#most episodes that are pleasant on a first watch became an absolute slog on a rewatch

[vaugarde]

terribly sorry for progressively getting more and more annoyed and tired with jn. this show kinda gets a lot more exhausting on a rewatch when you know its not going to get better

[chopperiv]

Alright I’m going to talk about TAZ: Graduation

It’s not going to be pleasant so I’ll put it under the cut. I just have to vent, and this seems as good a place as any to do it.

I just finished Episode 4, the newest episode as of this writing, and I’m utterly, thoroughly, unbearably bored. With every episode so far, I’ve been excited to see what new adventure the Grad Gang will get into this week, and every time, the answer has been “they don’t”. Instead of the boys gallivanting about, having fun escapades across a world lovingly created by their dear brother, The Adventure Zone: Graduation is shaping up to be a long, tedious slog of half-baked characters, scenes that go on far too long, and absolutely no narrative arc whatsoever.

Travis’s pacing as DM is glacial. I was willing to forgive the first episode, since it was the first one and of course he had to introduce a lot of information to both the players and the audience. However, the episodes and scenes since then have been slow-paced at best, and borderline-anchored at worst. Have there been good goofs? Yes, absolutely. These are still the McElroys we’re talking about; I think they’d have to actively try not to be funny to actually not be funny. And Travis has had his fair share of good bits! But a lot of the time, if there is a memorable scene or specific moment from Graduation, it’s the players who are the ones making it better, and Travis just provides the backboard for them to bounce off of. Master Firbolg taking an accounting class and not understanding it in the slightest (”WHAT IS SYLLABUS?!” “I am...dunce.”); Sir Fitzroy Maplecourt getting scammed by the “Realm of Goodcastle”; Argo Keene’s surprisingly heart-tugging backstory and ongoing fascination with limes! These are all great bits!

But nothing is happening on the story side of things. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it indication that the woods are more important than they seem at the end of episode 1, and now, in episode 4, the group finally has a D&D-esque goal: track down a monster. Though even still, they’re tracking down a monster to give it a subpoena. On the one hand, that’s goofy McElroy antics. On the other, it’s an indicator of just how annoyingly rooted in accounting and other boring mechanics this world is.

In the trailer for the season, a joke was made about how the school treats Accounting as its most important class, but then Travis turned around and said “no, actually, it really is the most important class, and everything in this world revolves around accounting, including major game mechanics”. The joke became reality, and you can hear in the episodes as the players (Justin especially, even out of character) strain to deal with these boring mechanics. Again, there are only 4 episodes released at this point, so maybe in the future I can look back and say “wow, remember when I thought the accounting rules were boring?”, but as it stands right now, it seems to exist mostly as a limiting factor on a) how much money the boys get, and b) how much property damage they’re going to be allowed to get away with.

In general, the idea of this arc seems to be “watch as these characters have a fun time doing stuff!” But in practice, the arc has become “watch as these characters hang around in places with no real direction until given a forceful shove by the DM!” Without an overarching narrative throughline (e.g. Find the Grand Relics; Defeat the Abominations; hell, let’s bring back Travis’s last stint as DM with Find out who killed Jeremiah Blackwell) the characters end up wandering around from scene to scene, told where they’re going by the DM and occasionally given choices on which of two paths they want to take to the same destination. I mean that last part literally. In the fourth episode, Travis shows the boys two shops and asks which one they want to go into, only to reveal that both doors lead to the same place. (Side note: Travis, you don’t get to dunk on Griffin for naming his store “Fantasy Costco” when a) Fantasy Whatever is a big part of the Adventure Zone brand, and b) you just took the E out of Barnes and Noble, said it was a pun, and called it a day.)

And let’s talk about the NPCs. I was a little worried when Travis said he had created something like 50 NPCs as proper characters (e.g. with sheets and everything), because there was no way that I or anyone else was going to remember that many characters. And there are a lot. The only one whose name I can remember off the top of my head is Rainier, and that’s because she’s the one the cast interacts with the most. Everybody else? No idea. Now, having a lot of NPCs isn’t necessarily a negative thing, but they either all have to stand out in some way, or it has to be accepted that not all of these characters are going to be important. And yet it feels like with every new character introduced, we’re expected to try to remember who they are.

I’d like to end this off by saying that I don’t think Graduation should be written off as “bad”. It’s not “bad”. But as it stands right now, I can’t really call it “good” either. Four episodes into Balance, we’d met Killian, and Magic Brian, and heard “ABRACA-FUCK-YOU!” for the first time. Four episodes into Amnesty, the crew was all together, had already had one encounter with the Beast, and was gearing up to take it on again with a proper plan. Hell, four episodes into Dust and Commitment, the story was ending! The one thing I want from this series at the moment, above all else, is for there to be an ongoing narrative to bring me back every week. As the series currently stands, we’ve got nothing. No antagonists looming over the hill. No overarching goal the protagonists will have to accomplish at some point, but are taking a temporary break from. They’re going to deliver subpoena to a Xorn, and I have no idea if that should be treated as a joke or not. Time will tell, I suppose.

People have claimed that “well Balance started out slow too, give this series time” and I have given it time. I’ve given it four episodes. As I said: Balance’s first arc was nearly over after 4 episodes. We’d had Barry Bluejeans, and Magic Brian, and learned about the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet. In Graduation, we’ve had nothing even close to any of that. If I was reading a book, and that book hadn’t introduced its plot yet after four chapters, I’d probably get bored and stop reading. I don’t see why the same can’t be said for a story-driven podcast where they supposedly play D&D.

TL;DR: I don’t want to dislike Graduation. I’ll still probably listen to every new episode when it comes out. But right now, I’m not anticipating the new episode. Travis, if you read this, I’m sorry about how harsh I’m sure I’ve come across.

I just really, really want to like this series.