Liar Game became the highest-rated television drama of the season.
The breakout phenomenon of the new year. Kantoku Sora had opened the door to an entirely new genre in Japanese television.
A drama created in just one week by an anime Kantoku had somehow become the highest-rated live-action production of the year so far.
Half genius, half reckless creative instinct, Liar Game had become the hottest drama of the winter cour. At this point, some people were even beginning to say that Sora might have been a television genius mistakenly trapped in the anime industry all along.
Seiun TV, Aobane TV, Shirakawa TV, and HaiOn TV - the four major networks - were now facing an unprecedented crisis. The Southern Alliance, a latecomer that had only recently stepped onto the national stage, was advancing with terrifying momentum. Once the winter cour ended, it might very well begin seizing the territory the four giants had always treated as their own.
It was the counterattack of the newcomer.
The four major networks had believed that by blocking the animation field, they could turn the Southern Alliance into an industry-wide joke. In reality, the ones who had become the joke were themselves.
If Steins;Gate and AD truly gained strength in their later episodes, just as Sora had claimed, then the four major networks might not even be able to maintain their suppression of the Southern Alliance in the anime market.
Compared to The Demon of Time, which held a 5.4% rating among the five networks that season, Liar Game's rating of over 5% still had a noticeable gap.
But the meaning behind Liar Game becoming the number-one television drama of the season far exceeded the rating itself.
It proved that the Southern Alliance had the ability to compete with the four major networks in the very field where they were strongest: live-action drama.
It also showed the entire Japanese television industry, along with the advertising and television marketing sectors, the real potential of this regional network that had once been viewed with skepticism.
The image the four major networks had built over so many years was beginning to crack. And that crack was what mattered most.
In early February, the Southern Alliance held a grand celebration. As the central figure of the event and the network's seventh-largest shareholder, Sora naturally became the focus of attention. Details of the gathering were pushed out through various media channels, as though the network wanted the whole country to understand that this victory was no accident.
In exchange for roughly 4% of the network's shares, the Southern Alliance had not only gained a creator with enormous influence in the anime field, but also someone capable of making its crucial drama division shine. Since the network's founding, this was the first time one of its dramas had taken first place in seasonal ratings.
Before this, many people in the industry had said that Sora was the lucky one.
Now, the tone of the Japanese media had completely changed. The new consensus was that the Southern Alliance had been the one to make an absurdly profitable deal.
No one had imagined that the secret weapon used by Japan's newly risen national broadcaster to break through the joint blockade of the four major networks would be an eighteen-year-old boy.
Several days passed. On Friday, the fifth episode of Steins;Gate aired.
More than a month after its premiere, the anime finally entered its true main plot.
The purpose of SERN, the antagonist organization that had been repeatedly mentioned in previous episodes, was finally revealed.
Through an old computer called the "IBN 5100," left ten years earlier at a Buddhist temple by someone Rintaro did not know, he, his closest friend Daru - a genius hacker - and the prodigy scientist Kurisu Makise used the machine's unique code decoder to break into the servers of a scientific organization called SERN, located across the ocean.
Inside the secret files on the organization's website, they discovered that SERN had been secretly attempting to create a time machine for decades.
They simply had not succeeded.
But once that information was connected to the messages left ten years earlier by "John," an internet figure who called himself a time traveler and claimed that twenty years in the future SERN would master time travel, use it to control the world, and become its absolute dictator, the central line of the story finally revealed itself.
On one side stood Rintaro, the protagonist with a severe case of chuunibyou, a science enthusiast whose actual research ability was barely above amateur level, and the founder of the "Future Gadget Laboratory."
On the other side stood SERN, the organization destined to take control of the entire world twenty years later.
The battle between them had begun in the present.
The time machine was real.
John was truly a person from the future.
The Phone Microwave was real as well.
But one thing remained difficult to understand.
Why had the world line shifted in the very first episode simply because Rintaro sent a message saying that Kurisu had been stabbed?
Why had they moved from a world line where Kurisu had died to one where she was still alive?
That message Rintaro had accidentally sent to Daru two weeks in the past after unknowingly fulfilling the conditions for the Phone Microwave's time travel - what kind of importance did it actually hold?
Could a single message really be that decisive?
