Works where you were surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers [Archive]

Ionathus

2024-05-07, 11:41 AM

Murk

2024-05-07, 11:43 AM

It is very rare nowadays that I watch a movie or read a book without knowing other people's opinions beforehand.
So, sadly, no "huh" moments.

The last time I remember a "huh" moment was with The Mummy (1999). I thought was a barely passable Indiana Jones knock-off, and I assumed that was the general opinion. Only much later did I find out people actually liked it. And general opinion only seems to have improved over the years. Huh.

Edit: Oh, no, actually, a far more recent one: Thor: Love and Thunder.
I disliked Ragnarok, had no intention of watching this one, so I didn't bother looking up reviews.
Then my brother convinced me into the theater anyway, and I actually quite enjoyed myself. I thought it was a vast improvement over Ragnarok.
Reading the reviews afterwards was a "huh" moment for sure.

Tyndmyr

2024-05-07, 12:25 PM

A few months ago, we watched Argyle on a spur-of-the-moment excursion during a vacation. We had seen scattered ads for it but knew nothing else going in. We enjoyed it, thought it was campy and charming nonsense fun. I didn't think further of it until weeks later, when I found out it apparently has a reputation as a critically-panned flop. I had a pretty distinct moment of thinking "huh." Fairly neutrally, because while I enjoyed the movie, I wasn't brimming with passion to defend it against its critics. The flaws were real, they just didn't bother me until others pointed them out.

Yeah, fairly similar. It wasn't a terribly realistic film, but I never really expected it to be, so ice skating on oil was just funny. It's basically just another Kingsman movie, but somewhere between the glorious original and the okayish sequel in quality. The horrible, horrible prequel must not be spoken of.

A movie can be enjoyable without being a great film, I think. The reverse is also true. Consider the movie Vanilla Sky. Good movie? Yeah, probably. Well made. A financial success. Critically not hated. Do I want to see it again? No.

It's like food. Sometimes, even if you could have a fancy meal, you just want kraft mac and cheese from the box. I'm not gonna say that this makes this meal a great food, or healthy, or fancy...but sometimes it is exactly what you desire, and that's okay. Something doesn't have to be great in order to get enjoyment from it.

Sometimes there is great enjoyment to be found in movies that are objectively pretty rough. For instance, I saw Mad Heidi a bit ago, and...it was pretty fun for what it was. I can't honestly say that a Swissploitation film is anything other than a slightly weird mashup of half baked ideas and the occasional violent cheese pun, but I felt my ticket money was well spent. Totally wouldn't be shocked if others felt differently.

From the opposite direction, The Quiet Place. That movie was so incredibly boring and ultimately pointless. The only good thing about that movie was that it reminded me of the existence of Mars Attacks! and I went and watched that.

As a setting idea, it's kind of cool. The specifics really get to me, though. If the monsters can be straight up killed via shotgun, they most definitely do not rule the world. How would they take over, say, a warship? Ultimately, they die to bullets, and are not infinitely strong, and are frankly terrible at stealth and easy to bait. They get murdered off really fast if treated realistically.

There are other ways one could make that setting work, though, and get a really, really strong proper horror vibe from it. Say, a sci fi setting in which these things are discovered, and there simply is no military available for a time. Think this film crossed with Chronicles of Riddick.

Oh, Hazbin Hotel is this for me. I had a buddy tell me it was great, watched the first episode, hated it, and...apparently the rest of the world is really into it. I don't know why. The main character doesn't even make sense for the world she's in. The entire show is the example of thinking one is edgy for referencing adult topics, and expecting that to be inherently awesome. Because I watched one episode, which I regret, the entire internet now wants to advertise merch from it at me.

Zevox

2024-05-07, 01:00 PM

One that comes to mind for me is the game Shadow of the Colossus. Whenever you see people discuss it online, it's praised up and down as fantastic, sometimes as one of the greatest games ever made. When I finally picked it up and played it, I found it very underwhelming - a few good ideas for a boss fight spread far too thin over 16 of them, with very little else even there to speak of. I simply cannot see in it whatever it is that its fans do.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, I've generally liked post-Endgame Marvel movies. I haven't seen Antman or the Disney+ shows, but I absolutely loved Guardians 3 and would probably say it's my favorite Marvel film, and rate Multiverse of Madness and No Way Home quite highly among the series personally. The rest may not have been their best work ever, but I still largely enjoyed seeing them - Black Widow less so than the rest (I only even went to see that one because some friends invited me), but even it had its moments. Don't understand the doom and gloom people who talk like the whole thing has been terrible since Endgame. I wish it felt like they were building towards something again - the lack of any Avengers movie or much setup for one for so long is quite noticeable - but individual films have remained worth seeing to me.

Oh, back on video games and a more positive note: Marvel's Midnight Suns. It seems to have underperformed, but I absolutely loved it. The combat system is a blast to play, with the card game element making for surprisingly engaging gameplay that's never quite the same twice, even when replaying the same level. The way all of the abilities interact and the kinds of things you're able to pull off with them was just great. And while the story was nothing special, it was perfectly fine, and got in some cool moments at times. The big finale, while a touch long, was a very satisfying capstone fight that forced you to use everything you had quite well to pull through too. It's not flawless - I don't enjoy scouring the grounds for crafting ingredients when you need/want those - but it was a great time, and I'm disappointed it didn't fare better. I'd love to see the sequel it teased at the end.

gbaji

2024-05-07, 02:02 PM

Yeah. I never got the hate for Solo either. I enjoyed it. At the end of the day, it's a one shot film, and does exactly what it needed to do (tell the origin bits for Han Solo). It checked every single box it needed to check: His signature pistol? Check. Millenium Falcon? Check. Chewie? Check. Kessel Run? Check. Why he's a smuggler? Check. It had good dialogue and well written characters (and lets face it, the whole "robot rebellion" bit was hillarious). Harrelson's character made sense and fit in. Han's introduction into the criminal world worked and made sense. There were no glaring plot holes (which is a huge plus for me). And they snuck in a few easter eggs and character references/tie-ins along the way. What the heck did people actually expect from the film that they didn't get?

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.

1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

2. fans. Also crazy people. Also convinced that they know better about the subject matter than anyone else. While they don't have the insider pull that the first group has, they can be ridiculously vocal and loud about their opinions and thus influence things (usually in crazy ways). There is also only rare intersections of "what the fans want" and what I consider to be good ideas/stories/whatever.

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good story with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.

So sometimes, it's hard to tell which opinion is the "minority" one in the first place. And I really suspect that many times, folks think they are in the minority when they really aren't. You hear everyone on the interwebs telling you "this film sucked!" or "this is the greatest film ever!", odds are those super strong hyperbolic opinions are coming from one of the first two groups, which rarely actually represents a majority of anything. They just happen to have the largest and loudest platforms for their opinions.

I distinctly remember one summer long ago, two "war films" came out. At the time, one of my friends was well into film school and he was raving about one of them. It was directed by some famous director, who had come out of retirement to do the film, and it had hollywood A-listers lined up to be in the film, and it was going to be fantastic, and the work was amazing, etc, etc. So we went with him to a showing of the film. It was "The Thin Red Line". I honestly invite folks to watch this film just to see how bad a film can be made. I could write whole essays on all of the horrible aspects of this film, but I think I can sum it up by simply observing that when the film finally ended (like for real this time, and it's not just another slow fade to black fake out, and there are credits rolling), I actually heard someone a couple rows back say "Oh thank god!".

The other film was "Saving Private Ryan". So yeah... that happened.

Trixie_One

2024-05-07, 02:09 PM

No Country for Old Men.

High five. I genuinely despise that film.

You didn't even mention how awful the villain was who I'll never understand why people thought he was so neat and/or cool.

For my own, the UK version of the Office. I remember being trapped at a house party/sleepover that turned into an unending binge of the series from which there was no escape. I drank alot while there to numb the pain but alas acohol can only do so much.

It's more mixed in terms of how much they're loved but also the works of Kevin Smith. He made one good film in Clerks and that's very much it. I'm sure that Dogma is only good if this is the very first time if you've been exposed to the ideas and if not it comes off as a crappy sub-par Vertigo comic.

Worst of all though is Chasing Amy which might be one of the very few films that I hate more than No Country. If I could reach through a screen and throttle someone he'd never have survived when he popped up to explain the plot and explain how it related to his own life.

Mordar

2024-05-07, 02:51 PM

It's more mixed in terms of how much they're loved but also the works of Kevin Smith. He made one good film in Clerks and that's very much it. I'm sure that Dogma is only good if this is the very first time if you've been exposed to the ideas and if not it comes off as a crappy sub-par Vertigo comic.

Worst of all though is Chasing Amy which might be one of the very few films that I hate more than No Country. If I could reach through a screen and throttle someone he'd never have survived when he popped up to explain the plot and explain how it related to his own life.

Clerks was overrated. Jersey Girl is his best movie. Mallrats next, but well down the line. Fight me.

- M

Trixie_One

2024-05-07, 03:29 PM

Clerks was overrated. Jersey Girl is his best movie. Mallrats next, but well down the line. Fight me.

Not seen Jersey Girl, but Mallrats was telling crap jokes about comics the movie that 80s/90s geeky kids only liked cause they were the exact same crap jokes they made with their friends.

Last Kevin Smith film I saw was Zack and Miri where I was grumbling loud enough about how much it sucked in every concievable way that by mutual agreement it was turned off after 15 minutes. Only time that's ever happened when I've been in a group watching something by the way. On the rare other occasions where I've really not been on board like the Office I'd either been over ruled or just suffered in silence.

Also dang looked up Jersey Girl on letterboxd out of interest, and wow, this sentence from one of the popular reviews:

Poor guy - he put his heart on a slab for the world to see, and the world decided that his heart was corny and hollow. No wonder he's making Clerks III now.

I can't stand Kevin Smith, and even I think that's decidedly brutal.

Ionathus

2024-05-07, 03:32 PM

It is very rare nowadays that I watch a movie or read a book without knowing other people's opinions beforehand.
So, sadly, no "huh" moments.

I've been lucky to mostly experience the opposite. Part of this is because I've trained my friends over many years to not give me any spoilers or even many vibes about something they think I'd like to see, because they know I like experiencing most works totally blind. But also probably because I'm not plugged into a lot of "standard" advertising venues that would fill me in.

The last time I remember a "huh" moment was with The Mummy (1999). I thought was a barely passable Indiana Jones knock-off, and I assumed that was the general opinion. Only much later did I find out people actually liked it. And general opinion only seems to have improved over the years. Huh.

Oh, it's absolutely a fairly cheap Indiana Jones knockoff, and I feel like even people at the time (at least the adults -- I was a dumb kid :smalltongue:) knew it. But charm can do wonders for an otherwise mediocre movie. If the cast is good, or there are decent jokes, or if it even feels like the people involved had fun making it, that can really amplify the good aspects and make me overlook lazy writing or crummy special effects.

Edit: Oh, no, actually, a far more recent one: Thor: Love and Thunder.
I disliked Ragnarok, had no intention of watching this one, so I didn't bother looking up reviews.
Then my brother convinced me into the theater anyway, and I actually quite enjoyed myself. I thought it was a vast improvement over Ragnarok.
Reading the reviews afterwards was a "huh" moment for sure.

Interesting, I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone disliking Ragnarok but liking Love & Thunder! I never saw L&T myself as I was warned off it by someone who I trusted. Had you seen many other Marvel works recently? The overwhelming critique I heard about L&T was that it was way too "Marvel", and featured a lot of recurring tropes that had been overused in the MCU up till then. So one possibility is that those elements hadn't been played out for you.

Then again, maybe not -- I didn't see it myself so can't know for sure.

Oh, Hazbin Hotel is this for me. I had a buddy tell me it was great, watched the first episode, hated it, and...apparently the rest of the world is really into it.

Great example of how the perception of "popular opinion" can differ wildly: everything I've seen about Hazbin Hotel is that people don't like it. But it's possible I'm only getting that from niche sources that share my (and seemingly your) tastes.

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.

1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

2. fans. Also crazy people. Also convinced that they know better about the subject matter than anyone else. While they don't have the insider pull that the first group has, they can be ridiculously vocal and loud about their opinions and thus influence things (usually in crazy ways). There is also only rare intersections of "what the fans want" and what I consider to be good ideas/stories/whatever.

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good story with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.

This reminds me of a great bit of advice from a writing workshop: "Any old schmuck can tell you what isn't working in your story. Nobody in the world can tell you how you should fix it."

Meaning: You have to meet the audience where they are. People don't need to be storytelling experts to have a valid opinion about the stories they consume -- the average person will pick up on the symptoms of bad writing, bad acting, bad editing...though they may not be able to articulate the source problem. In fact, you should always be wary of people who claim to know why something you made doesn't work, because they're usually wrong. I think that applies to both critics and fans (more egregiously with fans), and almost never with your "real people" third category: they don't bring preconceptions to the story, either about how to tell a "good" story (critics) or how to handle this story with the proper respect (fans). They're just there to have a good time.

That's not to say critics don't have their place. They're useful for pointing out trends. They're useful for industry knowledge and historical context. They're useful on a technical level, where they can point out the reason you didn't like something but couldn't find the words to articulate the weird filming trick that was being overused. But they're only a subset of the audience -- one that consumes orders of magnitude more content than the average audience member, and is thus much more likely to overreact to "clichéd" writing -- and it is definitely a mistake to treat their reviews as the definitive opinion on the work. The best critics approach their reviews as "here's what worked and didn't work for me."

Batcathat

2024-05-07, 03:39 PM

Back when some friends and I did a podcast about sci-fi and fantasy (no, you haven't heard of it, I think it barely broke triple digits of listeners per episode) we had one episode where the topic was basically the same as this thread and I started out by saying that I didn't really see why people thought either Star Wars and Star Trek were that great (don't get me wrong, they're both entertaining enough, I've just never understood why they've reached the point of geek religions) and of course the reactions to that took up the rest of the episode. Though I suppose that doesn't really count, as I was well aware I was in the minority. :smalltongue:

Since it feels too easy to bash on popular stuff, I've been racking my brain trying to think of something where I was surprised people didn't like it as much as I did, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything. There are certainly works that I think should be more appreciated (my goto is usually "Person of Interest", I genuinely think that the latter half of that is one of the best sci-fi shows out there) but I'm not sure if any of those qualify.

I guess I might've been surprised that so few prefer Legend of Korra over the Last Airbender?

Trixie_One

2024-05-07, 03:41 PM

Great example of how the perception of "popular opinion" can differ wildly: everything I've seen about Hazbin Hotel is that people don't like it. But it's possible I'm only getting that from niche sources that share my (and seemingly your) tastes.

It's definitely mixed depending on where you look. I've seen places where it's loved, places where people hate it and think it's the worst thing ever. Then there's the more naunced take that it's flawed but worth giving a go if you like musicals, as it really does have some decent songs, and it helps to not mind too much how incredibly rushed the plot and character arcs are. I'm in that last camp.

Mechalich

2024-05-07, 04:02 PM

Mordar

2024-05-07, 04:18 PM

Not seen Jersey Girl, but Mallrats was telling crap jokes about comics the movie that 80s/90s geeky kids only liked cause they were the exact same crap jokes they made with their friends.

Also dang looked up Jersey Girl on letterboxd out of interest, and wow, this sentence from one of the popular reviews:

I can't stand Kevin Smith, and even I think that's decidedly brutal.

(1) Know your audience;
(2) KS, the guy people love to hate. And I don't like him so much either.

Back when some friends and I did a podcast about sci-fi and fantasy (no, you haven't heard of it, I think it barely broke triple digits of listeners per episode) we had one episode where the topic was basically the same as this thread and I started out by saying that I didn't really see why people thought either Star Wars and Star Trek were that great (don't get me wrong, they're both entertaining enough, I've just never understood why they've reached the point of geek religions) and of course the reactions to that took up the rest of the episode. Though I suppose that doesn't really count, as I was well aware I was in the minority. :smalltongue:

Yeah, you probably don't get why the Macintosh was such a big deal, or why 1939 Oldsmobiles are so important either. "Tesla? I didn't know that crappy electric car company was Serbian." Go mow my lawn, kid.

Solo had really bad press and an immense burden associated with being the Star Wars film that came out after The Last Jedi. The single group of people who were most likely to rush out to see it and then talk about it were also the people most eager to hate it as part of the backlash to TLJ. The film itself is decidedly fine, but it's not good enough and especially not tightly crafted enough to avoid being picked apart brutally by an audience motivated to do so.

Additionally, Solo was burdened by not being a commercial success, which was a first for the franchise, and among the very large number of people who didn't see it this became a self-fulfilling assessment. If it lost money, in an environment where TLJ made money, it must have been terrible. The reality was of course much more complicated, but rarely has a film been painted with such a giant 'hate me!' bullseye in the popular consciousness.

Agree Solo took heat for TLJ (probably deserved) and the acting classes rumors didn't help things. Frankly, if I got to cut 10 more minutes out of it (sprinkled across the film) I think I would have liked it a lot...instead of just thinking it was good.

- M

JNAProductions

2024-05-07, 04:19 PM

I thought The Fabulous Emancipation Of Harley Quinn was okay. Not great, but I had a nice time when I took my aunt to see it. (She gave me a haircut, so I took her to the theater as thanks.)

It helped that I didn't have high expectations going in-and even then it's for sure flawed. But, as a way to spend two hours or so? It filled the time.

Errorname

2024-05-07, 04:45 PM

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.

While there's definitely extreme ends of the scale between 'fan' and 'real person', there's a lot of space in between "guy who has encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek" and "guy who thinks Star Wars and Star Trek are the same thing" and I've never seen a good dividing line, and whenever I've seen somebody try it ends up feeling less like a sound taxonomy and more "how much do I agree with this person".

Most people are fans, to some extent, and plenty of not chronically online people have brain-breakingly strange film opinions that you just don't see them posting about.

Ionathus

2024-05-07, 04:55 PM

Most people are fans, to some extent, and plenty of not chronically online people have brain-breakingly strange film opinions that you just don't see them posting about.

I had a friend who genuinely preferred the Shyamalan Avatar film to the original cartoon. Wasn't even defensive about it: just good-naturedly thought "oh, I liked the film more." We tried to interrogate him about this and convince him otherwise, and he just sort of shrugged off all our comments and questions. And no, I don't think he's the type to troll us about this.

There's all types in this great big beautiful world of ours, I guess.

Buufreak

2024-05-07, 04:59 PM

I had a friend who genuinely preferred the Shyamalan Avatar film to the original cartoon. Wasn't even defensive about it: just good-naturedly thought "oh, I liked the film more." We tried to interrogate him about this and convince him otherwise, and he just sort of shrugged off all our comments and questions. And no, I don't think he's the type to troll us about this.

There's all types in this great big beautiful world of ours, I guess.

I guess someone had to like it.

DavidSh

2024-05-07, 05:56 PM

Tricky question. While I don't always agree with popular opinion of movies and tv shows, I'm not surprised about it. For example, I actually liked Cats (the movie with CGI augmentations), but I didn't for a moment expect that to be a common view.

gbaji

2024-05-07, 08:13 PM

my goto is usually "Person of Interest", I genuinely think that the latter half of that is one of the best sci-fi shows out there

I actually really liked that show too! It managed to balance out "action adventure" with "cop(ish)/spy(ish) show", and "just enough sci-fi to tickle my fancy" pretty much perfectly. And yeah, one of the rare shows like this that managed to actually maintain a reasonable balance all the way thorugh to the end. Most just jump the shark at some point, and you get this kind of "it was great, until X season, then it went downhill". Which is a pain, since I like re-watching series' sometimes, and I'm a bit of a completionist, so I end up having to force myself to slog through the crappy later seasons of some shows as a result. POI managed to change course and add new things here and there, but still stayed "on target" the whole way. Great show. And had a pretty broad appeal (or at least it seemed to me it should). No one aspect of the show really took over and dominated the others, so if you liked that part, the others wouldn't likely turn you off.

And for completenesses sake, guess which war film came out in 1998 that Jim Caviezel appeared in? (hint: It *wasn't* "Saving Private Ryan"). Sigh...

KorvinStarmast

2024-05-07, 09:53 PM

Solo was almost good.
Hit a lot of good notes, but had these complete "we mailed it in" moments that took the shine off of the gem.

No Country For Old Men
Another almost good movie that had some great scenes, and then you went 'wait, what?'

The Exorcist:
I walked out of it after they had a 14 year old girl do torture sit ups on her own bed.
Not entertaining, at all. I was 16 at the time.

DaedalusMkV

2024-05-07, 11:05 PM

So I sat and watched, as they stretched it for over 4 hours due to ads galore, No Country for Old Men. To this day, I want my money back that I didn't spend. I want my time back. I want the ability to throw a brick at every person who told me it was good.

I'll back this to the end. No Country for Old Men is probably the best example of a movie that might be technically brilliant, but just isn't any fun to actually watch. I do appreciate the villain for being intense and conceptually interesting, but basically everything else about that film is just not enjoyable at all. By the end I was upset and tired and generally unhappy about everything, and I genuinely think I'd have been better off never having watched it at all. I guess I sat through the whole thing, so it was better than Jurassic World 2, but that's not a high bar to clear. And considering I watched it at home, the fact that the ending of No Country for Old Men made me want to throw my drink at the screen should probably tell you a lot about how much I appreciated it.

Oh, back on video games and a more positive note: Marvel's Midnight Suns. It seems to have underperformed, but I absolutely loved it. The combat system is a blast to play, with the card game element making for surprisingly engaging gameplay that's never quite the same twice, even when replaying the same level. The way all of the abilities interact and the kinds of things you're able to pull off with them was just great. And while the story was nothing special, it was perfectly fine, and got in some cool moments at times. The big finale, while a touch long, was a very satisfying capstone fight that forced you to use everything you had quite well to pull through too. It's not flawless - I don't enjoy scouring the grounds for crafting ingredients when you need/want those - but it was a great time, and I'm disappointed it didn't fare better. I'd love to see the sequel it teased at the end.

Midnight Suns was probably the best X-com styled small squad tactics game I've played since X-com 2, and that's reasonably high praise. I genuinely liked pretty much every element of it, including exploring and solving mysteries in the spooky haunted grove, though the payoff for that specific gameplay element really wasn't great. The card-based tactical combat worked shockingly well and allowed some great customization, team compositions were diverse and bringing different heroes really felt new and exciting, and the characters were by and large endearing and well-written enough that the 'hanging out with superheroes' part of the game never felt like a drag. I will very likely go back for a second go-around with the DLCs at some point, and that's something I only do for games I really like.

For myself, I thought Iron Man 3 (or perhaps more appropriately Tony Stark: The Movie) was the single worst Marvel movie prior to Endgame. I absolutely hated it, and its unreasonably smug villain, and its painfully stupid plot, and especially the fact that there's basically no Iron Man in the Iron Man movie. Most people seemed to rate it somewhere between 'decent' and 'good', and I pretty much never see it on those 'worst Marvel movies' lists that float around on a regular basis. I was genuinely surprised that the vast majority of the people walking out of the theatre were so positive about it at the time. I also thought Captain America 2 was a bit overrated - it wasn't terrible, but I found its central threat hard to stomach and just generally didn't understand why so many people were treating it like a masterpiece. I still think it's pretty weak overall, and kind of total nonsense within the context of the MCU as a whole. On the flipside, most people hate on Ant-man 2, while I actually really enjoyed it. It had one of my favorite MCU villains in Ghost, a rare case of an MCU villain I can actually sympathize with and who had actually interesting powers that were used in creative ways, and a pretty good balance of action, spectacle and drama. I tend to rate it in my top 10 MCU movies, something that I suspect almost nobody else would.

Zevox

2024-05-07, 11:45 PM

Another one that came to mind for me: Portal 2. Both Portal games tend to get nothing but praise from anyone who talks about them, and I was late to the party on both, so I came to them expecting to like them as well. And I did I like the first one when I played it, so you'd figure I'd like the second as well, right? But nope, I did not. I can't even recall why at this point, but I do remember feeling like the game wore out its welcome pretty quickly, and more or less forcing myself to finish it even though I wasn't having much fun because I knew it wasn't long and I wanted to at least be able to say that I'd completed the game.

(I have a much harder time coming up with movies, or especially TV shows, for this than video games because I watch those a lot less than I play video games. I can think of maybe two new shows I've watched in the last decade+, and the last time I watched a non-Marvel movie was probably Solo. Which I'd also agree was a pretty decent movie, I just wasn't surprised by the situation there.)

Midnight Suns was probably the best X-com styled small squad tactics game I've played since X-com 2, and that's reasonably high praise. I genuinely liked pretty much every element of it, including exploring and solving mysteries in the spooky haunted grove, though the payoff for that specific gameplay element really wasn't great. The card-based tactical combat worked shockingly well and allowed some great customization, team compositions were diverse and bringing different heroes really felt new and exciting, and the characters were by and large endearing and well-written enough that the 'hanging out with superheroes' part of the game never felt like a drag. I will very likely go back for a second go-around with the DLCs at some point, and that's something I only do for games I really like.
I would definitely recommend it. I went back and replayed with the DLC after the last one came out, and they were a lot of fun. Deadpool is particularly well-realized, as his unique mechanics heavily reward him for being a glory-hog who gets all of the kills, while punishing him for getting hit (making characters who can taunt, like Wolverine for example, his BFFs). Storm and Venom are quite good too; Morbius is the only "eh" one, but at least him being a second character with the Bleed mechanic gives him unique synergy with Blade.

The_Snark

2024-05-08, 12:04 AM

Saph

2024-05-08, 03:10 AM

Solo had really bad press and an immense burden associated with being the Star Wars film that came out after The Last Jedi. The single group of people who were most likely to rush out to see it and then talk about it were also the people most eager to hate it as part of the backlash to TLJ. The film itself is decidedly fine, but it's not good enough and especially not tightly crafted enough to avoid being picked apart brutally by an audience motivated to do so.

Well . . . it's not really fine. You're right that the backlash to TLJ was the biggest reason for why Solo got so much hate, but it's not actually a very good movie on its own terms. The action sequences are mediocre, the characters range from pretty good to very bad, the story is uninspired, but it could still have worked if it had done the one thing that a backstory movie needs to do . . . and it botched that one thing completely. So I think it deserved the roasting that it got.

On a more positive note, one movie that I'm constantly surprised doesn't get more praise/recognition is Margin Call. It was a moderate commercial/critical success, but it never made many waves and even more than 10 years after its release very few people know about it – I only found out about it because I happened to see a clip on Youtube one day. But the cinematography, dialogue, and the performances by the cast are all amazing. It's way, way better than the Wall Street movie and its sequel, but those are the ones that everyone seems to think of when they hear 'finance movie'.

Eldan

2024-05-08, 04:48 AM

My problem with Love and thunder personally was that it was way too flip-floppy with tone, even more than other Marvel movies. And Ragnarok could play over that with some really high high points, whereas L&T just had "I'm really slowly dying of cancer. Anyway, here's a **** joke. Oh no, the gods destroyed my whole civilization, I will mope about it in black an white. Anyway, here's Russel Crowe with a silly accent."

Eh, you know what? I'll just throw this one out for a big one:
All of Star Wars. I've never seen a Star Wars movie all the way through. They are all of the uninteresting. I like them neither as lighthearted action movies, nor as serious fantasy, nor even as light pulp, nor as SciFi. They are just dull stacks of tropes with nothing to recommend them. Yes, even that Star Wars movie. Yes, even all the spin-offs. No, I don't like the games either. Not even the "good" games. The entire franchise is just unbearably dull.

Eldan

2024-05-08, 05:06 AM

As a setting idea, it's kind of cool. The specifics really get to me, though. If the monsters can be straight up killed via shotgun, they most definitely do not rule the world. How would they take over, say, a warship? Ultimately, they die to bullets, and are not infinitely strong, and are frankly terrible at stealth and easy to bait. They get murdered off really fast if treated realistically.

There are other ways one could make that setting work, though, and get a really, really strong proper horror vibe from it. Say, a sci fi setting in which these things are discovered, and there simply is no military available for a time. Think this film crossed with Chronicles of Riddick.

