A very well-written, articulate post. I agree with everything except the part with Zoraal Ja. I thought him magically becoming the antagonist and starting all this trouble oh noooooo was cheesy, it was cliche, and it was lazy. Bakool Ja Ja had been defeated and the writers needed something to drive the story forward because they'd lost their antagonist and I guess they get anxiety when there isn't a clearly defined antagonist at all times. Perhaps Bakool wasn't supposed to be the antagonist, maybe that was an accident. But he was the antagonist for 1/2 of that story, and then he.....wasn't? idk. Regardless, not buying the Zoraal Ja part of the story - it just felt disjointed and seemed as though there was no clear development towards the 0-100 "kicked out of the contest and then kills his dad" pacing of his story thread. We spent too little time with him to get any meaningful character development out of him, and we slogged through tedium to get small bits of what maybe was his motivation. It made it too hard to connect to that character.