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I don't really have a worst or most avoided but Most Disappointing! Wandering Witch: The Journey Of Elaina - I really enjoyed the novels so I was looking forward to this one a lot, but goddamn aside from the most mechanical, technical production standpoint this adaptation was loving disastrous. I don't think every individual story in the novels that have been translated so far is a winner or anything, but the anime version of every single story it adapted - even the early ones I liked, once I get past the excitement of the strong production and hearing characters I like be well-voiced - was a regression across the board. Good stories lost varying amounts of charm and coherency, bad stories devolved into downright farce. The whole production had no mastery of tone or character subtlety at all, and made tons and tons of weird adaptation decisions - some small, others bafflingly large - that consistently served to strip stories of what made them most interesting and doubled down on a genuinely-flawed protagonist's worst traits, while skimming through or outright omitting most of the scenes or even entire stories that might have served to effectively endear her to the audience rather than flooding my twitter timeline with weekly discussions of whether she's a sadistic slaver psychopath or just a narcissistic moron. I was wildly relieved when the 3rd manga volume came out and was actually outstanding, because this disastrous adaptation was beginning to make me wonder if I was just some kind of moron for liking the novels to begin with. Dishonorable Mention: Deca-dence: For much of its run, Deca-dence was disappointing mostly by comparison to director Yuzuru Tachikawa's other work on Mob Psycho 100, one of my favorite shounen action series of all time - and this was probably an unfair comparison on some level, as I've since learned that he wasn't chiefly responsible for some of the incredible action scenes on that show that were a big part of why I was so excited for Deca-dence. The writing and delivery makes a good-faith effort to hold up its end, too, with some genuinely insightful and cutting commentary on the self-reinforcing systems of late capitalism, and how people are malformed by those systems. And the action scenes we did get are hardly bad, they're still quite good when you're not comparing them to the ungodly level of something like a Mob or a One Punch Man. But I just felt like the deeper we got into the series, the more its support pillars started to visibly buckle. Our two leads, Natsume and Kaburagi, are immediately endearing and believable, but the problem is that you basically know everything there is to know about them by episode 3 - maybe episode 6 if you really stretch it - and their arcs basically just coast from there, and the supporting characters are basically all some mix of essentially-one-note and wildly underused - with perhaps the most egregious being a Traitor arc so predictable and by the numbers that I keep entirely forgetting that it even happened. And then we get to the finale, which is actively a disaster and kind of threatens to push the show from "disappointing by high standards" to "actively bad" IMO - after spending the whole season building up this idea of radical revolution, of tearing down evil systems entirely, of radical revolution, our finale sees Kaburagi (Natsumi has basically no relevant role in events at this point beyond yelling "KUMICHOU" a whole lot) doing a cool action scene that nonetheless basically just follows the exact script the system laid down for him in episode 1, going through a death fake-out I did not even come close to buying or having any feelings about whatsoever, and then experiencing a flash-forward to our heroes' glorious new society.....which is basically identical to the one they were rebelling against - with the exact same people sitting, unpunished, unbothered, and basically unchanged - operating the system more or less exactly as it was before but with some of the rough edges sanded off. I could even maybe get behind this if it were clearly intentional or the show were making some sort of deliberate statement, but the gulf between the heroes' expressed goals and the point at which they ultimately declare a complete and unambiguous victory goes entirely unexamined and un-commented on, as if the show forgot what it was even doing. Just a baffling turn of events that really completed my heel-turn on the show as a whole. Spiritus Nox fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 01:22
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 21:30 |
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