#seriously this franchise has some of the worst names

[bagea]

gundam name moment

[otakween]

Digital Monster X-evolution

If those janky Digimon World cutscenes were a whole movie, it'd be this. To be fair, I think outdated CGI has a lot more charm than a lot of the higher quality but soulless stuff they put out nowadays. Plot-wise it was nothing special, we've seen this plot a zillion times by now. They just injected it with some new gimmicks. I did find the main character charming enough. I honestly wouldn't mind seeing another attempt at an all-CGI movie as long as that didn't become the new default (slippery slope lol).

Notes:

Although the plot of this film was really simple they managed to add some convoluted lore anyways...because Digimon. Just when I was thinking "that was confusing" I saw that this wiki has a 900 page long (not really lol) explanation/play-by-play. Maybe I'll read it when it's not my bed time: https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_X-evolution

Of course they had to open the movie with Leomon dying (really?) Why is that a thing? I've never felt emotional seeing any Leomon die tbh lol

I think Dorumon and his digivolutions have really strong designs. His rookie form kinda looks like a furry version of Monodramon. I've been playing Digimon RPG (the MMO) and just by chance ended up with him as my partner (I actually thought I was getting Impmon lol). Fate!

Not a lot of levity here, the script took itself very seriously and the characters spent most of the film just being existential and talking about the meaning of life. Kinda heavy for a silly little monster battle film.

Legit got a little emotional when Dorumon was being bullied, but it's really easy to feel sad for a furry little creature

The CGI actually held up better than I thought it would for the most part, the mecha digimon especially looked awesome. The only "AH! KILL IT WITH FIRE!" moment was Andromon -shudder-

(Of course, Andromon is ugly in any form, but this is definitely his worst).

Weird seeing Omegamon vs. WarGreymon. I was also surprised to see Magnamon in the Royal Knights. He just seems more beast-like to me than the other knights.

Tokomon was one of those "is it cute or is it annoying?" baby characters. I'm leaning more towards cute, but there were moments where I was like "alright, that's enough of him" loi

Dorugamon kinda reminded me of Toothless. I wanna pet his big nose :3c

They just couldn't resist, they had to call something in this franchise "Yggradsil" didn't they

(They also used other Norse names, the same ones used in Ah! My Goddess).

The funky X-forms of digimon were fun, very angular. It reminds me of the newer Pokemon games how they keep adding new gimmicky forms. I'm sure we'll be seeing more of these. I guess in a way, this is a more realistic "evolution" since it has to do with the digimon reacting to their environment by developing antibodies.

I saw people complaining that Frontier only had two Royal Knights, well I guess they made up for it a bit here. Are they always gonna be working for the villain side? I wanna see a series where they're the heroes!

It was neat seeing Silphymon again. I get excited when 02 characters show up cuz it's kind of the underdog season in my mind.

The villain digimon (aside from the royal knights) weren't very well explained they just kinda showed up, caused havoc, then went away. The only reason why I have a name for any of them is cuz I read the wiki. I guess it would be hard to naturally fit in all the names...

The name "Alphamon" was kind of an eyeroll. They're running out of epic names lol. (Also, it just makes me think of alpha bros nowadays). The design is nice tho, it's got the black w/ gold highlights thing that I liked in Frontier.

Lots of badass cape shots in this (see my final screenshot above)

At the end of the movie the digital world was destroyed and then restored (Frontier much?) It wasn't really clear what that meant for the digimon. Did they all just resurrect via digiegg? Were they recreated exactly as they were before the world's destruction? -shrug-

Pretty sad that this movie never got any love in the states. I wonder if there's a fandub out there somewhere.

Apparently Digimon World 4 is related to this movie so I'll be playing that next!

[med-ex]

feelin rlly idk HAPPY?? over this franchise as a whole✨

I wasn't even alive for Fallout 1 & 2 - but upon entering the world 3 years after they were released, would grow up hearing its name constantly... never did i think it would take GTA's place as my favourite video game series. Like literally never thought the weird little isometric game talked about by my older cousins would be the one.

I played Fallout 3 at the worst period of my life- it became a pure escape from graduating high school, becoming a severe alcoholic and moving off my mountain into my province's capital city. I was in love with it to the point that when I came home to my family home to visit, I would haul my xbox 360 in my backpack and strap my little tv to my back with a rope- ✨that's✨ how addicted I was to it.

It resonated with me in a way no other game series has. No, I obviously didn't grow up in the same standards as the wastes, but could resonate with foraging for food, no clean water & mess, destruction and despair everywhere you turned.

Fast forward a year or so, and I try Fallout: New Vegas. This is where it finally became my favorite series ever. I could list all the reasons, but they're similar to what you'll see all over the net; it's just amazing. I already was all "fuck the government" since I was a child but it made me think- think about the rule of authority, think about perseverance, weigh out what "right" and "wrong" truly means and the blurred line between the two.

By the time I was 21, I tried Fallout 4. It took some getting used to in the terms of its modern graphics, but I really loved how I got to experience conversations that felt like I was actually having them. I loved building the world back up and when I was brave enough to try mods- then shit got real interesting. I was already obsessed with Fallout 3 & NV but we can thank Fallout 4 for getting me into the community as a whole.

I was one of the ones to make fun of FO76- the launch was a huge part of that, but I just didn't understand how it could ever truly fit into the Fallout series. I played it for the first time when I was 2022, and now after 2 years I wholeheartedly regret shitting on it so hard. There are so many cool quests/stories and though some of them are silly seeing as it's online-based and they need to cater to that and though it's a bit strange at first, it feels so cool to be around other players adventuring the wastes + actually having to persist to build your own base, feed yourself and survive- as console commands don't exist in the same realm they used to with the earlier titles.

Now, we arrive at the airing of the first Fallout television show. I seriously thought it was gonna be shit- I just couldn't imagine them being able to do a good job but as we can see, here we are. The show is amazing and I didn't even know it was something I wanted so badly. The only real-life renditions of Fallout I've seen is that one live action trailer for 76 + cosplay- so seeing it in film, is seriously so fucking cool.

Idk guess im just gettin a little ✨sentimental✨ towards a series that has given me so many lessons, so much ability to cope with my own shit + gotten me into such a fun community filled with funny jokes, amazing art, discussions and rich lore that maybe one day could leave the video game + TV screen and become even a book.

Ty to the crew of original artists who started this back in the 90s, and thank you to the crew of artists at Bethesda in this current century who kept this game going💖

[giulliadella]

Hellraiser: the Toll is dumb AF

You freaks liked my review of The Scarlet Gospels, so I'm here to deliver this short review of another garbage Hellraiser novel while I'm procrastinating with studying for the finals. Spoilers for the entire thing (and some funny fanart) below:

Hellraiser: the Toll is a novella written by Mark E. Miller that serves as a passage between The Hellbound Hearts/Hellraiser movie and The Scarlet Gospels. It sucks harder than a black hole.

Short summary (5 sentences)

Kirsty Cotton is a depressed fucked up person that is running from place to place because she's scared of "The Cold Man" which is a nickname she gave to Pinhead. She gets a letter from some random theology professor and decides to go visit The Devil's Island in French Guiana where she's told the Cenobite would wait for her. She goes to a hotel kept by an old lady and a butler named Walter, the old lady is skinned alive and the butler tries to kill Kirsty, but she smacks his face with a hammer and kills him. Then she enters the jungle prison on the Devil's Island and meets Pinhead, they chat, then argue, then start a fight which ends by Kirsty smashing his face with a hammer and taking out one of his nails. She returns home and keeps the nail in a jar on her night stand.

Endlessly confused plot

I honestly can't tell what universe does this book describe. It's a mashup of "The Hellbound Heart" and Hellraiser movie, but the second movie is not cannon, which is very weird. The author basically picked and chose whatever random thing he liked and made a senseless mashup. One of the worst things about it is the same fucking issue with the Boom! comics and that is that Kirsty hates Pinhead because he "killed her father and ruined her family". Which is pure bullshit from every angle. In "The Hellbound Heart", Cenobites only killed Frank and Julia and let her go. In Hellraiser, they also killed Frank and Julia and she barely escaped. Her father was killed by FUCKING FRANK. Pinhead didn't ruin Kirsty's family, Frank did. I don't think that Kirsty would hold any ill intent towards the Cenobites, in fact, in Hellraiser 2 she objectively doesn't. She wanted to save them for fuck's sake. And they all gave their lives for her. I really have no idea why would she have any reasons to hate Pinhead, but oh well.

Pinhead acts like a whiny little child

Seriously, what the fuck is with these books and assassination of Pinhead's character? Why the FUCK is he depicted as narcissistic, misogynistic motherfucker, when he couldn't be further from it? Also, why does he use his fists to fight Kirsty when he can summon chains with hooks by will and also has like 12 butchering knives hanging from his belt? The worst part is probably the dialogue, especially when he says "Jesus wept", like, come on, that's the dumbest thing I've ever read. Does the motherfucker who wrote this think that Frank and Pinhead have any parallels? Because if he does, he needs a hit on his head with a hammer, just to reset his brain.

Hell is shit - literally

The description of Hell in this book is even dumber than in Scarlet Gospels. It says that the floor in Hell is made of shit. And there's a hole and people in Hell worship the hole and throw babies in it. Like, what the fuck. Also, I fucking hate the fact that he described Cenobites as foul smelling. Do your research, motherfucker, they smell like vanilla! There is some stench of rot beneath, but nobody in the entire franchise never had the urge to vomit when they were close to the Cenobites, so it can't be strong. I don't know how did the author of this garbage come to the idea that Cenobites smell like shit and that Hell is made of shit, but it's literally like how a 13 year old would describe it. I don't know what is the reason, but maybe, just maybe, straight men have much different interpretation of what Cenobites are compared to queer women like myself.

Stuff I liked

There was one scene where a demon was running in the rain screaming FUCK!FUCK!FUCK!FUCK!FUCK!FUCK!FUCK! until he was struck by lightning. I laughed my ass off with that.

The fact that Kirsty kept the nail she knocked out of Pinhead's face by her bedside was so cute. Like, this book has some shipping, but it fucking sucks. Mostly because both Pinhead and Kirsty are very much out of character. But keeping the nail was definitely in character for her lol.

Overall, this entire book could be summed up by this illustration:

The Toll sucks. It doesn't suck as much as Scarlet Gospels, and, thank Goddess, it's only 40 pages long. But it still sucks. It ruins both Pinhead and Kirsty and their relationship and it's definitely not worth your time. If you want good stories about the Hell Priest and his human crush, go to AO3, there are many of superior quality.

[drifting-pieces-blog-blog]

yo, do you think Netflix could make a better Moon knight show than Disney plus?

And other than Oscar Isaac, who would you cast as Moony?

I mean daredevil Netflix is better than most mcu movie so a Netflix moon knight show might be better than the Disney one

Alright, thank you for your time :D have a nice day!

Hello!

Oh that's a tough question.

I absolutely adored the Netflix Daredevil. Specifically season 1. The hallway fight scene is my happy place. Netflix is known for blowing it out of the water When They Want To. Not to mention the casting was the single best casting job I've ever seen. And Frank Castle? They couldn't have done better.

Since Disney has not actually taken the reigns of Dare Devil yet, it's hard to say how they will choose to carry on the story or what different choices they will make.

But the real difference in the two? How much they are willing to invest. Because it really was all about the script, the direction, and the cast.

You see, Marvel (And Disney) tend to have very strong opinions about what happens in their movies. And these choices have affected many of the movies in very negative ways. Often leaving the directors, writers, and actors very frustrated.

They also tend to heavy hand things and put a lot of pressure on directors. Not to mention that Marvel has an ultimate goal to reach and when you start interconnecting things, it's going to get MESSY.

My biggest joy in Moon Knight was how it was a stand alone and not involved in a larger messy plot with an end goal of tying him into a larger franchise to make movies and more money.

