#ask hamlet

Didst thou really just quote the bard Jimmy Page as a pick up line? For, ’tis kind of working...

Why in heaven and earth would boys be falling out? Or perhaps it is thou who makes the boys fall out, with thy loaded god complex, thy lust to be remember’d for centuries? Thou murderous ways are the tools of an immortal. But be wary, for these songs thou speak of know what thou hast done under darkness.

Hmmm. This is hard because I am not Isayama, and I have no way of knowing whether I’d do better than he is. It’s like easy to critique when you’re not the one creating it, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I can’t feel very frustrated with Isayama because writing is damn hard.

I’d say that I think the pacing issues are, in part, dependent on the medium the story is being told in. It’s a manga that is monthly and most monthly mangas have some pacing issues because you have to wait a long time for cliffhangers, if a plot thread takes a breather, etc, and it tries audience’s patience (at the same time weekly seems to like, literally kill the mangakas). Bungou Stray Dogs and Noragami are the only two monthly mangas I can think of that have very little pacing issues, and even then they have their frustrations.

For SnK specifically, I think the anime is doing a great job addressing the pacing issues. The way they reworked the Uprising Arc seems to have been a good decision, imo, though of course in a written medium you don’t have to cut as much and I missed some of the cut content--yet the way they introduced Kenny and when they introduced him set up the final conflict in that arc more resonant, imo.

For the Marlay Arc... I kinda think switching perspectives for a monthly manga is almost certainly gonna prove a problem, but it can be done and I’ll be curious how the anime handles it. Then again, the anime is gonna be weekly, so it’ll be less of a problem. Part of the Marlay Arc’s issues are that I’m pretty sure Isayama was aiming to have chapter 100 be The Big Chapter that it was, with That moment, and so some of the chapters of the Marlay Arc (particularly Reiner’s flashbacks) were really unnecessary fat for the story. They were nice to have, but they gave us no new information (not all of the flashbacks! But a few of the chapters were mostly padding). Probably they were only there to drag the story out to have the transformation in chapter 100 call back to the series’ first chapter, which is fine, but like... you can also kinda tell. I’m betting the anime is going to heavily condense the flashbacks for Reiner, and maybe intersperse some of the Marlay content with the flashbacks of Paradis during that time? But they might not intersperse it, and I think they can get away with it if the Marlay Arc is compressed, given the weekly medium of an anime.

It kinda comes down to how much does the medium affect the story you’re telling and how much does an author need to take it into consideration, and are there sometimes times when you’re just kinda screwed?

SnK is Isayama’s first manga and it’s a massive success. That SnK has bad pacing is a thing, but it doesn’t ruin the story for me.

Oh, I’ve heard of her paintings too, well enough. God gave her one face and she makes herself another. Never mind that we can paint ourselves an inch thick, but we will all look like poor Yorick someday.