Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

[FeigningGrey]

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.

 

[MysticKnightJoe]

I mean, I remember that people used to complain about the merchandizing of the prequels, so I'm kind of shocked that they're treating the merch underperformance as a sign of the films' sucking rather than just merch being more expensive in general, or that maybe we should be glad its not as big a push?

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Like when I was a kid merch was something kids could buy and play around with, now it feels like it is 95% for collectors and grown adults that is extremely overpriced it's kind of ridiculous. Like who else is going to pay over 300 dollars for a Mara Jade lightsaber? It is silly if this is the real push here

 

[all fictions]

Ah so it just fundamentally misunderstands the theme of the epic, or rather just doesn't really care about it. Fair enough.

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That's a bit unfair. You could say the same of Fate Arthuriana, because it's neither about the concept of chivalry and courtly love (medieval works and Mallory especially), nor is it about Right vs. Might (T.H. White, who you could say did the same thing as Nasu did by choosing to make the legend about that), but about something else entirely. The Epic of Gilgamesh as adapted in the universe is about another concept than the pursuit of immortality while still following the plot beats.

 

[Cosar]

Like when I was a kid merch was something kids could buy and play around with, now it feels like it is 95% for collectors and grown adults that is extremely overpriced it's kind of ridiculous. Like who else is going to pay over 300 dollars for a Mara Jade lightsaber? It is silly if this is the real push here

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Yes, the massively expensive collector items are collector items. But they're not the totality of the merch which is obvious if you went into a target or wallmart. Suggesting otherwise makes you and anyone who buys your argument look ridiculous.

 

[MysticKnightJoe]

Yes, the massively expensive collector items are collector items. But they're not the totality of the merch which is obvious if you go went into a target or wallmart. Suggesting otherwise makes you and anyone who buys your argument ridiculous.

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I mean even the non-collector's stuff has really jumped in price. 95% might be an exaggeration of course but there is definitely a shift in that you are either paying way more for stuff that isn't as good or the same, or you are paying out the nose for an absurd luxury good. That usually gets scalped heavily anyway.

 

[Queshire]

Gil's a fun character. He rejected being a tool for the gods, but his capabilities isolated him from humanity even back in his own time. Enkidu is the only one who could really relate to him.

In modern day time he's basically an old man disappointed in kids these days, but still gives them a chance to surprise him.

 

[Wind-Up Citrus]

I would want to see a big budget catcher in the rye film

If only to see the absolute clusterfuck the author's estate about no movies and how badly movie execs can butcher the tale of the incel.

 

[ApocalypticFish]

Personally, I was never really super into Gil, and I've been friends with someone who's enough of a scholar on the topic but is also enough of a weeb that he's lampooned Fate's interpretation of Gilgamesh and Mesopatamia a few times, so my opinion on Gilgamesh tends to oscillate between "this is kinda cool thematically" and "shut the hell up".

 

[Claudette Savagely]

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.

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:

Spoiler: Long ass chart and spoilers

Villains​	Installment​	Sympathetic personal or ideological goal​	Self-serving goal​
Mysterio	Far From Home		X
Agatha Harkness	WandaVision, Agatha All Along		X
Wanda Maximoff	WandaVision, Dr. Strange 2	X (is both)	X (is both)
Karli Morgenthau/Flag Smashers	The Falcon and Winter Soldier	X
John Walker	The Falcon and Winter Soldier		X
Power Broker	The Falcon and Winter Soldier		X
Sylvie	Loki	X
General Dreykov (Red Room)	Black Widow		X
Infinity Ultron	What If? Season 1		X
Wenwu	Shang-Chi	X
Ikaros	Eternals	X
Eleanor Bishop	Hawkeye		X
Kingpin	Hawkeye, Echo, Daredevil Born Again		X
Green Goblin	No Way Home		X
Arthur Harrow	Moon Knight	X
The Destine Family	Ms. Marvel	X
Damage Control	Ms. Marvel		X
Gorr	Thor 4	X
The Intelligencia	She-Hulk		X
Crusade Against Monsters	Werewolf By Night		X
Namor and Talokan	Wakanda Forever	X
Kang	Quantumania		X
High Evolutionary	GotG		X
Gravik	Secret Invasion	X
Dar-Benn	The Marvels	X
Sinister Strange	What If? Season 2	X
Cassandra Nova	Deadpool 3		X
Death	Agatha All Along	X
The Watchers	What If? Season 3		X
Dr. Octopus	Your Friendly Spider-Man		X
Scorpion	Your Friendly Spider-Man		X
Norman Osborn	Your Friendly Spider-Man		X
The Leader	Captain America 4	X
Thaddeus Ross	Captain America 4	X (is both)	X (is both)
Anti-Vigilante Cops	Daredevil: Born Again		X

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.

