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emperorsfoot · 8 years ago

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I have mixed feelings about Omniverse. There were some things I liked about the series and some things I really, really did not like. Overall, I have to say that my opinion of the series is split 30/70 with the 70% being negative. So, for the most part, I didn't like it. But first let me discuss the things I DID like.

We got a stable Plumbers Headquarters in Bellwood and more regular Plumbers characters.

The Plumbers always stuck me sort of as the Green Lantern Corps., and just like with the Lanterns, the Corps. Comics are way better than the Green Lantern comics. Why? Because its about the whole Corps. The whole organization, not just a circle jerk for Hal Jordan (or whoever the Lantern for sector 2814 happens to be at the time). And that was what was nice about expanding the cast of Plumbers. We got to see a whole Corps of Plumbers, not just third-tier 'Plumbers Helpers' or single-episode cameos to remind us that other Plumbers existed. We had regular characters with names and backstories -many of whom weren't even from Earth. It was a good attempt at world building, and in a show that is constantly claiming to be about “experiencing what its like to be another species” or “learning how differences make us strong”, that's something that's very important. Because, as we all know (should know) UNLIKE Green Lantern Corps. (Blackest Night story arc) the Earth isn't actually the center of the universe. (Neither is Ben for that matter, although you wouldn't know it from watching the series.)

Gwen goes to collage and she and Kevin get away from Ben for a while.

For pretty much all their lives, both Gwen and Kevin's lives have revolved around Ben Mother-Fucking Tennyson. Gwen because they were raised more like siblings than cousins, she was pulled into all his absurd alien adventures -literally- from the moment they started, Ben is incapable of doing anything without her and when she does get out, he pulls her back in again -remember, it was Ben that went to Gwen at the beginning of Alien Force. If he hand't asked her for help, she might not have been a main character in the second series. And Kevin became obsessed with Ben when he was only eleven years old. When he was still in his formative years. Over the course of Alien Force and Ultimate Alien that obsession and thirst for revenge morphed and shifted into an uncomfortably dependent friendship. Seriously. Ben is Kevin's ONLY male friend Kevin has that's an actual friend, not a 'business partner' or 'tech-buddy'. Its good that Gwen went to collage and Kevin followed her, so that they could both get some time away from Ben to grow as individuals. Sure, we the audience didn't get to see any of that individual growth and development because the series was too busy being a circle-jerk for Ben. But then, I've come to expect that from this franchise.

Prince Looma and Tetramand marital practices (“Many Happy Returns”)

Same as with the additional Plumbers characters, this was a good way to add some easy world building. They took an existing alien species that the viewers are very familiar with and gave us a glimpse of their culture. It was mostly played for laughs, but I think it was one of the better episodes (and not just because it was also a mostly Kevin-centric episode). In one episode alone, we learn how Tetramand ask for/arrange their matches, engagement ceremony, length and traditions, how engagements are broken off, and even a little bit about the marriage ceremony itself. To someone who knows how to pay attention it was like a cascade of culture building, world building, and general information that expanded the world of Ben 10.

Rook -Kevin and Gwen in one person.

When they took Gwen and Kevin away, they had to replace them somehow, because -as the franchise has consistently proven- while the whole thing might be one giant Ben-wank, Ben Tennyson is also utterly and completely incapable of doing anything on his own. He needs a sidekick -usually one who's smarter and more skilled (read: more useful) than Ben himself, and doesn't mind playing second fiddle to the spotlight hogging, ego-driven, narcissist Hero of the Universe. Rook does that wonderfully while also making sarcastic quips that go over Ben's (and his fans in fandom's heads). Also, adding another species -and more importantly, showing us his home planet, family, and how his people live- was more great world building.

Basically, what I liked about Omniverse was all the wold building they tried to do.

Now, the things I didn't like...

I'll start small and shallow:

The dramatic change in artwork.

Where do I begin? First and foremost its inconsistent with the rest of the franchise up to that point. Ben 10 TOS, Alien Force, and Ultimate Alien were all drawn/animated in the same style. Something similar to the Young Justice cartoon style, proportionate bodies with realistic facial features (realistic for a cartoon). That style worked for an adventure series. It was good. But then Omniverse rolls around and suddenly everyone's got giant eyes that take up half their faces, but they're not cute anime eyes, they're weird cat-like eyes. Their body proportions are all weird so that some characters are 60% legs, or their arms are so long their hands are at their knees. Max doesn't have facial expressions anymore, Ben looks like he's ten years old again, Kevin's chin is so long they have to give him a giraffe neck to compensate... All of the familiar characters look mutated and gross. I almost wanna say Omniverse was the worst artwork decision they could have made for the franchise, but then, I've seen the new reboot and that one's even worse.

