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It's bad. A couple of funny scenes - the strongest ones are Bean and Mora talking about their relationship, where the jokes are pretty good and Bean gets some much-needed dimensionality. On the whole though, the season is just another baffling reminder of the show's squandered potential. All these amazing voice actors, the gorgeous art and music, and then the writing is This. Plots are incoherent, continuity's a mess, jokes are few and far between. The episode where the Dreamland gang are running from Evil Bean's headless body is just...man, I don't know what's going on there. They spend the whole episode repetitively running away from it, but then it starts heading towards the castle and they follow it? Their whole thing is hiding the body from Dagmar for [reasons that nobody remembers] but that morphs into this entirely separate thing, at odds with the first thing, and then Elfo and Dagmar have the most tepid confrontation imaginable and the situation resets to zero. It's such weird, janky storytelling. The gag early on with the audience stand-in who's like, "I don't remember what's going on and many of the things that happened up til now are confusing and poorly explained!", and then gets shot, or Alva being like, "this'll help me with my poorly defined evil plan" - it really doesn't make the show's core problems better if you just point out that they're problems, and then don't fix them. If the point is meant to be that the overarching plot makes no sense and is deeply cryptic and unsatisfying, why has the show spent so much time and energy focusing on it? It could be a funny joke that the plot is bad, but they don't go that direction either, they just lovingly point out the show's failures and then continue to do them.
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Sep 2, 2023 13:27
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:14 |
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What struck me in the final episodes was just - every time they do a battle scene, it's really good. The animators get a chance to flex, and we get to see these characters in action rather than sitting around reciting so-so dialogue. The big battle where every supporting character gets to do something, and Elfo and Bean's running battle through the mushroom patch with Dagmar, those are genuine high points. You get the sense the animators care about the characters and want to showcase them doing cool stuff. Then the writing around those scenes, woof. The aforementioned big battle ends with Bean lightning blasting everyone, but somehow this means Dagmar still wins, and then Bean is dragged off by guards, but Dagmar knows where she is and has her imprisoned (?) in the castle, so...what? Why does Bean lose the climactic fight and then receive clemency while living in Dagmar's castle until she's ready to quit mourning and fight Dagmar again? Why can her friends, who Dagmar also wanted to kill, freely wander in and out of her room while this is happening? I guess Dagmar was holding out hope that Bean would wear the cursed crown now that Evil Bean was dead, but honestly, I puzzled that out just now trying to map the sequence of events there. I definitely do not remember what the cursed crown was even supposed to do. (I looked it up just now. It was meant to "pay off Maru's debts to Hell". It seems like that's a part of the plot that they already handled a season ago, so I don't know why Dagmar is still futzing around with it now.) There's so much that could have been really good. In this final season you can see that they wanted to tell a serialised story, but however their writer's room is set up, you just don't get the sense this arrangement of writers can do that. Character beats wobble about all over the place, the plot spins on a dime, and the show contradicts itself constantly. Bean has two big scenes where she says she's going to destroy all magic, but then she just forgets and never mentions it again. It feels like veteran animated sitcom writers trying their hand at a fantasy epic, realising it's hard, and retreating back into sitcom whenever the going gets tough, leaving the show uncomfortably straddling two worlds. Also Elfo sucks forever. He never gets better and he gets a pity girlfriend because someone really, really thinks he deserves kisses, I guess.
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Sep 5, 2023 11:16
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Steamland was a cool setting where they could do jokes and storylines they were clearly more comfortable with (because they were more modern), but yeah, the way it interacted with the plot was wild. Alva is a cool villain idea, voiced by an extremely funny comedian, who does absolutely nothing in the plot despite showing up frequently. The most significant thing is that Bean meets Mora there. They clearly wanted Bean discovering "stience" in Steamland to be a character arc thing, but they didn't wanna do the legwork to show her actually learning anything, so that never really goes anywhere beyond her shouting about how cool science is while she zaps stuff with magic in the finale. Also yeah, wow, I completely forgot there was the "I have to erase Dagmar from existence" setup that the show forgot about too. What was going on with the plotting in this show?
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Sep 6, 2023 17:43
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OldMemes posted:I just finished it, and what a wildly uneven show. The animation was great, and the voice cast were really good, but the pacing is so strange. There are far too many "running jokes" that just became the same thing repeated over and over. I mean, at least they didn't have Zog honking all the time (John DiMaggio was especially strong this season), but we don't need to hear the horse laughing, or Shocko making a noise over and over and over again. You don't need one note characters like Chazz, when you've got better ones who can be used for drama AND comedy. Mop Girl was a one note character who got developed INTO an actual character, and had an arc and everything, so they could do it. One of the really baffling things is how many comic relief characters whose core joke is just "has an annoying voice, says stupid things, and is evil" there are. There's Freckles, Scruffles, Chazz, like a million side characters where this is their entire bit. Sometimes there's nominally a joke there, like how Freckles is an evil ventriloquist dummy, but all the jokes are actually just about how Freckles sucks and is annoying to listen to. Which is the case for the audience too! It also sucks for us to listen to him, not just the characters in-fiction!
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Sep 10, 2023 20:06
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