#twavie :3

[jasondeansgothwife]

everyone besides me has probably already seen this but look what i found

[dunkelzahn]

So, Double Decker. We’re one episode away from the finale and I, for one, will be glad for it. This series has been nothing but a disappointment, and it pains me because the ways to fix it are so simple. This show has everything I would enjoy, but the execution just falls flat. I got into this series because it was being hyped as a spiritual sequel to Tiger & Bunny. Both shows have been put in the “Buddy Series” franchise by Sunrise. Some sources were even reporting it as a prequel to T&B, which has turned out to not be the case.

The following is gonna contain spoilers, though, so if you haven’t caught up and you care about things, just skip on past. To summarize because this is a long rant more than an organized post: The tone is clumsily set and inconsistent, the characters are static, the show is poorly paced, and there’s almost zero foreshadowing for the majority of the plot developments, both sapping them of their impact and making them come off as asspulls. If this is the kind of storytelling we can expect for Tiger & Bunny’s Season 3, I hope that the series stays dead.

Double Decker Doug & Kirill follows Kirill Vrubel (A lot of people have talked shit about this name, but it’s a Russian name, so.) as he becomes a detective in the SEVEN-O section. SEVEN-O handles ‘Anthem’, a drug that kills 30% of its users, gives the others incredible highs, and, when too much is taken, can give them superpowers while warping their minds and bodies. SEVEN-O’s main weapons are the AMS Bullets, which contain a secret mix of chemicals that act as a cure for Anthem.

Sounds awesome. Sciencey police stories? Crime dramas? Feed them to me.

SEVEN-O consists of Travis, the self-serving boss who lives by movie trope rules, Sophie, the secretary that speaks with a ‘cute’ inability to say the letter ‘r’ (Instead she says things like “Twavis” and “evewyone”), Doug, the veteran (and Kirill’s partner), Deana, the Tough Action Girl Who Doesn’t Follow Rules, her partner Kay, the Law and Order newbie who’s an extreme foodie, Yuri, the robot, and Max, the other Tough Action Girl who’s kinda-sorta but never outright stated to be in a relationship with Yuri. Also assisting them is Doctor Apple, a young genius who makes all of their tech and might be a voyeur. Kirill is a Young Idiot who’s totally divorced from reality and desperately wants to be a hero. Also his sister is missing.

I hope you read that last section, because that’s about all the character development anyone gets. They are all totally static characters and, while the series reveals minor details about them here and there, what you see is what you get. Max and Doug get some of their past fleshed out, but neither of them really change. Or, rather, the changes Doug goes through don’t feel natural because he doesn’t feel natural as a character. None of them have any level of charm except for Kay and Yuri, and Max when she’s dealing with Yuri.

Kirill’s main flaw, and much of the source of both ‘humor’ and ‘drama’, is that he’s an idiot who keeps jumping to conclusions about people, their methods, and their goals. He’s such an idiot that he doesn’t even realize that his sister, Milla, is actually his brother, Valery until they walk into the same bathroom and start pissing next to one another. Oftentimes this stupidity will be underscored by the narrator, a ‘comically’ screaming man who screeches out the truth of the matter, such as “That’s right! Doug’s actually a huge asshole!” or “Kirill is an idiot! This isn’t that kind of series!”

Not only does the narrator shatter the mood of quite a few scenes, he’s jarring and never really that entertaining. Fortunately, they mostly phase him out early on, but by that point he’d soured several viewers. Especially when it came to Kirill talking with a side character, Derick (Doug’s former partner who quit to open a shitty restaurant, instantly giving him more personality than Doug himself) and they found out they knew each other from... an unnamed incident that the narrator declares boring so they won’t bother with it.

And that kind of displays part of the show’s humor there. When it’s not trying too hard to be irreverent to the genre with characters specifically avoiding specific tropes, it’s trying for cringe humor at Kirill’s expense.

...

