esselfortium wrote:Nadeko didn't stand out to me in the least until S2, so that's not at all why I enjoyed her appearances there. I don't think she stood out to many people until S2, and I think that was pretty much intentional. Looking back it felt like her existence prior to that point was just planting the seeds for things to happen later on. The earlier series even hint at it in ways that seem designed to only be picked up on in retrospect, like when Kanbaru offhandedly refers to her as the final boss.
Yeah, I just listened to a review of the franchise by DigiBro that sort of reiterates your perspective here. My feeling with the Nadeko arc in S2 was that while it added details to Nadeko's backstory, it was limited to doing so in a way that didn't change her relatively shallow characterization in Bakemonogatari and, while that would have still left a lot of room for pretty drastic changes if she was a quiet character, instead it sort of came down to feeling like a laundry list of examples of ways in which she's a shallow moeblob instead of making her seem like a character who cannot still be accurately summarized as shallow moeblob. And then, she becomes shallow yandere moegod. I didn't feel like she had enough charisma to make a tragic character or an entertaining antagonist -- and, after all, that was part of the point of her character the first time around.
However, I'm realizing that I'm placing a lot of value in the cleverness of philosophical conceits, with interesting characters taking a second place, while other people will watch primarily for the moe or primarily for suspenseful plots or something. As a plot, the Nadeko arc is structured a lot more conventionally than pretty much every other arc, and where Nisemonogatari is a story whose central conflict is disagreements about the value of authenticity, the Nadeko arc's central conflict is basically just that a character is angry and envious for shallow and crappy reasons and then causes problems for everybody else by being self-absorbed and thoughtless. In other words, it's an emotionally driven conventional conflict of the type you'd see in homeric-era plays. I prefer something more warped, even if it lacks the same kind of emotional payoff, because I'm not watching the show for emotional investment but instead for all the fascinating probes the author is throwing out that make me question my own assumptions and values, so having an arc driven by envy and worry and protectiveness felt like a cop-out when I expected a steady supply of arcs driven by moral epistemology and stupid brain-teasers. (Thus, Owarimonogatari immediately got my attention by featuring both the euler equation and the monty hall problem in the first episode.)
In my defense, there are a *lot* of urban fantasy shows with emotionally-driven conventionally-structured plots and cute girls, but there are few urban fantasy shows with plots based around the hilbert hotel paradox.
Though in a thread which is sorta aimed at winding people up it's not such a big surprise anyway.
