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I tried watching Dragon Ball once. Someone was charging for an attack, and it literally took them 3 episodes to charge it (while cutting to other characters dealing with their own drama elsewhere).
When they finally fired their charged shot, it missed. I turned it off and never went back to that show. What a waste of an hour and a half.
I was actually living in Japan at the time, and I’ve learned why some shows drag on like that. It’s because a manga series is super popular and it gets licensed for animation… but the manga is incomplete and still being made. So eventually, the anime catches up to the latest volumes and then they need filler to keep the series going while waiting for the manga-ka (author/artist) to make more stories. So they stretch out scenes and stories to cover multiple episodes instead of just getting to the point and moving on.
That’s why we get lengthy shows like Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, etc. They’re made before the manga is finished, so they will run out of material and abruptly end unless they stretch their story arcs out over dozens of episodes.
The other route is to find a decent place to end an anime series without a full resolution of the plot. For instance, the '90s Berserk anime just told the story up to the eclipse, which was just about where the manga was when the show aired. The series is still being made now, 2 decades later (even after its manga-ka passed away last year), and there have been a couple attempts to make new anime series telling more of the current plot. But they’re not stretching the story across hundreds of episodes to keep it going.
Someone was charging for an attack
I’d recommend TeamFourStar’s abridged version then.
“Could someone define ‘filicide’ for Goku? I’d ask Gohan, buuuuut…”
“…I’m actually not sure what it means. Isn’t that when you kill a pony?”
Sometimes they just make up whole new stories (Bleach) or say fuck it and go their own way (Fullmetal Alchemist). I feel like the more accepted recent approach though is having a mini-series of an arc which has normal pacing (actually even often accelerated pacing cause they only get 12 episodes) and then just putting the show on hold.
And then you have when the anime affects the manga and the manga starts stretching the story out for “content” (feel like this happened with My Hero Academia and Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun). If it was a novel that’s being published on a pay by chapter platform you’re just completely fucked because they (generally) follow the Mark Twain model of pay per word so once a story gets popular that shit absolutely gets milked into the ground. If you’re lucky they waited to do the anime until the comic adaption was half done at which point the novel will hopefully be done…
you’re just completely fucked because they (generally) follow the Mark Twain model of pay per word so once a story gets popular that shit absolutely gets milked into the ground.
This is a legit problem for web novels and wuxia (which get written and released chapter by chapter).
Lot’s of random plot arcs that go nowhere, and a lot of recycled story structure.
I stopped reading Tales of Demons and Gods halfway through, because the main character gains the ability to pause time and “power up” whenever he wants. I was already quite tired of it, but that was the “fuck this book” moment
I shall seal the heavens and The Desolate Era are some of my favorites (although TDE has some severe plot meandering syndrome)
Yup, these are called filler episodes
After that one fight scene it is sadly already dark outside.
After that one fight scene, it’s 3 days later.
I remember, as a kid, watching the spirit bomb episode(s) of DBZ and thinking, “Wow, fighting sure takes a long time in anime.”