It's a big worry. The more big characters you have involved, the less time you are going to have to establish and develop each individual character and their relationships. And since Moon Knight has his own inter-system relationships to deal with first, there is a HEAVY chance things are going to get overlooked or underutilized or cast aside in favor of a quick fix or sloppy story telling (Looking at you End Game).

I think that the Moon Knight we got in season 1 was absolutely amazing and that was in large because of the freedom that was given to the cast and crew and director of the show. The absolute freedom and research and care they put into it. I'm not sure they would have had that financial ability if Netflix had done it. Not to mention they would have put limits on the set design and location. Disney has that lovely ability to just go "You want the Wadi desert? Let's go."

And OSCAR. This man MADE Moon Knight. His own research, input, and creative suggestions. He was the one that gave Steven the accent. He cast his brother as his body double. He even chose to do the single shot mirror dialogue with Marc and Steven. That's a flex that a lot of actors can't do. There have been MANY that have tried to play multiple characters and complained about how hard it was the whole time. Oscar took it as a fun walk in the park. I honestly can't imagine anyone else doing a better job or even as good a job as he did. If they had used anyone else, it couldn't have been a well known name. It would have had to be a new person. (All though I did just try to imagine Ryan Gosling as Marc for the briefest of moments and it gave me some serious Smallwood vibes. That Smallwood scrunkle on that face? Yes.)

And trust me, when I heard they were making a Moon Knight show with Disney, I was skeptical as hell going in. I'm super protective of my boys. I feared the worst. I have never been happier to have been wrong. I hope I continue to be wrong with season 2. I WANT it to be just as amazing. I want it to blow me out of the water and destroy me like season 1 did. So I'm just sitting here holding my breath and trying not to think about all the ways they could seriously mess it up. (there are so many).

Uh... Did that answer your question?

[joshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

PARAMOUNT PLUS KNUCKLES WOOOOOOOOO

Spoilers obviously!

Episode 1 thoughts: writing is kind of annoying, and I don't think I like this version of Knuckles that much - his proper arc in the movie was good but divorced from that context this is basically just idiot meathead Knuckles pushed in another direction entirely. Wade isn't funny or entertaining. Sonic's model looks worse than it did before, the forehead wrinkles are so offputting. I feel like they fucked their own lore weirdly - the second movie showed the literal founding of G.U.N. in this continuity and yet their headquarters are based in London and they're apparently already big enough to have double-agents within them working to support criminals. G.U.N. just didn't feel like such a big thing in the second movie is all, but now they are with no fanfare. Also they've acquired both warp rings and Knuckles' quills from ???? so hmmm. I'm definitely approaching this too much as an adult out to nitpick rather than remembering that this is for kids and it doesn't matter when G.U.N. became so prominent or how and when they got their hands on X macguffin, but idk I feel like the first 2 movies were paying some degree of attention to stuff like that so this just sticks out to me.

Episode 2 thoughts: actually not just Wade but I think nobody is funny or really all that entertaining to watch. I don't think the Sonic movies are great or anything but this feels aggressively like we're just going through the motions. I need a hero scene was kind of torture. I appreciate Knuckles gliding anyway since that's one of those things that's acknowledged surprisingly little despite being a core part of his gameplay in every playable appearance he's had.

Episode 3 thoughts: my favourite so far on the sheer absurdity of a lonely Jewish mother whose husband left the family and whose kids hate each other finding solace and comfort in Knuckles the Echidna and teaching him about Judaism

Episode 4 thoughts: absolutely indescribable experience. felt like a high budget fan parody. I was juggling so many feelings through my head while watching, reaching each end of the quality spectrum - this is both incredibly kino and also one of the worst things to ever grace the Sonic franchise. one must actively sever any interest in pretending this is something that should be taken seriously in order to enjoy it, although in doing so one must also acknowledge that the Knuckles show on paramount plus is now but a joke. the same Sonic movie franchise that rejuvenated public interest in the franchise has also birthed unto us a mockery of everything the series has ever stood for. Wade Whipple stole a kid's bicycle and chopped off a man's ponytail with a katana before then forcing that man to undress.

Episode 5 thoughts: this is straight up more enjoyable when consumed as a bizarre and surreal anthology but with a continual plot wherein the anthology part of it is just what is gonna be the directorial fetish of the episode. in this case it's several instances of shots being split across comic-style panelling or the same frame repeated in grid-patterns across the screen, things like that. that type of shot for bowling for 10 minutes and then a heartwarming emotional reunion with an estranged father turned heartwrenching as Jewish mother recounts the fact that he hurt us before and he's going to do it again. I almost forgot I was watching a Sonic the Hedgehog show until the bad guys showed up and reminded us that Knuckles the Echidna does actually exist in the show named after him. I'm starting to think this show is seriously worth watching entirely because it's so ludicrously detached from its source material and absurd in everything else it chooses to depict. The dialogue is so unnatural it's hilarious. Everybody has a certain voice they're doing for the camera and it's all super exaggerated. Wade actually betrays Knuckles in the end and I'm about to watch the last episode to see what happens.

Episode 6 thoughts: I think this show is incredible

Overall thoughts!

I don't even know how to succintly put into words how much fun I was having with this by the end. And I do mean by the end - you can see the progression of my enjoyment after each episode in this post itself - but it really is kind of slow and annoying to start until it eventually reaches such a level of absurdity that I turned off Sonic fan brain and turned on "I want to laugh at batshit insane media" brain. Once it got to that point though I was so fucking invested that I was feeling everything. I wanted Wade to start throwing bowling balls at the buyer so fucking bad and he did. The electric guitar kicking in when Knuckles powered back up and became the flames of disaster or whatever was the most excited I've been watching anything in a while. The juxtaposition between a serious emotional tale about broken families and standing up against those who have hurt you versus Wade Whipple in a Knuckles costume having a musical performed at him about the strength of the heart or whatever is immaculate.

I feel like this show was greenlit and allocated a budget before they actually decided anything they wanted to do with it so they just wrote some vague story outline and handed each episode off to a different director to see what they could come up with. The few who played it a little more safe, kid's action show type thing, didn't really offer much. But the ones who decided to have fun with it and just not even care about the source material, those are the ones that turned out really fun.

I will acknowledge right now obviously that none of that is exactly praise from the lens of a Sonic fan. This isn't good at being Sonic in any way, it's not even good at being part of the separate and standalone Sonic movie continuity either. Calling it disrespectful to the source material is an understatement and even the times where it decides to pull from what it's adapting you get absolutely bizarre errors like the Flames of Disaster being singularly attributed to Knuckles just for the hell of it. This should not be thought of as a serious attempt at telling a story within any Sonic the Hedgehog setting. This is a high budget parody that, through circumstances we'll never quite know, is also an officially licensed and endorsed Sonic the Hedgehog product. It's the worst Sonic adaptation ever. It's also so fucking entertaining and I would honestly recommend it to just about anyone. I'm literally already lining up a rewatch with some friends. It's so fucking fun. Like there's an element of irony and there's an element of so bad it's good and perhaps all of this is birthed by that and me being in a state of "I just finished something absurd and need to process it so I'm just yelling" but as a lifelong diehard Sonic fan who yearns for nothing more than good quality Sonic content I had more actual fun with this than almost any other Sonic adaptation period. This shit, my friends, is kino. And Wade Whipple is my new favourite Sonic character.

[balanceoflightanddark]

Avatar the Last Airbender Netflix Episode 1- "Aang"

Well...the time has come.

My biggest question going into this series is asking why it needs to exist. I mean, from a business standpoint it makes sense. ATLA exploded in popularity overnight during the pandemic and Netflix wanted to cash in while the iron was still hot. Moreover, it's one of those "safe bet" projects. The name recognition alone is going to attract some viewers, even if just to compare it to the original. Doesn't matter if you don't like it, you still saw it. And if it boosts their numbers, it'll be a success regardless of critical reception.

No, my question stems from a creative standpoint: what are they going to do in order to make this remake seem like a necessary thing? What was so important that they needed to retell the story over again?

That's my thoughts going into the first episode. My first complaint is the structuring. It would not be a stretch to say that this episode had THREE introductions (arguably five if you count Aang and the water siblings being introduced): one by Kyoshi that gave an overview of the setting, one that set up that the Fire Nation was going to attack the Southern Air Temple during Sozin's Comet, and yet another by Gran Gran where she basically recited the original series opening. It just feels clunky, that we're being told the same information over and over again with exposition dumps.

And yeah, there's quite a few of them. Sure, some exposition is necessary to quickly relay the state of the world. But then we have stuff like Katara explaining that the Earth Kingdom is holding out in Ba Sing Se even though that's not exactly relevant to the current story? Stuff like that seems too much to throw at the viewer in too short a span of time. I'd hate to compare it to the original series where stuff like this was introduced more organically within the context of the story (Ba Sing Se was first mentioned in Iroh's siege of it, right?).

Last thing is that the acting was...hit or miss. Which to be fair I think was more direction and writing than any fault on the actors. Katara was...she was just kind of there for the most part I felt, not having any of the pent up anger of the original. And Gran Gran...yeah, her acting was bad. Really bad. Again, I'm blaming more on the writing since she felt stiff and didn't have any of the loving qualities despite her weariness of the original (didn't get a scene of her saying goodbye to Katara and Sokka for example).

Now, stuff I liked, and there was quite a few that I did like. I liked the actor who played Aang, he was a great choice. Really nailed down the balance between goofball and needing to take things more seriously. Some of the comedy beats were pretty good, like the one Southern Water Tribe member saying "He looks dead" about Aang, Sokka screaming his head off while riding on Appa, or one of the Fire Nation sailors grumbling about Zuko dragging their asses all over the place (first swear in the franchise and Zuko caused it).

There are two things I want to address here. The first change of Aang being more duty-oriented and wanting to clear his head instead of running away. I get the backlash...but I also think it's addressed here. In the original, Aang learned out in the worst way possible with nobody there to ease him into it. Which resulted in him running away. Here, Monk Gyatso broke it to him as gently as he could. It was still a bad situation, but I think a father figure being there to sort of steer him in the right path would've toned down his reaction in the original if that was allowed to happen. Plus it would've given Aang more incentive to take his duties seriously if Gyatso guided and vouched for him. Like he's doing it for his old mentor. I'd be interested to see where this goes.

Last thing: the scene between Aang and Iroh. It's simple, but effective. Aang asks why Iroh why the Fire Nation is waging the war, and the old man just gives off what sounds like Fire Nation propaganda. Aang shuts him down and Iroh...silently nods and agrees with him. It's actually pretty powerful. Aside from him realizing the implications that he just advocated the imperialistic rhetoric to a survivor of said rhetoric, it also sort of humanizes the Fire Nation a bit where an old veteran like Iroh admits that no, sometimes he and his people weren't always in the right. It's just he can't do much about it.

There. I complimented an Iroh scene and admitted he got one of the best scenes in the episode. Happy now?

All in all, it was...a solid start. I think I'm a bit more forgiving in terms of Aang's changed character since...well, I wasn't asking for a one-to-one remake of the original. There were a few things that bothered me, but I'm willing to hold the benefit of the doubt until they start becoming bigger problems down the line.

At the start of my watch, I asked whether or not a remake like this was necessary. What I got from this episode was..."maybe?" It's clear they want to do something different in terms of character, which is fine. It's just how clunky some of the dialogue and structuring choices were that holds it down a little. A shaky start, but there's room for potential.

[themattress]

"Those damn, dirty ape movies!"

If you want a good laugh, there are not one but two reviews for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes that are seriously offended by how humans are treated in this fictional franchise, acting as if the makers of the films are a bunch of misanthropes who hate their own species and are engaging in ape propaganda. I am not joking; they are angry that a franchise about apes that even has the word "apes" in the title doesn't do enough for humans in-universe and out of it.

Let's break some of these remarks down.

Someone had an idea about how to make “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” and it’s a bad one. How about a movie that’s set centuries in the future, where the only characters you see for a full hour are apes — as in apes cavorting, apes swinging from trees, apes fighting each other? Wouldn’t that be interesting? The answer is no. Not interesting at all.

