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[Bauglir]

Sledgehammers to the knees and boring MC gets a magical harem anime are both objectively terrible, but then the latter proves really enjoyable for a lot of people and you start getting weird issues trying to rationalize those two facts out.

See, this is exactly my point. It doesn't make sense to say "objectively terrible" here, except as hyperbole, because entirely reasonable metrics that many people use come to exactly the opposite conclusion. It is marketable, and it is entertaining to lots of folks. It's very good at those things! Likewise, I'd say the K-Mart clothes mentioned upthread are better than designer Italian clothes because I can afford them, and it's entirely arbitrary to say, "Oh, no, price isn't an eligible quality for judging things, but the type of fabric is for some reason."

[Neonivek]

Ok I have to ask...

How many fights does Ichigo have where if he actually decided to... well... end the fight...

Would the fight have ended in five minutes?

I watched two fights back to back at random and in both he pretty much strung the battle on endlessly.

[Spehss _]

Ok I have to ask...

How many fights does Ichigo have where if he actually decided to... well... end the fight...

Would the fight have ended in five minutes?

I watched two fights back to back at random and in both he pretty much strung the battle on endlessly.

Sounds like every shonen fight scene ever.

[Andres]

I bet it was a slow slide... but I just started watching this fight after I stopped watching after the Bount Arc... So it is like "Ohh she was rough around the edges but she was still learning her stuff" to "How do shields work?"

It was implied that she'd been psychologically tortured ever since she arrived in Las Noches (a few months, I think) so not only would she be more emotionally fragile, her powers would probably suffer as a result too.

Her powers are directly tied to how capable she thinks she is. She gets better by the Fullbringer arc. Also, skip the Bount arc. It's filler. It's pretty bad filler at that.

Ok I have to ask...

How many fights does Ichigo have where if he actually decided to... well... end the fight...

Would the fight have ended in five minutes?

I watched two fights back to back at random and in both he pretty much strung the battle on endlessly.

Which fights?

[Neonivek]

Ichigo versus Aizen is one.

[i2amroy]

You know what I would really like to see? A show where the amount of power one character has access to at any given point is severely limited but can be spent in any desired amount at once. Then the choice comes down to "do I blow lots of power right at the start hoping to finish the fight quickly and thus save power in the long run? Or do I try to exert as little power so that even though the fights take much longer I still used less power?" If done right you could end up with characters that go full blown killer style at the very start of the fight, with others basically not using any power at all unless they absolutely have to. Could be a pretty interesting power premise I think. Tie it in with the idea that most powers could be nigh-unblockably fatal if you crank them all of the way up against someone not using theres, and you'd get some really tense psychological moments at the start of each fight. Maybe tie in their power supply with their ability to live or something to, so it's a really aggressive dilemma on how much power to use at any given point.

[Neonivek]

You wouldn't want to see that.

Because what you are going to get is a character who uses ALL his power... and then What do you know... he actually had a ton more power the entire time.

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

You know what I would really like to see? A show where the amount of power one character has access to at any given point is severely limited but can be spent in any desired amount at once. Then the choice comes down to "do I blow lots of power right at the start hoping to finish the fight quickly and thus save power in the long run? Or do I try to exert as little power so that even though the fights take much longer I still used less power?" If done right you could end up with characters that go full blown killer style at the very start of the fight, with others basically not using any power at all unless they absolutely have to. Could be a pretty interesting power premise I think. Tie it in with the idea that most powers could be nigh-unblockably fatal if you crank them all of the way up against someone not using theres, and you'd get some really tense psychological moments at the start of each fight. Maybe tie in their power supply with their ability to live or something to, so it's a really aggressive dilemma on how much power to use at any given point.

I would love a scene in that imaginary animation where one of the characters mention that a lot of fights actually end up with both contestants standing stock still for up to 2 hours, waiting for the other person to make the first move and waste their energy.

[IronyOwl]

You know what I would really like to see? A show where the amount of power one character has access to at any given point is severely limited but can be spent in any desired amount at once. Then the choice comes down to "do I blow lots of power right at the start hoping to finish the fight quickly and thus save power in the long run? Or do I try to exert as little power so that even though the fights take much longer I still used less power?" If done right you could end up with characters that go full blown killer style at the very start of the fight, with others basically not using any power at all unless they absolutely have to. Could be a pretty interesting power premise I think. Tie it in with the idea that most powers could be nigh-unblockably fatal if you crank them all of the way up against someone not using theres, and you'd get some really tense psychological moments at the start of each fight. Maybe tie in their power supply with their ability to live or something to, so it's a really aggressive dilemma on how much power to use at any given point.

I think this is sort of a subset of fights being mechanically sound and tactically interesting in general, which is obviously an uncommon feature at best.

But yes, rush vs balance vs turtle dilemmas could be interesting.

You wouldn't want to see that.

Because what you are going to get is a character who uses ALL his power... and then What do you know... he actually had a ton more power the entire time.

Well of course everything would be terrible if they do it terribly.

I would love a scene in that imaginary animation where one of the characters mention that a lot of fights actually end up with both contestants standing stock still for up to 2 hours, waiting for the other person to make the first move and waste their energy.

Or where the fight takes 2 seconds because either rush mode works or doesn't work and either way somebody's already lost. Still, could hardly be worse than eyeballing it most of the time.

[i2amroy]

It would probably help if you either had easily visible power amounts (a meter, or a halo that turns black, or something), or the authors really played up the "you have only a limited amount of power, use it very wisely or you die" idea (Maybe have at least a few characters go out that way in the middle of their fights).

