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I have mentioned a few times here and there that I have a lot of love for animation. I love the different creative styles and the vast freedom of stories that can be told within them. Animation should absolutely be more popular due to the range it has in offering stories and themes that would be far more expensive in live action productions, but it seems to be an industry hanging on my a thread in current times. It's unfortunate. Animation in the west is aimed more at children, being incredibly low budget as a result. And adult cartoons feel the need to be nothing but fast-paced vulgarity in order to almost attempt to justify their existences. Thanks, Rick and Morty! In fact, the adult side of things seems completely void of style and substance; the content made for children is often featuring more stylistic choices and designs. It is sad to even be writing this out, knowing how bad things have managed to get for certain areas of filmmaking despite the potential they have. Despite this, I still every now and then try to catch up on some potentially appealing recent shows. Or I'll try to find something older, perhaps going through some shows or films I once saw as a child. 

I have felt the want to watch more animations as of late. While the anime industry seems to be doing alright, and with more diverse stories than the western animation industry, anime can feel like a bit too much sometimes. And reading subtitles is something I'm very used to and don't mind, but sometimes does get a bit tiresome. And dubs, well, nobody wants English dubs! This has had me leaning more to what I grew up with: western cartoons. Colourful, dumb, and with plenty of nostalgia. My Amazon Prime subscription was finally coming to an end, and I didn't know what to watch, leading to one last scroll through its library. I came across Dan Vs. this way, stumbling across it out of pure chance. I was surprised. I had never heard of this show before. Immediately I assumed it was bad; after all, you often hear about shows you haven't seen if they're good, as fans spread the word around with references and discussions. Dan Vs. however, was completely new to me. My curiosity got the best of me, and I dived into it. 

<center>**Dan Vs.**</center>

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As is no surprise these days, one of the main reasons I and perhaps even you may not have heard of Dan Vs. is because it was cancelled after its third season. Released around 2011 and getting the axe around 2013. This meant the show was cut short, but at the same time did see three entire seasons released, to which I might argue so far seem like more than enough. Dan Vs. is a show that doesn't seem to have a linear story to it, or so at this particular point I'm at. Each episode is a different story in the life of Dan, an absolutely insufferable protagonist that is stumbling through life, angry at everyone and everything. Dan is the kind of person everyone hates, and refuses to be near. Dan lives a strange life in which he is constantly seeking revenge on this who he believes have somehow wronged him. Either by causing him an inconvenience of minor detail, or merely existing to which he finds offense. As the show's name implies, each episode is Dan Vs. someone or something. That can be Dan Vs. Canada, or Traffic, or Ninjas. Even Dan Vs. The Dentist. Each episode is like this.

What I have noticed so far is that Dan is often acting like a crazed lunatic. An unemployed conspiracy theorist fueled by hate and a lust for revenge. But Dan is somehow often right about these things. These mini twists add to the comedic tone of the show, which is necessary based on how annoying of a main character Dan is. It's funny that this insufferable character seems to be riddled with nothing but delusions but ends up actually being correct. Sometimes he's also taking insanely drastic measures like stealing explosives to try to decrease the traffic problem; it's these moments that the show gives us that really exaggerates the character of Dan, of has no limits or real understanding of the world and idea of consequences. To match this his best friend, a completely normal guy that seems to be heavily manipulated by Dan. Always picking up the phone when Dan calls and asks for help to get revenge. 

One potential downside of the show is that it's actually *very* repetitive. Every episode is structured in the same way. While it's nice to not have any story that is linear and several seasons long, instead it's something you can pick up whenever, not even remember where you left off, but that doesn't even matter. But this also means that if you watch more than two episodes in a row, it does start to grow a bit too familiar. You sort of know what to expect from the characters and the story because you've absolutely seen it before, just under different environments and scenarios. Some cartoons can handle this better than others, but with Dan Vs. it seems quite persistent on following this structure to the end. While the animation style of Dan Vs. isn't anything special, it also isn't anything to really impress you. The character designs can be quite fun in some episodes, and the backgrounds are often drawn with some sort of distortion in the perspective which makes the world around Dan look even more stupid and false. I think that addition adds quite a bit to the show, but the generation animation isn't much to really celebrate.

Despite that, the show is pretty fun so far. I'm quite a fan of flawed protagonists in films and television shows, so having one that seems to be both horrible but weirdly right in his crazed conspiracies is quite funny. I assume it has some sort of niche fanbase, but I'm still quite surprised that I never have heard of this show prior. Only coming across it as a result of it being buried within Prime Video's horrific library. It's nice to see something a bit more aimed at an adult audience, without the vulgarity that seems to plague the genre today. This is by far the main appeal to me, and it's unfortunate that it got cancelled; though as mentioned before, this has three entire seasons, and the formula the show has seems to make those three seasons more than enough.

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