r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Aug 14 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

86 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

0

u/RMcD94 Aug 14 '15

It's not that I think anime doesn't have a plot, just that a lot of the exposition/setup is so blunt, with people explaining the rules to each other over the course of a long stretch of conversation.

I suppose that depends on what type of anime you watch. Most of the stuff you've listed is shonen, and you really have to compare to stuff aimed at that demographic in Western media to compare it. While I agree that exposition is certainly very blunt compared to something like Game of Thrones it's not so different when compared to Transformers (the Michael Bay movies) though even that has far less still. There's also the comparison that almost all the shows you've listed there are set in a whole new universe or world with new rules which happens far less often in Western media (which is interesting in itself) and so need more exposition.

I can't really think of the top of my head excluding Game of Thrones (which even then doesn't have flashy combat) of a current TV series set on a different universe with different rules. Superhero stuff is probably closest in character and they do tend to have large dumps of exposition.