Fuck you, it was interesting. Watching apes is always interesting in these movies; usually moreso than watching humans. Humans have never been the appeal of this film series.

We begin with a trio of young chimpanzees looking to rob eggs from an eagle’s nest. Why they want these eggs is unclear and has no direct bearing on what follows.

Huh? The movie stressed over and over again that it's for each ape to raise their own personal hunting eagle. Handling eagles is literally the main character's father's job!

Proximus is a bad fellow, but then again, who cares? This is where we realize where this is heading: chimps vs. gorillas. We don’t have a dog — or an ape — in this fight, much less a person. Indeed, what takes place many centuries from now between bands of apes really isn’t our business, is it? We might wish them well across the veil of years, but we don’t need to know the details and have no investment in the outcome.  

Who is "we"? Because most viewers do have an ape in this fight, namely Noa and his allies since Proximus being a bad fellow is enough to get people with basic empathy to care.

“Kingdom” is the fourth and worst of a rebooted series that began in 2011 and has expressed, from the beginning, a hatred of human beings and human civilization and a love for apes and the animal kingdom.

No. It only expressed the same truth that the original movie from 1968 expressed: humans are a species prone to self-destruction and if human civilization ever falls it will be a suicide. Apes didn't conquer the world; they inherited it when the humans killed themselves off.

The film follows a young chimp named Noa who escapes a gorilla attack and goes off on his own. Along the way he meets a young woman named Mae — finally, an actual human — but for a long time she doesn’t say anything, because she doesn’t trust Noa enough to let him know that she’s an intelligent, thinking entity. The dilemma of a lone, defenseless young woman, surrounded by apes and working to advance the interests of her people, might have been the basis for a good movie. That might have been a heroine we could get behind. But the screenplay by Josh Friedman is so spineless and limp, so unwilling to take any stand in favor of human life, that it makes Mae into a side character and tells the story through the eyes of Noa. 

It's honestly kind of eerie how much this writer shows the same kind of bigotry that many humans in the films like Mae herself do, where value on human life is placed higher than ape life despite both being "intelligent, thinking entities" simply because it's human life. Mae is absolutely not "a heroine we could get behind" because she has no reason not to trust Noa other than his species and no reason not to work to advance the interests of her people and the apes together other than being a human supremacist who can't accept a different species as equal. Despite actually having credible reason not to, Noa and his ape friends put their trust in Mae, and she betrays that trust in the most heinous way possible, subjecting many apes to the same fate that an ape died saving her from earlier. Sorry; that's not a heroine.

But Noa has no story. He has no drive, and so he can’t drive the movie. He just has generalized niceness and a concern for his fellow chimpanzees, a concern that the movie is incapable of making us share.

"Us"? Speak for yourself. Many people are invested in Noa and his concern for his fellow chimpanzees because they aren't heartless like you and don't like seeing innocent people of any species get hurt. And freeing his tribe and avenging his father's death isn't a drive? Learning to be strong and earn the respect and partnership of his father's eagle while also discovering the teachings of Caesar as the start of his hero's journey isn't a story? WTF!?

When we see computer-generated chimps hugging each other, the sight isn’t heartwarming. It just makes you wonder why you’re still sitting there watching this nonsense.  

Again, speak for yourself. it only makes you wonder that.

Until this franchise stops mistaking its stone-cold misanthropy for political virtue, this franchise is going nowhere.

It's made over $240,000,000 worldwide and counting already. Clearly, you're wrong.

It's that misanthropy — cloaked in reverence of nature's contrasting purity — that's fueled my hatred of the new Planet of the Apes series. It's a pointed but shallow reboot that flips the script of the classic 1968 film by pitching humans as cartoonish villains, and apes as a metaphor for an unrelentingly exploited enslaved people. It also proves these movies have officially outlived their usefulness. 

There has only ever been "cartoonish human villains" in the first of the new series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Every other human villain have been nuanced characters. This movie has apes as "cartoonish villains", so you'd think this guy would be satisfied! Also, there was no "flipping the script" - in the classic 1968 film, the apes weren't the bad guys either (you're thinking of the 2001 Tim Burton movie if you think that); the famous twist ending was all about how humans did themselves in and that the evolved apes simply conquered a dead world.

We follow Noa, a peacefully unambitious chimp eking out an existence with his eagle-raising tribe — until the army of nearby despot Proximus Caesar puts a branding iron down on Noa's lush paradise, and kicks off one of those wonderfully human war-like things Caesar at one time so hated humans for.

If you think Caesar hated humans, you haven't been paying ANY attention.

Humans have mostly lost communication and higher-level thinking, the very attributes that Woody Harrelson's character — the villainous general brought in to eradicate the simian scourge once and for all — fought to defend. There, his evil, self-stated goal was to (in an admittedly insane and vile way) stave off humankind's incipient genocide, which he feared "would destroy humanity for good this time. Not by killing us, but by robbing us of those things that make us human." Remember, he was the bad guy. But he was only made a villain through this franchise's endless and awkward contrivances, which show up with mind-numbing consistency. 

You just said "in an admittedly insane and vile way" - not specifying that this way wasn't just "eradicating the simian scourge" (which would do nothing since the virus has already spread and killing them wouldn't make it go away) but by killing any human who caught the virus, including his own son. His militia was splintered off from the main human army, who were understandably against him. Yes, he was the fucking bad guy, to all species.

Throughout the series: there are the evil humans, seemingly dipped in vats of superheated cruelty juice, bent on destroying the peaceful apes despite having little motivation and an inability to do the one thing we're theoretically good at: kill. 

Again, just the human villains in Rise and the Colonel in War. And the Colonel had a clear backstory and motivations behind his cruelty that he spoke of at length.

There is its lost hero, Caesar, bent into log-line knots to try and literally eradicate humanity, while staying completely morally blameless.

Fuck off. Caesar was never trying to eradicate humanity. In the first movie, all he wanted was a peaceful life for he and his fellow apes. In the second, he constantly tried to prevent war between apes and humans. In the third, a big point is made at the start on how merciful he is despite being in a war he never started or wanted, a war that is fought to defend his people and not to massacre the other side. The other side dies out from a virus and literal acts of nature such as an avalanche, not from Caesar and his apes killing them.

And in every movie is an ineffectual but pure human tagging along, doe-eyed, to prove there's some good in us, after all — if only we behaved more like those golly-gee animals close to the natural world. 

"In every movie"? You only seem to be describing Nova in War here.

And she wasn't ineffectual.

Because aside from that famous final line, the 1968 original (based on the book by author and resistance fighter Pierre Boulle) concerned itself more with the impermanence of humankind.

Lol; "aside from that famous final line", which made clear that humankind's impermanence is its own damn fault. It recontextualizes everything about the film to show that humans were the real monsters, not apes. The modern series' stance isn't anything new, you idiot.

Altogether, it emphasizes the unsettling sensation of having an assumed pre-eminence — either as human, or member of a majority — reversed.

I'm getting major white anxiety "Replacement Theory" vibes right now....

Telling the story of humanity's downfall and ape's rise from the ape's perspective narratively demands us to empathize with the ape. And the thesis is that there is something uniquely and innately dangerous about humankind.

Because comparing subjugated people to animals has its own controversial history. But using them as the noble savage — a long-ingrained trope that othered people of colour to suggest they had both lower intelligence and more of a connection with nature by an assumed distance from civilized behaviour — only complicates it for the worse.

You're the only one making the comparison here, pal. Says something about you.

Kingdom's use of that weird, symbolized grouping is watered down due to the mostly ape-focused plot, but brings it right back in the finale with the unprompted, unearned and frankly unneeded line: "Humans will never give up. Not until you claim all things for yourselves."

"Unprompted, unearned, unneeded"? Did you miss the part where Mae literally tried to kill the apes who trusted her because she didn't want to risk any apes gaining access to human technology which she claimed rightfully belonged to humans just like the planet does?

We don't need hours of synthetic, impossible to empathize with faces to learn we shouldn't enslave or eradicate one another.

There it is again, throwing the amazing motion capture and CGI work and the ape actors' performances under the bus by saying it's "impossible to emphasize" with anything that isn't human even if it thinks and feels just as much as any human can. It's honestly despicable.

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Level 1: Let's-a-go easy with some illuminated Mario!

What I want to explore at least partly over the course of Nintendo-vember is the fact, that Dobson was biased with a capital b when it came to videogames and Nintendo. To be more specific, Dobson not only hated people who played anything but Nintendo, acting like PS3 users are the scum of the earth (which we can see examples of a lot near the end of the month), but he was also very opinionated what counts as “the true and honest” depictions of his favorite Nintendo characters.

Again, something more explored down the line soon, but to give at least one example for how even the slightest “deviation” from Dobson’s own interpretation can result in him getting pissed, only for things to backfire on him in some sense (partly a cosmic one) let me turn back time a bit to the November of 2017.

Almost 6 years ago, it was announced that Illumination, the studio behind the Despicable Me movies and some really shitty Dr. Seuss based works, would head the animation work on Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros movie. And people were pissed.

Many of them believing that the studio would ruin their favorite videogame character and produce something that was of great disservice to him. And that was something people claimed, before even the voice cast was announced and everyone had a mental breakdown over Chris Pratt voicing Mario.

For your sanity though, don't click on the vidoe of that fat slob from Boston who is more of a disservice to animation than Live Action Disney is currently

Now to be fair, I am myself aware of the quality of Illumination up until the Mario movie came out. The Despicable Me and Minions movies, plus Secret Life of Pets, having been the most successful endeavors of the company, while also creating some rather annoying, though in my opinion funny cartoon slapstick characters. But honestly, I never thought that Illumination doing the Mario movie, could possibly be the worst thing to ever happen. At the very least, even if the company had fucked up royally with Dr. Seuss related content, they actually have some understanding of cartoon slapstick in their work and can in my opinion create some very colorful movies. And let us be real here, Super Mario has never been the most “adult” or deep franchise on the planet. So as long as Nintendo would keep them on the leash (which they did in the end) I doubted the movie would be utter shit. I at least did not expect it to be the Teen Titans Go of Nintendo, dumb like Boss Baby or unfocused and insulting like Wonder Park.

And lo and behold, the movie came out and minor things aside (like using Take on me as a pop song in the background at one moment) it captured the essence of Mario, was very colorful and a smash hit. To the point it was up until Barbie came along still the most successful movie of 2023 and is the third highest crossing animated movie of all time. With the place actually being the second, if the Lion King remake from 2019 wouldn’t be technically considered animated. Heck, you could actually call it the most succesful animated movie of all time currently, if you also decide to look at the list in such a way, that "sequels"/continuations ofalready established IPs don't count.

What I am trying to say is, in hindsight, many people should have just simply tried to be calm and see where things were heading.Give Illumination the benefit of the doubt. Particularly if they decided to first think about what was likely going to happen and analyze the pro and cons of Illumination doing the movie.

But fuck using your brain when your name is Andrew Dobson.

Dobson took genuine offense to the idea of Illumination doing the movie and as such made a “mock art” of what Mario would likely look in their art style.

There was just a tinsy winsy problem with it. The artwork in itself….

Turned out to be better looking, than most things Dobson did at the time.

No, seriously. Considering the lack of a decent art output at the time aside of shitting on nerds via SYAC strips, this, for what is obviously meant to take the piss out on Illumination’s art style reserved for the Minions, actually looks rather decent. Sure, Mario looks like a tic tac, but for a “quick” sketch, it looks nice. Mario looks -unlike Dobbear in 95% of the strips- actually happy by the way he smiles as well as very cartoonish. And considering that the blood and soul of Mario is kinda in the cartoonish nature of the game series -as evident by how ridiculously Mario Wonder is currently- Dobson in my opinion captured here the soul of Mario better than he did in other pics he did way back in the earlier 2000s.

