On Consistency

[エタンノクス [ETHA]]

See the article here

What shows can yout hink of that fall into that pattern? Can we say Pokemon? haha

[nara_clan_anbu]

pokemon and inuyasha both seem to fall into this for me, though i love both.... yugioh too if you still watch it

[thresholdXCI]

I used to love DBZ and Pokemon as much as anyone when I was younger. But this article pretty much sums up why I'm much less inclined to enjoy them now.

Death Note was one of the few series that managed to keep up a consistent tension, perfect pace and a steady torrent of twists and turns in the plot - and despite getting a little bit silly in a couple of places it largely did everything right. You could start an episode knowing you were going to be treated to more story developments and twists. And it kept me completely hooked like little else before it. When I watched Naruto though there'd be many times in which I'd watch an episode and at the end of it still not be any the wiser as to who was going to win a particular fight and the story would be in the exact same place as it was earlier. I know there are complications with following original manga releases and whatever - but had it been kept as 30-50 episodes, Naruto could have been a blisteringly entertaining show with a lightning pace.

And slice-of-life series, largely exempt from story pacing issues, should just last as long as characters remain interesting without changing their character/ situation too much. Otherwise you end up either boring fans, or alienating them.

[Samshel Darkspear]

In my honest opinion it's fairly simple to tag anything coming out of the shonen genre as inconsistent, even the harems. At one point everything seems to stop for an episode or two, as if the characters remembered they had a story to tell, then we are back to the status quo as soon as the credits roll.

It's funny, because I had several examples in mind when writing the article and they were all brought up save for Bleach, I started watching the show until it began moving in slow motion around episode 33. I was definitely not going to sit through three hundred or so episodes of that, over and over.

The problem with most of those shows is that they are designed as cash cows, they'll go for as long as the creators feel they can feed the repetitive sandwich to their audience, the one that seems to have perfected this formula is none other than Pokemon. They simply reset the counter every generation, starting off with new never before mentioned Pokemon and new sidekicks.

But consistency is not always about mindless repetition, it's also about how they continuously add new stuff that clashes with the setting so badly it breaks the flow of the show, whether it's a new character or a "special episode".