The whole series is just one big Ben circle-jerk.

Remember all those new Plumbers characters I was so happy about? We can't have a single episode about them that doesn't involve Ben. Either Ben having to rescue then while Grandpa Max vomits a small novella of exposition, or Ben trying to investigate their past for X, Y, Z reason, or them driving around Bellwood while Ben has seemingly endless battles around them that inevitably block their path, or Ben tagging along while they visit their home planet. There is no way to develop a single new character in the show without Ben having to be involved in some way. Look. I get it. The franchise is called “Ben 10”, so obviously its about Ben. But ya know what? Avatar is also called “Avatar” and they manage to have multiple episodes about other characters that don't even involve the Avatar at all. Believe it or not, it is possible to make Wester cartoons with a wide cast of characters, AND develop said characters without the title character having to stick his nose in every time someone farts.

They somehow made Ben 10 a harem anime.

Now, I like a good harem as much as the next sexually repressed and asocial nerd. Goodness knows Martian Successor Nadeshico has a permanent spot on my list of Top Ten Anime I Recommend to Everyone. But is just seemed kinda weird... Ultimate Alien ended with Ben and Julie seeming really solid. Then at the beginning of Omniverse, they're not even together anymore. Now, Word of God is that Kenny's mother is Kai, so obviously Ben and Julie couldn't be together forever. At some point they had to break up and Ben had to get with Kai. But Omniverse did not handle the inevitable facts of canon well. There was no real mention of reasons why Ben and Julie were no longer together when they seemed so solid at the send of the previous series, then, all of a sudden, Ben had a million and one women wanting to bone him. Looma, Ester, Lucy, (even his cousin Sonny in one episode and that was creepy), and yes, still Julie and Kai. And, like most protagonists in harem anime, Ben does absolutely nothing to deserve all this adulation from the distaff gender. Its very frustrating.

Kai Green -I like the IDEA of Kai, but I actually hate the CHARACTER Kai.

I really like the idea of Kai. I really do. I like a strong, independent, female, well educated, Native American character. To often in fiction Native characters are portrayed as “magical” in some way. Either as sages or spiritual guides, shapeshifters, mediums, or healers. Its very rare to find a Native American characters who's just a normal, down-to-Earth person with hopes and dreams, anxieties and fears, plans and aspirations, etc. Kai is none of the cliché tropes that Native characters are pigeon-holed into. This is best illustrated by an exchange of dialogue between her and Ben when he comments on her hand-to-hand combat skills and asks if its some “ancient Navajo” fighting technique, and she scoffs at him and says she took after school classes at the mall -like any normal teenager would! Kai is a real person, she's not just a conglomeration of stereotypes and tropes. I really like the idea of Kai. I really do. That being said... THE WRITERS SEEMED TO HAVE DONE EVERYTHING IN THIER POWER TO MAKE KAI UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY UNLIKABLE! (Yes, I did have to shout that in all caps.) I like the idea of Kai, but Kai herself is condescending, and an intellectual snob. I don't like Ben, but there's one episode where he's at a museum (seeing an exhibit that Kai put on) and he makes a comment along the lines of “I didn't know aliens had old stuff!” and Kai responds to him like he's the dumbest piece of shit to ever crawl out of the public school system -and she does this in front of a crowd of his peers and strangers. Lets step out of the cartoon for a moment and look at it with some perspective. How would you feel if you've part of a tour group and someone in the group (you may or may not know) asks a silly question. What would you think if the tour guide responded with something like “How far up your ass did you have to stick your head to find that question, dumbass?” You'd think they were a terrible tour guide and should be fired, right? That's what Kai did to Ben. And that wasn't even the first time she showed a clear disrespect for Ben either. In the original series, she says she only like Ben when he was Benwolf (later renamed Blitzwolfer in Omniverse) because she wanted a “pet dog” that she could “train”. That's kinda understandable and excusable because she was ten at the time and kids are amoral assholes who don't know any better. But Omniverse is six years later, Kai is sixteen and she hasn't improved with age, she's become more of a bitch. I really don't understand why the show insisted on shoving them together and insisting that they both love each other and are happy together in the future. When we see her in the future, she's always with Ben 10,000 but she's still making disparaging comments about him or his arch enemies and Ben just smiles and cuddles and kisses her.

