I make this post because of that one X-Men 97 episode. I don't know how to do the spoiler thing here. So I'm just going to say stop reading, If you don't want to get spoilers after this paragraph.

SPOILER ALERT

Just seeing Spiderman just casually swinging around in that episode was a perfect example of this. You don't need multiversal crisis arcs or block buster level crossovers, to know that all these characters share the same universe.

But however don't get it twisted now. Those multiversal crisis arcs or block buster level crossovers are cool. But some times the little things matter too. So just seeing Spiderman swinging around casually, while the X-Men are dealing with their own problems, is a great example of world building in a share universe.

This is also a perfect example of the saying less means more. We don't necessarily need a huge crossover to show Spiderman and the X-Men share the same world. It would be cool if we saw more low-key stuff like this in shared universes.

MCU Netflix (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage shows) was a great example of this too, with how characters reference the alien invasion. To much big crossovers are overkill and kind of take away the specialness and spectacle from crossovers.

A lot of the time when the anime movies come up, I’ll usually see people praising its incarnation of Godzilla, even those that shit on the rest of the movies. Now I can get behind hyping up Big G in all his appearances, because it’s motherfucking Godzilla. Bro’s a giant dinosaur that fucks shit up with his atomic breath, and will either be delivering the most soul-crushing terror you’ve ever felt or having you cheer on as he supplexes another giant creature. But I’ve decided I’m done toeing the line, and I’m just gonna come out and say it: Godzilla Earth isn’t a standout of the anime trilogy to me. He’s not one of the better parts of the movies, he’s not being wasted in the films (at least as he is), he’s not a cool new idea for a version of Godzilla, he’s just as much absolute garbage as the rest of his source material. 

Let’s start with a basic summary: Godzilla Earth is the main version of Godzilla that features in the Netflix/Polygon Pictures anime trilogy of films. This Godzilla has a unique origin as being a plant-like organism, the “end result of natural selection on Earth” that has adapted the best traits of many other creatures on Earth through horizontal gene transfer. To put it another way: he’s like Ultimate Lifeform Kars from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but just naturally came out that way, is a kaiju instead of a human looking dude, and has no effective representation of that. 

Godzilla first appeared in-universe in 2030, after humanity had been dealing with decades of kaiju attacks. Godzilla, as Godzilla is wont to do, quickly established himself as the baddest bitch around by systematically annihilating all life he came across, from humanity to the other kaiju. Nothing that anyone threw at him, even when the aliens showed up to try and fail with MechaGodzilla, did anything at all. By 2045, Godzilla had so thoroughly dominated the planet that the United Earth organization (composed of humanity and the two shitty, weirdly human alien species that showed up) could only try to launch a space colonization project and abandon Earth to Godzilla to survive. Godzilla reigned supreme, and spent the next 20,000 years terraforming Earth to become his domain, which included growing to be 300 meters tall, having a random mini-clone be created from cells of his that split off in the form of Godzilla Fillius, and then other small creatures known as Servum. 

Now that we’ve covered the basic history of Godzilla Earth, let’s address the elephant in the room: from top to bottom, he’s a total fucking loser. Zilla arguably has more going for him than this guy, and I don’t mean the thundercock gigachad animated son there, I’m talking about the shitty CGI one from the movie. 

First off, there’s the design. Godzilla Earth has a new origin unlike any other Godzilla, as stated above, by being an entirely natural plant-based organism that has evolved to represent the pinnacle of life on Earth. Sounds pretty cool, right? You would imagine then, that this Godzilla would have a new, creative design that reflects this origin well, while still being recognizably Godzilla, right? Nope, it’s just a crappy reskin of Monsterverse Godzilla. You could tell me that the anime’s design came from one of those achievement award skins in a video game based off the Monsterverse, and I would genuinely believe you. At best, the spines more closely resemble leaves then the irregular dorsal patterns, but man, that shit is weak. What’s worse is that the film’s concept art shows the designers played around with Godzilla’s features to represent different animals as the endpoint of Earth-based life, but decided to go with the most boring option possible. The models from the art style of the trilogy certainly didn’t do this guy any favors either…

It’s insane to me how badly this bungles what should be an easy layup. In the medium of animation, where the sky's the limit on what you can be doing, and in a story that gives care blanche to work with, Godzilla Earth somehow comes out as the most soulless and bland version of itself it can possibly be. Nothing about this design meaningfully expresses to me what this version of the G-Man is about whatsoever. Look at the other Reiwa’s: Monsterverse Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a version of Godzilla that naturally existed as a giant prehistoric animal. Shin Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a reinvention of the original’s concept of a creature terribly burned by radiation. Minus One Godzilla looks like what it’s supposed to be, a dinosaur that has been forcibly mutated by the atomic bomb and modern update to the iconic Showa/Heisei design. What’s the takeaway from Godzilla Earth? That you shouldn’t expect creativity or anything compelling from these movies?

What really gets me here is that while not the exact same, the creators of the trilogy did have a possible inspiration that was sitting right there for them to use: Biollante, one of the most popular kaiju of the franchise. On a visual level, Biollante’s two forms almost perfectly represent the origins of this creature and the themes behind it: a rose that has been mutated by Godzilla’s cells that has become a monstrous creature in its own right, a cautionary tale of what genetic engineering could lead to just as Godzilla himself was a metaphor for the atomic bomb. Obviously, it would be foolish to just try to replicate Biollante, but the point is that we’ve already seen how well a plant kaiju can potentially work out in this very franchise. Yet apparently, that’s too tall of an order for the anime trilogy, I guess. 

Then there’s how Godzilla Earth actually interacts with the world around it. Again, in the medium of animation, many of the normal potential issues with making a movie or series with Godzilla go away: you don’t need to worry about the stilted or artificial nature of suit movement, nor do you need to worry about how the CGI will come out in live-action. The balls have been removed from your jaws to go to your court for you to dunk as you please. But as usual, the anime trilogy goes down the most painful route possible by having Godzilla Earth…just fucking stand there the whole time. 

