Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

aHappySacka posted...

MaxZorin007 posted...

My mother is dead you cocksuckers

I guess we made a grave mistake.

I am dead serious about this.

Let's bury these puns.

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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Yes, yes, no, yes.

Dying Light is ehh, the rest are pretty good.


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DeltaBladeX posted...

I knew it would be coming. Not my fault they brought back what I missed in the game most people hated.

You're kind of confused, though.

People didn't hate Andromeda because it added more RPG-ish complexity. Even people who loved Mass Effect 1 loathed Andromeda.

What people actually hated was that the game took almost everything that people actually liked out and wiped their ass with it.

If all you're really interested in is the mechanics, and you don't care about the plot enough to ignore all of the terribleness, then there are probably far better games out there you could be playing.


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Metal_Mario99 posted...

Liberals aren't particular about their bedfellows.

I'm kind of surprised The New Yorker (and the Slate, which they reference in the article) called her out on it at all. Standard operating procedure for decades has pretty much been to ignore that sort of thing because racism only counts when it comes from white males.


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Yellow posted...

It's a fallacy though. I think all paradoxes are.

I'd love to hear how you'd solve the Grandfather Paradox, then.

That's not sarcasm, btw, I actually would be interested.


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DeltaBladeX posted...

*awaits scorn*

I came in to ask you when you suffered your concussion and to suggest that you should probably get yourself to a doctor immediately, but you've taken the fun out of it now.


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So you're just going to keep making the same mistake over and over, and keep invalidating the point you're trying to make, because you're too stubborn to be introspective.

Got it.

Thanks for saving me the time by telling me to ignore every opinion you have on the subject from now on, because they're all going to be objectively wrong anyway.


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Chewster posted...

Making every woman wear swimsuits because some of them like it is like if I went bowling and made everyone else use the same ball weight as me. Meaningless analogies are fun!

But your entire argument is kind of shit on by the fact that no one is forcing any woman to participate in the pageant in the first place.


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Revelation34 posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/3-poll-of-the-day/76653372/902747503

Revelation34 posted...

The difference is true feminism is about equal rights. SJWs want MORE rights.

Yes, that post WAS an example of the mistake you've been making. Good on you for pointing it out.

Now learn from it.


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I use Firefox mainly because it has NoScript, which has been the most useful program I've ever had for keeping viruses off my computer. But also because the main alternative is Chrome, and Google can go fuck itself.


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Solid Sonic posted...

Someone was modded for saying boy and it got me thinking.

"Boy" could probably fall under offensive because it's a classic insult for black people in certain parts of the US.


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TheCyborgNinja posted...

How do you explain the obvious fact that China is in the process of taking America's place globally?

Improved fertilization and agriculture provided the resources necessary for China's rapid industrialization, putting them back into a position where their superior population numbers give them the edge in geopolitics, whereas America is settling back to the position we SHOULD have been in all along, but which we leapfrogged by taking advantage of the post-WWII devastation of Europe and the collapse of colonial powers. Doubly so now that Europe has effectively rebuilt itself and forged a counterbalancing alliance, while many of the former colony nations have themselves managed to build up economies that place them on par, making the competition more severe than ever.

Realistically speaking, it doesn't matter who we elected President or Congress for the last few decades, nor what policies they pursued, we were never going to retain the same level of economic dominance and political supremacy. What we're generally seeing is the result of global inevitability, based on forces that are beyond any one person (or any one nation). We just don't like it because it means all the people we kind of stepped on on the way up are lining up to kick us on the way down.

About the only real impact we could have had on the process was if a completely insane government just started nuking everyone, which would break the cycle, albeit with negative consequences for most people involved. There really wasn't a realistic outcome where the US retained global hegemony and into the next century.


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That's not really anthropomorphizing your electronics.

Anthropomorphizing would be if you named your headphones "Steve" and acted like they had their own personality.

What you're describing is closer to animism.


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I don't remember 80s cartoons.

I live them.


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Revelation34 posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

The truth can't be a fallacy. That's not only illogical but impossible.

Then the truth you have to accept is that your statement is effectively rendered false via flawed logical premises.

Or to explain in greater detail in this specific scenario, YOU don't get to define the true, objective, universal definition of "feminism" or "feminist", solely so you can make absolutist statements about what does and doesn't "count".

Hence, your fallacy.


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Zangulus posted...

Holy shit. Bear shopping mall! But who is driving car?!

Judge Reinhold


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Bacon_Pancakes posted...

So it's good the left hates Trump cus, for the first time, it's really pushing young ppl into activism

If it's pushing them into stupid activism, it's arguably worse than apathy.

