I have absolutely loved politics in Slime in all seasons. The ones yapping are the guys in the comment section calling the politics as "yapping"

Damn ikr? As much as I reeeeally enjoy the fights, the politics just clicks with me without any issues.

It's not world building, it's yappin. You can do world building by showing and doing stuff, you don't need to sit around and do nothing. At this point they could have just printed out a few pages and sold them as Season 3.

Just ignore them as they clearly dont like this series for what it is.

the first half of the season exists solely to save budge for the second half, you can see a clear increase on the scenes quality after its over... all the endless meetings could have easily been a email but were stretched to full episodes of mostly static pictures because clearly they had no budget for a full 24 episode anime, this is not an assumption i'm taking out of my ass, as previous sessions had points where the budge literally just ran out, i don't remember the season but there was this rushed ending at one point with a low res dragon attacking a city in the distance at some point that they probably don't want to repeat
my favorite part of slime is in fact the city building and evolution on the society that rimuru is pushing, not the fights in case you are wondering

U are right, and who disagrees is wrong. As a isekai+haren watcher, always people tell "but everything is so simple, nothing get the explanation right, etc...", but now that they implemented something different, the same people are complaining, lmao.

I'm going to necro this post because I don't like when people try to brush off criticism that does have some validity to it. While I don't entirely disagree with everything you've said, I do have a few things I would like to argue, as well as some of my own opinions as someone who also loves fantasy worldbuilding.

Firstly, the Slime adaption airs as a weekly show in effectively 20 minute segments. Having 4 weeks of the show be exposition that, realistically, could be at least partially condensed and still convey the same information, can result in it feeling like a slog to get through. It might be a different story if we weren't beholden to the Anime industry's 12-24 episodes that are 20 minutes long, and instead have 8-16 40 minute episodes, it may have worked much better, but unfortunately that was not the case. This is a side tangent, but that is another example of why I think the current standards of seasonal anime and the industry surrounding it are failing and in dire need of change.

There's a reason adapting prose into other mediums usually turns out poorly when done purely 1-to-1. Even keeping all the exposition, they could have taken the liberty to restructure the episodes interspersing, other events in between the meetings to break it up and make it feel like like sitting in a lecture. A better way to handle it even in the source material, would have been to have something more active happening and, when needed, flash back to parts of conversation from meetings, to convey whatever information needed to be provided for the context of the scene. This is a tool often used by a lot of really adept writers.

Secondly, and building on the end of the first point, most of the politics and worldbuilding in this show aren't actually particularly deep. If you compare to other fantasy (not just LN/Manga) you'll realize most of this stuff is relatively surface level. Yes, they talk about building a kingdom, but have they ever once talked about how to manage the waste generated? Surely the goblins and lizardfolk have different living requirements and needs compared to humans? What about language barriers? How about historical relations between different species/nations? Realistically, a lot of the politics/worldbuilding they talk about are fairly skin deep, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I enjoy worldbuilding and politicking in my fantasy, even if it's not ocean deep. The problem I have is when those politics and world building are somewhat shallow compared to what I've seen or read elsewhere and the method the author uses to convey it is mountains of exposition. It ends up being world elements that I've already seen in other media, but told in a very stale and honestly boring fashion. In my opinion, if you're going to do exposition like this, it really needs to be something deep that hooks me. Otherwise, I would rather have it tell me everything I need to know in a quick and concise manner and then just get on with the rest of the story. I don't have a whole lot of desire to watch 20 minute segments of a show telling me surface-level variations of ideas that I've read in much deeper detail in fiction written decades ago.

If it had been a bit condensed, and didn't need to span multiple relatively short episodes spread out over multiple weeks, it would be a different story. However, how it was presented in the show was ultimately fairly dry and left me personally feeling as if I just wanted to get to the next arc already. That being said, I did sit through it because overall I find the story and it's world to be very enjoyable with a lot of interesting and fun ideas spread throughout.

As I said in my first point, these issues in the adaption could have been remedied fairly easy by breaking up the pacing a bit. I would have liked to see characters actually doing things more often with the kingdom and management rather than simply talking about their plans for doing the things. The parts where they're building the dungeon and other scenes like that were the actual interesting parts of this season's worldbuilding, it's just that there were a lot of parts that effectively consisted of talking heads sitting around a table. I see you've replied to someone else about "show don't tell," the thing is that it's just a very basic principle in creative writing. Even more so, if you're writing fantasy, you should really be leaning more towards show than tell. Sure, you can break the rules and have it still be good, but if you're going to do that, it needs to be done for something that's truly great and stands out. In Slime's case, a lot of what they talked about in meetings was relatively par for the course when it comes to fantasy politics and worldbuilding, there wasn't that much that really stood out from the genre as a whole.