At the end of the fifth episode, Rintaro finally had his first genuinely impressive moment.
"We possess the Phone Microwave, an undeniable time machine. We'll leave SERN behind and completely change the ruling structure of this world! Hahahaha!"
His tone was still soaked in theatrical delusion, yet beneath that childish grandeur was a seriousness that stirred the hearts of the fans who had followed Steins;Gate this far.
Although the main plot only became clear in the fifth episode, a new realization began to spread among viewers.
This story was actually quite interesting.
Even so, loyal fans were still just loyal fans. The next day, Steins;Gate's ratings fell to 4.76%. The online score, however, moved in the opposite direction. Because of the almost divine plotting of Liar Game, many newer anime viewers began to place a little more trust in Sora.
They started to believe that the slow opening of Steins;Gate might truly have been careful foreshadowing rather than empty stalling. As a result, some earlier ratings were revised, and the anime's online score climbed back up to 8.8.
The fact that Steins;Gate could still maintain ratings at this level was largely thanks to the tremendous exposure and traffic that Sora had brought to the work.
If some other anime Kantoku had been producing Steins;Gate, its ratings might have been hovering around only 3%.
In short, no one in the Japanese television industry had yet realized what was truly impressive about Steins;Gate.
By contrast, the fifth episode of AD, which aired on Saturday, saw a considerable rise in ratings.
Fuko's arc had entered its middle-to-late stage.
In order to bless her older sister's wedding, Fuko spent every day carving wooden starfish - her favorite thing - and giving them to students at school. With each gift, she made a promise with the person who accepted it: on the day of her sister's wedding, they would come to celebrate the ceremony.
After the protagonist Takasaki and the heroine Nagisa Furukawa became friends with her, the two discovered that Fuko was only a ghost. Her real body might have been that of a girl in a vegetative state, lying somewhere in a hospital bed.
Youhei, the protagonist's best friend, went to the hospital out of curiosity to see her. Afterward, he completely forgot that Fuko had ever existed. Even when she stood directly in front of him, he could no longer see her.
Fuko, of course, knew that she was only a ghost who had somehow gained a physical form through some mysterious phenomenon. Her wish was simple: she wanted the students at school to attend her sister's wedding. Even if her sister could not see her, she could still receive the blessings of the classmates who had made a promise with Fuko.
But as the wedding day drew closer, the students who had once received Fuko's wooden starfish and promised to attend the ceremony began, little by little, to forget her.
And along with their memories, they also lost the ability to see her.
This kind of romance woven with fantasy had always had a strong market in Japan. On top of that, within the first season of AD, Fuko's arc was considered one of the strongest in quality.
After five weeks of broadcast, once the plot and worldview had finally opened up to the audience, AD's ratings did not fall. Instead, they rose. The fifth episode closed at 5.32%.
On the same night, the fifth episode of The Demon of Time reached 5.48%.
Compared to the previous week, the gap between the two works was shrinking.
In the end, the only thing that could really be said was that Sora was not shining quite as dazzlingly in the anime field this season as he had during the broadcast of Re:Zero.
But objectively speaking, AD's performance was still extremely impressive.
Then Sunday arrived, and the most important broadcast of all took place: the fifth episode of Liar Game aired smoothly.
The main foreshadowing of the Minority Decision game had already been revealed.
The biggest point of interest in the fifth episode was explaining why the woman in white had chosen to cooperate with Shinichi, and at what point the two of them had formed their alliance.
In the end, the truth was exactly what the audience had guessed.
She cooperated with Shinichi because he offered more.
Not only did Shinichi give the woman in white most of the 2.2-billion-yen prize, he also took on the risk of advancing to the third round of Liar Game as the winner. Most importantly, the guaranteed-victory method devised by Mushroom Head's three-person team had been designed from the beginning to deceive the woman in white. By cooperating with Shinichi, she could strike back at them as well.
Between revenge and greater profit, her betrayal in the fourth episode became perfectly logical.
Then the fifth episode opened a new arc of Liar Game. The heroine, Nao, as a member of the second round's losing group, entered the loser revival game known as the "Layoff Game."
The next day, Sunday, the fifth episode of Liar Game closed with a rating of 5.29%.
The series remained firmly in first place among television dramas that season.
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