#the story gets worse bc it breaks your suspension of disbelief

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

"okay but what ACTUALLY happened in that minor characters backstory" "what did that character SPECIFICALLY do to become like this" "how does the plot device ACTUALLY work" oh my god i don't care! i don't care about your cinemasinsing about every little detail! does knowing this technical detail improve the audience's emotional understanding of the story? no? then i don't want to fucking see it in canon!

anything you come up with in fanworks is going to be more fun for you than what the author can do in canon! any attempts by the author to explain something technical in the story takes away time and investment from the main plot! so if the technical explanation doesn't inform the main plot then it's just useless trivia for completionism's sake! this shit should be written about in fanworks! or spinoffs! or idk the writers can tweet about it or smth! i don't need it in the actual main story!

[saveahorserideaneddie]

but it is just like abby… eddie is making the choice to permanently move to texas just bc he doesn’t want to put his foot down as a parent

i don’t understand this mindset that eddie telling chris to come back to LA would be “strong-arming” him… not only is chris only 14 years old, but he’s been gone for 3 months- enough is fucking enough, but no lets let a moody teenager completely dictate everything, right? the same talking point ramon and helena used to take him away in the first place?

returning to texas in and of itself is a symbol of giving up. eddie is literally giving up on being a parent to chris, letting helena and ramon raise him while he lives down the street and gets visitation rights to his son since aparently we’re letting chris dictate things now.

not to mention- eddie is blatantly casting aside his entire relationship with buck for this… why would buck just magically forgive him for abandoning him and telling him he’s unlovable and unimportant just because eddie changed his mind about permanently leaving.

walk w me for a second here- if i said “i’m going to steal everything in your house” and go as far to actively break in, but then change my mind at the last minute and go “oh nevermind”…. are you just going to act like i didn’t actively break into your home or are you going to call the cops?

the intent is there- eddie is choosing to give up, over fighting for his son, and fighting to keep his life intact; that isn’t healing, and that is not something we should be encouraging as a fandom, nor should we be happy that that’s where eddie’s story is going; we should want him to heal, not make his problems worse, and permanently moving back to texas is only going to ruin his life, his son’s life, and his relationships w everyone in LA.

and while we’re on the topic of abby- technically abby did come back too… but not after completely moving on. you can’t tell me these writers wouldn’t give eddie a new gf who moves back to LA with him whenever he comes back after the time jump- they don’t want buddie together or else they would be making strides towards not against- and after spending an entire half-season showing eddie both being an asshole to buck, and also not being a good enough friend to point out how tommy was an awful boyfriend (only playing around w the phone thing, never actually having a meaningful heart to heart about how buck deserves better)… the writers have been clear in the intent to isolate them from each other, and that doesn’t point to eddie being buck’s anything- it just leads to eddie signaling to buck that he doesn’t matter to anyone, and he never will because now everyone he’s ever loved has left him at some point, which is what set eddie out among the rest, but now tim has made eddie just as careless about buck’s feelings as the rest of them.

as for the uhaul thing- when has this show ever put effort into getting details like that correct? the suspension of disbelief in this show is egregious in every episode, and we are suddenly supposed to take the size of the uhaul at face value? they absolutely would play it off as “ofc all his stuff is in there wdym??” because production constantly chooses the cheapest option possible for things like that, especially if they are more practical (and a uhaul trailer is more practical to film with than a whole ass moving truck- especially when it’s for a scene that obviously is only going to take up the last 45 seconds of screentime because they love to just give buck and eddie crumbs of plot when it comes to each other)

im not trying to be rude or be difficult, but i feel like we consistently as a fandom jump to the conclusions they want us to so they can keep baiting us and dragging us along for nothing and until we stop doing that and actually start pushing back against them when they try to fuck w stuff, they will just continue to drag us along- they’ve been doing it for six years, they will continue doing it as long as we let them- and we still are.

i don’t understand how people think “eddie=abby” is a good thing…

eddie treating buck the same way abby treated buck is just a kick to the face, not some grand romantic gesture

i think we get lost in this idea of “ooh a parallel” but look at what the parallel is… it’s two people who had a major impact on buck’s life abandoning him for selfish reasons with no regard for his feelings on the matter- proving him right that he is unlovable, and unimportant to everyone in his life

the amount of people who think that buck shouldn’t get pissed at eddie for this is…. shocking… bc if the only person who never left me behind suddenly does right after i’ve gone through an emotionally traumatic experience (maddie getting violently kidnapped) especially for a selfish reason like giving up on being a parent, i don’t think i could ever find it in me to trust that person again after they explicitly and intentionally break that trust

[madokasoratsugu]

im new to shokugeki and i dont care about spoilers, why is it bad?

a no joke answer bc u deserve this:

tl;dr Shokugeki sucks because it lost its direction halfway through the story, and when Tsukada (the author) realised that he’d bitten off more than he could chew with such a huge cast of characters.

long answer:

here’s the thing. Shokugeki started out good. 

it mostly played off the usual shounen tropes: a challenger would appear, but then they quickly joined the friendship circle, rinse and repeat. but with such a wide cast of characters with differing goals and personalities plus the high stakes of only the top 10% graduating, it made it easy to bank on the character interactions and friendships, which is what the first half of Shokugeki did, heavily so. and it worked ! 

it was a simple set up (protag aims to beat his dad in a cook off, goes to cooking school, meets friends and foes ! a tournament arc ! fun and shenanigans ! yay!), but Shokugeki did it good. it didn’t subvert any expectations, just did according to what it set out to do. nothing felt exaggerated beyond the typical manga stuff, and everything achieved was earned with hard work. with the occasional fluff and friends thrown in, it became a comfy mix for a good shounen manga.

if anything, id say that half the success came from the character’s relationships themselves - the plot wasn’t anything special, but the genuinity that the characters and their friendships and goals (shared or not) were treated with were wholesome and fun.

which is why it was so fucking jarring when it derailed by throwing aside half of its cast and completely stagnating all character development for the remaining half.