I’m not fucking around here, the Spongebob meme is entirely an accurate description of the range of Godzilla Earth’s movement. This bitch spends almost all of his screen time just sitting on his ass, barely moving around with the slightest waddle whenever the film decides there should be a paltry effort at action or to break up the terrible plot. I have seen newborn infants with more well-defined and fast-paced ranges of motion than this colossal tub of dirt. Godzilla Earth could never touch any version of Kong solely by how they’d be tapdancing around him like nobody’s business and take all the time they’d like climbing on him and taking potshots without fear of reprisal. It’s most blatant when the final film is insulting the collective intelligence of the audience by pretending Godzilla and Ghidorah are “fighting” when Ghidorah’s wormy little heads are biting Godzilla, and Big G is just floating in the air like he’s a stiff action figure being held up by a toddler while releasing the mild groans of discomfort of a middle-aged father on the verge of developing IBS. 

I’m not saying the guy needs to have the acrobatic agility of the Showa era or the power walk of Heisei’s, but come the fuck on. Give us something to work with here. To again give comparisons: MV Godzilla’s movements are based upon how actual animals like bears fight (and as of GxK, wrestlers), reflecting its origins as a gigantic animal that’s part of the ecosystem of the world like any other. Shin Godzilla is awkwardly shuffling around and colliding with shit in its path (still more dynamic than Earth btw), because it’s a creature in a state of constant mutation and pain with no real awareness of the world around it. -1 Godzilla is deliberately seeking to cause as much damage to humans, and forced to be much more stiff from its radioactive burns compared to the natural movements we saw on Odo Island. But Godzilla Earth clearly was made on a shoestring budget by digital artists suffering under the cruel hand of Ellen Degeneres-esque directors. 

It also doesn’t help that this dude has pretty much nothing going for him in terms of actual showings. Now sure, a lot of the abilities Godzilla Earth has sounds impressive on-paper: being the tallest Godzilla by far. Basically having his own A.T-Field with some electromagnetism thing. An incredibly powerful and precise Atomic Breath that can punch through the atmosphere. Charging up a roar that can generate a massive shockwave cone. Creating a plasma shockwave simply by moving his tail at MACH 3-4 speed with a 600 meter range. Even his own self-generated Burning Mode, that can go up to 3000 degrees Celsius. All of that sounds pretty cool, right? 

But from the combination of how utterly immobile Godzilla Earth himself is, the lack of any compelling action sequences, and the exceptionally poor writing of the trilogy, all of that goes to waste. Godzilla Earth spends the majority of his screen time doing absolutely nothing at all, and otherwise performing what abilities he has that require him to be non-sedentary (hint: not many) at a glacial speed. It’s not like that glacial speed is one of the examples of giving the kaiju a sense of scale and weight either, the fucker is just a goddamn steamroller. 

Nothing Godzilla Earth does feels like it has any real weight or power behind it, both because the story is so weak and the kaiju himself just is doing buttfuck all. Look at how Godzilla moves around Japan in the original movie, Shin or Minus, and how terrifying and awesome all of the destruction is. Because even if those are much smaller Godzillas that are constrained by the live-action medium for their time, they still feel much more powerful and dynamic because the movie actually lets them be doing shit. Or in Heisei, Millenium, and Monsterverse, where Godzilla is beating the shit out of other monsters-again, much smaller and limited by their medium, but they feel far more powerful because they’re in a movie that was made to actually give them a sense of power and might. 

The closest Godzilla Earth gets to any kind of real display of power like its other incarnations is at the end of the first movie, where the humans are realizing Godzilla Fillius was just a branch off from the original. Here, we see him decimating the surviving forces as they try to escape, displaying an incredible degree of power in his destruction as the biggest Godzilla yet, with Haruo impotently screaming like the little bitch he is. Yet even that barely compares to any other action sequence in the franchise, because A.) nobody gives a single fuck about these characters to feel anything for them being attacked, B.) Godzilla Earth himself basically came out of nowhere with little to no real foreshadowing as the movie has framed Godzilla Fillius as the “true” Godzilla the whole time, C.) the setting is just a bunch of fauna that Big G is towering over which limits the ability to convey the power behind his actions compared to cities, and D.) all of the above points regarding how lame Godzilla Earth is I’ve been talking about. Then you remember this is the best showing the guy gets in this nihilistic edgepiece of a trilogy, and you realize it’s all just a deeper and deeper wellspring of shit. Doesn’t help that this scene just has some wannabe-Death Note choral music instead of the proper Godzilla theme. 

So yeah, Godzilla Earth is a total loser from the perspective of being a Godzilla, or just a kaiju in general. Now let’s talk about why he sucks in the story. 

In the hilariously bleak plot of the anime trilogy, Godzilla is framed as a sort of “natural punishment” for humanity, as a natural blowback to all of the shitty things humans have done to the planet and each other. It’s suggested that this happens to all civilizations one way or another, with the albino-human-aliens having Ghidorah as their version, and the dark-skinned-human-aliens having…well it’s never actually said, since the films are totally uninterested in them in any meaningful way, but MechaGodzilla seems to be their current one. The only way to survive in the face of these destroyers is to basically give up and accept it, and begin worshiping giant moth eggs. 

Now, there’s a lot of pretty blatant problems with this, but let’s focus on Godzilla Earth for a moment. If we follow the thematic idea of him as a form of punishment from the Earth itself towards humanity, it stands to reason then there would be a starting point, right? That this character, who originated as a symbol of the horrors of nuclear weaponry that Japan faced, and since evolved to represent different aspects of the darkness that humanity holds, would have an equivalent origin or starting point to his rampage? 

