#like aldnoah.zero 💀

[njararna]

i recently finished vld and i’m like. struck by how dissonant the final two seasons are. it really does feel like a whole new show and not in a good way; the plot is extremely flimsy, characters are introduced who wind up having no real narrative importance but eat up screentime anyways, relationship arcs are started and dropped, and the battles just wind up being a repeat of ‘we have to stop this laser’ and just fights in an empty wasteland with nothing interesting in the dynamic or strategy. when i was watching s7 i remembered why i stopped before the final episode, because seeing that new robeast come out of the sky immediately post-sendak just made me so tired.

s8 as well just…doesn’t know what it wants to do. allura is put through the absolute most and COULD have an interesting arc of being pushed down a darker path as a result of her unresolved grief and continuous loss but the plot of her taking in the dark entity really winds up having no actual consequence on the narrative. genuinely, her and lance’s relationship could have been easily one of the most interesting in the show had the writers actually paid attention to the stuff they had allura say in s8e1 to lance about not having a family or a home or anything at all. it could have been a really great exploration of two characters seeking solace in each other for the wrong reasons—allura because she desperately needs someone to not leave her, lance because he needs someone to love him to feel like he has worth. launch date left me feeling really sad at the end and i know it wasn’t the intention. their relationship throughout the whole season just seemed to be undercut by this feeling of sadness and a misalignment. i couldn’t believe they were really in love, even at the end. they had little moments together and when they did, it was so devoid of chemistry or energy. honestly i really just mourn all the potential allura as a character really could’ve had especially in s8, and how the end for her after all this loss and pain and grief was for her to essentially kill herself, that her best ending was to reunite with her dead father and not to keep living despite it all, that she wouldn’t get to see altea restored or to be the leader for her people she wanted so much to be. it’s a tragedy and not in a good way.

and i think vld’s desperate attempts at ‘nuance’ and ‘morally grey’ characters really wind up sabotaging it in the end; i can’t tell you how hard i rolled my eyes when they tried to convince me zarkon was simply blinded by quintessence or when lance told those kids how ‘allura saw good in everyone, even in zarkon and honerva’. this isn’t how you write nuance, zarkon prior to quintessence had been shown to believe firmly in the castes in galra society and saw the potential of quintessence as simply a means to create greater weapons. the galra were an empire before they went galactic, and empires have never been good in the first place. nuance isn’t about saying how ‘the bad guys have a little bit of good in them actually’, or that ‘in another reality, alteans are evil’. and these muddied messages lead to people actually saying the galra empire wasn’t all bad. looking at the series as a whole, i feel it was doomed from the start to be this way, and its unfortunate. there is so much potential here, and its wasted.

(also the belief that s8 was edited and reanimated is a bunch of bs, while certain elements like ezor being alive were 100% edited in and shiro’s wedding a last minute edition, doesn’t mean the rest of the season underwent major overhauls. its clear the studio was under a tight schedule and the amount of money you’d need to animate a different character over/remove a character for entire scenes or scrap entire pre-existing footage is ridiculous and not to mention an exorbitant amount of work. the reality is is that s8 was poorly written from the jump, and while executive meddling is likely (as always), i think we have to accept there’s no secret s8 or conspiracy. it was bad. when you listen to the showrunners, they’re proud. i don’t think major editing was the case OR that they sabotaged their own work because of the fanbase. these are all just excuses to cope with the reality)