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you make a great point about catering to a younger audience: shonen/shoujo writers don't necessarily want to write simple stories, and as such must instead make viewers understand narrative complexities, lest they risk alienating their primary audience. (my hero academia, naruto, etc etc.).

an equal factor in the frequency of info-dumps via dialogue is the seasonal anime environment: some shows get huge budgets, great staff and (sometimes) enough time, but most don't. as such, the ever-underappreciated character animation and character art suffer, leaving stiff dialogue as the only viable means to communicate an idea to the viewer. a parallel to books really puts things into perspective: imagine a book that can only express the most rudimentary of concepts in its narrative and descriptive passages. they fix the space and time during which the action takes place and blandly sketch the actions of the characters present, but nothing beyond that. naturally, it falls on the dialogue to pick up all the slack, and it just as naturally collapses under the pressure. really can't overstate the value of art and animation in anime.

since most anime fall under the umbrella of either shonen or low-budget anime, that probably leads to the "industry standard" you mentioned. it seems almost necessary in those contexts, though! perhaps the creative constraints budding writers and directors work under shape their standard art-making approach.


mid-fight discussions are truly the worst! they're almost always moment-inappropriate. that being said, i think that, depending on the nature of the fight, putting it on pause can serve the story. if it's a narrative climax, absolutely don't kill the pacing. it is when an author/director decides to start a fight before proper tension and stakes are built up that stopping the action can bring benefit. sousou no frieren is particularly adept at this. the show, for genuine reasons i won't expand on right now, oftentimes requires battles to start with very little forewarning or directly connected plot threads. the anime (and, if memory serves right, the manga as well) counteracts this by interweaving the past and the present, building suspense and inertia the bouts would've otherwise lacked, eventually leading to a satisfying finish. it does suffer from talk-during-fight-itis in some of the latter arcs, though, and it's not always excusable.


as for your question: lengthy, perfectly truthful, perfectly self-aware dialogue creates perfect exposition. it's like reading production notes. this creates a very rigid, clear interpretation of characters, hence why the term binary came to mind. admittedly, i used it improperly, and "fixed" would've been a better term for what i was trying to say.

thank you for your comment on my comment (lol)

virtue signaling (and the over-use of exposition through dialogue) is also a pet peeve of mine. gimai seikatsu is this season's worst offender: dialogue is consistently bogged down by its over-considerate nature (it reads like a business email chain). i don't really mind it in feel-good shows, but it can kill the flow of anything tonally bleaker.

oftentimes, in an attempt to make their characters appear more mature/reasonable, writers will make them explain themselves with scientific rigor. so, if they feel responsible for something they had no part in, they'll tell you and they'll do it in a paragraph long line. this kills nuance, it assigns a binary value to their feelings. words are great for transmitting exact ideas, but unless arranged by a skilled author, incapable of properly communicating the complexity of the human psyche. anime scriptwriters are talented and could probably swing that, but what about the characters who're actually speaking? either you have them break character or purposefully dumb down and expand their lines, at which point the dumbed down lines serve as the only source of characterization in the eyes of the viewer, due to sheer volume.
this style of self-justifying, self-describing monologue is extremely in-your-face and rarely intentionally fallacious, so other, more subtle attempts at chipping depth into a character will be overshadowed.

(i think that the problem of over-exposition thru dialogue is part of what makes monogatari widely acclaimed. it mainly consists of dialogue, but the dialogue doesn't serve as an perfect expository tool, so it gives visual/musical staff plenty of agency. it subverts a common industry problem, and people like that)

were the scriptwriters to take a step back and trust the holistic ability of the medium to convey emotions, they'd find that viewer understanding and engagement would actually increase. i don't dislike wordy shows, but when dialogue demands that it be the expository cornerstone, that's a problem.