I also didn't like it but thought it had interesting ideas. I think I'd go even smaller than Chronicles of Riddick.

Make Alien with it, to start the franchise. Spacestation contains one of these things, they have no weapons, it picks off the crew one by one as they accidentally make noises while trying to build traps and improvised weapons. Formulaic, but a nice gimmick with the sound, should work.

Saph

2024-05-08, 05:13 AM

Liffguard

2024-05-08, 06:36 AM

Pax1138

2024-05-08, 08:21 AM

I did always feel that Solo would've been a lot more enjoyable if it just didn't star Han Solo. If it was just a Star Wars movie about just some new guy falling into doing this stuff, without any of the backstory elements, I think it might've been pretty great.

Buufreak

2024-05-08, 08:23 AM

Dogma

Alright, maybe it is the cynical catholic in me, or maybe it was being a teen when comedy central would show more than just garbage reruns all day, but I love dogma, and actually have it on DVD. We still pop it in from time to time when we need a laugh.

Iron Man

I'll do ya one better. I generally think, as someone who grew up with comics and all the varied animated series (xmen evolution is a gem and you can't make me think otherwise), that damn near all the marvel movies are subpar. So many of them are an attempt at setup and story building that I feel alot of the joy gets cut and left on the floor. I understand, it was a time to try to bring all these things mainstream, but literally hours upon hours of world building across many different characters and franchises just so I can sit in a theatre and go "oh yea, like that one comic" on a fairly regular basis? Nah, I wish I had my money back.

But that doesn't cover the biggest offender. Iron man. The poster child. The first one to come out in the collective continuity. And by golly, do I think all 3 are just meh movies at best. Explosion. 30 minutes in a cave. Existential crisis. Corporate hostile takeover. A very non villain. Credits. Angry Russian guy. Oh, he is trapped in an office instead of a cave. Car race. Falling out with friend who is now new actor and we are supposed to nod along. Angry government. Cucked (can I say that here) by the big explosion not happening. Credits.

Then 3. Oh baby, 3. We gave pepper temporary powers. We took Tony completely out of the movie for about an hour. Funny joke about smokes and milk, and a dad that never came home. White washing of perhaps one of the bigger names in marvel villainy, and ultimately just deleting the character entirely. Blowing up all my own suits for some crazy reason. Iron man will return.

It is all just such slapped together writing, storyboard, character designs. They all have dare I say good scenes, but ultimately they aren't good movies. I'd maybe call them 5's, but really they are in descending order for me.

Ps. This is eventually going to become the new hot take thread.

The Patterner

2024-05-08, 08:47 AM

So I never got into Coboy bebop, I saw a couple of episodes and sure, it was alright but nothing spectacular. Then I saw the live action version and was like, oh, this was fun.

That was my 'Huh' moment.

Looper also didn't work for me, Joseph Gordon-Lewits character just came across as a selfish prick and I didn't care for anything that was happening. I realize that I have only really liked one movie by Rian Johnson and that's Knives out. Last Jedi and Glass onion had some really cool and well made parts, but there is something about Johnsons movies that just makes me annoyed.

The Glyphstone

2024-05-08, 08:49 AM

Batcathat

2024-05-08, 08:59 AM

Not a movie, but I absolutely fell in love with the board game Galaxy Trucker while I was in college, got my own copy but never had a group to play with until I moved and got a local game store. Turns out I seem to be the only human being in the state, if not on planet Earth, who actually likes this weird little game.

Huh, in that case you can add that one to my list, too. Me and several of my friends are quite fond of it.

Darth Credence

2024-05-08, 09:26 AM

Not a movie, but I absolutely fell in love with the board game Galaxy Trucker while I was in college, got my own copy but never had a group to play with until I moved and got a local game store. Turns out I seem to be the only human being in the state, if not on planet Earth, who actually likes this weird little game.

I love that game, too. And if you can't find people to play, there is a digital version (https://galaxytrucker.com/) so you can play alone (if that's your jam).

Rodin

2024-05-08, 09:34 AM

Ghostbusters 2 for me. I unironically like it better than the original. I think I might have seen it first, as a lot of the complaints about 2 are that it’s a re-hash of the first movie and I didn’t have that prejudice going in. I get thinking the original is better, but I do not understand those who think 2 is bad.

Similarly for Star Wars, growing up all my favorite lines and scenes were in Return and New Hope, with Return edging it in my personal ranking. I was very surprised that Empire is so highly regarded, as I’ve always considered it the glue which holds better movies together. I am baffled that some people rank Return lower than some of the prequel movies!

Zevox

2024-05-08, 10:01 AM

[...]but the game's not really about "boss fights", and if you went in looking for that, it's not surprising that you came away disappointed.
For the record, I didn't go into it expecting anything in particular, beyond a good game. What I described is what I came away from the game feeling it is.

(xmen evolution is a gem and you can't make me think otherwise)
I don't agree with the rest of what you said, but I'm with you there. X-Men Evolution is actually my favorite X-Men show - or X-Men anything, really. It has its flaws, but it captures most of what I like about the X-Men concept really damn well, and mostly avoids the elements I don't (such as whenever time-travel and space travel get involved). And it has the one version of Wolverine that I actually really like - he works a hell of a lot better in the supporting role he has in that show than he ever does as a/the main character, IMO.

Similarly for Star Wars, growing up all my favorite lines and scenes were in Return and New Hope, with Return edging it in my personal ranking. I was very surprised that Empire is so highly regarded, as I’ve always considered it the glue which holds better movies together. I am baffled that some people rank Return lower than some of the prequel movies!
Yeah, I'm in a similar boat. While Empire is good, it was always my least favorite of the OT, with Return of the Jedi being my favorite, and I was legitimately surprised to learn how common the reverse opinion is once I saw internet discussions of the franchise. And I too cannot fathom ranking Return lower than any the prequels - or any of the other non-OT films.

The Glyphstone

2024-05-08, 10:02 AM

I love that game, too. And if you can't find people to play, there is a digital version (https://galaxytrucker.com/) so you can play alone (if that's your jam).

I have the digital version on my phone and play it religiously, yes.

Ionathus

2024-05-08, 10:44 AM

Ps. This is eventually going to become the new hot take thread.

That was my fear. I appreciate everyone who has engaged this topic objectively! Thank you all for being willing to analyze the things you liked and didn't like from a bit of a distance, as a curiosity rather than a rant!

Not a movie, but I absolutely fell in love with the board game Galaxy Trucker while I was in college, got my own copy but never had a group to play with until I moved and got a local game store. Turns out I seem to be the only human being in the state, if not on planet Earth, who actually likes this weird little game.

Galaxy Trucker is one of those games where I absolutely love the concept, but actually playing it drives me up a wall :smallamused: Every time I play, I get fixated on building a perfectly efficient ship, which is completely against the spirit of the game. It doesn't help that my wife isn't cutthroat enough to punish me for being a perfectionist1 :smallcool:

1. To those who haven't played it: Galaxy Trucker has a mechanic where one player can rush through their "building time" at the start of a round, to force the other players to finish faster than they'd like. My wife is better at building faster than I am, so in theory she'd be able to "punish" my perfectionism by catching me with a half-built ship. But she's too nice to take advantage of that.

Mx.Silver

2024-05-08, 11:00 AM

Ps. This is eventually going to become the new hot take thread.

And was started by the very same person who started the old hot take thread!

We're on to your schemes, Ionathus. We're on to your schemes! :smalltongue:

(xmen evolution is a gem and you can't make me think otherwise)

I don't think I can really recall seeing many people arguing against that, tbh. As a show the discussion was generally one of "I think it's neat" versus "I didn't watch it". So probably more an example of something having a small audience rather than a minority opinion within said audience (as is also the case for the people mentioning things like Midnight Suns).

On topic: uh, can't really recall a time where my minority opinion status has come as a surprise to me, I'm afraid. There's one or two instances I can recall where I've been surprised by being in the majority, but that's the opposite of what's being asked for.

Either way, I don't think I'm going to be beating the contrarianism allegations :smallwink:

tomandtish

2024-05-08, 01:44 PM

Ionathus

2024-05-08, 02:06 PM

And was started by the very same person who started the old hot take thread!

We're on to your schemes, Ionathus. We're on to your schemes! :smalltongue:

Guilty as charged :smallcool: I subsist exclusively on forum chaos and, occasionally, certain lichens.

I don't think I can really recall seeing many people arguing against that, tbh. As a show the discussion was generally one of "I think it's neat" versus "I didn't watch it". So probably more an example of something having a small audience rather than a minority opinion within said audience (as is also the case for the people mentioning things like Midnight Suns).

Fun fact, this is the only X-Men media that I had as a kid. I spent years thinking X-Men was an exclusively teenager superhero team, with the exception of Xavier, Wolverine, and Storm.

On topic: uh, can't really recall a time where my minority opinion status has come as a surprise to me, I'm afraid. There's one or two instances I can recall where I've been surprised by being in the majority, but that's the opposite of what's being asked for.

Either way, I don't think I'm going to be beating the contrarianism allegations :smallwink:

Of course you won't beat the allegations: we are come here to this thread to wallow in our contrarianism, after all!

Out of curiosity, what were the things you were surprised other people liked as much as you? That's kind of a fun dynamic all of its own. We went to see Everything, Everywhere, All At Once completely sight unseen, knowing nothing about it, and when it generated really positive buzz a few weeks later (and then got multiple awards), that was a very pleasant surprise!

Rodin

2024-05-08, 03:48 PM

This is AT THE TIME, since the movie came out 30 years ago. Several of us went and saw Pulp Fiction opening night. We came out thinking it was a very bland movie.

Even now, I think Tarantino is overrated. He's had a few movies I enjoy, but I can still take or leave him. But it isn't surprising now that mine is a minority opinion.

I generally enjoy Tarantino's works. There's a couple I've bounced off of, like Inglorious Basterds. After a while I realized I had never seen Pulp Fiction, supposedly his magnum opus. I came out with the same opinion as you - the vignettes didn't hang together well for me and I didn't really get the point of them. It was kinda boring compared to other movies of his I've really enjoyed like Jackie Brown and Resevoir Dogs.

The other movie where I got this retroactive disappointment is Spaceballs. I love Mel Brooks' body of work. I'm a keen defender of some of his movies that are less well regarded, like Men in Tights. And I'm an enjoyer of Star Wars (admittedly not recently, but Spaceballs is a parody of the OT). So I should love it...right?

I not only consider it one of his weaker films, I outright dislike it. I don't find it funny, with the humor being hamfisted and juvenile jabs at Star Wars rather than funny in their own right. Again I refer to Men in Tights, which is hilarious if you've seen the Kevin Costner Robin Hood film that it directly parodies. Yet I enjoyed it massively despite not seeing the original until years later, which became hilarious itself as I immediately recognized all the scenes Men In Tights was mocking. Spaceballs just felt like it was trying too hard. There's a handful of quotable lines and that's all, for the rest of the time I was just bored.

In both cases it wasn't me watching and finding out that popular opinion was against me. I knew what popular opinion was, and knew I agreed with popular opinion on every other work by these directors. It was shocking to find out that I didn't enjoy one of their most prominent films.

Errorname

2024-05-08, 03:55 PM

Then 3. Oh baby, 3. We gave pepper temporary powers. We took Tony completely out of the movie for about an hour. Funny joke about smokes and milk, and a dad that never came home. White washing of perhaps one of the bigger names in marvel villainy, and ultimately just deleting the character entirely. Blowing up all my own suits for some crazy reason. Iron man will return

I love the Iron Man 3 twist but the problem is that the movie's fakeout villain is way cooler and more interesting than the real villain. I don't know how you fix that. Making the real villain the Rebecca Hall character would have helped, but I still think she'd have had problems.

Fun fact, this is the only X-Men media that I had as a kid. I spent years thinking X-Men was an exclusively teenager superhero team, with the exception of Xavier, Wolverine, and Storm.

Evolution kind of ruined me on a lot of X-Men stuff, because the changes they made to the core dynamic are all pretty much universally positive and I really missed them when I tried to get into stuff with a more traditional team dynamic

DrakeRaids

2024-05-08, 04:18 PM

Mx.Silver

2024-05-08, 05:18 PM

Of course you won't beat the allegations: we are come here to this thread to wallow in our contrarianism, after all!
You call this collection of posts contrarianism? Inculding the one that couldn't even get through its rant without making an appeal to being part of 'the real majority'? Others of the form "[cult classic/critical darling underperformer] didn't resonante with me, an average viewer"? Rookie stuff! :smalltongue:

To be (slightly) less silly about it, most 'unpopular opinion' threads tend to lean more towards people seeking validation — often for opinions that are fairly commonplace — than full on contrarian stuff. Probably because it's just more common, but might also be a case of the more obstinate contrarians contrarian-ing themselves out of contributing to the 'acceptable contrarianism' space.

Yes, I do realise that's kind of what I'm doing right now :smallwink:

Out of curiosity, what were the things you were surprised other people liked as much as you? That's kind of a fun dynamic all of its own. We went to see Everything, Everywhere, All At Once completely sight unseen, knowing nothing about it, and when it generated really positive buzz a few weeks later (and then got multiple awards), that was a very pleasant surprise!

The one that mainly comes to mind is Lingua Ignota's music, which I was into before she "got big" — in an extremely relative sense of the term — and which I'm still a little surprised by how many waves her stuff made in the alternative/idependent music commentary side of things, given the sort of genres she works in. Granted, this was mostly around the time Sinner Get Ready dropped, which is/was probably her most approachable, 'listener-friendly' album1 but still felt a bit surreal seeing it happen.

The anime Erased might also count, but there's some split over opinions about various aspects of it that I may fall back into the minority opinion on, so I don't know if it really does. Plus going into it would linvolve having to talk with Internet People about anime, which I try to avoid these days :smalltongue:

1A statement that feels like it's a joke, given what Sinner Get Ready is like, but when compared to her previous output it's rather difficult to argue against. This isn't a knock on Sinner, btw, it's a really good album, just that it's considerably less "harsh noise" than what preceded it.

Mordar

2024-05-08, 05:24 PM

Oh, I have a pair...

Daredevil the movie? Actually pretty good.

Elektra? Ditto.

- M

Errorname

2024-05-08, 06:19 PM

I think my big one was game of thrones, before the television series came out I managed to get through the first four books. At the end of the 4th I just looked at it for a little while and realized that no matter how badly I was trying I just couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters. Wasn't the grittiness or the deaths or any of the other unpleasantness that turned me off it was just a simple lack of investment in where the story was going.

Common problem with Feast for Crows even for people who were really into the first three, it takes a lot of big swings with new characters and secondary characters promoted to PoVs while not featuring some of the most established PoVs while also being a deeply bleak book.

I definitely liked it the least on first read, although I appreciate it more nowadays.

gbaji

2024-05-08, 08:03 PM

Oh, I have a pair...

Daredevil the movie? Actually pretty good.

Elektra? Ditto.

Well. crap. Me too! Yeah. I actually enjoyed both films. They were both reasonably well writen, with good followable plots, and pretty darn good action sequences (actually quite good action sequences). I went in expecting "street level heroic stories" and that's exactly what I got. I think they mainly got panned due to Affleck having a bad rep at the time (don't even remember why), and that rubbed off on the spinoff as well. And yeah, it was also just a tricky time period for superhero films in general. I think audiences were still warming to the idea, so some products did really well, and others not so much. And it's not always clear why. Very very whimsical outcomes IMO. A few years later, it seems like the timing was right, Iron Man came out, and the rest was history.

I actually created some animalism shaman type folks in my game, using inspiration from Elektra. The whole "animals flowing out of the tatoos" thing was cool. Minor seeming thing, but for some reason, that's what I remember from it.

Buufreak

2024-05-08, 10:17 PM

KorvinStarmast

2024-05-09, 08:20 AM

I liked Looper.
Also, forgot to hit quote, but it's fine: Tarantino is vastly overrated, and besides inglorious basterds, I don't think I've much liked any of his films. Jackie Brown was a really good film, but part of the appeal for me is that the soundtrack was from my era of growing up (a lot of soul hits that I used to hear on the radio) and Pam Grier still had that on-screen chemistry and attractiveness that was (for me in junior high and high school when she became well known) mind boggling. Another part of the movie's texture that I liked was the bumbling mistakes of various parties in it.

Part of Tarantino's appeal to me is the dialogue: Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs had a particular style of banter that caught me ear. (True Romance did also). Inglorious Basterds would have died without Cristoph Waltz.

My wife hated Pulp Fiction, and got mad at me for watching it on VHS.

Mordar

2024-05-09, 10:49 AM

Well. crap. Me too! Yeah. I actually enjoyed both films. They were both reasonably well writen, with good followable plots, and pretty darn good action sequences (actually quite good action sequences). I went in expecting "street level heroic stories" and that's exactly what I got. I think they mainly got panned due to Affleck having a bad rep at the time (don't even remember why), and that rubbed off on the spinoff as well. And yeah, it was also just a tricky time period for superhero films in general. I think audiences were still warming to the idea, so some products did really well, and others not so much. And it's not always clear why. Very very whimsical outcomes IMO. A few years later, it seems like the timing was right, Iron Man came out, and the rest was history.

I actually created some animalism shaman type folks in my game, using inspiration from Elektra. The whole "animals flowing out of the tatoos" thing was cool. Minor seeming thing, but for some reason, that's what I remember from it.

It got hate because Ben Affleck was too pretty. Of course that defies common thought, but it is the case. RDJ might have grown to be too pretty, but he had the addictions thing, so he could be liked. [/hottake]

Tattoo rocked, and the movie take on Typhoid was kind of clever. I was a little disappointed they made Stone a bad guy, though - I loved the Miller run with DD and Stone/Shaft/Claw fighting the Hand, so did not love seeing one of the good guys turned heel and tossed aside.

- M

Ionathus

2024-05-09, 10:55 AM

The other movie where I got this retroactive disappointment is Spaceballs. I love Mel Brooks' body of work. I'm a keen defender of some of his movies that are less well regarded, like Men in Tights. And I'm an enjoyer of Star Wars (admittedly not recently, but Spaceballs is a parody of the OT). So I should love it...right?

I not only consider it one of his weaker films, I outright dislike it. I don't find it funny, with the humor being hamfisted and juvenile jabs at Star Wars rather than funny in their own right. Again I refer to Men in Tights, which is hilarious if you've seen the Kevin Costner Robin Hood film that it directly parodies. Yet I enjoyed it massively despite not seeing the original until years later, which became hilarious itself as I immediately recognized all the scenes Men In Tights was mocking. Spaceballs just felt like it was trying too hard. There's a handful of quotable lines and that's all, for the rest of the time I was just bored.

In both cases it wasn't me watching and finding out that popular opinion was against me. I knew what popular opinion was, and knew I agreed with popular opinion on every other work by these directors. It was shocking to find out that I didn't enjoy one of their most prominent films.

Men in Tights was a childhood film for me (yes, I realize how weird that is). It was the only Mel Brooks film I watched until I was fifteen at least. I thought it was hilarious. Having now seen several of his other works, it's my second least favorite (History of the World Part 1 didn't really do anything for me). I don't think it was because I heard popular opinions against it...I think it was just genuinely my tastes changing and broadening. Men in Tights and Spaceballs are full of "gags" in that classic Airplane! style, and something like Young Frankenstein has slightly more downplayed humor (by comparison, at least). I still like Spaceballs more, but something about Men in Tights lacks charm for me. Maybe I've seen it too much.

You call this collection of posts contrarianism?...Rookie stuff! :smalltongue:

No, I call this collection of posts contrarianism! :smallamused:

Plus going into it would linvolve having to talk with Internet People about anime, which I try to avoid these days :smalltongue:

Oof, big agree, don't get me started. I have like five people total in my real life that I trust enough to talk about anime without A) them getting weird or B) them thinking I'm weird. It's got so much cultural baggage that you have to slog through to discuss anything, and you can never know if that person's only conception of anime is some truly heinous garbage...and worse, you can never know for sure if they like that heinous garbage or not. It's such a can of worms that I usually avoid it.

"So, , what have you been watching recently?"
"Well there's this show on Netflix about adventurers who eat the monsters they kill, it's hilarious and really creative--
"Oh, you know. My wife and I are working our way through [I]Only Murders In The Building..."

Oh! Oh! I got a good one, on topic and everything.

Bright.

Had modern fantasy. Felt very shadow run going in. Starred an actor I like(d). Genuinely liked the design of orcs, who I've always had a soft spot for as a race. What wasn't to like? It wasn't a perfect movie, but I genuinely enjoyed it.

Then I check with friends and reviews. It is my understanding that people flat out hated this film, and I still can't see why.

Interesting! That's one that I've never seen, only absorbed some vague opinions on it through passive osmosis. The impression I got was that most discussion of the film focused on its utterly bonkers (if anything I've heard is true) allegory to real-world race issues, which overshadowed or influenced all potential discourse about its quality as a film in itself. Visually, it looks like an interesting world. But it makes perfect sense why a film that makes such bold storytelling choices as "the orcs represent black people" would become a lightning rod for other reasons, and have its non-storytelling qualities overlooked.

I think that gets at a really interesting part of this thread: very few works that people think are "obviously bad" are bad at every level. Usually, someone on the creative team did something right. You can love the acting but hate the writing, or appreciate the costumes even if the SFX are garbage.

When literally every part of the work is bad, it starts to make me wonder if the creative team was trying to be bad on purpose. Very few things have ever made me think that: the only one that comes to mind immediately is Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, which I genuinely believe is terrible on every possible level. But even then, I wouldn't be surprised if someone managed to point out to me how good the, say, sound design was.

Mordar

2024-05-09, 10:59 AM

I think that gets at a really interesting part of this thread: very few works that people think are "obviously bad" are bad at every level. Usually, someone on the creative team did something right. You can love the acting but hate the writing, or appreciate the costumes even if the SFX are garbage.

When literally every part of the work is bad, it starts to make me wonder if the creative team was trying to be bad on purpose. Very few things have ever made me think that: the only one that comes to mind immediately is Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, which I genuinely believe is terrible on every possible level. But even then, I wouldn't be surprised if someone managed to point out to me how good the, say, sound design was.

As a not-at-all fan or viewer of the Anime, I thought the live action Airbender had good costumes and sets.

Veering away from media, growing up I very much enjoyed SPAM. Only once I moved to a different state for college did I fully appreciate just how small a minority I was in that regard, and how dreadfully wrong the majority can be. Bet it won't be hard to guess where I am from...there's really only two choices.

- M

gbaji

2024-05-09, 12:59 PM

Interesting! That's one that I've never seen, only absorbed some vague opinions on it through passive osmosis. The impression I got was that most discussion of the film focused on its utterly bonkers (if anything I've heard is true) allegory to real-world race issues, which overshadowed or influenced all potential discourse about its quality as a film in itself. Visually, it looks like an interesting world. But it makes perfect sense why a film that makes such bold storytelling choices as "the orcs represent black people" would become a lightning rod for other reasons, and have its non-storytelling qualities overlooked.

Huh. That's... interesting. I also got a very Shadowrun feel from the film, and thought it was very good for that reason.

If folks looked at the Orcs and Elves in that film, and drew some kind of direct correllary to any particular modern world racial groups, they brought that correlation to the game with them, and it exists entirely inside their own minds. Which... you know... speaks volumes about those people that they would make that correlation in the first place.

I guess the moral is that no matter how fantastic your setting, and how completely and obviously disconnected it is from the "real world", some people just can't let go and just enjoy the fantasy (and you know, just take it at face value for what it is). Yes. There was racial conflict in the film (or maybe more correctly "species conflict"). But it included fantasy races that simply don't exist in our world. If folks applied their own real world stereotpes to that... it's on them.

It was actually a quite good film. Bit tropish in spots, but what good film isn't? I would strongly recommend watching it and not being scared away cause you heard something bad about it.

DavidSh

2024-05-09, 01:00 PM

Veering away from media, growing up I very much enjoyed SPAM. Only once I moved to a different state for college did I fully appreciate just how small a minority I was in that regard, and how dreadfully wrong the majority can be. Bet it won't be hard to guess where I am from...there's really only two choices.

- M

Probably some Pacific Island. Hawaii seems more likely than, say, Guam, just because of the relative populations.

Spam isn't really any worse than scrapple, and keeps better. Given the choice I'd go with scrapple just because of my Pennsylvania heritage.

Metastachydium

2024-05-09, 01:55 PM

growing up I very much enjoyed SPAM.

Bet it won't be hard to guess where I am from...

…is it Nigeria? Yes, I know. I'll show myself out.

Mordar

2024-05-09, 02:28 PM

…is it Nigeria? Yes, I know. I'll show myself out.

But before you go, please help fund my efforts to recover my $37M fortune! If you can provide me 2 dozen donuts and a blank check from your account I promise to share my recovered fortune with you!

On topic - Babylon 5 and Doctor Who. Saw a few episodes of each and thought "Well this is no good". Guess about a bijillion sci-fi fan people disagree with me. Which is probably almost all of them.

- M

Tyndmyr

2024-05-09, 02:46 PM

Oh! Oh! I got a good one, on topic and everything.

Bright.

Had modern fantasy. Felt very shadow run going in. Starred an actor I like(d). Genuinely liked the design of orcs, who I've always had a soft spot for as a race. What wasn't to like? It wasn't a perfect movie, but I genuinely enjoyed it.

Then I check with friends and reviews. It is my understanding that people flat out hated this film, and I still can't see why.

I thought the movie was mediocre at best, but the world it depicted was a shadowrunesque sort of cool. I won't say I thought it was good, but I thought the idea at least had some strong potential. It just needed for the fantasy/cop story to be a little less generic, that's all.

In other opinions, Memento is overrated. It *only* has any cred because of the disjointed flow of the sequences, but if you put them in order, the movie would be insanely boring, and even as is, it certainly isn't rewatchable.

Also, I didn't like the original ghostbusters. Like, I know that everybody else apparently loves it, but I can't get through the darned thing. So, that was surprising, albeit more the show itself being surprising, as I knew the reactions in advance.

I did always feel that Solo would've been a lot more enjoyable if it just didn't star Han Solo. If it was just a Star Wars movie about just some new guy falling into doing this stuff, without any of the backstory elements, I think it might've been pretty great.

So, I absolutely hate the film, but I have to concede that the land battle segment of it does feel gloriously like the Imperium in W40k. The film itself was utterly pointless, but I truly wish the people who made it had continued to flesh out that bit of it, and just went full warhammer on it. If you're going to do a gritty version of space fantasy, well, uh, that's your franchise right there.

Ionathus

2024-05-09, 03:23 PM

If folks looked at the Orcs and Elves in that film, and drew some kind of direct correllary to any particular modern world racial groups, they brought that correlation to the game with them, and it exists entirely inside their own minds. Which... you know... speaks volumes about those people that they would make that correlation in the first place.

I guess the moral is that no matter how fantastic your setting, and how completely and obviously disconnected it is from the "real world", some people just can't let go and just enjoy the fantasy (and you know, just take it at face value for what it is). Yes. There was racial conflict in the film (or maybe more correctly "species conflict"). But it included fantasy races that simply don't exist in our world. If folks applied their own real world stereotpes to that... it's on them.

Interesting. Every mention of the film I've seen focused on the social commentary being hamfisted and very blatantly a 1-for-1 real-world parallel to real world groups. It was such a universal opinion that I believed it was the creators' intention. If that's not the case and it's a more nuanced take, or just "playing with" those elements, that might tip me over the edge into checking it out.

Again, this is with the caveat of "this is just what I heard" since I never saw it. I apologize because I know that makes me a really frustrating conversation partner -- I can just retreat to the safety of "well I've never seen it, this is just what I've heard, so it's useless to argue with me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

On topic - Babylon 5 and Doctor Who. Saw a few episodes of each and thought "Well this is no good". Guess about a bijillion sci-fi fan people disagree with me. Which is probably almost all of them.

The difference there for me is that Doctor Who fans often feel like Star Trek fans: they have no illusions about other people liking it. In fact, they can sometimes even seem bashful about recommending it to people.