Though to be fair, these pics look decent enough and at least Dobson was experimenting with different styles back then. Perhaps his cartoonish style would have worked best with Nintendo, if he refined it just right.

Which you know, kinda defeats the “purpose” of the picture if you ask me. I mean, it is obvious Dobson just did it to vent and piss on the fact that a company he considered “inferior” to other animation studios, would bring his favorite videogame character on the big screen for the first time since that Bob Hoskins movie. But if he wanted to mock the idea, he failed. Simply because in his sketch he doesn’t really “highlight” why Illumination being behind Mario would be bad. Not helped by the fact Dobson lacked giving more context why in his opinion that was a bad idea. And the few posts he did, painted him just as hating Charles Martinet and believing Charles would be the main voice of the characters in the movie

An as stated earlier, in hindsight, any “criticism” or fear Dobson might have had, proved in my opinion invalid in the end. The movie was not only a success, but it also paid tribute to his “precious” Mario is from Brooklyn background.

Frankly, the only thing I can see in the pic I would criticize is that Dobson a) gave Mario four fingers despite the fact he should know by now he has five (though that may be a cartoony jab at the Minions. Though even that jab is half assed, cause if he wanted to emulate their design, he should have given Mario three instead of four digits) and b) Mario being likely completely bald under that cap. The later just doesn’t fit entirely. Which, considering the Minions are mostly bald, may have been the intention by Dobson, to create an uncanny effect. Unfortunately, the rest of the artwork balances it out mostly, so on average the sketch ends up being visually more pleasing than anything.

Honestly though, the picture’s existence does highlight one thing more than anything: That Dobson would rather create something out of spite and hatred, rather than a genuine sense of enjoyment. That and if Ilumination being announced as a company to animate the movie, I wonder how he reacted in light of the casting or other Mario related news. Like can you imagine how livid he must have been when Mario+Rabbids by Ubisoft was announced and became popular?

[serendertothesquad]

I can finally go off about the Odd Squad Season 3 pitch bible (AKA happy 9th anniversary to this big lil' franchise)

I had originally wanted to do a little analysis video on this thing, and maybe I will someday, but for now here's a text version of that video.

I have not found the overall series bible -- and oh you better believe me when I say I've tried, and oh you better believe me when I say I have found shit -- but if I die before it's unearthed, then it will be, perhaps, the greatest failure in my pseudo-career as Odd Squad fandom leader. We've had cast members reveal pink drafts of scripts, we've found deleted scenes in some episodes...I just wanna see the big old pitch bible for the entire show. (Why didn't Sinking Ship Entertainment give me that when they sent me a fan package in exchange for me not promoting watching the show via VPNs? The fan package was nice but if I got a copy of a nice thick happy show bible I think it'd cure my depression!)

"But Seren, you managed to get PBS's Metadata Bank wiped from public view of everyone on the Internet who isn't a PBS employee, won't the same thing happen aga-" Shhh. Shhhhhhh. The answer is no. Absolutely not. Not on your life. Worst-case scenario is that a Season 4 bible is decided to be kept locked in a vault that's tighter than anything Disney could ever craft.

Can we move on now? Right, cool. Then let's go.

Y'know, it's sad that they continue to uphold that Season 1 and Season 2 were set in Nondescript Town, Nondescript State despite any and all evidence pointing to both being set in Toronto. I don't care if it makes it seem more local to kids. Some kids don't really have a giant-ass replica of their town's name sitting in their town's main square.

"But it's in the backgro-" Shhhhh. We're talking about the demographic that weaponizes brutal honesty better than John Wick weaponizes his own two fists. Shhhhhh. I'm willing to bet some kid has noticed that sign.

Tim McKeon and Adam Peltzman had the balls to put in a merch pitch that would have made Hasbro execs slam their hands on the table and then immediately go in for the deal-closing handshake.

No but seriously, they could have made bank on selling miniature vans. Osmerelda had a mini-van toy of her own in "Monumental Oddness", even! Odd Squad's already just slightly toyetic, one more injection won't hu- wait, the chance has passed now. Well, fuck. Never mind.

But ohhhh no, that's not even the most egregious part. The most egregious part is the fact that they called Creature Room employees...ah..."creature wranglers". Quite obviously, we know that's not all they do...I mean look at Ocean, as one example.

...Okay that's not so egregious.

Also, I, uh...well...they're not so much "roles" so much as they are "departments". You don't really go into a job interview at the local Target saying you'd like to apply for the role of part-time cashier like it's a school play and you really wanna strut your stuff. Odd Squad is a workplace. It has always been a workplace. Let's stick to the roots.

And while you guys do that, let's move on to the characters! This is one of the things I most want to see from an Odd Squad show bible, because if PBS can hike up their belts and declare Oprah to be physically seven years old right on the Wild Wild Internet, for all we know Olive could have been named Olivia somewhere in pre-production and they wanted to make her a hell of a lot more fucked-up than she turned out to be.

You know what's also sad? The fact that no one has the balls to admit that Odd Squad has precincts and it's not just smaller offices also named Odd Squad under a Big Office that's probably named, oh no you better not guess it, Odd Squad.

Let's be honest here, Opal is by far and away the most "we erased only the small smudges but she's otherwise polished" character in here. Everyone else has characterization that differs wildly from the final products. Opal...not so much. Pretty much everything said about her here is right on the money.

Except for, uh...that third paragraph. Let me word-vomit about that.

It does not matter how hard the franchise will try and make you believe Opal is not the leader. The fact of the matter is, she is the leader, de facto, and as such, she takes charge in all kinds of situations. However, that doesn't necessarily mean she's not keen on passing the buck to her teammates, as she's done it before (see, blugh, "Odd Squad in the Shadows") and she's more than willing to do it if she has to. This is a trait I honestly would have loved to have seen in her -- an Opal who decides to go-off-queen on her teammates by saying that she's the boss and what she says goes would have been more entertaining to watch than the final product we got. Opal's an enjoyable character, but she could have used a lot more polishing to make her as perfect of a character as her predecessors. Yes, even with the story arc.

Such a good example of this unused trait in action would be with a plotline similar to "O For a Day" -- Opal is forced to fill in for an Odd Squad Director after they get ill or sick in some way, and as a result, she slowly begins to get drunk on her own power until it becomes full-blown alcoholism and it gets to be at its utter detrimental peak for the precinct and the agents that work there. Maybe she micromanages like a boss bitch so that it's micro-micromanaging. Maybe she has her sanity go weeeeeaaaaaaaow down the drain. Maybe she becomes what CEOs of corporations aspire to become. Whatever the outcome, it could have served as wonderful character development for her and showed that being a leader is no easy task and choosing one is not a "pick a name outta a hat" method.

Whereas Opal is a sort of weak expy of past characters (Olive/Otto) -- and even that could be a stretch -- Omar is explicitly referred to here as an expy of Olympia and Otto, which...well yeah, actually that's pretty accurate.

You know who he's also an expy of? Pinkie Pi- nah that joke got old fast in 2016, I'm not revivin' it again.

Omar is one agent out of the group whose personality remains largely the same, but also has something just a teeny-tiny bit...off. In this case, the thing that's off here is the fact that he's gullible. So let me word-vomit about this too, and throw some Pepto-Bismol into my Walmart shopping cart while I'm at it.

I'm going to be real with you guys, even though some of you might already be aware of this: Otto is not a gullible motherfucker. He's really not. If some random stranger on the street waddled on up to me and asked me what the first word I'd use to describe Otto would be, "gullible" would not be the first word that springs to mind. Has he had gullible moments? Oh abso-fuckin'-lutely without a doubt. He's a dum-dum blorbo sometimes and if I gotta be frank with Frank then I like him like that. But is he easily gullible? Yeah no.

Maybe Otto being gullible all the time was something that was planned for when he was nothing but an idea on paper. I've seen enough criticisms about his character development to where I could probably hang that guess out on a limb and pray to the oracle in "Nature of the Sandbeast" that I'm lucky.

But I digress. Omar's gullibility being exploited to hell and back by his teammates would have been amazing to see, but alas, it never really came to pass in Season 3. Would have made for great conflict with The Shadow when she didn't have an obsessive schtick for Opal and didn't decide to wake up and choose the "by proxy" option for her crimes.

Now where in the McFuck can I begin here? Can I start by going inside and telling the cook I'd like a McCrispy Lack of Facts with a side of large What the Fuck and a large WHOA AN ACTUAL ORIGINAL CHARACTER with no ice? Cool, thanks, card got approved and I'd like my receipt please.

To say Orla is a writers' pet is something that you could have some bobo respond to with "citation needed" and get citation...but not really enough citation. For a character that is no expy of any previous one in the franchise and is something birthed from the God of Originality in the Television Industry...well yeah, you could say that justifies it. But Orla is really a fantastic character through and through and she deserves all the love she can get. I mean it's not every day you get a character willing to make people spill their coffees by punching and kicking the ever-loving shit out of an octopus (for simplicity's sake, let's assume it's an octopus, okay? okay) on a network where physical violence can become weirdly memetic at best (I'm side-eyeing you, Arthur) and controversial at worst (I, uh...I can't name any controversies about that. I am sorry).

I'm not about to delve into the historical parts of that paragraph, largely because history is my worst subject. I can say for sure, however, that I see why they changed what she called cars. If we wanna get technical -- and I mean insufferably so -- then cars would technically be the carriage and the horse. The horse serves as the engine, and then you have the carriage as the main body of the vehicle. "Metal chariots" is a more broad term that is far more accurate, because when I, for one, think of a chariot, I think of the carriage and the horse.

Also, I'm pretty sure sandwiches were around back in her time...lemme see here...

Mmmmmhm. As I thought. And let me check the timeline of the show here...

...Oh! Well wouldja look at that! Not exactly 400 years, but close!

Yeah, something tells me a lot of writers on the crew might have gotten an A in comedy but got an F in history. That or they simply went "bitch, we don't give a fuck!"

Tim and Adam slipped in an absolutely beautiful burn that missed the show as much as that one guy who shows up to meetings several hours after conclusions.

Like I said before, and I will repeat: Orla is not an expy of any one character. She is an original character made from scratch like your mother's baked bread. I find it hard to believe that she's a copy of Otis in any aspect outside of "hey, both of our seasons have us as the feature of story arcs". I can kinda sorta see the "surprising skills" aspect, but not by much outside of the season premiere. (Which, to be fair, had her scaling a wall with the same strings the Zephyr Heights royalty used to pull themselves up, but did not have her saying anywhere that she tamed a jaguar. Nowhere does it say she tamed a jaguar. Wrestled alligators, but the fun stops with big cats that can eat your face off.)

Perhaps I can blame that on poor execution within Season 3 itself. After all, it tried to gamble with character development and it failed. And that's just one flaw out of many.

Shifting subjects, though, the most hilarious thing I find about this paragraph is her ability to come up with ideas that are out-of-the-box. Which, for those that have not watched the horror that was the second half of the season and miraculously lived, is Osmerelda's schtick. She is explicitly labeled as the out-of-the-box member of the group. They did a theft-not-theft of something from the pitch bible and slapped it onto Osmerelda and ohhhhhh maybe that's part of the reason why she's terrible as a character.

Wow. Eureka moment! How about that?!

Before I get started on tearin' apart Oswald like a huge-ass Thanksgiving turkey from the supermarket, I'd like to address what has to be one of my biggest pet peeves of the season.

"Librarian/museum worker" is not a thing. Stop trying to make "librarian/museum worker" a thing, Gretchen. It will never be a thing.

If you want to call Oswald by the correct terminology, then allow the Seren to educate you.

He is an Odd Squad Security agent first and foremost. He's got the uniform, he's got the position, he's got the duties, he's got the competence to make Owen eat dirt and live, it's all right there.

Second and backmost...he's a museum curator. A "Curator" is what you call people who work in museums. I know this because I punched it into Google because I'm a petty bitch who eats reruns of A&E shows for every meal.

For what it's worth, I will also accept "museum archivist" and "archives technician". That too.

