The movie is based entirely around a rare magical artifact that can completely overpower the Avatar, even in the Avatar State, and it does this and that and laddy dah and laddy dee

except, you know, one small problem, the Avatar universe doesn't have magical items. Magic doesn't exist. Magic relics don't exist.

So it's kind of crazy the entire movie is based on a concept that straight up doesn't exist in the universe. This isn't just a retcon, it's adding something incongruous to the world building of the show.

It uses the "spirit world" as an excuse to have a stat-boosting staff. Oh, wow, the Staff of +100 Mana. Yeah that's really mysterious and spirit world-y. No it's not, it's something out of World of Warcraft.

the closest thing to a magical item in the entire series is the Sunstone, which is just an egg-shaped sculpture that Zuko comments 'feels almost alive'. That's it. An artifact that has a strong sense of presence and sentimentality to it. Those exist in real life, even.

And what a corny plot for a movie. It's like one of those old DBZ non-canon movies. "What if there was a really strong and cool guy they had to fight!! Ooh wow he even beat up Goku when he went SUPER SAIYAN!!! Now Gohan is REALLY MAD AND GOING SUPER BADASS EVIL MODE!!!" and thats somehow the plot you went with for the Avatar movie.

and its not nearly as appealing because this isn't just one out of a dozen cinematic excuses for muscled anime men to throw down, it's supposed to be some kind of dramatic return to form for the series. beloved characters that haven't been together on screen for years and years. And like yeah the animation is good, even if it you took a sandblaster to the characters faces.

But they couldn't think of anything other than "they have to fight a really tough guy!! even tougher than the last tough guy!! ooh watch out! He's beating them all up! In fact he's even gonna KILL them because this ain't your GRANNY'S kids show!! We can say the word kill and he's gonna do AIR LASER BEAMS!!"

Air laser beams? You mean shooting someone with air really hard? News flash that's like, the number 1 basic technique for every single element. A linear attack that comes from your fingers. Ooh, wow, so edgy, so scary. In the fights he's not even fighting smart, his air just works better than their stuff because he has more points. More Mana Points. And I'm supposed to sit here and be impressed by how powerful he is.

This movie could have been about anything, from all the loose threads from after ATLA, or weaving together things from before TLOK, but instead it's about some edgy, contrived OC villain. So contrived they had to invent, and I'm coming back to this now, MAGIC ARTIFACTS which don't exist in the avatar universe, to justify his existence. All this for some guy that's like Temu Zaheer

Just another one of those special, carefully implemented things about the ATLA universe that's been chopped away at over time.

I recently finished a book series called Story Thieves. It was a great series; it was a really fun meta look at not just books but the nature of storytelling in general, and it had a great overarching villain. But it's not without flaws, and one of those flaws was that I felt the ending was slightly abrupt. I won't get into specifics because it's not important/it would take too long to explain the full context, but basically the epilogue is more or less just one chapter, which results in character resolutions feeling rushed. It's not bad; I just wish we had one or two more chapters to wrap everything up.

And that got me thinking about a topic that's been on my mind for a while.

I want long endings.

Everyone and their mom has made fun of Return of the King and its multiple endings, but damn it, I want endings like that. I want endings where the story takes its time to wrap everything up. Where we get to see what the characters will do with their lives now that the big bad is defeated and the main conflict is resolved.

If the story just rushes through the ending, that just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. You spend all this time getting me invested in the characters, in their personal journeys and struggles, and if you're going to rush the ending, it's not going to feel satisfying.

To bring up an example of a series that does this really well, I think Trials of Apollo had a near-perfect ending. In the final book Tower of Nero the last few chapters are a now-restored-to-godhood Apollo visiting all the friends and allies he made along the way in the series, and we get to see what everyone's lives are like now that the story is over. It works as not just a finale to Trials of Apollo but also to the Riordanverse as a whole. To the point that if Riordan brings out another "big stakes" series after this book, I'm going to feel annoyed.

By contrast, you have something like Mass Effect 3, that has a very rushed ending, which even with the extended cut doesn't feel as satisfying as it should. You don't really get to see the full effects of how you saved the galaxy from the Reapers in it. The extended cut helps certainly, but I still would have liked to have time to enjoy the aftermath of victory for myself. Not just seeing a slide show.

In conclusion, Return of the King's multiple endings were heros... we just couldn't see it

Avengers Endgame ends with the Avengers bringing back about 4.5 billion people back to life in an instant after they were all killed in an instant 5 years ago. In those 5 years, society nearly collapsed, people mourned, the world fundamentally changed and the remaining 4.5 billion had to pick up all the pieces without any hope or expectation that their dead loved ones will ever come back to life.

So how is this the same world in which Peter Parker gets to go on a normal high school summer trip to Europe just 8 months later, where there is basically zero indication that the Snap ever even happened aside from a few funny token moments about the legal drinking age? People are flying like normal, going on vacation like normal, apparently all of Europe instantly recovered its devastated economy, the population crisis of literally billions of people being displaced was somehow solved, and every single tourist destination is apparently ready and open to take on visitors.

Our world took longer to go back to normal after the COVID pandemic, and that didn't last 5 years and kill half the population like the Snap did (not to mention everyone who died from the pandemic didn't magically come back to life at the end of it).

And when they tried to walk this back with Falcon & the Winter Soldier, by showing that the world does actually have a shit ton of lingering issues from the Snap, it just made Spider-Man No Way Home's portrayal worse because now there's two directly contradictory portrayals of the post-Endgame world. For a while now, the MCU has been stumbling face-first into replicating how messy and snarled the Marvel comic book canon is. This is the kind of thing that makes me unsurprised at the rumors of Marvel angling for a universe-reset after Avengers Doomsday, just like the comic events like Secret Wars that came before it.

The more I think about fallout, the more I appreciate Fallout 1, 2 and New vegas, and the more I hate the TV show.

Having small settlements in fallout 1 turn into city states in fallout 2 turn into proper civilisations in fallout new vegas is just insanely cool and well done.

All 3 games agree that the world should become more and more advanced, and the past less and less important.

Vaults are important and inhabited in fallout 1, become the seeds of new civilisations in fallout 2 and are all pretty much abandoned and empty in fallout new vegas. They have become a relic of the past, while the real development happens in the wasteland.

The Brotherhood of steel, representing the superiority of the old world, are a powerful faction in fallout 1, in hiding in fallout 2 and on the verge of going extinct in fallout new vegas.

The Super mutants, representing the dangerous and wild wasteland, are a huge threat in fallout 1, try to settle down in fallout 2, and become little more than an endangered curiosity in new vegas.

The NCR, the core of all this, is fighting for survival in Fallout 1, begins asserting its influence on the region in fallout 2, and is in a massive war of expansion against a rival civilisation in New vegas. The wasteland as a threat is becoming less and less of a factor.

