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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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Counterpoint: Kill la Kill pared everything down as much as possible, eliminating filler and eliminating or truncating redundant animations, and wound up with nearly perfect pacing as a result. Meanwhile something like Hunter x Hunter turned into like 90% filler (or even worse, story progression that was so empty and slow it basically was filler) and became basically unwatchable as a result.
There's definitely a line where paring things down goes too far, like Cyberpunk Edgerunners was Studio Trigger taking the streamlining a little too far when the story could have had a bit more in places, but in general I can't help but feel like filler is more a negative to overall pacing and the approach should instead be to control the overall pacing with things that still advance the overall story but are more focused on a narrower tangent, instead of just throwing in completely empty and self-contained filler.
wrong, hunter x hunter is good. sometimes a story is some guys hanging out and playing a video game. character interaction and development can be story all on it's own even if there isn't a "main plot"
Hunter x Hunter turns into "what if we do a training montage but drag it out for 100 episodes and then also it goes nowhere anyways, with a high stakes constantly-relevant apocalyptic plot that's kept in slow motion and full of weird politics about how revolutionaries are bad and silly overlaid onto racist caricatures of the DPRK."
Like it starts off with an interesting enough premise and the pacing doesn't really get bad until they go play yu-gi-oh for like 20-30 episodes in a storyline that means nothing and goes nowhere, but then it just gets unwatchable with the chimera ant arc where it just hangs in stasis to do the world's slowest training montage that ends up not even mattering because the real answer was just "use a literal nuclear weapon to solve everything, lmao." Like everything from what was it, something like episode 60 to episode 140 (it's been a long time since I watched it) could have been squished into 20 episodes and still have been slowly paced.
nah all that stuff rules. sometimes a good story is hanging out with the cool characters you like and not worrying about the broader plot or pacing (which are still good)
But that's not what Hunter x Hunter does in the Chimera Ants arc. There it stops on a cliffhangar to go have background characters give Gon and Killua a Rocky training montage for ten hours while everything else treads water in the background, then just has someone come in out of left field and solve the whole thing with a nuclear bomb and some incoherent philosophizing over which is the bigger evil: the cannibal monsters with magic powers who want to eat the world, or like this guy who didn't want them to do that who used "the most evil weapon ever conceived which is very illegal and bad" to kill one cannibal monster with radiation poisoning, solving everything through the power of Great Man theory and nuclear weapons.
That final fight before the nuclear bomb deus ex machina was probably the peak of the entire series in terms of fight choreography and animation, though. It just should have happened 50 episodes earlier and ended that arc then and there.
counterpoint: i think it's funny and good to win a shonen battle by bringing a nuke. also i just generally think that's a reductive view of the arc. im not like the number one huh fan or anything, i mostly just think stuff that's good can have lots of fat and often the fat makes it better (though obviously not always)
Agree with you on Chimera Ants being bad, though I was fine with Greed Island.