(Average) Barakamon

Series in one sentence:
Man with boring job, that brings less value to the world than a garbage collector, gets his house constantly broken into by people he should've called the cops on weeks ago.

Series in more sentences:
Handa prides himself in his work as a calligrapher, but when a snooty critic has no good word to say about his art, he loses his cool and punches the man, affecting his reputation.

His father suggests he moves to the countryside to get away from it all and Handa wishes to use the opportunity to improve and reinvent himself, but is constantly disturbed by the locals, one of them an overly optimistic little girl.

After watching Handa-kun, I said to check out the series it was based off of.
I'll admit: I've seen Barakamon's cover art and accompanying synopsis pass me by at Crunchyroll multiple times, long before finding Handa-kun, but never clicked on it, because it sounded intensely boring.

And I was right.

I love Handa-kun. Ignoring the first half of the first episode, it's well-paced and clearly made by people who wanted to have fun with it. Barakamon is none of those things. The pacing is bad, none of the jokes are funny, I cared for none of the characters, including Handa himself, and the whole plot is just one big nothing.

It's already hard to get me or most (Western?) people excited for the art of, well, writing letters using a big ol' ink brush, so to make Handa's whole story arc revolve around Japanese calligraphy is a peculiar choice. It's a boring profession, so why should I care if he fails or succeeds at fine-tuning his talents? I'm not even able to discern whether Handa is a good calligrapher; everything he does looks like a bunch of muddy, aggressive swipes on a piece of paper. That shit he drew on the boat in episode 4 was absolutely hideous.
I suppose you need to be Japanese to possibly understand the beauty of it all, but really, do most modern Japanese people care about calligraphy in any serious degree? Does anyone who likes Barakamon like it because it features Japanese calligraphy?

It's hard to feel invested in Handa's supposed growing connection with the locals, as not only are the children either bland or annoying and do they keep breaking into his house, there's no time spent on showing them grow accustomed to each other. Handa moves in in episode 1, and in episode 2 it's already established he gets free food from some local every day, and the little stalker girl is familiar with his work habits. Days to weeks have supposedly passed.

Handa in Barakamon is presented as overly obsessed with his profession and a fairly aggressive person at times, who's apparently never experienced a moment of happiness or tasted friendship in his life. How else can he be so affected by these countryside people, their habits, and countryside kindness? None of it makes sense if Handa-kun is even a little bit canon, since he was very timid in that one and loved by everyone, though he needed time to realize that.
It'd be more fair to say is that it's the Handa-kun series that doesn't make sense, since it's Barakamon's spin-off and all, but it stays the superior show to me. Handa is a more interesting character in that one, the humor is better, the side-characters are better, and the underlying story that is Handa's loneliness and craving to connect with people is more relatable.

Also, that "sea slug is an orgasming dick"-joke is really inappropriate to do with two 6 year old girls and I've become a worse person having seen it.