When a story get dragged on for too long.

[Traece]

Originally Posted by NinjaRealist

... and Fairy Tail are all way too long and too repetitive (not that I've actually finished any of these). There are a lot of shounen manga like this and with very few exceptions they all become unreadable at some point.

I can only speak for the anime here on Fairy Tail. The way character development and the story work in Fairy Tail makes it a much easier series to stick with for a long run. Having the characters being continuously developed one by one with interesting back stories has kept things interesting. For the overall story the mold is sort of broken from Naruto and Bleach with it being broken up into arcs that can sometimes be outright dismissed. Most of what is there is relevant to the story and has an impact on the characters, despite the property being very capable of being episodic (everyone just running out and doing random quests for money). Personally, I felt that the majority of those arcs were paced pretty nicely as well.

Originally Posted by Blaat

I honestly think TWGOK dragged out the moment the main character had to recheck all the previous girls and I stopped reading there. I also think One Piece dragged out not in a "it should have ended a long time ago" kind of way but more like "the story should be a lot further along."

I can see that. At first glance that was a very questionable move, but what ended up happening was the ability to add immense depth to those characters. While I enjoyed Keima meeting and "capturing" all sorts of interesting girls, it had to evolve into a bigger story at some point in time.

As far as the trend of only having 12 episodes, I honestly dislike it. Most of my favorite animes tend to hover in the 22-26 episode range which was a bit more common years ago. While I admit that a lot of animes with 12 episodes are very good, I also feel like a lot of those could have run another 12 episodes (source material permitting, of course). When a really good anime comes around, I rarely feel proper closure with 12.

[Archon_Wing]

A series's refusal to end can have disastrous consequences. Even if it was good, if a story is pushed past longer than the author initially anticipated, there's no real way to remain creative.

Consider the ultimate example-- Dragon Ball Z. By the time of Cell Arc ending, you have the main character dead and the torch being passed. Seems like a great place to end, but nope... And whatever you think of the Buu Saga, there's GT. And GT was definitely stretching it beyond where it should have gone. It's funny because you could view each arc in DBZ as the last.

I have to admit I lack patience for such things as my completed series over 26 episodes is very short. It would be hard for me to imagine things that should last long. Though the likes of HxH are exceptions and I expect them to last a long time.

Other good examples are shows like YuruYuri. It was straining to keep itself together, but it ran for just the right amount of time and never reached the point of stale.

I feel the biggest example to me in recent memory was the Nanoha series. The beauty of its first two seasons are that they are self-contained and almost watchable separately. While the first season had poor pacing, the 2nd season had an excellent balance that could have outlived its stay but didn't. It could have been 26 episodes, but it got its points off in 13. For whatever reason the third season got 26 episodes and man, it should have stayed 13 episodes-- pretty much the opposite effect.

Why am I talking about Nanoha? The series ended in 2007, right? Well, no it didn't just end with everyone going off happily in their lives and advancing to further exploits. Nope, it was followed by a fourth season that wasn't animated [yet], consisting of two mangas to where I hope to God that they never get animated, because they are terrible, somehow combining exploitative fanservice and degradation of characters into fanservice objects into one, and nonsensical grimdark crap that shits on everything the series stands for. At the same time. With no end in sight. If it weren't canon, I wouldn't give a damn, but yea.... My opinion is that the Remake movies were done to simplify the series because it grew into such a clusterfuck and undid the damage of this, but like I said it'll be a dark day if it comes back to the screen with that since while StrikerS was a flawed series that espoused the issue relevant to this thread, it still occasionally did good, these two took those worst flaws and expanded it tenfold. So this is a future fear.

Animate the card game though!