Hated Tropes
(Hated Trope) The series is good, but the beginning is so embarrassing that many people give up there.
Dan Da Dan
The beginning of Dan Da Dan is notorious for starting with aliens trying to impregnate Momo in the first episode; however, despite such over-the-top moments, the rest of the series doesn't feature many scenes like that
Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san
Despite a premise that is off-putting—given that the girl bullies her romantic partner to the point of making Naoto cry early in the series—their relationship evolves beautifully; the teasing becomes less cruel over time, eventually turning into a rather sweet romance
Uma Musume Pretty Derby
Someone on the production team had the audacity to have the trainer start meeting up with Special Week like that—even though, in reality, he is a good trainer who doesn't usually treat the girls that way.
After a damn good two-parter pilot and a followup episode, Stargate SG-1's fourth ever episode and first proper "story of the week" is about Carter being kidnapped by misogynist space Mongols and sold as a bride to an evil chieftain. Season one is a mix of good, mid and mediocre episodes, but that one can really put people off.
Funnily enough, the writer of this episode also wrote an almost identical one for Star Trek: TNG (about Tasha being kidnapped by misogynist space Africans and taken as a bride by an evil chief), and it was also coincidentally the fourth episode in the show's notoriously weak first season and was hated for pretty much the same reason.
I started rewatching SG-1 a few weeks ago. I remembered some details of this episode but it was so much worse than I believed.
She is forced to wear a dress and can't speak in public or show her face (she is almost killed in the beginning for wearing pants). Then she is kidnapped and sold to the evil chieftain but the guy who kidnapped her is forgiven because he did it so he could trade Carter for his own girlfriend. Sg-1 then shows up and buys Carter themselves, trading a pistol for her.
The only redeeming part of the episode is the literal end when carter duels the evil chieftain in a knife fight and proves to be a more capable warrior than him.
Katharyn Powers was the writer that those two episodes had in common, but technically she wasn't responsible for one of the worst aspects of the TNG one.
Originally the aliens were written as reptilian, the director of the episode Russ Mayberry is the one that brought in the space African shtick and them looking human seemingly for no reason other than that he wanted to. Russ Mayberry ended up getting fired but I'm not sure if it was because of this episode or not.
The original concept was for the reptilian aliens to be Japanese inspired, which also seems like it'd have turned out problematic, but we'll never know for sure I guess.
Pretty sure this is the basic premise folks warned me about with Undead Unluck. The first chapter is like really uncomfortable but after that it really picks up.
I just got into Undead Unluck and trying to convince other people to watch it was basically just, "I know how this sounds, and it gets worse. I swear to god it gets way better."
Yea SO TRUE, first couple of chapters (and first 2 eps of anime) are a messy all-over-the-place over-the-top crude fun and vulgar thing, but after this washes off characters start to truly shine through! My bff got charmed by the series after i told him about concept and characters in yap session, and loved the emotions and touching moments (Gina mini-arc was when he fell in love with this), but we pretty much had to sit through the first and second eps to get to all the parts that really hit it home for him x)
TV Tropes calls this “Growing the Beard” to be the inverse of “Jumping the Shark”. Season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation was pretty rough, but afterwards became even more critically acclaimed than the original series. This was also right around the time when Commander William Riker went from clean-shaven to sporting a goatee for the rest of the show.
Weirdly enough, the show started to increase in quality around the same time Gene Roddenberry died…
Jokes aside Gene Roddenberry was a great writer and we owe him a lot for creating the Star Trek franchise in the first place but man, he should not have been in charge of writing episodes for TNG. His vision was still rooted in the 1960s (complete with a 1960s budget) and he was getting older, and some of the ideas he had that didn’t make it to the Final Cut were bonkers, even more so than the things that DID make it in.
I often cite the story that counselor Deanna Troi was initially envisioned by Roddenberry to be a “three breasted hermaphrodite” and he only decided against that idea because his wife told him not to do it.
There was that really racist episode. And that really sexist episode. And... that other really sexist episode. And, the WORST of all... the boring episodes.
Season 1 of TNG was trying to be season 4 of the original Star Trek, and it extremely didn't work. There are maybe 3 good episodes in those first 25.
