same silent anxiety.
What if my character is next?
Mark, who was watching all of that with half his attention on the script and the other half on the smoke of recent gossip, found a moment to move closer to Alex and lower his voice.
"So... do you actually like her?"
Alex turned his head with such a dry expression it almost felt like lightning about to strike.
"You've been reading too much gossip."
Mark scratched his nose awkwardly.
Deep down, he still suspected that the actress in question kept rejecting the veteran's advances because of Alex. But looking around and seeing Emily, another famous ex, and several other women tied to Alex's past moving through the set, he wisely swallowed the theory before it left his mouth. One wrong sentence was all it would take to turn the whole place into a minefield.
In another corner of the set, one of the most famous women from Alex's romantic past approached the young assistant with the effortless softness of a perfect older-sister figure who looked far too flawless to be innocent.
"Hi."
The assistant answered softly, trying not to look nervous.
She was tall, eye-catching, beautiful in a way that was still too young to fully conceal any emotion. And that was exactly why she became even more flustered under that approach. Everyone knew about that woman's history with Alex. The whole country knew. So why come speak to her like that? Kindness? Curiosity? A warning?
For a moment, the girl felt her heart sink.
Had she really been that transparent?
Had the other woman already noticed the kind of feelings she was trying so hard to hide for her boss?
Meanwhile, Stardust Crusaders continued advancing with the steady confidence of a series that no longer needed to prove anything - only keep delivering. If Bleach had experienced a sudden eruption of popularity when Sosuke Aizen's betrayal launched it to another level, Stardust was walking a different path. More consistent. More methodical. More solid. It was like watching the tide rise a single inch at a time until, suddenly, you looked down and realized it was already above your waist.
In the following episodes, Stand users like [Sun], [Death], [Judgement], and [High Priestess] appeared one after another, maintaining the same level of quality while feeding the audience new catchphrases and new images to chew on endlessly. Some internal jokes began repeating across comments, videos, and subtitles. Kakyoin Porridge. "Yes! I am!" And before long, another phrase established itself with enough force to escape the fandom bubble entirely.
Vehicle Killer.
It was one of those cases where the joke did not come from a single scene, but from the delayed realization of a pattern so ridiculous that, once noticed, it became impossible to unsee. Someone lined up the whole sequence and threw it into the comments. If you counted Joseph's two plane crashes from the previous arc, then added the third aerial disaster against [Tower of Gray], the ship destroyed in [Strength], the off-road vehicle ruined by [Wheel of Fortune], the helicopter that crashed under the influence of [Death 13], and finally the submarine abandoned during the most recent battle against [High Priestess], the conclusion was unavoidable.
Nearly everything Joseph got into ended up as scrap.
And if they also included the camel from the [Sun] episode, then the statistic became even more humiliating.
The best part came when Polnareff himself, exhausted by so much disaster on wheels, rotors, and hulls, muttered something that sounded exactly like the audience's collective voice:
"I'm starting to think it doesn't matter what vehicle we use. In the end, everything crashes, explodes, or gets destroyed."
After that, there was no going back.
Viewers started noticing the same detail in droves, and the joke exploded. "So that was the old man's real Stand?" "I'm never getting on a flight again without checking whether Joseph is on the passenger list." "The easiest way to beat Dio is simple - put him in the same car as Joseph."
The joke spread because it carried that perfect logic of a great meme: it was ridiculous, it was precise, and once spoken aloud, it made far too much sense. And so, step by step, episode by episode, Stardust Crusaders kept doing what very few works managed to do with such consistency.
Not merely entertain.
But invade the way people spoke.
Invade their routines.
Invade the way they laughed, argued, teased their friends, answered teachers, flooded comment sections, built theories, and turned fiction into habit.
This was no longer just a hit series.
It was becoming a living phenomenon.
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