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I wouldn't call that time wasted, I think it's usually very important to create an atmosphere, and to better understand the world that the people we're watching

by Zababa 5y ago

I wouldn't call that time wasted, I think it's usually very important to create an atmosphere, and to better understand the world that the people we're watching are living in. I've never watched Secret of Kells so I can't comment on that. But it's funny that you pick something like Fate, in both the original Stay Night (the visual novel) and Zero (the light novel), there is a lot of technobabble. It gets cut in the anime adaptations, along with most of the interesting parts of the characters and the story. The original Stay Night by DEEN was a weird mix of all three routes, not great by any means but at least brought something new, UBW was butchered, and I'm trying to keep things civil so I won't talk about Heaven's Feel. Zero had the same treatment, most of the internal dialogue of characters was cut, leaving a story with half-baked characters and trying to compensate with the visuals. > So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime. That's true. However, I think time is not always a hard limit. Sometimes the movie being slow is part of the experience. It is something I like a lot, so I probably have a bias here.

dragontamer 5y ago
> But it's funny that you pick something like Fate, in both the original Stay Night (the visual novel) and Zero (the light novel), there is a lot of technobabble. It gets cut in the anime adaptations, along with most of the interesting parts of the characters and the story. Fate/Stay anime is interesting as a series and as a storytelling medium. On the face of it, it feels like Fate/Stay is a soft-magic system where the magic is called out as magic and rarely elaborated on. Here's healing magic here, or noble phantasms over there, or reality marbles, or whatever. But in actuality, Fate/Stay is a hard-magic system, supported by the depth of the original story. All the magic has rules. They just skip over the rules explanation in the anime, because they don't have the time for it (ie: they chose not to have time for it, and focus on other elements of the story). I agree that pointing out to the audience the hard-magic system and its rules probably would be beneficial. On the other hand... maybe not? All of the anime (including the Tsukihime and Garden of Sinners anime/OVAs) consistently skip over these explanations and just leave it up to the audience to figure out the rule system on their own (if they care). "Story told as if it were soft magic", but with a hard-magic reference point thanks to a series of in-depth rules published in that visual novel that a much smaller portion of the fanbase has read is... fine. Its like how Lord of the Rings has all this history in the Silmarillion that 99% of readers don't know about. If the audience cares about the details, the original VNs / wikis / etc. etc. exist. If they don't care about the details, all the better, they didn't want to hear the explanation in the first place. Its a compromise system, but its an interesting compromise. Frankly, a lot of audience members are happy with the soft-magic hand-waved explanations given in the anime. I don't think Fate/Stay is a "deep" anime, not on the levels of the other shows I've discussed. But it still shows how cutting out the techno-babble in the actual anime (and just handwaving the details) increases the density of the show. Especially because the "harder" fans know how in-depth all of those explanations actually go.

by Zababa 5y ago

dragontamer 5y ago

> But it's funny that you pick something like Fate, in both the original Stay Night (the visual novel) and Zero (the light novel), there is a lot of technobabble. It gets cut in the anime adaptations, along with most of the interesting parts of the characters and the story. Fate/Stay anime is interesting as a series and as a storytelling medium. On the face of it, it feels like Fate/Stay is a soft-magic system where the magic is called out as magic and rarely elaborated on. Here's healing magic here, or noble phantasms over there, or reality marbles, or whatever. But in actuality, Fate/Stay is a hard-magic system, supported by the depth of the original story. All the magic has rules. They just skip over the rules explanation in the anime, because they don't have the time for it (ie: they chose not to have time for it, and focus on other elements of the story). I agree that pointing out to the audience the hard-magic system and its rules probably would be beneficial. On the other hand... maybe not? All of the anime (including the Tsukihime and Garden of Sinners anime/OVAs) consistently skip over these explanations and just leave it up to the audience to figure out the rule system on their own (if they care). "Story told as if it were soft magic", but with a hard-magic reference point thanks to a series of in-depth rules published in that visual novel that a much smaller portion of the fanbase has read is... fine. Its like how Lord of the Rings has all this history in the Silmarillion that 99% of readers don't know about. If the audience cares about the details, the original VNs / wikis / etc. etc. exist. If they don't care about the details, all the better, they didn't want to hear the explanation in the first place. Its a compromise system, but its an interesting compromise. Frankly, a lot of audience members are happy with the soft-magic hand-waved explanations given in the anime. I don't think Fate/Stay is a "deep" anime, not on the levels of the other shows I've discussed. But it still shows how cutting out the techno-babble in the actual anime (and just handwaving the details) increases the density of the show. Especially because the "harder" fans know how in-depth all of those explanations actually go.