Not going to lie, those are the best expectations. It's a great series, but so was solo leveling. A great series becomes legendary because of a few conditions, luck and accumulating a big fandom are part of it.
But the worst thing a great series can have is when people are expecting it to be a legendary. When you go in with high expectations it's easy to compare and see the worst in a piece of art. Going in with low or regular expectations allows you to see that this series is actually pretty solid.
Boruto and legend of Korra are also solid series in their own right, but coming as a direct sequel to a legendary series, they couldn't live up, and sometimes even directly contradicted or diminished the original series' plot / protagonist's achievements. This does nothing but anger the fandom, leading to nitpicking of the series and group mob hating. Those series' do have flaws, but if the original legendary series that was their prequel didn't exist, they'd probably be solid series', instead of universally hated series.
Ragnarok is seeing the main flaws that lead to a hated sequel and doing a good job of avoiding the . It's changing the plot (we just established that MC can't become a shadow monarch because there's only ever 1). The original MC's powers and plots aren't diminished. He's still fighting very powerful beings only he can fight. MC is not going the dagger route, but the fist. We have established different goals and powers (with finding and befriending the children of the monarchs, in contrast with the prequel that killed the monarchs) also being able to fuse with them is a good start. And we have set a clear goal of trying to find his missing mother, and get strong enough to fight alongside his father.
The worst a sequel can do is try to mimic the original, it just leads to easy comparison, and everyone is already emotionally biased to the original, there's no winning when you try to follow many parts of the original plot, but also have new content. It just leads to a bad story where the things they do to be similar don't hit the same as the original, and the changes make people uncomfortable. No winning...
Sorry for the rant XD TLDR: go in to every series with low expectations. It's funner to be pleasantly surprised, or have your expectations matched, than with high expectations, where you either have your expectations matched, or be disappointed.
No I actually agree! Your opinion really is well said… but I half agree about boruto being good if it was a stand alone.. the worldbuilding changed so much that it’s doesn’t feel like their ninjas anymore.. konoha was a hidden village now it’s a whole city. If we didn’t know the context before it wouldn’t make sense at all… I’m glad ragnarok is careful not to disappoint fans with usual sequel tropes.
That's fair. I never watched Boruto beyond a few episodes. That kinda sucks though, taking away the ninja aspect. But legend of Korra kinda did the same thing. They took away a lot of the fantasy politics and replaced it with more diverse modern political ideologies that were fighting instead of countries. All took the beautiful ancient asian world and turned it steam punk :/. Wouldn't have been bad tho if you never watched the original. But it changed so much. Korra never went on her adventure to learn the elements because she already had 3 mastered :/. Sigh. Comparison is so easy because we already saw the original and expected something similar or better. But that's hardly ever the case :')
I had low expectations but this is pretty good.