Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

DanZapman said:

I don't think this is unpopular, I've seen a lot of people say this and I agree. Someone with an internally consistent extremist ideology is a lot more interesting than the guy whose entire motivation is crying about Death not being his girlfriend. Having a somewhat better major villain just wasn't enough to save the cinematic universe as a whole.

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Actually comic Thanos is better, Infinity Gauntlet clears Infinity War/Endgame easily, and the Death Motivation is simply superior and cool as hell. The MCU is so determined to strip out so much that is strange and operatic and wild about the comics and in the process end up flattening a lot. And then they introduced Death in that Agatha show I didn't watch anyway so idefk.

Movie Thanos just does the same thing Marvel keeps doing with a lot of their villains (Killmonger most infamously) of the "Too far radical." It renders him feeling kind of derivative and squanders the Mad Titan angle. He just feels like some wack job instead of the ultimate wack job. It's like if the DC movies changed Darkseid into just some alien overlord who wants money and other material resources. It's just not as fun

Yeah, based on my reading I much prefer comic Thanos. Especially as the "halve every population once" is such a crude use of the Gauntlet and also would surely absolutely cripple many cultures, even as others would be back to where they'd been in only a generation or two.

Dachi said:

Fate/Type moon


Something I absolutely hate is how much people seem to vilified or all usleses goddes jokes about Ishtar, which is quite absurd considering most of sumerian/akkadian mythology she's portraited as rather benevolent goddes,

Compared to mythological Ereshkigal who's straight up more evil but revisioning including removing part of being married to nergal and several other god's.


Or even how hypocrit people are about how she's somehow more villain then giglemesh same gilgamesh who would let majority of humanity die becouse big boomer moment humanity of this day sucks back in my day

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absolutely correct and we have a good essay on how cool Ishtar should be on the forum here.

The MCU suffers from a truly bizarre affliction.

It can't be too earnest. But it also can't bee too funny/sarcastic. It's trying to thread the needle of everyone being a sarcastic dipshit while also being al serious and gloomy and Thanos is the physical embodiment of that.

MysticKnightJoe said:

I really like the Legend of Vox Machina cartoon. But I don't like Critical Role. Does this make sense?

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Makes perfect sense. LVM is very much focused on telling the story and showing the events. Critical Roll has... all the other stuff, like people breaking the character and such. It has rolls and everything. If you are not interested in "table talk", so to speak, it makes sense you prefer the "clean" version of the events.

ShyPerson said:

I would like for something in a fantasy setting to not transplant a modern school system, but instead use an apprenticeship system.

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You might like Modesitt's Imager Portfolio, then. The MC of the first trilogy starts as an apprentice portraiture artist in a guild.

MysticKnightJoe said:

Actually comic Thanos is better, Infinity Gauntlet clears Infinity War/Endgame easily, and the Death Motivation is simply superior and cool as hell. The MCU is so determined to strip out so much that is strange and operatic and wild about the comics and in the process end up flattening a lot. And then they introduced Death in that Agatha show I didn't watch anyway so idefk.

Movie Thanos just does the same thing Marvel keeps doing with a lot of their villains (Killmonger most infamously) of the "Too far radical." It renders him feeling kind of derivative and squanders the Mad Titan angle. He just feels like some wack job instead of the ultimate wack job. It's like if the DC movies changed Darkseid into just some alien overlord who wants money and other material resources. It's just not as fun

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You make a fair point about it being overused in the MCU but I haven't seen much of the MCU and I'm still fundamentally disinterested in what boils down to Thanos being an incel mad that Death likes Deadpool instead of him. I do think that comic Thanos works better if he's in love with the concept of a cosmic force instead of Death being an actual specific entity. Still have to disagree based on the stuff I've seen but I could see how that could change if Marvel had the guts.

DanZapman said:

You make a fair point about it being overused in the MCU but I haven't seen much of the MCU and I'm still fundamentally disinterested in what boils down to Thanos being an incel mad that Death likes Deadpool instead of him. I do think that comic Thanos works better if he's in love with the concept of a cosmic force instead of Death being an actual specific entity. Still have to disagree based on the stuff I've seen but I could see how that could change if Marvel had the guts.

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The Deadpool thing came way later, and was basically a joke. Thanos isn't an incel, he's insane, but in a romantic, titanic sense.