I mean sure it could be done horribly, but so can anything.

Alternatively you could have it so that the power is basically "off" or "on" without much in-between. "On" is crazy-powerful but it burns through your lifespan in moments, while off means you're just fighting with your fists and if the other person goes "on" then you are pretty screwed. Stretch out that psychological tension of "are they going to activate now?" out throughout the whole fights, which become this horrible world of constantly trying to outguess when your opponent is going to go "on". Less of a turtle vs. rush idea, and more of a psychological one, so it might play out a bit better being interesting as a tv show.

[Frumple]

... so basically you want to see an anime where the main character uses vancian style magic. Spells slots!

That said, there's several (shonen, usually) manga out there that have similar conceits. Power that will kill(/corrupt/drive insane/etc.) you if overused is almost standard, really. Freaking Naruto did that, albeit not as a central focus. Other stuff manages it as a central focus -- Madoka, ferex, if somewhat more drawn out. Eva used power measured in minutes (after the power cord got cut) regularly. There's a decent sized chunk of more obscure stuff I'm forgetting the names of. Edgier stuff (or at least stuff that's trying to be edgy) seems to enjoy using the concept. Aiki (warning if you actually look for that one, it's thoroughly NSFW -- written/drawn by a critter probably better known for porn, and it shows. There's many amazing faces, though.) works with the concept via a more-or-less crippled protagonist/antagonist.

[EPSIL0N]

I'll have to look up some of those, I like anime but I'm also in the camp that gets annoyed that we can go x-many installments with the main character(s) slowly losing a fight only to find another magnitude of power at the last moment and then win with ease and there is no last consequence to this new power.

I am trying to remember if I actually liked dead man wonderland but I seem to remember that with the powers being blood based there were limitations on how much could be wasted.

[Reelya]

The anime of Deadman Wonderland did quite poorly commercially in Japan, so it was not picked up for a second season. Basically there's no hope in hell of ever seeing him get out of that prison, although you could read the source material instead.

Those drawn-out things like you describe tend to be confined to stuff based on shonen battle mangas. Those mangas are released at maybe 24 pages per week, and they need to keep the young teenage readers "hooked" week after week with ongoing action, and with a younger target readership, you need to compensate for having many readers who just cannot go back and start at the start, these comics need to be able to be picked up in the middle with no problems. So you have to make every 24 page installment exciting, have cliffhangers, and make sure you can pick up and drop the series at any point without getting too confused about who is doing what. These constraints don't really allow the writer to have tons of intricate long-term plots going on. Really you would only have space for 1-2 side plots along the main plot at a time. Plus of course the writer doesn't want to wrap up a popular series too soon, so you draw out the main battles, have lots of side quests/smaller battles, and you drop miscellaneous plot elements quickly if they get in the way of telling an exciting tale in each 24 page installment.

Light novel based series *can* do things a lot different to mangas. They're usually released in tankoubon format (though some are serialized as written chapters in magazines), which is about 200 pages of written material, so they can have a big action start, slow down in the middle and get more "talky" then back to action for the finale of the novel. But a big stretch of discussion in the middle of a manga would totally kill your readership. For light-novel based anime you get arcs somewhere between a couple of episode to a season with a well-defined story arc, and intricate plotting. The only caveat is that these types of anime tend to feel like they "reset" a bit after each arc, since the start of each novel will have the characters in their daily life, then Adventure Happens, and it's resolved maybe a little too neatly. The Index / Railgun series and the one about vampires Strike The Blood are good examples of this type of series, each of those has arcs which are 4 episode each, corresponding to a different novel in their series.

I really never got into shonen battle stuff at all. I'm getting into some shonen sports series now. In sports series, the overall arc tends to be based around some real-life tournament, so there's a definite time limit on the future action, and many of them are based around school team sports, so after that tournament is over, some of the characters will have to graduate. Usually the main characters are first years (three year high school) and the overall story focuses on their single year of tournaments. They don't usually go past this, as then you'd just be explaining the same tournaments over again, which is not fun for the writer or reader. The way these mangas extend the lifetime of the series is not by tacking stuff on after the final battle, they do it through flashbacks, backstory and character development. So you end up with detailed character histories of not only the main characters but most of their opponents as well, and it's very rare that they will try and depict the other team as pure frothing evil. My favorites in sports: Hajime no Ippo, Yowamushi Pedal, Kuroko's Basketball and Baby Steps.

[i2amroy]

So I recently ended up reading this manga (God knows why! ) and it turned out to be much more hilarious than I ever imagined so I'm title dropping it here: Dragons Rioting.

This looks like your extremely typical ecchi harem setup (stay with me though!): main protagonist's heart is physically vulnerable to sexual arousal and so he enrolls at what he thinks is and all-male school only to find out that (no surprise here), it's an all-girls school that recently went co-ed instead. The hilariousness comes from the way that they decided to handle his reactions, rather than screaming and bad protestations like you see repeated so often elsewhere they decided the best thing to throw into the setting was extremely over-the-top martial arts moves. End result? The main guy spends something like half of his time on page repeating his mantra of "Clear Mind; Silent and Serene Heart" while yelling things like "The Way of the Swallows Wings: Retreat with Expedition" before back-fliping away from swimsuit teams.

Spoiler: Complete with similar over-the-top illustrations, of course. (click to show/hide)

Of course it's still horribly fanservicey the vast majority of the time, but I laughed aloud enough times while reading it that I figured at least some of you would get a kick out of it .

[Leafsnail]

http://i.imgur.com/8oC5yko.jpg