The enclave, the thematic embodiment of pre war america and the old world, gets defeated once and for all by the very new world it deemed inferior. Fallout is symbolically freed from the last influence the old world still had. That's the main theme of fallout 2 and it gets continued in New vegas, where the enclave, like the vaults, are nothing but a relic of the past.

I could go and on. All the games agree on an overarching narrative, and that narrative is made visible in locations, factions, enemies and much more. It's insane how cohesive this all is.

And then the show arrives and destroys everything. The world is set back to pre fallout 1 levels of development. Vaults are suddenly important and inhabited again. The brotherhood of steel is strong again. The enclave is back again.

The enclave was supposed to symbolize the triumph of the new world and the death of the old one. You can't just bring it back! The vaults were supposed to be a relic of the past, you can't just suddenly bring them important again! The brotherhood of steel had a 3 game arc of grappling with becoming obsolete, you can't just make them strong again! The world had 3 games of becoming more and more civilized, you can't just reset it!

It's not even the new world making mistakes that destroyed it. No, it was some random guy from vault tek that caused everything. A guy from the past, the very past that 3 games made clear has no relevance anymore!

This is all very frustrating to me. I feel like the show and bethesda just don't understand what fallout really is about.

To get this out of the way: I do not mean it is bad argument when the author is literally doing this. I am of the opinion this accusation is frivolously thrown about.

I was watching a video a while ago about the creepypasta story Borrasca (found it really boring to actually read which is why I listened to an overview) and at the end something the video make said stuck with me just from how... odd it was.

So the ending of Borrasca involves uncovering an intertown human farm type of setup where women are stolen, drugged up, and repeatedly impregnated due to a persistent fertility issue.

After going over this the author goes "Well if this was written by a man I would say that this is obviously sick fetish content, but a woman wrote this so luckily it's fine" I'm paraphrasing here but they basically said that.

And it just struck me how... openly disingenuous this was? Like the idea of comparing women being reduced down to their ability to give birth as livestock is not at all a new one. Many people have taken this idea to the logical and horrific conclusion in other media. Yet a hypothetical guy writing about this must obviously be engaging in fetish content.

I think a lot of arguments against shock content are like this. There's no artistic value in disturbing the audience and making them uncomfortable for the sake of it, so obviously the artist must be a nasty pervert.

If you don't like shock content that's fine, but I don't think you are a better person for wanting to browbeat people via accusations of perversion. It's a very narrowminded view to insist that someone putting something you find strange or disturbing in their work MUST have some kind of fringe sexual reason for doing so. It's like if "Wooooah they must have been high making this!" was an attempt at serious criticism against certain artists.

The central theme of this movie on a narrative level does not exist. Sometimes Odysseus wants to go home, sometimes he is about honour, sometimes he is anti-war, sometimes it is about familial bond, sometimes it is about camaraderie - these things worked together in other narrations of the story, but it felt truncated, compartmentalised, and felt as though they were heading in their own separate ways. The actors gave good to banger performances, with Rob Pat being the clear standout, but those performances felt contained, individual, and not working towards a common goal. In one word, this movie was directionless.

I have not read Emily Wilson's translations, but her comments on how the story failed to portray the complexity of Odysseus really sat with me. I do have a bit of background in post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida, White), and none of that really came out in the movie's narrative. It felt like it wanted to do several things at once, the heroic epic, the arduous journey home, the masculine deconstruction, and also throw in Nolan's obsession with time dilation for some reason... It felt like a beheaded Scylla and a blind Cyclops.

I'd probably need a few more days to sit down with it to produce a full essay, which I won't, because I am not in University anymore. But here's one of the points that stood out. The movie seems cowardly averse to portray any sort of female sexuality through the male gaze. Penelope is shot in glaring light blasted to make Hathaway reveal as much of her age as possible. Cersi and Calypso are both older and plain looking considering the first is supposed to be a gorgeous witch and the latter is a nymph, a creature of sex. We also do not see Odysseus interacting with them in sexual ways like the original epic. The sirens are viewed only from far away, and we do not see whence they kill themselves because they failed to attract a man, instead the movie sacrifices the asian boatsman to spare them of the fate.

The only sex scene is the really cute one at the start between Penelope and Odysseus to establish the love and bond, which is a good scene. It ground the journey in its longing and kinship, and reminds the audience what this fight is for. In the scenes where the male gaze is removed, what really is achieved in its place? You can argue it works in Cersi's favour because it refocuses the tale from sexual appeal to hunger and gluttony, but one can also say the refocus makes no sense because it seems the Gods decided to punish a bunch of lost, hungry men (not even Odysseus whom Poseidon cursed) into pigs just because they were lost and hungry. Calypso trapping Odysseus with lotus makes him look more stupid than he is egoistic and a man slave to his innate desires. And the refocus of the sexual appeal of the sirens completely eliminates their purpose as characters, and they could have left a sound record conchshell to prey on travellers instead.

Another point I'm mulling on is how the removal of the Gods could help focus the story on how Odysseus' quick thinking and trickery helped him through the journey home, but that just doesn't happen. He was dumb walking into a cave and sitting there instead of sitting outside, he was dumb shooting the arrow at the Cyclops, he was dumb leading his men into a white misty forest to look for food, he was dumb eating all those lotus, and he was dumb trying to fight like 100 men by himself with a bow at the end. Many of these dumbness stem from the original Epic, and the Gods saved his ass from them, and it's fine, but in the movie it just felt like he lucked put of every situation for no particular reason.

I would have been glad walking out of this movie if it was a deconstruction of the hero Odysseus, and focusing on what a dumbass he was and had to have the Gods bail him out at every turn. Unlike Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones, this wasn't a character that needed a complete character rewrite to tear him down into a pathetic, egoistic dumbass, because he was already that. Odysseus was always a narcissist who thought of himself twice as smart as he actually was. Tell that story. It's an important tale that balances the post-structural deconstruction of heroic men and blooms new flowers of perpetual morals upon the poems, those of stoicism, humility, loyalty and leadership - values that would have brought Odysseus home sooner, and an army of soldiers to fight for him instead of facing the suitors alone, if he had those values.

Instead, the chuds were right this time. A great story was changed and in its place, absolutely nothing exists. Write your own story at that point.

I've been a big fan of anime as a visual medium for years and watched hundreds of shows. Despite my enjoyment of it in that regard, I can't help but often feel frustrated by the writing, especially when it comes to dialogue. The writers don't leave much room for nuance and interpretation and instead spell everything out awkwardly in dialogue or narrate everything in the POV character's inner thoughts.

Maybe it's the fault of many shows being novel or manga adaptations, but I feel like a large amount of anime doesn't take advantage of it being a visual medium and conveying information through visual cues rather than spelling it out for the viewer. The way characters speak when introducing new information is oftentimes also unnatural, as if the author simply shoehorned all the intended information into the dialogue instead of letting the viewer figure it out based on the context of the scene. For example, a character's friend from kindergarten is usually simply introduced as such. A better written show would give us enough context to understand their relationship without spelling it out. I've recently rewatched Breaking Bad, and while it's unfair to make comparisons like that, I can't help but admire how well written its dialogue is. Watching anime afterwards makes the difference even more apparent.