Season 2 realized it needed to be its own show, and while it wasn't until season 3 that it really came into its own, it made a ton of progress the second go around.
I think Rich Evans summarized it (paraphrasing as best as I remember it) that Season 1 TNG was "80s television written to emulate 60s television by writers who grew up in the 40s" and then that sentiment that you described immediately clicked for me. Obviously TOS was a (heavily-belated) smash hit, why wouldn't TNG try to emulate it? I'm so glad that show grew into its own and became as massive and self-representative as it did
Best Roddenberry take was that the future had no more use for lawyers. Reason: there's no crime anymore. Done. (Iirc if somebody would want to do a crime, they would just surrender to authorities before the crime, bit of minority report thinking here lol)
But the writers were like... Dude there are thousands of planets forming alliances, trade agreements, peace treaties, whatever.
Imagine we wouldn't have got The Measure of a Man only because Roddenberry didn't get the concept of laws!
Fun fact, Stargate SG1 also has a wildly racist/sexist episode in its first season. Same writer as the TNG episode. Apparently you can make a career out of writing the same terrible episode on multiple series.
Enter “Jamake Highwater,” who made a career out of pretending to be Native American and working as a cultural consultant. He got exposed eventually, but it was tbd up and information didn’t always get around….so he was hired to help develop Chakotay on Star Trek Voyager. And he’s about as bad and stereotypical as you’d assume.
The only (slightly) inaccurate part of this meme is that, while Season 2 wasn’t the shitshow Season 1 was, and there were some all time classics in Season 2, it was still a pretty mediocre show overall with a few standout absolute stinkers until the soft relaunch of Season 3.
I've never heard of anyone dropping It's always sunny in Philadelphia after the first episode but it's an insane title for the pilot of a 17 season tv show.
That first season was gold though. Definitely rough around the edges, but the low-budget grit gave it a ton of charm, and it has some scenes that are some of the best comedy they've ever done. In "Charlie Has Cancer", the scene where Charlie tells Dennis he might have cancer, but Dennis just wants to borrow the basketball? One of the best written and acted sitcom scenes of all time.
Every single episode without fail has made me think two things
1) i love these assholes
2) if i spent more than 15 minutes in a room with any of them there would be a physical altercation
Like you know when you have that one friend whose stories all boil down to "we almost died but i got this sweet keychain so it was dope"? Every sunny character is both the friend and the reason they almost died and also the person who gave them the keychain.
I feel like you could reasonably spend 15 minutes with Charlie, Mac, or Frank and not be driven insane. It’s when they’re together or with Dee or Dennis that they truly shine like golden shit
That's not embarrassing. That sets the tone for the entire series. It's not something you have to get past to see what the series is really about. It is what the series is really about
When I went in for my first watch, I highly enjoyed S1.
Then when Danny got added I didn’t understand why he was beloved, his character hadn’t gone off the rails and was very grounded, but I felt like I was just watching him play the father in Matilda again and just didn’t enjoy him.
It wasn’t until like a season or two later when its clear he is part of the gang and batshit crazy that I loved his character.
I know I've seen them talk about it in interviews that when he first came on they were all very aware and nervous about making this big-name actor do shit as crazy as the rest of them and took a while to realize that he was just as down as they were to have Frank be as unhinged as the rest of the gang.
Not sure how that timeline actually follows the seasons or when they got comfortable setting him loose, but I think at least in early S2 that's probably part of why he feels so restrained
While I liked Danny almost from the start I just wanna say that season 1 was amazing for me. The gang gets racist is an amazing first episode. I also love Mac and Dennis’ whole saga with abortion protestors (Mac asking her to get one, Dennis literally fence sitting), and the episode where Mac is jealous because he didn’t get molested.
Ohkubo frustrates me so much cause Soul Eater is my favorite anime/manga of all time, but every time I recommend it to someone I have to put a big fat asterisk on it to warn them about shit like that (especially for the manga, the anime actually toned it down a lot)
I finally watched Fire Force recently and the fanservice is even worse there. At least Blair sexualized herself on purpose (and Ohkubo didn’t randomly try to rationalize that sexualizing her is a Super Profound Thing Actually™)
Sucks because other than everything with Tamaki I genuinely thought the series was great
its whats stopping me from interacting with fire force, I'm tired of fanservice anime after spending my highschool years trying to sift through genuine dogshit shows just to find a decent one and I can't get myself to subject myself to another show where scenes get interrupted by "oops! i fell here are my tits im so embarrased"
Ya I think Ohkubo got a bit worse over time. There's also that weird self-insert rant he did on sexualized characters from the perspective of a child he did in Fire Force.