Okay, have we got that settled? Cool beans. Let's move on.

Oswald as a character is, for all intents and purposes in existence, what happens when you take Oscar, suck every last inch of science out of him, and then replace it with an obscene level of bookbookbookbookBOOKBOOKBOOKBOOK. He's still got the same "sacrifice your lives to the devil that births oddness, here I shall stay in my safe zone" mentality that Oscar does, and he's the smart guy of the team, but that's about it as far as comparisons go. I never really pinned Oscar as a nerdy ol' bookworm anyway, though it would have been amazing and hilarious to see.

That being said, Oswald applying the power of the writing gods' hands to real life and failing tremendously would have been a great trait for him. You know the lil' man would read a book on overcoming social anxiety and pull off a Shocked Pikachu Face when it doesn't work. And then he'd read on why it didn't work, try again with the opposite, and pull off another Shocked Pikachu Face when that fails.

Ah, now, see? These are other traits I would have loved to see in Oswald.

Him being an insufferable jerk who goes "well eckshuelleh" every 5 minutes -- yes, including with exposition, that market of which Oprah had cornered for 8 years -- would have probably made Season 3 more enjoyable, at least for me.

You know what would be a good thing to add to that batter, though? Him being meta.

In Season 3, especially in the second "kids are more forgetful than a backwards elephant" half, Oswald makes a few callbacks to earlier seasons. Which is nice and all, but imagine if he pried through particular cases and nabbed specific events and relayed them to people like it's his job and livelihood. If they had enough balls to make Xavier and Xena utter jerkasses, they could have grown two more to make Oswald an utter jerk, but one with redeemable qualities. As an example of one: he's a jerk who goes "well eckshuelleh" on people, but he does it because he loves the show. He loves Odd Squad lore and history. He's a fanatic.

I mean...well...he loves it already. He's enough of a fanatic and that shit has been proven. But they don't really lean into it all that much. It might as well be more informed than anything else.

But jerking the subject away from that...what if God gave you a character with all the autism traits, and you decided to come out and say "nah, he's not autistic, he's a quirky lil' man"?

You're telling me you can't make the boy canonically autistic in the same way that, ohhhh, I dunno, AJ Gadgets is canonically autistic? Or that one Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood character whose name I forget? You're on a network that embraces diversity the same way wine moms embrace the triple-L of "Live, Laugh, Love" and you had an opportunity...and Tim and Adam both blew it. Out of the water. Nuclear explosion. Does autism exist in the world of Odd Squad? Is there air?! You don't know!

Okay, that's a dumb question. I was reminded that muscular dystrophy exists, along with whatever disability Xena has.

Instead, what they did with Oswald was make him so friendly and sociable with people you wouldn't believe he's been a hermit in the belly of the Big Apple for [REDACTED] years. Which is a waste, because I'd have liked for him to be canonically autistic. They spend so much time on gender and making sure girls and women triumph over men and boys that they forget about disability, y'know?

Ah well. There's always Season 4. But let's be honest, I'm fully prepared for them to laugh and say "there are no autistic people in Manchester, what a silly notion!"

Here's another pet peeve of mine when it comes to this show, and those who have followed me and my biz for a long time probably know this already.

I don't like the formality error on proud display here.

Let's set the record straight. You don't call your boss at work Manager, not unless they're one of those whoo-hoos who knows they're paying you minimum wage for busting your ass and is reveling in it. No one does. No one calls them that.

So exactly why call Oprah by Ms. O? Or even the Big O?

Yes, it's an easy identifier for popularity purposes. Yes, it's her title that everyone calls her by except for a few close pals.

But that's just it -- it's a title. It's not her actual name. It's not like her mom delivered her cesarean-style and decided to name her Ms. O to compete with Elon Musk and whatever gibberish he's named his kid this time. It's not like Oprah decided to get a legal name change to go with her meal of a free promotion. Oprah is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, her actual name, and to insinuate it's not puts you in a silly delusion with a silly mind that might not be so silly.

But, y'know...I've screamed this at people for nearly 9 years now and no one's listened. I was friends with Joshua Kilimnik and had the crew watch my stuff and still no one's listened.

...Maybe I'm the one who's deluded...

...Um.

...

Yeah okay, maybe I might have a point if they're not even bothering with title capitalization anymore.

Not much to spice up here, but if you're wondering where in the blue hell Onika came from: she's from Season 2 of OddTube. Is not an Odd Squad explorer or an oddness finder, but rather, she built an entire 2015 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, threw some Odd Squad stuff on it, and called it half of a day, all with her own two hands.

Okay, it's hilarious that they're using teamwork and perseverance as an example of "broader themes". Yes, they are broader themes, but you also have:

Bullying

Trauma

Stop being like your family. You are not your family. You are you.

Friendship (is magic!)

Why going to work sucks ass on a daily basis

I could keep going, but I think I've made my point well with just these 5.

Nice justification for the set piece that is Oprah's office, though. That's clever. But...and it's a but bigger than any but Sir Mix-a-Lot has ever sung about in his career...this just highlights one of the problems with kids live-action shows. Had the show been animated in full, there would be no "I'll take seven slices of pizza and you can stuff your faces with the rest" to be found. Instead I must suffer in agony as I get whined at that "Odd Squad is not a cartoon".

One of the Odd Squad God's biggest mysteries is why, exactly, they axed Omar, yoted him into a single episode and a shitty-ass clickbait thumbnail, and decided to replace him with Orla.

...

No, no...actually I might know why. It may or may not have anything to do with the discussion of whether Orla is a "writers' pet" or not. No one @ me, I have theories.

But let me lay down Chris's crispy McNugget of truth for you all: while Orla does have appeal in her not understanding how technology works to save her life, Omar has somewhat equal appeal in him being a lover of traveling and buying souvenirs. Hell, if they wanted to grow balls that would make AC/DC weep, they could have cohosted the series. But alas, it was simply not meant to be.

Given how PBS Kids is planning to go the short-form route as a means of cutting costs while still aiming for quality, I'm kind of sad this never came to fruition. Imagine numerous seasons of OddTube, one for each country. All they would need to do was account for every Canadian in each country because if not then the bad guys have won.

...I mean it could come to fruition. Maybe. It might not. Maybe. Hopefully. It could be with Orli or something I dunno. She could shoot the shit or however British people say the phrase!

When I tell you folks this aged like milk, lemme tell you it aged like fucking milk. Like you could hear it churning at the grocery store while the manager does fuck-all about it.

Anyone who has absorbed enough of this franchise knows that episodes have absolutely been no stranger to rehashing mathematical concepts. And that's fine by me, because the episodes themselves aren't derivative outside of that regard. Each Season 1 and Season 2 episode is hand-crafted so it doesn't feel like a painfully obvious Xerox copy of a previous episode. Key word being "painfully obvious", keyer word being "painfully", because there are episode copies out there (see "The Trouble with Centigurps" and its mid little brother "Worst First Day Ever") that are obvious but don't actively make you say "I'm going to buy some Clorox and pour it into every facial orifice known to scientists who study human life".

Season 3 was absolutely no exception. However, instead of creating new plots and just sticking with that, they created new plots and also rehashed old ones in addition to reusing math (and science) concepts. Like plopping new pasta sauce on old shittily-cooked spaghett'. Is shit, tastes like shit.

One of the most glaring examples is with the infamous clip show episode, "Welcome to Odd Squad". Anyone can clearly see it's a rehash of "Odd Squad Needs You" from Season 2, just with new elements (a B-plot, Orpita instead of Oprah...No-Name who's essentially relatability personified). And, I mean, y'know...it's a clip show, which, in most cases, spells bad news for a series and/or a franchise. That too.

All in all, these comments are hilarious to me. Even if they are a stark reminder that in a show where comedy comes first and education comes second...there's still education.

If your first thought upon reading this wasn't "this seems more of a better fit for Wild Kratts or Cyberchase than Odd Squad" THEN WHAT THE MCFFFFFFFFFUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU GET BACK IN THE HOUSE. YOUR LITERACY IS O F F JIM YA GOTTA READ IT AGAIN.

Okay, but I digress. In a world where the rules of scientific concepts like biology and anatomy go completely out the fucking window and land right onto your uncle's Corvette, this is a very stupid lesson and I'm honestly glad they didn't go through with it. We don't need lessons on the ecosystem in a world that explicitly defies the rules of ecosystems as we know them in real life.

I just did an audible groan at that stupid-ass pun. "Mathience"? Really? Suck a peanut. Like 90% of the "odd" puns are better than that trash. Be the fuck for real.

This is a nice plot, really, but I dunno...something about it just doesn't sit right with me. Let's be realer than real here, one of the climates would have had to be the Arctic. Another one might have been in the Amazon somewhere, or another place that's humid. And the third one...yeah I dunno about that one. But this plot isn't sitting right with me. Like a bruised coccyx.

...Okay, my brain got fried there for a moment. Let's move on.

I guess it's time I air out my ire with this episode -- which is a good episode, but let me just take the time to talk about one of the things that bothers me about it.

The 44-Leaf Clover is supposed to grant whoever finds it magical powers. So where in the holy God of McFUCK are the magical powers of the Mobile Unit?

Let's be realer than realer than real here: the Mobile Unit having magical powers would have really spiced up Season 3. If not the entire Unit, then at the very least Opal and Omar, who initially went on the adventure. But that part of the Clover's lore is just dropped clear straight away like my dinner from last night. We have four normal humans with no powers who pissed off that one guy who called them politically correct. Which honestly sucks and is yet another thing we can throw into the "Odd Squad Missed Opportunities" bucket. Wow is that bucket getting full. Shall we dump it in preparation for Season 4?

...Yeh but oddness struck like a long-ass time ago. You don't get two of the same snowflakes and not find it odd. Confetti Betty's a step up, sure, but oddness is oddness. Let's try and keep continuity, hmm?

---------------------------------------

So that's it. The Odd Squad Season 3 pitch bible, properly dissected and torn through and ripped to utter shreds like a dog to a slipper. Sorry not sorry. Had to be done.

Still holding out hope for an entire series pitch bible to unearth somewhere in life. Preferably sometime before my death. Preferably on the 'Net. Preferably stored on my computer somewhere. I can and will tear into that too if it ever pops up.

But for now...we wait for Season 4 news. Since I don't want to do anything big this year for the franchise's 9th anniversary because ADD and depression and ADD, you all can have this instead. You're welcome. This has rotted in my drafts for at least two months. Take it.

[tibby]

did you watch the final after film. not that any of them have normal vibes per se but this one had such bizarre vibes

oh i did and i gotta say. easily the worst one of the franchise. like all the other after movies are trashy in an entertaining way, giving us gems like "elizabeth bennet needs to chill" and ""FUCKEN TREVOR!!!!" and doing things like recasting everyone except the leads between two films leading to one of the most confusing movie viewing experiences of my life (and i've seen escape from tomorrow). and truly no other franchise is going to feature harry styles setting his mom's house on fire only for it to never come up again. after, after 2: why is sufjan stevens playing, after 3 tokyo drift and 4FTER are incredible in the worst way.

but after 5??? trash without any of the fun. nobody asked for a hardin redemption arc especially since the guy ALWAYS sucked. like i know this is on me for taking the movie seriously but god that was some serious misogynistic bullshit. and also probably the worst wig josephine langford has had to wear in these movies. whatever. at least we got a likeable new character (the guy who beats the shit out of hardin on the beach).

i'm excited to see if they do the after movies about their kids, who i can only imagine are named like, tardin and hessa.

[crusherthedoctor]

8, 9, 10, 11, 12!

12 has already been answered, so that leaves the other four. :]

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

Where would I even begin?

Mr. Principles being considered a faithful representation of Sonic's character?

Eggdad being praised because Eggman before that point was apparently one-dimensional?

Sonic and Shadow not crying waterfalls = Sonic and Shadow have no emotion?

The Freedom Fighters being touted as more useful or important than the game cast?