MysticKnightJoe said:

The Deadpool thing came way later, and was basically a joke. Thanos isn't an incel, he's insane, but in a romantic, titanic sense.

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Yeah, I can work with that.

Thanos was responsible for probably the worst comic I've ever seen, so I've got to give it to MCU Thanos for at least being Not That.

DanZapman said:

Yeah, I can work with that.

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Look just read Infinity Gauntlet, it's good and fairly short. That's what this boils down to.

SzechuanSauce said:

Alright, to move on to something a bit less troubling, I think Star Wars should die. I think many, many long running franchises should just run their course and eventually fade into history.

It's demented to keep on milking these properties, stop picking things up from our childhoods and puppeting its decaying corpse. Let new things arise, there's only so much media you can make out of some guy from California thinking "Hey, what if Kurosawa movies, but in space!"

The only moral milking of franchises is the copious amounts of fanfiction written by teenagers or bored office workers.

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And I think that Star Wars is in neither better nor worse shape than it was pre-Disney. Its just that unlike before, there's now the expectation that some of what would've been relegated to old EU series is actually going to be brought to a larger, more mainstream audience.

MysticKnightJoe said:

It wasn't an impossible sell, of course, but I think it just resulted in a bit of an uphill climb for the movies, which ended in flying off a precipice and falling straight down into the pit with Rise of Skywalker.

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Another unpopulat take - TROS is a 6/10 at worst. (And frankly, we dodged a bullet compared to what we would've gotten in Trevorrow's Duel of the Fates, and the old Legacy of the Force BS.)

Tyran said:

The real reason TFA is the worst SW movie ever is because it is aestehtically and thematically boring, outright sterile really.

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Even hotter take; TFA is a superior version of A New Hope.

Artificial Girl said:

Yeah, TFA and TLJ's superweapon seems to exist mostly because, well, Star Wars has superweapons so we better put one in there.

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To be fair, it makes sense when you remember that the First Order are basically Imperial fetishists, so of course they'd try to recreate that shit in line with their wehraboo leanings.

Alan Kelson said:

And I think that Star Wars is in neither better nor worse shape than it was pre-Disney. Its just that unlike before, there's now the expectation that some of what would've been relegated to old EU series is actually going to be brought to a larger, more mainstream audience.

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Strong agree with this actually. I feel people forget that the original EU put out a lot of pretty bad stuff, but it was all relegated to the circle of Star Wars enthusiasts (Admittedly one of the larger fandoms). Star Wars Acolyte is certainly no worse than one of the weaker books or games, but it is just out there in front of a wider audience, and also cost way more.

Alan Kelson said:

Another unpopulat take - TROS is a 6/10 at worst. (And frankly, we dodged a bullet compared to what we would've gotten in Trevorrow's Duel of the Fates, and the old Legacy of the Force BS.)

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I don't agree with the 6/10 (Though I have only seen it once and I mostly just remember being very disappointed in the cinema) but yeah I definitely feel everyone forgets Trevorrow is a pretty massive hack and the Duel of the Fates script is...not great.

MysticKnightJoe said:

Strong agree with this actually. I feel people forget that the original EU put out a lot of pretty bad stuff, but it was all relegated to the circle of Star Wars enthusiasts (Admittedly one of the larger fandoms). Star Wars Acolyte is certainly no worse than one of the weaker books or games, but it is just out there in front of a wider audience, and also cost way more.

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Speaking as someone who got into Star Wars mainly via the old EU - I literally wrote a book report on Vector Prime back seventh grade - this, 100%.

MysticKnightJoe said:

but yeah I definitely feel everyone forgets Trevorrow is a pretty massive hack and the Duel of the Fates script is...not great.

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Ironically up until Dominion, I hadn't actually had a bad experience with Trevorrow - I liked the first Jurassic World, and thought Safety Not Guaranteed was quirky and charming, so if anything, I should be more upset by his dismissal than anyone...
Except that outside of Finn's arc, Lando, Rey getting a dual-bladed lightsaber and not making her into Palpatine's granddaughter, everything I've read about Duel of the Fates leads me to want to reply to everyone wondering "why didn't we get a better Episode IX" with the words, "We did"* - because I'm certain DOTF would've sucked a lot more.

