(About the Alice in borderland) So I'm not the only one who thought so! I had read the manga before the season 2 came out and when I saw this arc, I wondered how they would cover the guy up. Everytime I thought that surely, they won't really put him naked, that would be too hard to cover... well imagine my surprise when watching the episode. Btw are you enjoying the new season so far?

uh spoilers i guess since its only been out for like a day but i'm already finished?

i don't like it as much as the first season, tbh. i kinda zoned out in the middle and don't remember what happened, which makes me think there was something up with the pacing. but also maybe i don't think you're supposed to watch an entire season of television in one sitting and while you're making jam, so maybe it was a me issue. what i liked about the first season is that they were able to disguise the fact that it is based on a manga relatively well when adapting the visual design. there are some visual design conventions that are common in manga character design that when adapted to live action just do not make sense logistically, and so it can be really obvious when you're watching something that has been adapted. i don't usually have a problem with that kind of thing, bc it usually happens in places where you would expect there to be whack ass clothing, so the fact that it looks weird isn't going to break immersion (ie like the fma adaptions etc). but i found the second season had way more trouble due to just the absurdity of some of the characters, especially with the return niragi. normally i don't really give a shit about weird costuming, but his post burns look is just. well. i thought he looked like someone airdropped in an anime character in the first season and i think it even more for this season. idk, i don't really think that it's a problem per se, it just took me out of it enough to remind me that it's an adaptation of a different media form and i think i would have preferred them to have been more uniform in adapting the character designs across the board at the expense of one being less 'canon' accurate, as opposed to having one that stands out very strongly despite looking 'accurate'.

So I’ve been thinking about how much potential JtV had and how it’s ended up like.......this, and there are two things I keep coming back to:

the world the show exists in feels a lot smaller than it did at the start

the time jump wasn’t equipped to bear the weight of Jane’s grief

This got longer than I planned and whether it makes sense or not is debatable but I’ve just had Thoughts so I’ve stuck them under the cut.

Losing a main character, along with the section of the show that they were the lead of, is definitely a part of that first point. And along with the role of the crime/detective plot being dramatically reduced, Luisa and Rose also stopped being in the show as much. It’s funny going back to watching s1, because the cast and the world just felt so much fuller. The show gave Jane friends, there were mentions of people we never saw on screen, whereas now it doesn’t really feel as though the characters have a life beyond what we see. Characters that are introduced into the show as Jane’s friends seem to vanish as fast as they arrive, and there are cases like Dennis where he more or less disappeared once he was ruled out as a love interest. I know that ‘so these random people are apparently Jane’s friends?’ is something the narrator has joked about several times, but by this point in the show it makes things like a whole bunch of people turning up for Jane’s 30th feel hollow and doesn’t help at all in the richness of the world. It’s not exactly the same thing since the premise of Crazy Ex Girlfriend involves someone moving to a town where they only know one person, but if you look at the cast at the end of the show, they excelled at getting characters to go from ‘random side character’ to ‘I can’t imagine the show without them’ in a way that makes the world of the show feel so much bigger and richer than it did at the start. Yes, JtV has added characters (a favourite of mine being Darci) but it just........idk to me it feels smaller.

And that first point applies in terms of the scale of the story, or of the threat. I think this is a problem that came with losing the detective plot as a main part of the show. Imagine if the show had gone in the direction where we would look back at s1 and think ‘remember when we thought Rose was a big threat? ha!’. @aparticularbandit made a great post pointing out how Mutter could have easily been Bigger and Badder than the show let her be, and then for so long the show didn’t really have a ~villain or mystery, at least not on a bigger scale than Anezka/Magda. And the lack of that, the fact that the show did away with a plot that had the potential to keep getting bigger and wilder meant that containing it more or less to a cycle of drama with Rose/Luisa a) made it feel repetitive and b) removed a lot of the potential for twisting and turning plot developments to complement the more restrained and character-based Villanueva plots. And, looking at s5, I am aware that kidnapping your lead character’s husband and torturing him until he has amnesia is a Big Villain Move but that plot was badly done and I’ve already talked about it endlessly so I won’t go into it here. And maybe s5 has some big plot left planned, but this is about missed potential more than anything.

A third and final thing that makes the world of the show not feel as developed as it could have been is the writers’ seeming reluctance to vary the characters put together for plots, only exacerbated by the show removing a main character. @petramos, @solanospetra and @jetrafied have already said a bunch of good stuff about this, but it’s just so strange that we’ve got to almost the end of the whole show and there’s been what......one? proper Petra/Rogelio scene? Have we even had a proper Petra/Xo scene beyond a brief exchange of hair/shorts compliments? Imagine if we’d had An Adventure In Aunty-ing starring Luisa and Anezka (I know they had a plot together but....still)! Or Luisa and Honorary Aunt Lina! Imagine if we’d got The Lawyering Adventures of Michael and JR! Give us Darci and *spins wheel* Rafael! Idk, going back to the point about lacking characters there’s a limit to how many you can pair up, but even with pairings we’ve seen many times the writers seem reluctant to change the dynamic. The Rogelio/River stuff is feeling old and repetitive, even Jane and Petra who have had probably the best development often seem to loop back to arguing. Going back to Michael, the Michael/Alba dynamic was something I always wanted the show to get to go into more, and then just as they managed to break him and Rafael out of their pattern of rivalry in s3 they killed him and undid everything when they brought him back. We were robbed of The Great Rogelio Rafael Michael Matelio Father’s Day Extravaganza we deserved! There’s just such a feeling of regression and repetition at the moment, rather than genuine progression. 

Putting together this lack of strong growth between all the characters and the lack of a big external threat means that, five seasons in, so much of the drama is still from internal conflict, rather than problems being faced by a big Villanueva-De La Vega-Solano-Cordero(-Factor-Santillan-etc) unit. And I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any internal conflict! That would be unrealistic and it’s good to keep the dynamics moving and changing! But I feel like it should be a bit more Big Family vs Life And Its Problems than it is at this point.

And now (this is a lot shorter I promise) the second point: the time jump. Honestly, a jump was exactly what the show needed at its halfway point. It would shake things up, put the characters in a new place while also giving them theoretically several years of relative calm in-universe, and from a practical perspective it would let them age up the child actors. Maybe it would have been more like the multiple smaller jumps in Chapter 28 than what we actually had in s3, but a jump would have been great. Provided that it was the jump itself that was mixing up the show. The problem was that it wasn’t the time jump that was the big change, it was something that happened immediately beforehand. And I’ve already rambled on enough (you know, looking back at that post I’ve........I’ve just repeated most of it here whoops, there I was complaining about the JtV writers being the repetitive ones lol) about that didn’t give the viewers enough time to deal with something very dark, nor did the continued lightness of the show really feel it did the grief justice. And obviously, they weren’t going to let the show get bogged down in sadness, so honestly I feel the jump should have been the twist on its own. They should have let it freshen up the show without having it bear the weight of something so traumatic.

So. That’s them thoughts written down.