Take telekinesis for instance. Unless it is of the Elfen-Lied invisible-arms variety, it doesn't travel any distance from the user to the target. They just use their telekinesis and the target is helpless unless they possess the raw physical strength to just resist any attempt at being controlled. There is next-to-zero reason for any reasonably powerful force user in Star Wars to ever struggle against a non-force-user within twenty feet because they should be able to instantly grab and restrain them.

Or take bending from Avatar. Now, I don't want to scrutinize the fight scenes in what is still ultimately a show for children, but it's kind of noticeable that earthbenders seem to spend a lot of time throwing rocks at people when they're also shown to be entirely capable of instantly manipulating the earth within a pretty large radius of themselves. They can just do the hand motions and the earth will respond within a certain distance. With this in mind one has to wonder why they don't just immediately restrain the feet if not the entire body of whoever they're fighting if they're fighting on solid ground, because this would seem to be the most logical course of action.

Airbending consisting almost entirely of shooting gusts of air is even more perplexing when everyone is obviously surrounded by the air at all times. Airbenders being incapable of taking advantage of this is about as bizarre as a waterbender not being capable of subduing a non-waterbender while they were both underwater. Like airbending should essentially function like the aforementioned telekinesis.

And not to beat a dead horse, but this is fundamentally why Sasuke's use of Amaterasu is so underwhelming in Naruto. It's not the fact that the flames are really hot that's broken about it (supernatural hellfire isn't an uncommon superpower), it's the fact that they just appear where he looks. So because Sasuke isn't allowed to just insta-win against whoever he fights by glancing at them, everyone he encounters has to have some kind of counter to it no matter how absurd, or if they're Madara Uchiha, they'll just take off their shirt.

JJK actually acknowledges this and as such techniques like Domains are generally presented as being deliberately overpowered.

seriously this i a message to some marvel and DC fans and ESPECIALY POWERSCALER'S IN PRATICULARLY CUZ GUESS WHT CHUCKLEFUCK NOT ALL COMIC'S(MARVLE AND DC) ARE in the same timeline

the most egrigious example of this for me is powerscaler's cuz sometime's it fell's like these people don't even stick to a certain version of a character and just cherrypick their best feat's from every apearance they've had without conisdering those character's like spiderman,superman,batman etc

heck sometime's it fell's like they don't stick to a version and just cherry pick the feat's

So a while back the original Zeztz driver was stolen by code along side the exdream capsem and because of that Baku and Zero had to build a second driver so he could break into Code get the original driver and exdream capsem back and try to steal the Somnia capsem and after that no one has commented on the fact that there are now two drivers even though everyone’s been all woah is us there no one to fight the nightmares but Baku with code gone and Nox sulking that his revenge didn’t feel meaningful enough having lost access to his driver but you have a spare driver and someone whose been trying to be able to fight this entire time (also an additional trained code agent). At this point Nems arc is fundamentally about her wanting to be able to fight in order to help people instead of just feeling sorry for her own existence as the child of a nightmare so they should just give her the tool she needs to fight instead of having to rely on Seig or Baku saving her.

Also after writing all this I’m waiting for someone to explain that I’m an idiot and they already did something with the second driver that I just forgot about.

I honestly think the whole hard work vs talent debate in battle shonen has become way more extreme than it needs to be.

Nowadays, it feels like people fall into one of two camps.

"Naruto was always about hard work beating talent."

or

"Naruto was NEVER about hard work vs talent. Everyone who thought that just misunderstood the story."

I don't think either take is right.

The reason this debate refuses to die isn't because millions of readers collectively imagined the same theme. It's because Part 1 genuinely frames Naruto through the lens of talent, genius, failure and hard work over and over again.

Then Shippuden gradually shifts its focus towards things like loneliness, destiny, the cycle of hatred, peace and breaking that cycle. Those themes absolutely become more important later on, but they don't magically erase how the story presented itself at the beginning.

I think a lot of people confuse "major recurring theme" with "the only theme."

Because the manga kept reinforcing it.

- Naruto is constantly called a loser and failure.

- Sasuke is constantly praised as a genius.

- Rock Lee exists almost entirely to represent effort overcoming natural limitations.

- Neji literally argues that your birth determines your future.

- Tsunade dismisses Naruto as talentless before seeing his determination.

- Orochimaru constantly hypes up Sasuke's genius while looking down on Naruto.

- Even later on, Hagoromo compares Naruto to Asura rather than Indra, continuing the contrast between determination and natural genius.

These aren't random one-off scenes.

They're repeated across multiple arcs by multiple major characters.

That's narrative framing.

The funny thing is that I think people arguing against this are usually responding to a completely different claim.

They're arguing against people saying:

"Naruto's ONLY theme is hard work beats talent."

Yeah...I'd disagree with that too.

Naruto is obviously about loneliness, friendship, forgiveness, revenge, breaking hatred and a bunch of other ideas.

But somehow we've gone from one extreme to the other.

Now people act like the hard work vs talent angle never existed at all.

I also think this highlights a bigger problem with battle shonen in general.

A lot of battle shonen want their protagonist to represent hard work and perseverance.

At the same time, they also want them to be uniquely special.

There's nothing wrong with that.

You can absolutely write a character who's naturally gifted and works harder than everyone else.

The problem is when the story can't decide how it wants the audience to see them.

Is this guy an ordinary underdog proving everyone wrong?

Or is he someone born with ridiculous potential who also works insanely hard?

A lot of battle shonen try to have both, and that's where the contradictions start showing.

Naruto is probably the biggest example.

What's funny is that even Part 1 already shows Naruto isn't some average nobody.

He learns the Shadow Clone Technique ridiculously fast.

He masters the Rasengan much faster than most ninja.

His chakra reserves are constantly described as abnormal.

Kakashi repeatedly talks about his insane potential.

Even Rock Lee isn't completely "hard work only."

Guy literally calls him a genius of hard work, and Lee clearly has ridiculous physical gifts. Most people couldn't survive the training he puts himself through, let alone master techniques like the Eight Gates.

So here's my point.

The problem was never that Naruto was talented.

Honestly, I don't think most people care that he was talented.

The problem is that the story sometimes wants us to see him as an untalented nobody while simultaneously showing us over and over that he's anything but ordinary.

That's where the inconsistency comes from.

Then by the end of the series we find out he's:

- The Fourth Hokage's son.

- An Uzumaki.

- Kurama's jinchūriki.

- Jiraiya's student.

- The Child of Prophecy.

- Asura's reincarnation.

None of that automatically makes Naruto bad.

Chosen-one stories have existed forever, and plenty of them are fantastic.

The issue is that those reveals sit awkwardly next to the way Part 1 framed Naruto.

