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The courage to admit you didn't understand everything in an anime
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Nov 11, 2015 15:36
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Since I'm phone posting I couldn't do it but imagine I had Sharkey's pre-ghost avatar underneath that line with a / to show it was being said...
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Nov 11, 2015 15:38
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Srice posted:Since I'm phone posting I couldn't do it but imagine I had Sharkey's pre-ghost avatar underneath that line with a / to show it was being said... Okay I'm imagining it real hard right now... 
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Nov 11, 2015 15:51
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Lemon Curdistan posted:I agree. There wasn't any problems with the plot though: the pacing problems are mostly due to not getting enough character building moments. 
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Nov 11, 2015 15:52
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I liked G-Reco and willingly admit I was only sure what was going on maybe 70% of the time. Maybe.
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Nov 11, 2015 15:53
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Lemon Curdistan posted:I agree. I have never hear anyone say the second part. The closest is people (including myself) saying it didn't need a full 52 episode run which I stand by as true and also apply to every other Gundam series.
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Nov 11, 2015 15:56
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I'm really behind on Gundam. I enjoyed Build Fighters a lot but lost interest in Try and G-Reco after a few episodes. Haven't seen IBO yet. Maybe I'll wait for the series to end and watch it all in one go.ImpAtom posted:I have never hear anyone say the second part. The closest is people (including myself) saying it didn't need a full 52 episode run which I stand by as true and also apply to every other Gundam series. Yeah even a lot of the Gundam series I really like (Zeta, Turn A, etc.) really don't need a full 52 episodes and start to drag a bit.
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Nov 11, 2015 15:58
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ImpAtom posted:I have never hear anyone say the second part. The closest is people (including myself) saying it didn't need a full 52 episode run which I stand by as true and also apply to every other Gundam series. Then let me be the first and say that I think G-Reco would have benefited enormously from being a normal 50 odd episode Gundam series, with the proviso that I actually like filler in some cases and Turn-A is my favorite Gundam series, at least partially because it's so slowly (but in my opinion well) paced. I want filler with the characters just putzing around in Towosanga or the Venus Globe so that I can actually get a feel for what life is like in these places and see more than just the absolute bare minimum needed to convey the story. Both of those locations looked amazing, but I have no idea of anything about them beyond the most superficial details because the characters basically went there, talked to someone and hosed off as soon as they were done. Which to me is a problem, because when I see a place that cool looking I want to see it explored a little. I feel it would also have given the plot and characters room to breathe by having more episodes, so that relationships and interactions are more firmly cemented in the viewer's minds and it is easier to convey certain story or character elements. I've watched Turn-A 3 times completely and several episodes more than that and still notice new things about it when re-watching odd episodes that change certain aspects in my mind. A lot of those details I think people missed because they're small and easy to miss, leading to some conflicting interpretations of events in viewer's minds when done with it (was Dianna dying, who did Loran end up with, is Turn-A weak for losing to a Zaku, did it have nanomachines all along and so on), not because they're stupid or not paying attention and G-Reco has half the run time and more to convey making it even more of a problem. It's not the only problem I have with G-Reco, but it is the biggest one by a long way. tsob fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Nov 11, 2015 |
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Nov 11, 2015 16:38
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tsob posted:Then let me be the first and say that I think G-Reco would have benefited enormously from being a normal 50 odd episode Gundam series, with the proviso that I actually like filler in some cases and Turn-A is my favorite Gundam series, at least partially because it's so slowly (but in my opinion well) paced. I want filler with the characters just putzing around in Towosanga or the Venus Globe so that I can actually get a feel for what life is like in these places and see more than just the absolute bare minimum needed to convey the story. Both of those locations looked amazing, but I have no idea of anything about them beyond the most superficial details because the characters basically went there, talked to someone and hosed off as soon as they were done. Which to me is a problem, because when I see a place that cool looking I want to see it explored a little. There is literally not a single 50-episode Gundam series that doesn't have terrible pacing. Even if G-Reco got an extra 12 (which is already a huge increase over the current lineup) would be more than enough. It would be awful if they had to pad out the series to literally double its length. Almost every Gundam series is more or less able to convey its plot within the running time of 3-4 movies. The ones that don't are more because the movies are poorly produced rather than an inherent lack of running runtime. More episodes are nice to flesh things out or give smaller characters more development for certain but 50+ is absurdly excessive for the plots Gundam tends to tell. The only one I can think of that really used 50 episodes was AGE and... it was AGE and effectively 3 smaller series smushed together. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Nov 11, 2015 |
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Nov 11, 2015 16:42
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ImpAtom posted:There is literally not a single 50-episode Gundam series that doesn't have terrible pacing. Even if G-Reco got an extra 12 (which is already a huge increase over the current lineup) would be more than enough. It would be awful if they had to pad out the series to literally double its length. That's nice. I disagree. I think Turn-A could have actually used a handful more personally, much as I love it, just because I would have liked to see a bit more of Corin's story and more time to do a longer epilogue but don't actually want any of the existing content cut and that AGE would have benefitted from at least another 26 or so episodes, not less. It would also need a far, far better writer to make use of those episodes, but trying to cram 4 generations in to a 52 episode series was just asking for trouble and I like the idea of those 4 generations. Sure, there'd be filler. And I'm okay with that, because filler is the best place to do world-building in my opinion. It can be done in line with the main story, but having filler allows greater freedom to explore it and I'm okay with the trade off that all of the content might not be about the central story.
