#imnot spending half an hour writing that to abandon it to my sea of personal posts.

[boypussydilf]

I think maybe the cause, or at least some of the cause, of the Sgt Frog Tonal Weirdness is, like… Let’s say you take any random episodical, status-quo, kids/family comedy cartoon. It’s not impossible for there to be Serious Episodes in there, happens all the time, but a lot of the time the Serious Things are things that, by nature, cannot affect the status quo. They don’t change anything, they don’t impart any new information - the Seriousness is caused by either decisions made by the characters during the episode, or by some external force that has never been a problem before - including off-screen - and will not be a problem again. Do you follow me or am I being too vague? I don’t even know if this is accurate. And yet still, regardless, point is: in this situation, you want the cause of your Serious Episode to be either the characters as they are now, or something that can be contained to one episode and doesn’t have any bearing on anything else.

This is because if you Get Serious, and then, while in Serious Mode, impart new information about the characters or the world, it changes things, on a more fundamental level. If you share New Character Information while being silly, it can be ignored at will, used exclusively for jokes, overwritten… doesn’t matter. If you share New Character Information while being serious, that information seems important.

Sgt Frog has had some changes that technically affect the status quo - mainly, or perhaps exclusively, the introductions of new recurring characters - but overall, it relies very heavily on everything being the same. Keroro will always be trying and failing to invade and the Hinata kids will always be in middle school and no one will ever learn from their mistakes, because the status quo presented from the outset is where the jokes come from. You can’t change it, because where would we be without the faithful gags of terrible invasion plans and middle school crushes to return to?

So you would expect it to follow the same general formula of comedy series that cannot under any circumstances alter what the normal everyday lives of the characters are like. It can get serious sometimes, but not in a way that gives the impression that anything has changed.

Except! It! Doesn’t! Well, sometimes it does. Sometimes we get episodes with Serious Tones that don’t have any consequences outside of the episode (like the one where Keroro runs away with his new motorcycle, or, I THINK, the season 1 finale where they think their mission has been completely called off but ‘Twas All A Misunderstanding.) But there’s also a lot of instances where the series Gets Serious, and then, while Serious, imparts new information about the characters or the world that affects how we see them! We learn backstory that gives important context on why the characters are the way they are and who they used to be, we get important lore on the Keron army and their methods, we… I don’t know… See them… committing war crimes? Meet… ninjas trying to kill the platoon who don’t know they’re actually run by a Keronian- I don’t know what the fuck was happening in that manga chapter I’m still trying to work it out.

Anyway, basically, Sgt Frog is a series where nothing in the day-to-day can ever change but then they drop information that feels both tonally and in subject matter like it should change things or at least open a gateway for things being able to change in the future but it can’t happen and then the tone is a little weird and inconsistent sometimes. That’s all.