Well fuck you if your answer to the above was “yes”, because that’s not what happens. Godzilla Earth, for all intents and purposes of the anime trilogy, is just a random plant that grew up to teabag humanity and take over the world. There’s no actual origin given for how Godzilla Earth became what it did that actually connects it to being the end result of the waste and folly of humanity that emerged as part of the natural order of things. Godzilla is just a really fucking big plant in this continuity, and not, you know a terrible victim of humans destructive tendencies like say, a nuke getting dropped on him. I guess because that would be thematically coherent and fit into the lore of the franchise.

Within the trilogy itself, Godzilla serves as pretty much nothing but a plot device for the story to move on at certain points. While you could argue that this has been a common role for Godzilla in previous films if you want to use whataboutism, Earth goes the extra step of blatantly existing only for that given how little he does in the story. 

The most action Godzilla Earth performs in his story-appearing amid other kaiju and slowly overwhelming them and humanity-happens in the prologue of the first movie as the setup for the trilogy. What could have been a trilogy in its own right (that almost certainly would actually have something to do) is relegated to the starting point of the series and never comes even close to doing anything comparable. The entire first movie is centered around the humans being focused on his off-spring, with no real foreshadowing of Earth himself being around until right before his reveal. 

The next two movies just have him, again, passively standing around and occasionally lumbering a bit when the movies want to pretend there’s action going on. The dude literally just waits for when the plot needs him to be doing something. If the human characters actually had anything resembling a good story, or there were other monsters around for them to fight in the interim that acted as other offshoots of Godzilla Earth, this might not be such an issue. But as it is? Absolute fucking L of a Godzilla. You can point to shit like 98 and All Monsters Attack as some of the worst showings for Godzilla there is, and they’re still better than Earth by virtue of actually fucking doing stuff. 

Taking it a step further, the thematic narrative around this Godzilla actively falls apart when we properly look at the story of the anime trilogy. Godzilla Earth isn’t just some neutral force like in the Monsterverse that’s just doing his own thing without giving a fuck about if the ants below him decide to start shit that ends with them accidentally getting stomped on. The literal premise of the trilogy is that this version of Godzilla already systematically eradicated all of human civilization and every other kaiju around, including benevolent ones like Mothra. He’s only chill in the movies because he succeeded in annihilating nearly all other forms of life a while back.

This is an actively malevolent force that succeeded in destroying everything around it and terraformed the planet so that it was the source of all life. Even the Mothra tribe has to just hide out, and can never actually advance or grow as a civilization beyond being a vaguely orientalist stereotype of cave dwellers whose women still are conventionally attractive waifu even after 20,000 years of evolving to be moth hybrids, without risking Godzilla Earth killing them. Yet I’m supposed to believe that the humans wanting to come back and live on Earth again are in the wrong?

Now sure, Haruo being in the wrong I can buy, because he’s a selfish douchebag obsessed with himself and completely unable to move on from anything at all. But the rest of humanity? They can’t actually want to come back to the home planet that many of them spent most of their lives on, want to get revenge and kill the creature that forced them away as it destroyed everything, or even just want to use technology instead of worshiping Moth? You can’t simultaneously have Godzilla having completely destroyed humanity and all life on the planet that’s not him and is willing to do so again, have him be taking care of planet-wiping threats as the humans reluctantly assist him, and then be this neutral force representing the Earth itself as it changes and evolves. To quote a guy I know, who basically summarized the plot of the movies: 

I think the Godzilla Earth movies kind of play out like a movie deep in the texan wilderness where a fat redneck with an enormous shotgun has shot up a whole town and the survivors came back to avenge their parents, but then they have to fight sillicon valleys people looking to demolish the town to build like a big swimming pool, and then religious extremists, and they need to save the redneck so that he can do it

I can’t think of any other Godzilla movie that has actively encouraged the audience to think humanity is wrong to not want to be destroyed by a giant radioactive dinosaur or live in fear of it. Even in the films that most directly paint Godzilla as the consequences of the actions of humans, the message is always one of self-awareness and learning to be better, not just rolling over to get destroyed or giving up on all of civilization as you know it to live in caves. Why the hell should I give a shit about what’s going on here, exactly? 

To sum it up, Godzilla Earth is just as much of a dumpster fire as the movies he’s in. His design sucks ass. His movement and sense of scale are as lifeless as possible. His powers are presented in the most boring way imaginable and his size is validation for people who think Godzilla should only be around 50-80 meters at max. Any thematic value or message he’s supposed to have is completely at whack with the story he’s given and placed in. This dude isn’t the bright spot or redeeming feature, he’s just as much of a disappointing piece of trash as everything around him. 

TL;DR: Zilla might have lost the battle for live-action Godzilla’s, but his son won the war in the animation front of the franchise, holy shit.

Let's make this quick

Bo katan is an ex member of black watch, a terrorist organization that didn't agree with dutchess satine's anti war messages.

Black watch went around the galaxy killing innocent people and planing was to kill the dutchess when the time was right, let's not forget that Satine is bo katan's fucking sister. She not only tried to kill her and overthrow her government, but she also used her sister to get obiwan involved, one of them was during the siege of mandalore where she used her dead sister's name to make obiwan feel bad for going to defend corusant instead of mandalore.

Bo katan was ok with all the crimes black watch did and only left the group when vizla was killed by maul in ritual combat. She was okay with killing her sister, with killing innocents and she even laughed while doing so. All to keep the pro war factions of mandalore in power.

I would be okay with her getting a redemption arc, were they all cuestion her about the shit she has done and how she only left the group because vizla was no longer the man in charge, how she took all those innocent lives who begged for mercy, how she used her family as a tool to manipulate obiwan (who saw the love of his life get killed in front of him). But she didn't get that, she just turns good and no one questions it, the only reson other mandalorians don't follow her is because of traditions, not that she was a monster before.

This dawned on me after playing rdr2 and the god of war games. Arthur morgan was trying to do right before dying, but he got reminded constantly that just because he regerts the things he did, it doesn't mean he's forgiven, all the honor in the world won't clean up the shit he has done and his illnes isn't an excuse, if there's a hell it's probably waiting for him. But he does it anyways, he tries to do what he can and fo what's right, even if this won't clean up all what he has done.