And it's hard to say "for the first time", since we've already seen something similar (with all of its negative repercussions) during the hippie era.


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We do.


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I wouldn't.


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I didn't have preschool, so generally speaking, once I started school the time period where people generally try to encourage you to color inside the lines or care whether you're doing it "properly" had long since passed.

I DID have art classes from 1-5, but those were generally more concerned with whether or not you were actually putting effort into something rather than what you were producing, so you could pretty much shit out an abstract mess and still get credit for it. And if I remember correctly, those "secondary" sort of classes (Art, Music, Library) didn't actually have grades as much as they did ratings for participation ("Satisfactory", "Needs Improvement", that sort of thing).

I can't actually remember most of what I drew or painted or sculpted in art class because I was never really interested in visual arts at all, but I'm sure most of it probably looked like total shit, and I still always got "Satisfactory" grades.


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Revelation34 posted...

They are since a real feminist is never a SJW.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman


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Mead posted...

Now 2/3 of the store is adult swim/Nintendo themed

I bought a Mario 1-Up mushroom t-shirt there 15 years ago.


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I can safely say that, as of 25 years ago, Hot Topic was still a cynical attempt to exploit counterculture marketing that made most of its money off selling pop-culture to mall goths and proto-hipsters.

So no, no one on this board remembers it as being an actual goth/punk store.


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...pre-orders...

~shudder~


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TallTamryu posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

it would probably run out of pages in about 20 minutes.

Running out of infinite pages seems hard to do.

Maybe that gives you an idea of just how hard I'd be using it.


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WastelandCowboy posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The fact that enough of you vote for him to keep him in office is what makes him qualified to represent you, regardless of where he lives.

Conservatives abound up here.

Literally Trump county.

In other words, he represents THEM, and the real reason he doesn't represent you has nothing to do with where he lives and everything to do with the inherent failings of democracy as a system.



WastelandCowboy posted...

If you dont live in the same town, county, or even district, you do not represent me.

From what you've suggested, even if he lived in the same house as you, he wouldn't represent you.


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Apple is basically technology for people who don't know how you use technology, costing three times as much as it should. I have zero interest, and will probably spend the rest of my life never buying a single Apple product again.

I used to use Macs back in high school (in the early-to-mid 90s), back when it was actually the far better platform for desktop publishing and graphic design work (which is what I was using it for), but the PC has long since caught up (and arguably surpassed it), so it has no real value to me at all anymore.


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If I had a Death Note, it would probably run out of pages in about 20 minutes.


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That was more or less exactly what I expected.


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Zeus posted...

tbh, I picked up X-Men Destiny during a black friday sale years ago and still need to play it >_>

It was okay. The gameplay is simplistic, the voice acting is generally meh, and the plot is somewhat generic, but it's not terrible as a time-killer.

It's not helped by the main characters all being kind of terrible, though. Just being able to character create yourself a unique character would have added a lot to the game, IMO.


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WastelandCowboy posted...

A corrupt schmuck who doesn't even live in the same congressional district as us thinks he's qualified to represent us.

The fact that enough of you vote for him to keep him in office is what makes him qualified to represent you, regardless of where he lives.


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EightySeven posted...

I think he's trying to say that it was an incomplete genocide so we settled on fucking them out of existence.

It's probably more likely that we murdered them out of existence, and parts of them only managed to survive at all because some of us fucked them, and the resulting offspring managed to assimilate into our society rather than their own.

Again, Native Americans are a really good parallel there. Except in their case, we eventually stopped killing them and just started giving them casinos.

Clearly, if casinos had been a thing 50,000 years ago, there might still be Neanderthals around today.


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Metal_Mario99 posted...

EclairReturns posted...

I used to read it and reread it like some kind of maniac, then I stopped reading and subsequently stopped caring about the book series.

You just described everybody ever.

Not me. I skimmed the books and thought they were bland, and the movies never appealed to me at all.

That's at least partly because I was already of legal drinking age by the time the first book came out, and was more or less out of the target audience.

It also doesn't help that I'd been reading much better written fantasy novels for more than two decades by that point, so I was never as impressed as the sort of people don't really read for fun all that much.

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I just call them bullet houses.


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RoboXgp89 posted...

to the person saying they were genocided obviously they weren't if we had sex with them

You can both have sex with and murder people. Sometimes not even in that order.


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TIE543 posted...

Because this is NintenFAQs

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I feel like no matter how long any of those games take, it would be time wasted. You can do better.


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papercup posted...

The novel predates Star Wars, so if anything Lucas ripped-off Dune.

Nah, Lucas ripped off Flash Gordon and samurai films.