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Finally, someone who understands that Starlin's authorial voice actually matters!

You go into a comic book shop these days and it's like everyone forgot the poor bastard even exists, nevermind that he originated the character and is pretty much the only one with a track record of depicting him well.

 

[Cosar]

I mean even the non-collector's stuff has really jumped in price. 95% might be an exaggeration of course but there is definitely a shift in that you are either paying way more for stuff that isn't as good or the same, or you are paying out the nose for an absurd luxury good. That usually gets scalped heavily anyway.

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You can go to Target right now and get a toy lightsaber for ~10 bucks. Now, there are a number of other more expensive options as well, but I don't think 10 dollars is some exceedingly unreasonable price tag for one. There's a bunch of shirts that seem about as expensive as non-star wars shirts. The Starships and action figures don't seem that out of line with the vague prices I remember as a kid, at least accounting for inflation to some degree. There is, broadly speaking, the same amount and type of Star Wars merch now as back then. Hell, I think they might even have just more 'midrange' lightsabers now too: there were some 30-50 dollar ones that were special in some way that I didn't bother to really investigate.

So, no, it's not an exaggeration. You are just conflating expensive collector items with kids toys and hoping that people aren't paying attention to the slight of hand. Now, I would accept that there has been inflation, but for the most part with toys it seems generally in line with the inflation that you see in a basic inflation calculator.

Maybe the difference is more that you can just see the general poor quality of kids toys in general? Alternatively, we definitely see more articles and advertisements regarding the new Star Wars collector item, so that can make them seem a lot more omnipresent than they actually are.

 

[DestinyPlayer]

I think that Fate Gilgamesh's whole attitude and personality is, overall, about the one thing about him that isn't out-of-place from his original story.

Sure, he's supposed to have learned things and gotten humbled from his quest, but he is still an ancient king.

 

[Squirtodyle]

Gil is basically my favorite ever take on an arrogant character.

Arrogance as a character trait is a bit hit or miss for me sometimes, but Gil's arrogance being taken to such absurd levels loops all the way back around to being insanely endearing.

 

[Hologram Killer]

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.

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:

Spoiler: Long ass chart and spoilers

Villains​	Installment​	Sympathetic personal or ideological goal​	Self-serving goal​
Mysterio	Far From Home		X
Agatha Harkness	WandaVision, Agatha All Along		X
Wanda Maximoff	WandaVision, Dr. Strange 2	X (is both)	X (is both)
Karli Morgenthau/Flag Smashers	The Falcon and Winter Soldier	X
John Walker	The Falcon and Winter Soldier		X
Power Broker	The Falcon and Winter Soldier		X
Sylvie	Loki	X
General Dreykov (Red Room)	Black Widow		X
Infinity Ultron	What If? Season 1		X
Wenwu	Shang-Chi	X
Ikaros	Eternals	X
Eleanor Bishop	Hawkeye		X
Kingpin	Hawkeye, Echo, Daredevil Born Again		X
Green Goblin	No Way Home		X
Arthur Harrow	Moon Knight	X
The Destine Family	Ms. Marvel	X
Damage Control	Ms. Marvel		X
Gorr	Thor 4	X
The Intelligencia	She-Hulk		X
Crusade Against Monsters	Werewolf By Night		X
Namor and Talokan	Wakanda Forever	X
Kang	Quantumania		X
High Evolutionary	GotG		X
Gravik	Secret Invasion	X
Dar-Benn	The Marvels	X
Sinister Strange	What If? Season 2	X
Cassandra Nova	Deadpool 3		X
Death	Agatha All Along	X
The Watchers	What If? Season 3		X
Dr. Octopus	Your Friendly Spider-Man		X
Scorpion	Your Friendly Spider-Man		X
Norman Osborn	Your Friendly Spider-Man		X
The Leader	Captain America 4	X
Thaddeus Ross	Captain America 4	X (is both)	X (is both)
Anti-Vigilante Cops	Daredevil: Born Again		X

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.