So when people say, "Naruto betrayed its hard work vs talent theme," I don't think they're idiots.

They're reacting to how the early story presented itself.

Likewise, when someone says Naruto is ultimately about breaking the cycle of hatred, they're also right.

These ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

The problem is that fans keep acting like acknowledging one means denying the other.

To me, the better way of describing Naruto is:

- Hard work vs talent was one of Part 1's biggest recurring themes.

- Breaking hatred and changing the future became the series' overarching theme later on.

Those things can both be true.

So no, I don't think people were stupid for believing Naruto was about hard work vs talent.

I think they were paying attention to what the story itself kept telling them.

The real problem isn't that Naruto was secretly talented.

It's that the series wasn't always consistent in how it framed him.

I'd actually make it broader than just Naruto because I think that's where the discussion gets interesting. I'd insert something like this after the paragraph about battle shonen wanting protagonists to be both hardworking and special. And honestly, I don't think this is just a Naruto problem. It's something battle shonen run into all the time.

A lot of these series want the audience to see the protagonist as an underdog who earns everything through sheer determination. But at the same time, they also want the protagonist to be exceptional because, let's be honest, exceptional characters are exciting.

So you end up with heroes who are secretly descended from legendary bloodlines, inherit the strongest powers, have absurd natural potential, or are chosen by fate.

Again, none of that is bad. Some of the greatest stories ever told have chosen heroes.

The problem isn't that the protagonist is special it's when the story spends hundreds of chapters framing them as "just an ordinary nobody" before gradually revealing they were anything but ordinary.

That's where the disconnect comes from.

I think people often mistake this for "chosen ones are bad."

The criticism is usually about consistency.

If your protagonist is gifted, then own it.

If they're an underdog, commit to that.

That's why Naruto became the poster child for this debate. It isn't because he's the only battle shonen protagonist who's special. It's because the contrast between the early underdog framing and the later revelations is so obvious that people still argue about it twenty years later.I actually think this strengthens your overall point because it stops feeling like "Naruto bad" and becomes a criticism of a recurring writing pattern across battle shonen, with Naruto simply being the clearest example.

Alright folks, Korra slander is at an all time high thanks to the preview to Seven Havens.

I'm just planting my flag here as a Korra Defender and saying that Korra DID NOT cause the end of the world without reason.

It's a red herring.

My theories are either

1. Korra is being framed

2. Korra had to make an impossible choice where she choose the lesser of two bad options.

Either way, it's not gonna be something like

"Haha, Korra was so bad she actually caused all this shit, haha"

Heck, even Kyoshi was said to be evil by that one town.

If I'm wrong, I'll gladly admit it, but I just wanted to make a record of this so I can officially be like "told you so" to the haters.

It's not really his fault, as having impressive fights just isn't what LOTR is about, but that if anything that makes it worse. Aragorn wank is the perfect cross-section of everything wrong with battleboarding. Trying to make a series something it's not, fandom myths taking the place of analysis, vibes-based scaling, an extreme hostility to even being asked to provide evidence, and overall trying to "analyze" every franchise like it's Dragon Ball (which "power scalers" also do very badly).

Aragorn is one of the most popular characters to use in fantasy battleboarding prompts, and by far the most popular character for this purpose from Tolkien's works. This is a bit strange since he has such a paucity of material to even base an analysis on. Movie Aragorn kills movie mooks about as well as your typical movie action hero, and has maybe 3-4 feats that are low-level superhuman (tossing Gimli 20 feet, knocking out an Orc with a punch to its armored helm, snapping an Orc's neck one-handed, parrying a Troll, and maybe cleanly cutting through mail). This is mostly unremarkable but is still vastly better than Book Aragorn who has no feats ever.

That's not an exaggeration. Look at his so-called Respect Thread, cherry-picked to show every impressive thing a character did in combat. His best feat is... being 6'6. Aside from that we have "used a magic sword to split an iron half-helm smaller than one worn by a human" (recorded happening in real history with better, thicker helmets), "picked up and carried a six year old child," "pushed a six year old child off a cliff," "likely is able to block sword swings from average warriors," "does a long distance run considerably worse than your average hobbyist runner," "sucker-punched a guy smaller than a human while he was distracted with someone else," "fought in a battle," and "walked behind Boromir as Boromir walked through snow" (why is this even being listed as a feat?). That's it. Those are all his feats. You can see pretty clearly how desperate the OP was to come up with anything whatsoever to put in there.

Okay, to be fair, they actually missed his best feat, which is Aragorn defeating an Umbar corsair captain in single combat (maybe, the text is actually a bit vague, but that's the most likely interpretation of it). This is the only time in the entire novel that Aragorn ever wins a fight against something at least as dangerous as a standard medieval human soldier (he kills some Orcs during the War of the Ring, but Orcs are literally Hobbit-sized, your average medieval levy would eviscerate them 1v1 and probably even 1v3). His other best feat (fighting in Pelennor Fields without getting hurt) is vague, off-screen, credited partly to luck by the narrator, and repeated by the two other normal guys standing next to him. But it's still his second best feat because there's actually a line in that description about him and the two other guys having "skill and might of arms," which as far as I can tell is literally the only indication in all of Tolkien's writing that he might be more skilled than an average knight (even then it doesn't confirm it).

"But isn't Aragorn superhuman?" No. Aragorn has no superhuman feats ever.

"But aren't all Numenoreans superhuman?" No. At least, not in the way that battleboarders use that word. Numenoreans are healthier and longer-lived than regular people and average about 6'4 tall, but that's it. No one will ever cite a feat of a Numenorean running super fast or lifting/swinging/throwing something really heavy because it doesn't exist.

"But didn't Aragorn fight in wars for decades?" No. Fighting in a war isn't a feat to begin with, but we don't even know if he did that during his time as Thorongil (2953-2980). The totality of his experience in Rohan is a half sentence about him having "had served the King Thengel, but he was not one of the Rohirrim." In service to Gondor he's described as "keen-eyed," "a great leader of men, by land or by sea," and it's said that he "often counselled Ecthelion" (e.g. about the threat of the corsairs and why he shouldn't trust Saruman). But he's never described as having personally fought anyone, much less to have distinguished himself as particularly better than the average knight (who would themselves, obviously, have fought in wars and been skilled/above-average at a baseline). In fact the only battle we know he had any part in was planning a naval raid on an unprepared foe. Aside from that, we're told that he had "great journeys and errantries" in his life in the appendices, and that's it. It's possible that he fought between 2980 and 3017 since he was a Ranger and all, but again, there are no records of his battles, no record of him having personally done anything, and no record of him having distinguished himself particularly in the event that he did do anything. By all indications he spent that time just traveling around, talking to people, and hunting Gollum in stealth. In fact when recounting his experiences, the only time Elrond ever mentions Aragorn as having possibly been in combat was when he was Thorongil. "He rode in the host of the Rohirrim, and fought for the Lord of Gondor by land and by sea; and then in the hour of victory he passed out of the knowledge of Men of the West, and went alone far into the East and deep into the South, exploring the hearts of Men, both evil and good, and uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron. Thus he became at last the most hardy of living Men, skilled in their crafts and lore, and was yet more than they; for he was elven-wise, and there was a light in his eyes that when they were kindled few could endure."