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Nov 11, 2015 16:47
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tsob posted:That's nice. I disagree. I think Turn-A could have actually used a handful more personally, much as I love it, just because I would have liked to see a bit more of Corin's story and more time to do a longer epilogue but don't actually want any of the existing content cut That would have utterly gutted Turn-A's already meandering pacing. That is good if all you want is more of the world but terrible for it as an actual show. Age absolutely didn't need more episodes. It had more than enough episodes it just used them poorly.
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Nov 11, 2015 16:50
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Honestly, anime tends to be pretty terrible at pacing in general unless it's like a 13 or 26 episode show. It's really, REALLY terrible if it's based off a shounen manga. The Japanese don't understand the very concept of pacing sometimes. I like Turn A a lot and its one of my favorites, but it isn't perfect. The middle portion of the show just kinda drags on and on. They find a spaceship which is all well and good, but it takes them like 15 episodes to actually get into space after that. Once they do actually get into space, the show gets really good again.
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Nov 11, 2015 16:55
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ImpAtom posted:I have never hear anyone say the second part. The closest is people (including myself) saying it didn't need a full 52 episode run which I stand by as true and also apply to every other Gundam series. I've definitely seen multiple people say that it's basically perfect and doesn't need any additional episodes.  I agree it didn't need 52, though, just because 50+ episodes is almost always too much. Turn-A is the only series where having the full four-cours run actually worked out. 10-13 episodes would've nicely fixed G-Reco's pacing issues and made it a much better show. 
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Nov 11, 2015 16:58
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ImpAtom posted:That would have utterly gutted Turn-A's already meandering pacing. That is good if all you want is more of the world but terrible for it as an actual show. I want both, and I think Turn-A managed both really well by having such a slow pace. It's one of my favorite things about the show and if it didn't have such a slow pace then I don't think we'd have gotten some of my favorite moments, like Dianna working at the war hospital (including the washing machine scene) or Anis' Cow. And I'd like to see more shows that allow that room to breathe personally. You might think it's poo poo pacing, but it's pretty perfect in my opinion and I'm not obliged to agree with your view on it since it's just an opinion at the end of the day, not some kind of objective fact. Edit: Also, I think the word gutted there is pretty hilarious, given that implies taking something out and making it less than, when I'm talking about adding a small bit more.
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Nov 11, 2015 16:58
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50 episodes is like 20 hours or so. If a writer needs more time than that for their story to be good instead of bad, they're not a good writer.
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Nov 11, 2015 17:00
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Srice posted:50 episodes is like 20 hours or so. If a writer needs more time than that for their story to be good instead of bad, they're not a good writer. Or they're a writer who wants to convey more than just the bare bones of a story. Or they're a writer who wants to convey a very long and/or complex story. Or probably other poo poo too. That's a very arbitrary definition that actually disallows some of the most celebrated stuff ever made as being defined as good, including most of the most beloved tv shows of any kind ever made.
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Nov 11, 2015 17:03
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My problem with G-Reco is that I mostly didn't care about it by the end. I got what was going on and I found it amusing, but I didn't find it interesting. Would I have liked to see more of Klim, Mick, Mask & Manny? Yes. Did the mobile suit action kick rear end? Also yes. That alone wasn't enough to make me find the overarching plot or the way it was resolved engaging. I'm glad that other people liked it way more and that Tomino reached to a good amount of the audience in what is probably going to be his last Gundam series. People having different opinions is a good thing and we don't need to call each other dumb babies or pretentious nerds over it. I think that if a show fails to engage an audience that is both already into Gundam and used to Tomino's style, it isn't doing a very good job of communicating itself. Maybe it is just me but I think the minority opinion would get a lot less snippy if we didn't have our opinions compared to "a pantomime of rape" or got talked down to whenever we speak up.
