#if there was more Intent to paralleling his sort of unceremonious failure as a hero with johnny’s…

[cospinol]

Knowing that the source material for super crooks covers only the final heist/arc& the whole front of the show is Anime Original sheds so much light on the specific ways it doesn’t work for me… i’m naturally t*mesk*p averse but this one feels counterintuitive to the purposes of a timeskip, its construction is just Off in ways that don’t make sense until you know the first 3/4 of the show were retroactively bolted onto this standalone arc lol; we get so much information from both parts and yet it still feels like the whole narrative is told not shown, because all they’re doing is working around/often against each other. I think the second-to-last heist is really good in its own right but it and the source material actively ruin each other when they’re presented like this..

Obviously i’m mainly talking abt how little sense it makes for praetorian (functionally the main villain of the first part of the show, who most of johnny’s personal conflict is with in this part) to have his fall from grace/takedown Entirely Offscreen; if seeing him on tv as a disgraced ex-hero was our first encounter with him as viewers and we just Knew this obviously fucked up (uninhibited, at rock-bottom, nothing to lose) guy had bad blood with the protagonists (which I think must be the case in the comic) he’d be a scary figure for a single fight or so but in the anime he’s impossible to take seriously in the final arc because it’s such a step down from the type of scary he was in previous arcs; the thing that really worked for him as a villain /was/ the squeaky-clean image+the fact that he was getting away with everything he did. The reveal at the end of the second heist about his true alignment and the sequence of taunting scenes following it are sooo good, but that character work is a total waste because it literally disappears in the hard cut to the next part of the story… the ways in which he acts as johnny’s personal villain are pre-defeated off-screen to the point that fighting him at all in the final arc seems like a narrative waste of time, especially since we *didn’t* see any of his interactions with gladiator pre-timeskip so it felt like payoff with no setup

But also aside from him there are lots of other jarring things that are Explained by the last arc being the beginning of the actual story, like johnny’s literal eleventh hour transformation from world’s biggest idiot to strategic mastermind, and the intros for most of the team being not in the least informed/affected by the prior arcs such that this might as well be the audience’s first time meeting them (this is true of the entire supporting team, imo)… everything we need to know is contained in what we get here, the first 3/4 of the show is totally extraneous. The only real exceptions are kasey (mostly just because she’s the only character of any substance in the first arcs, but even she suffers a bit… her male fantasies speech i can see being really excellent as a character intro at the beginning of a comic book but in the context of the timeskip it feels lazy, shorthand for character work we were actively denied) and gladiator (a whole other can of worms, not just in terms of the way he’s Applied to the praetorian situation not matching up with his prior scenes.. i don’t think he’s really worth getting into I’ll just say Johnny sucks and leave it at that)

What a bummer though. The first few eps of the show (the first half..?) are mostly unsalvageably weak in their own right but if we’d gotten a three-episode ova that really committed to either the count orlok heist on its own or the casino heist on its own, this could have easily have been an 8/10, but bolting them to each other ruins both. so much time spent with these characters and yet it still feels like everything important happened offscreen