Quote:
Originally Posted by Zek
This would have been a pretty good episode, but as usual my complaint is about the pacing. They're still doing this ridiculous 1 chapter per episode pace, complete with the slow-motion action and pointless filler scenes. The animation was decent and the music is rather good, but the awful pacing ruins the whole thing. All they had to do was continue how they were handling it before the filler(which at this rate was completely unnecessary), but this is just insulting.
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The "pacing"? I've seen this canned response used in just about every Naruto episode thread since episode 3, but I can't quite figure out how it applies to this episode.
This episode was poorly written, featured poorly explained events (Sakura and the pill?), and appealed to the intelligence of someone in primary school, but I can't figure out how the pacing was in any way comparable to that of the previous episodes. How are you even measuring pacing? By using some pretentious, arbitrary number that is derived from the manga? How is it determined that more of this number in an episode is better, and when is the number too high for an episode to be enjoyable?
The problem with Naruto doesn't come from how many "chapters" from the manga each episode crams in--if they were, these past episodes would be better than the filler episodes, and they aren't--nor is it from the fact that Naruto has the appearance of being dumbed down. No, it comes from the fact that, after all of these years, we, the viewers, have grown up and have become more sophisticated than we previously were. Many fans stopped watching Naruto once it was announced that the fillers would last for a very, very long time (myself included), and, again, considering most of the people watching Naruto were/are teenagers, tweens, or children, most have matured. The problem with Naruto doesn't come from the producers, but rather the problem comes from us, and the bizarre nostalgia that we hold from years ago, of what we believe Naruto once was. The viewers have aged tremendously over the break, but the intended demographic hasn't. At one point, we were Naruto's intended demographic, but now that's no longer true, and you can't blame the writing staff for that.
Naruto writing, at least as far as the anime is concerned, has always sucked ass. The "pacing" has always sucked ass. Please, stop trying to compare Naruto now with nostalgia. Naruto is just a silly kids show that we're all slowly outgrowing. There's no sense in comparing it with what it "used to be". What it used to be no longer exists. So, hey, why don't we think of something different with our criticism, instead of just hopping on the elitist bandwagon?