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Nov 11, 2015 17:08
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There are plenty of 13 episode shows with a lot of depth and plenty of hella long shows that are shallow as hell 20 hours is really just an immense amount of time and whenever I start up something of that length I always have that nagging feeling at the back of my head, wondering if it's gonna be worth the opportunity cost
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Nov 11, 2015 17:10
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I don't think Monster wasted their episode count
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Nov 11, 2015 17:13
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I think a good baseline to consider wrt to worldbuilding and such is that the expanded editions of the LOTR trilogy clock in at a little over 9 hours, so a 50 ep series is over twice that
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Nov 11, 2015 17:16
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There are good series that are very long but they are series that tend to be pretty different from Gundam. Almost every core Gundam plot is very simple. They have fairly basics arcs and character development and don't tend to have a ton in the way of twists. Adding more episodes for worldbuilding just stretches that out further and the characters don't tend to survive that well. While the Gundam movies tend to miss cool bits of worldbuilding they are better for the character's arcs in a lot of places and the places they're not are nothing to do with pacing. Srice posted:I think a good baseline to consider wrt to worldbuilding and such is that the expanded editions of the LOTR trilogy clock in at a little over 9 hours, so a 50 ep series is over twice that To put it another way: Gundam Age is longer than the entirety of the Harry Potter film franchise.
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Nov 11, 2015 17:21
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For what it's worth, i think g-reco would have benefitted with a couple more episodes. mostly i wish they had spent a little more time on the ending, and the part where they came back from towasanga where they were told a bunch of things happened i would have preferred if that was shown. Unrelatedly: tsob posted:That's nice. don't do this. it makes you sound like a passive-aggressive rear end in a top hat.
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Nov 11, 2015 17:41
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Srice posted:I think a good baseline to consider wrt to worldbuilding and such is that the expanded editions of the LOTR trilogy clock in at a little over 9 hours, so a 50 ep series is over twice that So what? Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and plenty of others have 50+ hours of content and they don't even take place in fantastical worlds that require world building. Babylon 5 is a series that did require world-building and even counting only the second, third and fourth seasons (i.e. the generally accepted good ones all written by the same writer and with not much in the way of bad content) that's still roughly 60 hours of content there alone. While those shows do have their problems, you won't find many critics or fans saying their length or pacing is the big one I would wager. Even just confining it to anime there are shows like the previously mentioned Monster that make good use of their length. There are plenty of bad shows that are long. That doesn't mean that being long is bad or that no show should be more than an arbitrarily defined length or else it's writer is by definition bad. That's just silly. There are also plenty of bad short shows, many of which struggle to fill even 12 episodes with content and whose stories would probably benefit from being more complex or lengthy, not less. Not to say that the episode order needs to be longer in all of those cases, only that the actual story could use more content. I think One Piece makes a really good example here, since the story is quite literally all about the journey. Oda could knock out a story that is done in 10 volumes or 26 episodes or whatever arbitrary length you want to set, but it won't be nearly as good since it won't capture that feeling of adventure and by the time they get to Raftel it won't feel earned since it would be impossible to make it feel like a difficult journey only the main characters are capable of in that short a time frame. The anime definitely has a lot of pacing problems, but there is no way fitting it in to 26 episodes would be a better choice and it being longer does not make Oda a bad writer. Droyer posted:don't do this. it makes you sound like a passive-aggressive rear end in a top hat. I am a passive aggressive rear end in a top hat. It's one of a long list of related but minor problems that have come up in counselling for much bigger behavioral issues over the past 6 months. On the other hand there is at least one poster in this thread that is advocating that all anime should be held to his arbitrary standard for pacing or the writer is by definition bad, so a bit of sarcasm or snippiness feels warranted.
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Nov 11, 2015 18:37
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tsob posted:I think One Piece makes a really good example here, since the story is quite literally all about the journey. Almost every single person I know who enjoys One Piece says it could have cut quite a lot of stuff and nobody would have missed it. That said One Piece is designed very differently from Gundam series and so it having an ongoing story is not bad because it is designed around it. Gundam series are not designed around ongoing adventure (aside from something like BF which probably could handle it) and the longer you stretch it out the more it impacts the core story.
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Nov 11, 2015 18:42
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tsob posted:I am a passive aggressive rear end in a top hat. It's one of a long list of related but minor problems that have come up in counselling for much bigger behavioral issues over the past 6 months. On the other hand there is at least one poster in this thread that is advocating that all anime should be held to his arbitrary standard for pacing or the writer is by definition bad, so a bit of sarcasm or snippiness feels warranted. Literally no one has done this, and the gundam thread is not the place for you to air out your psychological issues.
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Nov 11, 2015 18:43
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Droyer posted:Literally no one has done this, and the gundam thread is not the place for you to air out your psychological issues. Hey now. Gundam is exactly the place to air out psychological issues, as long as you don't mind getting brutally killed afterwards. Still better than Evangelion in that regards though.
