#Megamergers

[eclipsemeteor]

Nobody asked for this but my dumb ass in the middle of the night, waking up suddenly thinking "yo what if you combined Gundam SEED with Megaman ZX?" So here's Kira Yamato, with a Model XH variant to give him a Freedom-like Megamerge.

Stepping stones, photoshop edits and a sprite recolor were the start of this:

[neomel]

What is WRONG with them !!!!! <3

[emeraldthelynx]

Designs for the Megamerged forms of Lan and Megaman. (I had so much trouble with this, I still hate the helmets...)

Chapter Two of Light the Future is now up!

[efraart-mix]

Last year I made some Escáloz and Elmet arts using the biomentals from Mega Man ZX biomentals, and now (As part of the Ibis Paint tests), I have decided to do the same with Polaris :D

[shinysamurott9]

Thinking about a scenario where Alouette and Ciel sit down and watch some Magical Girl anime together

[tigertaurus22]

Concept art for Aile double megamerged with Model LM, or Model LMX

This is after she confiscates the biometal from Rei, and only Aile can do so because her brother is still infected with malice.

Abilities include making portals and copied projections of slain enemies. They’ll appear kind of like the sages’ avatars in Totk, except lavender in color.

[megaman-zx-prismatic-kingdom]

Concept art for Model LMX, or if Aile double megamerged with Model LM

[zonaraze]

it honestly annoys me so much that in the english version of zxa, they just have atlas say "biometal...!" in the ending scene when in the japanese version, she says something that explains a LOT about the biometals

i'm like 90% sure her line translates to "the biometals...! do they still have the strength to resist us...!"

WHICH IS A CRAZY LINE TO CUT OUT TBH

it implies that a) yes, the guardian biometals were somehow modified to not be able to talk, b) the 4 mega men actually KNOW about their biometals not being able to talk, and c) the reason model z is able to stop the 4 of them from moving is because he is attempting to communicate with their biometals' consciousnesses and trying to get them to cancel their megamerges.

[douchewiththeshades]

This was a big one.

oc design comm! Megamerge Model V! Honestly i had a blast with this

ive always wanted to imitate megaman zero and zx and making this character was a lot of enjoyable work

comm was for my main man @mcsunshineii

[beeclops]

Cartoon Network’s Website Was Deleted. That Should Scare You All.

Warner Bros. Discovery is deleting some of our most beloved movies and TV shows—and some may be gone forever.

The most remarkable feat that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president David Zaslav has accomplished this decade may be his rapid transformation from relatively little-known network executive to name-brand villain of the culture. For this, he can thank such disastrous high-profile decisions as stonewalling the striking writers and actors, crudely stereotyping his properties’ audiences, and tanking much-hyped movies that were all but ready for release—all of which reflected poorly and played out rather publicly.

Lest you be inclined to defend all this as just a hard-nosed boss making tough-but-fair decisions, consider that Zaslav continues to be very, very bad at making money and managing a media conglomerate—just ask the investors who depressed WBD’s stock value to a near-all-time-low valuation of $6.62 per share on Monday. Or look to the company’s loss of its long-held NBA broadcast rights to Amazon, the $9 billion write-down of its other TV assets, and its nonstop waves of steep layoffs. Or even its wildly unpopular move to shutter Cartoon Network’s iconic 26-year-old website, scrubbing an almost historical archive of clips, show episodes, and digital games in order to direct young viewers to sign up for the clunky streaming platform known these days as “Max.”

Nuking a kids’ network’s digital presence is hardly a sin on par with, say, killing Cartoon Network altogether, as was rumored to have occurred last month. Even though Zaslav didn’t go that far, it wasn’t unreasonable for so many to assume he had. Since April 2022, when he finalized the megamerger that fused his Discovery Communications juggernaut with WarnerMedia, Zaslav has repeatedly invited mass criticism for actively degrading and torching so many of the treasured creations that made his media empire such a highly valued asset.