All I'm saying is, every time I've witnessed somebody say "I've never seen the original Star Wars trilogy", someone in the room yells at them like it's a moral failure. Star Trek or Doctor Who fans often seem more just pleased that anyone's giving their franchise the time of day :smallamused:

And yeah, I think I probably would lump Babylon 5 fans in with that group as well...if I'd ever met one in real life :smallbiggrin:

Mechalich

2024-05-09, 03:30 PM

On topic - Babylon 5 and Doctor Who. Saw a few episodes of each and thought "Well this is no good". Guess about a bijillion sci-fi fan people disagree with me. Which is probably almost all of them.

This is somewhat more nuanced. Doctor Who is a series with a fair amount of mixed opinions. There are people who are really, really into it, but there are also a lot of science fiction fans who are of the 'this isn't for me' variety. The series is also known to vary wildly in tone and quality from run to run and even episode to episode, so it's absolutely possible to be exposed to a bad batch of Doctor Who and bounce off the franchise. Babylon 5 takes a while to build its characters and setting, and many of the first season's episodes are quite weak compared to later offerings (IMO the first really good episode is S1E9 'Deathwalker').

Interesting. Every mention of the film I've seen focused on the social commentary being hamfisted and very blatantly a 1-for-1 real-world parallel to real world groups. It was such a universal opinion that I believed it was the creators' intention. If that's not the case and it's a more nuanced take, or just "playing with" those elements, that might tip me over the edge into checking it out.

Again, this is with the caveat of "this is just what I heard" since I never saw it. I apologize because I know that makes me a really frustrating conversation partner -- I can just retreat to the safety of "well I've never seen it, this is just what I've heard, so it's useless to argue with me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

I've seen Bright, and I'll speak for the conventional wisdom on this: that film has perhaps the worst urban fantasy worldbuilding I have ever seen, which is saying something. This is a film so lazy that Will Smith makes an extended riff based on the Shrek franchise to the face of a bunch of orc gang members, in a world where orcs have supposedly lived alongside other species for a thousand years and therefore the very idea of 'Shrek' as a thing is preposterous. It's also a film whose central commentary is about integrating an orc into the police force, but randomly shows a Centaur cop - which would be about ten times more challenging - in one scene with no explanation whatsoever.

The film actually works better if you broadly treat all the fantasy elements as a weird skin someone put over the footage and just envision it as a Bad Boys spin-off in which Will Smith's character gets a new partner.

Errorname

2024-05-09, 04:09 PM

I guess the moral is that no matter how fantastic your setting, and how completely and obviously disconnected it is from the "real world"

The film does everything in it's power to connect the fantastic elements of the setting to the real world, that's the foundational premise of the movie, the "real world" elements are the hook.

Interesting. Every mention of the film I've seen focused on the social commentary being hamfisted and very blatantly a 1-for-1 real-world parallel to real world groups. It was such a universal opinion that I believed it was the creators' intention.

Even if it wasn't the creators' intent (which I really strongly doubt, I don't think this sort of thing happens accidentally), there are very good reasons that people reading it as sloppy shallow and thoughtless social commentary was a very common reaction to it.

Tyndmyr

2024-05-09, 04:20 PM

But before you go, please help fund my efforts to recover my $37M fortune! If you can provide me 2 dozen donuts and a blank check from your account I promise to share my recovered fortune with you!

On topic - Babylon 5 and Doctor Who. Saw a few episodes of each and thought "Well this is no good". Guess about a bijillion sci-fi fan people disagree with me. Which is probably almost all of them.

- M

Who is a really mixed bag, I think even its fans will admit that. For every glorious episode, there is a *lot* of half baked ideas executed with a leftover prop budget of perhaps ten dollars and the worst CGI that money can buy.

There are some ideas and episodes that really do work, but if you're into wild and crazy sci fi without a strong need for continuity or realism, Rick and Morty largely just does it better on average.

The film actually works better if you broadly treat all the fantasy elements as a weird skin someone put over the footage and just envision it as a Bad Boys spin-off in which Will Smith's character gets a new partner.

That already exists, and is Men in Black.

Not a complaint, the MIB films were fun enough, just...it's amusing how similar Will Smith's character is in all of them.

Ionathus

2024-05-09, 04:47 PM

Who is a really mixed bag, I think even its fans will admit that. For every glorious episode, there is a *lot* of half baked ideas executed with a leftover prop budget of perhaps ten dollars and the worst CGI that money can buy.

There are some ideas and episodes that really do work, but if you're into wild and crazy sci fi without a strong need for continuity or realism, Rick and Morty largely just does it better on average.

Yep. Doctor Who is the campiest of the camp, and you really do have to go in knowing that. It does occasionally produce some real gems, but you have to sift for them.

I never got into Rick and Morty. "Ugly, abrasive, cynical adult cartoon" has never been my cup of tea. It's genuinely interesting to see it compared to Who, and especially weird to see someone say "Rick and Morty is a better execution of Doctor Who", given how wildly different their aesthetics are.

Tyndmyr

2024-05-09, 05:30 PM

Yep. Doctor Who is the campiest of the camp, and you really do have to go in knowing that. It does occasionally produce some real gems, but you have to sift for them.

I never got into Rick and Morty. "Ugly, abrasive, cynical adult cartoon" has never been my cup of tea. It's genuinely interesting to see it compared to Who, and especially weird to see someone say "Rick and Morty is a better execution of Doctor Who", given how wildly different their aesthetics are.

That's fair, they have a significant style difference. Rick and Morty is far cruder. However, the basic episodic space adventure insanity between the elder traveller and his young companion visiting various sci fi tropes is so very Dr Who that Rick has literally called himself Dr Who, and heck, even the theme music is pretty darned close. Play them back to back.

Errorname

2024-05-09, 06:05 PM

That's fair, they have a significant style difference. Rick and Morty is far cruder. However, the basic episodic space adventure insanity between the elder traveller and his young companion visiting various sci fi tropes is so very Dr Who that Rick has literally called himself Dr Who, and heck, even the theme music is pretty darned close. Play them back to back.

I can see it, but still even if the broad structure is the same the actual feel of the show is so different that I struggle to imagine Rick and Morty as a proper substitute.

Morgaln

2024-05-10, 09:00 AM

Batman Begins: I just didn't like that movie at all. The plot was a convoluted mess and the villain destroyed his own credibility halfway through the movie. I disliked the movie so much that I could never bring myself to watch the sequels.

I also have a few video game examples:

Xenogears: for some reason this game is often celebrated as one of Squaresoft's masterpieces, and I never understood why. The game's graphics were ugly even at the time of release (the character models looked worse than FFVII, which is a feat in itself). The story was weird and worse, about halfway through the game it just stops being a game and becomes basically a visual novel (as far as I know, they run out of budget to create the second half). It took me three tries to finally stick with it and finish the game, and I'm still not sure it was worth the time.

Memoria: This is a weird one, as it is a disconnect between which I consider the "good" ending and what others seem to think. Major spoilers for the game ahead:
Memoria is a point&click game set in the Dark Eye universe. it's the sequel to Chains of Satinav; CoS ends with the female lead (Nuri) being transformed into a raven by the magical energies set free by the villain. In Memoria, the B plot is trying to find a cure for that transformation. During the whole game, Nuri is a raven; she can still speak, but it is obvious that she is successively losing her "human" side (she's not actually human but that is irrelevant here); she's also turning into a raven mentally, and she is losing her memories as she does.
By the end of the game, she barely remembers anything. She doesn't remember Geron (the character you play and male lead) and she doesn't have any memories of the adventures they had together. Some of it comes back when prompted, but only vaguely, and it clearly distresses her as it makes her realize that she has lost memories and that there is something missing. On the other hand, multiple times during the game she has expressed how much she loves the freedom and lack of responsibilities in live as a raven.
At that point, you do find a cure, but you have to decide whether to actually apply it or whether to let her be a raven forever. For me, the choice was obvious. Even if I applied the cure, Nuri wouldn't remember anything. She'd not be the person Geron fell in love with, and she would always know there was something missing. So I decided to let her go, to have her live a happy live as a raven

Cue my surprise when I found out that is very much a minority opinion. Most people think turning her back is the right choice, claiming that missing memories aren't a big deal and you can just make new memories after all. Never mind how creepy it is to basically wake up with no memories at all and some guy being there telling you he's your boyfriend and to just trust him.

Mordar

2024-05-10, 11:07 AM

Batman Begins: I just didn't like that movie at all. The plot was a convoluted mess and the villain destroyed his own credibility halfway through the movie. I disliked the movie so much that I could never bring myself to watch the sequels.

To me, interesting ideas, so-so execution. Dark Knight was a bad movie with a great performance. Rises proved Nolan didn't use the version of Batman that matters to me, and can commit the sin of smashing together multiple big comic storylines in a way that sucks the good from each of them. And he again made Bane a chump...just not as bad a chump as we saw in previous films.

I suspect two of those are minority, but I think not such a big gap.

- M

KorvinStarmast

2024-05-10, 12:27 PM

Dr Who never did anything for me. So I ignored it. Didn't care for the Simpsons either.

Mx.Silver

2024-05-10, 04:56 PM

No, I call this collection of posts contrarianism! :smallamused:

Touché :smalltongue:

Oof, big agree, don't get me started. I have like five people total in my real life that I trust enough to talk about anime without A) them getting weird or B) them thinking I'm weird. It's got so much cultural baggage that you have to slog through to discuss anything, and you can never know if that person's only conception of anime is some truly heinous garbage...and worse, you can never know for sure if they like that heinous garbage or not. It's such a can of worms that I usually avoid it.

Yeah, pretty much. It also doesn't help that talking about it online in English-language spaces inevitably means running into that subset of Americans who seem to struggle with fully conceptualising non-American things and people1, more of whom watch anime than you might expect. Unsurprisingly they tend to be pretty bad about it, but that'd be getting off-topic for the thread. Also I don't want to have to remember a bunch of terribly conversations I've been stuck in over the years :smalltongue:

I've been trying to think of anything I have that's actually on topic. I guess, maybe that I'm less fond of Oppenheimer than people generally seemed to be? Like, I think it's an okay film, I just didn't expect the 'classic' and 'Nolan's best work' that a fair number of people were throwing around at the time. Although, I don't know if mine's really that much of a minority opinion a year after the fact, now that the 'back to the cinemas' hype's died-off.

1not all Americans are like that, obviously. Nor is this kind of behaviour unique to them (especially when talking about things related to Japan), but it is something you see more from Americans than you do from other parts of the online Anglosphere, likely for a variety of reasons it's not really worth getting into at the moment.

halfeye

2024-05-10, 07:17 PM

The Girl from Uncle.

Thr series showed up here after the Man from Uncle ended, and I liked it.

I guess a person's got to do what feels right to them, but I thought Hart to Hart made her too much of a doormat.

warty goblin

2024-05-10, 09:59 PM

To me, interesting ideas, so-so execution. Dark Knight was a bad movie with a great performance. Rises proved Nolan didn't use the version of Batman that matters to me, and can commit the sin of smashing together multiple big comic storylines in a way that sucks the good from each of them. And he again made Bane a chump...just not as bad a chump as we saw in previous films.

I suspect two of those are minority, but I think not such a big gap.

- M

I just don't find Batman interesting, like, even for a superhero he's boring. I liked the Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson Batman pretty well, because it had fantastic style and a lot of it wasn't very Batman-centric, but it would have been substantially improved with zero Batman content. Would have fixed the thing where all the functioning adults were standing around talking about serious things while studiously ignoring the dude in fetish gear gate-crashing the whole thing.

Because I didn't watch it until years after it came out, I wasn't surprised that I'm the only human on the planet who likes the John Carter movie, I just don't get why.

Ditto the Jason Momoa Conan movie. It's got everything a barbarian movie should have, biceps, boobs, blades and blood.

I remain deeply confused by the fact that most people apparently hate the Architect scene in Matrix Reloaded when it's the best scene in the movie.

That said, Cloud Atlas is the best piece of sci-fi this century. Fight me.

Ionathus

2024-05-11, 12:43 AM

Ooh! I remember one!

I watched Hancock, the bizarre superhero film, in theaters on a random day while trying to kill time until my mom finished her errands. It was just “what was playing” that day so I watched it.

I remember thinking it was weird, but okay enough. Interesting in some parts but the ending kinda petered out. But overall I liked it. Come to find out that people have very strong negative opinions on it.

For good reason, to be fair. It really is a weird, WEIRD movie.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-11, 04:57 AM

I think Hancock is one of those movies that's been reassessed over time now that people have figured out what it actually is as a movie and are judging it by that, not any expectations attached to "superhero movie" or "Will Smith movie". (And also pretty much everything Will Smith did since has shown how much worse it could have been).

Mechalich

2024-05-11, 05:06 AM

Because I didn't watch it until years after it came out, I wasn't surprised that I'm the only human on the planet who likes the John Carter movie, I just don't get why.

Nah, appreciation for John Carter has increased over time, to the point that it qualifies as 'officially underrated.' John Carter, like Solo, is another case of marketing failures overwhelming basically everything about the film itself. Disney basically strangled the marketing push for the film and also couldn't find it in themselves to title the movie 'John Carter of Mars' for inexplicable reasons. The movie failed catastrophically at the box office as a result and was considered in the general consciousness to be a failure until enough time passed for revisionist criticism to occur and permeate the internet.

John Carter isn't a great film - it has significant story, pacing, and acting problems (Dominic West, in particular, seems to have no idea what he's doing in the film at all) - but it's a fun film with some genuinely great visuals and set pieces that deserved better treatment.

The Glyphstone

2024-05-11, 06:00 AM

Peelee

2024-05-11, 07:23 AM

In other opinions, Memento is overrated. It *only* has any cred because of the disjointed flow of the sequences, but if you put them in order, the movie would be insanely boring, and even as is, it certainly isn't rewatchable.

I don't think "if you completely change the structure of the movie then it's not a good movie" is really the criticism you think it is.

Sermil

2024-05-11, 02:46 PM

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.

1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

One thing I've heard about professional movie critics -- I think I once heard a professional movie critic actually say this -- is that they watch a lot more movies than you or I do. A lot more. A professional critic might watch a movie every day of the week, or at least one every other day. Most of them also probably watched an unusually high number of movies when growing up, that's why they became critics.

The end result is that professional movie critics tend to be more excited by something new, something different than the average person. An average person, seeing a somewhat-clichéd-but-well-done bit, might say that it's well done. The professional critic, on the other hand, has seen that cliché over and over and over and over and is so sick of it that they only see how clichéd it is. So a movie that finally does something different or just doesn't fall into the same-old-tropes is going to automatically get bonus points from many critics just because they don't have that "oh, God, this again" reaction.

MarkVIIIMarc

2024-05-11, 07:20 PM

Bright with Will Smith.

I heard it was rhe worst movie ever and turned it on one night near midnight

Well darn it. They cuss in the most booring way possible and there are some plot holes but it was way better than worst movie ever. I actually enjoyed it.

llama-hedge

2024-05-11, 09:09 PM

My whole family really liked Pacific Heat, even though it was widely panned as a bad Archer ripoff. I've only seen a few episodes of Archer, but other than art style and genre I don't think they're that similar beyond the really superficial comparisons. The only reason I found this out was that I looked it up to find out when the next season was coming out, only to discover the chance of that ever happening was practically nil.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-12, 04:34 AM

Hancock could have been so much better if they hadn't hamfisted a romance subplot into the middle of it.

I think this is a perfect encapsulation of what I was talking about when I said people brought expectations to Hancock that stopped them seeing what it was.

That "subplot"? That's the plot. It's who the characters are, why they are where they are, and what decisions they need to make to change their situation.

The problem is that it has a really jarring transition into that out of the misanthrope comedy setup.

Rodin

2024-05-12, 05:13 AM

I think this is a perfect encapsulation of what I was talking about when I said people brought expectations to Hancock that stopped them seeing what it was.

That "subplot"? That's the plot. It's who the characters are, why they are where they are, and what decisions they need to make to change their situation.

The problem is that it has a really jarring transition into that out of the misanthrope comedy setup.

It almost feels like it was meant to be two movies. The first movie being where Hancock learns not to be a misanthrope and actually be a hero, and a second movie where his long lost love returns. Both halves are decent on their own, but as part of the same movie the plots don't mesh well.

BloodSquirrel

2024-05-12, 06:43 AM

Something I liked that others didn't, Solo. To this day, I do not understand why people don't like it. It was Han and Chewie: A Love Story, and that was exactly what I wanted out of that movie. Complaints about him taking the name Solo and the like just don't make sense to me - I didn't care about it, but if that annoyed a person, it was about five seconds of time in the movie.

From my experience, the general consensus on Solo was that it was an alright movie, but that it would have been improved if it wasn't trying to shoehorn itself into being a Han Solo backstory. The 'Solo' is a good example- it's annoying because it's trying too hard to explain something that we didn't need to have explained to us. We already understood the thematic purpose of Han's last name being "Solo". There's something very artificial in general about taking an established character and trying to cram an origin story for everything associated with him into one movie that covers a few days of his life.

But aside from that, there wasn't much particularly wrong with it, and the fact that it flopped had more to do with TLJ backlash than it being just that bad. I certainly liked it better than Rogue One, which I think would have flopped just as hard it if was coming after TLJ instead of coming during the post-TFA enthusiasm.

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.

1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

2. fans. Also crazy people. Also convinced that they know better about the subject matter than anyone else. While they don't have the insider pull that the first group has, they can be ridiculously vocal and loud about their opinions and thus influence things (usually in crazy ways). There is also only rare intersections of "what the fans want" and what I consider to be good ideas/stories/whatever.

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good story with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.

I don't think this breakdown works at all. The "experts/critics" from establishment media outlets are known much more for being borderline marketing agents for major corporate franchises than the "film snobs" they used to be, while Youtube critics (who are probably far more influential at this point) are generally more in line with "casual fan" opinion.

Meanwhile, reviews from the general public are always going to be dominated by people who have a strong opinion, because people are more motivated to talk about things they loved or hated than things that were "okay", but this doesn't mean that those people are from any one general category of fan. Someone may be 'meh' on most of the MCU, but really like and really hate a few MCU movies.

The old "snotty pretentious critics vs. dumb slob mass audiences" dynamic, to whatever degree it existed, died when the internet stripped professional film critics of their monopoly of public discussion of films.

Common problem with Feast for Crows even for people who were really into the first three, it takes a lot of big swings with new characters and secondary characters promoted to PoVs while not featuring some of the most established PoVs while also being a deeply bleak book.

I definitely liked it the least on first read, although I appreciate it more nowadays.

I really enjoyed A Feast For Crows for what it was- a character study on Cersei Lannister. It helped that I had just started the series and wasn't waiting on it or waiting for Dance afterward for years.

The bigger problem with those two books is that the bloat started to set it, GRRM started to get lost in his own garden, and the overall plot doesn't seem like it's making any progress. Dance was the bigger offender of the two, but it hurts both books that there was a lack of follow-up to all of the various plots and arcs that were being explored. If I had gone into A Feast For Crows after years of anticipation, anxious to see resolutions or at least major developments to the long-running plot, I might have been far more frustrated with it. But after having powered through the first three books in relatively short order, the change of pace was actually kind of welcome.

Lucat

2024-05-12, 03:22 PM

Probably got to be Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I watched it and thought that it was deeply mediocre, and carried the themes of the original comic in a very shallow and unsubtle way. Then, I noticed that tons of people absolutely loved the series, and even like it more than the comics. To be fair, a lot of people who said that hadn’t actually read the comics before watching the series.

Zevox

2024-05-12, 04:08 PM

Probably got to be Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.
Oh, that reminds me: one for me is Definitely Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Watched the movie after seeing everyone seemed to love it, including some friends of mine, and was not impressed at all. I recall feeling like it wanted to be funny, but didn't how to; and beyond that I guess you can say I found it forgettable, as I remember very little else of it at this point (granted it has been over a decade).

Lucat

2024-05-12, 05:04 PM

Oh, that reminds me: one for me is Definitely Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Watched the movie after seeing everyone seemed to love it, including some friends of mine, and was not impressed at all. I recall feeling like it wanted to be funny, but didn't how to; and beyond that I guess you can say I found it forgettable, as I remember very little else of it at this point (granted it has been over a decade).

The comics are a lot better. The humor in the comics and movie is a bit hit-or-miss, I will say.

Peelee

2024-05-12, 08:09 PM

Oh, that reminds me: one for me is Definitely Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Watched the movie after seeing everyone seemed to love it, including some friends of mine, and was not impressed at all. I recall feeling like it wanted to be funny, but didn't how to; and beyond that I guess you can say I found it forgettable, as I remember very little else of it at this point (granted it has been over a decade).

I read Lucat's post and almost replied immediately to say exactly what you said.

Zevox

2024-05-12, 10:45 PM

I read Lucat's post and almost replied immediately to say exactly what you said.
Ah, it's not just me then. :smallsmile:

Eldan

2024-05-13, 02:59 AM

I really enjoyed A Feast For Crows for what it was- a character study on Cersei Lannister. It helped that I had just started the series and wasn't waiting on it or waiting for Dance afterward for years.

The bigger problem with those two books is that the bloat started to set it, GRRM started to get lost in his own garden, and the overall plot doesn't seem like it's making any progress. Dance was the bigger offender of the two, but it hurts both books that there was a lack of follow-up to all of the various plots and arcs that were being explored. If I had gone into A Feast For Crows after years of anticipation, anxious to see resolutions or at least major developments to the long-running plot, I might have been far more frustrated with it. But after having powered through the first three books in relatively short order, the change of pace was actually kind of welcome.

In retrospect, I definitely think Dance with Dragons is the low point in the series. I really liked Feast of Crows, and moreso on a re-read, but Dragons just has such long stretches where nothing happens. And entire viewpoint character plotlines that just go nowhere and feel pointless. Man did I ever not care for Ser Whatsface in Dorne, or Quentyn Martell.

Ionathus

2024-05-13, 08:33 AM

It almost feels like it was meant to be two movies. The first movie being where Hancock learns not to be a misanthrope and actually be a hero, and a second movie where his long lost love returns. Both halves are decent on their own, but as part of the same movie the plots don't mesh well.

The commentary I usually see is that the first half of the movie was really good, and the second half ruined it. But I like your take on this better.

I think with an entire movie's runtime to work with, that second movie could have worked. Cut out or dramatically tone down the misanthrope stuff and give us a better arc for understanding the "immortal duo" and why these things matter. The premise for that second half was interesting and compelling: immortals who are paired for eternity but become mortal when they stay together -- that's a cool storytelling idea. The problem was that it came out of nowhere and didn't have any groundwork laid to build an interesting story in the time they had left.

Also the fact that the plan the "main villains" cook up is to shoot the invincible guy, and it only works because he happens to be -vincible now for reasons they couldn't have possibly predicted. :smallsigh:

halfeye

2024-05-13, 08:38 AM

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.

Peelee

2024-05-13, 08:56 AM

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.

https://media4.giphy.com/media/5xtDarmwsuR9sDRObyU/200.gif

Mordar

2024-05-13, 11:09 AM

Because I didn't watch it until years after it came out, I wasn't surprised that I'm the only human on the planet who likes the John Carter movie, I just don't get why.

I don't think people didn't like it...I think they just didn't pay to go see it. My recollection may be off, and I liked it (because lots of reasons, including the actors from Rome and Dejah...even useless Willem Dafoe can't ruin all of them)...I don't recall strong dislike from any sector other than Disney Finance.

Ditto the Jason Momoa Conan movie. It's got everything a barbarian movie should have, biceps, boobs, blades and blood.

You know the John Krasinski show on Amazon about the CIA employee? If they called that "John Bryan" it'd be a pretty alright show. If they'd have called the Momoa debacle "Barney the Not Very Civilized" I might have been able to stomach it. Had some cool scenes. No part of it Conan.

Is it a minority opinion to suggest that Momoa is a bargain basement, buy-one-get-three-free version of the Rock, and my favorite role of his is singing and dancing in the TMobile commercial with the kids from Scrubs?

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.

The Great Wall of China is bland and boring.

Oh, here's a potentially good one (and fully honest): Kurt Cobain was crap. Nirvana is a blight on Dave Grohl's resume.

- M

Tyndmyr

2024-05-13, 11:39 AM

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.

Excellent take.

I feel like half the stuff in the art world is borderline insane, and why this is the most famous painting just seems to be weird. It doesn't have any unusual composition or anything going for it, it's just a portrait.

One thing I've heard about professional movie critics -- I think I once heard a professional movie critic actually say this -- is that they watch a lot more movies than you or I do. A lot more. A professional critic might watch a movie every day of the week, or at least one every other day. Most of them also probably watched an unusually high number of movies when growing up, that's why they became critics.

Eh, in the post-pandemic world of streaming on demand, I feel like this is less of a thing than it used to be. I've seen an absolute crapton of movies, and there are a nigh-infinite number of them on tap at any point. Having seen lots of movies isn't really a rare trait nowadays.

I don't think "if you completely change the structure of the movie then it's not a good movie" is really the criticism you think it is.

Something relying solely on a twist is okayish the first time, but it doesn't make for a rewatchable film. Non-sequential storytelling isn't that weird, and a great film that uses it, but has other advantages as well, such as Pulp Fiction, is gloriously rewatchable. Memento doesn't have that.

Nah, appreciation for John Carter has increased over time, to the point that it qualifies as 'officially underrated.' John Carter, like Solo, is another case of marketing failures overwhelming basically everything about the film itself. Disney basically strangled the marketing push for the film and also couldn't find it in themselves to title the movie 'John Carter of Mars' for inexplicable reasons. The movie failed catastrophically at the box office as a result and was considered in the general consciousness to be a failure until enough time passed for revisionist criticism to occur and permeate the internet.

John Carter isn't a great film - it has significant story, pacing, and acting problems (Dominic West, in particular, seems to have no idea what he's doing in the film at all) - but it's a fun film with some genuinely great visuals and set pieces that deserved better treatment.

John Carter suffers from having multiple sets of bookending on either side of it, resulting in a lot of stuff that isn't actually the main story you've sat down to see. However, it absolutely could have been awesome.

The film within a film that is inside of Fall Guy is basically "John Carter, but awesome" if you are craving that. Fall Guy is a solid flick in general, not a bad thing to grab while it's in theaters. Bit of an homage to stuntmen, and definitely a lot of stunts in the movie, which I enjoy.

Peelee

2024-05-13, 01:38 PM

Non-sequential storytelling isn't that weird, and a great film that uses it, but has other advantages as well, such as Pulp Fiction, is gloriously rewatchable.

Keeping in mind this thread is for works where I'm considered rhe minority:

Pulp Fiction is wildly overrated. It's still ok, which for me is miles better than some other stuff Tarantino has done.

Although I've never been surprised to discover I'm in the minority on this opinion.

Errorname

2024-05-13, 03:00 PM

Cazero

2024-05-13, 03:22 PM

It's a perfectly fine painting, but it was made famous when it was stolen and recovered.
Weird, I was sure it was made famous by virtue of being the works of someone famous.

Mordar

2024-05-13, 03:53 PM

It's a perfectly fine painting, but it was made famous when it was stolen and recovered.

While that was a popularizing moment, I think it carries with it several qualities that make it so important/regarded/known - the advanced realism of the portrait, the depiction of light/shadow, the anatomy underlying the portrait (maybe LdV's greatest skill was in depicting anatomy, and that's saying something!), the value placed on it by contemporaries, and yes, the placement in the Louve (story says both the museum and the artwork gained fame together).

Yup, it isn't very exciting, but the artistic importance is based on fundamentals. It is the Celtics, not the Lakers. If you're old enough to know Larry and Magic.

My favorite piece in the Louve by far...Winged Nike of Samothrace. Maybe the Greeks couldn't paint but they could shape the heck out of stone.

Minority take: Gothic German architecture crushes Hausmann. But Hausmann's urban design (what he was actually supposed to do, I think) makes places look much more livable.

- M

Peelee

2024-05-13, 04:31 PM

Weird, I was sure it was made famous by virtue of being the works of someone famous.

Indeed, just like Ginevra de’ Benci, Adoration of the Magi, and Salvator Mundi. All of which were done by the same dude who did Mona Lisa. Now, just a shot in the dark here, but how many of these were you familiar with before I named them?

