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Old 2011-10-15, 22:03   Link #158
Triple_R
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Arabesque View Post

I will admit, watching this episode at first did cause me to cringe a bit at how badly the transition between the last episode of season 2 and the start of this one had been handled, and reading the thread I see that the case had been made and discussed already so I won't go deeply into that ... but I want to point out that I don't actually think that the events that had happened here (mainly Yuji switching sides) could be described as illogical going by what happened in the past season. If anything, I think that it's a natural progression for his character (and the story) to take, just that the problem was that the note the second season concluded on made what happened here seem to be out nowhere.

In short, I think that the problem is the way the content had been shown, with the end of the past season trying to paint things in a positive light and the start of this one saying that it was actually a more depressing ending than we were told. Of course, having a direct continuation being tonally different is not a good thing at all,
Precisely. This is exactly what I (and probably some other posters as well) meant by jarring transition.


Quote:

To put it simply, they were going to pick between the lesser of two evils.
Here is where I disagree with you. You forget that there is a third option here: Create a partially-anime original bridge to more smoothly transition from anime original Season 2 ending back into faithful source material adaptation.

Where I differ with Reckoner is I honestly had no real problem with how Shakugan no Shana Season 2 ended. In fact, after the slow-paced first half, I think that JC Staff owed it to Shana viewers to give us a whizbang! action-packed second half, and I'm glad that they did. If going with an anime-original ending was needed to achieve that, then so be it.

But once you insert a significant amount of anime original content into your adaptation, your anime narrative is altered by that. And for the anime narrative to feel coherent and smooth, what comes after that anime original content should flow believably from it.

But JC Staff decided to veer hard right, and to go totally faithful in its adaptation work right from the first minute of the first episode of Shana III. Fidelity to the source material is usually for the better, but not for the purposes of this Episode 1. For the purposes of this Episode 1, they should have built a bridge, imo.


However, I'm not going to hold that against future Shana III episodes, just this first one, so it's not a big deal for the anime season as a whole.
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