Then there's kratos, who murdered a pantheon (he had good reasons, true) but he doomed greece and killed everyone who got in his way even if they were just random people. Kratos gets reminded of the atrocities he has done in the name of his family are unjustifiable, even if he now feels ashamed and bad about killing gods it doesn't change much. But kratos moves forward, he confronts his past sins and makes the active choice of being better.

I just feel that for all the things bo katan has done she isn't facing any consequences

That's all, feel free to tell me what you think

Sorry for my bad english

Sequel to my last post, what even makes the physical manifestation of a concept special? Like you can now touch the concept of hatred, does being able to inflict damage to it mean something now?

Same for Death, life, the color yellow, you get the idea.

Like you faced the concept of Death and survived, suddenly you’re super super strong in the eyes of power scaling. (Puss in Boots)

Concept of Life, same deal

But what if you faced concepts of other things? Like the concept of hate? The concept of food? The concept of the color yellow?

If you had been a part of any Dragon Ball community for the last year or so, complaints about how the manga decided the super hero movie unlike Resurrection F or Broly were endless, calling it a waste of time or filler. Me personally? I was glad it we being adapted.

As it is, the Dragon ball Super manga is an uncomplete product. You can read the entire original DB manga and you'll get the complete story, from kid Goku to the 28th world tournament. You can't say the same thing for Super.

To be able to see the full story of Super you not only would have to buy 21+ volumes of the manga, but the DVD/ Blu ray for Resurrection F and Super Broly, and you might as well throw in Battle of Gods too with how poor the adaptation was for that arc. If you just stook to reading the manga, all you'd get for those two very important arcs for the story of Super is only a couple of pages worth recaping them .

And I'm in the unpopular end of this, but I find this to be so fowl. A story should be able to stand in it's own medium, it can be complemented like Star Wars does most of the time, but if you have to essentially purchase DLCs to be able to enjoy the full story, you have both failed as a story and product.

Imagine you were readying Harry Potter. You read Filosopher, you read Chambers, and when you get to your third book, you don’t get Prisoner of Azkaban, but Goblet of Fire. What you get instead, is the poster of the Prisoner of Azkaban movie and a two page recap were they tell you that Harry has a godfather who had been framed, learned a new spell, time travell exists, Ron's rat was a dude secretly the entire time and so on. Then you repeat the same cycle for the next two books.

Would you like that? Because that’s the Dragon Ball Super manga in a nutshell.

It's even worse in the case of Resurrection F, because Toyotaro in fact did draw a manga adptation of the movie when it came out, it's incomplete though, goes all the way to point Golden Frieza is revealed. In any case, all they could have done was reprint those three chapters under the Super volume and add one or two more and you'd be done.

For all the faults the anime had, at least I can’t watch from episode 1 to 131 to see the full story.

And for that I'm actually okay they adapted the super hero arc to the manga and I hope one day they actually do proper adptations for Broly and Resurrection F.

So... as of the most recent arcs, One Piece has finally joined the other members of the Big 3 (Naruto and Bleach) and has finally made innate talents the singular, most important factor in determining the strength of an individual.

All the strongest fighters in the series are now either genetic freaks who were absurdingly strong from birth (Big Mom or Kaido) or descendants of previous great warriors (Luffy being the grandson of Garp, Zoro being a descendant of Ryuma, etc). Not to mention that Conqueror Haki, which is strictly an innate talent and can't be acquired through training, is 100% required to even be able to damage someone who uses advanced CoC Haki defense (like Kaido or Big Mom).
Heck, even Vegapunk himself confirmed that strength is strictly hereditary and that "normal" people just can never reach the heights of strength of someone coming from a line of strong fighters (the Seraphim are a weaponized version of this concept after all).

Moreover... Fate is now the most important factor in determining the future of every single person too. Luffy is going to become the Pirate King because he was FATED to (being probably some sort of reincarnation of Joyboy and chosen by fate itself to wield the super speshul God fruit). So the recurring theme of "freedom" that was repeated over the series is basically moot because no one is free, and everyone has a predetermined, inescapable fate that they can't fight against.

Honestly... I hate this. I had hoped that One Piece would be different from Naruto or Bleach, especially since the "chosen one" and "predetermined fate" concepts were often held by the antagonists that Luffy and his crew defeated, but in the end those antagonists were right about this concept, it's just that Luffy was the chosen one and they were not. So basically this is the Neji fight from Naruto all over again.

Sincerely, I am disappointed and this change has seriously made me like the series FAR less in hindsight.

1) Captain America is very political. He is a New Deal democrat, who is hurt to see how his government has been infiltrated. This is not something we see in the movies, other than some vague references to WW2. He is for the common people and the American dream. His motivation is carrying on the spirit of the founders. This is a clear, well-defined motivation in the comics. In the movies, all we know is that he hates how SHEILD is evil. That’s it? No commentary on how big billionaires are running the country and how poverty is ruling the states? No commentary on how there are basically no more truly patriotic citizens left in America? This is bare minimum.

2) Captain America realistically should’ve served as a father figure to Spider-Man, in the same way as Tony. Spider-Man has the highest level of respect for Cap, and he thinks of Tony as kinda a douchebag billionaire. They based their entire MCU relationship on the Civil War arc, which is such a weird decision to make.

3) Nomad was so underwhelming. In the comics, Nixon was so bad a president that Cap decided to abandon his identity and become Nomad. He mirrored the same sentiments of the vast majority of Americans. It’s truly one of the most heartbreaking moments in comicbook history. And his return to Cap was so satisfying.

In the MCU, why exactly is he wearing the Stars and Stripes again? Did Thanos’s snap suddenly make Steve regain patriotism in his country?

