Every year, I get charged like $20 to renew the moderngafa.com domain name. Every year, I try to write at least one post on here to justify keeping this old blog running. When I logged in to check things out, I was hit in the face by a big ugly AI feature button. That sucks. Everything sucks now. At least I have World Trigger. World Trigger is awesome. Except the first season of the anime. That sucked. And hey - it’s getting a reboot. However, a new question burns in my trion gland. What if that sucks too?
Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter × Hunter began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1998. An instant hit, an anime adaptation premiered the following year… and it sucked. It added a lot of weird little filler scenes to keep up with the still-ongoing manga. Also: it looked like ass.
Starting in 2011, a brand new anime adaptation of Hunter × Hunter premiered that was more faithful to the original manga in both content and not looking like ass. For many, it is one of the best animated series of the decade if not of all time.
And it sucks. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great show, but that’s mostly because it adapts so much of a comic series that was already great. However, this adaptation isn’t perfect. Quite possibly my favorite scene from the manga - the suchi scene, iykyk - was inexplicably cut from this adaptation. Does that make the whole show suck? Nah, but it sucks that they cut it. I’ve seen worse.
Hiroyuki Takei’s Shaman King began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1998. This one took a bit longer to hit TV scenes in 2001, but it still ended before the manga did just like Hunter × Hunter. As with Hunter × Hunter, the Shaman King anime made up all kinds of crap and from what I’ve heard a significant part of it was completely made up. Also: it looked like ass.
Starting in 2021, a brand new Shaman King adaptation premiered. And it sucks. Oh boy, does it suck. This reboot didn’t just cut a single sushi scene, they cut the whole food court. The first episode handwaves away an entire chapter of important character development that apparently happened off screen between two scenes.
Then every episode skips the early one-off stories to “get to the point” and only do the plot-heavy stories. This results in an incredibly fast-paced story that moves at a million miles an hour featuring characters who aren’t given any room to… like… exist.
Daisuke Ashihara’s World Trigger began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2013. Stop me if you heard this one before. It got an anime while the manga was still going, it added some stuff, it ended early, it sucked.
World Trigger’s first season isn’t completely terrible. The low quality animation can be attributed to the manga’s admittedly bland aesthetic. The filler stuff is mostly contained to a single arc toward the ending. The biggest complaint people usually have is the pacing. The biggest offender is the amount of recap during the 14-episode Invasion arc that could easily have been 10 episodes.
Nobody expected the second and third seasons of World Trigger to be announced, nor did we expect them to go so hard with the animation by cutting the episode count significantly and taking a quality over quantity approach. After this, I surprisingly started seeing a lot of people wanting a complete remake of just the first season with the budget and animation of the second and third. I thought that was a pipe dream.
Then they announced a complete remake of just the first season with the budget and animation of the second and third. The fandom rejoiced. We’re getting everything we could have wanted. When this reboot is done, we’ll have three solid seasons of a World Trigger anime that aren’t ugly or horribly paced.
But what if it sucks? It might suck.
I’m not saying it’s not gonna be pretty or a better watch than the original. I’m not going to go back to the original Hunter × Hunter anime just because it skipped a funny sushi scene. But I think we all need to go into the World Trigger reboot with some cautious optimism.
After the first time I read World Trigger, I watched the anime. A few months later, the 2nd and 3rd seasons were announced and the English dub of the anime became more readily available, so I watched that. Then I re-read the manga for the first time. And it was… weird.
I started to notice scenes that were “missing.” A bunch of stuff I remembered liking just weren’t there. This is because there were so many anime-only moments that I Mandela-effected into misremembering as being part of the original manga.
And I like some of those moments. When people think of anime filler they usually mean entire episodes of arcs, but there are often little scenes and even single lines of dialogue added to the story to punch up an episode or make it longer. Look at how Toei turned Dragon Ball’s short chapters into 22 minute episodes.
A lot of World Trigger’s microfiller is comic relief stuff with side characters like Yotaro, Raijinmaru, Replica, and those three C-Rank idiots. A lot of that stuff is great. And it’s the first thing that could get cut.
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| Haven't had an image in a while, here's my favorite shot from the series. |
I doubt they’re going to cut the filler arc and keep everything else with better animation. Nobody wants to watch that. Half of the invasion arc is just recaps of the previous episode. They’re gonna cut it down significantly. And they very well may just cut some good stuff.
Maybe it’ll be like Hunter × Hunter and cut a single scene here and there. Maybe it’ll be like Shaman King and cut everything except the “important” parts. I don’t know how you do that since World Trigger doesn’t really have “monster of the week“ style chapters. Maybe they’ll skip the part where Yuma gets hit by a car. Maybe they’ll cut Fujin.
Okay, they’re not gonna cut Fujin. But there are so many scenes in World Trigger that they could easily cut - if they wanted to. This is the same studio who cut the scene where Goku catches his own Kamehamaha when adapting Battle of the Gods into Super. This is also the same studio that cut literally everything that was good about Digimon Adventure and replacing it with a bunch of stuff that was awful when they remade that.
Maybe you think I’m being paranoid. They’re taking a bad show and making it better. How can they screw that up? If they cut a goofy Yotaro scene it’ll actually be closer to the original manga. But then I think about that sushi scene.
So I want you to think about your favorite scene from the first season of World Trigger. Not a major battle moment or anything big like that. Think about your favorite little character moment. Think about a scene you really like that isn’t necessarily adding anything to the story but you like anyway because it’s fun.
That scene has a chance to be cut. Hell, that character might even be cut. You can tell the story of World Trigger without Channo Squad, without Sakurako, without Karasawa, without Osamu’s mom.
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| Slope. |
I think one of my favorite anime-only parts of World Trigger is the sequence where Osamu comes up with the strategy for the second round battle of the B-Rank Wars. He spends multiple days studying and researching and planning until he steps out to get some fresh air and only then does the idea come to him. It always surprises me when I remember that whole sequence wasn’t in the original manga because it fits in so well. It’s a perfect sequence.
You know what else is perfect? The sushi scene. The Kamehameha-catching. The entirety of Digimon Adventure… okay that one was never really a “remake” to begin with but it still sucked. If the reboot of World Trigger cuts Fujin it’ll still be better than Digimon’s reboot. That's my thesis I guess. See you all next year. Maybe by the time my domain renews again the reboot will be out. Idk.