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this is such a good post. seriously you didn't have to give us that chart. i have never been super interested in thanos but i might look into starlin now

 

[Triggerhappy]

But my actual Hot Take is the Serpoians... Aren't that problematic (they are but they are meant to be creepy villains)... Maybe it's because I'm in the United States and the trope of being "Probed" by Aliens isn't new or unheard of (I will admit it does feel very Icky in a way that made my jaw kinda drop... Mostly from the Dialogue which whilst Humorous has a sense of discomfort about it)

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It comes down to the very particular way in which they've got Ayase restrained in their first encounter. Take away that particularly compromising position and their, ahem, cybernetic enhancements, land much more comedicaly.

Yes, the massively expensive collector items are collector items. But they're not the totality of the merch which is obvious if you went into a target or wallmart. Suggesting otherwise makes you and anyone who buys your argument look ridiculous.

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Yeah, the collector stuff is collector grade specifically because they're supposed to LOOK like how ten year old you remember your star wars action figures. Not how they actually were. Kid's toys look less refined not only because they're cheaper, but because they have to hold up to childish abuse.

Hey, it worked for Jackson's LOTR!

Just ignore that those were a continuous production in a very different media landscape.

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I think we're also victims of our own success here too. When Jackson made the Lord of the Rings, he had to show the studio executives his homework and explain how he was actually going to pull this all off. He already had an established record doing effects at or below budget.

Today the technology exists to put literally anything on the screen, anything at all you can imagine. It's so attainable, in fact, that executive rarely ask how they should go about it (because the answer will always be more CGI) or even if they should go about it.

 

[IiamLiam]

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.

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Is this going to be stickied forever? it started to get old after the half a year, 176 pages, and 4,412 posts.

Thread tax: Omelas should be mindwiped from are plant, so that we can go to space already. Thats right, I think if nobody talked about Omelas we would be an interstellar civilization.

 

[all fictions]

Every time someone hates on the stickied post, it gets longer and only on their browser.

Thread tax: I have said again and again that historical verisimilitude matters more than historical accuracy. The past is a foreign country, even with all our knowledge and the entire field of history, there are still things we do not know about historical periods, still things that are being discovered today. We can never accurately represent how the past is, only gets as close as we can. Not only that, the general public has a solid perception of history shaped by outdated history classes and pop cultural osmosis, they expect certain things and not others. If you make a story in the Middle Ages with a blacksmithing woman named Tiffany, people will cry foul and woke agenda. So people clearly are only after what feels authentic to them rather than what actually is.

All that said, someone should make a lot of Korean webtoon writers sit down and read a history book. Korean fantasy webtoons at least try to do something different than their Japanese isekai cousin by having their stories take place in facsimiles of the 17th century and beyond, so they have that going for them, but wow do they still fuck even that up. Why are you mixing together 18th century European Enlightenment aesthetics with an emperor who has a harem, widespread legal chattel slavery (not in colonies but in the motherland itself), medieval knighthood, barbarian tribes in the north, and widespread 19th century news media? Pick a lane and stick to it, a lot of these elements clash together horrendously.

It gets even worse when they add dungeons out of nowhere.

 

[Miath]

Hm. I recall @ the news bit specifically, that broadsheets are pretty old, like, 1400s old.

 

[Aineko]

Thread tax: I have said again and again that historical verisimilitude matters more than historical accuracy. The past is a foreign country, even with all our knowledge and the entire field of history, there are still things we do not know about historical periods, still things that are being discovered today. We can never accurately represent how the past is, only gets as close as we can. Not only that, the general public has a solid perception of history shaped by outdated history classes and pop cultural osmosis, they expect certain things and not others. If you make a story in the Middle Ages with a blacksmithing woman named Tiffany, people will cry foul and woke agenda. So people clearly are only after what feels authentic to them rather than what actually is.

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This sounds like you're saying it matters more to people who are unrepentantly wrong in ways you object to? I advance the brave suggestion that we not elevate that preference to unqualified "more important".

 

[MysticKnightJoe]

Every time someone hates on the stickied post, it gets longer and only on their browser.

Thread tax: I have said again and again that historical verisimilitude matters more than historical accuracy. The past is a foreign country, even with all our knowledge and the entire field of history, there are still things we do not know about historical periods, still things that are being discovered today. We can never accurately represent how the past is, only gets as close as we can. Not only that, the general public has a solid perception of history shaped by outdated history classes and pop cultural osmosis, they expect certain things and not others. If you make a story in the Middle Ages with a blacksmithing woman named Tiffany, people will cry foul and woke agenda. So people clearly are only after what feels authentic to them rather than what actually is.