Criticising the Pontaff era for supposedly being too meta, while Frontiers gets a pass when it actually is overly meta?

The belief that wanting the characters to be reasonably accurate to (or at least be respectful to) their game selves is too demanding and toxic?

Frequently getting the details wrong in the games they claim to be a fan of?

Ian Flynn/Evan Stanley said it, therefore it must be true?

I could do this all day...

9. worst part of canon

Frontiers.

What a twist, right?

Yes, other games are obviously worse on an objective scale, like '06. This is not an anti-Pontaff extremist situation where I seriously try to claim that ___ as a game functions less than '06. But with all the other games I'm not so keen on, I can think of a redeeming quality. SA2 introduced Rouge, had some cool Eggman moments when isolated, and some nice aesthetics like the Pyramid Base and some A.R.K. levels. Unleashed had an iconic intro cutscene and gave us Eggmanland and the Egg Dragoon. The Storybooks portrayed Sonic himself well, with Secret Rings also having one of the few good non-Eggman villains. '06... has a lot of entertainment factor with how bad it is. Even the Boom games are at least easy to ignore, since they're part of the now-defunct Boom sub-franchise.

Frontiers is the only game I can think of where I struggle to come up with a single thing I like about it. Is my bitterness amplified by how dirty they did Eggman? Yeah, I'll hold my hands up and admit that, but by no means is that my only axe to grind. The way the rest of the cast were used, Super Sonic being overused to the point of losing all meaning and creating an uphill struggle for future games because Muh Dragon Ball Power Levels, the story itself and what it did to the Sonic lore, being completely sick and tired of Flynn's growing influence in the entire franchise, the game itself being extremely dull and having the overly desaturated environments and mostly indistinguishable enemy designs to go along with it... This is Sonic's return to glory? A game that desperately wants to not be a Sonic game marks the Year of Sonic? Give me a break.

It doesn't help that after all this time, I still rarely see anyone actually explain what makes the game or story good, instead preferring to belittle those who don't see what the big deal is, or using its popularity as an indication of quality. Kind of like the IDW standom. Funny, that.

10. worst part of fanon

...Also Frontiers.

Thanks for nothing, Sage.

Beyond that, there's the equally obvious ramifications of what IDW has done to the fandom. Namely, how Sonic, Shadow, Eggman, and other characters have been looked at with a warped lens by fans thanks to IDW's portrayal of them, and their efforts to justify their issues and/or pin the blame on SEGA.

Even IDW's own characters aren't safe from this; Flynn and Stanley's tug-of-war with Starline left lasting consequences, as did reducing Tangle and Whisper to be little more than obligatory lesbian rep (or a nightmare face dispenser in the case of Whisper). And tell me this, dear reader: with all the fanart of her that exists, when's the last time, or even the first time, you saw Surge be used in a fanfic, with an actual story? As her actual self (for better or worse)?

11. number of fandom-related words you've filtered

None, actually. But only because it does fuck all regardless, lol.

[evieveevee]

Forza Motorsport (PC) Review

Scratched Paint

Forza Motorsport is the game I have been looking forward to all year, particularly since I sold my PS5 to go all-in on PC. Positioned as a new starting point for Forza Motorsport as a franchise, it promises a next-gen visual experience, alongside more robust physics and multiplayer. But, does it deliver?

A Note from the Author

Hi! It’s really special to be able to review something like this, and to be one of only a few creatives based in Australia/New Zealand, not to mention one of even fewer transgender creatives, given the opportunity to do this. It’s an immense honor that I take very seriously, and I’m proud to be bringing this out for you today. If you’re interested in publishing this review on your website, please contact me directly. Enough talk though! Let’s go racing!

Lights Out and Away We Go

Let’s start with the out-of-box experience with Forza Motorsport, the first stuff that everyone’s gonna see. There’s a brief accessibility setup, including the usual settings like Subtitles, and new settings like the Blind Driving Assist and support for low vision features too. For customization minded dorks like yours truly, there’s a handy shortcut to the settings menus so you can dive deeper into things like the graphics settings on PC with a “worst case” benchmark involving a full field of 24 cars on a rainy circuit with complex lighting. Also in the settings, you’ll find comprehensive controls over the assists, including a few quick presets to base your own off. I turn off the racing line and most assists, leaving only ABS on while I shake some of the rust off. Folks who want to make sure they’re getting exactly the experience they want out of this will walk away satisfied.

However, it’s after the configuration that the trouble starts. The game loads into a practice session on Maple Valley — a returning Forza original track — in one of Forza Motorsport’s cover cars: the 2024 Corvette E-Ray. I hit the accelerator, hear the awesome engines roar to life, but then I noticed: my wheel configuration was not at all right.

In the review build I had access to, my wheel (the Logitech G29) was not properly detected, did not show appropriate inputs in the UI, and it was wildly misconfigured, requiring 10–15 minutes of messing around with the wheel settings before I hit something that approached proper handling and the sort of response I expect. Forza Motorsport also does not have support for shift indicator LEDs, continuing this trend from previous entries and the Horizon series, something which is frustrating and I would appreciate being fixed in a future update.

Check Engine Light

About now is when I began to take note of the visuals of the game. With the promise of next generation visuals in Forza Motorsport, and the additional power that the Xbox Series X is able to leverage, I was hoping that the visuals would feel like they’d taken that generational leap. In some regards, namely those related to gameplay like dynamic time of day and weather systems, the leap is absolutely there. Forza Motorsport has incredible lighting and the dynamics are incredibly solid.

However, on PC, it’s clear there are some problems.

Let’s start with one of the most obvious generational visual leaps: raytracing. If we want to showcase the generational leap in graphics, an RT implementation is the way to do it. However, it’s clear that the state of RT reflections on — at the very least — AMD RDNA3 cards like the 7900 XT is extremely poor. The RT is being done at an extremely low resolution, providing a blocky and terrible facsimile of the environment surrounding your vehicle. This issue visible on racing suits with reflective materials or on visors. RTAO seems mostly fine, but this issue is very strange, and I hope that Turn 10 and/or AMD are able to fix this issue soon and provide proper RT reflections.

It gets worse before it gets better sadly.

Building It Up

While the PC version’s apparent problems are abundant and annoying, the core of the game is extremely solid, and it’s very evident in the Career mode that Turn 10 has created: the Builder’s Cup.

The idea is relatively simple. You’ll pick from one of three cars, and you’ll carry that car through the entire series. A series is about 5 or 6 races, during which you’ll improve the car you choose, pushing it faster and faster as the rest of the field does the same to theirs. There are larger rewards up for grabs for completing a series, but each race offers plenty in the way of credits you can invest into other new cars. You’ll do at least three laps of practice before each race, with a goal time that will indicate you’re competitive against the field. You must complete practice and the race in the same session. If you exit the event after completing practice, progress is not saved and you will need to run the practice session again.

Here’s where it gets complicated. If you’re not familiar with racing games, or even if you are, I want to stress something right now: the words I am about to say are not a joke, a prank, or played as something silly in the game. They are deadly serious.

In order to build up your car, you need to level it up. You level up your car by driving well through the various sections of each track and gaining Car XP (CXP) for sections that are quick and hew close to the racing line, with bonuses for passing certain thresholds. Each section is rated on a scale from 1.0 to 10.0. I believe — but may be wrong — you also get CXP for completing events. Get enough CXP, you get a level, and each level gets you a certain number of Car Points (CP), which can be used between events to apply upgrades to that car. Your CP and CXP are only available on that specific car, meaning that even if you have multiple copies of one car, each one has its own balance of CP and CXP. Each available upgrade costs a certain amount of CP, but adding an upgrade is not a permanent choice. Instead, it’s a flexible balance that you can move around into various upgrades according to your needs. Additionally, upgrades are restricted to specific Car Levels, so you need to level up your car a specific amount to, say, unlock the ability to change your aero parts.

Look, I think this one’s gonna be controversial. In a way, this system does guide you through what’s worth upgrading and all, a great feature for people who are learning their way around the tunes. For expert players who already know what they need out of a tune or are able to pick out the weak points on a car, it’s going to mean grinding out Car XP so you can get the upgrades you need, all the while dealing with the poor tune. It means that I’m definitely turned off of cars that I can’t immediately jive with, even if I recognize their potential. I think the primary audience that cares about Forza Motorsport will be frustrated by this system, but folks trying this out through Game Pass and wanting a more casual experience out of things are likely to be happy with it.

Zooming Away

Let’s look at the on-track experience a little closer now.

It’s worth saying that circuit racing is its own beast, and if you’re coming from Forza Horizon or Need for Speed’s open world racing experiences, you’re in for a unique, tight sort of experience. Be prepared to learn the ropes of non-contact racing though; contact is strongly discouraged in Forza Motorsport (and in real life), with penalties applied for egregious contact, or contact which nets you an advantage. Corner cutting is the same; you need to stay with two wheels within track limits at all times. Thankfully, you can turn on visible track limits in either marker (intermittent triangles) or ribbon (unbroken line) styles.

The experience of driving in Forza Motorsport is great, as you might I expect. With an appropriate vehicle and tune, you’ll be cruising from corner to corner, earning Car XP, and enjoying the intensity of competitive racing. Having full race regulations on in single-player content is great practice, and the system feels like it deals with both the AI opponents and you in very fair ways. All of this combines to make Forza Motorsport feel great, in that indescribable sort of way that driving tends to be; you kinda… just have to experience it to understand, I feel. But, I need to emphasize that this applies only when the vehicle and tune you’re driving are set up properly. It’s a bummer to see that the stock tunes are still rough, when competing sims have much more robust and good feeling tunes out of the gate. Combine that with the upgrade system locking certain parts of that tune behind levels, and it’s a recipe for pain.

As you drive, the information displayed is pleasantly minimal, but still conveys just about everything you need to keep focused on your race. In the lower right, you have a speedometer and RPM indicators, as well as indications of fuel remaining, tire life and temps, and your acceleration and braking inputs. All of this is useful information, available to you at a glance, but also reminds me that shift indicator LEDs are still not supported in Forza Motorsport, and that makes me sad. Limited customization options, besides turning them on and off, is also kind of a bummer.

Besides that, in the upper right, you’ll have visibility of your segment scores and car XP, and in the top left, you have visibility of your current lap time. All of the UI can be toggled on and off to suit your needs. However, racing enthusiasts will also note there is no radar showing nearby cars, nor weather radar to allow you to plan around the new dynamic weather systems. Much of this sort of information, as well as control over TCS and Brake Balance, is available in Gran Turismo 7’s MFD, a feature I desperately wish was in Forza Motorsport, but if they can only choose one bit of UI to take from that, I hope they add a radar, because the current system of proximity arrows (which, perplexingly, are not on by default) is not adequate, and it can make dealing with traffic on tight courses unpredictable. I also hope that the input UI can be made a bit larger, and the information about tires can be made more reliable.

Tires, worth noting, seem like one of the weak points of Forza Motorsport. Tire data was unclear to read at first: tire temps are shown on the larger real-time view, but tire wear is only shown via the small meter to the side of it. Tire life predictions are *not accurate* and will rapidly go from 3 laps to 1 lap over the course of a single lap even with clean driving. It’s super unclear if some sort of accelerated wear is on, but if it is, that information is both not exposed to the player and creating incorrect predictions about tire life, both of which are frustrating.

Star of the Show

For all that though, we still need to talk about the multiplayer experience. Before launch, I had the opportunity to play with other reviewers as well as Turn10 employees in full multiplayer lobbies, and I was extremely happy with the experience!

As you do those races, you’ll notice that each race starts at a fixed time, and that there’s time for practice before each session. This is a great change! You’ll get the chance to size up your competition, get a feel for the track, and set a qualifying time for the final race. This change continues beyond the introductory series as well, and modes like Forza GT and the Touring Car modes will always be there. There’s also a slot for a rotating featured series, and open series’ as well, allowing to show off your project cars on the track. All of these use the same structure and it makes me extremely happy; it feels more like a fleshed out version of the Sport mode in GT Sport/7.