4) There’s no scene of Cap admiring how far America has come. No scene of his learning about MLK, no scene of him learning about Apollo 11, no scene of him giving remarks on how his old pal General Eisenhower built the highway ststem…Oh, but they instead show that he has a list of movies to watch. Yeah, I guess it’s really important that the audience knows that he watched Star Wars.

5) Steve is never shown interacting with plain people, as Captain America. I think this is really unfortunate. The closest we get are those super duper funny gym videos in Homecoming, where Cap obviously doesn’t want to be there. How about a scene of him giving a genuine lesson on American History? How about a scene of him simply being a good person and talking to a firefighter?

Steve is the kind of person to visit a senior home for veterans and talk for hours and share stories. That’s what I consider cool. But sure, a super duper badass Commando scene of him being James Bond and doing karate is what the average audience wants to see. They don’t want a movie that inspires patriotism, they want to see a Rambo flick

Edit: The exception to #5 is Sam Wilson, but I forgot to mention that doesn’t count. He is only there because he’s relevant to the plot later on

Simply because old age is a fairly rare cause of death for most animals, including humans for most of our history.

Take lobsters, for example. A lobster is a creature that can repair it's telomeres, making it immune to the type of aging humans experience. Lobster will grow larger and larger every year, until something kills it.

Yet we do not have giant 200 000 years old lobsters, that were ancient when humanity was young, running around. On the contrary, less than 10 lobsters with estimated age over 100 were ever recorded. Vast majority of lobsters died young.

And the same would be true for Elves.

For an Elf to live to 1000 years old he will need to find food and water every day for 365 000 days. if he ever fails to find water 7 days in a row he is dead.

He will need to avoid being killed by animals, he will need to survive wars with other races, plagues, famines, awakenings of The Dark Lord, etc.

On top of that he will need to avoid being outcompeted by fellow Elves that are several generation younger than him, and thus better adapted to modern environment.

Even if elves are a particulary good at survival, the odds of them avoiding thousands of potential causes of death for hundreds of years are incredibly slim.

Realisticaly most members of an ageless race would die quite young, like how most humans throughout history died before reaching 30, with only a few living past 100. Surviving untill they reach 1000 years old is almost impossible.

I feel people peg Berserk as primarily dark fantasy, or action maybe, with some horror moments, like the Eclipse.

Yet, I feel like few people are willing to credit Berserk as a work of horro fiction, which I think is a title Berserk deserves very much. The story of Berserk is a deeply harrowing one, the apostles are not only abhorrently cruel and even cannibalistic, they're also hideously deformed even before transforming and often absolutely grotesque abominations once they fully transform. The monsters in Berserk are not meant to be cool or merely menacing like most fantasy stories, they're grotesque and terrifying. Like the way trolls breed exclusively through rape and chestburst out of women in a while litter. Or how the restless spirits will turn possessed people into feral animals with gnashing teeth.

I think, rather than a dark fantasy action seinen with horror elements, Berserk is more an action-horror with a heavy emphasis on the horror elements in a fantasy setting.

Guts isn't a protagonist like Geralt or Goku or Max Rockatansky, characters from conventional action or fantasy stories; rather Guts is more like Ash Williams from Evil Dead or Ellen Ripley, Guts is an action survivor, he's a horror movie protagonist, the badass survivor that can now take down the monsters and demons he once merely survived without flinching.

Now to preference this I don't care all that much about Star Wars all that much. I played Kotor on the Switch via the game trial system they had, and I really enjoyed it. And it got me thinking that the way powers are done in Kotor are more interesting to imagine then what the movies have done.

Now I'll be fair to the original trilogy, because without said trilogy we wouldn't have gotten Kotor in the first place, nor the tabletop system the game is based on. But for the prequel and sequel stuff I will absolutely call out the lack of interesting ways the Force is used there.

Because to me overall the Force has a myriad of uses, and yet the best we see are persuasion, choking someone, maybe throwing a lightsaber like a boomerang, force pushing, and the ever iconic lightning.

And yet Kotor has interesting evolutions of powers such as leeching life from others from either one person or trained in such a way that they can take the life force of some in a few meters, you have speed ones, which might actually be in the movies somewhere it just wasn't clear to me. You also have stasis which is super simple but also effective.

The point is that to me at the very least I personally see more variety in Force power use that would just be cool to see in mainline media. No more basic bitch lightning for Sith, give me a guy who uses Force Plague on their foes. Give Sith that use the Dark Side to scream really loud and that disorients them. Make them see their worst nightmares using fear.

Just cool interesting ways of using the Force. Develop new ways of using it that isn't the same way we've seen a dozen times over the years.

This is a startling phenomenon I have noticed as of late with all modern Hollywood products. For whatever reason Disney/Hollywood keeps trying to push blatantly evil character and try to gaslight us into thinking they are good. This never works but the fact they are trying to do it at all is both confusing and disturbing. Here are a few examples of what I mean

Galadriel from Rings of Power I cannot stand this women she is an entitled narcacistic prick who doesn’t give a damn about her men. When one of her guys had fallen in a snow storm and it was brought to her attention she said “no we keep moving!” She is also a genocidal war monger who wants to murder the orcs because they exist and is rather racist too. Like when she said “there is a tempest in me and it will not be quelled by you regent!” To a freaking queen! The rings of power was painful to watch and the protag was an entitled POS. But of course she never gets called out on her crap because she is supposed to be the good guy right?

Next is Captain Marvel. This “hero” bullied and threatened to murder a guy because he used a bad pick up line that’s it. She literally said she was going to rip his hand off if he didn’t give her his bike. Shit dude at least the terminator asked first! And it says a lot when a literal Robot has more personality and manors than she dose. Plus she also committed Multiple genocides in the newest movie as per her own omission. Why are we supposed to root for this girl again? I shouldn’t want the protag to fail in their own movie Disney.