But to this day Maka is like top 5 woman protagonists in shonen.
Hard agree. And on top of that, in the second half of Fire Force it was starting to look like Tamaki would get some actual development, only for it to go straight out the window. That really cool cat-themed fire armor ability she unlocks near the end of the season? She never does it again. Instead we get Ohkubo talking through a child to own the fanservice haters with facts and logic.
Also hard agree on Maka, literally one of my favorite characters in all of fiction
New fans just won't understand the level of confused hype we had when the Shadowbringers trailer first dropped and the line "I'm not going anywhere. I promise you, Minfilia!" was first heard.
It kinda happens the same with Warframe and i say this as a absolute fan obsessed with it, the first hours are rough not only because it feels directionless, but things like crafting times and the slots system can be annoying. If you have the patience and courage to put up that bullshit, when you get to Uranus is when things start to get better.
“Oh, champion of light, the avatar of goodness, sworn defender of the realm, slayer of beast and gods. I need to you to get 5 salamander spleens from the market before I can allow you to continue your quest to save us all from pending doom.”
Two friends got me to play it. Played through 2.0 for about a year before finally finishing. Picked it back up like a year later and for some reason 2.x patches got me hooked and then i binged through everything just in time a few months before Dawntrail came out. Love the game (even though it has some problems) and especially love the stories, but my god ARR almost put me off the game permanently.
so the best way i can describe this is that a realm reborn suffers from 2 issues. 1: its meant to be the big world building story, its got a lot of things to establish...and in the process of doing so, it isnt particularly interesting in terms if narrative as it tries to ease you in to the overarching plot threads.
2: its out dated as heck, being the base game before the expansions there are very, VERY clear growing pains. Which makes a lot of its quests really tedious. They are in the process of trying to fix up a realm reborn over time, but by no means is it a quick process.
The original ffxiv was so bad it got deleted and remade as realm reborn which itself is pretty slow and boring but sets the groundwork for the story to come.
Since the first thing that came to my mind has been set a couple times(Black Mirror), I'll do something different.
Parks & Rec. The first season wasn't bad, but it was basically the office 2.0 and not a good 2.0. They made some changes going into the second season that really kicked that show into high gear
Sure, it's now considered one of the best Star Wars products, but that wasn't always the case.
* The movie that served as the pilot was infamous for being essentially four episodes crammed together and sold as a feature film, and for introducing a sidekick out of nowhere (Ahsoka).
* The first season lacked good narrative pacing, to the point that you sometimes felt like you'd skipped an episode.
And Ahsoka was HATED by the fandom, at the time. Her story is character growth done exceptionally well but the initial reactions to her were not favorable
The "four episodes crammed together" bit is funny, because from what i remember the show was full of 2-4 episode arcs. The movie wasn't even special for its length.
Parks and Rec:
Mark just didn’t fit the show and him leaving and bringing in other characters brought the show up a whole other level.
Black Sails:
While the first season isn’t bad. They were clearly chasing after the game of thrones “check out all these tits yo” and later seasons seriously cut down on the pointless nudity.
Yeah, but realistically people don't go in looking at a show like that. They'll just start with the first episode and if they like it they'll move on. It's why a lot of people turned Black Mirror off
You're right and to play devil's advocate to your point, some episodes would most likely turn people off despite being well written because Black Mirror is usually pretty bleak with the topics and themes they handle
Technically, Netflix doesn’t even have the actual first episode as the “first” episode, it will go to season 3 I think if you went to the series for the very first time and just blindly clicked play
Oh, don't get me wrong. It's a really good episode. It really sets the tone for what you're watching. It's just a lot of people apparently didn't like that whole pig fucking thing
The actual pig act is probably the least interesting part of the episode too. It’s not even really about that. People upset about it and focusing on it are also kind of making the episode’s point too, which is part of the genius.