Fun fact, assuming anyone says "none of them", there was even a boost to Salvator Mundi's fame when it sold for half a billion dollars not too long ago. But even then, still largely under the radar in general modern cultural zeitgeist.

Louve

Louve
Louvre.

Those wacky French!

Errorname

2024-05-13, 04:44 PM

Weird, I was sure it was made famous by virtue of being the works of someone famous.

It was a known piece of art from a famed artist, but it wasn't definitive and universally recognizable in the way it is now prior to it being stolen

Mordar

2024-05-13, 05:07 PM

Louvre.

Those wacky French!

Absoluvrey correct.

The shame.

- M

Tyndmyr

2024-05-13, 06:02 PM

Keeping in mind this thread is for works where I'm considered rhe minority:

Pulp Fiction is wildly overrated. It's still ok, which for me is miles better than some other stuff Tarantino has done.

Although I've never been surprised to discover I'm in the minority on this opinion.

Love the film myself, probably very close to the perfect movie, if I had to pick one.

Tarantino does maybe get a little overhyped, though. His average film is pretty good, better than Hollywood's average, but, say, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gets a little too fixated on a specific era, and unless you really, really want an ode to hollywood, it's a bit thin. Oh, it's got a coupla great scenes, but all in all, it's a B tier film at best. Not to mention his foot thing coming up in basically all his films.

PirateMonk

2024-05-14, 12:30 AM

I really enjoyed watching The Book of Henry and was surprised to later learn it had gotten fairly negative reviews. Although my rebuttal to the critics can be summed up as, "you say 'tonal whiplash and bizarre plot twists' like that's a bad thing", so maybe I should have seen that coming.

Conversely, I watched Team StarKid's The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals last year despite being unenthusiastic about the premise because the sequels seemed interesting. It wound up being a bit worse then I expected (most of the songs didn't do much for me and it didn't walk the line between entertainingly meta and obnoxiously meta very gracefully), though at least the lead actors were charismatic enough to render it watchable. While browsing the franchise's TVTropes page, I learned that the show attracted a substantial new fanbase, many of whom disliked the (far superior in my view) sequels.

As a more marginal example, I rewatched The Adventures of Tintin (2011) a few years ago and was surprised in retrospect by how nonexistent its lasting cultural impact has been.

Rodin

2024-05-14, 02:24 AM

In retrospect, I definitely think Dance with Dragons is the low point in the series. I really liked Feast of Crows, and moreso on a re-read, but Dragons just has such long stretches where nothing happens. And entire viewpoint character plotlines that just go nowhere and feel pointless. Man did I ever not care for Ser Whatsface in Dorne, or Quentyn Martell.

The problem with Feast and Dance is that they were meant to be a single book. GRRM started writing and realized he had way too many ideas, so he split them - one focusing on the south, the other on the north and east.

That’s where the bloat sets in. There isn’t enough forward progress because the two books take place mostly simultaneously. Plot build-up is slow in the side plots because what would have gotten a few chapters in previous books (or not shown directly at all) is now given large portions of a book. Separating the regions means we get nothing from some characters for an entire book, but then they get half a book to themselves. Or vice-versa.

Dance is worse I think because there aren’t as many interesting factions in the North and around Daenerys. If the two books had been interwoven with the bloaty side plots cut down I think they would have been better received.

KorvinStarmast

2024-05-14, 07:52 AM

Kurt Cobain was crap. Nirvana is a blight Yes. And Pearl Jam is overrated. (I know, tastes differ, but I was wearing flannel shirts back in the 70's...).

Peelee

2024-05-14, 08:07 AM

Yes. And Pearl Jam is overrated. (I know, tastes differ, but I was wearing flannel shirts back in the 70's...).

I'm not a fan, but also, I don't think people were buying records because of the flannel.

Eldan

2024-05-14, 08:09 AM

Louvre.

Those wacky French!

Wacky English, really. In French, the r isn't silent.

Mordar

2024-05-14, 10:40 AM

I'm not a fan, but also, I don't think people were buying records because of the flannel.

Because it is crazy hard to play a flannel record!

- M

Peelee

2024-05-15, 05:05 AM

Finally pegged down something that had been gnawing at me:

Something relying solely on a twist is okayish the first time, but it doesn't make for a rewatchable film. Non-sequential storytelling isn't that weird, and a great film that uses it, but has other advantages as well, such as Pulp Fiction, is gloriously rewatchable. Memento doesn't have that.

Would I be surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers of i think that not every movie needs to be rewatchable?

Tyndmyr

2024-05-15, 03:19 PM

Finally pegged down something that had been gnawing at me:

Would I be surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers of i think that not every movie needs to be rewatchable?

They don't have to be, but it's a definite plus when they are.

Vahnavoi

2024-05-16, 02:11 AM

I feel like half the stuff in the art world is borderline insane, and why this is the most famous painting just seems to be weird. It doesn't have any unusual composition or anything going for it, it's just a portrait.

Especially when it comes to older art, good part of it stems from them being artifacts of age, and reviewed from viewpoint, of it being non-trivial to produce quality work. You, on the other hand, live in an age when there's massively more people and both the knowledge and the means to generate equivalent works is more widespread.

Related, I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority for defending "unnecessary remakes". There is no such thing. The thought of an "original" that can't be improved on or shouldn't be replicated is by-product of an age when it's too easy to record and copy performances. This is an anomaly. It has been overwhelmingly more normal to keep art alive by re-enacting it. Just giving new people something to do is a justification for re-enacting or remaking a work. The value of a finished re-enactment or remake may vary, but should only be decided after the fact. I have spoken. :smalltongue:

pita

2024-05-16, 06:51 AM

I find the ending of The Good Place upsettingly bad but most people I talk to about it put it as one of the best TV finales of all time. I also don't absolutely hate the Lost ending (I think it's a mixed bag caused by mismatched writer/audience expectations) so maybe I'm just weird about endings.

Ionathus

2024-05-16, 10:02 AM

Related, I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority for defending "unnecessary remakes". There is no such thing. The thought of an "original" that can't be improved on or shouldn't be replicated is by-product of an age when it's too easy to record and copy performances. This is an anomaly. It has been overwhelmingly more normal to keep art alive by re-enacting it. Just giving new people something to do is a justification for re-enacting or remaking a work. The value of a finished re-enactment or remake may vary, but should only be decided after the fact. I have spoken. :smalltongue:

Same. I'll often think "...why are they adapting this?" but I'll stop short of saying remakes shouldn't happen. There's always another potential story to tell, and the best adaptations give us a new look or perspective.

Obviously if the remake sucks, then I'm happy to dunk it in the garbage and blame the studio for churning out uninspired nostalgia bait. And if a studio gets a reputation for this, then they no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. But all things being equal, if I don't already have a reason to mistrust the creative team, I'm almost always on the side of "let them cook" when it comes to adaptations or remakes.

I find the ending of The Good Place upsettingly bad but most people I talk to about it put it as one of the best TV finales of all time.

This is indeed a certified minority opinion as far as I know! Everyone I've talked to has really loved The Good Place's ending, myself included.

pita

2024-05-16, 12:07 PM

This is indeed a certified minority opinion as far as I know! Everyone I've talked to has really loved The Good Place's ending, myself included.
Gonna spoil the hell out of it
There were two huge missteps in the last season that tanked it, IMO.
The first, and minor one, is the character of Brent. The Good Place sort of avoided the question of actual Evil in the show. "Does Hitler deserve redemption". The worst character in the show was Eleanor, who was selfish, a little cruel, mean, and in part thanks to Kristen Bell being low-key one of the best actresses alive, incredibly charming. We were on Eleanor's side throughout her redemption, and we loved it happening, and we loved the relapses, and we loved everything about her. Brent, on the other hand, was the sort of evil we get to know in real life. Brent wasn't trash the way Eleanor is, he was evil. He was unpleasant to be around. He was overall terrible. And he brings to question this core idea that the show tries to answer, "does everyone deserve a chance", and the show sorta answers it with "not really". We see, after everyone has found their perfect selves, that Brent still sucks. This is minor, but serves as a bit of a damper on the last season as a whole, as he's a big part of it throughout its first half.
The second thing, the thing that made me go "you seriously went and did this?", is this: The entire show, the core premise of the later seasons, is that these four misfits made each other better people. That it was what they had gone through together that molded them and made them better. They were supposed to torture each other, and they did, but they taught each other how to work on their worst parts. Basically, the Good Place was saying "the real good place is the friends we meet along the way".
After we went through a whole arc of "these people are better people because of who they'd been with and the lives they've shared", something that goes so far as to make Chidi decisive, the answer the show comes to is "Heaven kinda sucks, actual death is better". They had the perfect answer of "The Good Place is the people you love" right there in their hands and went with "The Good Place can only be good with suicide". It was bull**** and it pissed me off. My gut feeling was that there was a bit of a How I Met Your Mother thing going on, where they had the ending they wanted in mind and tried to reverse engineer it and it didn't work, and they still did it in spite of going with a new ending that fit where they were with the characters.
TLDR: The Good Place betrayed the hell out of the premise it had developed for three and a half seasons in order to deliver A Big Idea that didn't work for me.

Tyndmyr

2024-05-16, 01:53 PM

I find the ending of The Good Place upsettingly bad but most people I talk to about it put it as one of the best TV finales of all time.

I'm with you on that.

Fortunately, if you simply pretend the last episode does not exist, the penultimate episode also works gloriously as a finale with a wildly different message.

Ionathus

2024-05-16, 02:23 PM

Gonna spoil the hell out of it
There were two huge missteps in the last season that tanked it, IMO.
The first, and minor one, is the character of Brent. The Good Place sort of avoided the question of actual Evil in the show. "Does Hitler deserve redemption". The worst character in the show was Eleanor, who was selfish, a little cruel, mean, and in part thanks to Kristen Bell being low-key one of the best actresses alive, incredibly charming. We were on Eleanor's side throughout her redemption, and we loved it happening, and we loved the relapses, and we loved everything about her. Brent, on the other hand, was the sort of evil we get to know in real life. Brent wasn't trash the way Eleanor is, he was evil. He was unpleasant to be around. He was overall terrible. And he brings to question this core idea that the show tries to answer, "does everyone deserve a chance", and the show sorta answers it with "not really". We see, after everyone has found their perfect selves, that Brent still sucks. This is minor, but serves as a bit of a damper on the last season as a whole, as he's a big part of it throughout its first half.
The second thing, the thing that made me go "you seriously went and did this?", is this: The entire show, the core premise of the later seasons, is that these four misfits made each other better people. That it was what they had gone through together that molded them and made them better. They were supposed to torture each other, and they did, but they taught each other how to work on their worst parts. Basically, the Good Place was saying "the real good place is the friends we meet along the way".
After we went through a whole arc of "these people are better people because of who they'd been with and the lives they've shared", something that goes so far as to make Chidi decisive, the answer the show comes to is "Heaven kinda sucks, actual death is better". They had the perfect answer of "The Good Place is the people you love" right there in their hands and went with "The Good Place can only be good with suicide". It was bull**** and it pissed me off. My gut feeling was that there was a bit of a How I Met Your Mother thing going on, where they had the ending they wanted in mind and tried to reverse engineer it and it didn't work, and they still did it in spite of going with a new ending that fit where they were with the characters.
TLDR: The Good Place betrayed the hell out of the premise it had developed for three and a half seasons in order to deliver A Big Idea that didn't work for me.

1. IMO The show doesn't say "not really" to the idea of Brent's redemption -- it says "not yet." As they're devising the final afterlife test that ultimately gets implemented (you're tested, you get feedback, you're rebooted, you try again), they acknowledge that some people may never break out of the cycle if they're truly that selfish/ignorant/cruel. But that's up to them. We even see a little moment of Brent in the finale, multiple Bearimys into the future, and he's still going through the process for the umpteenth time. Maybe he'll figure it out one day.

Keep in mind that the second set of humans was, morally speaking, "roughly equivalent" to the original Team Cockroach. When they're setting up the test, The Judge has some line about how the Bad Place is required to send four test subjects who had similar point totals. So Brent sucks, more than any other human in the cast by a long shot, but probably not orders of magnitude more. His real barrier to improvement is less any actively evil intentions and more his absolute lack of self-awareness or empathy.

Ultimately, it was a tricky thing to write about. You can't really get away with depicting truly cruel or depraved people going through these tests: depicting a serial killer as a test subject would completely ruin the tone of the show. But I think they leave it as elegantly as they can, with a solution that "scales" to both minor evil like Brent and the more abhorrent evil they had the good sense to not depict: eventually, with infinite time and effort to work with, anyone who's trying to improve themselves will get there. That's the point of "the new system."

2. As for the finale itself: nobody can tell you how to feel about the showrunners' philosophy. If it wasn't to your tastes, then it wasn't to your tastes, and I'm sorry the ending hurt the experience for you.

That said: I don't think your preferred message is as incompatible with the show's conclusion as you think. They do get better together, as friends. They do conclude that people working together make each other better. They spend countless ages in the true Good Place together. And they save most of humanity from unearned eternal torture. They accomplish what they set out to do. And then, eventually, they've had their fill of it. That doesn't cheapen the experiences they had. Human life is all about change and impermanence. Given how many layers-within-layers Team Cockroach's afterlife experience was, it feels quite consistent with the rest of the show that they would end on "moving on to the next thing."

they had the ending they wanted in mind and tried to reverse engineer it
I hope this doesn't sound snarky but...keep in mind this is kind of what you're doing right now. You had formed an expectation of the ending in your head, and as a result you weren't receptive to the message they had to share because you were waiting for them to say the thing you wanted to hear. I disagree with you pretty strongly that this comes out of nowhere. The message of change and impermanence is baked into the entire show from the get-go.

Goodness knows I've done this same thing a bunch -- most recently with Hadestown, which I enjoyed the first time but felt they fumbled the ending. After a conversation with several people and reading some analysis of the show, I've re-evaluated my own conclusions and done a complete 180 -- I believe wholeheartedly that they executed exactly what they were going for brilliantly. As a result, it's turned from one of my least favorite endings into something that resonates very deeply.

Ramza00

2024-05-16, 02:32 PM

come on man, we can not talk the good place, a show about the after-life

without talking about religion, and thus breaking the board rules about that :smalltongue:

for if I say the word storehouse , a kind of accumulated point system , well that is so close to saying magic religious words about the self show

and these things have been debated before, these mine-fields ]Doug Forcett: The man who got it right, well 92% of it![/COLOR]

Peelee

2024-05-16, 02:33 PM

On the second point, I feel like it should be reframed as "things end, and that's ok". Endings are scary, much more in life than in TV. But, generally speaking, regardless of how much or little you want something to end, everything will eventually end. In The Good Place, they ultimately end up in an eternal place where things don't end. And they're eventually given the choice to end it anyway. It's not necessary to make that choice. But it's ok to do it, because it's ok to let things end.

Framing it as suicide brings in all the standard implications of the word "suicide", which is typically attached to excessive mental or emotional distress, which is nothing at all like what the scenario is when Team Cockroach makes their decision. They have no distress, are mentally and emotionally well, and have full unfettered and unrestricted informed consent as to what the choice entails.

tl;dr - it's ok for things to end.

Ionathus

2024-05-16, 03:20 PM

]Doug Forcett: The man who got it right, well 92% of it![/COLOR]

Ehh, Doug Forcett was alright, but I never really forgave him for how he mistreated his brother Jimmy. Underneath all of that good-natured radish growing and snail mourning lurks a petty, vindictive man.

Peelee

2024-05-16, 04:22 PM

Ehh, Doug Forcett was alright, but I never really forgave him for how he mistreated his brother Jimmy. Underneath all of that good-natured radish growing and snail mourning lurks a petty, vindictive man.

I know it's blue text but I really hate that argument.

Ionathus

2024-05-16, 04:52 PM

I know it's blue text but I really hate that argument.

Haha, I knew going full blue text would be necessary!

Saul Goodman is the new Walter White. Lots of viewers were charmed by him, and they'll look for any excuse they can find to absolve him of his actions.

Peelee

2024-05-16, 04:57 PM

Haha, I knew going full blue text would be necessary!

Saul Goodman is the new Walter White. Lots of viewers were charmed by him, and they'll look for any excuse they can find to absolve him of his actions.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/5xtDarmwsuR9sDRObyU/200w.webp?cid=6c09b952jzm1f8vxk7fhcyq6fysygxcqn6q0 c4n7rzkt85rk&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=200w.webp&ct=g

Seriously, the amount of time I've spent trying to tell people that a show about an unbelievably capable con-man who is charismatic as all get-out has conned them into believing he's a victim is a fantastic example of how cons can be effective, i tells ya....

Errorname

2024-05-16, 05:17 PM

Goodness knows I've done this same thing a bunch -- most recently with Hadestown, which I enjoyed the first time but felt they fumbled the ending. After a conversation with several people and reading some analysis of the show, I've re-evaluated my own conclusions and done a complete 180 -- I believe wholeheartedly that they executed exactly what they were going for brilliantly. As a result, it's turned from one of my least favorite endings into something that resonates very deeply.

I will say do prefer the concept album version of Doubt Comes In where it's just Orpheus and Eurydice without the Fates, but I haven't seen the show live yet so maybe it'll play better in the theater.

Also curious about what you felt they fumbled about the ending. Is it just the general sticking to the myth's tragic ending or was it something specific about the execution

pita

2024-05-16, 05:25 PM

Haha, I knew going full blue text would be necessary!

Saul Goodman is the new Walter White. Lots of viewers were charmed by him, and they'll look for any excuse they can find to absolve him of his actions.

I recently rewatched Breaking Bad and then saw BCS for the first time. I definitely disliked Walter far more than I did Jimmy. I do feel like it was less "one brother to blame" and more "a plague on both of your houses". Less "Jimmy's the victim" more "dear god, people, learn to leave each other alone". Though Jimmy did go absurdly over the top in his revenge, and was also terrible to begin with, meaning I've just argued myself into supporting Chuck.

NGL if I met someone who behaved like Doug Forcett there is a part of me that would absolutely hate him. I feel like he's got the same problem Tahani did, combined with Chidi's problem - He's doing things out of a selfish motivation, because he thinks everyone else will burn in hell and he won't, but he's also so overfocused on exactly what the right thing is that he's encouraging misery. It's good to tell a kid who's getting a little too into hurting you to stop it. A snail doesn't care what you name it.

Somewhat back on topic for the thread, I also have a somewhat unpopular Breaking Bad opinion

Walter White becomes a supervillain in the last 2 seasons, culminating in him doing some genuinely awesome stuff in the last episode, and it undermines all of the great work of the first three seasons.

J-H

2024-05-17, 06:27 AM

It was apparently a failure, but I thought the Black Adam movie was pretty fun. Most supers spend their time just fighting other supers with slow-mo battles and big team-ups. I enjoyed seeing a speedster/tank just let loose against a modern(?) military(?). The fights were far above average in general, except maybe the last guy (demon transformation dude). The plot holes were mostly caused by insufficient worldbuilding that's probably in the comics (Why is this Khandaq place ruled by American/European mercenaries?).
I'd rather see more of it than Superman movie #10 or Batman #15.

Eldan

2024-05-17, 08:32 AM

Speaking of superheroes, I thought The Marvels was a pretty average to good Marvel movie, and definitely one of the better ones since Endgame. Light hearted, short (definitely a bonus, they have been getting way too long), fun characters, a good action scene or two, a creative idea or two, and not too much crowbared in universe building or cameos, either. Perfectly serviceable. Of course the story was stupid from start to finish, but it's still a marvel movie.

So I came out of the cinema thinking "yes, this was a perfectly reasonably spent evening watching a forgetable superhero movie", and then went online and saw everyone hated it.

Ionathus

2024-05-17, 10:13 AM

Seriously, the amount of time I've spent trying to tell people that a show about an unbelievably capable con-man who is charismatic as all get-out has conned them into believing he's a victim is a fantastic example of how cons can be effective, i tells ya....

You know, I've never really thought about Jimmy's charisma affecting me as the viewer before, which seems pretty gullible when I say it out loud. :smallbiggrin:

I recently rewatched Breaking Bad and then saw BCS for the first time. I definitely disliked Walter far more than I did Jimmy. I do feel like it was less "one brother to blame" and more "a plague on both of your houses". Less "Jimmy's the victim" more "dear god, people, learn to leave each other alone". Though Jimmy did go absurdly over the top in his revenge, and was also terrible to begin with, meaning I've just argued myself into supporting Chuck.

The great thing about their dynamic as brothers is how emotional and believable their fraught dynamic is, and how much you want to root for one or the other at different times! It's a messy, complicated relationship. Jimmy does seem to genuinely love Chuck, and he's putting in a lot of work to take care of him through his illness at the start of the show. At the same time, he absolutely does not deserve to keep practicing law. He does blatantly illegal and unethical things for highly vindictive and selfish reasons. Jimmy really is a "chimp with a machine gun", and a lot of people do get hurt. Just because Chuck is a nasty, belittling, manipulative ass about saying it doesn't change the fact that it's true.

I also have a somewhat unpopular Breaking Bad opinion

Walter White becomes a supervillain in the last 2 seasons, culminating in him doing some genuinely awesome stuff in the last episode, and it undermines all of the great work of the first three seasons.

Yeah, the Breaking Bad finale is probably too "clean" and Walt gets more redemption than I think he deserves. I'm willing to forgive them for it, though, since it's still just so damn cathartic. To me, it's less about Walt getting an actual redemption -- after all, he still dumps a bunch of money on Gretchen and Elliot and then makes them think assassins are trailing them. He didn't come back just for redemption: even now, he's still hung up on making sure he gets credit for the money he "earned". It's a cool scene, but it shows that Walt's not done a total one-eighty. That pride is still there.

To me, the emotional weight of the finale is more about the conversation he has with Skylar ("I did it for me"), and the confrontation he has with Jesse ("I want this." "Then do it yourself."). Two of the best scenes in the show, and a great chance to give closure to the two people Walt hurt and manipulated the most.

On topic for the thread: I genuinely don't know how other people felt since I've never seen much discourse about the final BCS season, but I didn't really care for the Better Call Saul finale, for many of the same reasons you didn't like the Breaking Bad finale.

Knowing now what the "present day" scenes in Better Call Saul are building to, I don't think they add much. I think you could've just left the story as a pure prequel and ended it after the resolution with Lalo and Howard. People are in their starting positions for Breaking Bad, Saul has committed to fully jumping off the slippery slope, and Kim has gotten her digs in about how he loves the con too much and got in over his head. That's a more satisfying conclusion than Saul striking a deal and then going back on it with a long speech. It was a drawn-out anticlimax that didn't really do much for me.

Also curious about what you felt they fumbled about the ending. Is it just the general [storytelling choices] or was it something specific about the execution

Oooh, I'm so glad you asked! I've been wanting someone to ask me this question for a long time!

(Keep in mind, this is talking about what I originally thought they'd fumbled. After reconsidering my position, I now think this is a strength rather than a weakness.)

I watched Hadestown live, on tour, and it was amazing the whole way through, but I struggled with the ending. I thought it was muddled or they missed their own "point." Because the show acknowledges multiple times that it's a sad story with a sad ending, yet remains so relentlessly optimistic, I really built myself up for them to do something subversive at the finale, or change the ending somehow. Everyone already knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. What's the point of being coy about the doomed lovers' story if you're just going to "play it straight?"

I came into the show under the impression that it was about love, and lost love, and working together to mend your relationships and forgive each other. And those are some of the themes of Hadestown. But my mistake was in thinking that this was the entire point. I was so confused why Orpheus would have any doubt at all, and why he would question Eurydice's commitment. Why would he turn around at the last second? Again, we all know that he does. So it's so weird that the show makes a knowing wink at the audience about the doomed heroes, but then still dooms them anyway, supposedly because Orpheus didn't love her enough?? To me it felt cheap and contrived.

But the trick of Hadestown, which I only realized after reading some analysis and listening to the album again, is that it's not a story about love. Not mostly at least. It's a story about hope. Hades and Persephone don't struggle because they don't love each other -- they struggle because they've lost the hope that things can ever be better again. Same for Orpheus and Eurydice. Same for everyone on the surface. Orpheus's power in this world isn't that he's got a lovely voice and he sings a good love song that gets Hades horny again or whatever -- Orpheus's power is that "he could make you see how the world could be...in spite of the way that it is."

Orpheus brings hope to everyone he interacts with -- other humans, Eurydice, Persephone, all the shades, even Hades himself. He brings the world back into harmony and saves them from the broken cycle of the seasons. But in doing so, he gets absolutely put through the wringer and he loses his own optimism along the way. That's why he looks back for Eurydice at the end. Not because he doesn't love her, or he suspects her of not loving him enough to follow him home. He looks back because he doesn't believe that Hades actually had a change of heart and allowed her to leave. He doesn't believe he's worth following. He doesn't believe that he deserves Eurydice after he let her down. His love for Eurydice never fails. It's his hope that fails.

And if that was where the show ended, I would still probably be mad about it. But there's one more song that wraps it all up: Hermes doing a reprise of the opening number. And hearing his words in a new light, with all of the talk about hope and continuing to try over and over, no matter what (Persephone to Hades: "Are we gonna try again?"), the story about optimism that infuses the entire show, there's an added meaning now:

Don't ask why, brother, don't ask how
He could have come so close
The song was written long ago
And that is how it goes

It's a sad song
It's a sad tale
It's a tragedy
It's a sad song
But we sing it anyway.

'Cause here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time
I learned that from a friend of mine

Hermes is telling the story of Hadestown, over and over and over again. Knowing it won't change, but being willing to hope it can anyway. My first time through, I thought this was just a narrative trick to wrap it all up. But it's something else entirely. Hermes knows that Orpheus and Eurydice are doomed. And he doesn't care. He's going to keep being hopeful, keep trying, as a conscious choice. The show turns optimism into more than fuzzy feelings or a successful love story: it becomes an act of defiance.

And, without getting too into my personal life or real-world topics...well, let's just say the idea of a defiant, active hope, a hope that realizes how bad the odds are and doesn't care -- that idea hit me a lot harder than I expected.

The Glyphstone

2024-05-17, 03:55 PM

That was my fear. I appreciate everyone who has engaged this topic objectively! Thank you all for being willing to analyze the things you liked and didn't like from a bit of a distance, as a curiosity rather than a rant!

Galaxy Trucker is one of those games where I absolutely love the concept, but actually playing it drives me up a wall :smallamused: Every time I play, I get fixated on building a perfectly efficient ship, which is completely against the spirit of the game. It doesn't help that my wife isn't cutthroat enough to punish me for being a perfectionist1 :smallcool:

1. To those who haven't played it: Galaxy Trucker has a mechanic where one player can rush through their "building time" at the start of a round, to force the other players to finish faster than they'd like. My wife is better at building faster than I am, so in theory she'd be able to "punish" my perfectionism by catching me with a half-built ship. But she's too nice to take advantage of that.

I'm actually a perfectionist too, which is why I only play the game in turn-based mode.

Rodin

2024-05-23, 12:10 PM

Peelee

2024-05-23, 12:28 PM

I must have had really bad taste as a 14 year old

There's actually a name for that phenomenon! It's called "being 14 years old". :smalltongue:

I'm not about to act like i was immune to that phenomenon either.

Ionathus

2024-05-23, 01:08 PM

As a kid, I vastly preferred The Secret Of NIMH 2: Timmy To The Rescue! over the original.

Kids have no taste: never have, and never will. That's a quantifiable fact of life.

Metastachydium

2024-05-23, 01:22 PM

There's actually a name for that phenomenon! It's called "being 14 years old". :smalltongue:

Also, it has an early onset in some countries because people commonly just skip year 13.[/BLUE]

Batcathat

2024-05-23, 01:26 PM

Oooh, I just remembered one where I boomeranged. I watched Batman & Robin when it came out, and found it pretty entertaining. It was goofy Batman stuff, and I didn't think much more about it. Years later, I found out that it apparently sucked. It was long enough that I didn't have clear memories, so I just kinda shrugged it off.

Then it came on TV one day over a decade after I had originally seen it in the cinema. Hooooooo boyyy. I must have had really bad taste as a 14 year old, because it was hilarious for a completely different set of reasons then my enjoyment of it as a kid. So I got surprised by my own surprise about how bad the movie was!