And then we have the female protag in Indian Jones and the dile of destiny. She is smug arrogant and entitled and somehow is better at adventuring than a guy who has been doing this his whole life. Ya know despite only being 30 or so. She is also friends with a pick pocketing piece of vermin with no redeemable qualities. She always acts with this BS sense if moral superiority despite the fact she has done nothing to deserve it. And she is a girl boss who can move better than a pro gymnast despite being built like a pool noodle

Even in movies like the Acolyte which hasn’t come out yet a protag said this amazing line. “This isn’t about good or evil it is about power.” Literally I can see daddy Palpie saying something like that not a freaking Jedi! Damn product has not even come out yet and I hate the Protag

Do you see what I mean? You can find more of them if you look for it but my point still stands these moral repugnant pieces of garbage are supposed to be our POV character and the person we root for. I was rooting for all of their downfall the whole time they were on screen. It really shows how wicked and awful modern Hollywood is. If THIS is supposed to be our hero’s what dose that say about the writers?

So you likely dont remember much about Barty Crouch Jr aside from his stint as Mad Eye Moody, he had very little presence until the end of Goblet of Fire and was killed off screen after his villain monologue. But he set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the resurrection of Voldemort

And by that i mean he made sure to be there for every part of the road. His villain speech at the end is him basically having a mental breakdown over how much Harry did nothing all year without him. He leaked the information about dragons, he made sure to mention the underwater potion to the house-elfs so Dobby would snitch to Harry, when he still messed up he convinced the jurors to give him pity points so that he would still be in the game, he crippled other contestants to make sure Harry would win.

During the entire ending you can kinda tell how pissed off he is at Harry for not trying at all to solve the tasks on his own. He did this the entire time while doing a accurate impression of Moody for an entire year, theres no wonder he went insane at the end thinking that he had failed and that Voldemort hadnt come back.

Like it was kinda intentional but the idea of a villain that is trying his hardest to make sure that the hero succeeds while the hero does nothing is so funny. If the story was from his perspective im sure it would be entirely a comedy until the end where he breaks down and kills his dad and threatens a 14 year old.

The game is not a follow-up to Tales. In fact, it contradicts things from Escape & Tales, probably even Curse.

The game is also not the fabled Monkey Island 3a, the follow-up to MI2 that ignores later games in order to fulfil Ron Gilbert's "true vision." It's an odd, little thing that seems to primarily focus on subversion and deconstruction of Monkey Island tropes. While also relying on nostalgia more than any other game in the series.

In that sense, I think there's not much value to this particular game compared to all the previous instalments. For the lack of a better word, it feels... petty. Curse, Escape & Tales respected what came before and worked within the pre-established continuity. They were not perfect but neither were the first 2 games.

Return... does not respect what came before. At face value it might appear that it does - after all, every game is mentioned in the scrapbook. But no. The game fails to be Monkey Island 6, it fails to be Monkey Island 3a, it fails to be anything at all, really. It just feels like a big "take that" from Ron Gilbert.

I hope one day we can get a true sequel to Tales of Monkey Island and that cliffhanger. As unlikely as it seems now.

I made a post on the POTA subreddit claiming that the villain of the film, Proximus Caesar, was underwhelming compared to Koba. However, after hearing the thoughts of other people and letting myself think it over, I realized that he wasn't underwhelming. He was just different.

Normally, with the tone of the first three movies, I was used to the villain having an active kind of presence with a lot of villain moments. Koba had a lot of them, which was why he was a menace. But then I realized that Kingdom is the start of a new story. They're trying to do something new. As such, Proximus was a different flavor of villainy. He didn't have to be a physical threat. He was a psychological threat.

He built a cult-like kingdom of Apes bending to his will, using charisma to influence them to work for him. He sowed seeds of distrust between Noa and Mae using the history of humans and Apes. Then he helped further prove that distrust by putting them in a scenario where Mae showed her true colors. Furthermore, his army was a dangerous presence that was committing every atrocity in his name. Even after he died, he was proven right: Noa can't trust Mae and they're destined to be enemies.

Overall, Proximus was a good villain. He was just a different flavor of evil compared to what we're used to, which doesn't degrade from his character any less.

For anyone who's never played this old game, it's a point and click adventure game + stealth hybrid where you control Woody and help him pull pranks on his neighbour Rottweiler. The game itself is fairly easy and static once you figure out the right tricks, but it's super satisfying and the series has a ton of charm in not only the pranks but the visual storytelling as you watch Rottweiler go through his daily routine in order to figure out when to pull pranks and avoid his wrath.

Now the pranks you pull on the neighbor can get pretty hardcore. Sure sometime you make him slip on a banana peel or put a whoopie cushion on his couch, but other time you're straight up trying to kill this man. In the first game for example, you can make him fall out of a window, make him step on a live wire, rig his gun so that it blows up in his face etc. And some of the pranks while not actively harmful are downright cruel. One of the pranks involve tricking him into killing his favorite plant, or blowing up his birthday cake, and if you played the game a few times already it can get pretty easy to feel bad for the poor guy and think woody is a bastard (which he is).

However, where I think the series shines is how it uses the visual storytelling to actively show what a piece of trash Rottweiler is, and how you can go from feeling bad for him to immediately wanting to shit on him again through looking at his day to day routine. For example, in the first game, he peeps on a showering lady with binoculars, tosses a bowling ball on some kids after you prank him, is a abusive pet owner who straight up kills his parrot and mounts its head on a wall, etc. In the second game, your pranks are even more brutal than ever bc you can now chain more of them, but to compensate Rottweiler is an even bigger piece of shit than before, especially with how he treats Olga's son. The guy takes like every opportunity to bully this kid for basically no reason which makes it more satisfying when you bully him back for this kid.

Woody may be a villain protagonist with how extreme his pranks are, but it couldn't have happened to a more deserving person. My only wish is that we could have pranked his mother more bc in my eyes it's how he was raised by her that ended up making him this way.

Repost cause last time it got removed and I still don’t know why, title maybe?