There’s also the ability to do custom multiplayer (and singleplayer) events, just as you’d expect. You can make lobbies as desired, and race away to your heart’s content! I did not test the multiplayer side of that during my review period though, sorry about that. My focus was on the featured multiplayer, as that’s where I’m going to spend most of my time, and expect that’s where most players will be as well.

Chequered Flag

So, wrapping up here, crossing the finish line. Forza Motorsport is a pretty damn good experience, and makes meaningful improvements over previous entries (and over competing sims such as Gran Turismo 7), but it also comes with its own unique set of regressions, particularly in the PC version. However, all of my complaints about this are primarily quality-of-life (with the exception of the state of the visuals on PC, and all the sorts of things that Turn 10 can fix up with some TLC.

Career and Multiplayer are the real standouts, providing a ton of depth for players to explore and a lot of options for how they want to race, and comprehensive new systems for both of them mean that the overall experience is going to be incredible for the primary audience of the game. Hardcore racing sim fans may find aspects of it disappointing, as I did, but hopefully their feedback will help them steer the future of this title into true greatness.

For now though, I can softly recommend Forza Motorsport for PC! I hope to see improvements to it in the future but what’s here is a great package that’s likely to please fans of all stripes.

My copy of Forza Motorsport was done using a copy of the game provided to me by Xbox Australia and New Zealand (Xbox ANZ) for the purposes of review. Xbox ANZ also provides me with a subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to use as part of my streams and coverage.

[subbyfoxelf]

[movie review] dungeons & dragons (2000)

… fuck, i have so much more to say about this than i expected to. i expected to basically be like, “yeah, it’s bad, but what are you gonna do?”

write several pages about it, i guess. is what i’m gonna do.

i mean, yeah, it’s bad! i’m reasonably sure i’m not breaking that news to anyone. but i think my memory did actually kind of underestimate how bad it is.

don’t get me wrong, it is still solidly in the “enjoyably bad” zone rather than boringly bad. there are at least two entirely distinct actors in this who know exactly what kind of movie they’re in and are just bringing that paul freeman in power rangers, ewan mcgreggor in revenge of the sith, raul julia in street fighter “i will make this bullshit watchable by myself if i have to” energy. jeremy irons is the one everyone (rightly) calls out, but i think richard o’brien also deserves a shout-out for some similarly fine scenery chewing!

but yeah, other than that… yeesh.

you know what really kept hitting me over the head the entire time we were watching this? this movie came out one year before fellowship of the ring. one year. one. a single year. just, yikes? and while fellowship was beholden to books that had been called “unadaptable” on more than one occasion prior to jackson’s landmark trilogy, dungeons & dragons by its very nature is designed to offer a storyteller nearly limitless potential as far as what kind of story they can tell.

and what they came up with was… this.

and like… there’s truly no reason a cookie cutter story like this has to be a death sentence for a movie. usually the idea of having a story this basic is it gives you plenty of room to flesh out the characters and the world and all the little details in the margin that make a lot of scifi/fantasy yarns so beloved. so it probably wouldn’t have been the worst idea to… have?... some of those details? like, any of them? at all?

… one good character?

… an interesting location?

seriously, anything?

like, really, tell me any detail about any character or setting in this movie. go ahead! i’ll wait.

i mean, there’s the magic school. its deal is that it’s… a magic school. oh! or there’s the empress. her deal is that, um, she’s… the empress. oh but she has this old guy advising her! his deal is that, uh, he’s… her… advisor.

oh wait, there’s some dragons! heck yeah, that’s one of the things that’s literally in the name of the franchise, there we go! their deal is that, um… they’re… that they’re dragons. (and that they’re really bad cgi, even by the standards of the time.)

wait, there’s also some dungeons in this! that’s the other thing that’s in the name of the thing! they’re, um. well. they sure are… there! my favorite is the underground maze that a second act secondary antagonist just has like in his basement that he just takes the main white bread thief guy to and is like, “well! here you go! here’s a maze for you to do some fun thief stuff in!” and nobody mcprotagonist just kinda jumps around dodging traps & being a rueful underdog and the secondary antagonist and his minions mug for the camera a bunch while commenting on his progress and as the audience you’re sitting there going, “why is any of this happening???”

it’s kind of a perfect visual shorthand for the entire movie, actually.

similarly, in theory opting not to use any of the many extremely popular d&d campaign settings is fair enough. d&d is certainly designed to let you do something new if that’s what you want to do. but the “new” thing they opted to do is just the fantasy worldbuilding equivalent of forgetting to change the name of your paper from “new document.” like, what is even the point of having an “original” setting when you clearly have no actual interest in making something of your own? is it literally just so they didn't actually have to crack open any d&d books to look anything up? (... shit, that’s exactly it, isn’t it?)

i know that every single character in this movie is the most cookie-cutter version of the kind of character they are, but the character this jumped out the most with for me was the dwarf, whose name i am just not going to look up. like, okay, i guess someone decided the movie needed a grumpy dwarf that eats & drinks a lot, that’s a totally valid fantasy trope. but the way he’s introduced is the party just kinda stumbles into him, and he ends up caught up in a fight… and then he kinda just starts tagging along with them and acting like he’s been part of their party the whole time? like, in literally the next scene the party is deciding what to do next, and he says something along the lines of “it seems we have no choice,” and like, hey broseph? you know who definitely, absolutely has a choice from what i can tell?

like, seriously, a line of dialogue could make this make sense. i mean, you have everyone else in this movie telling you what their entire deal is in basically their first few lines of dialogue. this movie is overburdened with exposition even though it doesn’t really have anything it needs to exposit about??? but you can’t spare a single line of dialogue to establish why this random dwarf is suddenly their ride or die companion? or what his deal is at all? seriously?

also, like, i love how both me & my partner remembered two completely different things about marlon wayans’ character that would’ve made him less insultingly written, and both of us were wrong. i remembered him being revealed to still be alive before the final battle and helping out rather than, you know, the only person in the party who wasn’t white being killed halfway through the movie, holy shit.

my partner, on the other hand, remembered him being revealed to have been an elf the whole time out of nowhere, which i 100% believed when he said it btw? like, my memory of this movie was so foggy that i was literally like “yeah, i’m pretty sure that’s true!” and nah, they just killed the one black guy halfway through the movie, and then at the end of the movie they were like “guys, he’s totally still alive, we promise” but figured they’d get to, y’know, showing us that he was still alive in the big budget sequel this was obviously getting. which it was obviously getting! it definitely wasn’t going to be a scifi original movie where the only returning actor was the antagonist’s toadie, don’t be silly!

look. this movie would be inoffensively bad if it weren’t the first attempt at making a movie out of a world that literally exists so people can craft stories where the only limit is their imagination. it kind of still is inoffensively bad? like, i certainly enjoyed watching it and ripping to to shreds with my partners. but just…

fuck, guys!! you were adapting dungeons & dragons!! the game whose entire deal is, “hey, let’s tell a story!” there were so many wonderful stories being told at tables around the world on a budget of “hey guys, can everyone chip in for a pizza?” and the way you brought that to life with the weight of a hollywood budget behind it was… this? this is what you gave us? honestly, that’s just sad.

d-rank

[auggielovesreading]

Security Breach is the WORST game in the franchise.

Let me explain.

Now, hear me out. This might get hate because, as we all know, when SB was released the entire FNAF spotlight shifted to it. Everyone was talking about it and the fandom grew 10x bigger overnight. From a gameplay point of view it was amazing. The graphics were really cool and the free roaming was well designed, but that was about it. To me it played like the knock off FNAF games people developed in 2015, almost FNAF, but not enough. Let’s be honest here, the characters just didn’t feel like Five Nights at Freddy‘s characters. I know they’re meant to be modernized versions of the original crew, but it wasn’t well executed. Freddy and Chica remained in the game, but Foxy and Bonnie were completely written out. Not to mention the complete bastardization of Freddy and Chica.  I loved Glamrock Freddy while playing the game solely because I do believe he was meant to be possessed by the ghost of Michael Afton, which is such a cool viewpoint to be lead by the character you’ve been playing as since 2014. It was fun in the moment but still didn’t translate to Five Nights at Freddy’s.

One of the best things about FNAF is that it has a very signature feeling to it. I think that feeling was lost at Sister Location. The characters we see in these games have the same basic design but we’re completely lost in translation. Freddy has been overdeveloped, between OG Freddy, glamrock Freddy, withered Freddy, shadow Freddy, toy Freddy, nightmare Freddy, twisted Freddy, golden Freddy, Lefty? Not to mention the others that I literally do not have it in me to name. There’s just TOO MANY!

Serious question. How did a single dad running a pizzeria afford the materials it would take to make over 100 animatronics? One animatronic costs anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 depending on the quality. These ones are massive and have free movement, allowing them to roam on their own without coding to do so, these things would probably cost about 700,000 dollars each (probably more. definitely more but whatever.) You’re seriously telling me this man spent 70M dollars on animatronics just to shove some kids souls in there? No way.

And let’s address the elephant in the room, SB is a children’s game. Sure, there’s some measly jump scares, but it’s the children’s equivalent of the original games. The original games featured the eerie 8-bit murder scenes and bone chilling lore of the heartless child serial killer luring kids to the back room of his pizzeria and slaughtering them, only to shove their corpses into the suits of the characters he made. Never once in security breach did I ever feel a hint of fear or that signature eeriness that made the old games so amazing. If you play security breach to the end, you escape the pizzeria and woohoo yippee no scary suits or child murder or anything. Where’s the fun in that? In past games the endings have still left you feeling weird. Like burning down a building (and yourself) or being reminded that you have to come back the next week, or just flat out being brutally murdered anyway. My personal favourite has to be in Help Wanted (the VR game) when, despite completing the game, you’re led by glitch trap to the back where there’s a more than creepy birthday display for you, complete with your favourite lifeless animatronics sat against the wall and our signature rabbit leading you to the back room, cut to you standing on stage and realizing that you’re now trapped in the bear suit you so loved as a kid! AMAZING! Experiencing it in VR is absolutely chilling and I never got that feeling from SB. It’s just too Disneyish.

Anyways.  It was also a huge part of the plot that the Freddy Fazbears Pizzerias’s were unable to stay open for long because of the reputation. Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 was literally set in a haunted house they made based on the restaurant. A company that can only continue making profit making a haunted attraction based on the horrific tragedies that took place in their establishments would not go on to continue making very successful multi-level MALL SIZED attractions in the future. Does nobody care that every single building this company has made, people have been horrifically murdered in? specifically children? To put it plainly, SB’s restaurant would’ve never existed in the first place. The modern setting alongside the crappy lore being added to the plot completely ruins the feeling of Security Breach. The characters we’ve all grown to love and the setting and timeline thats held the story together have been detached and destroyed. Nothing is holding SB to the FNAF franchise besides its tiny additions to the lore. Oh great, William is back from hell? For shits and gigs?

To sum it all up, I miss that straight out of 2014 feel that FNAF games 1-4 clung onto so well, but it’s been ruined and I don’t think it’s gonna get any better. Let’s all pray that the movie is set STRICTLY in the universe of the first few games, because I stg.

