We all know the deal withNetflix. While TV used to be exclusively a medium that we’d tune in to once a week, talking about the events of each episode with friends and anticipating the release of the next, Netflix has found success by trading almost exclusively in the"binge"model — that is, releasing all or at least much of a show at one time, giving fans the opportunity to gulp a whole show down as fast as possible. There are definitely benefits to this; in the age of streaming, weekly releases feel more artificial than ever, as we all know most shows are fully produced before we see the first episode, and there’s no more sting of a painful cliffhanger or being disappointed by a bad week of TV. Just watch the next episode, it’s right there.
There are definitely downsides, though, and that’s why I’m here to ask you to do one thing: do not binge all ofJoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Oceanat once when the first 12 episodes drop on Netflix December 1st.
RELATED:‘JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean’ Trailer Reveals Netflix Release Date
First of all, despite Netflix’s binge model becoming almost ubiquitous in TV over the past decade or so (the creators ofThe Boysfelt theneed to justifyits second season not releasing all at once!), TV anime has been a weekly experience for as long as TV anime has even been a thing. Most anime aren’t even fully completed when they premiere, for better and for worse, as anyone who watched anime-making animeSHIROBAKOor thetrainwreck of a productionthat wasWonder Egg Prioritycan attest to. As such, from weekly old fansubs to currentCrunchyrollstreaming, anime fans have never really had a binge culture when it comes to new releases. It’s actually way more weird and frustrating when Netflix announces a license for a brand new show and we have to wait for it to be complete for it to grace our screens, knowing full well it is coming out weekly in Japan. In fact, Netflix themselves seem to have gotten a clue about this recently, asthis season’sBlue PeriodandKomi Can’t Communicatehave seen Netflix shift to weekly releases for new anime; a couple of weeks later than their Japanese airings, but a solid move in the right direction.
Despite that change in strategy, Netflix has still decided to drop the first 12 episodes ofStone Oceanat the same time. It’s sooner than we’re used to — at least it’s coming out everywhere at the same time, so we aren’t waiting months for shows that we know already exist elsewhere — but it still ignores the reality of how anime fans are used to enjoying their cartoons. More important, though, it goes against the very nature ofJoJo’s Bizarre Adventure— the titular adventure itself.
Ask any JoJo fan what the franchise is about, and you’ll get different answers — the love of music andfashion, the high-octane battles, the downright strange and creative powers authorHirohiko Arakicomes up with for his many colorful characters — but the heart of the series is the journey you take with it. The series is comprised of what it calls “Parts” — there are eight distinct storylines so far, each with a different protagonist, each having its own overarching plot, all connected in some way by their heritage as Joestars — but what they all share is a joy in taking the long way around their narratives.
In Part 3,Stardust Crusaders, the gang finds out early on that they must find and do battle with the vampiric DIO (Takehito Koyasu), the most iconic villain of the whole series. The part of the show that actually involves fighting DIO is minuscule, though, and aside from our heroes technically moving closer to his residence in Egypt each time, hardly anything that goes on in any of its 48 episodes has much to do with that hook. Jotaro (Daisuke Ono) and friends take detours, get lost, crash their planes — anything that can go wrong will go wrong for the sake of putting the protagonists in another sticky situation against yet another of DIO’s seemingly endless army of baddies. This formula is applied to every Part, with enough change in scenery, tone, and purpose to keep them feeling distinct.
On paper, that doesn’t sound all that special — it’s the basic setup of any “monster of the week” show, after all — except, like everything related to this series,JoJo’s Bizarre Adventuretakes the whole concept to the next level. Araki isn’t content with writing throwaway villains just to buy time; each one feels meticulously crafted to be an entirely unique experience, with powers that are more often puzzles for the heroes to solve than problems they can just punch away at the end of the episode. In one episode the gang is taking refuge behind a rock and trying to figure out why the heck the sun won’t set; in another they are having a normal dinner at a new restaurant in town when their food is suddenly a little too tasty; and maybe next week everyone is working against time as they age at an accelerated rate on a train. No two enemies are the same, and it’s almost as fun trying to figure out how the heroes will be able to use their own talents and powers in new, unexpected ways to get out of jams as it is to watch them actually do it.
Not to mention that, especially as the series has gone on and become more comfortable with the unique identity it has carved out for itself, the villains themselves often manage to be memorable, fleshed-out characters in their own right — villains that, again, are usually only in one to three episodes at most, yet manage to make such huge impressions that you’d be forgiven for mistaking them as main characters themselves. All those mountains of episodes haven’t been for nothing asJoJo’s Bizarre Adventurehas perfected its craft to the point that tiny enemy-of-the-week arcs often feel like complete stories by themselves, with characters you’ll come to love to match.
And it’s exactly that pitch-perfect approach to serialized storytelling that is done a huge disservice by giving in to the traditional Netflix urge to watch every episode they release as soon as they come out.JoJo’s Bizarre Adventureis not a show defined by the big plot twists or dramatic highs and lows that are most accentuated by binge-watching. No,JoJois a franchise that often asks you to forget about the big picture for now; to appreciate the small, intricate stories that it so carefully pieces together.JoJoknows that you’re here to eventually see the big bad get knocked down, but in the meantime it has a whole fleet of other cool and interesting villains for you to appreciate for the couple episodes they’ll be around. Much like how the entire franchise is made up of separate yet connected “Parts,” it isn’t so much one big story as it is dozens of tiny stories with a thread connecting them, keeping what should be an unsustainable formula into a seemingly never-ending string of hits.
WhenJoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Oceanshows up on Netflix on August 26, 2025, keep theJoJospirit alive by taking it slow to fully take in all of the tiny, quirky things that make this series so special. You’ll be thankful you did.
