Quote:
Originally Posted by LeoXiao
Yeah this is one of those shows where you're probably better off watching it when it's all said and done, instead of waiting seven days to see the plot progress an inch further each time for 235 days.
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(wall of text incoming, sorry)
Yeah, I've seen this happen so very many times before, where people keep complaining about pacing this, padding that, OMG why are they going so slow...
People. It is
your own psychology which is making you fault a story's pacing, not the story itself. It is your own brain that is screwing you over in terms of enjoying a story much less than you could have been.
Myself, I hadn't heard of this series until recently, hadn't heard any hype about it, just some random person's sig on another forum prompted me to look it up. So I came in completely fresh.
Watched the first episode, kept watching...straight through to 19 (had to take a break for food and sleep somewhere in there). After that, picked up the manga immediately (just had to find out who that female titan was). Read that all the way to 47.
So, I just recently watched the whole anime from start to present as one big, six hour OVA. And I had no manga spoilers, nor forum speculation, nor time to think and reflect between episodes.
I can
promise you, if you had watched it that way, the story moves FAST. There are so many twists and turns along the way, that even when there are whole episodes of non-action, it's almost a relief. You start to feel like the characters themselves do, that you don't even want any more action, that you just want to figure out what the hell is going on.
When you stretch a story out over
months, what I just watched in hours, well, no shit, there are going to be parts that feel slow. And when you watch a 15-20 minute long clip, then go to a forum of other rabid fans frothing all sorts of ideas left and right, and get to think about every single detail for an entire week, then no shit, the story will get more stale, more quickly (because you'll figure out a lot of stuff beforehand).
Well, now, I'm in your same boat...I can either pounce on every little tidbit, week by week (or month by month in the manga's case), dissect it to all hell, chew on it like a piece of gum until it's lost its flavor...or, I can stop. Walk away from it. Try to forget about it, go do some other things for maybe a year or two. Not because I don't like the story, but because
I love it. Because I
want it to feel special, I want it to feel fresh and spectacular, I want it to keep feeling as amazing as it did when I first walked into this world.
Myself, I'm sticking around until the end of this season. The manga's only going to advance one or two chapters in that time, and I'll read those too. After that, I'm gone for at least a year. It is entirely worth it to wait that long, so that when I come back, I can see a huge chunk of the story as it was meant to be seen/read.
The simple truth is, creating a story takes a whole lot longer than consuming it, no matter what medium one is working in. It's like growing a vegetable in your garden...you have to give it that time, that season to grow, and ripen. Otherwise it's your own fault for snatching half-formed tomatoes off the vine, and complaining how small and bitter they are. Well again, no shit.
tl;dr that's the problem, spans of attention.
