
Originally Posted by
YukikoKurosawa
That's not really the problem. It's that most of these meeting scenes are extremely dull and don't actually add anything. There's little to no actual character development, new information, or anything dramatic happening. It's an excuse to recap what everyone knows thus far, and formulate some sort of plan, which isn't innately a problem, but they happen so often in the story, and they're generally so dry that it gets tiresome. It's partly the way the story frames them that make them boring. They're extremely low energy, and the writers rarely make use of them to have something interesting happen. Like, I can predict exactly what's going to happen the vast majority of the time. It's just "lets have everyone go meet in a room, barely animate, recount what we've learned thus far, plan our next move" and absolute nothing else happens except in rare instances. I genuinely think it's partly a crutch for the animators to get away with not having to animate, because characters standing in a room talking is the easiest thing to do as an animator, especially since the character models already have a wide variety of pre-existing emotes they can just use, along with it just being plain easy to write.
It's just lazy storytelling. For example, I just read a scene in a novel I'm currently reading of characters in a room talking where a lot actually happened, it was filled with drama, plot twists, character development, and actually moved the story forward on top of all of that, in only 9 pages. It was an incredibly interesting chapter and I couldn't put it down until it was over. The problem with most meeting scenes in the MSQ is that nothing actually happens. Characters just stand, recount what we know already, and make new plans. It's the most dry writing imaginable. But were they to do a scene like I just described from the book I'm reading, it would be A LOT of animating. So ofc, it's easy to just plop characters in a room and have them just stand around and I suspect thats the main reason they do it. But god it is ever tiresome, but fortunately these kind of scenes aren't super commonplace, not since ARR anyway, which was almost entirely just that.