Haven't seen Willow, but Blood Origin is fine. Its ok for shows to just be OK.

I don't understand the hate for "I don't understand the hate."

Thanks! I tend to talk out of my arse a lot so I'm glad it helped. :)

Anime is strictly speaking animation. AiB is a live action adaptation of a manga.

Theres similarities - anime can often deal with heightened emotion and melodrama, same as manga adaptations.

Alice in Borderland is a manga adaptation, yes, and manga will have flashbacks and character backgrounds dropped into the middle of plot proceedings.

Other media does this too. Breaking Bad will often have flashbacks in the cold open.

Presenting things in strictly chronological order can and will undercut a lot of tension. If we see the protagonist set up his dramatic reversal ahead of time, you lose the drama.

Its OK if its not for you, but there's real storytelling value to flashbacks.

As for the "everyone is an idiot" thing: Its really hard to write a character who is smarter than the writer. 😅

The 'battle of wits' genre kind of runs on a cycle of laying down the rules for a scenario, then MC finding a way to twist circumvent or beat the rules. Some shows do this better than others.

I find it helps if you remember that you, the viewer, have distance from the situation in the show and sometimes more information than the characters do. Nobody is a perfectly rational actor operating on a sphere in a vacuum; the characters are often tired, stressed, anxious, unsure who to trust, or otherwise not thinking clearly.

The Beach arc of AiB is pretty good about this: Yes, everyone should chill the fuck out and solve the murder, but, uh, there's other factors going on that makes that difficult.

A lot of these confrontations are as much ideological as they are intellectual. Often a scenario is designed to have character's ideals questioned more than they are to make perfectly logical sense. Its a thing that happens in melodrama. You either like it or you don't.

Part of the fun of these shows is the power fantasy of being the smartest guy in the room. The trick is to hide the idiot ball or at least not deploy it too liberally.

"Welcome to the OC, bitch!"

I loved this show but it was trash. Soapy, delicious, quality trash. Everyone was awful doing awful things and the conspicuous consumption was terrible and the nerd baiting was pandering and I loved every trashy, terrible minute of it.