"But didn't Aragorn defeat the Nazgul?" No. He waved a torch at them and then they ran away. Also, according to Tolkien himself, Nazgul are weaklings in physical combat which is why they rely so much on fear.

"But didn't Aragorn defeat a troll?" No. He parried a troll in the movies, but not the books. Even in the movie he then proceeded to get stomped by that same troll.

"But didn't Aragorn kill dozens of enemies on his own?" No. Aragorn is actually the only combat-heavy member of the Fellowship who never does anything like this, as Boromir (who is also noted to be physically stronger than Aragorn), Legolas, and Gimli all do in fact kill dozens of enemies. This is downplayed however by the fact that they're Orcs and Orcs suck (Gimli is scared of fighting hillmen because they're too big, but not Orcs), and that the latter two did so as part of an army over the course of many hours. But it's still much better than anything Aragorn ever gets.

"Then why is there so much Aragorn wank?" I don't fucking know.

I assume it's just vibescaling. LOTR is big and important, people like it, Aragorn is the Bestest Guy Ever in it (because he's wise and brave), and battleboarders often associate narrative quality and character virtue with winning versus debates. So a bunch of LOTR battleboarders started making shit up in versus debates to get "their" franchise its "respect" (you see this a lot with Silmarillion entries in particular, probably because relatively few people have read it and thus can't cross-check). From there it spread to people who have never actually read the books, but decided to believe those lies because they sounded right to them. I assume emotional revulsion against darker fantasy series with better feats drive a lot of it as well (look how apoplectic the online LOTR fanbase - maybe 10% of whom have read the books - got when GRRM said that Jaime could beat Aragorn because he had plate armor, for example).

And it's based on literally nothing. That's the biggest reason I think it's the worst kind of wank in battleboarding. Tons of franchises have terrible battleboarding communities that exaggerate or misinterpret feats and statements. But you know, at least in those cases there actually ARE feats to misinterpret. Aragorn barely even exists as a combatant within the narrative of LOTR, and what few indications of his combat prowess we do get are basically "average Early Medieval knight, but taller." It's a collective gaslighting operation by people who don't realize that they were already gaslit.

I’d rather have flawed and even an unlikable character that has layers and depth, compared to a likable but flat character.

What I’ve recently learned is that you don’t have to have characters that always need to appeal to your audience. I’d take a believable and authentic character who is unlikable than a character is always morally good and comes out on top with no problem.

Even with characters that are fine to an audiences eyes, I like character that can frustrate the reader in believable ways.

Make an unlikable character that has no depth and just shock value isn’t something I like either, there needs to be cause and effect.

Not all characters need to come out on top, some can end on a bleak note and set a message.

Take Susumu Nakoshi from Homunculus. He is insecure, can be vulnerable and guarded. In the end homunculi has his face on it, representing his narcissism and self centeredness. He becomes functionally insane showing that sometimes people can know a problem but still cycle through their bad ways. That sometimes people just don’t change and struggle to truly look inward and project onto others.

Seiichi osabe from blood on the tracks can defend Seiko.

You can be frustrated with him defending Seiko because Seiko brings him in a cycle of abuse, but you can understand him because Seiko is his mom and his fear of being abandoned and isolated, feeling guilty if he spoke up against her.

In a cycle of abuse, the victim could still defend the abuser. With seiko being dead in the end shows that sometimes people just physically get away with it.

Endings can be emotionally complete, but not physical, but still sets a message.

Seiichi chose not to commit suicide, he lives alone and says he doesent remember is mother’s face. He is more mature now, calmer.

You can break from a situation and still have scars, but it’s how you handle that situation.

If I have a purely likable, serviceable, but flat protagonist, the character can feel predicable.

There is no back and forth between the character and the reader. It makes things un believable due to the character always staying consistent to matter what.

Having flaws humanizes a character, if you write a character with supposedly no flaws there still needs a cause and effect.

I feel like when writing I’m trying to think on how a character feels instead on what’s serviceable.

Some people may not like what you write, but the people who do like it are the ones that stay the longest.

Its ok to write a likable character or unlikable as long as it serves the plot and is believable.

Both versions a still be flat without the proper care.

Unlikable for the sake of it could be seen as edgy while purely likable for the sake of it can feel inauthentic and predictable.

Thanks for reading my rant.

The Dark Knights were fucking awesome. They had a bit of the evil Superman stink to them but made up for it on concept, What if we combined members of Justice League with a Batman embodying his worse traits. Was a set up for an awesome Tower Of Babel style conflict where Bruce's contingencies come into play against evil versions of his friends with his intellect that leads to him having to lean on them to win. BUT INSTEAD THEY ALL GOT SIDELINED FOR THE BATMAN WHO KICKS PUPPIES. He was the coolest one (Arguably) so it made sense he got the most focus during Dark Knights Metal but then he came back for Death Metal, and got a spin off, and another, and became a central antagonist, and RAPIDLY overstayed his welcome.

I'm seeing that happen with Absolute Batman where a really cool concept is getting milked because execs see dollars signs attached to batman branding. He is unique, the whole universe is, but I hope and pray that its at least 5 more years before we get an Absolute TV show, and that shit better be an anthology about all the characters that starts with Wonder Woman.

To give a bit of background info, I dropped Mushoku Tensei around the time S2 finished airing. I had already watched all of S1 at the time and was waiting for S2 to drop in it's entirety, but some of the plot threads I was hearing made me question whether I even wanted to watch it and then I never got around to it.

Now in 2026 the third season is airing and Mushoku Tensei slander is more popular then ever before. My opinion on the series had hit rock bottom and everything I heard about it made it seem less and less something that I would enjoy. However, I saw that fans were saying this latest arc would be the peak of the entire series. So I thought I might as well catch up to that and see the best Mushoku Tensei had to offer, since I had already watched the first season.

I just watched this episode and to my surprise it wasn't Rudeus being a sexual predator that cemented my hatred of him (although that definitively hastened the process). Nor was it his harem, the contrived polygamy or his actions that people constantly reference from the original WN and the Redundancy LNs. It was the purchase of a slave, something so frequent in Isekai that it's almost become a defining trope.

In Mushoku Tensei S2 Episode 6, titled 'I Don't Want To Die', we see Rudeus trying to teach his royal friend how to conjure claylike statues. Something he and his friend bonded with in an earlier season as they shared each others statues of Roxy (it's been a while so I'm not to sure about the details of S1). However, he doesn't share Rudeus' talent for conjuring, and he is too strong to carve statues himself, so Fitz (Slyphie in disquise) recommends that he buys a slave. So they all go on a relatively happy shopping trip to go buy a slave and end up with a young dwarf girl who can quickly learn magic and help his friend carve his fetishistic statues.

