>>42746847
Children's shows sitcoms, slice of life are very focused on the characters just interacting together in 1 room almost like talking heads and at best going on a field trip yet still talking about themselves rather than the story.
It's very hard to focus both on the characters and the story without one undermining the other, you need A LOT of time/episodes spread out. A normal person takes 1 hour to socialize with each other, often times 8 hours. It's very hard to pull off socializing and character representation within 13 episodes, that's why most people tell you to watch more than 1 episode of Moomin and MLP since you can't get the full picture from all perspectives, there's a bunch of characters that don't feature at the start of the season.
I remember watching Galatik Football and being more interested in the story going on in the background during the football match rather than the football tournament itself ... also it takes a whole 6 episodes just to get to their 1 true tournament match and another 7 episodes to reach the mid-level boss that even the writers commented on that it felt like a finale episode which they had to skip the football match into tiny fragments to focus on the more interesting story of infiltrating and rescuing a character being blackmailed and kidnapped by the corporations.
Storm Hawks also had a great world, but too childish and they never revisit ideas, concepts, locations outside of a max 2nd episode, similar to how MLP does with its "recurring" characters.
That balance is a main issue. You can either attempt it to miraculously combine both heavy lore story and character defining SoL or simply separate them into their own shows.
For example S1 E2 while it's a much more adventurous version of E1 and far better than S2's premiere ... you're clearly noticing the lack of story, everfree forest lore, no Zecora, no pauses around a bonfire, etc. etc. you're basically autowalking and railroaded, there's no exploration, only pitstops for the challenges.
You can say that they combined the adventure aspect with the character defining moments as best as they could, but it's no Kulipari and Redwall structure wise. There's no in-depth exploration of Nightmare Moon's backstory or Celestia and Twilight doesn't do anything beyond cringe at the word friend or do anything more interesting like doubt herself or try to stop the mane5 from following her ... similar to Moomin's simplistic storytelling, but then you say "that's it?" yep that's it.
Even if say you were really good at story and a different kind of character development it can easily detract from your main idea of a low-stakes adventure. Since character "development" requires A LOT of episodes, change and exposition to see how the character evolved.
The question is always how to combine them properly without undermining the other.