But it's not really a question of who ripped off who, as much as picking something superficially similar for comparison to help people who know nothing about the setting/franchise to latch on to.

Dune and Star Wars are basically both set in space, with space ships and pseudo-magical powers. Beyond that they tend to diverge, but that alone is enough to give people a feel for what to expect.


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DrPrimemaster posted...

Aren't homo sapiens partly responsible for killing them off in the first place?

We basically outcompeted them, killed them, and occasionally fucked them.

How Europeans interacted with Native Americans in North America is probably a pretty good analogy for how Neanderthals were driven extinct. Just imagine that Americans and Canadians never stopped treating them the way we did for the first few hundred years, and we basically kept treating them that way until all of them were gone.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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As a last thought there, in a setting where the Alliance and the Empire are co-equal political entities in the same universe engaged in a Cold War, it really opens a lot of complicated plots you can apply to Luke's New Jedi Order.

In a setting where the Empire is still cartoonishly evil, you could easily have one of Luke's earliest students defect to the Empire. Potentially, they discover some cache of notes (or Sith holocrons, or whatever) from Palpatine or others, using the knowledge to embrace the Dark Side and reestablish the Sith. Then you get all the lightsaber battles you can stand, as Luke's Jedi become the lieutenants in the Alliance military who occasionally have to oppose the Sith who support the Empire. And then you've also got the potential plot where heroes have to travel into Imperial territory and try and take down the Sith Academy.

Conversely, in a setting where we drop the black/white absolutism for shades of grey, Luke can have a student who defects to the Empire... but then starts his own Jedi academy, that still follows the Light Side. While their worldly politics differ, they're still both "good" in the sense of following the Jedi traditions and ideology. In fact, in such a setting, maybe one of the Alliance Jedi tap into the Dark Side in an attempt to overcome the Empire, and it's left to an allied group of both Alliance and Imperial Jedi to unite and hunt down the new world-be Sith.

Or maybe Luke isn't an idiot, and he implicitly understands that the downfall of the old Jedi were tying themselves to mundane politics, and he establishes a New Order that tries to be impartial, and sides with neither Empire nor Alliance, and instead focus on their own spiritual advancement or helping others on the small scale, not interfering with massive space battles or diplomatic manipulations (in that sense, the Jedi would very much mirror the monks of Japan they were originally based on, with the monks of the Nara period who were implicitly tied into government and politics replaced by the monks of later eras who became itinerant wanderers who would travel from village to village with no real authority, but willing to fight when necessary - which is what the Jedi should have been anyway, until the prequels and the EU ruined them).


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Zeus posted...

Or they could have worked in some clone emperor shit or sent him off to the outer rim. There's always stuff for him to do and restoring the jedi order seems like something that might come later, possibly as a teaser ending to the potential trilogy. Then they could Jedi Academy down the road.

You're basically asking for Dark Empire. Which was an interesting enough story, but I don't think it would have worked well on film.

Something along the lines of the Thrawn trilogy might have worked, but there were still parts of that that were pure cheese, and you'd still have the problem of Han and Leia.



Zeus posted...

idk, even with 2 Death Stars down and the Emperor gone, it seems like there was enough military strength and leadership left to continue putting up a fight. And, given the leadership structure, it *might* have been possible to avoid the whole operation splintering.

Oh, I agree. In fact, that's exactly what I'm saying. Two Death Stars and an Emperor don't immediately win the war and collapse the Empire.

But the narrative as presented is that doing those things DID ruin the Empire. Then the Rebellion established the New Republic. And then the remnants of Imperial power hid in secret for 30 years before reemerging as the First Order, effectively shattering the New Republic and leaving the remnants of the Republic as a new Resistance which is basically just the old Rebellion with a new paint job.

But the movies don't really explain that at all, and you're left assuming the Rebels have been fighting for 30 years with absolutely no evidence of success or progress. And even if you are aware of the finer details of the backstory, the backstory is kind of stupid.

A setting where the Rebellion has become the New Republic, with the conflict being a weaker Imperial Remnant/First Order being the underdogs while the New Republic is weakened by politics and infighting (the likely scenario you'd get trying to rebuilt a galactic government in the wake of the Empire's fall - see also, Rome), would be much more interesting than just replicating the original setting beat for beat.

If anything, it might be interesting to go for the Rome analogy even harder, and have the successful Rebel Alliance/New Republic sort of break down into separate polities coalesced around differing views of what the New Republic should BE (since they were disparate groups only allied in the first place against the more dangerous threat), while the disintegrating Empire manages to stabilize itself and reform along different lines (a la the Holy Roman Empire), with the New Republic (or maybe just have it be the Alliance?) and the Empire being two opposed and equally balanced powers in the galaxy locked in an uneasy peace, but with neither really able to actively destroy the other.