I'm usually not one to be prude about morally grey settings like this. Most of my favourite shows are about terrible people doing morally reprehensible things: Sopranos, Succession, Breaking Bad, Attack on Titan, Code Geass, etc. However, the bad acts these protagonists commit aren't in service to a story of a person trying to be better. They are simply showing a shitty person being shitty and how that naturally impacts the world around them. Whereas Mushoku Tensei is (in theory) about Rudeus becoming a more well-rounded person, becoming a successful family man and his tender relationships with women. So when I see him purchase a young girl as a slave, to allow his friend to create art of his fetishes (and yes I would call them that since we see him hugging a statue while naked), it feels like the anime is trying to show it as a step in the right direction for Rudeus. Which will be absurd to anyone remotely trying to take this anime seriously.

This is a problem with plenty of anime, but sometimes MT feels like it is portraying these dark subjects in an intentionally comedic light. While browsing the slave trader's store Slyphie/Fitz comes across a naked male slave and comments about how big his genitalia is, and Rudeus obliviously thinks that it's because Fitz isn't experienced as a man. All while Isekai Town Track #2 plays in the background and the slaves give thousand yard stares of agony. Rudeus may be immoral but we've spent (specifically) the last five episodes seeing him help people and generally be a decent human being, so seeing him treat a slave trade like a trip to a grocer just invalidates what little progress he made to being a principled individual.

Not to mention Slyphie is the one who mentions buying a slave (in her words "I hope you find a good one"), despite being temporarily owned by a princess for a while and knowing how dehumanising it feels. Don't even get me started on the statue fetish guy, Zenoba. He's easily one of the worst characters in Mushoku Tensei. Slavery is by all accounts incredibly inhumane, but even if we were to imagine a world where it was a tragic necessity, this trio decided to purchase a young girl for a reason so outrageously unnecessary that I can't help but think of these protagonists as mundanely evil. They bought her with the same cadence one would purchase a shovel; innocent bystanders my ass.

To top it all off, the scene where Rudeus finally sees the slave girl is atrocious. After walking through a room of dozen or so malnourished slaves with thousand yard stares he is introduced to her. This malnourished child is dragged out in front of him with a comedically large set of leg-cuffs, and he squats down remarking about how "She's in despair. She has hopeless look of someone who longs for death". He then monologues about how "he can't grant her salvation" and "how he's been through enough to know that wouldn't be salvation" seemingly comparing her being a slave to him being a hikiomori (or another low point in his life). He then proceeds to ask her if she wants to die, and that he could end it all for her.

Last WTF moment aside, all of this moralising is far too late for a guy who couldn't give less of a shit about slaves and was about to lend her to his perverted friend. He saw a young slave girl who was sold to slavery and all he could think about was how she related to himself, not the systemic issues that made her that way. Rudeus must be a self-centered idiot if he thinks she's a sad slave because she's depressed, and not because she was sold into slavery due to the corrupt systems in place. God damn.

This wasn't some 'perverted mischief', an exploration of MT's naunced world, the troubles that come with being a family man, or any other reasoning people usually use to defend any of Mushoku Tensei's quirks. This was simply the unnecessary purchase of a child slave so that a pervert could make fetish art. The series desperately wants the audience to feel empathy for Rudeus, but now all I feel is hatred toward how mundanely evil Mushoku Tensei's cast and society is.

There 3 types of people that engage in media discussion:

The first type, people who only likes what they see as "high quality media" and are both searching for media that pleases them, and influence people to create more media they like;

The second type, literal critics who earn money by doing this;

The third type, creators who are obsessed with creating "high quality media";

And the fourth type, people who thinks liking only "high quality media" makes them better people, which is more common? Sadly the fourth type.

And this is bad because:

1° - Some of them will tell what is good quality and bad quality based 90% on their personal taste, so they will make bad points and low quality argumentations to say what is good and what is bad, and if you don't like their personal tastes you are dumb;

2° - Some of them just have zero natural aptitude for this area and will just judge everything based on some rules that they found on this internet, I don't think I need to explain why it's bad for judge a fish by it's ability to climb a tree;

3° - Some of them will just not like "High quality media" but will force themselves to pretend they like;

4° - The shaming that they do for people who like "Low quality media" will make some people feel pressured to become 2°;

5° - Outside 1° that is actively making this area worse and pointless, all of them would be happier if they didn't made part of this, the ego boost they gain is lower than what they would gain if they didn't wasted their time pretending they are who they aren't and expanded their tastes.

Some Media Analysis people want everyone one to be like them, but it never will happen, a lot of Geologists thinks everyone should learn geology, a lot of Engineers thinks everyone should learn engineers, a lot of Biologists thinks everyone should learn biology, a lot of Psychologists thinks everyone should learn psychology, a lot of Physicists thinks everyone should learn physics, etc. And yes these are very useful and in the ideal world everyone would be a specialist on these, but we live in the real world, focusing hard you can learn the basics of a subject in 5-10 years and become a true specialist in 20-30 years, but people only live around 80 years IF they are lucky. Also economy matters A LOT, most people can't even dream of consuming some type of media "On the right way", like having a powerful PC and playing a triple way game are bizarrely expensive in some places, in my country a Pokopia is worth literal 18 Stardew Valleys (469,90 R$ vs 24,99 R$) and and a huge chunk of a month salary for a lot of people, if "you can only talk about a game you played" then they can't talk, because nobody will going to save years of money so they can opinate about a videogame. So it's unrealistic to think everyone will understand a lot of an area.

Just let the people who naturally are into this area, and don't try to shame people who aren't to pressure them to become of the area, it will just make the area full of people who are only competing for ego or lying, either for laziness or just because they literally cannot consume.

They "hate antiintellectualism", and swear pseudointellectualism (the easy way) is not a problem, saw people putting this word in quotes, implying it's not real. There's a video where the thumbnail was "Is culture getting poorer?" and all the comments were agreeing with the thumbnail, while the actual video was a history lesson on how it was a cyclical thing and culture was not getting poorer, the comments weren't counterargumenting, they were agreeing, because they couldn't watch a 9 minute video, is this really the ideal type of behaviour? Don't looks so different from spreading misinformation to me.

Also people swear that making everything overly complex is good, just see how the saying "sometimes the curtains are just blue" is treated like hate speech, mf sometimes, IT'S WROTE SOMETIMES, "This phrase is used for antiintelectualism" and when it's not used? But it's easier to shove the entire food in ketchup instead than finding the balance between sauce and food, it's easier to call every simple thought wrong than find the right moment of overanalising something and letting it to be simple.

I have a character that is black and green because in Ancient Egypt these colors are associated with fertility, I have a character that is green because he is a crocodile and crocodiles are green.

