Geek Confessional Thread 2024

[MNblockhead]

I tried Delicious in Dungeon and got an episode and a half in before I gave up. I am not saying it is bad, but I HATED it.

Maybe try a few more episodes. I had almost given up on it but the underlying story and character development is much better than the campy conceit would make you think. It snuck up on me but now I'm invested in the story and characters and am fully hooked.

 

[MNblockhead]

Thats was Vox Machina and Rick and Morty for me.

Vox Machina is another that goes to an entire other level after like the 3rd episode.

But I could never get into Rick and Morty.

 

[MNblockhead]

I struggle with a lot of shows. I bounced off Delicious in Dungeon and Vox Machina too. I often feel like if I could force myself to watch two or three episodes I'll get interested but I don't want to make myself keep watching something that isn't holding my interest.

I wonder if the short episode format leads to folks giving up on shows too quickly. If the same stories were release in hour long episodes, I wonder how many people would give up on them? There are some shows that I'll watch 20-30 minutes of an just stop, but generally, with shows with hour-long episodes I tend to watch the first episode.

 

[MNblockhead]

Yeap folks love to throw out the "you just have to sit through it until it clicks" bit. Ive been a perpetrator of that myself (looks at DS9). Though, ive gotten to a point where I just rather put my time into things im gonna like from start to finish. For example, folks tell me to read Wheel of Time often. Everyone of them tells me about how its like 14 books and only 7 of them are bad...

I'm doing it in this very thread! I get where you are coming from, but sometimes those folks are right. Then again, sometimes they are wrong. I don't think there is anything my son can do to get me to watch another episode of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. I forced myself to watch a second episode. I've even watched portions of episodes from later season. Every effort has only convinced me that it was time I would never get back.

 

[MNblockhead]

How long did it take to get there? I think I watched the first couple (maybe only 2 or 3?), and was just bored. Honestly, if it was more crude it would have been more interesting to me.

FWIW, I love Rick and Morty when they do gross stuff like the Raising Gazorpazorp or the fantasy land episodes, because I like the way that they play around with the source material and make interesting plots out of it. But things like their Hellraiser episode bore me because they didn't bother to understand the source material.

It really picks up after the 3rd episode.

 

[overgeeked]

I'm doing it in this very thread! I get where you are coming from, but sometimes those folks are right. Then again, sometimes they are wrong. I don't think there is anything my son can do to get me to watch another episode of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. I forced myself to watch a second episode. I've even watched portions of episodes from later season. Every effort has only convinced me that it was time I would never get back.

I turned it off after the dog scene. Don't care what comes after that.

 

[MNblockhead]

This is why so many anime fans swear by the three episode rule. Some shows take a bit to get going.

But the fact that anime episodes are so short often creates a sense of them taking longer to pick up than they do. Because they are broken up into such short segments, it is easy to just nope out and not go on to the next episode. I think more people would get hooked if the content was in hour long episode. I would say give the show an hour. More often than not, the first couple of episodes of most anime's I've watched seem designed to hook a different type of viewer than me. Most anime shows just don't grab me. All of my favorites grew on me over about an hour or so of watching them before they hooked me. So my personal rule of thumb is to given them about an hour. If not for that rule, I would have missed out on Attack on Titan, Deathnote, Vox Machina, Delicious in Dungeon, and others. The only anime I can think of that hooked me in the first episode was Castlevania.

 

[MNblockhead]

Of course, with lots of anime you have the problem in the other direction. The first few episodes are really interesting and pull you in, then it just drags out the middle forever.

My spouse and I started Attack On Titan and liked it. But we got about a third of the way through with the show and gave up. We're contemplating if it's worth it to just fast forward to the last season.

I love Attack on Titan. But, like a lot of anime, it suffers from a lot of filler episodes. I prefer anime shows where the season is fully created and then released, rather than trying to be an ongoing weekly show. But, overall, I really enjoyed Attack on Titan.

 

[payn]

It really picks up after the 3rd episode.

...and then again after the 5th and then 7th?

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I love Attack on Titan. But, like a lot of anime, it suffers from a lot of filler episodes.

And then once in a while you just plain get trolled by the creators. Haruhi Suzumiya's Endless Eight remains the most gloriously over the top version of that, and will probably retain the record for eternity because I'm pretty sure no producer will ever let that happen again.

For those unfamiliar with it, imagine a Groundhog Day time loop scenario, only the show gives us eight nearly identical episodes with each portraying an entire two-week loop, the POV protag only gradually becomes aware he's stuck in a loop, and the one character who does notice doesn't tell anyone until well into the run and even then she has to explain again and again what's going on because everyone else resets. Thankfully we only see eight loops out of the 8000+ ones the one temporally-lucid character lives through, which has consequences later on. Roughly three and a half hours of the four hour long arc are the same scenes from slightly different points of view done eight times over, and at the end of it the protag doesn't remember a thing. He can't even play piano.

Viewers were rioting by the end of it, although I confess I loved it for the sheer stupid guts it had to take to make and air it. The best part is, the show's adapted from a YA novel series, and in that this whole sequence is a short story that quite rationally only shows the final loop before it's broken because the protag doesn't personally recall any of the others. Stretching to eight full episodes was entirely the anime studio's decision. Madness. Wonderful, awful madness.