Unnecessary rant time!
I forced myself to watch this Netflix show called Unicorn Academy the other day and there was so much wasted potential.
The characters felt like actual real people trying to pretend to be obvious tropes with the main character just having main character syndrome or just the occasional moment where the writers were like “oh yeah, we need to make her the main character!”.
There was also this whole cool teased backstory they never expanded on and a villain who arguably was in the right that they just tried to frame as morally evil when it was obvious there was way more going on.
Overall the writing felt choppy; episodes were cut in weird places, the pacing was pretty good but those cuts made it hard to tell how good it was, and the wasted potential made it hard to feel satisfied with the ending of season/chapter(?) one.
It felt like it was someone’s first attempt at writing a tv show. The character designs were pretty good, the animation was pretty solid—though looks a little funny in places—for some reason the first episode is like 3 times as long and a musical. In my humble opinion, they should have spent the music budget elsewhere, like on the animation. There is also no such thing as subtlety to these writers.
I’d recommend if you want to watch something semi-seriously. It’s not as comically bad as I thought it would be. The second season comes out on the 27th and I will likely follow up on this post if they fix some of the weird issues I had with it (I watched it because I wanted the unexplained backstory).