On the topic of Robins, I remember watching Robin Hood: Prince of thieves when I was also probably around 14 or so and thinking it was pretty cool, which is... definitely not the majority opinion, though I don't remember whether or not I was aware of that at the time (probably not, since I had just recently started using the internet at that age).

KorvinStarmast

2024-05-23, 01:41 PM

Mordar

2024-05-23, 02:39 PM

On the topic of Robins, I remember watching Robin Hood: Prince of thieves when I was also probably around 14 or so and thinking it was pretty cool, which is... definitely not the majority opinion, though I don't remember whether or not I was aware of that at the time (probably not, since I had just recently started using the internet at that age).

I enjoyed it and was a bit disappointed at the nay sayers.

It was very well received when it came out, and despite the clever Mel Brooks smacks on it Costner Robin is a much more enduring image than either Elwes Robin or Crowe Robin. So yeah, I'm with Korvin.

Flipped opinion: I was not at all excited by Burton's Batman when it first came out, and it was actually a few weeks before I went to see it (despite being a pretty solid comic book fan...though in the middle teen years cleaved to Marvel like all good teens). The thing I liked most about the movie was the soundtrack, and overall I thought the film pretty meh. Over the years though, it grew on me. Batman Returns is still the best of all the Batman theatrical releases, but Batman now runs a strong number 2.

No, The Dark Knight wasn't good. It was a terrible movie on several levels, but had a transcendent performance by Ledger. Doesn't mean Bale was good, and Nolanverse bit.

- M

Gnoman

2024-05-23, 07:36 PM

Peelee

2024-05-23, 08:31 PM

This is a bit of an inverse, because I knew the general opinion before going into the show, but I had a very different reaction to Don Draper of Mad Men than what I expected.

Most people seem to think he's cool and awesome early on while gradually souring on him as you realize he's a bad person.

Me? I found him to be a loathsome piece of human excrement from episode 1, only to gradually warm up to him as his past starts getting revealed. As the show went on, I began to look at him as someone who is not a great person, but is genuinely trying to rise above the cesspool he came out of, and at a deep level knows there's something not right about him.

That's exactly how I felt about Walter and Skylar White when watching Breaking Bad for the first time. Walter just got worse and worse, Skylar was trying to get out of an increasingly abusive relationship, and everyone went on about how Walter was so awesome and Skylar was such a bitch.

And not dissimilar with Better Call Saul. Except people eventually realized Walter wasn't a power fantasy, he was an ******* fantasy, but people still think that Jimmy would have turned around and stopped scamming if only Chuck had believed in him for some reason, despite several things in the show explicitly showing us that that would never happen. Maybe one day...

Errorname

2024-05-23, 11:03 PM

I will say do prefer the concept album version of Doubt Comes In where it's just Orpheus and Eurydice without the Fates, but I haven't seen the show live yet so maybe it'll play better in the theater

Yeah it worked really well on stage. Perhaps unsurprisingly the album was better at being an album and the stage show was better at being a stage show

Saph

2024-05-24, 04:56 AM

That's exactly how I felt about Walter and Skylar White when watching Breaking Bad for the first time. Walter just got worse and worse, Skylar was trying to get out of an increasingly abusive relationship, and everyone went on about how Walter was so awesome and Skylar was such a bitch.

I've seen both the "Walter is awesome, Skylar's a bitch" attitude and the "Walter's a monster, Skylar's an innocent victim" attitude a lot. My personal take (and one that I'm pretty sure is a minority one) is that the two of them are actually pretty well matched. They got married and stayed married for a reason.

It was ultimately the biggest problem I had with both BB and BCS, despite how high-quality they are. The main characters in both series are just really horrible people, and it's hard to enjoy a series when there's no one you're rooting for.

Ruck

2024-05-24, 05:16 AM

Does it count if I say I thought every Daenerys chapter in the books was a painful slog that brought nothing to the work, and eye-rolled at the on-screen portrayal (and not because of Emilia Clarke!).

She is apparently hugely popular and I would rank her maybe 5th most interesting Queen...at best. Stupid Mary Sue characters.

- M

I don't really care whether or not you like Dany the character, but if a power-hungry maniac who sets an entire city on fire is a "Mary Sue," then the term really has lost all meaning.

Great example of how the perception of "popular opinion" can differ wildly: everything I've seen about Hazbin Hotel is that people don't like it. But it's possible I'm only getting that from niche sources that share my (and seemingly your) tastes.

I have not watched it, but I thought this review (https://ponett.medium.com/my-own-personal-hell-thoughts-on-hazbin-hotel-1b226af317f5) was excellent at dissecting the storytelling (and art) problems with it.

I suppose that's fundamentally the problem, it absolutely didn't need to do any of that. It fulfilled its role, but its role was unnecessary, arguably counterproductive. He's a smuggler because he's a smuggler, that's his backstory, it didn't need to be explicitly shown. His pistol looks like that because that's what his pistol looks like. Do we also need a separate movie showing him choosing his hairstyle? The Kessel run was a throwaway line to give the story universe a bit of illusory depth and verisimilitude. Every subsequent attempt to expand on it or rationalise it has ironically just made it shallower and cheaper. Not every aspect of a character's backstory needs to be shown on screen. That's why it's backstory. Indeed, my major criticism of Solo is that it isn't really a story, just a list of boxes to check. A parade of unnecessary fanservice.

It's a general problem with "fan" spaces, but it's a major problem with Star Wars in particular, this inability to let anything be ambiguous. There's nothing inherently wrong with prequels, but origin stories specifically are generally a bad idea imo, because by taking things that used to be ambiguous or implied and nailing them down into something explicit, you make the story world feel smaller and more contained, even if the story as a whole is technically bigger now.

No real opinion on these movies themselves, but I fully agree on two particular points:

1)Backstory is by and large unnecessary and showing it more so.
2)I have a theory that Star Wars caught fire originally because it left so much for the public to fill in with their own imaginations, and explaining all of those things, as you said, makes the world smaller than we can imagine, shallower and cheaper.

This is AT THE TIME, since the movie came out 30 years ago. Several of us went and saw Pulp Fiction opening night. We came out thinking it was a very bland movie.

Pulp Fiction is wildly overrated. It's still ok, which for me is miles better than some other stuff Tarantino has done.

Funny enough, I rewatched Pulp Fiction for the first time in ages a couple of years ago and I came to appreciate it more than I used to. It's much more thematically rich than it seems on the surface.

The other movie where I got this retroactive disappointment is Spaceballs. I love Mel Brooks' body of work. I'm a keen defender of some of his movies that are less well regarded, like Men in Tights. And I'm an enjoyer of Star Wars (admittedly not recently, but Spaceballs is a parody of the OT). So I should love it...right?

Spaceballs is pretty mediocre IMO. I think The Producers and Blazing Saddles are clearly his best. (Probably a bit of a contrarian here, but the one time I saw Young Frankenstein it just didn't really do much for me.)

I will add that History of the World, Part II was surprisingly good.

Batman Begins: I just didn't like that movie at all. The plot was a convoluted mess and the villain destroyed his own credibility halfway through the movie. I disliked the movie so much that I could never bring myself to watch the sequels.

I think The Dark Knight is by and large excellent storytelling but I barely remember anything from Batman Begins.

Nah, appreciation for John Carter has increased over time, to the point that it qualifies as 'officially underrated.' John Carter, like Solo, is another case of marketing failures overwhelming basically everything about the film itself. Disney basically strangled the marketing push for the film and also couldn't find it in themselves to title the movie 'John Carter of Mars' for inexplicable reasons.

Literally because Mars Needs Moms flopped and the execs decided it must be because people don't want to see "Mars" in a title, not because... who would want to see the premise implied by "Mars Needs Moms"?

Oh, here's a potentially good one (and fully honest): Kurt Cobain was crap. Nirvana is a blight on Dave Grohl's resume.

Well, I feel strongly enough to say I find this wildly wrong, but not strongly enough to argue about a band and man whose existence ended 30 years ago, because whose mind is going to be changed about that?

I find the ending of The Good Place upsettingly bad

YES. Don't worry, you're not alone.

(I find, among other things, Michael Schur has an issue with falling in love with his characters over time and refusing to give them real adversity or even any struggles to overcome-- this happened in Parks and Rec, too, where in the later seasons all a main character had to do was want something and they'd suddenly have huge success at it.)

Specific to The Good Place, it really seemed like the message was "heaven is when you can consume everything you want to consume and when you're bored of that you can essentially commit suicide." That's a really depressing outlook, moreso for someone who wants to say something about the human condition and write books on morality.

Seriously, the amount of time I've spent trying to tell people that a show about an unbelievably capable con-man who is charismatic as all get-out has conned them into believing he's a victim is a fantastic example of how cons can be effective, i tells ya....

Well, if it makes you feel better, I feel the same way on the amount of time I've spent telling someone that my opinions on some of the characters in the show are based in my morality, while they repeatedly insisted they were based in my feelings.

Just because Chuck is a nasty, belittling, manipulative ass about saying it doesn't change the fact that it's true.

And see, that's why I don't like Chuck. How we deal with things reflects on our character, too, and I've had too many arguments that amount to "Chuck is right about Jimmy so the ends justify his means," which I don't agree with.

Moreso because Chuck makes clear that he's always resented Jimmy, long before he became a lawyer of questionable ethics or even a criminal-- simply because he's better at charming people. I don't think you can separate that motivation from his actions.

Aside, I thought the ending was kind of stupid.

Personally, the biggest place I bump up against this is with critically praised TV shows that check a bunch of boxes for Prestige TV (expensive cinematography, highly recognizable actors often from film, ponderousness masquerading as importance) but that are pretty hollow on actually delivering satisfying storytelling. The TV version of Fargo is one of my biggest offenders in this regard-- I think it's a shallow pastiche of actually-good films made by a guy who doesn't understand those films.

But then, my other problem is that critics by and large don't value real drama or real comedy. Dramas tend to be praised for how expensive and immaculate they look more than if the story is compelling and well-told. And comedies are usually praised to the extent they are not comedies-- whether that means praised for their realism (Abbott Elementary, The Bear) or actually being a drama (Barry) or something else. But you'll never see a show or movie on top of a critic's list just for being the funniest damn thing they saw all year. Making people laugh legitimately is hard and deserves credit.

Peelee

2024-05-24, 06:54 AM

Well, if it makes you feel better, I feel the same way on the amount of time I've spent telling someone that my opinions on some of the characters in the show are based in my morality, while they repeatedly insisted they were based in my feelings.
Did you happen to mention how you knew people exactly like Chuck and that rubbed you the wrong way? I see that a lot, and that's a blatant appeal to feelings.

And see, that's why I don't like Chuck. How we deal with things reflects on our character, too, and I've had too many arguments that amount to "Chuck is right about Jimmy so the ends justify his means," which I don't agree with.

Moreso because Chuck makes clear that he's always resented Jimmy, long before he became a lawyer of questionable ethics or even a criminal-- simply because he's better at charming people. I don't think you can separate that motivation from his actions.

Aside, I thought the ending was kind of stupid.
The "means" for Chuck was not hiring Jimmy into his law firm. Which is a pretty reasonable means. That's it. That's all. Unless you want to want to count Chuck getting Jimmy to confess to committing multiple felonies, but I'd argue against that, since, ya know, Jimmy committed multiple felonies. Specifically in his capacity as a lawyer, which is supposed to be held to a higher standard. And those felonies were not only against Chuck, but also affected both his business and his professional reputation. And even then, Chuck didn't try to use the true confession of multiple felonies to have Jimmy back in prison (where he inarguably should go), but only to strip him of his license to practice law (which he inarguably should not have).

Gee, it's almost like Chuck was right and not only were the means downright reasonable, but the ends were also far lighter then they should have been!

But then, my other problem is that critics by and large don't value real drama or real comedy. Dramas tend to be praised for how expensive and immaculate they look more than if the story is compelling and well-told. And comedies are usually praised to the extent they are not comedies-- whether that means praised for their realism (Abbott Elementary, The Bear) or actually being a drama (Barry) or something else. But you'll never see a show or movie on top of a critic's list just for being the funniest damn thing they saw all year. Making people laugh legitimately is hard and deserves credit.

A.) Weren't This Is Spinal Tap and My Cousin Vinny wildly popular with critics, just to name two?
2.) Man, I do not get the love for The Bear. Like, even if its crazy accurate, why would I want to watch more of it? It's just people being stressed and crappy to each other. I tried for two or three episodes and just could not see the appeal.

Metastachydium

2024-05-24, 07:19 AM

I don't really care whether or not you like Dany the character, but if a power-hungry maniac who sets an entire city on fire is a "Mary Sue," then the term really has lost all meaning.

Very hard disagree there. Godmode Sues are a thing, as are Villain Sues. And Daenerys… She checks all too many boxes of the basic skillset as well. I mean, shiny silver hair, violet eyes, s-p-e-c-i-a-l power, (nominally) oh-so-progressive views, all male characters she interacts with usually either fall in love with her immediately or are strawman opponents… She's really a textbook case.

And as for your specific squabble, I'd say her fetishizing power as her birthright would be neither here nor there – were it not for how characters much smarter than her are routinely shown to agree with her assessment on that. I'd say her solution for virtually all problems being "aggressivel apply dragons" or "aggressively aplly more dragons" would be neither here nor there – were it not for that apporach consistently working.

Ionathus

2024-05-24, 08:53 AM

I've seen both the "Walter is awesome, Skylar's a bitch" attitude and the "Walter's a monster, Skylar's an innocent victim" attitude a lot. My personal take (and one that I'm pretty sure is a minority one) is that the two of them are actually pretty well matched. They got married and stayed married for a reason.

Hard disagree. I hate this perspective. "Walt and Skylar are both terrible people" is a golden mean fallacy -- their actions are not anywhere near the same order of magnitude of wrongdoing, and it cheapens the depths of Walt's depravity to compare him to his wife.

Walter had countless opportunities to get out of a highly illegal, highly dangerous business and he kept going, endangering his entire family in the process. He killed or ordered the deaths of numerous people in cold blood. He emotionally manipulated every person who cared about him (particularly Skylar and Jesse). And he did it all for explicitly selfish reasons.

Skylar smoked, had an affair, and went along with the impossible situation Walt thrust her into. She's no saint, but she does not deserve to be spoken of in the same sentence as her husband. Walter is clearly the villain and none of his family members even come close. This "everyone in Breaking Bad sucks" crap is rampant and annoyin.

(I know that's not quite what you were saying -- sorry for going off on a tangent rant, hopefully this didn't feel like I was yelling at you specifically!)

It was ultimately the biggest problem I had with both BB and BCS, despite how high-quality they are. The main characters in both series are just really horrible people, and it's hard to enjoy a series when there's no one you're rooting for.

I'll agree with you about BCS's main characters. I think Kim and Jimmy are much more suited to each other than Walt and Skylar. They're parallel arcs, for sure, but Kim enjoys the con...at least until they reach the series finale breaking point, that is.

Weirdly, it was much easier for me to enjoy BCS. I don't know what it is about Jimmy that makes me find him more endearing than Walter. Maybe it's because in the moments where Walter would get meaner and scarier, Jimmy often got smaller and more scared. I suspect that weakness makes him seem less malicious to me, even though he's hurt countless people with his actions. I don't know if anyone else had this experience, but my watch of BCS kind of mirrored Gnoman's experience with Mad Men: since I started out knowing that Saul Goodman is a little slimeball of a person, I started BCS with a much lower opinion of him. And then his charm and genuine hardships slowly warmed me up to him.

TBF I probably also enjoyed BCS because the B Story with Mike, Nacho, Gus, and Lalo was so compelling. Nacho and Lalo in particular were such captivating characters, but I'll never complain about more Mike.

KorvinStarmast

2024-05-24, 08:57 AM

I'd say her solution for virtually all problems being "aggressively apply dragons" or "aggressively apply more dragons" would be neither here nor there – were it not for that apporach consistently working. And pouting. Being the Mother of Dragons is the only reason that little teenaged waif whom her brother pawned off on Drago to get a Dothraki Army of reconquest even matters, in-Universe. (Per the book). The rest follows from that.

Errorname

2024-05-24, 09:07 AM

Very hard disagree there. Godmode Sues are a thing, as are Villain Sues. And Daenerys… She checks all too many boxes of the basic skillset as well. I mean, shiny silver hair, violet eyes, s-p-e-c-i-a-l power, (nominally) oh-so-progressive views, all male characters she interacts with usually either fall in love with her immediately or are strawman opponents… She's really a textbook case.

The "[x] Sue" is such a useless lens for looking at fiction that I generally hate to use it. Daenerys is written as special, as a sort of stock fantasy protagonist and a messiah figure, and I don't think that's inherently a bad thing.

I think the actual problem with her chapters is her supporting cast, which suffer from Martin's weak Essosi worldbuilding. Name a Dothraki character that isn't Drogo

Peelee

2024-05-24, 09:20 AM

I don't know what it is about Jimmy that makes me find him more endearing than Walter.

Jimmy's got charisma out the wazoo.

Also, Jimmy is both book-smart when he applies himself (he is clearly a very capable legal mind) and street smart. Walter is street brain-dead. Dude jumps into bed with the first person available every single time. Jimmy was successful because of who he was, Walter was successful in spite of who he was.

Darth Credence

2024-05-24, 09:21 AM

Walter had countless opportunities to get out of a highly illegal, highly dangerous business and he kept going, endangering his entire family in the process. He killed or ordered the deaths of numerous people in cold blood. He emotionally manipulated every person who cared about him (particularly Skylar and Jesse). And he did it all for explicitly selfish reasons.

Skylar smoked, had an affair, and went along with the impossible situation Walt thrust her into. She's no saint, but she does not deserve to be spoken of in the same sentence as her husband. Walter is clearly the villain and none of his family members even come close. This "everyone in Breaking Bad sucks" crap is rampant and annoyin.

Skylar also could have put an end to it all at any time after season 3 started. All she had to do was tell her sister what was going on (or tell the cops when she was trying to have Walter thrown out). She has a lawyer repeatedly telling her to get out and go to the police. When Walt moves out and signs the divorce papers, she could have just let him go but did not. She's not as bad as Walter, because Walter did it, but that "went along with" bit is far, far worse than you imply. Plus, before she knew about Walt she was already working for Ted and signing off on the cooked books - she didn't stop that until after she knew about Walt.

Skylar was not a good person, independent of what Walt did. The death of Hank is as much on her as it is on Walt - neither of them pulled the trigger, and both had ample opportunity beforehand to do something about it.

Peelee

2024-05-24, 09:23 AM

Skylar also could have put an end to it all at any time after season 3 started. All she had to do was tell her sister what was going on (or tell the cops when she was trying to have Walter thrown out). She has a lawyer repeatedly telling her to get out and go to the police. When Walt moves out and signs the divorce papers, she could have just let him go but did not. She's not as bad as Walter, because Walter did it, but that "went along with" bit is far, far worse than you imply. Plus, before she knew about Walt she was already working for Ted and signing off on the cooked books - she didn't stop that until after she knew about Walt.

Skylar was not a good person, independent of what Walt did. The death of Hank is as much on her as it is on Walt - neither of them pulled the trigger, and both had ample opportunity beforehand to do something about it.

Anecdotal, but the discussion here is first I've ever encountered of Skylar not being a good person (which i agree with) that isn't centered on her "mistreatment" of Walt.

Also, Hank's death is not on her as much as Walt. It was a direct action of Walt being, as i described before, street-brain-dead.

Keltest

2024-05-24, 09:33 AM

Peelee

2024-05-24, 09:42 AM

Eh. I think if you see someone playing with matches in your house, and you and they both know its dangerous, and you tell them its dangerous but don't stop them, you have some responsibility for when your house catches on fire. Maybe not as much as the person playing with your matches, but if you enable them, you have responsibility too.

Sure, and i agree she is culpable. I just don't believe it's "as much as Walt".

I'll readily admit i could have been more clear on that.

Saph

2024-05-24, 09:50 AM

Skylar smoked, had an affair, and went along with the impossible situation Walt thrust her into. She's no saint, but she does not deserve to be spoken of in the same sentence as her husband. Walter is clearly the villain and none of his family members even come close. This "everyone in Breaking Bad sucks" crap is rampant and annoying.

It's been too many years since I watched the show, so I can't give you specifics, but I remember gradually noticing over the course of the series that Skylar actually had lots and lots of opportunities to improve, turn around, or bail out of that 'impossible situation'. Pretty much just like Walt. Except that with Walt the show makes it really explicit with the message of, "no, he absolutely DID NOT have to do all this, he had an alternative that he deliberately turned down again and again". With Skylar it's never made explicit, but she very consistently keeps on taking the easy-but-wrong path over the hard-but-right one.

And for the record, I don't think everyone in Breaking Bad sucks. I had quite a bit of sympathy for Marie and Hank and especially poor Gomez. Skylar and Walt, though . . . yeah, they absolutely do.

Ionathus

2024-05-24, 10:05 AM

Jimmy's got charisma out the wazoo.

Also, Jimmy is both book-smart when he applies himself (he is clearly a very capable legal mind) and street smart. Walter is street brain-dead. Dude jumps into bed with the first person available every single time. Jimmy was successful because of who he was, Walter was successful in spite of who he was.

This is a very good point. Going back to Breaking Bad now, Walt is a phenomenally more pitiful character than I remembered him. He's just...so oblivious. I know that's probably somewhat unfair, as now that I've seen BCS prequel material I know exactly how professional and careful Gus's operation was, and that makes Walter's fumbling attempts to negotiate or strategize even more laughable.

Rewatching Breaking Bad, some of Walter's scenes are absolutely agonizing. This jackass just will. not. shut. up. At least when Jimmy starts running his mouth, he's usually got something compelling to say and I can believe that he talked his way out of something. But Walter is just...ugh. Some of his ego-fueled rants are genuinely painful. Bryan Cranston knocked it out of the park, creating a character that could appear reasonable and good-intentioned and intelligent to me on a first watch, but with undercurrents of ego and shortsightedness that are so plain to see on rewatch.

Anecdotal, but the discussion here is first I've ever encountered of Skylar not being a good person (which i agree with) that isn't centered on her "mistreatment" of Walt.

Also, Hank's death is not on her as much as Walt. It was a direct action of Walt being, as i described before, street-brain-dead.

Yes, that's a huge step up from the usual discourse. Skylar has genuine flaws and she made the wrong call. But at least people on here aren't pulling the "actually Skylar is the real villain, Walt only ever killed all those people because she made him feel emasculated!!!"

Echoing your opinions for Hank's death. Even if Skylar is culpable in Hank's death legally as a co-conspirator, she was not the one with the previously-established relationship with a murderous gang of white supremacists. In fact I'll go a step further than calling Walter street-brain-dead in his dealings with Jack's crew: He knew exactly what he was getting into. He knew how nasty these people were, and he worked with them to execute a bunch of hush-up prison murders anyway. And then he called them in on his own brother-in-law, if only for a few minutes. The fact that he (wrongly) thought he could control Jack's gang doesn't change the fact that Walt was okay using them for murder. That goes beyond lack of street smarts and goes into full-blown serial killer territory.

(I'm aware you were probably implying that part as well, just wanted to call it out explicitly)

Ionathus

2024-05-24, 10:09 AM

And for the record, I don't think everyone in Breaking Bad sucks. I had quite a bit of sympathy for Marie and Hank and especially poor Gomez.

Don't forget Bogdan! Bogdan is blameless.

But check out this beautiful line from his entry on the "Breaking Bad wiki":

Bogdan Wolynetz
Bogdan is Walter's non criminal nemesis

Morgaln

2024-05-24, 10:54 AM

Darth Credence

2024-05-24, 11:07 AM

Anecdotal, but the discussion here is first I've ever encountered of Skylar not being a good person (which i agree with) that isn't centered on her "mistreatment" of Walt.

Also, Hank's death is not on her as much as Walt. It was a direct action of Walt being, as i described before, street-brain-dead.

Walt Hank would have lived had she told Marie when she first found out, told the police when they asked her about criminal activity when she tried to throw him out, told the police after any of the times her lawyer explicitly told her to go tell the police (it was made pretty explicit that she had an off-ramp, too, with the lawyer telling her repeatedly), told the police when she is suspicious that Walt had something to do with the failed attempt to kill Hank, told her sister that the money came from Walt breaking bad rather than gambling, if she had turned him in rather than asking him to turn himself in when she thought he was in danger, or if she had not taken a bunch of the money and given it to Ted preventing Walt from getting them out in Season 4. (All of that happened prior to her being scared for her life around Walt. She had another opportunity to tell her sister after that, but backed out. That could have saved him, too.) Probably wouldn't have saved his life if she hadn't pushed to run the money laundering business, but that certainly shows her that she was all in at that point.

But the final thing that makes her every bit as responsible as Walt, if somehow all of that wasn't enough? Hank knew, talked to her about it, and gave her the opportunity to help take Walt down. She wouldn't help. Later, Walt and Skyler go to dinner with Hank and Marie to drop off the blackmail confession. She was fully in at that point. She broke bad as much as Walt did.

Peelee

2024-05-24, 11:26 AM

Jimmy reminds me a lot of Discworld's Moist von Lipwig, but before the events of Going Postal. A smart, capable and charismatic con man who never thinks that the things he does are actually harmful to people. Unfortunately for Jimmy, he doesn't get a patrician to help rehabilitate him...

Walt would have lived
Until the cancer got him, or a hitman. If you want to argue about how Walt would have lived, Walt would have lived, Walt would have lived if he had accepted Gretchen's help.

She was fully in at that point. She broke bad as much as Walt did.
Nope. She never would have had people killed, as a quick example. No matter how you dice it, Walt was worse. Which, aside from accuracy, I'm not concerned much with because she was still pretty entrenched by her own volition, as all the opportunities she had to pull out and stop you pointed out are correct.

Again, I'm not saying that she was innocent or clean. Just that i hated people who gave her so much **** specifically because of how she acted towards Walt.

Mordar

2024-05-24, 11:44 AM

I don't really care whether or not you like Dany the character, but if a power-hungry maniac who sets an entire city on fire is a "Mary Sue," then the term really has lost all meaning.

Well, I was mostly contemplating everything up to the last 2 episodes or so...other than the author-insert criteria, I think she fits the mould, though moreso in the series than the books.

ASIDE: Isn't "fits the mould" a funny turn of phrase? Since you don't put formed things into a mould to see if they fit...it seems there is a "fits into the mould of" version of the idiom and that makes more sense to me. Assume it has been shortened over the years...

2)I have a theory that Star Wars caught fire originally because it left so much for the public to fill in with their own imaginations, and explaining all of those things, as you said, makes the world smaller than we can imagine, shallower and cheaper.

Oh so very much yes. While I like definitive ends to specific stories (generally dislike the "whatever happens when the door opens at the end is up to your imagination" elements), I really don't want every nook and cranny illuminated with spotlights, every tiny thing explained and dissected...leave room, sometimes *lots* of room around the edges and I generally enjoy it more. I pity the children who must play imagination within such rigidly confined and fully explained fantasies. {not that such a thing would occur because children are immune to such adult stupidity most times}

Literally because Mars Needs Moms flopped and the execs decided it must be because people don't want to see "Mars" in a title, not because... who would want to see the premise implied by "Mars Needs Moms"?

Heard similar. Hard to imagine geniuses like those learning to breathe much less running studios and making multi-million dollar decisions.

Well, I feel strongly enough to say I find this wildly wrong, but not strongly enough to argue about a band and man whose existence ended 30 years ago, because whose mind is going to be changed about that?

I wonder if this is a product of time and place, and musical rivalries. I have definitely changed opinion about music (and books and movies) from less formative eras - 60s, 70s, and earlier - so perhaps those were less emotively built than those of my formative years.

New opinions:

James Bond was much less "-ist" than many of his contemporaries, and would very likely be considered progressive in most circles.

- M

Metastachydium

2024-05-24, 01:32 PM

The "[x] Sue" is such a useless lens for looking at fiction that I generally hate to use it. Daenerys is written as special, as a sort of stock fantasy protagonist and a messiah figure, and I don't think that's inherently a bad thing.

