For the life of me though I will never understand the evidently common belief that the characters are a weakness of this series.
I'm not sure if this is a common view elsewhere, but if you're referring to what I said I just meant that their development didn't feel like as much of a focus as the actions they took to explore the setting. They were all still good characters.
Mac Arrowny posted...
Any thoughts on the three arcs in FtNW, Roba?
I really liked the beginning of the first arc when it was slowly trickling out information about the setting and revealing just how messed up the society was. The second half of the arc where they were running from rats wasn't as good, mostly because it felt odd that they went from still training their powers to push around rocks a few days earlier to Satoru suddenly being able to carve up a huge rock and bombard enemy rats all night (it also didn't help that one of the episodes had really funky animation for some reason) but it was still enjoyable. The second arc was good too because it explored some of the reasons for their society's harsh decisions (to prevent karmic demons and ogres) as well as the natural consequences of forcing children to live like that when two of them ran away to escape it. This was probably my favorite part of the series now that I think about it. The third arc was a bit of a step back to running from rats (though it was nice to see the consequences of having a slave caste like that, too), but I found it better than in the first arc because of the ogre. It was oddly compelling to have an enemy they couldn't defeat, and her origin of being stolen from her parents and raised as a rat was a good tragic background. This kid was born because their harsh measures failed, and the damage she caused underscored the need for them... but she was also only born because those harsh measures drove two kids to run away. It's an interesting conundrum and I was kind of glad the series ended without finding an easy solution for the society to adopt moving forward. ---