Džóran: The Princess of Snow and Blood

I quite liked the beginning of this anime series, it had interesting backgrounds and beautiful animation. It was intriguing, including the narrative and the main female protagonist. However, as the season progressed, it became clear that it was just a lot of various tropes thrown together. The opening story and plot line were over before I could get my head around them, and suddenly I was gradually getting tired of this anime series. I think that the early departure of the first main villain meant that everything just started to tail off and was going nowhere, and the main female protagonist lost her spark, there were no real surprises, I found that it was rather irritating at times, and the main thing, the question of who was actually corrupt and dysfunctional, was also extremely predictable from the very beginning. Mostly, however, the impression I was getting more and more was that a lot of the scenes and twists pushed too hard and were just there for effect. Even with some of the characters, I got the impression that they were just there to facilitate some would-be drama and then were just dropped as soon as the screenwriters thought the audience would be impacted. Well, yeah, however, when you can predict what is going to happen every time, you just get even more bored. Suddenly all I saw was an empty husk of a show where the fights were the only thing that looked good, and so by episode eight I said enough and gave up. I am probably even quite glad because according to a friend who finished this anime series my predictions turned out to be spot-on, meaning there would have been no surprises in store for me, on the other hand, he also told me about some surprises that actually really pissed him off after all the wannabe dramatic build-up. In other words, the screenwriters obviously do not know the legendary quote by a certain Mr. Martin Radovsky, "When you die, it is going to be for a long time." So, I was officially done with this anime series with four episodes to go, and I am not going to award it more than 4/10, and maybe even that is too much. (26.06.2021)