Then you come into Episode VII years later, once this new status quo has become the norm, and the conflict can revolve around minor skirmishing between the factions (a la the Great Game in real history) that threatens to blossom into a new, far more destructive war. Minor characters get introduced, with young Republic troops or unaligned outsiders forced to pick a side, and bam, new trilogy.

(And for bonus points, you can even imply the Empire isn't evil this time, and maybe the Republic has grown corrupt. Moral complexity? Who really ARE the bad guys?)

That would also let you keep Han and Leia mostly distant (they're in charge in the government of the good faction, and too busy for boots-on-the-ground action), and then you can potentially have Luke teaching a New Jedi Order (or living as a hermit until a new student finds him) to make things more complicated (and that way, you can have a couple Jedi without overdoing it, like the prequels did).


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Zeus posted...

Yeah, that was pretty awful. From what I've seen of the Clone Wars, child Boba Fett is pretty cool in that.

From what I've seen of the Clone Wars, I have no real desire to watch more of the Clone Wars.

And while I know Disney tends to consider it canon, I kind of ignore it in the context of not being the movies, because I assume they'll do the same, and ultimately wipe the slate clean (again) whenever they feel it's convenient.

It's like how Lucas and his minions claimed the EU was canon, but Lucas didn't give a single shit about it, so they had to come up with complicated excuses involving multiple tiers of semi-canon to justify it.



Zeus posted...

idk, I kinda suspect that had the films continued, Carrie might have been in a better place (which, as I consider the phrasing, may be a poor choice of words). As for Harrison Ford, had they locked him into a longer contract, he could have cut off an arm and still be stuck starring in another few movies.

I think the movies were part of what sent her downhill in the first place, so more movies likely wouldn't have pulled her back up as much as potentially accelerated her problems. The movies ending is part of what helped her shift her life into a healthier place and sort of allowed her to get clean. Without that break, she might have self-destructed completely.

As for Ford, they DIDN'T have him locked into that contract, and he was never going to sign one like it. Long-term multi-picture deals weren't as common at that point (definitely not in the way Marvel does them these days), and no one was going to think to sign anyone to exceptionally long multi-picture deals for a franchise almost no one thought was going to make it past the first movie anyway. By 1983 he was successful enough that they couldn't have bribed him into it, and (he was barely willing to do Jedi as-is - they've openly admitted they only froze him in Empire because they weren't sure they could convince him to come back to do Jedi at all).

And more to the point, LUCAS didn't really want to do Star Wars after Jedi. It wasn't until years later and the appeal of tons of cash started to revive his willingness to do it that Lucas was willing to commit to the prequels at all. Realistically, we were never going to get an Episode VII in the 80s or 90s. In theory we COULD have gotten Episode VII instead of Episode I (and we probably would have been better off if we did), but even then, you're talking almost 20 real world years post-Jedi, which would probably have been about 30 years later in-universe. Which leaves you not much different from what we actually got, only with older Han, Leia, and Luke.



Zeus posted...

Granted, since Luke was the big draw, they could have just built things around him.

Weeeeelllll.

Luke was supposed to be the heart of the first movies, but a lot of people definitely saw Han as the more interesting character. And even if we assume Luke post-Jedi development would be strong enough to carry a movie on his own, you're still going to be left with the audience constantly wondering where Han, Leia, and Chewie are if they don't show up.

Short of being willing to kill them off completely, or having them "retire" (which would almost require you to say the Empire had completely collapsed, the New Republic has been reestablished, and the Rebellion is dissolved, so Leia feels like she's completed her duty), it would always be a problem that needs to be addressed.


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Zeus posted...

tbh, I kinda enjoy it when the villains aren't necessarily wrong. One of my friends hated that about Killmonger, though.

Definitely agree. I always prefer stories where the villains don't consider themselves villains. It makes things more interesting and complex than "Mwu-ha-ha I'm an evil bad guy!"

The only problem there is that, in a lot of cases, when you're dealing with a villain who seems to have noble motives but questionable methods, all too often you run the risk of leading the audience to sympathize with the villain, potentially to the point of preferring them to the hero.

It happens a lot in wrestling, where badass justified heels can appeal far more than pure babyfaces. It's also part of why Doctor Doom's popularity has skyrocketed over time, as his characterization got more and more complex (and arguably, the same could be said of Magneto).



Zeus posted...