Anywho, tax for the thread:
Everyone complaining about Chewie's death in the old EU is being a dumbass; he got one of the most metal kriffing endings in the history of the galaxy. (And if he'd been Force Sensitive, its the moon that would've been crushed by the Wookiee.)
*Which isn't to say that I agree with all its decisions or that I would've done the same thing.

Broke: ANH is better than TFA
Woke: TFA is better than ANH
Bespoke: Star Wars is just beanie babies but worse

Alan Kelson said:

Everyone complaining about Chewie's death in the old EU is being a dumbass; he got one of the most metal kriffing endings in the history of the galaxy. (And if he'd been Force Sensitive, its the moon that would've been crushed by the Wookiee.)
*Which isn't to say that I agree with all its decisions or that I would've done the same thing.

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It's a good death. I think I read somewhere that RA Salvatore was told he had to kill someone and he decided he'd rather be known as the guy who killed Chewie than Han. I think people have this habit of taking characters as these precious dolls that cannot be scratched or destroyed and that's weak. Han's death in TFA was actually a highlight too

MysticKnightJoe said:

It's a good death. I think I read somewhere that RA Salvatore was told he had to kill someone and he decided he'd rather be known as the guy who killed Chewie than Han. I think people have this habit of taking characters as these precious dolls that cannot be scratched or destroyed and that's weak. Han's death in TFA was actually a highlight too

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And then people complain about how Disney had to "make up" for Rian Johnson "ruining" Luke Skywalker... even though TLJ was actually a massive box office success.
(Granted, I do wish Rian held off on killing Luke until Episode IX - I would've like to see him properly interact with the rest of the cast and reach an equilibrium between the hero he was in the OT and the more disillusioned war vet he was in TLJ.)

Alan Kelson said:

And then people complain about how Disney had to "make up" for Rian Johnson "ruining" Luke Skywalker... even though TLJ was actually a massive box office success.
(Granted, I do wish Rian held off on killing Luke until Episode IX - I would've like to see him properly interact with the rest of the cast and reach an equilibrium between the hero he was in the OT and the more disillusioned war vet he was in TLJ.)

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Eh, something can be hugely financially successful and also bad writing.

MysticKnightJoe said:

Han's death in TFA was actually a highlight too

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I guess my hot take aside from despising Ep7 and rating it the worst SW film, is that Han's death fucking sucks.

Cinematography is alright and Ford is trying his best but the direction is fundamentally stilted and it relies on an extremely shallow and wooden opposite character that made me fundamentally unable to invest or empathise with him, and who came across as a soulless changeling. It's probably one of if not the most important parts of the film to nail and it totally shits the bed.

Sumanai said:

Gil was corrupted by the Grail!

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Funnily enough, despite the post talking about rewrites, Gil not being corrupted by the Grail is something that has stayed consistent and canonical across works since the very beginning.

MysticKnightJoe said:

Movie Thanos just does the same thing Marvel keeps doing with a lot of their villains (Killmonger most infamously) of the "Too far radical."

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My unpopular opinion is that people keep using that critique without understanding what it means.

Like, putting Killmonger on the same level as the Malthusian eco fascist terrorist is incredibly bizarre, the only connection here is a very broad "killing lots of people for an understandable motivation". One has at least a foundation in reality, the other is based on completely incorrect axioms and the method he comes up with is far worse than anything Killmonger sought to do. Even in the movie itself, Quill notes Titan is off its axis and its gravitational pull is "all over the place", meaning Thanos' self-serving explanation for his backstory being an overpopulation crisis is not quite accurate.

Ever since Black Panther people have thrown that accusation of villains all being "too far!" radicals because Killmonger was that good, enough that they thought the movie was discrediting him, even though he was acknowledged as right even if his solution was wrong, and the characters even tried to save his life but he refused.

If Thanos counts as a radical, do we count Ultron as well? After all he only wanted to protect humanity from threats and from itself. What about Loki? He has sympathetic motivations and was victim of Asgardian expansionism, does that make his goals of ruling Midgard justified? What about Kaecilius, who wanted to eliminate death? Or

The moment you extend that definition of radicals to any villain treated remotely sympathetically, it becomes silly.