All that said, someone should make a lot of Korean webtoon writers sit down and read a history book. Korean fantasy webtoons at least try to do something different than their Japanese isekai cousin by having their stories take place in facsimiles of the 17th century and beyond, so they have that going for them, but wow do they still fuck even that up. Why are you mixing together 18th century European Enlightenment aesthetics with an emperor who has a harem, widespread legal chattel slavery (not in colonies but in the motherland itself), medieval knighthood, barbarian tribes in the north, and widespread 19th century news media? Pick a lane and stick to it, a lot of these elements clash together horrendously.

It gets even worse when they add dungeons out of nowhere.

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It's a funny balance. I'm not a historian by any stretch, but yes if there is something I perceive as an 'anachronism' in a fantasy book it usually will stick out quite strongly (Unless it is deliberate of course, like Once and Future King making several jokes about the matter). My most recent example is Dragon Age Veilguard which just didn't quite feel right. And I think that was as much on the fact they completely changed the tone from the last three games as much as anything else.

 

[NemoMarx]

Okay fate take wrt mythological accuracy:

Firstly, while I agree that Alexander and Gilgamesh get their aesthetics basically entirely swapped in fate, king arthur was also not a short blonde woman so it never really stuck out to me. The character designs are warped like that in various ways for most everyone.

Secondly, the whole pitch for Gil in FSN is that he is playing the role of an arrogant pretty boy, and that he looks conventionally normal and not out of place in the town of Fuyuki. The guy walks around like he's going to the local clubs, he sneers at people and tosses out slurs at them, etc. "Blonde twink" is in line with his role in the VN, as kind of a specific visual novel archetype of the guy who threatens to steal your girl. (This is at least a lot of how his aesthetic is supposed to read in Fate route - he's changed outfits for UBW to look a bit more serious from the get go with the black jacket.)

And like for the purposes of what FSN is doing as a story, all of that is fine! It wasn't written with the intent of creating a sprawling 20 year meta series that would actually go back to Babylon and show Uruk. He was a villain in 2/3rds of the routes of an eroge.

 

[DestinyPlayer]

And like for the purposes of what FSN is doing as a story, all of that is fine! It wasn't written with the intent of creating a sprawling 20 year meta series that would actually go back to Babylon and show Uruk. He was a villain in 2/3rds of the routes of an eroge.

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What's surprising is that there isn't a route where you instead manage to bed him.

 

[NemoMarx]

What's surprising is that there isn't a route where you instead manage to bed him.

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In the original Otome game version of fate, I wanna say Gil would have been one of the routes, but prototype and fragment details are so scattered I'm never quite sure. I know prototype gil was also softened a bit compared to fate route because of the role he would have played at least.

 

[Ford Prefect]

Gil is basically my favorite ever take on an arrogant character.

Arrogance as a character trait is a bit hit or miss for me sometimes, but Gil's arrogance being taken to such absurd levels loops all the way back around to being insanely endearing.

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Apart from it being entertaining the pay off is incredible. 'Here I come, King of Heroes.'

 

[Morganite]

I think people have this habit of taking characters as these precious dolls that cannot be scratched or destroyed and that's weak.

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I don't have any strong opinions about this particular example (having been unaware of it and all), but I think a lot of authors handle character death really poorly, so I'm usually going to be immediately suspicious. (Less so if it's the same author who created the character in the first place though.)

Alternatively, we definitely see more articles and advertisements regarding the new Star Wars collector item, so that can make them seem a lot more omnipresent than they actually are.

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I gotta say the store where I work frequently seems to be drowning in the collector stuff, but I think that might be more to do with "people here do not buy it" than anything else.

It comes down to the very particular way in which they've got Ayase restrained in their first encounter. Take away that particularly compromising position and their, ahem, cybernetic enhancements, land much more comedicaly.

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Personally, just the concept on the face of it is enough to make me go "Or I could just reread Cannon God Exaxxion."

-Morgan.

 

[ChatTzar]

Apart from it being entertaining the pay off is incredible. 'Here I come, King of Heroes.'

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Do you have enough weapons in stock?

 

[MysticKnightJoe]

I don't have any strong opinions about this particular example (having been unaware of it and all), but I think a lot of authors handle character death really poorly, so I'm usually going to be immediately suspicious. (Less so if it's the same author who created the character in the first place though.)

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Oh it is definitely not an easy thing to sell. But I don't think something being hard to do should be a reason to not write it...of course if we are talking extended material based on a movie universe or something yeah there are definitely restrictions. Later Star Wars EU stuff killed off a lot of characters, not just Chewie. Couple of the others were probably excessive.