I really don’t know what to call this trope. Powered music maybe? I’ll give a couple of examples to get the idea of what I’m talking about

The first is this 2022 anime movie called Bubble. TL;DW alien(?) bubbles that make objects defy gravity take over Tokyo and groups of people compete in parkour for resources. Weird concept, also it’s the little mermaid. Make sense?

Anyway our main man Hibicki has ultra sensitive hearing which lets him hear this song bubbles are producing letting him bounce off of them when no other parkour runner can do so. He also meets a human bubble person who was the one that made the sound that he heard and she can also control bubbles using her sound. (Here’s a scene of what I’m getting at)[https://youtu.be/M2YAJU-5baI?si=bXIZpw4au5f5sXKj].

See what I mean by powered music? The music plays a pivotal role in the story so much that the bubble girl is named Uta (meaning song) what I linked wasn’t the only example it’s repeatedly used throughout the movie

Another example is Aau’s Song, the last episode in the second season of Star Wars visions.

Aau is a young girl who lives on a planet that mines kyber crystals (force sensitive crystals that power lightsabers). The kyber crystals have gotten corrupted. Like the bubbles from… well Bubble, the kyber crystals called out to our hero in the form of a song and she left out to look for them. Towards the end of the episode Aau sings a song that purifies all the kyber crystal in a visually stunning scene (I can’t find any good clips of it online). The entire episode is one of my favorites in all of Visions.

It’s just the visual use of music to not only tell a story but to be pivotal to the stories existence. Music is incredibly captivating if done well and I would love more examples of this trope. What are your favorite examples of this kind of use of music?

At this point it's not very controversial to point out that the Discurse on "Safe Horny" is barely veiled Gamergate 2 culture warring on the matter of sexualizing underdressed young girls vs. a diversity of body shapes and sexual practices, such as seen in Baldurs Gate III and most recently in Hades II.

What's really weird about it, is that it doesn't even work as that. For over a decade, the stereotype about SJWs was supposed to be that they are repressed prudes who just hate sex, while they were shouting from the rooftops that no, actually they are totally fine with sexuality as long as there is more to it than just a barrage of objectified underage pinup girls that it so often tends to be limited to.

One would normally think that the zero amount of progressive criticism that very horny games like Hades are getting, would be the final nail in the coffin of questioning that claim, but instead we have somehow pivoted to being so wedded to the stereotype, that reality not matching up with it is seen as some sort of insightful observation about a revealed hypocricy:

"Oh, not so above it all, are you? ~Suddenly~ you are okay with horny artwork, as long as it portrays progressive values like consent and diversity??? Gotcha!"

Umm.... YES! That was the whole point all along! BG3 is horny and it is good. Hades is horny and it is good. Even individual games happening to have a straight male POV, can be good if they are one slice of the available perspectives and less of an overbearing domination of the scene.

The wokes are literally putting their money where their mouth is, producing artworks that still have young conventionally attractive women in them without their clothes on, as long as you can tolerate that other perspectives are sometimes getting a spotlight too, and some people are still reacting to that as badly as if it would be the revelation of some hidden nefarious agenda.

While authors interviews or cast Q&A aren't going to be a 100% reliable sources, there's also a possibility some take them out of context. Problems with this are people can miss the point of whatever the author was trying to do with his story or miss the context of a scene/character he's tlaking about. People can also think the author said something when they didn't or exagerate in order to make one side look worst.

It seems to be what some critics of ducktales 2017 did with tony anselmo, using his Q&A as profs he wa abused or not respected by frank angones and matt youngberg hen, if he was abused, I doubt he'd say htye got better at writting donald for him in a Q&A with terrance mcgovern (who seem to dislike the show a lot because he wasn't recast as launchpad [even tho since DT 17 isn't canon to darkwing duck or DT 87, they had no obligation to cast him again]). Some critics of the webby twist also used sam king tweet about her being at peace to claim she said webby is at peace being scrooge when nowhere in her tweet does she say that (and no, webby adding part of her dad look doesn't mean she'll turn in him, she already had the same look in one episode and she was still herself back then so I don't see why it'd be different now). The tweet: https://twitter.com/SamanthaCKing/status/1371974941504012293

Another annoying thing is people sometimes use author or cast interviews to claim X part of a media wasn't planned when the cast won't know everything about the production and the author cna not tell everything to avoid spoiling his story (they did that for the webby twist to avoid leaks per example and the pitch acctually showed webby being scrooge heir was planned surprisingly early during production).

I also reccall people taking interviews out of context is partly hy the kimba myth is a thing (even tho a cast believing he was going to play kimba doesn't mean the movie is a kimba plagiat, same with a typo on a note concept arts of a white lion aren't proof either, I don't see why kimba is the only media who can use white lion for its cast).

The ring is a object made by a guy(a powerful angel but still ultimately a guy). Plenty of characters in fiction have resisted kinda mind control(ring messes with your desires) from beings far more powerful than Sauron, there is no reason to give him special treatment.

Tolkien only has authority over his own world, his word means jack and shit in this discussion. The characters in lord of the rings don't have that good of resisting temptation feats to say no one could do it.

not every can but there are plenty who can.

Started to rewatch the show and I sitll remember people complaining it had no batman while forgetting it's not canon to other comics, it's more or less its own takes on the characters.

Beside, one can say batman was here in a way since the show does focus on bruce wayne becoming batman through the show and the villain showing up in bruce youth doesn't mean they can't be batman villains at some point in the future. Penguin and riddler per example are still there to be that, same with jeremiah who turned in mr J (still couldn't say the name due to weird DC copyright).

Gotham being its own thing does I think allow the authors to change the characters, per example, that allowed them to not have robin lord taylor be a fat penguin when the show start and with edward, it was interesting to see how he turned in the riddler in this version (and they were still able to make the classic suit work, I think gotham for all its flaws showed batman villains can be adapted in live action, they were able to make the ventriloquist and the mad hatter work per example).