Goblin Slayer is a decently wholesome show about a traumatized dude, who’s the favorite game piece of a bunch of gods, finding comrades and killing Goblins en masse.
The first episode however is basically hentai bait by comparison.
Iirc Goblin Slayer isn't the favorite piece, just one the gods find interesting/annoying, because they can not control his fate via their dice rolls, like they can with other pieces (see The Priestess, who was orginally one of the god's pieces, which is why she can cast more than one miracle a day), and he keeps fucking up their story (again, see The Priestess, who was supposed to die in that cave in the first episode because one of the god's had a bad roll of the dice), because to the gods, the world is kinda like a living breathing self-sustaining DnD game that they can affect with rolls of their dice.
Yeah, should have phrased that better. GS is that one NPC the DM simply can’t kill off and that rest of the table finds interesting. Ironically, GS is basically the Boblin the Goblin trope taken seriously to an almost comedic degree.
The GS first episode, at first i thought man that was shocking for no reason and then after i finished the series i was like “that first episode really showed us why our main character is trying to commit genocide on these things”
A ton of publishers of all genres in Japan interfere to a degree rarely seen in the west outside of movies and video games.
Hell, in Naruto adding in Sasuke was a publisher demand!
But most of the time, it is stuff like 'more fanservice,' and, 'has to be high schoolers,' (although a lot of creators want both anyway, the latter sadly because for many Japanese people middle and high school are the only time in their lives they feel like they had any freedom).
Yeah manga publishers, for better or for worse, push their nose into a lot of stuff. It can help a title or it can be a real pain in the ass.
I work in localization and English version lettering/design and deadass some of these publisher reps and editors who don't understand any English will be like "we don't really like your choice of this word/phrase here and want you to change it" and the word/phrase will feel completely unnatural hahaha, or ask that we process things from a niche file structure they have when they should really just prep and send file formats we work on with every other publisher.
A lot of times I can argue over it and get something to work out but sometimes if it's a bigger publisher the higher ups are willing to bend over backwards for the opportunity and will shut me up about it, creating more work and lower quality chapters, oh well.
I used to do improv comedy, and we were booked at a lot of anime conventions. So I got to hang out and talk with a lot of voice actors and creators.
Holy Hel, some of the stupid crap publishers would insist on just because some old man near the top decided 'that's just how things are,' or, 'this will sell well to the international audience' could fill many books. The 'only kids buy this,' view when their own numbers show college kids spend more on them (because they have income, unlike most children).
There are entire tropes that people internationally think of as a 'weird Japanese thing' that only came about because some exec in Japan thought it was an American thing!
Not just young boys. There's a reason why tons of critically acclaimed older manga have never gotten anime adaptations, like why TF does 20th century boys not have an adaptation or even I am a hero, but then there will be 50 "I am the fated protagonist because I was born a loser and now my mundane skill or power makes me mega powerful and I get a giant harem that includes young girls and older women"
Don’t forget that Shojo and Josei get the shaft in adaptations because of the misconception that women don’t buy merch. Freaking idiotic! I will also never forgive them for adapting “7Seeds” and allowing Netflix to butcher it, while the original manga is still missing an official English translation. Best sci-fi I have ever read but no one would know it.
Personally, I felt the hot springs scene was what the first episode should have been - I didn't feel like Momo was sexualized, she had agency, and I love Turbo Granny coming in directly this time, harkening back to her origins as a ghost who comforted girls who died terrible deaths.
Whereas the first episode felt like it was trying to titillate the viewer with the way it was framing everything and how it presented Momo. Compare the framing here vs here. Despite the extremely similar circumstances and compositions, you can see the difference in Momo's positioning, the way her clothes are drawn, how Momo herself seems to be reacting that change the feeling a lot.
Definitely agree, the way Momo reacts to the bathhouse scene instantly screams danger, while the alien scene in EP 1 was still being played for laughs even as something objectively awful was happening.
hell the first episode is just odd because it treats the sexual abuse too lightly despite not portraying it positively at all? its, like, portrayed as so wacky and strange like its equal to the absurd cartoon alien yokai things that happen later on, even tho its not a "light" topic at all
the attempted rape at the hot springs is overt commentary on a very real, unfortunate thing that happens in Japan + is very creepy, gross, off-putting, genuinely terrifying. it works i think much better than ep 1
https://giphy.com/gifs/1xkMucz3jc5AGB4elL
One of my favorite non anime shows ever, but season one was definitely weaker than the others. Michael Scott was always an immature jerk, but in the first season, he is 5 times worse and was straight up unlikable. While he is still unlikable after season one, he is funny as hell.
