Board Thread:Episode Discussion/@comment-24573226-20161224121458/@comment-4010415-20161228085546

Arkan421 wrote: I'll be honest here.

I don't like how RT handled Jacques' and Whitley's characterization. They really want us to hate Jacques, that he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, we get it. But well written bad guys have some redeeming qualities. Also, that Whitley turned out to be bad after only five minutes of screen time.

They say that the best villains are merely heroes, but on the other side.

The biggest problem is the fact that we barely get development or attachment to these new bad guys so that we learn to hate them over a long period of time.

Instead of characters, we got caracatures. I've actually seen someone explain the issue with Whitley as this:

Right now, the story is Weiss vs Jacques, not Weiss vs Whitley. That's why it's been focusing on Jacques, while Whitley has mostly just been standing silently nearby, smiling smugly at Weiss and staring at Jacques. It'd be unwise for RT to focus development on a character they're barely even using at the moment, when they should foucs on the characters who are actually doing something right now, which includes Jacques. Whitley's importance may come later, at which point they'll actually give him some focus.

If you ask me, their flaw with Cinder was that they were trying too hard to keep her and her goals mysterious. We didn't really get to get much of a look at her until volume 3, and even then, it wasn't quite enough.

The problem with Adam is that they weren't able to bring him in story-wise until volume 3. To be fair, they had initially planned for a significant portion of volume 3 to happen in volume 2, but then they realized that there were other things that needed to happen first.

I'm kinda sad that we haven't gotten much of Emerald and Mercury outside of "Cinder's lackeys, carrying out her plans", and so far in volume 4, it looks like they won't be doing much besides standing off to the side in the Salem's HQ scenes.