First came the sudden cancellations of already-completed films like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, then the secretive removal of dozens of HBO originals (e.g., Westworld, An American Pickle) from the HBO Max streaming service—which subsequently received an unholy intrusion of selected titles from Discovery+, the streamer that shuttered just so that HBO Max could just become Max.

Max kept shedding beloved entries from its historic catalog, including large chunks of Sesame Street and Looney Tunes. This continued into 2023 with the erasure of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim classics such as Dexter’s Laboratory and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, along other Max Originals like Game Theory With Bomani Jones, which was soon removed altogether. Later that same year, Zaslav’s mismanagement of the treasured Turner Classic Movies channel spurred Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson to basically stage an intervention.

In fairness, many (though not all) Max Originals are either available on other services, on physical media, or via video on demand. Some other shows from WBD have been licensed to Netflix. Still, in light of CartoonNetwork.com’s demise, it’s worth keeping in mind something key about David Zaslav, who hasn’t made an effective turnaround in valuation or revenue after two straight years of nonstop cuts across all his properties, extending into last month’s CNN layoffs.

It’s worth taking stock of how many of your favorite shows, networks, catalogs, and films belong to Warner Bros. Discovery, because it weighs a ton. In addition to every entertainment behemoth already mentioned, the company once known as WarnerMedia brought TNT, the CW, and DC Comics to the WBD marriage. In turn, Discovery imported its namesake channel, Animal Planet, TLC, Food Network, HGTV, GolfTV, and the Oprah Winfrey Network, among many other names.

Unless you grew up without any electronic screens, you’ve likely seen at least a couple of shows and flicks from any or all of those brands. You probably have a meaningful attachment to those works and thus a vested interest in making sure they remain available so you can share those experiences with your friends and loved ones. If you’re of the nerdier variety, you view all this media as an invaluable resource of important cultural markers. Where would cinema and TV of all kinds—comic, prestige, edutainment, reality, talk, news—be without these rich treasures, and how much would our collective consciousness have suffered in their absence?

Zaslav should understand this better than anyone. He’s had a front-row seat to shifts in media consumption since the fall of communism. He also ushered some of those major changes into being through his role in helping to launch CNBC and MSNBC. He should know the importance of preservation better than anyone, having gauged early on how rapidly physical media was subsuming into pixelated microscreens, and how urgent it was to ensure his brands retain their recognition, familiarity, and quality in the midst of that transition. What better exhibition of that than a rich, thorough catalog made readily available to consumers via a streaming platform?

But this man, to put it gently, couldn’t give a flying fuck. Because, much like Paramount’s decimation of the online MTV and Comedy Central archives, Zaslav’s own butchering of the Cartoon Network website is a cheap ploy engineered to force viewers into signing up for his own increasingly enshittified streamer—and at a time when the internet as we’ve broadly recognized it is rapidly crumbling.

In recent years, we’ve seen once inescapable media disappear from the internet at a frightening rate, whether it’s general-interest blogs and websites closing down (or worse, turning into A.I. slop factories), popular old browser games losing their adaptability and functionality, pre-Spotify music streamers tanking their servers, social networks collapsing into the void along with all their memories, hyperlinks degrading in functionality, or copyright-flexible artworks from an older internet age getting hit with suits by rights-holders and then being pulled from distribution.

The most remarkable feat that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president David Zaslav has accomplished this decade may be his rapid transformation from relatively little-known network executive to name-brand villain of the culture. For this, he can thank such disastrous high-profile decisions as stonewalling the striking writers and actors, crudely stereotyping his properties’ audiences, and tanking much-hyped movies that were all but ready for release—all of which reflected poorly and played out rather publicly.

