Anime recs and requests, a new beginning

[classicdrogn]

... I am starting to really hate backstory arcs. Not because I don';t want to know about the characters, but because they spend for bloody ever on slow pans with sad violins, dramatic pauses in the dialogue, and repeating the same scenes two or three times to hammer in that the character is thinking about them differently as their tragic story progresses. Just putting it on 1.5x speed isn't enough, but my vision's been getting worse and I can't read the subs any faster than that. SHY spent three or four episodes on the Russian vodkamancer senpai when it could easily have been two, even one if they rushed it, and still never covered how she got empowered, or gave more than a trace of Shy's own history. Sure lush-chan is cute and all, but you'd think the title character would be the one to be developed first...

And then there's Helck, that I just finished slogging through. Five oi siz episodes this time, and horns instead of strings, but still could have been condensed by at least one episode without actually losing any of the story. (Though the subversion of the "snow means love" trope is pretty cool after letting my temper recover, at least.) At least they pushed that back into the second season, where SHY spent the last third of its own dozen episodes glacially creeping along, and yes that pun is fully intended and still not nearly bad enough to express my disgust.

I get that animation is expensive time consuming and reusing the same footage with desaturation and sepia filters both saves a chunk of change and lets the staff make up for schedule issues, but if a show's going to get greenlit it should damn well budget enough time and money in the first place!