This is actually waaaaaay less of a problem than it used to be. It’s a bummer that we usually get shorter seasons now, but the tradeoff is that it’s far less common for filler to be injected into the story to drag things out than it used to be.
Comment on Or they completely botch S2 by rushing it
fireweed@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The pacing in manga (especially compared to any adaptations) is almost always better. With only a handful of exceptions, anime is too dragged out, which ruins action, humor, and drama alike. It shouldn’t take 22 minutes to adapt ~5 minutes of manga content. I said what I said.
Unboxious@ani.social 1 day ago
fireweed@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Oh I’ve been around the scene long enough to remember what it was like back before anime studios started adapting manga into anime panel-by-panel as a default. Some of those 90s series in particular had horrible filler (not just filler arcs, randomly-inserted filler scenes, as well as other highly-questionable changes to the source material). It was a huge relief when anime adaptations started becoming way more faithful to the source material in the 00s.
The problem is that when adapting the story from one medium to another, panel-by-panel adaptation means taking pacing that fits the manga format and awkwardly forcing it into the anime format. So when I say that 5 minutes of manga content gets dragged out to 22 minutes of anime content, I’m not referring to filler, I’m speaking to the nature of the manga vs anime media. In other words, a 5-minute manga chapter turns into a 22-minute anime episode once dialogue is spoken, actions are animated, sound effects are given auditory form, etc. (after all, think about how much faster it is to read dialogue vs speak it aloud, and how much quicker it is to flip through a manga’s action scene of a few panels vs watching the scene fully animated). Sure some substance is added through the addition of a soundtrack, visual flare, and such, however as far as plot, character development, theme development, etc go, you end up with less substance per minute of experience… and it takes a lot of soundtrack and visual flare to compensate for that. Some series pull it off, but it takes a lot of effort, skill, and more importantly, budget, for it to be truly successful. And even then, the thing about manga is that the reader gets to control the pace (they can decide whether to read slowly and savor the experience, or speed through it and absorb as much content as possible as quickly as possible), whereas with anime you cannot (unless you start fiddling with playback speed, which is much more effortful and affects the quality of the work dramatically).
Unboxious@ani.social 19 hours ago
Oh no, I get all that. But I’m not usually seeing one chapter adapted into one episode. Usually it’s more like a third of a volume.
Mercuri@ani.social 1 day ago
The Exiled Heavy Knight anime discussion is basically all about how much of a trainwreck the pacing is. I basically read the manga just to see how the story is supposed to go, because the anime would spend 22 minutes on one-and-a-half chapters. That’s DBZ Frieza saga levels of pacing.
I will say, light novels are usually better than their anime counterparts as well. I should compare light novels to manga adaptations though.
Zwiebel@feddit.org 1 day ago
Now read the LN for the next stage of enlightenment xD
turdas@suppo.fi 6 hours ago
For a lot of series I feel exactly the opposite. You spend 5 minutes reading a chapter and then weeks or months waiting for the next one. The moment-to-moment pacing is often much better in anime adaptations.
The bigger problem is that a lot of manga/novel series run on forever so the anime adaptation has no chance of ever finishing the story. This doesn’t really have anything to do with the medium and is more about the way this stuff tends to get serialized in Japan incentivizing authors to never wrap their stories up.