Lest you be inclined to defend all this as just a hard-nosed boss making tough-but-fair decisions, consider that Zaslav continues to be very, very bad at making money and managing a media conglomerate—just ask the investors who depressed WBD’s stock value to a near-all-time-low valuation of $6.62 per share on Monday. Or look to the company’s loss of its long-held NBA broadcast rights to Amazon, the $9 billion write-down of its other TV assets, and its nonstop waves of steep layoffs. Or even its wildly unpopular move to shutter Cartoon Network’s iconic 26-year-old website, scrubbing an almost historical archive of clips, show episodes, and digital games in order to direct young viewers to sign up for the clunky streaming platform known these days as “Max.”

Nuking a kids’ network’s digital presence is hardly a sin on par with, say, killing Cartoon Network altogether, as was rumored to have occurred last month. Even though Zaslav didn’t go that far, it wasn’t unreasonable for so many to assume he had. Since April 2022, when he finalized the megamerger that fused his Discovery Communications juggernaut with WarnerMedia, Zaslav has repeatedly invited mass criticism for actively degrading and torching so many of the treasured creations that made his media empire such a highly valued asset.

First came the sudden cancellations of already-completed films like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, then the secretive removal of dozens of HBO originals (e.g., Westworld, An American Pickle) from the HBO Max streaming service—which subsequently received an unholy intrusion of selected titles from Discovery+, the streamer that shuttered just so that HBO Max could just become Max.

Max kept shedding beloved entries from its historic catalog, including large chunks of Sesame Street and Looney Tunes. This continued into 2023 with the erasure of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim classics such as Dexter’s Laboratory and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, along other Max Originals like Game Theory With Bomani Jones, which was soon removed altogether. Later that same year, Zaslav’s mismanagement of the treasured Turner Classic Movies channel spurred Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson to basically stage an intervention.

In fairness, many (though not all) Max Originals are either available on other services, on physical media, or via video on demand. Some other shows from WBD have been licensed to Netflix. Still, in light of CartoonNetwork.com’s demise, it’s worth keeping in mind something key about David Zaslav, who hasn’t made an effective turnaround in valuation or revenue after two straight years of nonstop cuts across all his properties, extending into last month’s CNN layoffs.

It’s worth taking stock of how many of your favorite shows, networks, catalogs, and films belong to Warner Bros. Discovery, because it weighs a ton. In addition to every entertainment behemoth already mentioned, the company once known as WarnerMedia brought TNT, the CW, and DC Comics to the WBD marriage. In turn, Discovery imported its namesake channel, Animal Planet, TLC, Food Network, HGTV, GolfTV, and the Oprah Winfrey Network, among many other names.

Unless you grew up without any electronic screens, you’ve likely seen at least a couple of shows and flicks from any or all of those brands. You probably have a meaningful attachment to those works and thus a vested interest in making sure they remain available so you can share those experiences with your friends and loved ones. If you’re of the nerdier variety, you view all this media as an invaluable resource of important cultural markers. Where would cinema and TV of all kinds—comic, prestige, edutainment, reality, talk, news—be without these rich treasures, and how much would our collective consciousness have suffered in their absence?

Zaslav should understand this better than anyone. He’s had a front-row seat to shifts in media consumption since the fall of communism. He also ushered some of those major changes into being through his role in helping to launch CNBC and MSNBC. He should know the importance of preservation better than anyone, having gauged early on how rapidly physical media was subsuming into pixelated microscreens, and how urgent it was to ensure his brands retain their recognition, familiarity, and quality in the midst of that transition. What better exhibition of that than a rich, thorough catalog made readily available to consumers via a streaming platform?

But this man, to put it gently, couldn’t give a flying fuck. Because, much like Paramount’s decimation of the online MTV and Comedy Central archives, Zaslav’s own butchering of the Cartoon Network website is a cheap ploy engineered to force viewers into signing up for his own increasingly enshittified streamer—and at a time when the internet as we’ve broadly recognized it is rapidly crumbling.