And it's not even that widespread if you look at the spread post-Endgame objectively:


It's kind of even, and I had to cheat a bit, because the numbers of them which are "radicals" in the sense of an ideology is far smaller than those having sympathetic personal goals (many of which are sympathetic but still selfish at the same time). Wenwu and Wanda wanted their loved ones back, Arthur Harrow wanted to solve the problem of evil, Ikaros was following his protocol and doing what he genuinely thought would be best for spreading life in the universe, etc. A lot of these are edge cases that you can kinda, if you squint, link back to a real-life concern, but many are also quite esoteric. Mistress Death only did what she did because it's her nature, how do you even quantify that?

Because that's the problem with the criticism, many times I've seen it used by people blurring characters they thought were right because they found them sympathetic and characters they thought were right because they agree with their ideology. For example, transhumanists online find basically every villain in fiction whose motivation is immortality to be right and done dirty by the narrative. Does that make for an accurate assessment? Not really, it just means their priors will make them reach such a conclusion.

And also, it's a criticism I always found weird. Disney/Marvel not only did not invent this take (or we might as well say Jules Verne was paid by Disney for writing Captain Nemo the way he did), but also, do people forget this is the universe Magneto comes from? Erik Magnus "Survivor of the Holocaust" Lehnsherr? So is he "flattened", too? It's incredibly ironic to praise Comics Thanos because of the writing of Movie Thanos when these same comics do the same thing, except to a different character. Turns out even comics don't always do "strange and operatic and wild" things.

And finally, people are also lying. I was there for the first three Phases, and a common complaint was that, while the movies were good, the villains were the weakest part as being one-dimensional cackling evil people who more often than not ended up as a dark mirror of the hero with the same powers. Come Phase 3 and there are more sympathetic villains, like Zemo, Vulture, Killmonger, Ghost, Thanos, etc. ...And then now people turn around and complain about these sympathetic villains, because how dare they are still treated as villains and killed off? Nevermind that they will applaud Namor and the High Evolutionary both for taking the exact opposite stance writing the villain, while also not watching The Marvels which has a "radical" proven completely right by the end.

People fundamentally do not know what they actually want villains to be written as (and they do want villains because when there aren't they find it boring). I suspect the actual truth is that they will be content so long as they are written well, which is the real, actual crux of the issue.

Which also applies to Comics Thanos. He is good not because he is written with a delusional motivation, he is good because he is written well by exactly one person: his creator, Jim Starlin. He is the one who makes his motivation compelling, but not only that, Starlin makes post-Infinity Thanos good by showing him as a character who has evolved, grown, and won't do the Gauntlet thing again because it failed and he understands now as an introspective character why it was the wrong thing to do, and why neither omnipotence nor Death's love will make him happy. Keypoint being when Jim Starlin writes him.

As soon as others do write him, he reverts back to doing the same thing again, because comics do not change and even the most well-written character will be made to revert back to prior characterization by lazy writers and editorials.



By that token, Movie Thanos is better because he at least has a consistent arc rather than one writer fighting other writers every few years trying to flatten his character.

IMO Luke dying after astral projecting across the galaxy seems like pretty clear setup for Luke to not only come back as a forth ghost in the last movie, but actually do shit as a force ghost and fully literalize "if you kill me I will become stronger blah blah bah".

Also I really don't think Luke showing up as a bitter hermit is Rian Johnson's fault. Because Force Awakens already established that the Jedi were purged again and Luke is off somewhere not really doing anything. Given all the mystery boxed non-plot points supplied by the first movie having Luke retreat into hermitage after screwing shit up with Kylo is the simplest conclusion without having to engage in post-hoc ass pulling to explain why he was doing nothing but in a cool heroic way.

Like, I guess you could halfway and have him be out in the galaxy doing shit... but nothing actually effectual and relevant to the fight against the First Order. Kinda like Zez-Kai El, and IMO ending up like Zez-Kai El is way worse and less dignified compared to just pure hermitage.

Reveen said:

Like, I guess you could halfway and have him be out in the galaxy doing shit... but nothing actually effectual and relevant to the fight against the First Order. Kinda like Zez-Kai El, and IMO ending up like Zez-Kai El is way worse and less dignified compared to just pure hermitage.

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You think it's less dignified to try and understand how one lost their way by living among the people even if it doesn't work, than to give up and find somewhere to wait for your death borosely?

I consider Luke's arc attempt a bridge too far bearing in mind everything else that went to shit in the sequels, but not in itself something that couldn't work, but thinking it less dignified than Zez-Kai El seems a bit baffling to me.