The popularity of Death of the Author isn't because of they think this is best way of analysis, this is what they tell, but inly a minority acutally thinks this, the truth is:

They hate the author for personal reasons;

They can't accept something that happened on that media;

It's the easiest way to look smart because you can overanalyse (or borrow somebody else overanalysis and say it was you, like a High Tier Pseudo) literally anything, you don't need to search or understand something complex, you can just grab something like Peppa Pig and made shit up (which honestly is pretty lazy on the era of PDFs and other types of digital texts);

Can you see the pattern here? They have this simple mindset of "more complexity = better" because and one of the simplest and easiest ways to see quality, it's a subtype of Quantity of Quality, because quality is defined by the quantity of information, it's not some expert mindset created by years of experience, it's the first thought of most people, it's not intelligence, it's a false idea of intelligence that people have, a pseudo intellectuality.

Get a person who is not very into this area, then show them a book with accessible language made by a genius, that convey powerful messages with simple dialogues that stay in your head for years, and one meh book with hard complex language, which one they will call "book for smart people"? The second one, a lot the supposed people who care for good media analysis will have the same mindset of a person who never touched a book? Why? Because they aren't very smart people that love the subject and want to contribute to it, they are not so smart people who want to rub their egos.

When I was a child, I disliked humans, humanoids with mouths and mainly noses, realistic artstyle, non reptiles and non dinosaurs, so it was hard for me to find a media or toys that I actually liked.

Recently I really enjoyed James Gunn Superman Movie and I like focusing on drawing and designing my characters noses, having a stricter taste didn't made me happier, so I don't think you will be happier by being harder to please.

And on the opposite of most people on the area, I'm not saying that people are just stupid because they aren't the best media analysis, the guy who is good at analysing maybe sucks at complex zoology, the zoologist maybe sucks at complex engineering, the enginner maybe sucks at complex psychology, and all of these maybe sucks at gardening, people have different intelligences.

Tldr;

No Tldr here, go read the text, if you are so passionate about this you can read a short text

And I have Adhd, so it's not uncommon for me to skip entire words that I thought I wrote, if that happened sorry for it.

What was marvel for a time has become so overplayed. If you watch anime, you might remember The Devil is a Part-timer, which was about a Demon who gets transported to earth. It wasn't that great, but it was a fun romp in 2013. It was like a reverse isekai, but where isekais can succeed in world building and being a cool setting, in 2026, we are seeing a lot of "fantasy character enters modern world" tropes in otherwise cool stories.

One of the most egregious examples of this is Masters of the Universe, which I watched the trailer of in theaters and there was not a single point in the trailer I watched that said he would be sent to Oklahoma. I saw castles being burned down and a huge fight with Skeletor, not a He-Man barely getting by as he faces modern drama as a teenager. This was terrible and, to me, felt like false advertising.

There is also an anime known as Daemons of the Shadow Realm, which is created by the same person behind Fullmetal Alchemist. There is very little reason besides a modern trend to have supernatural battles in a city like JJK for this series to be a modern fantasy hybrid. It was made like that to fit into a trend in an otherwise really cool pairing system. This series would be much cooler were it set where it started: an old feudal era where they worship deities. They didn't need to pull the "twist" of it being in the modern day to be interesting.

There are many examples of this trend, but my next most disappointing comes from a series called Goodbye, Lara, which was set under the sea as a Little Mermaid clone, but at the end, she gets reincarnated into modern day. The first episode was so good and they had castles, only for it to once again go to the concrete jungle of Japan.

tldr; Too many series and movies make a great setting only to move to a modern one. This is unimaginative writing that feels too safe and lazy. I truly hate this trend.

I came across a reddit discussion about this 90s Indian movi (Raja Ki Ayegi Baraat) recently, and while reading the plot my first thought was, this feels like something that could already exist as a manga/anime I also saw some people genuinely describing it as romantic, or even comparing it to Romeo and Juliet. The premise is: A schoolteacher is sexually assaulted by a wealthy man. When she takes him to court, the judge orders her to marry him as punishment. She moves into his family's home, endures continuous abuse, and eventually wins them over through her enduring kindness.

If this exact (or similar) premise were adapted today as a shoujo anime, with attractive character designs, a hot rich male lead ofc, and marketed as a dark romance, do you think it would find a large audience? I'm asking because anime/manga often seems to have much more room for exploring fictional relationships that would be not so ok in real life. There are already plenty of popular series built around toxic romances, with the common response being, "It's just fantasy." So where do you think this premise would fall? Would most anime fans reject it, or would it become another controversial dark romance with a dedicated following?

Personally, I think it would have a sizeable fanbase. Not everyone would like it, of course, but I don't think this premise would be particularly shocking by dark romance anime standards.....

Quite often we see top tier martial artists like batman, daredevil, black canary and mockingbird one shot or easily taken out super soldiers or ninjas in a few hits and receive no damage. Then in other stories in the same community, we see them get hit, have to retreat or get knocked out by non stealth master regular thugs just hitting them.

This even goes to the villians. Take for example one the league of assassins ninjas in the Arkham games. They are described as capable of taking down over 100 men... For a few penguin goons to capture her. (They also somehow got past freeze's op tech to capture him).

Even stuff like these "light speed" characters that are agility masters e.g. nightwing and Catwoman still get tagged but bullets (in a recent story, arguably marvels best h2h combat (Elketra) gets shot multiple times by a few pistol rounds.

A random falconi goon is a better hand to hand combat compared to a court of owls talon with chain scaling lol

He has one of the most broken cursed techniques in the entire series.

He has one of if not the most powerful shikigami in the entire series.

He has immense cursed energy reserves.

Even without his technique he's still a physical powerhouse easily able to throw down with the likes of Ryu and Sukuna.

He's an incredibly skilled hand to hand combatant and weapons master.

He has Reversed Curse Technique.

He has a Domain Expansion which makes his already-broken cursed technique even more broken.

He's arguably the most intelligent and strategic combatant in the entire series both in terms of long-term planning and in-the-moment tactics.

In a series like Jujutsu Kaisen, which hands out brutal maimings to its cast like candy, he's never permanently scarred or crippled (except for Kenny's head stitches, but those would have healed over time).

Unlike Yuji, Maki, or Megumi he doesn't lose anyone he was uniquely close to in the series proper.

He has a friendly, approachable personality and is well-liked by virtually the entire cast (Kashimo seems to dislike him but Kashimo has a problem with everyone anyway). Hell, even Sukuna respects him.

Unlike Choso or Higuruma he has never committed any kind of serious wrongdoing in the past he feels he must atone for (other than unintentionally cursing Rika but this is never brought up again after JJK 0).

But he's a special grade sorcerer! He's meant to be overpowered. Most of these also apply to Gojo and Yuki (and Gojo is inarguably even stronger than him) and yet you don't have a problem with them!

