i enjoyed it!

i thought it had some good and some bad. my biggest problem with both s1 and s2 of jessica jones is that both would have benefitted from being shorter shows, s1 with like 8 eps and s2 with maybe 10...they both got very dragged out near the end although i don't think s2 was quite as bad as s1 in that respect. i think this season had relatively tighter writing tho, in comparison to other marvel netflix series. there were fewer straggly bits and i didn't feel like i had to skip through large parts of episodes the way i have for most of the other shows/seasons and for the most part, other than ***** there were annoying aspects to characters but they didn't make me want to tear my hair out? what they did with the red herrings i found fun and i think like i can clearly identify main plot + subplots without associated tangles of unnecessary bits that muddle the picture...but i wonder if some of the annoying add-ons in s1 were because they were trying to bloat the story more to fit the 13 episode length? at any rate up until like the last three episodes i was really quite happy with it, i tweeted "so technically i haven’t finished the season yet and it has full capacity to go to absolute shit bc i think the ending of s1 was utter shite and i don’t want to jinx it but it’s not like what i say will change anything now but i think this is my fave defenders season thus far…" and of course jinxed myself because the last few eps really slowed down in pace and flip floppy decision making and generally dragged but i got to the end without it feeling too much like a chore? i think one of the reasons why the last few episodes felt so stagnant tho might also have been because they stopped firing chekhov's guns by then. like, a lot of the elements introduced and resolved in the end were contained only within those eps, and they'd already kind of reaped the benefits of planted seeds from the first few eps of the season with no loaded rifles left to go off. that's why while i considered the season relatively tighter writing (esp. compared to other defenders' series/seasons), it wasn't really TIGHT. in terms of story it really kind of felt like they'd reached the end of the arc and went oh shit and had to tack on more material when they could have wrapped it up in one ep max...?

[spoiler alert]
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to be really concrete and give a specific example, they introduced the guard in the end and they needed to make sure jessica was otherwise occupied for trish to kidnap malus and i thought gave the opportunity to again show killgrave's grip over jessica's mentality but after she dealt with killgrave we completely lost her grappling with her feelings on being a murderer and the ethics and morality debates that she'd been plagued with throughout the whole season just vanished in the face of alisa in the last ep and it was REALLY unsatisfying!!!
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[end of spoilers]

i don't know what it says about me but the character i relate to the most out of all the defenders shows is probably jessica jones...i have no functional capacity to deal with emotions or trauma or really other people in general and i think that's what made me really resent ***** from the get-go...other than jj i rly like malcolm a lot hehe. i got really peeved when he had to *** *** **** i don't think that's necessarily poor writing because it's an accurate reflection of society but i resent that society a lot lol. on the other hand, something that is poor writing is marvel series consistently using black women as just characters to be killed off seriously please stop this all we have now is misty knight. wait thought about this again and i like vido and oscar too.

what else...i think it's good that they didn't have a true villain character this season. i think killgrave in s1 was almost too strong of a character (i don't mean in terms of powers; i think it was his writing and acting and presence and influence and personality etc.) and it made s1 really about him. if they tried for another villain there'd be no way to avoid comparisons and absolutely no way a second villain could be that good. instead it's more like, inner demons? lack of communication... but mostly it's characters grappling with their own mistakes or pasts or trauma or their friends' mistakes lmao

[another spoiler alert]
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like even with hogarth you could say shane and/or inez were the antagonists in her story but i think ultimately jerry being up her own ass and power-obsessed and unable to see past her throne/need for money and control was the culprit for her downfall, and anyway she recovered and probably now will never again trust a human being but when she sank to her knees it felt much more like she'd brought about her own disaster, and it was karma serving justice more than it felt like shane/inez pulling a con on her to me. i don't particularly like hogarth but i think her sidestory was rly well done this season
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[end of spoilers 2]

okay but the corollary to this is i seriously was not rooting for a single person except malcolm by the end...

something i really have to comment on is the sound editing in jessica jones...i love the songs they use but from the first seconds of the show, the background sounds, the use of directions and echoes and effects...it's SO good...even the silences and stuff...i just thought in terms of audio they did a really good job the whole season, i was very happy with that...

anyway to conclude i've read a few reviews after i wrote up these thoughts and neither reviewer seemed to like jjs2 at all, much less as much as i did LOL and i thought i tended to DISLIKE things more than like them. but i stand by what i said about everything and the pacing...someone said the last few eps are "faster" because there are more plot twists but to me the plot twists made the eps choppy rather than quick, and the scenes themselves took way too long...i like it when you have lots of fast scenes that move THROUGH the scenes rather than jumping from one place to the next because of a curveball...like the conversations in the last few eps were real snoozefests to me in comparison but i guess this is the beauty of human perspective and differences of opinion n____n

okay that's all for now!