Claudette Savagely said:

Eh, something can be hugely financially successful and also bad writing.

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Well, yeah, the middle three Bayformers are proof enough of that.
But given TLJ was the highest grossing film of its year AND got critical acclaim, I'm baffled whenever anyone suggests Disney was pressured to cave-in to the more reactionary fans with TROS.
Not only do the dates not line-up (JJ was brought onto IX a few months before TLJ came out), but outside of Rey Palpatine... I can't really think of anything that comes off as maliciously trying to undo the film, so much as it is JJ having to rush because Iger insisted on a 2019 release. If anything, there are parts of the film that feel like he earnestly wanted to build on what Rian brought to the table.

Reveen said:

IMO Luke dying after astral projecting across the galaxy seems like pretty clear setup for Luke to not only come back as a forth ghost in the last movie, but actually do shit as a force ghost and fully literalize "if you kill me I will become stronger blah blah bah".

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True, but I still would've preferred to see him properly interact with the rest of the cast before he kicked (and really wish he'd become Finn's space-dad). I think of his death like Natasha's in Avengers: Endgame.

Reveen said:

Also I really don't think Luke showing up as a bitter hermit is Rian Johnson's fault. Because Force Awakens already established that the Jedi were purged and Luke is off somewhere not really doing anything. Given all the mystery boxed non-plot points supplied by the first movie having Luke retreat into hermitage after screwing shit up with Kylo is the simplest conclusion without having to engage in some hackneyed explanation why it's all cool that he didn't do shit last movie.

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Honestly, there's a line from Shadows of Midnor that leaves me convinced that Luke's characterization in TLJ was a perfectly reasonable direction for the character to go in, and the differences between canon and Legends is more akin to one zigging, while the other zagged (well, that and Legends!Luke having a stronger support network to rebuild the Order with).
Mind you, I'm enough of a basic bitch that I would've been 100% onboard with Rey finding a badass Grandmaster Luke on Ach-To.

Reveen said:

Like, I guess you could halfway and have him be out in the galaxy doing shit... but nothing actually effectual and relevant to the fight against the First Order. Kinda like Zez-Kai El, and IMO ending up like Zez-Kai El is way worse and less dignified compared to just pure hermitage.

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Who?

Anywho, next hot take(s):
Star Wars needs a story of a major high-up in the First Order... who had been a willing rebel during the OT and went evil afterwards.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier would've become far more compelling if the response to the Winter Soldier's response to Steve's "...Bucky?" was, "Hello, Steve, been a while."
Yes, I'm suggesting Bucky actually being a willing collaborator with HYDRA would've made things a lot more interesting. (Probably because my first exposure to the character was in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance - where Bucky was well-aware of his and Steve's history and working with the Masters of Evil of his own volition.)

Deadpool & Wolverine is a closer adaptation of the Cable & Deadpool series than the movie actually featuring Cable was.

I wish Wilson Bethel's Benjamin Poindexter was killed by a seemingly cheerful fellow prisoner - who turns out to be the REAL Bullseye, taking a cue from the PunisherMAX incarnation of the character.

DanZapman said:

Eh, personally I do think there was a drop in quality as the series proceeded, even ignoring all the things that look weirder with retrospective knowledge of Rowling and her politics. For instance the third one got kind of silly with the time travel and it caused problems for the narrative that got ignored until the plot contrived to simultaneously break every time travel device in existence. More generally I just don't think that Harry's formulaic life at Hogwarts really had enough to it to keep carrying things for six books, especially when the books kept getting longer.

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The time turners are actually fine in book three. They work on an "it always happened that way" principle so all the remarks about it and their destruction was unneeded.

Prey (2022) is hot flaming trash.

CGI animals that looks like that out of a PS2 video game, apparently eating flowers can lower your body temperature to the point of avoiding detection which brings it to sub-zero temperatures something that would kill you also what flower in real life can actually do that???, said Native girl can't figure out a simple pistol and yet...She can easily figure out advanced alien tech and there's the fact it absolutely demonized the French as if they were evil Orcs, yes I understand colonization was evil but the way they depicted it came off as cartoonish. LMAO. Also Native Americans can do parkour?

Minus One had a budget of $11m-$15m and look what that film accomplished with such amazing CGI and vfx effects. No wonder that film embarrasses modern Hollywood with their unholy large budgets notably modern MCU films with their video game CGI.