Pacing and Duration in anime

A show often feels too short or too long, too fast or too slow. Which are the factors that define this feeling? The first thing almost everybody will say is that it depends on if you like what you are watching. Meaning, if you are having fun it feels fine and it’s only when you are bored or offended that it feels like something is off. That’s why people can be watching long series where nothing much happens to the most part and yet they are not bored with it. It’s not about how dense the plot is, it’s about how invested you are in it.

The industry does not care about pacing as it cares about duration. If something sells, they will keep making it until it stops selling. If they can make money with a hundred low budget episodes where nothing happens, they will do it and they will keep milking it without giving a damn about quality. The ones who are bothered by this are the consumers, not the producers.

This does not mean pacing is completely overlooked. Newer series have much faster pacing and more elaborate plots exactly because the demands increased along with the size of the audience and the number of competitors. The more effort you put into the script, the higher the chances the consumers will choose your product over something else from the hundreds of other series that are being made at the same time. This wasn’t the case in earlier decades, when not that many people would spend that much money on a medium that wasn’t producing that many titles every year.

Something that greatly affects the notion of pacing is the intelligence of the characters. The smarter they are compared to the bad guys, or whatever counts as the opposition, the faster a conflict is resolved. If the protagonist can outsmart the conflict, then the whole thing can end in a few hours at the most. That is why detective arcs with ingenious protagonists do not last much, whereas fighting shonen who usually have mentally challenged protagonists can stretch for hundreds of episodes.

This leads to something most viewers often confuse. The more flawed the characters are, the more mistakes and oversights they will be constantly making. Some viewers are fine with characters making mistakes, because it’s what makes them human compared to the boring picture perfect Gary Stues that do everything right all the time. Other viewers hate characters who make mistakes because they would never mess up that badly if they were in their shoes. When a conflict is prolonged because of said mistakes, it’s the latter kind of viewers that believes the story is moving slowly or in circles because the characters are not behaving as they would do. This is a ridiculous reason to dislike a series.

There is still the case when viewers eventually get tired of the characters making mistakes and no longer tolerate the story going nowhere, despite being fine with it at first. This is the result of repeating the exact same mistakes instead of new ones every time. Making mistakes is understandable, not learning from them is not.

Let’s finish this by pointing out how pacing doesn’t matter that much, since you no longer have to watch something in real time. You can make it go faster or skip ahead if you find it boring. You can pause it to take a break or go back and rewatch a scene you didn’t get. When you have such control over a video, you adjust pacing and duration to your needs, so it’s not that big of an issue as it was back when you were limited to what television or cinema screens were showing.