I can kind of agree with you on some of the character moments from the first major arc of S2 and by the end it does come off more as growth moments for both Shiroe and Akatsuki as they (a fair amount of characters) show how socially inept they can be and only ever interacted with people through a video game. Shiroe finally opening up a bit with the raid team as well as his own guild was a great moment, same with the encounter with Demicas at the end of that arc. The Akatsuki stuff does have a great payoff too during the actual raid, with some character growth for most of the main players.
The oddity with people downplaying their actual old lives in the real world probably has to do with Elder Tales being an escape for most of these characters. Shiroe and his issues at home and making connections in the real world, William's issues with peers' reactions to him playing an MMO, Reise's issues with making real friends, Isuzu's baggage related to her and her father, the raid guild as a whole dedicating their whole lives to a video game...everyone has some real world issues they'd like to avoid talking about, even if that still remains an end goal. I think the rest of it deals with characters probably trying to avoid thinking about the lives they may never actually get back to, being too busy to really focus on their past, and the author coming up with meaningful backstories.
You know what this show really lacks tho? More of Kanami's team on the China server. One episode and you can easily tell why she and her group are fucking badass and it introduces a new enemy type that ties back into the changes happening in the world. Serious...give me like a whole season with Kanami. At least the B-team quest after that is far more interesting and deep than I remember. Isuzu and Rudy's arc here is not only great, but it's an absolute amazing way to tie everything back to the game's soundtrack. Same with Roe2 and the Odyssey Knights.
Log Horizon s2 episode i dunno 6-END
Finished watching the rest of it. It's sad to say but S2 really does falter quite a lot compared to S1 and I think a lot of that is that the pacing is totally all over the shop. Characters (the Minami gang) appear out of nowhere and act like you've known them the whole time and then fuck off again. It actually still holds up surprisingly well in the moment, but the wait time between and thinking stuff is cool while it's happening and going 'wait, I've literally no idea who they are' shortens significantly.
The really quite uninspired animation doesn't help, nor does the fact that Shiroe's aims are a lot more intangible this time around, as are the plots of the enemies. Actually Rudy and Isuzu's travel plot with Roe2 and the 'NPC Storyteller' ends up being the strongest part of the whole season because it's focused around a traditional quest structure and lets the character moments breath around that.
Akatsuki gets in a lot more focus and seems like she's in a good place by the end, as does Naotsugu and Marielle (and Tetra to some extent – surprising she doesn't get a proper focus episode?). I do like the show basically says yeah, this is the designated couple, Minori's side is just drama. Still because she doesn't operate on the political level she kind of just ends up being Shiroe's bodyguard for most of the season again, which kinda blows.
Anyway the real sin of S2 is that it doesn't hold much in the way of massive revelations about the world or changing it in the way S1 does, apart from the geniuses storyline which is left unresolved. I doubt at this point we'll ever get an s3, which blows, because the show's mystery writing about the relationship between the two worlds and the game is still probably my favourite part of it all.
In any case, time to watch something with rather better animation just to cleanse my head from some of the really egregiously basic stuff in LH.
