Series Thoughts: Tales of Arcadia: 3Below (Full series)

• Released: 21 December 2018
• Creator: Guillermo el Toro
• Total amount of seasons: 2
• Seasons watched: 2
• Rating: 4/5

Synopsis

Two alien royals, their protector and their dog travel to Earth to flee from a coup on their home planet by a general called Morando.

My Thoughts

I gave Trollhunters a review full of praise before. So how does the second installment in the Arcadia quartet fare? Honestly, pretty darn well.

I always see 3Below being talked about far less often that the seemingly more popular Trollhunters and Wizards. Why exactly this is, I don't know, but my theory is that people prefer the fantasy setting of the other two series. Wizards also feels much more like a direct continuation to Trollhunters, minus some things that happen in 3Below, of course.

While I'm personally not a fan of science fiction, I think the alien stuff in this series was executed pretty decently. I don't have a whole lot of experience with the genre, but enough to say that it isn't my cup of tea. I naturally wasn't amazed by all the alien species and tech going on, but I did like some of the aspects of it.

Our main characters, while not my favorites from the Tales of Arcadia series trilogy, I still definitely appreciate a whole lot. Aja goes from a rebellious princess to a full-on queen embracing her title, Krel learns where he belongs and Vex rights his past wrongdoings. They're all pretty dang well fleshed out characters and I liked their arcs a lot.

The plot is not my favorite, especially season 2 with Morando trying to become a god and succeeding. I don't know, I've never been a fan of series where the final battle is just defeating a huge Kaiju form of the villain. I guess they executed it decently, but it just doesn't appeal to me personally.

The villains are some of my biggest criticisms with this series. I just...don't think they're as good as in Trollhunters or Wizards. Morando feels like a bit of a recycled version of Gunmar, but less interesting somehow. Many of the bounty hunters are just one-off characters (except the Zerons, whom I also don't find interesting) and the only one of them that leaves an impact is Tronos, who is killed off pretty unceremoniously. Then there's Kubritz...who really is just this series' variant on Usurna. Completely hatable villain. I guess the only thing that sets her apart from queenface plot-wise is that Kubritz had a heel-face turn last minute, but other than that she's equally detestable. 

Something I did really like in this series are the development Eli and Steve get. They already got quite a bit in Trollhunters, but this series really takes it to the next level, with Steve becoming even closer friends with his Creepslayer buddy and eventually falling in love with Aja. They share a cute romance together. We're not going to talk about the stuff in Rise of the Titans here. We're just...not. I'd rather pretend that never happened.

The animation in 3Below is still really good and we see quite a few new characters and locations in this series. Not all of them leave an impact, but overall I like the new additions to what was established already in Trollhunters.

This series also addresses some subjects such as "illegal aliens" (literally, I suppose) and racism. Like, in a way you wouldn't expect them to. I mean, technically this is still "fantastical racism", since they are literal aliens from another planet, but even when in human form, Krel experiences racism too. His human form, which looks like a latino. This is mostly confined to just one episode, but there's some moments interspersed in the series like this. 

While this series didn't leave quite the same impact on me as Trollhunters, I think I can safely attribute this to the genre just generally not being my thing. For what it is, however, 3Below is still very good and absolutely deserves a watch. There's also quite a few throwbacks to Trollhunters and even some appearances of Jim and his gang, so I think that's pretty neat!