This idea of limiting exposition is especially true when adapting something from text into animation or live action. Tolkien is one of the greatest world builders ever and is very exposition heavy, yet if you compare the film adaptions of LotR to the Slime adaption, you'll notice how little "sitting around and explaining things" there actually is in the LotR films versus this season, and yet Peter Jackson's adaptions are considered some of the best book-to-film adaptions of all time. Once again, adapting purely 1-to-1 is often not going to work out that well.

And before you or anyone suggests I'm holding the author to an unreasonable standard, this isn't some small time author publishing their work on their wordpress blog or AO3. The Slime LN is an officially licensed and published media that has sold almost as many copies as all of Brandon Sanderson's works to date, and this is a discussion for the third season of an animated adaption of said LN. You can't treat it as a deep work of fiction and then try to say he's just a little guy writing a little book when someone critiques it.

I'm generally in favor of supporting artists/authors/musicians/etc in their creative endeavors regardless of the content of the story, unless it's actively hurting or attempting to hurt someone. Even if it's not something I'm interested in or enjoy, I will at the very least support their right to express themselves creatively. That does not, however, mean that I'm incapable of recognizing and critiquing things that I feel could be better, even in media that I absolutely adore. If you aren't capable of critiquing the things you like, even things that are generally considered good, it stifles growth both of your own understanding of media and potentially the creator. The author of the LN could very much work on the way they present their worldbuilding, which isn't horrible, but could be better. The studio adapting it, could very much learn to better fit the adaption's coverage of said worldbuilding into a season's worth of 20 minute episodes and not have people feel the need to come on forums and whine about "yapping."

Think for a second about other series, like Frieren. Frieren has a deep world with a story that is very much focused on characters and what it means to care about others and be human, and yet did we see even remotely close to the same level of complaining about lengthy exposition?

I love Slime and even still enjoyed this season a lot. I will agree that a lot of people were over-reacting to the exposition parts. However, trying to argue that in general people are wrong or lesser for feeling like it wasn't particularly engaging is just a bad faith stance to take. You can't simply hand-wave criticism away with "worldbuilding" as an excuse when there are plenty of examples of how to handle things like that for adaption into a different medium, especially when there are so many people feeling the need to vocalize their dissatisfaction. Even Tolkien has people who study and critique his work, just look at discussions about the flaws of the Uruk-hai and their origins. People had even critiqued the critically-acclaimed movie adaptions for scenes that had been cut.

It really is easy enough to just look at it and say "yeah, I like the worldbuilding parts, but maybe there was a way to handle this better for this type of medium with it's unique constraints."

Every time I see someone try to push back against criticism of the pacing and structure of this season (or even other anime/LN/manga that might do similar things), they never bother to consider that maybe there's actually some validity to it. Instead they just try to pretend like it's a super awesome series for intellectuals, and anyone who disagrees is just a peasant who likes low-brow anime. Slime is a great series but it is far from flawless, and I will strongly argue that this "worldbuilding" section in the anime adaption was not handled as well as it could have been even while still enjoying it.

This kind of attitude of attacking any criticism comes off as an overly-defensive, elitist stance of someone who wants to think their preferred media is particularly "deep" without being able to accurately and honestly analyze or criticize the things they like. It just exudes the "it's deep, you just don't understand it" mentality of people who want to feel erudite but aren't. I am going to assume this is not the type of person you are or intend to be, but there are many people, especially with the anime fandom, that act this way.

Regarding the worldbuilding questions I asked earlier, some examples of authors who do consider things like that are Pratchett, Sanderson, GRRM, and Sapkowski among others. In Pratchett's Discworld series he had even given thought to how sewage was handled in a major metropolis type fantasy city. For anyone who hasn't read from authors like these, and who actually wants to engage with good fantasy worldbuilding and discuss it, I would strongly suggest reading some of those authors. Most of them have audiobook versions available as well.

Thats if the movie is canon.

I mean AFAIK, the first one wasnt so whos to say this will be?

@RABIGA7OR If you say so then I'll add that to my list!

Cannot say that I havent faced that problem. I had subscribed to the thread. In the same boat as you. Sincere apologies. The enemy force has withdrawn so no more notifications

Noted, didnt know that part was canon. The Benimaru's brother stuff isnt canon right?