In recent years, we’ve seen once inescapable media disappear from the internet at a frightening rate, whether it’s general-interest blogs and websites closing down (or worse, turning into A.I. slop factories), popular old browser games losing their adaptability and functionality, pre-Spotify music streamers tanking their servers, social networks collapsing into the void along with all their memories, hyperlinks degrading in functionality, or copyright-flexible artworks from an older internet age getting hit with suits by rights-holders and then being pulled from distribution.

The Internet Archive can only do so much to preserve all of this, especially when the nonprofit is already staving off endless, expensive lawsuits (and making steep cuts to its own selections while at it). The great irony is that modern life and culture’s hapless dependence on a functional internet—CrowdStrike, anyone?—makes it imperative that vast troves of history be copied in some form onto cyberspace; otherwise, it might as well not exist. This goes for a classic movie missing from any digital service or a publication of yore finding a new life and preservation online.

To seal off great works of art behind increasingly paywalled, pricey, and ad-choked streamers is to rob an already overwhelmed public of any actual choice in creative exploration. It’s further maddening when you never know that a given show, movie, or special will even remain on that service. If it does indeed go away, you may not even be able to find it through a physical copy or via some weird black market of cast-offs. No wonder the production company behind Adult Swim’s The Venture Bros. is currently offering a DVD sale of the complete series while the show itself remains in limbo between its recent Max removal and its upcoming Netflix entrance.

This is no way to treat some of our greatest cultural legacies—but it’s inevitably the result when we trust them with the David Zaslavs of the world. We should look at streaming-service erasure as an issue on par with that of greater internet fragmentation and the worsening digital amnesia that results.

It’s only going to get worse, especially as creators rightfully concerned about A.I. apps training on their hard work elect to take their stuff off the digital commons to protect their artistic contributions from cannibalization by the power-hungry networks attempting to supplant them. The data centers lose their higher-quality building blocks, but keep churning along in order to make something more artificial and just plain terrible. David Zaslav will stand by, burning more cash and trashing more titles, only to keep failing, and making our culture—as well as our history—all the poorer for it.

[neomel]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUHH

HAAAAAAUAAAUUUAAU GIVE IT TO ME I NEED IT I CRAVE

[unintentional-edgelord]

Companion post to the previous regarding Girouette and the Double Megamerge, though it goes more into differences between the one in ZX and that in Advent.

From Vent and Aile's perspective, while the double merge has given them the power to keep going, what they had to go through to get there is nothing short of horrible.

The ZX script straight-up tells us that they consider Girouettes' death their fault - Model Z does so, as well. We don't know anything about their dad so we can perhaps assume he was never in the picture, but either way, Giro's death now means that Vent and Aile have lost not one, but two very important parental figures in their lives. Sure, they've got a guiding force in Model X, but unlike Giro they've been matched with him for a week at most, and that bond hasn't been forged quite to that extent yet.

This is also at a point in their lives where they think finally, finally, they have exactly what they need to stop any more lives from being lost instead of being that helpless child they were at the theme park, so it's bitterly ironic that the moment they get the power to do this, they lose yet another parent.

The musical cues in the original ZX add an additional layer to it. On first playthrough, you wouldn't be likely to realise that Fragments, one of the "sadder" songs of the game which is present when Girouette dies, has the same melody as Snake Eyes, the theme of Slither Inc. HQ - interesting that they chose to use this theme instead of Metallic Soul, which is considered the theme of the Biometals and used during other sad moments of the game. Perhaps it's in direct reference to Serpent having a hand in Girouettes' death, the same way it's played right at the start of the game when Vent and Aile are talking about their deceased mum?

Either way, the one-two gut punch of that transition from Fragments to Trinity is powerful as hell; the fade out from Fragments leading into the bass line of Trinity lets you know there's some serious ass-kicking about to happen. Interestingly enough, the leitmotif of Trinity (that synthy bit) doesn't appear elsewhere in either ZX soundtrack; maybe in Rockin On if you squint really hard with the intro electric guitar It's honestly a damn shame because it's one of the coolest tracks in the game. Determined Eyes from Advent didn't allude to it either - but that theme is a whole other level of badass, so I'm not too fussed. Just would've been a really cool callback!

