Anime review: Shingeki no Kyojin S1-S2 (2013-2017)

While discussing/debating with colleagues about this anime I barely remember having watched the first season of, I decided to rewatch it and follow up with the second season for good measure. You know, to build myself a proper opinion.

To make it brief, it was even worse than in my vague memories.

I'll first mention the few good points:

• The plot is indeed captivating, you really want to know what the fuck is going on, and this desire somewhat pulls you along even through the dullest episodes.
• The titan designs were truly cool/interesting. I kinda wanted to see more of the Beast one upon reaching the end of S2, even though I hated the whole.
• Some of the human-controlled titan combat scenes were awesome, especially those with Annie.

Ehhh, that's basically it? And now for the truly bad:

• Worst offender: the pacing. While the first cour (until Eren seals the hole in the wall) was decently tight, everything after started to suffer from the worst excess in interminable {info,thought,emo}dumps and shoehorned flashbacks that clearly would have been but a few panels in the manga. The ridiculously long intro recaps (multiple minutes) kinda validate this feeling: they were stretching this shit like taffy.
• While I praised the combat scenes with Annie, the rest quickly started to smell of filler (yes, I'm not exaggerating). I mean, you can only watch the same Spiderman-with-swords over Epic™ music scene so many times before it starts to get very old.
• On the subject of Epicness™… the sheer length of these passages cheapened them to an incredible degree. Especially the grand speeches with the emotional depth of a Bluey episode, I rarely cringed that much in front of an anime.
• The cast. Be it the primary characters reaching a "generic shonen" level of flat and predictable or the secondary cast being way too large to truly develop everyone to the point you even care about their deaths, it was absolute crap. Come to think of it, the size issue also played a role in the bad pacing, since every jobber/filler gets at least a line or two. Even the "less worse" characters like Annie, Jean, Ymir, Reiner/Bertolt are barely expanded upon and/or just superficially deepened through a veil of mystery.

The first cour would maybe deserve a 6~7, but the whole? Not a chance in hell. Give me back my wasted time, you hacks.