Again, while "odd-coloured hair and eyes, last member of the Advanced Super Race with Extra Super Power, wronged by all the strawmen, salivated after (in one way or another) by every other male (and some of the strawmen too), kinda hard to suffer but the story keeps vindicating 'em and their stupid decisions" is certainly a stock characterization – in self-insert fanfics and shlock fantasy. Mary Sue is simply a term conceived so that we have a name for them. Daenerys in such a stark contrast in terms of quality as characterization goes compared to other characters, even other characters filling stock niches, that I kinda came to believe Martin went deliberately overboard with her just so that he can subvert the whole thing somewhere down the line.

Darth Credence

2024-05-24, 01:33 PM

Until the cancer got him, or a hitman. If you want to argue about how Walt would have lived, Walt would have lived, Walt would have lived if he had accepted Gretchen's help.

Nope. She never would have had people killed, as a quick example. No matter how you dice it, Walt was worse. Which, aside from accuracy, I'm not concerned much with because she was still pretty entrenched by her own volition, as all the opportunities she had to pull out and stop you pointed out are correct.

Again, I'm not saying that she was innocent or clean. Just that i hated people who gave her so much **** specifically because of how she acted towards Walt.

Sorry, that was a mistake typing. That was supposed to be Hank would have lived, not Walt. Clearly Walt wouldn't have lived, and we were talking about how she was every bit as culpable for Hank's death.

Walt was a worse person. Walt was no more responsible for Hank's death than Skyler was, because by that point, Skyler had had ample opportunity to put a stop to everything, and in the end joined Walt at least tacitly in blackmailing Hank.

I do not agree with anyone saying she was bad because of how she acted with Walt. I hate that as well - Walt was not a victim of anything except cancer. But I also hate that some think she was just in a bad situation, too. She broke bad. Everyone in the show broke bad in some way or another (except for Holly) - reducing the title to referring to only Walt is missing something about the show, IMO.

James Bond was much less "-ist" than many of his contemporaries, and would very likely be considered progressive in most circles.

- M

Book Bond, or movie Bond? There is enough of a difference between them that it matters, I think.

Ionathus

2024-05-24, 03:02 PM

Sorry, that was a mistake typing. That was supposed to be Hank would have lived, not Walt. Clearly Walt wouldn't have lived, and we were talking about how she was every bit as culpable for Hank's death.

Walt was a worse person. Walt was no more responsible for Hank's death than Skyler was, because by that point, Skyler had had ample opportunity to put a stop to everything, and in the end joined Walt at least tacitly in blackmailing Hank.

"No more responsible than Skylar" my ass. One of those two people called the paramilitary white supremacist gang, and it sure as hell wasn't Skylar.

Skylar was on the level of an accomplice. She accepted that Walt was involved in the drug world and she didn't turn him in. She knew he was cooking meth, and she cooked his books for him. I think legality-wise, she could be charged with all of his crimes -- I know there's some rule about crimes done in a conspiracy applying to all involved members, even if they weren't involved in each individual crime. But I'm not talking legality, I'm talking morality. Skylar wanted to run out the clock on Walt's cancer. In her eyes that was preferable to turning him in and, let's be honest, blowing up her and her kids' lives, probably permanently. That was a selfish and naïve decision, absolutely, and she's responsible for a lot of wrongdoing as a result. But Walt is responsible for himself.

No matter how you slice it, Skylar's involvement will never be on the same level of guilt as Walt hiring literal assassins to assassinate people. Which is something Walt had already done, and it was exactly what he was doing again when Hank, Gomez, and Jesse showed up in the desert and he called Jack again. He regretted it and tried to call it off, but that was absolutely his intent.

Peelee

2024-05-24, 03:17 PM

Sorry, that was a mistake typing. That was supposed to be Hank would have lived, not Walt. Clearly Walt wouldn't have lived, and we were talking about how she was every bit as culpable for Hank's death.

Ok, that makes more sense. Sorry.

Even then, though, she's pretty well removed from proximate cause. Like, by that argument, Saul is just as culpable. Again, I'm not arguing that they're not culpable. They're just not as culpable as Walt. Just as Walt is not as culpable as Jack.

Errorname

2024-05-24, 03:57 PM

Again, while "odd-coloured hair and eyes, last member of the Advanced Super Race with Extra Super Power, wronged by all the strawmen, salivated after (in one way or another) by every other male (and some of the strawmen too), kinda hard to suffer but the story keeps vindicating 'em and their stupid decisions" is certainly a stock characterization – in self-insert fanfics and shlock fantasy. Mary Sue is simply a term conceived so that we have a name for them. Daenerys in such a stark contrast in terms of quality as characterization goes compared to other characters, even other characters filling stock niches, that I kinda came to believe Martin went deliberately overboard with her just so that he can subvert the whole thing somewhere down the line.

I don't think "last of their kind with special magic powers" is unique to fanfiction. Notably you're describing Superman and Last Airbender, and as I recall both of those are quite popular. Daenerys being the heir to a wiped out royal family is also not at all unusual for a fantasy story, nor is her obtaining some unique magical weapon that turns things in her favour.

The one thing I would agree with is that a lot of Daenerys's supporting cast is thinly sketched. That is fair, but I think "they're strawmen who exist to oppose or salivate after Daenerys" is a misdiagnosis, it comes down to fundamental issues with how Martin approaches Essos in general rather than specifically a Daenerys problem. Notably I think you start seeing the same problems when ADWD brings other PoVs to Essos, Tyrion and Quentyn meet a few standouts but a lot of the Essosi are thinly characterized and not memorable, and it does make Daenerys's chapters harder for me than her closest counterpart, Jon, who has a much more robust supporting cast.

Well, I was mostly contemplating everything up to the last 2 episodes or so...other than the author-insert criteria, I think she fits the mould, though moreso in the series than the books.

The endgame turn that they were obviously writing the character around is something that's pretty important to include in your analysis, I feel.

Like I could plausibly describe Arthur Dayne as a mary sue. Greatest knight who ever lived, special purple eyes, magic sword, beloved even by his enemies. But that requires ignoring the full text and doing no analysis of his role in it.

James Bond was much less "-ist" than many of his contemporaries, and would very likely be considered progressive in most circles.

I find that exceedingly hard to believe. The early films are already pretty rough and I'm given to understand the books were worse. Maybe not uniquely bad for the time, but certainly not progressive.

sktarq

2024-05-24, 04:24 PM

Batman Begins: I just didn't like that movie at all. The plot was a convoluted mess and the villain destroyed his own credibility halfway through the movie. I disliked the movie so much that I could never bring myself to watch the sequels.

Was very meh'ed by the Nolan batman except the Dark Knight. This did have the advantage that I ended up seeing Judge Dredd in the 3D theatre
Speaking of which I was pretty happy with the that 3D craze for a bit. Sure most was trite shlock but both Dredd and Cave of Forgotten Dreams really used it to add to the movie and I am sad to see it go.

Dr Who never did anything for me. So I ignored it. Didn't care for the Simpsons either.
Same. For both and not liking the Simpsons in the 90's was apparently verboten for some reason...same with 90's SNL.

Nah, appreciation for John Carter has increased over time.... I will say the John Carter created so much that was later developed into more complete ideas that meeting the originals later seems derivative and trite.

Yeah. I never got the hate for Solo either. I enjoyed it. At the end of the day, it's a one shot film, and does exactly what it needed to do (tell the origin bits for Han Solo). It checked every single box it needed to check: His signature pistol? Check. Millenium Falcon? Check. Chewie? Check. Kessel Run? Check. Why he's a smuggler? Check. It had good dialogue and well written characters (and lets face it, the whole "robot rebellion" bit was hillarious). Harrelson's character made sense and fit in. Han's introduction into the criminal world worked and made sense. There were no glaring plot holes (which is a huge plus for me). And they snuck in a few easter eggs and character references/tie-ins along the way. What the heck did people actually expect from the film that they didn't get?
Needed to? eh no need for the movie and trying to pack it into one movie made it seem like he only had one adventure rather than building up his character over years and experience...and thus trite.
Good Dialogue and well written characters....well that is an opinion that many would argue against. In fact one could argue it undermined his character ace in the OT where he went from smuggler to general and at its core selfish to selfless. Sure TFA had already poleaxed his development because JJ is a trailer artist who can present to studio heads well...but there was no need to set fire to the good feels that remained of his growth.
Robot rebellion being hilarious...is one that I would also disagree with. Plus came off to many as preachy.
As for what they expected that they did get...a movie they didn't like and so didn't go (see Box Office) so later catch it out a friends house

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.
I think what gets me on this one is that some of the big classic art pieces (say David) do live up to their reps. Plus to get to the Mona Lisa you usually head down this GIANT hallway that goes on half of forever is 30 ft tall and so full of art that they have to lean it where it hits the ceiling....And that hallway is full of amazing stuff but you are getting stampeded by people heading to or from the ML

As for myself I would say Rush (2013) The movie that for some reason was sold as a sports movie when really it is an amazing character study that happens to be told through racing. I adore the piece but it was not met with much of that...too talky for aport movie fans or something and involved sports so ew from a bunch of others.
Also Neon Demon. Which I found to be a great, slightly psychedelic, modern fairy tale but was not well beloved upon release.

Also I didn't really like the theatrical LotR sequels. I tend to find battle scenes boring unless we see plot/character growth via said fight scenes (See Dredd, Bourne Idenitity, and Atomic Blonde for example) and the battles of Helms deep and Pelenor just felt massively unbalanced compared to the movie. I do think the extended cuts redeemed them though.

I also did not care for the newer Godzilla kickoff movie. (Not minus one..that was amazeballs the one with the MUTOs) It seems to have been popular enough for sequels but its basic logic was so bad i stewed in my seat the entire time. It left me...insulted.

Mordar

2024-05-24, 05:34 PM

Book Bond, or movie Bond? There is enough of a difference between them that it matters, I think.

That was the trick of it - yes, absolutely 100% book Bond. On a lark I decided to read them this year...was never a huge fan of the movies until Daniel Craig, and since I have been on a "classics of X" kick thought they would be worth a shot. *So* much better than I expected. See more below...

The endgame turn that they were obviously writing the character around is something that's pretty important to include in your analysis, I feel.

But I don't believe they were...I believe in GRRM's ability to write a successful conclusion to the character that the showrunners couldn't even approach doing. I think all of S7 was trying to be home-run swing payoffs, and almost all swings and misses. I believe that they recognized the huge following Clarke developed and so they turn the MS up to 11. I think even the ending was supposed to be Crowning Moment of Awesome or whatever, and instead it just went full serial psycho.

I know wikipedia is an easy target to punch down on...but the opening salvo of "...usually a young woman, who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, gifted with unique talents or powers, liked or respected by most other characters, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and generally lacking meaningful character flaws..." lands pretty well until you get to the last clause, and even that says "generally".

Like I could plausibly describe Arthur Dayne as a mary sue. Greatest knight who ever lived, special purple eyes, magic sword, beloved even by his enemies. But that requires ignoring the full text and doing no analysis of his role in it.

But he wasn't a central character, and was presented as tragic duty...hard to MS when your page count doesn't exceed quaternary characters.

I find that exceedingly hard to believe. The early films are already pretty rough and I'm given to understand the books were worse. Maybe not uniquely bad for the time, but certainly not progressive.

If this was 8 months ago and someone said what I said I would have been right there next to you. The books are actually much better in quality and in perspective. Bond is far from infallible, needs rescuing on several instances, including by female characters, is forthright about his weaknesses, and is in general a much better person than that represented by any of the actors I've seen, perhaps not including Craig. The other "-ist" is less clear because of the nature of the time, but even there Bond is presented as more forward-thinking (which of course in today's terms means he is slightly less than 'fully horrible').

- M

GloatingSwine

2024-05-24, 05:49 PM

It was very well received when it came out, and despite the clever Mel Brooks smacks on it Costner Robin is a much more enduring image than either Elwes Robin or Crowe Robin. So yeah, I'm with Korvin.

Unlike some Robin Hoods I could mention, that one had Alan Rickman.

That's pretty much enough to earn it its place really. Alan Rickman threatening to cut Costner's heart out with a spoon.

Errorname

2024-05-24, 06:38 PM

But I don't believe they were...I believe in GRRM's ability to write a successful conclusion to the character that the showrunners couldn't even approach doing. I think all of S7 was trying to be home-run swing payoffs, and almost all swings and misses. I believe that they recognized the huge following Clarke developed and so they turn the MS up to 11. I think even the ending was supposed to be Crowning Moment of Awesome or whatever, and instead it just went full serial psycho.

I think D&D have a pretty skewed morality and portray a lot of stuff as cool and badass that is actually horrific, but when they want you to think something is bad they are not subtle and they are not subtle about Daenerys ending as a mass murdering monster. You don't accidentally have a character burn a bunch of civilians (including children) alive onscreen and suddenly pick up a bunch of villain coding.

It's not like D&D were shy about talking about their thought process. That's part of why everyone hated it so much, all their episodes were always immediately chased by a vidoc where the writers went and said things like "Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet" before people could break out the redemptive readings for why the show wasn't as shallow and bad as it appeared to be. If they'd meant this to be awesome and cool, they'd have said as much, but they said the opposite.

I know wikipedia is an easy target to punch down on...but the opening salvo of "...usually a young woman, who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, gifted with unique talents or powers, liked or respected by most other characters, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and generally lacking meaningful character flaws..." lands pretty well until you get to the last clause, and even that says "generally".

Just saying the definition again isn't going to make me change my mind about it. It's a fandom in-joke that broke containment, not a useful analytical tool.

I'd also question the "inexplicable competence" and "unrealistically free of weaknesses" parts of this analysis. Daenerys makes quite a lot of mistakes and bad judgement calls. I don't think you're meant to look at the fate of Astapor and think "yeah, that Daenerys is leaving only good things in her wake", and while the show doesn't go nearly as far with showing you some of the consequences of her actions or emphasizing her darker tendencies, they're also clearly trying to make her final turn more of a shock. That's bad writing, but the only reason they presented her as idealized as they did was because they meant to tear her down.

Mordar

2024-05-24, 07:11 PM

Just saying the definition again isn't going to make me change my mind about it. It's a fandom in-joke that broke containment, not a useful analytical tool.

I'd also question the "inexplicable competence" and "unrealistically free of weaknesses" parts of this analysis. Daenerys makes quite a lot of mistakes and bad judgement calls. I don't think you're meant to look at the fate of Astapor and think "yeah, that Daenerys is leaving only good things in her wake", and while the show doesn't go nearly as far with showing you some of the consequences of her actions or emphasizing her darker tendencies, they're also clearly trying to make her final turn more of a shock. That's bad writing, but the only reason they presented her as idealized as they did was because they meant to tear her down.

For the record, not trying to change any minds or analyze anything. Just here to have a discussion about my opinion (and others') on an array of junk. If either opinion changes that's besides the point.

As someone else mentioned, she discounts the advice and experience of her best advisors and still succeeds at everything; she magically gets her inexhaustible armies most anywhere she wants; she flies across a continent and finds her nephewlover exactly where she needs to; she endures an unthinkable level of casualties but still wins...so I'd say that suggests some inexplicable competence. Her only weakness that pays off is letting her nephewlover stab her...probably in an attempt to make her tragic. The foolishness, impetuousness, cruelty...none of it stopped her from getting to the throne. So I agree those should be considered weaknesses, but are not depicted as such insofar as reaching her goals.

I do think some of my S7 dislike of the character is driven by the fact that they needed to do the heel turn in about 30 seconds, but IMO they *fully* sold out to make her the hero of the story for the vast majority of their creative control period...and I believe they would have written her bio as "Great Queen who returned dragons to Westeros, freed thousands of slaves and ended governments built on such practices, uprooted a horrible and oppressive regime lead by a terrible incestuous Queen (but not her, a different one), then tragically died at the hands of a heroic relative before she could bring peace to Westeros but shortly after she par-broiled, crushed or otherwise murdered thousands of innocent peasants including wee little children in a fit of despotic rage."

Not that Jon Snow is much better, by the way.

- M

Peelee

2024-05-24, 08:02 PM

Oh, that reminds me.

I'm defo in the minority on not caring for Daniel Craig's Bond. Both the way he plays him and the movie plots and styles.

Mechalich

2024-05-24, 08:16 PM

But I don't believe they were...I believe in GRRM's ability to write a successful conclusion to the character that the showrunners couldn't even approach doing.

I find this a strange belief, given that GRR Martin has not made significant progress on ASOIAF in over a decade and is 75 years old. The chances of him writing any conclusion whatsoever to the series are minimal. As for a satisfying conclusion, the series, left where it was at the conclusion of book five, was written into a massive hole, and the effort to get things out of that status and produce any ending other than 'ice zombies, everyone dies' would be positively herculean.

The final two seasons of GoT had a plethora of serious writing problems. Some of those were sourced directly to the showrunners, both in their general sloppiness and in their very clear desire to cut the remaining length of the show down below what it clearly needed to be to handle the remaining plot threads, but some of them were sourced to the very real fact that Martin left the show holding the bag.

I'm defo in the minority on not caring for Daniel Craig's Bond. Both the way he plays him and the movie plots and styles.

I think Casino Royale is great, but it's a one-off, and attempting to make sequels to it left that movie as an anchor around all subsequent Craig Bond films, dragging it down into this gritty and not-fun place where Bond doesn't belong.

Mordar

2024-05-24, 08:25 PM

I find this a strange belief, given that GRR Martin has not made significant progress on ASOIAF in over a decade and is 75 years old. The chances of him writing any conclusion whatsoever to the series are minimal. As for a satisfying conclusion, the series, left where it was at the conclusion of book five, was written into a massive hole, and the effort to get things out of that status and produce any ending other than 'ice zombies, everyone dies' would be positively herculean.

The final two seasons of GoT had a plethora of serious writing problems. Some of those were sourced directly to the showrunners, both in their general sloppiness and in their very clear desire to cut the remaining length of the show down below what it clearly needed to be to handle the remaining plot threads, but some of them were sourced to the very real fact that Martin left the show holding the bag.

Fair point. I would clarify to say "I believe in he has the technical and artistic expertise to write a successful conclusion to this character, even if I have doubts if it will occur."

I think Casino Royale is great, but it's a one-off, and attempting to make sequels to it left that movie as an anchor around all subsequent Craig Bond films, dragging it down into this gritty and not-fun place where Bond doesn't belong.

Tonally I think that matches *much* more strongly with the books, though. Stunningly few gadgets, lots of post-war morality, very reluctant to even consider killing in anything other than a fair fight...BookBond is radically different from Connery, and orders of magnitude different than Moore/Dalton/Brosnan. Probably why I liked the books after the recent reading and could mostly take or leave the movies (except for the tank chase scene...whichever movie started with that got points from me).

- M

Errorname

2024-05-24, 08:47 PM

As someone else mentioned, she discounts the advice and experience of her best advisors and still succeeds at everything; she magically gets her inexhaustible armies most anywhere she wants; she flies across a continent and finds her nephewlover exactly where she needs to; she endures an unthinkable level of casualties but still wins...so I'd say that suggests some inexplicable competence.

Having dumb plans, teleporting and having respawning armies is describing basically every character by the end of the show. The writers aren't giving her special treatment, the show just sucks generally.

There's no sense of strategy or logistics or attrition, people just win or lose depending on what the writers need to happen. There's two battles in Season 8 where the same parties (Daenerys and the Iron Fleet) fight, and Daenerys gets absolutely annihilated in one episode and then effortlessly wins in the next with no clear indication as to why.

Her only weakness that pays off is letting her nephewlover stab her...probably in an attempt to make her tragic. The foolishness, impetuousness, cruelty...none of it stopped her from getting to the throne. So I agree those should be considered weaknesses, but are not depicted as such insofar as reaching her goals

Considering that she gets stabbed for her foolish cruelty before she can sit the throne it literally does.

I do think some of my S7 dislike of the character is driven by the fact that they needed to do the heel turn in about 30 seconds, but IMO they *fully* sold out to make her the hero of the story for the vast majority of their creative control period...and I believe they would have written her bio as "Great Queen who returned dragons to Westeros, freed thousands of slaves and ended governments built on such practices, uprooted a horrible and oppressive regime lead by a terrible incestuous Queen (but not her, a different one), then tragically died at the hands of a heroic relative before she could bring peace to Westeros but shortly after she par-broiled, crushed or otherwise murdered thousands of innocent peasants including wee little children in a fit of despotic rage."

I can see why you'd think that prior to "The Bells" she wasn't being written as a villain and they were trying to make her seem like a good person, because in a lot of ways they were, but D&D's end state was always "oops, she's evil and the people who thought she was good were fools".

GloatingSwine

2024-05-25, 03:18 AM

I can see why you'd think that prior to "The Bells" she wasn't being written as a villain and they were trying to make her seem like a good person, because in a lot of ways they were, but D&D's end state was always "oops, she's evil and the people who thought she was good were fools".

The problem with the thesis "Daenerys was just bad, actually", is that you can't really make it carry its weight unless you completely ignore everything about the culture she came from and the events of her life. She comes from a culture where the bloodline right to rule is totally ingrained, she has been handed from pillar to post between a succession of terrible people (cartoonishly so, in the case of the Dothraki, who are absolutely nothing like the historical nomad cultures GRRM says they're based on and a hell of a lot like rampaging Indians in the less progressive kind of Western movie. What else was going to happen except returning to secure her rule with force.

You have to, essentially, fully buy into the Great Man Theory, where events are driven by Great Men who aren't at all a product of their upbringing, culture, and the socioeconomic tides of their times.

Augustus couldn't have been Augustus without the last ~200 years of the Roman Republic happening first.

I'm pretty sure that GRRM's original intent ~30 years ago was to point out that a "true heir" coming back to take over (as is common not only in fantasy but also folk tales and romantic fiction of days past) is more likely to end in tears than cheers. But frankly I think Terry Pratchett beat him to that one in Guards! Guards! and arguably Frank Herbert beat him to it with Dune Messiah.

The specific criticism of the way it played out in the series was that there's also no internal logic to why she decides to go full Mad Queen. There's no clear answer to why Daenerys thought it was a good idea in that moment to burn a lot of **** down. And that's what you need to even approach what they were going for. A cohesive internal world that shows why the character does what they do, rather than just "plot needs this to happen so everyone can point and say "Dragon Lady Bad".

Mechalich

2024-05-25, 05:08 AM

The specific criticism of the way it played out in the series was that there's also no internal logic to why she decides to go full Mad Queen. There's no clear answer to why Daenerys thought it was a good idea in that moment to burn a lot of **** down. And that's what you need to even approach what they were going for. A cohesive internal world that shows why the character does what they do, rather than just "plot needs this to happen so everyone can point and say "Dragon Lady Bad".

Based on what we know from the books, the most likely reason she goes down the Mad Queen path is that Young Griff 'steals' the throne out from under her by virtue of arriving in Westeros first and immediately on the heels of Cersei and Varys ruining basically everything in King's Landing. The show left out the Young Griff plot, which is an understandable choice, but that left a huge hole in the story. The showrunners, who clearly were overly enamored of Lena Headey's portrayal of Cersei - and it was a very, very good portrayal - simply left Cersei on the throne long after it made any sense for that to be the case, which turned everything that happened following Dany's return to Westeros a theater of the absurd.

I can imagine a sequence of events in the books going something like:
- Cersei blows up the Sept.
- Young Griff sweeps up from the south and takes King's Landing with almost casual ease, as the guards open the gates for him and Cersei is brutally executed.
- Young Griff is supposed to marry Dany as part of the plan, but this probably goes awry and he marries someone else, possible Myrcella Lannister (who's alive in the books), perhaps even Sansa.
- Consequently, when Dany finally does make it to Westeros, there's a married Targaryean on the throne who is not her, leaving her without a place, but wielding the power of at least one dragon and a massive army. That would be why she burns down the city (though I suspect Martin would just have her open the gates with dragonfire and let the Dothraki sack the city) and goes Mad Queen.

This set of events would force Jon Snow, facing the White Walker invasion, to ally with the Mad Queen to save the world, which is a very GRR Martin thing to make happen.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-25, 05:21 AM

Yeah, but that's just conquest as usual. In the sociocultural environment of Westeros having a bigger army than the other guy and being on the right bloodline is the normal way you get to be in charge.

It doesn't really make any special point about the right to or nature of power that I think Martin is actually going for in the books based on things he's said both in and out of them, the idea of power as the shadow on the wall not a "real" thing. A pack of dragons and massive army that will do everything you say is a pretty "real" form of power. (I also think he's got a bit too much Great Man in his ideas when he talks about that though).

Metastachydium

2024-05-25, 11:47 AM

I don't think "last of their kind with special magic powers" is unique to fanfiction. Notably you're describing Superman and Last Airbender, and as I recall both of those are quite popular. Daenerys being the heir to a wiped out royal family is also not at all unusual for a fantasy story, nor is her obtaining some unique magical weapon that turns things in her favour.

Nor is it unusual to have attractive characters. Or characters with weird eye colour. You can pick some individual elements out of the package and pretend the package is not there, but the package won't just disappear then an there.

The one thing I would agree with is that a lot of Daenerys's supporting cast is thinly sketched. That is fair, but I think "they're strawmen who exist to oppose or salivate after Daenerys" is a misdiagnosis, it comes down to fundamental issues with how Martin approaches Essos in general rather than specifically a Daenerys problem. Notably I think you start seeing the same problems when ADWD brings other PoVs to Essos, Tyrion and Quentyn meet a few standouts but a lot of the Essosi are thinly characterized and not memorable, and it does make Daenerys's chapters harder for me than her closest counterpart, Jon, who has a much more robust supporting cast.

Hrm. I don't remember Tyrion or Quentyn suddenly developing would-be-harems or getting forcibly validated at every turn just because they set foot in Essos.

The endgame turn that they were obviously writing the character around is something that's pretty important to include in your analysis, I feel.

As for the endgame: I'm just too lazy too quote the whole conversation, but especially for the series, it was a logical, if rushed (and poorly executed) conclusion (and even then, made infinitely more sense than a whole lot of things in the last two seasons, the baffling decision of the showrunners to try and set Cersei up as the Final Boss, as mentioned above by others, and the whole Great Council/epilogue insanity being massive outliers there, but I could also bring up killing off or lobotomizing every character too smart for the two D.-s to properly handle in S7, which makes me probably hate S7 more than S8 overall). Series!Daenerys always worked on a "give an absurd order to underlings; chide them for failing when they fail; use excessive amounts of violence; ? ; somehow actually profit" basis. And the anemic attempts to paint the whole deal as more nuanced (dragons are hard to control and are killing civilians! Slaves beat up older slaves and steal their toys! The old regime won't just roll over and die overnight because she told them too!) are invariably dropped without consequence long before we get into the idiocy that was the final two seasons.

Gnoman

2024-05-25, 12:02 PM

If this was 8 months ago and someone said what I said I would have been right there next to you. The books are actually much better in quality and in perspective. Bond is far from infallible, needs rescuing on several instances, including by female characters, is forthright about his weaknesses, and is in general a much better person than that represented by any of the actors I've seen, perhaps not including Craig. The other "-ist" is less clear because of the nature of the time, but even there Bond is presented as more forward-thinking (which of course in today's terms means he is slightly less than 'fully horrible').

- M

This is complicated because a lot of the character traits that actually make Book-Bond much less vile than his reputation are coded. A surface read won't see them. A departed friend of mine did a really deep dive on the entire franchise over on Something Awful that adds an enormous amount of context, but without that it can be rough to see.

Ian Fleming, on the other hand, comes across a lot better just by reading the books, because Bond does a lot of blundering into obvious traps before being rescued by the girl of the book.

Errorname

2024-05-25, 01:47 PM

Hrm. I don't remember Tyrion or Quentyn suddenly developing would-be-harems or getting forcibly validated at every turn just because they set foot in Essos.

I don't think that's really a fair assessment of how Daenerys' chapters go either.