Anyhow, the title "Trinity" as well could not only be a reference to Vent/Aile and both Models X and Z, but could also be in reference to Girouette and the Biometals; those lending the protagonists their strength. The whole tone of the track and the way it's built up really gives you the feeling that something monumental and never-before-seen is about to happen.

It's also interesting to contrast the original in ZX to the Double Megamerge cutscenes in Advent.

In the first one, Vent/Aile look like they're visibly in pain from the strain of the merge, as you can see:

And then they emerge triumphant from it - the pain, the sorrow has now given them the fuel and determination to carry on and become "a hero who can protect everyone." The framing of the scene, coupled with the soundtrack, is iconic and powerful as hell, particularly the shots of the helmet crystal and the hair spreading out like angel wings behind them - both of which are homaged in Advent.

I also like that Advent brought back Metallic Soul and not Fragments for the scene leading up to it. That theme feels a lot more like Vent and Aile's this time around, and hits a lot more poignantly than Fragments would in my opinion. Now if only they'd brought back Rockin On as the boss theme... Advent as a whole could've done a better job of tying into ZX to be quite honest.

As for the scene itself, I know the original in ZX is practically identical for Vent and Aile, but as I've noted previously, they both visibly look like they're in massive pain when they perform the merge for the first time. (It's also never explained why there's an energy surge that kills the mavericks afterwards, although it's super awesome - maybe Models X and Z channelled any excess power from the merge outwards to avoid killing Vent/Aile from too much energy?)

Advent contrasts this for them both, although more so in Aile's case than Vent's. Aile's is obviously a clear homage to magical girl anime, but she looks relaxed pretty much the whole way through, laughing and smiling at X and Z's cyberelves at the start and her joyful expression doesn't really disappear right until the end when she's confronting Grey. Vent's merge hints maybe that he's still in some pain, based on that yell he lets out - but it comes across less like a yell of pain and more like a kiai, feeling incredibly powerful. His scene gives off the feeling that not only has he grown into the responsibility and power that comes with wielding both Biometals, but he also utterly owns it now. Honestly, I don't think I'll ever get over how well-done the snappiness and timing of Vent's scene is.

On a mildly related tangent, though it is nice to see how happy Aile is during the merge in Advent, I will forever be annoyed that her scene doesn't feel as impactful as Vent's. It feels long and unnecessarily drawn out; yes I understand it's a contrast to the original in ZX and yes I understand it's supposed to be a magical homage, but not once (to me, anyways) does it feel to me that "this is the hero who saved the world four years ago."

Not even when we get the iconic helmet crystal forming, or the shot with the hair spread out like great seraph wings.

I mean come on, you're going to compare this from Aile's:

With this, from Vent's?

You did Aile dirty, Capcom.

You did Aile dirty.

(Disclaimer, while Vent is my favourite of the duo, Aile has a special place in my heart as she was who I used during my very first playthrough of ZX, and I'm honestly annoyed they chose to focus more on fanservice than anything else when she showed up in Advent. She so deserved better.)

[fat-slobby-gamers]

I've been diving headfirst into megaman again. Particularly zero and zx

I really don't like the look of Vent and Alie's megamerge but I love the concept (and bio metals are cool)

Model Z is cool though

[gears2gnomes]

AGDQ 2023 - Mega Man ZX

"Megamerge in action."

[tigertaurus22]

Fairy Tail ZX AU

Megamerged versions of Erza’s empress armors

I like to imagine that when Erza merges with Model Z, whatever armor she summons while merged will take on characteristics of the Model Z armor.

Her hair elongates and fades to Zero’s signature blonde when merged too.

I just think they look cool and would inspire fear in any actual maverick that crossed her path