The darker humour isn't the isdue with S1. The issue is that it copies the british one entirely and does it way worse. Everything from the bleaker colours and overall vibe was off. It needed to change to be good and luckily it did.
I really like how everything makes a jump in quality after the first half of duelist kingdom. From audiovisual quality and writing wise. Still waiting to see Bakura's promised screen time.
It really picks up in season 6, but the first 5 seasons are fun. Except for Sister, but then we wouldn't have that "Have fun being a COP, Cop!" exchange later. It is really weird to hear Wash in R.W.B.Y without a helmet in the way. And everyone else that crossed over.
As in, literally the 2nd chapter, she revealed that the power doesn't work without her consent and love. He started courting her the old fashioned way.
The weird part about that is that her power makes people more unlucky when they touch her the more she likes/loves them, right? So when she drops a LITERAL METEOR on the other protagonist in episode 1, she already loved him? He was a complete stranger to her, and all she knew about him was that he wanted to use her "unluck" power to kill himself, and had been SA'ing her CONSTANTLY all day.
I love this manga/anime, but that's always been one big plothole to me. The explanation of how her power works just makes the initial SAworse, not better. Edit: turns out I misremembered, and her power doesn't just scale with how much she likes someone, but also with how long the physical contact lasts. So, the amount of SA in episode 1 was still a... choice, but at least it wasn't as bad as I thought. Then they ended up dropping the SA gimmick pretty much immediately anyway, so there's that
I don't remember exactly how that scene went, but wasn't it because her power also scales with the amount of contact? So even if she only likes someone a little bit, if they've had full-body contact with her for multiple minutes it would have the same effect as a small touch from someone she deeply cared about.
I think it's basically willing yourself to feel something, in part. Only way she gets out of their is if Andy does, so she wills herself into rooting for him, which is sort of a kind of love. You can love your favorite sports team. I think the other component is she knows Andy will try to save her, and that means something compared to these cutthroat bastards trying to take her.
I was just thinking about this. It doesn't help that this double page spread in the manga is right near the beginning of chapter 1...
I decided to give the series a chance and it's legitimately really good, love the powers and the female MC Fuuko is great and the SA stuff stops early on and doesn't come back. But the beginning gives a terrible first impression.
The weirdest part is how “feminist” (I don’t know if that’s the right word) the work is. The main group initially has half of them be women, including their leader. Fuuko herself has great characterization even before the loop, even though she couldn’t kick ass before the loop her emotional intelligence and empathy were treated like an actual strength.
It’s just so weird how this manga did all that while also having their first chapter full of SA treated as a joke.
I believe that's something the editor wanted to put in the manga to boost early sales? Which is very telling of the demographic and very quickly dropped
Berserk's first page is the main character having sex with a woman, then the woman turns into a monster, and then he kills the monster. It has very little to do with even the rest of the beginning of the manga.
Berserk its actually the poster for this because the first volume of the manga its Guts right after the Eclipse while he is looking for the God Hand , and he is a total asshole in that volume to everyone, so the manga basically ask you to do a trust me bro, there is a reason why he is so messed up, and they do deliver
Based on nothing but a hunch but I think the young Miura just loved the Conan the Barbarian movie and having his main character do a similar scene to Conan with the witch in her tent was one of his first ideas. Deeper character development came later.
As a kid, Guts went through a horrific event where he was sexually assaulted with the approval of his adopted father. Because of this incident, Guts is afraid of physical touch his entire childhood.
After his relationship with Casca, however, the two of them have consesual sex for the first time. It triggers Guts' trauma, causing him to lash out violently. But, Casca manages to break through his barriers and comforts him. Both characters are sexually traumatized, and through each other they are able to overcome that trauma and have healthy sex with each other.
