After all, once Steins;Gate passed its twelfth episode, the story abandoned its seemingly restrained beginning and took off all at once. The plot erupted, its ideas unfolded in layer after layer, and the foreshadowing planted from the very start began to reveal itself one piece at a time.
The first twelve episodes nearly made viewers drowsy. But the thirteen that followed were the kind of episodes people had to watch two or three times, because without doing so, it was almost impossible to grasp every detail of that mind-bending narrative.
And when, in the end, every loose thread returned to the center of the story and closed into a perfect circle, the satisfaction rising from the depths of the soul was almost impossible to describe.
Only then did people understand that the first twelve episodes of Steins;Gate had not been boring.
They had been groundwork.
Everything existed to support the narrative explosion of the second half.
It was an absurdly imaginative work, a story built with top-tier narrative craftsmanship.
But a masterpiece was still a masterpiece, and that did not change another fact.
The pacing of that anime was far too slow.
The executives at the station were also afraid that Sora's fans would not have enough patience to hold on until the twist in episode twelve, abandoning the series before it could truly reveal itself.
But Sora had been prepared for that from the very beginning.
Before the premiere, he had already spoken with Southern Alliance TV. He promised that Steins;Gate would definitely become popular. However, he also made it clear that it was a slow-burn work. The station would have to ignore the slower rhythm of its early episodes and endure whatever public pressure might arise within the Japanese animation market, while continuing to grant the series the highest level of promotional support.
Sora himself was a shareholder of the station. On top of that, Re:Zero had already helped Southern Alliance TV gain national recognition, and in January, he had even helped the station produce a live-action drama.
His request was not excessive at all.
In fact, Southern Alliance TV went even further than Sora had asked. The station set aside several less competitive time slots in its schedule to rebroadcast the episodes of Steins;Gate that had already aired.
If anime fans could not endure the excess buildup, the lack of early explosive moments, and ended up dropping the show halfway through, that was fine. Once the series' reputation reversed and everyone began speaking of it differently, those viewers would have enough ways to catch up on the episodes they had missed.
That was the level of importance Sora now held within Southern Alliance TV.
And so, at that moment, every heavy stone pressing against his chest finally fell away.
After mid-December, Japan's major television stations began releasing trailers one after another for the anime, dramas, and variety programs scheduled for the winter season.
Seiun TV's main anime push, The Demon of Time, released its promotional video overnight. Within just a few hours, the trailer surpassed eight million views on NatsuYume and entered the platform's trending searches that very same day.
After that, Crimson Scales from Aobane TV, as well as the two flagship anime titles from Shirakawa TV and HaiOn TV, also released their promotional videos, all with similar results.
News related to the winter dramas from the four major stations also appeared frequently among NatsuYume's hottest searches.
Only after that first wave of promotion had passed did Southern Alliance TV finally make its move.
On December 21st, with only ten days remaining before the January winter season began, the station simultaneously released the trailers for its two main anime titles, Steins;Gate and AD, as well as its heavily promoted drama, Liar Game.
The Steins;Gate trailer, centered on the protagonist Okabe Rintarō and his theatrical chuunibyou madness, mixed scientific elements, eccentric lines, and a strange atmosphere. To be honest, most Japanese anime fans simply did not understand what they were watching.
Aside from thinking that the visual style of Steins;Gate looked explosive and that the heroine, Makise Kurisu, was drawn with stunning beauty, many people could not figure out exactly what made the work attractive.
The trailer for AD, on the other hand, was different.
Beautiful and adorable female characters, now refined by an even more polished art direction. Gorgeous, almost flawless backgrounds. School scenes filled with the breath of youth.
Romance anime could certainly become popular in Japan, but it was extremely rare for one to reach a 6% audience rating like Re:Zero had. Even so, generally speaking, works of this genre rarely performed badly.
That was especially true among Sora's fans.
Those who became his fans had usually been moved by the shared hardships and love stories between Natsuki Subaru, Rem, Emilia, Beatrice, and the other characters of Re:Zero.
Or they had been touched by the tragic love stories in 5 Centimeters per Second and Voices of a Distant Star.
