r/unpopularopinion•
robozee

All long-span or highly expansive fiction in watchable media is bad

Talking mainly about anime/TV shows since I don't read (much). Any such media with 100+ episodes is at best mediocre because:

  1. Maintaining continuity and/or avoiding minor and major contradictions over a long span of time is basically impossible, especially if you have different writers and directors working on different episodes which is very common in shows like this.

  2. Planning to make hundreds of episodes or several seasons ahead pushes the production team to "spread out" their budget and effort, instead of focusing on making the best quality work they can every episode. This also leads to the so-called "fillers".

  3. Every good and great stories have a beginning and an end. Every character exists to tell a story. Watchable fiction is not the Sims game or real life. There's only so much you can do with each character before they overstay their welcome, no matter how much we love them. When the author doesn't have an endgame in mind, or continues the story despite it ending, it often feels forced and lame.

  4. Because of 3) writers and directors try to "fix" this problem by making too many side-characters, or sometimes even adding new main characters, which not only overbloats the narrative unnecessarily but also leads to the focus being all over the place and 1)

I've only ever had experience with only three such shows in the past: Lost, Naruto and Jojo, but the experience was enough for me to avoid any such media in the future.

I know that you might be saying "you don't need to watch past than X", or that "just watch X and Y, you don't need to watch other shows/movies/OVAs in this universe". For me the whole fictional universe matters. If I'm going to invest, I'm going all in. If I only need to watch just a fraction of One Piece episodes for example, why bother at all?

Posted Nov 14, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

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