(I love fnaf. This definitely may have made me seem like I don’t but I 100% do and could sit down and give you the entire lore in about 20 minutes. This is just the harsh truth)

[onemistressandnomaster]

darcey and stacey and dove cameron

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about darcey and stacey--and dove cameron.

for anyone who doesn’t know (and that would probably be for the best), darcey and stacey silva are reality tv “stars” who currently have their own show on TLC. they had been trying to become store-brand kardashians for years. they filmed a pilot for a reality show called “the twin life” that was never picked up, founded a fashion brand, and languished in obscurity until darcey appeared on the first season of a 90 day fiance spin-off titled “90 day fiance: before the 90 days.” as the title would suggest, it was about couples who had not actually gone through with the k-1 visa process that would bring the foreign half to the united states. instead, it was about couples who were thinking about maybe possibly applying for a k-1 visa at some point in the future, with varying degrees of seriousness in their relationships. darcey was in a relationship with jesse, a dutch man 18 years her junior. she was one of the breakout stars of that show for her desperation to get married, her obvious plastic surgery, and her weepy histrionics. I believe in the second season we were fully introduced to her twin sister stacey, who was vaguely hinted at as being in a relationship with a younger foreigner as well. after darcey’s relationship with jesse ended in dramatic fashion, she stayed on the show with a new boyfriend, this one an english dude named tom who was only six years younger than her. the show also officially introduced stacey’s boyfriend and future husband, florian (who is 17 years younger than the twins). when TLC could no longer justify having darcey on a show about fiances without one of her own, they greenlit a spin-off aptly called “darcey and stacey” that would basically just continue their quest for (younger, european) love.

I’m not proud of watching reality shows. they are so often described as a “guilty pleasure,” and I think that phrase fits. I know how exploitative reality tv is, and yet, there is something satisfying about watching the people who agree to be on these shows because you can say to yourself, “I would never be this stupid. I would never act this way for so many people to see. things may be bad for me, but they could be worse!” when I watch anything from the ever-growing extended universe of the 90 day fiance franchise, I can feel that, while I may be working in a job that I hate, I could be coming across as the worst kind of crass american stereotype buffooning my way around a foreign country. but with “darcey and stacey” in particular, I feel this kind of mixture of superiority and pity on another level, because I think these two women exemplify so much of the problem with female socialization in this country.

the first thing that comes to mind while watching their show is the palpable desperation of the titular women--desperation to be famous, desperation to be sexy, desperation to be youthful and trendy and cool. all of the things which girls are taught from a young age to value. going on a reality show does not speak to a particularly healthy state of mind, particularly when the reality show is about dating. making something intimate and vulnerable into something public and exploitative is a fool’s errand. and to see how darcey in particular makes the same mistakes again and again, but constantly assures herself that this time it’ll be different, is pathetic. and I mean that in both the colloquial sense of it being cringeworthy and the older sense of it evoking pathos. I was struck by the irony in a recent episode where darcey was crying in her talking head about how she didn’t want to be like her mother. for context, her parents divorced when she and her sister were 11. her father, mike, remarried twice, to successively younger women, but neither of the marriages lasted. her mother, nancy, did not remarry at all, and presents as the polar opposite of her two daughters. nancy has aged naturally. she looks like a normal middle-aged woman. she wears bermuda shorts and puts her graying hair in a bun and doesn’t wear make-up. she doesn’t have a man in her life, but nothing about her behavior on the show (admittedly meager though it may be) suggests that she feels some kind of gnawing emptiness in her life. but to hear darcey talk, particularly in that talking head, her mother is deeply, agonizingly lonely, and darcey is terrified at the idea that she could end up, single and loveless, like her mother. except it really seems like darcey is just projecting. somehow, despite nancy’s seeming normality, darcey and her sister are obsessed with their looks. to the twins, being without a man beings being without value. for all their talk about empowered womanhood--and they bring it up constantly, almost to the point of parody--they are desperate for male approval. specifically, youthful male approval. it seems impossible for darcey to square the circle of her mother’s contentedness when darcey cannot handle being undesirable. and at the same time, her father’s singleness seems less upsetting to her; she did not weep in that talking head over his multiple failed marriages or his currently living as a bachelor. but to look at it from her logic, it is his right, I suppose, as the bestower of value not to see anyone worthy of that gift; but for nancy, a woman, to seemingly find value in her self, is a paradox that darcey’s mind can’t handle.

this talking head that struck me in such a particular way stemmed from a storyline on this newest season about darcey going to see a matchmaker. see, when this show started, darcey of course started dating another younger european guy--georgi, a bulgarian masseuse. that relationship spanned the first three seasons of the show, with darcey ultimately ending their engagement at the end of the third season. and this was a big to-do because she and stacey were supposed to have a big twin wedding extravaganza (even though stacey and florian had already gotten married during the height of the covid pandemic), and then darcey was no longer engaged, but stacey still wanted to go ahead with a big vow renewal for herself and florian. the twins, whether because it gives good drama or because it’s their genuine dynamic (or both), are constantly competing with each other, and the fact that stacey is married while darcey is not is a point of contention. if darcey cannot define herself as being identical to her sister because she’s not married, and if she cannot define herself as desirable to a man because she’s not married, then what is left to her? enter the matchmaker. but from the start, the matchmaking experiment was doomed to failure. the pictures darcey sent to the matchmaker were filtered within an inch of their life. it’s hard to build a dating profile when your pictures are so obviously edited. then, of course, darcey sought younger guys, even though the matchmaker pointed out that she had had no success so far with having a lasting relationship with a younger man. the matchmaker attempted to match darcey with someone around the same age (late 40s), only for the relationship to sputter after a couple of awkward dates during which darcey was constantly trying to signal her “sexy empowered womanhood.” it was as it became clear to darcey that this guy didn’t want anything to do with her that she gave that talking head about her mother. and funnily enough, if anything, she should be more worried about being like her father, given that they have both had multiple failed relationships with younger partners. but the real horror is her mother happily living alone. and even when the matchmaker pointed out that darcey, at 48, is acting immaturely and insincerely, that her shtick is at best tiresome and at worst pathetic, and that perhaps she needs to go to therapy, darcey refused to listen. and as a viewer, I could merely laugh at her. but I also want to reach through the screen and shake her, tell her, “you are a grown woman, not a teenage girl! grow up, develop some self-respect, stop worrying about what men think, get a vibrator, read a book! look to your mother as an example, not a warning” I feel like choice feminism and the conflation of empowerment with sexual desirability and all the other brain rot that gets funneled into girls from birth has dealt irrevocable damage to these women, and it continues to damage others as we speak. the brainless bimbo thing isn’t cool, nor is it feminist, nor is it fair. because the problem escalates to generalizing all or most women as being like this. the world tells girls to act this way out of one side of its mouth, then scorns them for being oversexed and overwrought out of the other. it’s a finger trap, and those caught in it need to realize it, for the sake of themselves and the sake of others.

and I have only touched on the plastic surgery addiction. I mean, the biggest storyline of the third season was their trip to turkey to get basically full body plastic surgery. they’ve already had so much plastic surgery as to make them virtually unrecognizable, and they still had to get more--to get “snatched,” as they termed it. and it looks horrible. they look swollen, stretched, strained. their breasts look both painful and comical as they swallow the entire torso. the filler in their cheeks and lips gives them a permanent duck face. they do not look beautiful. they almost do’t look human. and you don’t want to be that kind of person who springs to criticizing someone’s looks, but it is ludicrous to me to pretend like the way they look now is an improvement over the way they looked before all of the surgery. the emperor has no clothes. these over-the-top surgically modified faces and bodies look wrong, and our brains know that. and so often, what surgery has ruined, only surgery can fix. so sure, you may think that you are following the beauty trends by getting eye lifts and lip fillers and botox and breast implants. but when the insta baddie aesthetic goes out of style, and some other body type takes it place, what can you do but go under the knife again? and again for the next trend, and the next one? when do you realize that there isn’t a point to it anymore? when your nose has collapsed in on itself or you’ve lost feeling in your breasts? every effort to become more desirable only makes them more repellent. that they attract some men who are interested in their (father’s) money and reality show fame and the promise fo a woman who will do (almost) anything for love is not to their credit. to a well-adjusted person, they come across as grotesque--and given that they are on a channel that is like the modern equivalent of a freak show, whatever point they may think they’re proving to the “haters” is lost in the general disgust and ridicule they excite.

look, I know what it’s like to look in the mirror and hate what I see, and I suppose I’m lucky that some part of my brain recoils at the idea of, say, cutting into the flesh of my face, breaking my jaw, inserting some kind of plastic or filler, and then sewing it back up, even if I wish to god that I had been born with a stronger chin. I remember once lamenting the fact to my mother, who shared the same trait. really it’s a family trait from her side--round peasant face and weak chin. and she said that there were surgeries for that kind of thing, but that you couldn’t eat afterwards with some of them, because they might wire your jaw shut. and I think that idea horrified me so much because it reminded me of the pain I had felt with palate expanders and braces and wisdom tooth surgery. those, or at least the first two, had been cosmetic fixes to an extent. I got the orthodontics because I had a misalignment between my top and bottom teeth, and perhaps that would’ve caused a more serious problem down the line. the wisdom tooth surgery, though, had been necessary because I was in real pain as the wisdom teeth attempted to grow in. and afterwards, my jaw sore and tender, I had cried while trying to eat because it was agony and I was hungry. and to think that I would experience that again, except this time for reasons of sheer vanity. if I were only measuring success by marriage, then clearly weak chins had not stopped my mother or grandmother or great-grandmother or whoever else in my family from marrying. and then, too, I imagined the horror of it going wrong somehow, how much worse it would be to have disfigured yourself. and then, too, I imagined that even if it went well, what if I couldn’t recognize myself? my face was my face, the continuities obvious in the photos of my childhood. it was a face like other people in my family. it was the face I had been born with. in some ways, I think this is not a strictly healthy way for me to think either--god knows I have a tendency to hoard and a pathological aversion to change, but in this case, it’s a benefit. this is my face. this is my body. this is me. who would I be, if I changed all of that, if I threw that away when I could hardly bear to part with an old t-shirt? what worth was there in the face I had since birth?

which brings me to dove cameron. again, for anyone who doesn’t know, dove cameron is a disney tween star turned model/actress/singer/influencer. she’s best known for being the titular characters on the show “liv and maddie” (about twins, so it fits!) and one of the main characters in the “descendants” franchise. she also has a pretty clear case of severe body dysmorphia. if you google her, you’ll probably see stuff about the work she has had done, or you’ll be struck by the difference in pictures of her from a few years ago versus pictures of her now. apparently, even before she landed her roles on the disney channel, she was already getting plastic surgery to give her a more “hollywood” look. her mother actually wrote a book about how to turn your child into a “star,” with a heavy emphasis on achieving the most marketable look. so dove cameron probably went under the knife when she was a middle schooler--and then never stopped. most recently, she’s had buccal fat removal, which gives your cheeks a hollowed look. and there is something so annoying about people, especially women and girls, who will preface even the lightest criticism of her plastic surgery obsession with, “if this was her choice, I wouldn’t care! it’s her body, it’s her right, do it to make yourself feel good and sexy! if I had money, I’d do it too! but if you’re just following trends...” or “if you’re suffering from dysmorphia...” but what other reason is there for dove cameron’s plastic surgery if not to appear trendy, if not to fit the ever-shifting beauty standards, if not to make herself feel better by making herself feel consumable? what if “doing it for yourself” cannot be extricated from the wider culture in which you live? what was wrong with her face the way that it was, all the way back when she was a child? and then the counter is that everybody famous does it. well, isn’t it dystopic to think that every celebrity you see has had some kind of work, and every female celebrity especially must feel some kind of pressure to look beautiful? look at justine bateman, an actress who has recently had to defend her decision to...age. a natural process! and she has to defend a lack of action. I read internet comments that say they love the little enhancements a celebrity has gotten done, or they love the “face” they had when one plastic surgery trend was predominant. “oh, I wish kim kardashian would go back to her 2015 face, she never looked better.” am I crazy in feeling like we should only have one face? maybe I’m naive, but one face, untouched by an surgical attempts to enhance it, should be enough. imagine looking in the mirror and seeing the imprint of a surgeon staring back at you. or you see a thousand other people who have all gone under the same knife as you, and you have become like a car, only one in a line of identical models, value depreciating by the second. maybe in the end, the issue is that we think, because we may technically have the ability to “transcend” the material world, that we should as our right and our destiny. but I think an acceptance of both the possibilities of human ingenuity and the boundaries of human physicality would be more conducive to happiness. maybe the human body isn’t a problem to fix--certainly not if the idea of fixing it is just making it “sexier.”