In the end, they were anime fans who liked romantic elements.
Because of that, they naturally felt a stronger familiarity with a romance anime like AD.
Overall, expectations for AD were higher than those for Steins;Gate.
But among the trailers for the three works, what surprised Sora's fans the most was not either of the two anime.
It was the trailer for the drama Liar Game.
The heroine, Kanzaki Nao, happened to receive a package containing ten million yen in cash, and from that instant onward, she was dragged into a dangerous game.
The money inside the package became her debt the moment she accepted it.
She could choose to return the full amount untouched to the organizers and continue living her ordinary life.
Or she could turn that money into the first great capital of her existence, use it as a starting point, and participate in a game created by the organizers - a game about "money and life."
If she won, she would take ten million yen from another participant, pushing that person into the abyss of debt while she herself climbed to the top.
It was ten million yen.
In that society, someone who lent you ten thousand yen without collateral could be a close friend. Someone who lent you one hundred thousand was a bank. Someone who lent you one million might be your own family.
But someone who placed ten million yen in your hands?
How many talented people spent their entire lives without ever managing to gather their first real capital, disappearing into the crowd before they even had a chance? And yet this drama began precisely with that kind of premise.
Would the heroine be able to resist temptation and truly return the money untouched to the organizers?
Or would she gamble everything and enter the game?
It was only a trailer less than a minute long, but it already left countless Japanese television viewers restless, anxious, and itching with curiosity.
The Japanese television drama industry, in this context, had never presented a work with exactly this kind of premise before. The audience's enthusiasm exceeded even Sora's expectations.
"I had already suspected that Liar Game might have a market here, but I didn't think a single trailer could generate this much heat."
Sora looked at the fourth spot on NatsuYume's trending search ranking, where "Liar Game trailer" was listed, and his expression turned thoughtful.
In his previous life, back in the Japan he knew, works like Death Note and Kaiji had already occupied that territory of psychological tension and extreme games. In another market, due to restrictions on broadcast content, a drama of this type would have struggled to air on mainstream channels, ending up confined to pirate websites.
Because of that, although Liar Game had fame and a certain level of popularity, it had never truly reached the level of a nationwide phenomenon.
But in this Japan…
"Could this be the advantage of an unexplored genre? When a type of story has never appeared before, it naturally draws the audience in."
Sora thought about it for a moment, then let out a soft laugh.
Even so, he did not care too much. After all, Liar Game was not a production directly under his responsibility. He had only provided the script and some casting suggestions.
His requirement for the drama after its premiere was simple: it only needed to generate a decent amount of emotional points.
Of course, if the ratings were truly good and the reception was positive, helping to share some of the pressure Steins;Gate would face early on because of its slow-burn narrative, that would be even better.
Sora might not care about that kind of noise, but casual anime viewers were easily influenced. A negative tide was enough to make them abandon a series.
After that night, the premiere slots for the three winter works connected to Sora were also finalized.
Since Sora had shown such confidence in Steins;Gate, Southern Alliance TV followed its usual rule and reserved the prime Friday night slot at eight o'clock for the work.
As for Saturday, in order to avoid a direct clash with Seiun TV's anime in the same time slot - which would only cause both sides to suffer in the fight for viewers - AD was scheduled for nine o'clock on Saturday night.
Sunday at nine-thirty, meanwhile, was reserved for the premiere of Liar Game.
After the trailers for Sora's three works were released, the atmosphere within Japan's television industry became rather subtle.
The drama everyone had initially mocked him for making had obtained a surprisingly strong promotional response.
Meanwhile, the anime titles that many people had been optimistic about received only lukewarm reactions.
The situation was, indeed, a little strange.
But the executives at the four major stations did not think too deeply about it.
It was only a trailer. What could that prove?
Perhaps Southern Alliance TV had simply pulled some kind of promotional trick. The trailer might look attractive, but when the actual drama aired, it could turn out to be a complete mess.
In the end, whether it was a horse or a mule, everyone would know once the work premiered.
December slipped quietly away.
Temperatures fell across all of Japan.
Winter arrived.
And so did January.
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