Series!Daenerys always worked on a "give an absurd order to underlings; chide them for failing when they fail; use excessive amounts of violence; ? ; somehow actually profit" basis. And the anemic attempts to paint the whole deal as more nuanced (dragons are hard to control and are killing civilians! Slaves beat up older slaves and steal their toys! The old regime won't just roll over and die overnight because she told them too!) are invariably dropped without consequence long before we get into the idiocy that was the final two seasons.

Again, I think this is true for most of the cast in the later seasons. They make bad decisions that should have dire consequences, treat their allies badly, use brute force to get what they want and frequently succeed because the writers want them to. Daenerys isn't even the worst for it.

Metastachydium

2024-05-25, 02:39 PM

I don't think that's really a fair assessment of how Daenerys' chapters go either.

The thing is, she has an absurd amount of fanboys and strawman opponents compared to pretty much everyone else on either continent. Sure, the series made sure it gets even worse when it addj Jon to the roster for cheap incest drama (admittedly a Targaryen thing, if done very stupidly), but hey.

Again, I think this is true for most of the cast in the later seasons. They make bad decisions that should have dire consequences, treat their allies badly, use brute force to get what they want and frequently succeed because the writers want them to. Daenerys isn't even the worst for it.

Yes. Except Daenerys doesn't start doing it in the last seasons. This is just what she does, consistently, pretty much starting with Qarth.

Vahnavoi

2024-05-25, 04:17 PM

Errorname

2024-05-25, 06:12 PM

"Mary Sue" has always been iffy term to apply outside of fanfiction. That said, it may be possible Martin was actually angling to criticize, satirize or make fun of that sort of character - there is lot of that going on with other characters introduced early in the series. F.ex. I've seen a good case made for how Khal Drogo is a deconstruction of a Conan the Barbarian type of character, and Eddard Stark of Aragorn of Lord of the Rings. It's possible the author just missed the mark on the execution. It's hardly uncommon for a critical take to end up just a slightly edgier repeat of the target of criticism.

I think Daenerys ultimately boils down to her being deliberately constructed as a high fantasy character in a very low fantasy setting. It's not that she doesn't have serious flaws or struggle, but she's got a level of magical power that literally nobody else she's encountered (so far) can compete with.

Speaking of the original topic, I am of the apparent minority of viewers who didn't dislike ending of Game of Thrones. Yes the last seasons were weaker than earlier ones, but not to a degree I found particularly appalling. Daenarys going mad and Jon Snow having to stab her in the back, I found perfectly logical and fitting in context. The Great Council afterword was weak, but acceptable.

I think they really undermined Daenerys turning out to be the final villain by trying for shock value. D&D tend to prefer 10 seconds of shock to 10 minutes of suspense.

But also by that point the show is basically good actors and good production carrying scripts that have absolutely no weight. No sense of interiority for the characters, no sense of the broader world, no sense of lasting consequence. Just pretty looking war crimes and **** jokes

Vahnavoi

2024-05-26, 01:32 AM

Bohandas

2024-05-26, 02:22 AM

I feel that Rogue One was hands down the worst Star Wars movie (and also, on a tangential note, I feel that the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is, at this point*, solidly average for the franchise in terms of quality). I've since gotten the impression that a lot of other people consider it to be one of the better movies in the series, or at least one of the better Disney movies)

*thanks to six or seven of the eleven movies and a fair number of the TV shows not being very good either

Errorname

2024-05-26, 02:23 AM

Daenarys turning into a villain didn't come as a shock to me - it seemed like a logical conclusion to the strain she'd been under for a very long time, and in line with her previous acts when not given "proper respect", such as burning of all the Dothraki leaders.

I can't speak to how effective it was a shock, and Daenerys as an endgame villain did exist as a theory prior to the show, but I still don't think it worked.

It's just poorly dramatized. The actual triggers are dumb as rocks (Euron makes four impossible shots in rapid succession to knock a dragon out of the sky!), they do it in the span of a single episode and the characters are such hollow shells at that point that I can't care.

I feel that Rogue One was hands down the worst Star Wars movie and also that the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is, at this point*, solidly average for the franchise in terms of quality

I struggle to see Rogue One being the worst unless you have a really high opinion of the sequels and the prequels. Rogue One is pretty middling, but I've never found it offensive the way other bad Star Wars things can be.

Holiday Special mostly noteworthy for being a massive departure in tone and genre. It's like a glimpse at another timeline where Star Wars became something completely different to what it turned out to be.

Batcathat

2024-05-26, 02:44 AM

It's just poorly dramatized. The actual triggers are dumb as rocks (Euron makes four impossible shots in rapid succession to knock a dragon out of the sky!), they do it in the span of a single episode and the characters are such hollow shells at that point that I can't care.

Yeah, I felt like the basic ideas of the last season were alright (and Daenerys extremist side was definitely well-established, even if she usually showed it towards people the audience didn't like), but the pacing felt like someone was pushing slow-mo and fast-forward at random.

Bohandas

2024-05-26, 03:01 AM

GloatingSwine

2024-05-26, 05:06 AM

Daenarys turning into a villain didn't come as a shock to me - it seemed like a logical conclusion to the strain she'd been under for a very long time, and in line with her previous acts when not given "proper respect", such as burning of all the Dothraki leaders.

The series doesn't have Daenerys "turn into a villain" in a manner consistent with the world she lives in though, it gives her the full Riefenstahl, it uses imagery specifically intended to reach a modern audience and say "this is actually the worst person ever!" because otherwise it would have had to put a lot more work into making the audience actually hate her and fear the idea of her victory.

And it really does not earn that, because it just hasn't presented her as any worse than anyone else who runs around with an army conquering people.

It's not the only illogical thing to happen for the finale, of course. The Hound trying to "protect" Arya from the stain of revenge and going himself after she's literally killed an entire family, fed them to their father, and then killed him? Comedy gold! She should just have told him what she did to the Freys and watched his brain snap.

Precure

2024-05-26, 08:35 AM

Many of Martin's fantastical concepts have real world comparisons. Daenerys's attack is similar to aerial firebombing campaigns in our world, which made it less a case of madness.

Metastachydium

2024-05-26, 08:46 AM

"Mary Sue" has always been iffy term to apply outside of fanfiction.

I mean, if the glove fits…

That said, it may be possible Martin was actually angling to criticize, satirize or make fun of that sort of character - there is lot of that going on with other characters introduced early in the series. F.ex. I've seen a good case made for how Khal Drogo is a deconstruction of a Conan the Barbarian type of character, and Eddard Stark of Aragorn of Lord of the Rings. It's possible the author just missed the mark on the execution. It's hardly uncommon for a critical take to end up just a slightly edgier repeat of the target of criticism.

But like I said earlier, I broadly agree with this analysis.

Daenarys going mad and Jon Snow having to stab her in the back, I found perfectly logical and fitting in context.

It was perfectly logical, just executed stupidly…

The Great Council afterword was weak, but acceptable.

…but I'll draw the line here. "Stupid pseudomedieval shmucks don't understand democracy" jokes? "I don't care about worldly matter and I'm totally not that guy called Brandon anymore, therefore… Of course I want to be your king, using the old nickname of the person I'm not!" "Hm. The Hightowers and Redwynes were closely related to the old Great House and weathered the wars with their power and resources largely intact. Let's make this nobody mercenary guy who helped murder their relatives and sack the province on behalf of their old enemies the new Lord Paramount of the Reach and Warden of the South instead, I'm sure they won't mind!"

As for the North seceding, I understand why they'd let it happen. It's not like it's not a depopulated wasteland with depleted resources facing a winter it's not prepared to survive (no, it won't last for a generation, but seriously, it really is winter) is much of an asset or something their crippled budget has funds to fix. But they paint it as a "Sansa so clever" good idea.

Yeah, I felt like the basic ideas of the last season were alright

I don't know. The basic idea seemingly being "let's clear the board of any characters too smart for us to write and everyone whose face we tire of, logic be damned"… I kinda disagree.

(and Daenerys extremist side was definitely well-established, even if she usually showed it towards people the audience didn't like)

Hard agree, thank you. Errorname and Swine are right that they went overboard with the aesthetic side of it, but the basics were always there.

, but the pacing felt like someone was pushing slow-mo and fast-forward at random.

And man, so absolutely true. "Let's do an episode's worth of soap opera where nothing happens, than get done with the whole Long Night deal in the next single episode once and for all. What could go wrong?" Well, so many things, guys. So many things.

It's just poorly dramatized. The actual triggers are dumb as rocks (Euron makes four impossible shots in rapid succession to knock a dragon out of the sky!),

The actual triggers are more like how everyone doesn't immediately start venerating her as god-empress; how her underlings keep failing in dying (in, admittedly, increasingly stupid ways), prompting her to solve stuff with her usual "obey me or DRAGONS" routine; how she then starts losing said dragons (in, admittedly, increasingly stupid ways); and how by the end suddenly nobody really wants her on the throne (so shocking! Albeit their other candidate being Jon… Yeah, let's file this under painful to watch too.)

they do it in the span of a single episode and the characters are such hollow shells at that point that I can't care.

That much is very fair, though, at any rate. I honestly wonder why, to put it in the terms these very forums will understand the best, there weren't more viewers who upon seeing S7, did like (if I'm not mistaken) you after seeing TLJ and never come back for S8.

Peelee

2024-05-26, 08:51 AM

"Mary Sue" has always been iffy term to apply outside of fanfiction.

Fanfiction can be good quality writing and source material can be **** quality writing.

Vahnavoi

2024-05-26, 09:48 AM

Fanfiction can be good quality writing and source material can be **** quality writing.

Sure. That doesn't actually justify or make usage of the term less iffy.

Imagine having a term that specifies a bad thing based on origin. Then someone comes in saying "but things can be bad regardless of origin!". Yeah. We know that. That's not what the term exists to describe. Applying it regardless of origin ruins its specificity and just turns it to another word for bad thing. Semantic drift and dilution at work.

Mary Sue was at its most useful when it referred to fan author self-insert in fan fiction. Broadening its use beyond that just made it into another internet snarl word.

Peelee

2024-05-26, 10:00 AM

Sure. That doesn't actually justify or make usage of the term less iffy.

Why not? If a source material is as or more poorly written than a fanfic which has a character that fits the criteria, why is it suddenly iffy? Do the publication rights or IP licensing void that form of criticism? You say that criticism is most useful in fan fiction, which means you yourself agree and admit that it's not definitionally only applicable to fanfiction. The rest is just arguing price.

Also, I have no skin in the game on this specific accusation of Mary Sue. I've neither read nor seen Game of Thrones. I just don't think "you can't use this criticism because it's not fanfiction" is a terribly good argument.

JNAProductions

2024-05-26, 10:00 AM

Sure. That doesn't actually justify or make usage of the term less iffy.

Imagine having a term that specifies a bad thing based on origin. Then someone comes in saying "but things can be bad regardless of origin!". Yeah. We know that. That's not what the term exists to describe. Applying it regardless of origin ruins its specificity and just turns it to another word for bad thing. Semantic drift and dilution at work.

Mary Sue was at its most useful when it referred to fan author self-insert in fan fiction. Broadening its use beyond that just made it into another internet snarl word.

You're wrong.
Mary Sue might've STARTED as a term for fanfictions, but there's no reason it can't be applied to any fiction with a character in it. You can have a Mary Sue in fanfictions, in published books, in D&D... If the shoe fits and all that.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-26, 10:03 AM

Why not? If a source material is as or more poorly written than a fanfic which has a character that fits the criteria, why is it suddenly iffy? Do the publication rights or IP licensing void that form of criticism?

Trouble is the criteria have largely been broadened into uselessness, first by TVTropes and its relentless drive to categorise instead of examine and understand, and then by people using it as a catchall term for "female protagonist who I don't like".

It is a shoe which no longer fits anyone because it is four miles wide and an inch deep.

Peelee

2024-05-26, 10:05 AM

Trouble is the criteria have largely been broadened into uselessness, first by TVTropes and its relentless drive to categorise instead of examine and understand, and then by people using it as a catchall term for "female protagonist who I don't like".

It is a shoe which no longer fits anyone because it is four miles wide and an inch deep.

Dang, you replies fast. I edited a bit more into that post, but more your rebuttal of what i wrote at the time, I disagree its been broadened to the pointyof uselessness. It just isn't relegated to "author self-insert character". Which, i also note, is hardly even relegated solely to fanfiction.

ETA: Also, i hate the term "Gary Stu" and think Mary Sue is a perfectly gender-neutral term for any character that fits it. If you want to argue sexism plays a role in people using this term against women characters they don't like, i won't argue that. But that doesn't appear to be the case here.

Saph

2024-05-26, 10:21 AM

Trouble is the criteria have largely been broadened into uselessness, first by TVTropes and its relentless drive to categorise instead of examine and understand, and then by people using it as a catchall term for "female protagonist who I don't like".

Normally I'd agree with you, but in the case of Dany, she's a young super-beautiful female protagonist with silver hair and violet eyes and multiple super-powerful magical animal companions and a tragic backstory who's also a princess who's the heir to the throne and who's constantly admired/worshipped by almost everyone except the strawman villains she overcomes. She's practically a caricature of the archetype.

Complaining about people calling Dany a "Mary Sue" is like complaining about people calling Deadpool a rip-off of Deathstroke. It may or may not be true, but anyone with functioning eyes is going to notice that there's kind of a similarity there.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-26, 10:23 AM

If people are trying to apply it to Daenerys, it absolutely demonstrates its overbroadness.

Remember that the original term was used to denote a character who everyone likes immediately, and if anyone doesn't like them it's specifically to show how wrong that character is, is always right and if anyone disagrees with them it's to show how stupid that character is, and because they're also a fanfiction ASI probably has a romantic entanglement with the author's preferred member or members of the original lineup.

Daenerys is only valued as chattel until she acquires power as the world around her understands it (which is the power to kill, embodied as giant **** off dragons) frequently wrong about things and people in destructive ways which hurt her specifically because she is a teenager with absolutely no understanding of the world, and the process of her learning to exert power and rise to a level of political control in the world is slow and tortuous.

Now, in the later seasons of the TV show there's a lot of conflict where her advisors are wrong about everything, she ignores them and then wins, but that's because absolutely everyone has mashed potato for brains in the later seasons and stupid things happen on the regular because the plot requires them.

Vahnavoi

2024-05-26, 10:32 AM

Why not? If a source material is as or more poorly written than a fanfic which has a character that fits the criteria, why is it suddenly iffy?

Because the only clear criteria for application of the term were that it's a fan fiction character that is a fan author self-insert. All of the other supposed criteria are superficial and not widely agreed upon.

Do the publication rights or IP licensing void that form of criticism?

"There's a word for a bad thing from a specific source. Does not being from that source shield a bad thing from criticism?"

No, you use the word that specifies the correct source, if there is such a thing. Failing that, you call it just a bad thing and then specify what you mean.

"Mary Sue" has no utility for explaining what you mean, since outside its link to fanfiction, it's a loose checklist of traits that changes based on personal whim of nearly every user.

Metastachydium

2024-05-26, 10:42 AM

You're wrong.
Mary Sue might've STARTED as a term for fanfictions, but there's no reason it can't be applied to any fiction with a character in it. You can have a Mary Sue in fanfictions, in published books, in D&D... If the shoe fits and all that.

Yep.

for "female protagonist who I don't like".

Notably, in the context of criticising fantasy works, I'm pretty sure I used it (or the Stu variant thereof) to describe a certain someone form the breadth of work churned out by a certain Terry Goodkind the most by a very far margin. I'm not calling Daenerys one of those because she's female, and find the implicit accusation rather offensive. I call her that because she handily demonstartes a (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=26017507&postcount=146) whole host of traits associated with the archetype (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=26017754&postcount=162), thank you very much.

Normally I'd agree with you, but in the case of Dany, she's a young super-beautiful female protagonist with silver hair and violet eyes and multiple super-powerful magical animal companions and a tragic backstory who's also a princess who's the heir to the throne and who's constantly admired/worshipped by almost everyone except the strawman villains she overcomes. She's practically a caricature of the archetype.

Complaining about people calling Dany a "Mary Sue" is like complaining about people calling Deadpool a rip-off of Deathstroke. It may or may not be true, but anyone with functioning eyes is going to notice that there's kind of a similarity there.

See also this here above, yes.

If people are trying to apply it to Daenerys, it absolutely demonstrates its overbroadness.

Remember that the original term was used to denote a character who everyone likes immediately, and if anyone doesn't like them it's specifically to show how wrong that character is, is always right and if anyone disagrees with them it's to show how stupid that character is, and because they're also a fanfiction ASI probably has a romantic entanglement with the author's preferred member or members of the original lineup.

Daenerys has the single largest salivating-after-her harem in the series, and although I haven't touched the books in a while, I think it only differs from that in not adding Jon to the roster, but having an extra husband and even Xaro fantasizing about how a life of cruising the seas with D. would be so cool. And some "even the girls want her" on top.

Daenerys is only valued as chattel until she acquires power as the world around her understands it (which is the power to kill, embodied as giant **** off dragons)

That's pretty much only true until Drogo realizes he's madly in love with her, which is… Almost immediately after she's intriduced. His death throws in a brief hiatus (where People Who Are Really Bad are mean to her), but by the end of the whole Qarth thing, yes, she's entering full-swing "obey me or dragons" mode.

Now, in the later seasons of the TV show there's a lot of conflict where her advisors are wrong about everything, she ignores them and then wins, but that's because absolutely everyone has mashed potato for brains in the later seasons and stupid things happen on the regular because the plot requires them.

You have to be very generous to somehow pretend it isn't already on in S6 at the latest, where people not exposed to Her Inherent Greatness still do have pretty darn functional brains.

Peelee

2024-05-26, 11:01 AM

Because the only clear criteria for application of the term were that it's a fan fiction character that is a fan author self-insert. All of the other supposed criteria are superficial and not widely agreed upon.

Aside from the sexist uses, which tend to advertise themselves as such fairly clearly, it seems the criteria are widely agreed upon. Aside from a small minority that insist language is unable to evolve and only the original definition of self-insert character will ever be valid.

Bohandas

2024-05-26, 11:06 AM

Metastachydium

2024-05-26, 11:09 AM

Aside from the sexist uses, which tend to advertise themselves as such fairly clearly, it seems the criteria are widely agreed upon. Aside from a small minority that insist language is unable to evolve and only the original definition of self-insert character will ever be valid.

I am also yet to see any use of the term to describe a character that doesn't have any of the traits usually associated with the character type and is merely a self-insert (for which we have a better and cleare term in, well, self-insert), I might add, making the one defining quality Vahnavoi seems to accept as not only arguably not neccessary, but also not sufficient in itself.

Vahnavoi

2024-05-26, 11:12 AM

Aside from a small minority that insist language is unable to evolve and only the original definition of self-insert character will ever be valid.
Evolution of language is perfectly capable of making useful terms useless and you are not a neutral party in said evolution.:smalltongue:

Ramza00

2024-05-26, 11:13 AM

I am sorry but I am going to annoy both sides of the discussion, I am having fun and I hope everyone understands I have no ill will even if I may be passionate.

but in fantasy literature there is often the concept of “the special” , the one who was anointed by heaven, who was prophesied , etc etc.

The one who is not a self insert , yet the audience has mirrored their own dreams and desires onto via being seduced via hearing that persons thoughts, dreams, aspirations via a first person perspective. The reader now relates to the protagonist in a way that they feel attached to the character like the attached character is family or themselves, they are FANS.

What does one do with this fan energy?

=====

And what if this character who is a walking dream, turns out to be a NIGHTMARE, yet truly believes in their cause. Martin was 16 when Dr. Strangelove came out, and I can list a thousands of other examples but will not for it would be long. What if one lives in an absurd world, the bad place, and one person gets to decide the tempo of the musical hall in which everyone else is FORCED to dance to?

Martin was once a horror writer you see 👀 ( in the last five years Martin has used some of his wealth to set up a scholarship for aspiring horror writers to attend the Odyssey Writing Workshop, the Miskatonic scholarship.

Errorname

2024-05-26, 02:06 PM

Also, I have no skin in the game on this specific accusation of Mary Sue. I've neither read nor seen Game of Thrones. I just don't think "you can't use this criticism because it's not fanfiction" is a terribly good argument.

My position is more specifically that it was a fandom in-joke that broke containment and lost the context that made it make sense. I think it's carrying a lot of baggage from misuse and it isn't useful enough as an analytical tool to be worth keeping around.

Daenerys has the single largest salivating-after-her harem in the series, and although I haven't touched the books in a while, I think it only differs from that in not adding Jon to the roster, but having an extra husband and even Xaro fantasizing about how a life of cruising the seas with D. would be so cool. And some "even the girls want her" on top.

Do you think it is unrealistic for an unmarried royal who is rapidly amassing power and followers to have suitors?

And calling unwanted sexual objectification by older men who want to take advantage of her a harem is certainly a take.

His death throws in a brief hiatus (where People Who Are Really Bad are mean to her), but by the end of the whole Qarth thing, yes, she's entering full-swing "obey me or dragons" mode.

I question your takeaways from stuff like Mirri Maz Duur or the entire Meereenese plotline.

And what if this character who is a walking dream, turns out to be a NIGHTMARE, yet truly believes in their cause. Martin was 16 when Dr. Strangelove came out, and I can list a thousands of other examples but will not for it would be long. What if one lives in an absurd world, the bad place, and one person gets to decide the tempo of the musical hall in which everyone else is FORCED to dance to?

I'd also say that all Martin's main characters are playing into classic villainous archetypes as well as heroic ones. Jon is a resentful half-brother to the rightful heir, Daenerys has a lot of classic evil queen imagery, and Tyrion is very obviously a Richard III / Wormtongue figure, and I suspect a major tension in the final books will be which archetypes these characters ultimately end up filling.

Mechalich

2024-05-26, 04:07 PM

I question your takeaways from stuff like Mirri Maz Duur or the entire Meereenese plotline.

Yeah, and she doesn't even have control over the dragons until after the Meereen plotline concludes, which has yet to happen in the books. She can give them a command to breathe fire, but that's all. She rides Drogon for the first time and he dumps her in the wilderness, resulting in her getting captured by her enemies (which is where the book plotline currently ends).

Daenerys is a destined fantasy protagonist with two standout features: she's unreasonably beautiful and she has innate fire resistance. That's not really all that impressive given her circumstances. The dragons are part of a great destiny in which she, Jon Snow, and a third character whose identity has not yet been revealed, share (the show ignored this by turning one of the dragons into an ice zombie).

Sure, lots of people lust after her, but ASOIAF is an extremely lusty series with an open embrace of sexual objectification all over the place. I think this is a point where people get wires crossed because the show heavily emphasized Daenerys' appearance by repeatedly having Emilia Clarke take her clothes off on camera while Lena Headey, Natalie Dormer, Sophie Turner, and others were mostly allowed to keep their clothes on.

Peelee

2024-05-26, 04:12 PM

Evolution of language is perfectly capable of making useful terms useless and you are not a neutral party in said evolution.:smalltongue:

I agree that I'm not neutral in that and that language evolution can render words useless. I do not agree that has happened with "Mary Sue".

My position is more specifically that it was a fandom in-joke that broke containment and lost the context that made it make sense. I think it's carrying a lot of baggage from misuse and it isn't useful enough as an analytical tool to be worth keeping around.

Gotcha. I'm even less qualified to opine on this specific instance, then, since all I know about the fandom is they turned hard against the show at the last season or two.

Ramza00

2024-05-26, 05:32 PM

I feel the need to underline the whole Mirri Maz Duur plot line and the words she said to Dany in response to Dany’s questions “why”

will likely be relevant with the end of the books if Martin ever graces us with another 0 to 3 books

The end is often but not always written in the beginning with the genres of tragedy and horror

Errorname

2024-05-26, 09:56 PM

Gotcha. I'm even less qualified to opine on this specific instance, then, since all I know about the fandom is they turned hard against the show at the last season or two.

I find this one particularly egregious, because unlike something like Rey where I can at least see the logic even if I don't agree, show!Daenerys not only gets the same sort of treatment as her peers but is also easily the character the finale judges the most harshly

I feel the need to underline the whole Mirri Maz Duur plot line and the words she said to Dany in response to Dany’s questions “why”

Yeah, I don't fully disagree that Daenerys's chapters are generally not as engaging as other parts of these books, but I find the assertion that she's just up against strawmen kind of baffling. Like I guess if you're sort of glazing through her chapters to get back to the stuff you like I can see how you might think that, but I don't think it at all holds up to any serious analysis.

Metastachydium

2024-05-27, 10:31 AM

Do you think it is unrealistic for an unmarried royal who is rapidly amassing power and followers to have suitors?

And calling unwanted sexual objectification by older men who want to take advantage of her a harem is certainly a take.

Now you're doing it again. What I said about Xaro based on a vague recollection of the books is incidental to the point I'm making (which is why I didn't even bring up the whole "everybody wants her so much even the prostitutes of enemy cities dress up as her" from the series, besides the obvious reaosns why I didn't bring it up). Sticking mainly with the series that I remember better (sorry, I don't feel like touching the physical books now; they are very big and if I drop them on me I might get hurt or die!), your cherry-picker counterpoint hardly applies to Drogo or Jorah or even that sleazeball Daario, to not even touch Jon here. And that's before we get into how many people start immediately worshipping her every time she does something dramaticlly violent (Drogo's funeral, after Yunkai, when she kills all those Dothraki leaders…)

We can further compare her case to characters of a similar profile (young(ish) attractive females with political advantages attached). Margaery (someone very deliberate and intelligent, coming from the richest family with the numerically largest army in all Westeros) has three marriages or almost marriages, one to a guy who's not into women, one to a sadistic psycho she needs to work hard to play, and one to a kid she's manipulating expertly because he doesn't know better. Sansa (increasingly the last member of the Great House (previously) controllinga very large, strategically importyant and politically difficult province, and as such routinely deemed a valuable asset by various factions) gets an almost-marriage to the psycho above who doesn't want her and another guy not into women, an arranged marriage to a conventionally unatrractive guy (meant to punish them both, which is felt by both), one to another psycho sadist who just wants to go psycho sadist on her, plus too creepy older guys one of whom kinda gaslights her into reciprocating, but is really more into the memory of her mother. Then we have Cersei, with an arranged marriage to an older fat drunkard she hates, an arranged almost-marriage to one of the guys not into women, two gross incestuous relationships and something weird with a violent dumbass clown she holds in contempt but keeps around for political reasons.

Beyond how all three of them are far better rounded and more interesting characters than Daenerys for a whole host of unrelated reasons… I find it hard to believe you can't see who's the outlier here, by a wide margin.

I question your takeaways from stuff like Mirri Maz Duur or the entire Meereenese plotline.

Mirri Maz Duur is something of an exception, yes, but she goes way disproportionate on her specifically. As for Meereen, I maintain that the anemic "complications" that just quietly go away, barely explored (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=26018178&postcount=179) (I could have added the Mossador thing there, although that's not only framed as a "stupid ungrateful peasants don't appreciate what the new governance is doing for them", but I also feel like that's, for a change, halfway correct) before (Show!)Daenerys burns something big, declares she won and everybody cheers (again, this is not even S7/8) are not the game changers you make them sound like.

I'd also say that all Martin's main characters are playing into classic villainous archetypes as well as heroic ones. Jon is a resentful half-brother to the rightful heir,

(Also, outside fan speculation, so far that's exclusive to the Bad Seasons from the show. Or do you mean all the puppy-eyed musings about what makes a true Stark?)

Zevox

2024-05-27, 11:33 AM

Ah, here's another one I thought of for myself: my favorite Legend of Zelda game is Skyward Sword. When it first came out and I finished it, it was the first time I'd truly felt a Zelda game had surpassed Ocarina of Time, and after replaying it and Ocarina years later, I found I still very much feel that way. It captured the sense of epic fantasy adventure better than any other Zelda since Ocarina, it had fantastic dungeon design (particularly in the desert region with the localized time-travel element being very cool), great boss fights, and I even felt that the way they'd used the motion control element to add a puzzle aspect to many enemies' basic combat, requiring you to strike them from the right angles to be effective, was very appropriate for a series that so heavily involves puzzles to begin with. Pretty much everything I love about Zelda was in the game in spades, and my criticisms are few and fairly minor.