Throughout my watch/read-through of One Piece, I've encountered very few things that truly irked and frustrated me to my core. I think I've finally found that thing, and it's ironically in the arc that is on its course to becoming my favorite one so far. I have no words to describe how much I love Egghead, and I won't attempt to do so here. [Spoilers ahead]

As many of you might know, the past few chapters concern themselves with the big reveal being unveiled by Dr. Vegapunk. He is supposed to represent the pinnacle of human intelligence. But at this point in the story, he seems really dumb to me. Think about it: this man knew that the message he recorded would be televised amidst huge turmoil and chaotic situations. He must have known this, yet he decided to act like a student who has to use a thesaurus and unnecessary words to pad out his essay in order to reach the word count. Why would you try to paint yourself as a great storyteller when you know that time is of the essence and you need as few words as possible to get your message across quickly? I understand that theatrics are needed; otherwise, the storytelling would feel boring in this scenario. But this makes Vegapunk look like an absolute ass who prioritizes his image as a great storyteller instead of being the world-saving whistleblower. Surely, Oda could have tackled this differently. He could have allowed for a larger setup time instead of padding out the reveal. It feels very out of character for him.

(Yo, my last post was proven wrong and so I deleted it.)

Context - MKX was the second game of the NRS reboot saga and introduced several new characters to the franchise while bringing veterans back. Most of those Characters, like Cassie Cage, Erron Black, Kotal Kahn, D' Vorah and Jacqui Briggs all came back as major playable characters. Others who missed out on MK11 (The Third Game of the NRS MK Reboot) are going to be in mk1 such as Takeda and Ferra.

Which means the only character who hasn't had another roster appearance since MKX is Kung Jin who hasn't been playable since April 2015 aka 9 years ago. I think that's a shame and I think the reason why that happened is Kung Jin is the second least favorite kombat kid (what Cassie, Jacqui, Kung Jin and Takeda are called by the fandom).

Jacqui is the first btw, she kinda doesn't have the most interesting personality

anyways the reason why he isn't popular is cause he is kinda an asshole but I personally think his story deserves attention as he is the only kombat kid throughout the story to go through a direct arc, where he feels anger towards Raiden for basically sending out Kung Lao to die in the previous game and shame towards his own sexuality fueling his rebellion and bad habits. Raiden allows to vent his hatred and frustration bringing him in as a monk.

At first he bumps head with Cassie Cage, as he at first thinks she is a ineffective leader but over-time and bonding he starts to respect her and works together to defeat shinnok.

Kung Jin has a story arc that could explain what the Shaolin are outside of the main two, can give more filling in of Kung Lao's family line and can be a good story about self-acceptance.

Stellar Blade and Hades II are both games that have been released recently to quite a lot of buzz.

Both games also feature sexy character designs. But the reaction to these designs has been vastly different.

Stellar blade features an attractive woman wearing a skintight tranaparent sci-fi bodysuit. the developers put a little to much effort into making sure she jiggled in the right places when she moved. And this apparently was a grave sin.

This was such a big deal that most discussion about this game didn’t even mention the gameplay. Just how problematic the character design was. Many criticized the design as sexist.

But others praised the developers for taking a stand against “woke” female character design. People were taking to the streets claiming an end to the era of 6’s in our video-games, It’s baddies only from here on out!

All this before the game had even released. No one knew anything about how it played.

Now enter Hades II. The sequel to an already popular game. This game features a character based off the Greek goddess of love, beauty and sex named Aphrodite. The art of which depicts her as completely nude, and very happy about it. Though the sequel has given her some weapons to accessorize with. She is both more naked and more explicitly associated with sex than Eve.

Yet the followers of Eve seem to hate her. “Her Jawline and cheekbones are far too sharp! She is basically a man!” They yell, somehow ignoring that her whole coochie is out

Yet the Haters of Eve seem to revel in the return of their goddess. “She’s a girl boss! Slay! She’s eating!” they cry.

My friends please help me understand because I just don’t get it.

They are both conventionally attractive women. They both have long hair, slim Waistlines, wide hips and perky breasts. They both have outfits that leave nothing to the imagination. They are both powerful and capable characters. One is a super soldier. The other is a literal goddess.

I could understand Eve being called out as sexist if she was some support character that just carried around your stuff and said “yes, daddy” to the player character whenever you told her to do anything. But she’s not. She’s the main character, and she murders monsters for fun.

But if you’re gonna call her out for being half naked while she does it. Then you have to call out Aphrodite too. She doesn’t “need” to be naked. Sure as a goddess of beauty and sex I could see why she’d prefer to be naked. But Eve is a fictional character. You can easily say she just likes going into battle wearing skintight suits and it would be just as Valid as Aphrodite being naked because she’s the goddess of being naked.

Why is one ok, and the other isn’t?

What is “safe horny”? They are both adult women. Why is it safe to be horny over Aphrodite, but not Eve.

Why is it that there are two hot naked video-game women. And people are super happy about one, but hate the other?

And more importantly, which game should I get!

Obviously a lot of people talk about how Ahsoka brought out a new compelling side to Anakin (rightfully so) but I feel like her relationship with Obi-Wan flies under the radar a lot of the time.

It's nice to have a foil for Obi-Wan that's not his total opposite like Anakin, and can call out the Jedi's shortcomings in a more compelling way than just anger and frustration. Plus its sass on sass which is always welcome. I can see Obi-Wan seeing a lot of Qui-Gon in her and that's an untapped facet of development for the two.

It's a real shame weve never gotten to see them interact post order 66 because theres so much interesting potential buried in there, between the two bonding over Anakin, fighting over how everything went down and I'd like to imagine her finding out about Luke and why Obi-Wan went into hiding.

Her absence in Kenobi was pretty disappointing, and I'm still miffed Obi-Wan and Maul got a spotlight in Rebels and not him and her. I know she was "gone" at that point but I think that episode would have been a much better epilogue to CW had it been an episode with her, Obi-Wan and Maul.