Review update:
Anime only here, spoilers about this season.
People talk about huge world-building and character developments and here i am
thinking what they are talking about? I get the feeling that those people are webtoon-reader
who project their feeling and knowldge of the other medium to this medium.
From day 1 you probaly saw comments like "You will hate Rachel!", "Rachel is a b..!", it was unavoidable. Be it under the comments of the official crunchyroll clips or anywhere else in an episode discussion forum.
There is clearly a disconnect here. I still don't get why she did the things she did, why tests are held out the way they are, why the life of someone seemingly not being worth anthing, where the people come from (all the different races), what the outside world is like, why the tower is build like it is(is it really a tower or a huge world on every floor?). There is no world building or character building here, it's just throwing bunch of information without improving on any of them. Nothing gets resolved and when bringing up this point to those who read the webtoon, they reply with "this is just the prologue". This might be true but unfortunately i have to rate this as it is without knowing what might happen in the future or of things you know and get the context of.
First of all, the most important thing: I don't hate Rachel (not yet)
Stating this is like being blasphmous. But even though i saw the thing she did, i don't know why she did it, how can you as an anime-only? You can assume things, still there could be a whole lot of motives. You might know the truth as a reader but i don't know as of yet. Did Bam do anything horrible to her? Is he being very possesive of her? Bam seems like a genuine good person and it is unimaginable to think he would do something bad to her but at times he comes of like a stalker. In my opinion Rachel wants to get away from him desperately and yet he clings to her. She cloakes herself to stay hidden from him and turns her back, yet he follows her. This is not a healthy relationship. We obviously have the main character bias. The main character obviously is almost always the good guy or at least not the bad one. So it probably safe to assume he did nothing wrong; still i will wait until i have more information.
Two categories i want to elaborate on:
Music:
It is Kevin Penkin and you can hear he had a lot of new ideas for this soundtrack. Beautiful and without it, this season and its defining moments would have a lot less impact if any at all. Top!
Chracter:
Average at best. I liked the character of Endorsi and Anaak (the one who got fleshed out the most) but the main character Bam is boring as it gets. But this is not a negatove point because in my opinion this is wanted. He is still like a blank canvas and he gradually fills it with color. Khun on the other hand seems he is full of it, pessimistic to the core which is understandable. Rak and the others are mostly just there as set-pieces. There is not much development for them in this season but not everybody needs a dramatic development just for the sake of it.
To be honest, without being deragotory, this seems to be written by a teenager or by an unexperienced author AND/OR is badly directed and paced.
Here is hoping season 2 will improve things. This has a huge potential in the right hands and i still don't know it the author is the correct one. He seems to have a whole lot of ideas but didn't know how to flesh out each of them. I also hope Bam doesn't become some edgy emo character now, because of what happened. This would be too predictable and wouldn't fit him knowing him, how kind-hearted and naive he seems to be, he would probably first assume she had a reason in doing so and would seek the blame in himself first.
* Well, you expected a reason for Rachels behaviour, something that justifies what she did, and we got one, but it is not one i, at the very least, expected. I love it. Not an unnecessarily complex reason but a convincing one. Calling her a psycopath goes maybe a tad to far, but she is a manipulative one, who at times knows she is doing wrong but still decides to step over corpses. Her character is the fresh air i needed in this anime. 7/10 for me now.
