Thread:Harostar/@comment-26060995-20150208095855/@comment-24494906-20150209012052

You guys went into the second season and expected it to be that different? There was no way that was gonna happen; it was pretty obvious that the storylines would converge again (the subtitle of the second season, Route A, should already be a big hint, since there's a place in TG with a suspiciously similar name), and thus they couldn't be too different. The culprits have to stay the same. Also, Ishida still had to work on his manga serialization in parallel. There was no way for him to create a draft that would be completely different, that'd mean he'd have created a draft of completely new content equivalent in length to about 4-5 volumes. Just as a sidejob. So it's pretty obvious that if a scene from the manga matches what happens next, he'll copy that scene there to reduce his workload. And since the storylines will converge again, some (small) hiccups are to be expected, since this storyline has to roughly match the developments of the manga's storyline, but the manga's storyline probably wasn't completely written with this alternate storyline in mind.

Ishida is really good at pissing people off. First he pissed off the ones who expected the anime to follow the manga, and now he pissed those off that expected the anime to follow a really different storyline

I'm worried, though. I watched the second PV and the CM, and from what I have seen, Ishida didn't shorten the plot, he made it longer by squeezing a Cochlea arc in. And I think he about doubled the number of fights in his draft compared to the manga. No wonder they had to shorten his Cochlea scenario, they had no choice. I hope they will be able to squeeze the next arc into 2 or 2 1/2 episodes, otherwise, they'll have to squeeze the Anteiku arc into 4 episodes (incl. build-up) and that'll be really tough.

The next arc seems to have mostly new fights.

The anime staff couldn't do that much about the pacing of the last two episodes, so I'm mostly fine with the speed they were going at. (I was even surprised that they did show so much of Kaneki in centipede mode; I thought this fight would be shorter.) But there were two things that I really didn't like in the last few episodes. (Let's ignore animation quality, they're probably saving some budget and their best animators for later episodes. The best animation directors - Miwa and Shimizu (the animation directors of the OPs) - haven't directed an episode yet.) First: That there was no real explanation for the Shachi fight. I hope for the anime staff that this was a deliberate choice and that they're trying a slightly different narrative style (i.e., it's intentional that the viewer is confused that this fight happened). If they're doing that, then they're walking a thin line. It'll piss people off, but if this works out in the end, I'm d'accord. Otherwise, this would mean the staff - mainly scriptwriter, series director, episode director - didn't notice that there isn't sufficient explanation for this fight - which would border on incompetence, because this wasn't a problem that couldn't be fixed and it was a really glaring point of confusion for anyone watching that episode. There wasn't even a need to provide an additional explanation from Shachi's side - it'd have been sufficient to provide an explanation why Kaneki was fighting Shachi whom he just had freed from the cell. Just add two or three lines of Kaneki thinking about it and then deciding he should fight. (Since Ishida also seems to have moved the explanation why Kaneki was acting that insane into the next arc in his draft, it really might have been deliberate. We'll see. I think they'll explain in the next episode what a kakuja is.) Second (though it's minor compared to the previous one): They dilly-dallied a bit in episodes 2 and 3 to tease new characters. If they had continued with the plot, they could have covered most of the Donato stuff already in episode 3. That way, they would've had more time for the Cochlea raid. As for the twins, I think Ishida also might not have explained yet at this point why the Yasuhisa twins came to Cochlea to follow Kaneki, since Kanou wasn't really introduced yet, so I can overlook this one. (I don't understand Kanou's antics in the manga, too; why the hell did he hide from Aogiri in the first place, why didn't he join up with them immediately?)