[FLASH REVIEW] God-damn Dragonball Z setting such a bad precedent... · 8:56am Sep 3rd, 2017
I typed out the following in a fit of pique at 1:00 in the morning when I should have been asleep, but I just got so damn frustrated at reading what turned into a mind-numbing slog through yet-another-power-escalation story. You know the type, "Oh, fuck, we just made our character Mary-Sue levels of over-powered...Quick, make the next bad-guy even nastier...no, wait, give the current bad guy a "Final Form" that makes his previous form look weak in comparison...and THEN make the bad guy even worse!" Dragonball Z was the worst offender of the lot, and the one that I became aware of first. "Our good guy can sneeze and blow out a mountain, what are we going to throw at him to make it look like a challenge?" "I know, how about a bad guy...no, TWO bad guys who can accidentally commit mass murder by pissing too hard!" "Genius! Then make it so their boss could wipe out a solar system by farting!" "BRILLIANT! And then make the next bad guy so hard core he's like that guy...but he shoots SHARKS from his eyes!"
You take my meaning.
So here's my rant/review of Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls. Take it for what it's worth...which is probably not much.
OK, yeah, that's it. I'm done. I made it to Chapter 23 and realized I wasn't even halfway done and there's no freaking end in sight!
This is why I consciously chose to not watch Bleach; don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good, complex, interwoven story as much as the next uber-geek (I am an avid fan of Babylon 5, after all) but this crossover, like the source anime, just has this obsessive need to add complexity without actually resolving a god-damn thing!
With Babylon 5 and similar, at the very least the story arcs were de-facto set in stone: You had hour-long stories (or 2-3 hour stories, depending on if an episode was a multi-parter), you had season-long story arcs, and you had series-long story arcs. Every year we could count on, not really all, but most of the plots resolved to some satisfaction before even more of the fucking things were piled on.
I didn't finish reading this thing, so I'm not going to comment on the vast, vast majority of it. I understand from the comments that the Quincy/Soul Society feud is inherited from Bleach, so this author gets a pass on that particular bit of stupid. In fact, the author manages to actually sell (nearly) the characters on each side nicely. It doesn't...exactly...neatly...match, it's a bit imperfect and feels a teeny bit janky, but given the constraints I can only applaud the result. The one thing I will state with any sort of authority at all is that I'm...disappointed.
Sci-Twi's strengths are not faffing about with spiritual bows, but making techno-stuff that breaks the rules of magic. There's other, much more minor places I'm disappointed with this fic, but this one takes pride of place because it's so...glaring. The Sci-Twi from Friendship Games would be half data-analyzing, half building some sorta spirit-Tesla-canon-thing. Four chapters after she'd perfected the portable scanners, she'd be deploying a city-wide scanner. She'd accept the training from her brother (the MOST believable fusion in this fic, by the by. Let it not be said I don't appreciate the good stuff, too), but mostly as a way of furthering her overall understanding of everything that's happening.
For fans of Bleach (the ones who could stand to sit through the Dragonball Z-esque, "Nuh-uh, I'm the strongest kid on the playground!" mindless power-escalation garbage so many shonen anime have stagnated into), this fic is, I'm sure, a pleasurable and intriguing homage to the series that inspired it. I never could tolerate the crutch of, "I need a bigger, nastier bad-guy, so let's take the last bad guy...and give him LAYZUR-EYES!!!' that the Bleach story writers used, so unless this author can reassure me that, yes, the frustrating slog through chapters eventually does get rewarded by a god-damn conclusion, I'm probably not going to be resuming my read of this fic.
And before I sign off, I just want to make sure I'm clear on what I mean by a "conclusion." I just finished (spoilers marked for those who may not have actually read the story before this comment) the story arc where Adagio 'dies' in battle and uses her new Hollow abilities to give everyone a way out. Yes, that was a satisfying sacrifice scene that was excellently written. But given that it came right after they managed to have a probably-too-long-but-god-damned-fucking-BLEACH-is-the-source-material-so-of-COURSE-it's-loooooooooooong battle right after they lost a member of their crew to petty political bullshit right after having to deal with an epic cunt that can't recognize that the enemy of my enemy is (at least temporarily) my friend and oh, golly, there's bigger things to worry about with building sized hostiles stomping about (but, in fairness, said character type is an accepted trope of action fiction, so no points lost) right after finishing an epic slog through an invasion. It's simply...too...god...damn...much to have happen without a satisfactory resolution. Hell, even changing the order of some (Having Sci-Twi taken home by her family after the trip to rescue the family members, for example) of the above would have allowed for a story arc to resolve (Adagio's sacrifice play) so there isn't so much left unresolved at once.