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Nov 11, 2015 18:47
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Droyer posted:Literally no one has done this, and the gundam thread is not the place for you to air out your psychological issues. Oh gently caress off. If you didn't want some kind of talk about passive aggression, then you shouldn't have brought it up over a two word phrase in the first place. Also Srice said literally that on this page. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 11, 2015 18:54
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tsob posted:Oh gently caress off. If you didn't want some kind of talk about passive aggression, then you shouldn't have brought it up over a two word phrase in the first place. Also Srice said literally that on this page. someone could use the heart of space right about now
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Nov 11, 2015 19:03
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Here is a list of things that are cool and fine to talk about and discuss but kind of silly to get super angry about :
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Nov 11, 2015 19:14
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With a lot of shows, especially Gundam, a lot of episodes just kind of blend in and aren't super memorable, too. Or they are just part of a longer arc. Evangelion is 26 episodes, doesn't have the fastest pace ever (there are long shots of people just standing there doing nothing sometimes) but just about every episode of that show is pretty memorable. The original Gundam 0079 is also chock full of memorable moments. With a lot of 52 episode anime series like Zeta Gundam and Turn A, the episodes eventually start blending together. And I like those shows, too! Then you have stuff like DBZ where more than just episodes blend together and stuff goes at a super glacial pace.
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Nov 11, 2015 19:35
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Gammatron 64 posted:Then you have stuff like DBZ where more than just episodes blend together and stuff goes at a super glacial pace. I'm a Gundam newbie, so I can't speak for the other series you mentioned but stuff like DBZ should probably get a pass in terms of pacing. The manga it was based off of was still running while the anime was being produced, leading to those long pauses in action. Really, adapting any currently running series is a dumb idea unless you have a rock solid plan for some filler arcs or a good cut off point to end a season and wait for more material. Episode 3 of Build Fighters continues to be fun btw, the setting allowing for continuous cool fights is a great idea.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:17
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Gammatron 64 posted:With a lot of shows, especially Gundam, a lot of episodes just kind of blend in and aren't super memorable, too. Or they are just part of a longer arc. Sorry but I felt original Gundam was mostly filler of the worst kind. Some episodes were just weird and random, like the Great Old People Revolt.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:20
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Erg posted:I'm a Gundam newbie, so I can't speak for the other series you mentioned but stuff like DBZ should probably get a pass in terms of pacing. The manga it was based off of was still running while the anime was being produced, leading to those long pauses in action. Well I mean, that pretty much applies to all adaptations of Shounen Manga. See also: One Piece, Naruto. The actual DBZ manga is way, way better than the show. The Jojo's Bizarre Adventure anime is good, but that's because they waited like 30 years to make an adaptation of it.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:21
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Part 3 is also not totally perfect but that's because it needed to roughly fill a pair of 2-cour blocks over two halves of the manga and break things into 20 minute chunks without abruptly ending each episode
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Nov 11, 2015 20:25
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NikkolasKing posted:Sorry but I felt original Gundam was mostly filler of the worst kind. Some episodes were just weird and random, like the Great Old People Revolt. Of all the episodes you could have picked, that's one of the ones that's most clearly not even remotely any kind of filler.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:31
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Of all the episodes you could have picked, that's one of the ones that's most clearly not even remotely any kind of filler. At least he didn't bring up the 'White Base needs salt' episode, because a ton of plot-related stuff happens in that one, too.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:35
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Personally, i dislike the term filler. It's got a weird stigma attached to it, and episodic stories aren't automatically bad, even if they're part of a larger story.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:37
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Of all the episodes you could have picked, that's one of the ones that's most clearly not even remotely any kind of filler. It's early on so I remember it. My brain sort of deactivated later on in the show as everything got so tedious and boring. I would re-watch it to refresh my memory but eh.
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Nov 11, 2015 20:46
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Droyer posted:Personally, i dislike the term filler. It's got a weird stigma attached to it, and episodic stories aren't automatically bad, even if they're part of a larger story. I don't mind the term so much as the negative connotations it receives. Filler episodes that don't materially advance the main plot can still be really good and provide interesting insight into the characters, add depth to the world, or simply be super fun. The Surfing Turn A episode of Try that people herald as one of the better fights in that series was purestrain filler through and through that had only a tangential relationship with the main plot. A pie without filling would taste pretty bland!
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Nov 11, 2015 20:46
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I think filler started life as a term just to describe the anime only stuff included in long running shonen series to prevent it getting ahead of the manga. Then the term evolved to mean any episode where a main character isn't introduced or killed
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Nov 11, 2015 20:50
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