Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero Season 3

This series has been very strange. The first season was very compelling in the way it swayed the viewer to care for the MC purely through hatred of the way other characters treated him. The second season was a 2-year-ordeal for me to force myself to watch, and after finishing it I was surprised to find the pacing I reviled so much at its beginning that caused me to drop it for so long disappear when I reached the different world plot of the story. And now with this third season, I found it to be just... okay. It's closer to good than mediocre, butmuch of the plot feels recycled. It sort of works since this series seems to be fueled by how hate-able its antagonists are, but when the antagonism is re-used in the exact same way not once, not twice, but three times, it definitely feels lazy even if it sort of works.

What didn't work regarding the recycled plot elements was the primary protagonists, the three cardinal heroes, being deceived by the show's most hated character. For one of them, his character is he's a dunce so it is largely passable, but there comes a time when the suspension of disbelief for how dumb a character is is just too much. And then the other two, they're dumb but a type of dumb that actually has the capacity to think. So when both of them are deceived so blatantly by someone with a track record of lying that they themselves have recognized as a liar (unlike the dunce), I stopped caring for their characters. And then there's the MC (along with his crew) who suffered from the case of contrived inactivity. This is one of my major pet peeves with entertainment shows: when the plot is occurring and a character has ample time to *do something* to prevent an obvious thing from happening, and the character just *does nothing*. It's infuriating.

Anyway, it's got good visuals and other stuff, my primary gripes with it being the plot elements being recycled and characters feeling unrealistic.