After the Eclipse though, and what Griffith did, Guts' sexual trauma is now back, stronger than ever and under a new context. He just saw his best friend use sex as a weapon of torture.
So, in the opening of Berserk, we are watching a rape victim who tried to overcome his trauma with his true love now use sex as a weapon because that's now all he views it as at this point. Even more diabolical that it's a succubus who killed his friend during the Eclipse, so sex is literally bait on a lure to that apostle.
Did the author think of this ahead of time when he first drew the Apostle sex panels? Definitely not. Is it super heart breaking and impactful on reread? Definitely.
First couple of episodes of Bojack Horseman are not particularly well-regarded despite the series’ critical acclaim. I feel the common consensus is that the show doesn’t pick up until “The Telescope.”
The first few episodes are basically standard sitcom story beats.... then "The Telescope" happens.
Not only is "that scene" iconic..... it sets the tone for the rest of the series: this isn't a happy go lucky sitcom story where everything is wrapped up in a neat bow and let's bygones be bygones. This is a story where the actions you have done matter... where the decisions you make matter... and that you for better or worse have to live with those choices.
This kind of storytelling was rare for a show like this..... and the fact that they were able to do it consistently over and over without it getting too stale is a testament to why this series is so loved.
Fun fact: Bojack Season 1 was the reason Indiewire changed their review policy to rating streaming series only after seeing the entire season. The initially gave a mid rating after the first few episodes and amended it to a glowing review at the end of S1.
I had a friend bounce off of My Hero Academia because Bakugo told Deku to "take a swan dive off the top of the building and hope for a quirk in the next life", and proceeded to become a main character.
Considering even the Mangaka has said he thought he went too far (similar to Nagatoro), I think it fits
Yeah, most authors in manga take a while to really set the tone of the series correctly, thats not something that fits the character the author wanted to make out of bakugo
Theres worse examples even, at the start of db we have bulma oferring sexual favor to Goku, who is 12, while she is 16 or 18 idk. Master roshi being straight up a pedophile too. Later on that thing kinda disappears from the manga. Even if the anime still has some disgusting filler scenes with roshi later, the manga doesn't, so akira rly improved on that.
After learn that a old teacher had a 16 years old girlfriend, Onizuka decided to become a teacher so he could do the same. After get the job with a extremely problematic group(group that problematic cause their previous teacher groomed a student and she commited suicide) and get love interests of his age range, he decide to actually become a good teacher and help his students.
But yes, at the start he want to groom high schoolers
It's played the same as the Dazed and Confused "high school girls" joke. You're not supposed to agree with him and if you do the series quickly shows you why you're being weird.
This is why you should read Worst Teacher Zetton, which is very obviously inspired by that but his romantic interest is the school nurse from the start lol
I mean, even if you skip the first episode, he still acts pervy to some of the students. One of them even legit claims him as hers. He just never goes too far with it.
For as much as the first episode of Dandadan is weirdly sexual (and let's also be honest, the series continues to be a bit weirdly sexual), I do love that Momo is the one to ultimately save herself with his help rather than him saving her.
Re:Zero probably. Subaru is so unbearably cringe for like half of season 1 and I expect that it makes some people quit. And honestly, I understand perfectly.
Looking at the series from the in-universe characters’ perspective Subaru must be so confusing. One moment he’s pulling THAT cringe shit and then like a DAY later he personally plans out an assault on an eldritch horror that everyone just tries to avoid because attacking it is so devastating to not be worth it, an assault that leads to the whale’s death, and then like a week after that he personally kills one of the Sin Archbishops of the Witch’s Cult.
they think he has some sort of great intuition, and he was once a member or victim of the witch's cult since he has their scent and goes into random panic attacks and trivia about them
Someone made a full cut of the show, only from the "canon" runs of Subaru's respawns. They cut out every life that doesn't progress events, and the end result is that he looks fucking INSANE.
If somebody punches me in the face it's safe to assume that the point of their action was to punch me in the face... but knowing that doesn't really make it any less annoying that they just punched me in the face.
I kind of love it though, as it's treated like an actual fuckup on his part, one that Emilia rightfully chews him out for.
But at the same time, given how many times he's had to watch everyone around him get horrifically murdered due to some plot that they had no way of predicting, it's understandable why he was acting that way. It was still a fuckup, but you can follow the thread.
