Brevity is Power: Why Another Cour Won't Make It better

From communities on MyAnimeList and Reddit to self-hosted blogs, anime viewers often turn to a number of stock phrases and judgements when 'reviewing' the shows they watch. It has too much 'forced drama'. It's too 'edgy'. Or, perhaps most frequent of all, it should have had another cour.

But when it comes to the desire for a show to have had its story stretched over twice as many episodes – to give the characters 'more time to grow', for instance (which implies that no movie character grows enough) – can we really argue that we would have enjoyed twice as much of a show that didn't impress us with just one cour? And, alongside that, shouldn't we rather be asking the show to be shorter, cutting out its unfulfilling content so that the story focuses on what the writer and studio have been competent with? Perhaps then we would end up with stories as cleverly paced as Eve no Jikan's original ONA run (which kept viewers hooked within the massive gaps between the release of the show's mostly smaller-than-average episodes), or comedies as instantly fulfilling as the currently-airing short Ojisan to Marshmallow.

Drawing on a number of philosophies that clash with the thinking behind the 'it should have been 24 episodes' bandwagon, it becomes clear that asking for double the length – expecting a canvas twice the size to cater to the artist's needs and treating a single cour as a canvas too small – is an escape from criticism, not an exercise in it.

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