But that does seem to be quite a minority opinion. Most of them time when other people talk about the game I see them griping about the motion controls - which I felt worked quite well, especially compared to most other attempts to integrate such controls into series not originally designed for them during the Wii era - or the story, which really baffles me, as I find the story quite good by Zelda standards (which aren't admittedly aren't high, but still). The release of the Switch version which now lets you play without motion controls doesn't seem to have moved the needle either. Even seeing someone else bring it up as one of the better games in the series is rare, much less it being anyone else's favorite, and it does genuinely baffle me why so many don't seem to feel it's at least a darn good Zelda game, regardless of what anyone's absolute favorite may be.

Precure

2024-05-27, 11:36 AM

I think Xykon and his villain speech ("power is power") is overrated. In fact, I found him a pretty boring character and villain. He was only interesting when he was human.

Bohandas

2024-05-27, 11:42 AM

I liked Simcity Societies but apparently no one else did

Errorname

2024-05-27, 02:17 PM

And that's before we get into how many people start immediately worshipping her every time she does something dramaticlly violent (Drogo's funeral, after Yunkai, when she kills all those Dothraki leaders…)

Yeah, I have no idea why witnessing someone pull of a genuine miracle might inspire some devotion.

your cherry-picker counterpoint hardly applies to Drogo or Jorah

Her marriage with Drogo is something she learns to survive and there's a reason he has to die before she can actually self-actualize. I'd agree that Jorah gets sanded down for the show to make him more attractive, but I think that's for the benefit of Jorah far more than it was for Daenerys. The show is sympathetic to Jorah as a dogged nice guy whose affections are not returned, but he's quite creepy and controlling in ways the books are more honest about. He's not a good dude and his attraction to Daenerys is not an endearing quality.

I find it hard to believe you can't see who's the outlier here, by a wide margin.

I do not actually think Daenerys is an outlier, unless you think her own abusive brother or treacherous unrepentant slavers are particularly dreamy.

As for Meereen, I maintain that the anemic "complications" that just quietly go away, barely explored (I could have added the Mossador thing there, although that's not only framed as a "stupid ungrateful peasants don't appreciate what the new governance is doing for them", but I also feel like that's, for a change, halfway correct) before (Show!)Daenerys burns something big, declares she won and everybody cheers (again, this is not even S7/8) are not the game changers you make them sound like.

Season 5 and 6 are also bad seasons! I'd also dispute that the problem is that the complications are "anemic", the problem with Meereen in both book and show is that it's a nigh-unsolvable quagmire. It is a subplot that bit off way more than it could chew in terms of complexity and subject matter. George still hasn't solved it, and D&D's solution was to just throw up their hands and leave.

(Also, outside fan speculation, so far that's exclusive to the Bad Seasons from the show. Or do you mean all the puppy-eyed musings about what makes a true Stark?)

When does Jon display any resentment or ambition in the bad seasons? Honour and duty is all there is to him by the end of the show.

Precure

2024-05-27, 02:39 PM

Yeah, Mary Sue is a meaningless term. It's a strawman (strawwoman?) of fanfiction OCs since beginning.

Liffguard

2024-05-27, 02:39 PM

1)Backstory is by and large unnecessary and showing it more so.
2)I have a theory that Star Wars caught fire originally because it left so much for the public to fill in with their own imaginations, and explaining all of those things, as you said, makes the world smaller than we can imagine, shallower and cheaper.

Cory Doctorow's lates blog post (https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_tha n_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt) talks about this.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-05-27, 05:57 PM

I think Xykon and his villain speech ("power is power") is overrated. In fact, I found him a pretty boring character and villain. He was only interesting when he was human.

Xykon's a simple character, but a necessary one. He's interesting in the way people are forced to react and deal with him. In that sense, he's less a character and more like a force. He does have one interesting quality developed over the comic, though: It's hard to tell just how much his ineptitude is genuine and how much is a put-on. It's clear that he's sharper than he acts.

I think you need characters like that in any good story. Not everyone needs multifaceted personalities and deep introspective development. Like the straight man in a comedy routine, you need some static pillars that others can work off of.

My own contribution to the thread, The 13th Warrior. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

Oh, and Forspoken. Certainly has flaws, but it's a significantly better game than the reception it got. I largely blame this on meme-rot that came about because of the marketing poisoning opinions before anyone had even played it and gamers generally being media illiterate and unable to understand subtext in writing.

Zevox

2024-05-27, 06:48 PM

Oh, and Forspoken. Certainly has flaws, but it's a significantly better game than the reception it got. I largely blame this on meme-rot that came about because of the marketing poisoning opinions before anyone had even played it and gamers generally being media illiterate and unable to understand subtext in writing.
Oo, yeah, that's a good one. Forspoken is not a great game - I was definitely hoping it would be better - but it's not the garbage pile that general internet discourse would have you believe. The combat is fun, the mobility is fun, and the main character is pretty well-written. Has more than its fair share of flaws to go with that, which can make it hard to recommend to someone who isn't interested in fairly specific things about it, but the general discourse about it online is so mired in nonsense from people who clearly didn't even play it that you're unlikely to even hear about those.

Peelee

2024-05-27, 07:38 PM

My own contribution to the thread, The 13th Warrior. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

One of my closest IRL friends in our friend group discord server was renamed due to his talking up how good 13th Warrior was. So you're not alone!

Also i should really watch that sometime.

Precure

2024-05-27, 07:57 PM

Xykon's a simple character, but a necessary one. He's interesting in the way people are forced to react and deal with him. In that sense, he's less a character and more like a force.

I don't really have a problem with his role in the comic. It's just that I don't find him cool or charismatic as many fans.

My own contribution to the thread, The 13th Warrior. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

The 13th warrior is an awesome movie, a very unique setting and plot.

runeghost

2024-05-27, 10:48 PM

The 13th Warrior[/I]. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

You're definitely not alone. I love that movie. One of my top ten, easily.

And perhaps I'm dating myself here, but...

Hudson Hawk. I though the crazy, over-the-top off-beat humor worked, and I loved it. Everyone else I went to see it with BitD was apparently expecting a Die Hard sequel, and loathed it.

Somewhat similarly, I adore The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I'm neutral on Andrew Dice Clay as a stage comedian, but that was a quirky off-the-wall movie that I thought worked quite well. I won't call it a masterpiece, but it was fun, and I rewatch it every couple years. It was a critical and financial flop, and apparently everyone hates it. And I really don't get why. Sure, it's not The Godfather or Star Wars, but not every film needs to be.

Most Final Fantasy games. I played FF-X first, and loved it, but all the others (both before and after) seem like shallow retreads of the same formula... and people seem to love them all equally.

And on the dislike side of the aisle, Terry Goodkind and his "Sword of Truth" series in particular. Some people seem to really like him, other seem to find him acceptable generic fantasy. I think it is the absolute worst extruded fantasy product I've ever read. And I have a read a great deal of it. (To be clear, I read the first book in the series and threw it away once I was done to make sure no one else ever read that copy. It was that bad. According to reviews, the others in the series are like that one, but moreso. I have not been tempted.)

Mechalich

2024-05-27, 11:24 PM

And on the dislike side of the aisle, Terry Goodkind and his "Sword of Truth" series in particular. Some people seem to really like him, other seem to find him acceptable generic fantasy. I think it is the absolute worst extruded fantasy product I've ever read. And I have a read a great deal of it. (To be clear, I read the first book in the series and threw it away once I was done to make sure no one else ever read that copy. It was that bad. According to reviews, the others in the series are like that one, but moreso. I have not been tempted.)

The thing about the Sword of Truth series is that it's an allegorical polemic using a fantastical setting, like Narnia. However, unlike Narnia, where the allegory represented the strongest cultural element in the Anglophone world at the time it was published, the allegory the Sword of Truth is making is considerably more obscure (though not so obscure that I can't let xkcd (https://xkcd.com/1049/) handle explanations), especially to the fantasy-interested teenagers and college students who are likely to pick it up and, by carefully keeping the main villains off the screen for quite some time, Goodkind cleverly hides the really obvious bits for quite a few books. Also, Goodkind is a pretty good polemicist and is especially good combining seemingly subversive 'edgy' content, all the weird sex and torture stuff, with a very typical outcast power fantasy, in a way that had/has considerable appeal to mostly male teenagers who aren't successful in traditional areas - Richard's initial success coming from his ability to miraculously pierce the BS that runs his world rather than any specific skill at arms or magic or whatever (this is common, pretty much every 'gamelit' protagonist who uses some kind of system exploit to achieve ultimate power is doing exactly the same thing, making Sword of Truth actually comparatively subtle).

Considering how successful that the straight-up polemic in this zone has been, it should not really surprise anyone that a cleverly designed fantasy version of the same would be effective.

Zevox

2024-05-28, 12:49 AM

Most Final Fantasy games. I played FF-X first, and loved it, but all the others (both before and after) seem like shallow retreads of the same formula... and people seem to love them all equally.
Oh yeah, Final Fantasy as a series in general would qualify for me too, albeit for quite different reasons. I was a fan of JRPGs as a genre long before I played my first Final Fantasy, with the GBC remakes of Dragon Quest 1-3 possibly being my first RPGs period, and Tales of Symphonia holding the crown as my favorite game of all time for a little while in the aughts. But aside from a couple of spin-offs I don't really count (Crystal Chronicles and Tactics Advance), I didn't play any Final Fantasy games until much later, when I picked up a PS2 in 2008 (my family had bought mostly Nintendo consoles while I was young, aside from going with a Sega Genesis instead of a SNES). You'd think with FF being the most popular JRPG series out there I'd have quickly become a fan - it's certainly what I expected - but not so much.

First I played FFX, which I found good enough, but nothing great. I played Dragon Quest 8 around the same time and liked it more, for comparison. Then I tried X-2, and while I liked the in-battle class-change concept, immediately disliked the weird turn-based-but-not-really combat system, where you got your turns only after a certain amount of real time passed (the ATB system). I had no idea at the time that's how most of the series worked, so I was in for a rude awakening when I went and tried other games, only to find nearly all of them using some form of that. I wound up playing 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 13; I didn't even finish 7-9, found 4 and 12 decent but nothing more, found 13's gameplay okay but the story laughably awful, and would honestly call 1 my favorite of that whole bunch just because I can appreciate a simple old-school dungeon crawler, and it doesn't have the ATB system.

Final Fantasy didn't actually impress me until very recently as a result. 7 Remake and Rebirth are actually great games IMO, and 16 a pretty darn good one. But even with that, I could only say my opinion of the series a whole is mixed, and much lower overall than my opinion of other major series in the genre, which is bizarre for the most famous and popular example of one of my favorite genres of video games.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-05-28, 01:40 AM

Errorname

2024-05-28, 01:54 AM

Cory Doctorow's lates blog post (https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_tha n_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt) talks about this.

I can't speak to his specific Furiosa criticisms having not seen it yet, but it feels unpersuasive to me, or at least incomplete. Creative choices always have trade-offs, and adding anything to a story requires collapsing the space for implication and inference. If we label that trade-off as something innately bad or unsatisfying we are making an argument against art.

And that trade-off is at least sometimes justified. There's a reason we make finished movies instead of having the final state of production be a pitch or a script. The argument that a lot of genre writers overfocus on lore and backstory isn't untrue, but it's easy to overcorrect.

Oh, and Forspoken. Certainly has flaws, but it's a significantly better game than the reception it got. I largely blame this on meme-rot that came about because of the marketing poisoning opinions before anyone had even played it and gamers generally being media illiterate and unable to understand subtext in writing.

I think a massive amount of it is presentation. A lot of the clips I've seen would have been utterly inoffensive as offhand barks that fired off in a gameplay section, but because they play in a cutscene where the only thing you're doing is watching a single character emote to nothing at all it feels sloppily paced and draws a lot of attention to the dialogue.

Rynjin

2024-05-28, 03:42 AM

Negative: Bioshock: Infinite is a game I considered meh at best when it came out, and could not for the life of me comprehend why so many people praised it to no end when it came out. I think people who weren't avid sci-fi watchers didn't realize that "quantum" had already been a pseudo-science buzzword meaning "magic" for like 20 years at that point? So people thought the plot was a lot "smarter" than it really was.

Public opinion seems to have caught up to this opinion and gone the opposite direction (there is a nuclear hatred for that game in some people's hearts now that I...ALSO don't get), but it was much-belove don release.

Positive: Since somebody mentioned the Sword of Truth books, I'll throw in The Legend of the Seeker tv series, which even as someone who had read the books at that point I thought was better. The only good book in that entire series is the first one, and The Seeker captures those fun elements and then runs with them instead of tossing them aside for Gary Stu-protagonism turned to 11 and hamfisted political rants I recognized as being awkward and forced even as a young teen.

People seemed to dislike the show for some reason? I dunno how those books ever got a fanbase big enough to care that the series got the hatchet treatment.

Mechalich

2024-05-28, 04:07 AM

People seemed to dislike the show for some reason? I dunno how those books ever got a fanbase big enough to care that the series got the hatchet treatment.

The Sword of Truth books have sold ~25 million copies, putting the series roughly on par with the Outlander novels and ahead of well known stuff like Redwall, Shannara, and Percy Jackson, and easily in the top 20 of fantasy series/novels all time.

Even considering that a lot of people, such as myself, who read significant amounts of the series eventually soured on it (at the time, moving on to Sword of Truth was one of the standard 'what to do after you've caught up with the Wheel of Time' suggestions, which in hindsight was some brilliantly evil marketing), there's still enough people out there who genuinely are fans of the books to form a highly vocal group who were annoyed that the books didn't get a 'real adaptation.'

GloatingSwine

2024-05-28, 05:40 AM

pita

2024-05-28, 06:25 AM

people still think that Jimmy would have turned around and stopped scamming if only Chuck had believed in him for some reason, despite several things in the show explicitly showing us that that would never happen. Maybe one day...

I mean, there is a version of the timeline, I think, where Jimmy remains fairly crooked but doesn't go full immoral piece of **** who cares about no one. There is none where he stops scamming, because we see him running scams basically constantly from the very first episode, but I do think part of the tragedy of Better Call Saul is that the defining moments in it were points where people could have chosen to do the right things and instead chose to do the petty thing they knew they would regret, and these things add up (and by "people" I do mean "pretty much everyone"). This opposed to Breaking Bad, where Walter could have basically stopped at any point, he just needed to be king, because he was a man who constantly felt small next to others and needed to outdo them.

Peelee

2024-05-28, 09:20 AM

I do think part of the tragedy of Better Call Saul is that the defining moments in it were points where people could have chosen to do the right things and instead chose to do the petty thing they knew they would regret, and these things add up (and by "people" I do mean "pretty much everyone").

I disagree. What, exactly, was "the right thing" for Chuck to do? Take Jimmy into his law firm, accepting what he knew to be a massive liability, just so Jimmy could have what Jimmy wanted?

Trixie_One

2024-05-28, 09:22 AM

I absolutely believe that if there had been more books, there won't be so this all theoretical at this point, but if there was then Dany was absolutely going to burn King's Landing.

Back when s8 had just finished and the online asoiaf fandom hadn't yet fallen into inchorent rage, full on denial, or depressed acceptance there was some really good analysis to be found about how there's actually quite a bit of foreshadowing in the books that Dany does have a bells theme going on that's going to play a part when she goes full burn em all. People were mixed if Connington's backstory is also part of it, but apparently there's enough mentions for Dany to make it interesting even if you ignore the Connington chapters. You also got a lot of excuses along the lines of 'oh, but Tyrion will manipulate her into it, and/or won't mention the wildfire caches which will contribute to how bad it will be' but personally I figured that rather robbed Dany of her agency too if he'd have gone that way if the blame was entirely on Tyrion.

Interestingly you did see some small green explosions happening in the background when Dany goes on her rampage in the show that nobody comments on so I suspect that episode was very much based on Martin's rough concept for her arc where they will play more of a part.

Zevox

2024-05-28, 09:30 AM

If you ever want to play the other FF games, and I think 5 sounds like it'd be your jam since it contains the most complete class system before FF Tactics, make sure to check out the options. Every ATB entry in the series has an option to switch the game from "Active Battle" to "Wait" mode, where the battle pauses entirely when a characters turn comes up. Essentially, it turns the game into a fully turn-based RPG again.
Oh, I always used that. It does not change things meaningfully however - while opponents won't take a turn while you're taking yours if it's on, their atb gauge still fills, so the mechanic still punishes you for taking your time thinking, or even merely navigating the menus insufficiently quickly. It's a mechanic that combines the worst of both turn-based and real-time combat IMO, giving you the time pressures of real time gameplay but none of the action and excitement, and the menu-based combat of turn-based without the ability to take your time and think comfortably.

And I don't see how having a class system would make 5 more to my liking. I liked the novelty of changing classes mid-battle in X-2, but overall I prefer my JRPGs with characters who have defined playstyles suited to their character over ones with a class system generally. If I were to try one of the older FFs that I haven't, it would probably be 6, since a friend of mine counts that as his second favorite game of all time and will sing the praises of its story any time the subject comes up, so I'd at least get a good conversation piece with him out of it, even if I wouldn't at this point expect to like it as much as he does. But even that I doubt I'll do.

Darth Credence

2024-05-28, 09:33 AM

In regards to GoT, the thing that I was most different from everyone else was not thinking, in the episode The Bells, that Dany did the obviously wrong thing.

She was attacking King's Landing, controlled by Cersei. (The same Cersei who had planted a bunch of explosives around the sept and blew them all up when she got her enemies there.) Suddenly, the bells ring, indicating that King's Landing was surrendering, and she could land her last dragon and come take over.

Would you have believed it, as Dany? Would you have thought, 'yep, we won this, everything is OK'? Or, would you have thought, 'hmm, maybe this is a final trick by Cersei, and if I accept this surrender and land, I'm going to end up dying here and Cersei wins'?

I know that I would have thought trap. I could have seen the next episode showing it was a trap, and Dany was correct, or showed that it wasn't and Dany killed people who shouldn't have died and was therefore unfit to rule. But the idea that everyone immediately accepted that it was a true surrender and Dany not accepting it just meant she was bloodthirsty rather than wrong did not, and does not, make sense.

To be fair, I was pretty checked out of the show by then and may have missed some things, but I don't think I missed anything that would lead me to trust Cersei in any way.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-28, 09:44 AM

I absolutely believe that if there had been more books, there won't be so this all theoretical at this point, but if there was then Dany was absolutely going to burn King's Landing.

Sure, though I very much doubt it was going to be "because the bell chimed for madness o' clock".

The quasi-magical true heir from obscurity is, as I have noted previously, sufficiently established as a fantasy and courtly romance trope at the point that GRRM started writing that Discworld had already parodied it at least twice. The Song of Ice and Fire version of that is very much likely to turn out to be a brutal conqueror taking what's theirs by force not the hoped-for restoration of just rule.

But that ain't what the show did, because themes are for eighth grade book reports. It's not just about what happens, it's about why it happens and how you get to it happening.

Metastachydium

2024-05-28, 10:30 AM

Yeah, I have no idea why witnessing someone pull of a genuine miracle might inspire some devotion.

Yeah, my ten thousand buddies and I do that a lot whenever someone murders people horribly with advanced weapons. (Also, there was no miracle in Yunkai, just a one-sided loody battle.)

Her marriage with Drogo is something she learns to survive and there's a reason he has to die before she can actually self-actualize. I'd agree that Jorah gets sanded down for the show to make him more attractive, but I think that's for the benefit of Jorah far more than it was for Daenerys. The show is sympathetic to Jorah as a dogged nice guy whose affections are not returned, but he's quite creepy and controlling in ways the books are more honest about. He's not a good dude and his attraction to Daenerys is not an endearing quality.

Like I said, I don't remember the books quite that well, so I won't get into that bit, but in the series, yes, she is very much fond of them both, and the rough phase with Drogo, even, lasts for all of a day or so.

I do not actually think Daenerys is an outlier, unless you think her own abusive brother or treacherous unrepentant slavers are particularly dreamy.

Again, in the face of the full list for her and the closest analogues in terms of profile, I find that a very baffling conclusion.

Season 5 and 6 are also bad seasons!

Disagreed, although their Touched by Daenerys bits really do get stupid. (I consider the scene where the Reach and Dorne decide to ally with her and explain their rationale for that actively worse than nearly anything in the last seasons.)

I'd also dispute that the problem is that the complications are "anemic", the problem with Meereen in both book and show is that it's a nigh-unsolvable quagmire.

And yet, the "conflict between former slaves" thing comes up once and is never mentioned again, the "dragons are eating people" thing just quietly solves itself and… Um… That leaves the "reactionary terrorists" thing which is a bunch of strawmen with eminently questionable tactics scoring a total of two S7/8 style victories that don't make much sense and achieve even less in the grand scheme of things. Oh, and there's the siege thing resolved in, like, two minutes, I guess. (Admittedly, the book gave that one more love.)

and D&D's solution was to just throw up their hands and leave.

…with the implication that Danerys renaming the place and burning a few more people (mostly save soldiers, for an extra bit of funny) was a ringing victory that solved the problem. Rising orchestral tune, sail into the sunset triumphant.

When does Jon display any resentment or ambition in the bad seasons? Honour and duty is all there is to him by the end of the show.

Ambition… Maybe not really. He really is feeling uncomfortable around D. after a while, though, and the show, at least, never makes a big deal out of him being half-sibling with Robb as last season factions build him up against Daenerys. Maybe Sansa, but that's not about ambition and resentment either.

Hudson Hawk. I though the crazy, over-the-top off-beat humor worked, and I loved it. Everyone else I went to see it with BitD was apparently expecting a Die Hard sequel, and loathed it.

"My name is KitKat. This is not a dream." (How can one dislike Hudson Hawk?)

And on the dislike side of the aisle, Terry Goodkind and his "Sword of Truth" series in particular. Some people seem to really like him, other seem to find him acceptable generic fantasy. I think it is the absolute worst extruded fantasy product I've ever read. And I have a read a great deal of it. (To be clear, I read the first book in the series and threw it away once I was done to make sure no one else ever read that copy. It was that bad. According to reviews, the others in the series are like that one, but moreso. I have not been tempted.)

Until around now that I saw people post all the statistics on how well it sells, I firmly believed that was probably the least controversial opinion conceivable. Goodkind's work should somehow be added to the official definitions of the word bad. You did the world a great service disposing of that book.

Positive: Since somebody mentioned the Sword of Truth books, I'll throw in The Legend of the Seeker tv series, which even as someone who had read the books at that point I thought was better. The only good book in that entire series is the first one and The Seeker captures those fun elements and then runs with them instead of tossing them aside for Gary Stu-protagonism turned to 11 and hamfisted political rants I recognized as being awkward and forced even as a young teen.

Now, that, on the other hand, is where my surprise over being in the minority comes in: Wizard's First Rule is probably the worst of the lot. Worse even than Soul of Fire or Naked Empire, and that's a feat. It's the book that introduces such mainstays as Confessors, Mord-Sith, villains cartoonishly bad enough to sacrifice children in overeroticised ways, and randomly outlaw fire just so that the Toxic Masculinity Good Guy Savages have a good excuse for Morally Justified Cannibalism… In terms of tossing things aside, it has the highest ratio of random wordbuilding elements forgotten by Goodkind five pages after he introduced them of all books. It's entire second half is one prolonged non-consensual BDSM session I still don't know how or why I soldiered through. Even the freaking prose is more purple in it. No, it's not the almost charming only readable installment. It's the low point.

Batcathat

2024-05-28, 10:39 AM

I remember when I was maybe 13 or 14 and had read a lot of the big name fantasy series when a friend of mine recommended Sword of Truth. It sounded like something I might like, so I read the back of the first book and thought "Eh, maybe later". I feel like literally everything I've heard about the series since then has validated my decision not to read it (I think it's safe to say that "later" will never happen in this case). :smalltongue:

Metastachydium

2024-05-28, 10:43 AM

I remember when I was maybe 13 or 14 and had read a lot of the big name fantasy series when a friend of mine recommended Sword of Truth.

Why did you have Chaotic Evil friends?!

Batcathat

2024-05-28, 10:47 AM

Why did you have Chaotic Evil friends?!

All the Lawful Good ones kept trying to smite me for some reason.

warty goblin

2024-05-28, 11:09 AM

Yeah, but Soul of the Fire is the one with the murder-suicide STD*, and Stone of Tears has "sex this demon and it's barbed junk to death" scene that is permanently burned into my brain. We must also pour one out for Naked Empire and how to overthrow Evil Fantasy Communism with statues. Pillars of Creation should also be duly remembered, what with the protagonist switch o a person so annoying it made going back to Richard an actual relief. And who can forget Temple of the Winds and its classic ending where Kahlen is prophesied to betray Richard "in her blood" so she cheats on Richard by having sex with Richard, but then it actually doesn't count because she was thinking about Richard while cheating on Richard by having sex Richard while still fulfilling the prophesy because was on her period so the answer was period sex the whole time this is 100% normal thing to have a prophesy about what are you looking at. Also the scene where Richard rips a dude's spine out through his stomach with his bare hands.

In a way picking a worst Sword of Truth book is sort of like picking which large animal you want to take a big steaming dump all over a loaf of bread to make a sandwich, while some options are definitely worse, and there's some subjective wriggle room about moisture content and texture, absolutely none of them are good.

*Everyone always goes on about the chicken that is not a chicken from this one because the concept of a pure evil chicken is hilarious and dumb, but in SoT terms the chicken that is not a chicken is wholesome and good because nobody does any weird sex things with it or even tortures it to death because moral clarity.

Mordar

2024-05-28, 11:31 AM

I find this one particularly egregious, because unlike something like Rey where I can at least see the logic even if I don't agree, show!Daenerys not only gets the same sort of treatment as her peers but is also easily the character the finale judges the most harshly

I have a harder time seeing the differences between Luke and Rey in terms of aptitude and ability...understood the hate the character received, but never the basis of the explanation for it, if you will.

My own contribution to the thread, The 13th Warrior. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

One of my closest IRL friends in our friend group discord server was renamed due to his talking up how good 13th Warrior was. So you're not alone!

Also i should really watch that sometime.

Add me to the list of people who really liked it. AB is that "Oh yeah, I liked him in pretty much everything" actor that I wouldn't otherwise remember to put in my list of favorite actos.

For some reason I also think of Brotherhood of the Wolf when I think of 13th Warrior...liked both of them.

Why did you have Chaotic Evil friends?!

Shouldn't that be Lawful Evil friends? The Goodkind stuff was super popular at a time, so I think it (the recommendation to read) was an effort to make everyone toe the same line...

- M

Ionathus

2024-05-28, 11:36 AM

I feel that Rogue One was hands down the worst Star Wars movie

I disagree but this opinion makes sense to me.

(and also, on a tangential note, I feel that the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is, at this point*, solidly average for the franchise in terms of quality)

*thanks to six or seven of the eleven movies and a fair number of the TV shows not being very good either

I will never understand this one, though. Even at their worst, the Disney-driven works have passable production quality and inoffensive, if uninspired, writing and acting. The Star Wars Holiday Special is complete garbage, start to finish, with the possible exception of the animated part. You could claim that it's more fun to watch than the Disney dreck, maybe, since bad things can often be more enjoyable to experience than bland things, but in terms of "quality" there's absolutely no contest.

I mean, there is a version of the timeline, I think, where Jimmy remains fairly crooked but doesn't go full immoral piece of **** who cares about no one. There is none where he stops scamming, because we see him running scams basically constantly from the very first episode, but I do think part of the tragedy of Better Call Saul is that the defining moments in it were points where people could have chosen to do the right things and instead chose to do the petty thing they knew they would regret, and these things add up (and by "people" I do mean "pretty much everyone"). This opposed to Breaking Bad, where Walter could have basically stopped at any point, he just needed to be king, because he was a man who constantly felt small next to others and needed to outdo them.

I do like how believable all of the decisions in Better Call Saul feel. When I go back to watch Breaking Bad now, Walt's decision-making process and ego feel cartoonish in comparison. With Jimmy and Kim and Nacho and the rest, it all feels like a much slower, gradual slippery slope. It's inevitable, but subtle in some cases (and others not so much, like when Jimmy chooses to represent Lalo).