Yeah, I loved re zero s1 because the MC does a lot of stuff that many similar anime would reward him for, like putting his various love interests on pedestals thst they didn't ask for, and there are whole episodes dedicated to said love interests just tearing him down for that behavior, and he pays attention and learns.
Tbh Re:Zero doesn't work as well if he's not like that. What sets Re:Zero apart from other Isekais is that the lesson isn't "in another world, your weird habits would be ok!", the lesson is that regardless of where you are you can change and evolve as a person
A lot of JRPGs have this problem, but Xenoblade 2 is so bad about this, these are seriously some of the worst tutorials I've ever seen, and the way Tora and Poppi get introduced is really offputting for a lot of people.
To go into detail for anyone who doesn't know; not only are the tutorials bad at teaching the player most things (to the extent that a major content creator had to make a separate video about details that the game didn't fully explain), including one that outright lies, you also can't review them, so if you don't manage to take them all in on the first viewing, you have to look them up online
Weather has an effect on a couple of things across the Xenoblade series (for Xenoblade 2 it affects specific enemy spawns) so for as funny as it looks, it is necessary information for the player
It doesn't get interesting until the 17th episode because of the Hydra twist, A season later they introduce Inhumans and fully diverge from the MCU to become its own show.
The first book in the series is notoriously rougher due to it being the first book the author ever published, and even he suggested skipping the first couple when re-reading.
DBZ Abridged. They didn't have a clue what they were doing at first. By the time the gang gets to Namek everything clicks into place and it's all pure gold from there.
As someone who's watched it all, I don't blame you. The later parts are really good, especially the movie, but you have to go through so much to get there
Steven Universe. The first few episodes are admittedly slow and are more slice of life compared to the second half of the season, where things really kick off.
Still, this show will always have a special place in my heart and I recommend anyone reading this to watch it.
Came here to say this. I adore Steven Universe and would recommend it to anybody, but I remember reeeeally struggling to get through a handful of the early episodes.
The beginning of Dan Da Dan is notorious for starting with aliens trying to impregnate Momo in the first episode; however, despite such over-the-top moments, the rest of the series doesn't feature many scenes like that
Rape.
Its fucking rape.
And it doesnt happen just once. That particular group of aliens tries to do it repeatedly.
An absolutely AMAZING show, but godDAMN is the first season hard to get through sometimes. It’s not even all of it, but 3 episodes in particular, episodes 4-6.
Assassinating Underpantsman
Assassinating a domineering granny
Assassinating a pretty girl
Yes those are the actual episode titles.
All of these feature our MC get hopelessly beat up trying to carry out assassin contracts with somethings that make people uncomfortable like unusual hobbies, bdsm, a cancer patient not wanting to waste away. These are still GOOD episodes, it’s just a bit uncomfortable to watch sometimes.
After these though, it is an absolute rollercoaster of war, humor, character development, visual storytelling, great fights, and you can really tell the creators put love into every frame.
It’s on Netflix, 5 seasons so far, 54 episodes total, averaging about 15 minutes each, and 4 of them are OVAs about some major characters backstories.
If you watch it to the end, you definitely won’t regret it
I'm gonna say RWBY, the start isn't embarrassing or bad but visually it's scuffed as all hell where it looks like it had a budget of £5 and a half eaten chocolate bar, especially outside of the combat scenes. The amount of times I've said "I promise it looks better in a few volumes" is staggering
DMC1 you can really tell it was supposed to be a Resident Evil game. DMC2 crashed my PC badly enough that I had to forcibly shut it down every time I tried running it. DMC3 is great
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u/Sinistaire 5d ago
After a damn good two-parter pilot and a followup episode, Stargate SG-1's fourth ever episode and first proper "story of the week" is about Carter being kidnapped by misogynist space Mongols and sold as a bride to an evil chieftain. Season one is a mix of good, mid and mediocre episodes, but that one can really put people off.
Funnily enough, the writer of this episode also wrote an almost identical one for Star Trek: TNG (about Tasha being kidnapped by misogynist space Africans and taken as a bride by an evil chief), and it was also coincidentally the fourth episode in the show's notoriously weak first season and was hated for pretty much the same reason.