Kevin. Everything Omniverse did to, and took away from Kevin.

This should be a post unto itself. Anyone who reads my fan fictions will know that Kevin is my favorite character. So, of course the thing I'm gonna feel most strongly about is going to have something to do with Kevin Ethan Levin. So, sit down prepare yourself for a wall-o-text.

Osmosian. Look, I get that in the original series the PLAN was for Kevin to be a mutant and NOT an alien. But then Alien Force and Ultimate Alien changed that. They established that Osmosians were aliens. They established this so solidly that Omnivers' attempts to ret-con Kevin back to being a mutant makes no sense. Take a moment to seriously think about just how large that conspiracy has to be in order for “Osmosian” the alien species to really be a mutated Earthling. Max, Kevin's, and Kevin's mother's memories were altered, Aggregor is an experiment to replicate Kevin's powers, Ragnarok was really a Rooters agent, the Osmos System is an uninhabited system that Servantis altered the records of in order to supply a “home planet” for his fake species. And all of this was done without the Magistrata or any other high-level Plumbers stumbling across the conspiracy or finding out. Its just so far fetched. Its to much of a stretch for it to be a legitimate explanation -and yet, its canon. What it is, is absurd. This is not good story telling.

It makes the world smaller. Remember way up at the top of this post when I was listing the things I liked about Omniverse and most of it was me just gushing over the world building? Well, the Rooters story arc and subsequent ret-cons are the exact opposite of that. Its not 'wolf building' its 'world shrinking'. By making Kevin a mutant Earthling instead of an alien-human hybrid, they robbed the Ben 10 universe of a planet, a species, and possibly a culture to explore. If they really wanted to make Kevin a villain again so much, they could have had a story arc ret-conning Devin instead. Make Devin an Osmosian double agent who was supposed to infiltrate the Plumbers because Osmosians could be aggressive and warlike aliens (seeing how Kevin's so naturally obsessed with revenge, and Aggregor was determined to attain the power of a god, I think that's a plausible assumption). But, Devin accidentally fell in love with an Earthling -Kevin's mother- and quit his mission. The story arch could have been Devin's old war-buddies coming to enlist Kevin to finish the mission his father couldn't. Kevin might go along with them as a way to get to know what kind of man his father really was. They could play it the same way they did in the Rooters story arc and have him just pretending to join the baddies in order infiltrate them and help Ben defeat them and save Earth. Or they could make him OD on energy and go crazy and become a legit villain again. Either way, keep Osmosians as aliens would have been a better story than making them mutant Earthlings AND it would have been another great opportunity for more world building.

Ret-conning Kevin's backstory was cruel. Kevin has almost no positive male role-models. Thing about it. Think about his life. When Kevin was young, his male role-model was his step-father, an average human with nothing special or noteworthy about him EXCEPT THAT HE WAS TERRFIED OF HIS STEP-SON. Think about that. Kevin's first male role-model was afraid of him. How positive an influence could Harvey have been if he was scared shitless of an eleven-year-old child? Then Kevin was trapped in the Null Void and sent to prison where he met Kwarrel. Now, Kwarrel was shown to be a fairly decent guy. But lets also keep in mind that he is in an maximum security prison within the Null Void, so he must have done something pretty bad to be sentenced there. Also, keep in mind that we only got to see a few short flashbacks of Kwarrel and they were all through Kevin's point of view -usually of Kwarrel mentoring him. But we also know that Kwarrel was “top dog” in the prison. The only way to stay that was in jail is to rule through strength and intimidation. We saw Kwarrel being all nobel and empathetic, but that doesn't mean he wasn't also sometimes aggressive, violent, or even cruel to the other inmates. Omniverse gave Kevin NOTHER super-shitty role-model in Proctor Servantis. Amoral, self-serving, uses children as experiments and puppets, fucks with people's minds, and devotes his entire life to destroying one single human boy. The only truly positive male role-models Kevin has in his life are Max Tennyson and the memory of Devin Levin -except Omniverse made it so that Devin never actually existed. That was just downright cruel.

So, that's what I think about Omniverse.

#ben 10 omniverse #kevin levin #Plumbers #world building #Osmosians #Ben tennyson #Kai Green #native american representation in media #navajo #rooters #proctor servantis #weapon xi #ben 10 #alien force #ultimate alien

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