my attempt to dig into black clover lasted about 1.5 arcs

it kind of feels like it's just going through the motions of the genre

while having no ideas of its own, nor any particularly huge amount of love for the tropes it's regurgitating

correct

Absolutely correct

it's just like "you're in a group of quirky losers that feels exactly like the guild from Fairy Tail, now go do a Quest, now on the quest we'll introduce villains from a previously-unmentioned group that has the following six trope characters in it"

it deploys tried and true tropes but with no understanding of what makes them work, so they generally don't

i have regrettably been passively watching more of this than i wished to

it's.....it's just boring

and the pacing feels awkwardly rushed

like it's trying to catch up with its more established

rivals

i have NO idea what the pacing of the plot even is, holy shit

it feels like standard shonen escalation stripped down to a shell of itself for the sake of itself

i like a handful of the characters a lot, but like...the secondary/tertiary cast at best

which is never a great look when i can't be arsed to give a shit about our main character

I can't remember any of their names

uncluding the protagonist

i should clarify

'handful' = 'less than five'

then a bad guy who had already been defeated and then retroactively got un-defeated three times did an attack at one of the girls that grievously injured her and also blasted her shirt off and I was like "This is the kind of thing I could live with in a better series"