(insert infamous Central Arc expulsion joke here)

if you’ve started/are intending to start, id say its the most obvious after the Moon Banquet Festival Arc/beginning of Central Arc. the writing started getting sloppy, as did the handling of the characters. ive mentioned this before, and ill stress this again: i honestly believe that Central Arc is when Tsukada realised what a big miss steak he did in creating such a huge cast, and in the face of Shokugeki’s then success, made some poor authorial choices to keep the hype going (both plot and character wise).

for characters: half the cast was rid of via expulsion, including very competent chefs (which had no proper in canon explanation on how the fuck that happened) who happened to be fan favourites. i mean, Hayama Akira ? fuck, Nakiri Alice, anyone ? plus any poor remaining characters got shafted in lieu of Souma, hard. this became more prominent as the Arcs slowly go on, the ones of which took the worst brunt of it being Takumi and Megumi.

(what do u think is worse. your fav never getting a cameo or your fav being part of the forefront team but constantly getting fucked over because Souma didn’t get the spotlight of the chapter yet. vote now in the replies.)

for plot: higher and higher stakes were introduced that again, just didn’t make sense !! in Central Arc, Souma was expected to win against Eishi, the best chef in his entire school. when two arcs prior he just lost a cooking contest to two of his peers (placed third), and one arc prior struggled to beat Kuga in ticket sales (even then he didn’t win because his cooking was better, so. wasnt even a win on the cooking front). there was no build up ! NOT EVEN A TRAINING ARC. he just went straight from the bottom rung of the ladder to the fucking ceiling. super different from the first half of the series when everything would be shown in careful detail (best example i can think of off the top of my head being the Shokugeki against Mimasaka in the Autumn Election Arc).

also: in the midst of introducing Erina’s character arc and backstory, Tsukada seemed to completely forget (or maybe just didnt know how to link back?) that he’d already established an overarching plotline: Souma’s quest to best Jouichirou. so when Souma began overthrowing these foes that are his seniors said to be leagues ahead of him, the suspension of disbelief was stretching waaay thin. but hey ! its a shounen manga ! we can forgive this much (sarcasm). 

then Tsukada introduces Asahi. mother fucking Asahi. who is basically introduced by beating Jouichirou without breaking a sweat, but oh boy did he break the suspension of disbelief right then and there and completely toss the plot into the fucking fire. because there’s no end goal anymore ! the one thing that our main character has been working so hard for ? non existent. pointless. this no name (at that time) character has done it, pack your bags boys, let’s go home.

(might i note that at this point, Shokugeki was also uuhh nothing like the slice of life comedy it originally was. it became an action-psychological mix that just…doesnt work. and i mean. of course it wouldn’t. there was no foreshadowing, the villians can’t be taken seriously because 1) theyre also teenagers for fuck’s sake 2) Azami’s just a creep, plain and simple. he has no depth. no one cares about an antagonist who’s bad at just being bad.

the themes it began with was completely set aside for really badly written character backstories and angsty edgey bs that i still don’t understand why Tsukada thought would work in retaining hype. especially when considering how pure the premise was.

i honestly also think that its the Blue Arc + Dark Chefs Arc when Tsukada actually realised that his plot had gone haywire, since volume sales were dropping hard and fans clearly hated the direction the series had gone in. but instead of trying to reign it back in, he decided to just let it run buckwild because he just didn’t know how to fix it.)

to rub salt into the wound: so many promised resolutions are shoved into the background, done offscreen, or worse yet, forgotten ! scenes that fans have literally been waiting for. Souma VS Erina Shokugeki. Souma VS Takumi Shokugeki. Nakiri Alice coming back to the series and actually fucking cooking again.

(im sure that there’s more that lead to its downfall but like. shrugs. this is mainly to me why it sucks: it had A Lot going for it (im not ashamed to admit that at one point i actually genuinely believed it could be one of the next Big 3 on Shounen Jump), and it just didnt live up to any of it for no other reason other than Tsukada mixing elements of a story that didn’t work well together, tried to force them to work, and did nothing to fix it when it didn’t.)

so our plot is gone. so are our lovable characters. so is the slice of life comedy that drew most people in in the first place. the potential that it had is now dust. what does Shokugeki have left that makes it unique, that makes people love it ? here’s the answer !

nothing. 

that fact kicks you in the teeth every fucking time you remember how good the first half of the series was. 

then that fact dropkicks you when you realise that Shokugeki no Soma literally started on a 90degree drop into a dumpster fire when the series was at the apex of its popularity and plot buildup.

that’s why it sucks.