Ballroom e Youkoso

[neflight86]

My hangup so far (nothing to do with judges or judging) is that I'm completely lost whenever they mention specific dance moves or other technical aspects that I can't perceive. I just have to take everybody's word for everything because I have no knowledge of dancing. Typically, shounen sports stories have a segment breaking the sport down for the truely clueless, with sprinkled META commentary to keep the audience up to speed.

Ballroom doesn't really do that, and I'm split in opinion. On one hand, I'm glad it is respecting the audience's intelligence by not breaking down the entirety of how one dances in competition, allowing the animation and commentary to clue us in on the participants' faring. On the other hand, I'm afraid I'm too stupid to grasp the proceedings without that firm foundation most shows spoon feed me. For example, once they didn't get first place, I had no idea his dancing was bad enough to put them in last place until (his) hindsight filled in the gaps that he is still a weak dancer. I just don't have enough information to form solid conclusions about the state of these competitions. Time will tell if that is going to bother me down the road.

[KrayZ33]

Yeah, I criticised the same thing.

They don't really show the moves, they stopped doing that right after they introduced the training-box routine.
A shame, really.

I think it would've been best if they showed us some more training, maybe pick up on how he keeps doing X a lot better now than he did before and how it's difficult to do Y right after Z and why.

And then, during the tournament, slightly guide the viewer but mostly just hint at mistakes via animation etc.