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Reviews
Memorias de Idhún (2020)
Haha bad writing go brrrr-
Important Note: I haven't read the books, so take this with a grain of salt. Given there are a good few reviews here coming from the lovers of the books I decided I'll give them a read, but this is a review of the animated show and not the books.
The trailer had me interested for a while, I have a hard time getting into new anime (I'm very critical) but I decided to ultimately give this a try as Netflix would NOT stop shoving it in my face.
The first two episodes we establish Kirtash as a villain, with some other guy I can't be bothered to remember the name of, and we're introduced to our protagonists. This is fine. The pacing seemed fine until Episode 5- where it starts hinting at the son of the BBEG (I could see this trope a mile away) was developing feelings for Victoria.
Okay, cool, but... Why...? Why 5 episodes in? Each episode is 20 minutes with 5 episodes per part. On top of that, you have segments where timeskips are established and we're outright told that X months or Y years have passed. This happens several times, but it doesn't FEEL like that time passed and the entire thing feels horribly rushed and so poorly executed that they felt they needed to TELL us that time passed so it would excuse the utterly garbage pacing of the show.
Speaking of pacing; Kirtash started as an interesting albeit cliché character but got WORSE as the episodes progressed. Why did he become a famous singer? Why did he write a song about/for Victoria? That's cliché as hell and my friends and I all simultaneously yelled "OH NO" at that when I made them watch it with me because guess what guys, if I have to suffer so do you!
At the end of the day we couldn't watch much more of it, I dragged them through part 1 and we all quit at the same time. 3cringe5me. I came back to finish it off and see if it got better or worse, and it really only became tolerable.
The entire issue with this animated series is how badly paced it is. The entire thing feels like an early-mid 2010s roleplay plot some teens cooked up in a few hours because I'm assuming a lot of content was cut or condensed when it should not have been.
The series may have been marginally better if it was paced a bit better. Perhaps the whole romance subplot could've waited until episode 8, and we could've seen the characters actually go on more adventures and improve/grow as they learned, or something to give the protagonists more depth.
But unfortunately that won't happen, since we're probably never getting a part 3 because the garbage pacing and writing utterly annihilated any chances this show had.