A large part of what I’ve noticed about the show is their inclusion of LGBT characters. Deana might be into girls, Kirill’s straight but doesn’t mind dressing up as a woman to help someone out, his brother’s a crossdresser (though only for their safety rather than any deeper reasons), you get two guys obviously in a relationship and arguing, and Yuri and Max were living together and planning vacations with one another. But the problem is that... It comes off as they’re trying to earn points. Especially when they kill off Yuri, so you get that tired old “Dead Lesbians” trope all over again. Or the prom episode, with the villain being a girl so insanely in love with straight girl that she’d kill to make her happy.

Even Max’s backstory, what they deliver of it, comes off as “Look, she dated a transsexual/transvestite (It’s never clear which her date was) in high school and started taking on butch styles because of that! Pat us on the back for being inclusive!” It feels insincere. Like they want points, not for actual, natural inclusion. Especially since the build up to it has been more along the lines of “She’s about to kill herself because she’s been bullied!” rather than “She’s just crying and cutting her hair so that she can wear a tuxedo and a side-cut to prom!” Kudos for inclusion, not so much for making a huge deal about calling attention to it like they want you to hang it on the fridge.

...

Speaking of tone, it’s incredibly inconsistent. They start off acting like a cop drama, then they whiplash into “YOU’RE AN IDIOT IF YOU THINK THIS IS THAT KIND OF STORY, THIS IS A COMEDY!” in the first episode. And they stick to that for about three more episodes before it starts changing into a serious drama, then suddenly a burst of comedy, and then a sudden snap back to a plot so serious that it doesn’t feel like it belongs in the same series. It’s inconsistent and that inconsistency is frustrating.

To bring up Tiger & Bunny again, the tone was set from the first episode and the darker, more dramatic bits that crept in did so over time, with plenty of buildup. There wasn’t a feeling of inconsistency because, by the twelfth episode, things had been serious for a good while but comedy was still present as well. It was balanced and felt natural, with little to no whiplash.

It’s not just the tone that’s off, either. By the end of T&B’s first episode, you knew just about where every character stood. You knew the rough outline of every character’s personality. But as of Episode 3, Double Decker is still introducing main characters and we haven’t learned much about existing ones already.

That haphazard way of introductions plagues the rest of the series, too. We’re only introduced to the main villains in episode 5 (of 13! That’s part of why I’m so frustrated with the pacing, they waste so much time!) and then they vanish for four episodes (of thirteen!), only to be wiped out almost immediately after they appear again while the *real* main villain, along with the organization he represents (which only got properly introduced that very episode, in episode 11 of 13!) taking the reins. for the remaining three episodes of the season. In episode 11, we finally discover why there’s a second sun, it’s actually a space colony that only the government knows about and has somehow managed not to be noticed by any amateur astronomers! In episode 12, we learn that the colony is an evil colony that created Anthem to perfect their super soldier serum and the reason they want Kirill is because his bodily fluids are the cure for Anthem!

The last item isn’t mentioned or hinted at anywhere in the series until then. Nikai, the second sun, is hinted at by a drunk raving about conspiracy theories and having connections ‘upstairs’, but that doesn’t really make for proper foreshadowing. If I were making a story where the surprise twist was that Thor was going to appear, having a drunk talk about Thor early on and then never bring him up again wouldn’t be proper foreshadowing either. The series seems to think that tossing in massive plot twists makes for an entertaining story, but it really just keeps people from getting invested.

I’m ending this now, largely because I’ve run out of steam and I’m honestly tired of talking about it. I’ll finish out the series, but if Double Decker gets another thirteen episodes, I’m probably just going to skip those. And I’ll be recommending that any friends of mine who might be interested do the same.

[alpaca-suri]

ID: A series of screenshots taken from the aforementioned wiki. 1: "Travis is the all powerful brother." 2: "Travis' Good Boy Vibes are warm enough to melt a human being alive. He is the Softest boy. He is the human embodiment of the :D face, and the most valid being in the entire universe." 3: "He has been co-host of MBMBAM since its founding in 2010, though many goofs have pertained to the fact that he is simply a guest on the show and not actually a brother." 4: "His daughter Barbara "Bebe" McElroy is a visionary who occasionally manages Travis's social media accounts far better than he ever could." 5: "Travis has killed before, and he will kill again. Though, you need not worry, he kills to protect." 6: "Twavis Patrick." End ID.

Some highlights of travis’s fandom wiki page