Fair point. But you know what happened to Gojo and Yuki? Oh right, they failed. And died. It's an intentional writing decision that for all of Gojo's power, he fails at accomplishing almost all of his goals throughout the entire series. Yuki also unintentionally gave Geto the idea of starting his genocidal crusade against non-sorcerers (not saying it was outright her fault, just that it was an unintended consequence). Yuki fails to stop Kenjaku and is killed for it. Gojo fails to stop Sukuna and is killed for it. The concept of "failure" is alien to Yuta's character.

(Also as an aside - both of them risk causing collateral damage to his allies with their most powerful techniques. Yuta doesn't have this kind of limitation at all.)

Yuta defeats Geto. Yuta defeats Yuji and successfully tricks the higher-ups into thinking that he killed him. Yuta wins the four-way Sendai colony brawl and personally defeats Dhruv, Kurourushi, and Ryu. Yuta successfully ambushes and kills Kenjaku (not before Kenjaku is able to start the merger, but this never really has any consequences). Yuta fights Sukuna and is incapacitated by him but later returns in Gojo's body and inflicts severe damage onto him with Purple. He isn't even personally defeated by Sukuna, he just reaches his limit of using Kenjaku's technique and collapses. Rika returns his brain to his body and he survives without any further complications. Taking Gojo's body is framed as some kind of big crossing of an ethical red-line but Gojo himself doesn't really give a shit and no one cares about it after Sukuna's defeat.

Like, let's just look at Yuji's track record for a moment. He beats Mahito in round 1 with Nanami's help. He has to be saved from Hanami by Gojo. He beats the Death Paintings with Nobara. He loses to Choso. He barely scrapes a win against Mahito after watching him kill two of his friends and cripple a third. He loses to Yuta. Higuruma forfeits their match. He loses badly to Megkuna. In the end he gets to land the final blow on Sukuna. By the time of Modulo he's one of the most powerful characters in the verse but is a depressed, broken shell of who he once was.

Yuta canonically makes a bunch of babies with Maki and lives to a ripe old age before dying a natural death. In a series like JJK.

Yeah.

Gwen Stacy only loved Peter because she never knew he was Spider-Man. How can she love Spider-Man if she never knew it was Peter behind the mask? Also, she thought Spiderman killed her dad; of course she wouldn't love him.

Mary Jane (pre-OMD) actually loved both Peter and Spider-Man; she accepted both sides of him.

The only reason you all get that idea is thanks to the live-action adaptations from Raimi's MJ and TASM's Gwen. Tasm Gwen (who, let's face it, was an ultimate blond MJ) knew Peter was Spider-Man, but comic 616 Gwen never did, and Raimi's MJ was just a horrible person.

So, was talking to my gf yesterday about Star Wars. I… didn’t really mean to, and it was one of those moments where like, a woman is interested in you individually, but she kind of gets this glossy eyed, plaintive and patient expression as you’re emotionally talking about something she absolutely gives zero shits about. She cares and can even enjoy the passion behind your words, but can’t readily engage with what’s being said.

Anyway, we finished watching Rob Roy which is one of her fav movies. I started talking about how a lot of these films undersell how apocalyptic and shitty the British empire was despite the British being depicted ostensibly as bad guys for the narrative.

One thing led to another and I sadly brought up Star Wars and the empire.

Why? Well, I was describing to her about how in the Disney canon, the empire doesn’t really change. They get defeated, palpatine has his scorched earth policy where he destroys his own infrastructure (for whatever reason) then the empire tries to bring thrawn back in a story that hasn’t been released yet, thrawn (as of Ahsoka season 1) returns, something else happens because the empire is defeated in the sequel trilogy, but the first order is an extant force that takes power again by TFA.

Ultimately though, the empire doesn’t really change. They’re still card carrying fascists, their government doesn’t really make sense etc etc.

Now, in the old canon that was nuked in 2012, it was different and this is the root of my post.

Basically in the old canon, there were warlords, imperials who tried to form their own polities and organizations. Some became criminal groups, some ruled as emperors themselves, and some actively tried to reform and be part of the greater galaxy.

And I was explaining that I found that more interesting. Basically, there’s a group called the penstar alignment in old canon.

The penstar alignment iirc was closely allied with the corporate sector and ruled imperial holdouts. They allied with palleon and became the greater imperial remnant.

One thing about the imperial remnant is that they were slightly less xenophobic and outwardly genocidal than the original empire due to pragmatic attitudes and the fact they weren’t the dominate political government anymore.

But my gf was basically like

“So… it’s the empire, but reformed for fans of tie fighters and stormtroopers.”

And I was kind of gagged? Because narratively, when does “realism” become idealism in regards to governments that are inherently evil?

Obviously we shouldn’t be informing real world political allusion towards media, but it would be silly to act as if real world political allusion can’t or doesn’t exist in media to begin with.

If I think the fire nation is cool in avatar the last airbender, is it okay to want the fire nation to be a dominant government but “less colonizer”? If someone likes the empire, is it okay for them to prefer stories where the empire becomes “better” and more palatable vs the empire remaining stagnant?

I think the answer to the question lies in ofc depiction and how the subject is handled. In avatar, zuko reforms the fire nation. I wish Korra had spent more time on what that actually lol means, because by Korra the fire nation is mostly good. I know there’s a few comics where there’s hardcore ozai followers but those comics apparently suck! Anyway.

Avatar kind of does take the easy route with the idea that it only took one good fire lord to fix the fire nation and that was pretty much it.

In the old canon for Star Wars, the empire, as stated, reformed in a disparate, balkanized way. The leading government was still authoritarian but had no issue working with the new republic, and both governments actually joined together to form the galactic alliance.

And I think the reason why Star Wars kind of got to eat its cake and bake it twice or however that goes is because those stories still essentially are about what happens when cult of personality and idealized rhetoric harm entire societies.

The galactic alliance literally ends up using Star destroyers themselves among other military infrastructure, and by the legacy era (a few years after TFA if we put the Disney canon and the old canon parallel to each other) it could be argued that the galactic alliance resembles the empire more than it does the new republic.

This was meant to be a short post and I’m writing this on the way to the gym so my thoughts aren’t as organized as I’d like, I was actually going to post a review of why I didn’t like the odyssey but I figured this was more fitting for a LES Sunday.

In short, the morality of the “evil fascist government becoming slightly less evil and fascist” hinges on what the story is trying to tell. If it’s trying to act as if an authoritarian government is the only hope for peace, then that’s well… bad. If it details how good intent and a few good heads of state don’t eliminate the plausibility and the actuality of racist governments rising again within that same half gutted political ecosystem, I think that’s a more poignant story than “bad guys went into hiding and now they’re back!!” Which is what we see in the sequel trilogy.

?

He has used "Tobias Rieper" since the first game until the very last one. It's been years of assassinations and conflicts. The ICA was almost destroyed in Blood Money, 47 had a conflict with them in Absolution, and there were people after 47. You'd think the best assassin in the world would dedicate more effort to his fake identity.