You're forgetting that he was working *two* contracts, both of which specified wanting the targets taken alive (and, in Vader's contract, they were *only* good alive). As such, it made sense for him to just arrange the capture instead of attempting a riskier move that might have killed some of them.

He didn't capture them at all, though. He followed them, predicted where they were going because they took their time with their broken hyperdrive, and then called Vader to tell them where they were going (apparently quickly enough for Vader to "arrive just before you did"). Then he basically made part of the terms of his agreement with Vader "Hey, I've got Skywalker's friends, once you get what you want give me Han so I can double-dip." He mostly just lucks out that Vader is willing to humor him.

Vader did most of the heavy lifting, and that mainly because he could swing Imperial weight around to cow Lando into submission. And had Vader not been so quick to fuck Lando over and renege on the deal, Luke and Leia would almost certainly be turned or dead, and Han would still be hanging on Jabba's wall.

Boba's pretty much a glorified errand boy. He's about on par with Greedo in A New Hope.



Zeus posted...

And just because Vader broke whatever deal he had with Lando doesn't mean he would leave Fett out in the cold. If you recall, he agreed to compensate the difference on the bounty if Solo didn't survive carbon freezing instead of just giving him the Lando treatment.

Yes, and he promised to spare Cloud City from future Imperial interference, and apparently agreed to leave the others in Lando's custody once he had what he wanted.

Vader pretty clearly doesn't give a shit what he has to promise you to get your cooperation. He'll promise the world, because he doesn't necessarily feel obligated to ever follow through on his end. What are you going to do, complain about it to the Emperor? Try to kill him over it? Get too uppity and he'll Force choke you and blow up your floating city.

The fact that he's willing to pay Fett at all - and give him Solo - basically just boils down to this:

Zeus posted...

Of course, as a bounty hunter, Fett had value to Vader whereas Lando didn't really offer any long-term value.

Fett potentially has future use to the Empire, so Vader is willing to pay him (credits are pretty much meaningless when you've got the Imperial expense account) and give him Han (Han is a nobody, Vader only wants him to lure Luke out). But nothing in that scene really suggests that Vader considers him any more important or useful than any of the other bounty hunters. If Fett got too lippy, Vader likely would have killed him too.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Yeah, I loved the story as a whole. The game had phenomenal writing.


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"Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and all of us against the stranger."

That's pretty much the defining principle of human nature. We always group ourselves into "us", and "them", and define "them" as "the enemy".

Racism is just when you use skin color as the defining trait that separates "us" from "them". As humans, we also use religion, nationality, sex/gender, ideology, and about a thousand other factors to draw that line. In the smaller scale, things like which sports team you root for or which console you prefer is enough to define "THE ENEMY".

One can only assume that "that blatantly other species that looks nothing like me and seems to think differently than I do" would draw a pretty hard line.

It's also why some people have said in the past that the only way we'll ever truly have peace on Earth is if we're attacked by aliens, because that way we'd be able to define them as "them" and in the process lump all humans as "us", erasing lesser distinctions. And even then, for some people, some of the other distinctions would still be worse (hence why sci-fi always seems to have fifth columns and race traitors who turn on humanity to side with the aliens for one reason or another).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Oh, and to elaborate on something I just said there:

ParanoidObsessive posted...

HE'S basically benefiting from the Power of Narrative that has always helped the heroes in the past.

This actually reminded me of a concept/quote from the Discworld tabletop RPG, where "Narrative" is literally the most powerful force in the universe:

"A character who tries casting himself as The Brave Peasant Lad Who Outwits the Troll may find he is actually playing one of the Twenty Poor Peasants Eaten by the Troll Before the Knight Comes Along. Or he might even be the Devious Little Human Squashed by the Troll Hero (troll stories aren't very subtle)."

Basically, the heroes thought they were in the story where the brave heroes overcome an evil genocidal space tyrant, but it turned out they were really the obstacles the brave visionary hero Thanos had to overcome to achieve his goal and "save" the universe.


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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I'm really glad they gave Thanos the "You'll know what it's like to lose. To believe so desperately that you are right, yet fail all the same" line, just it's basically a giant "fuck you" to the idea of the power of friendship

I saw a MovieBob video where he basically said the real gut-punch of the movie is that the movie basically subverts expectations along those very lines.

Basically, in every other Marvel movie, the heroes do the right thing, they learn their moral lessons, they grow as characters, and their willingness to improve and live up to those higher ideals ultimately allow them to succeed. They learn to trust, they learn to love, they learn to work as a team - whatever. But in Infinity War, every hero basically learns the lesson the universe was clearly presenting to them, and they do what they're clearly supposed to do in the context of the narrative - and still lose. Thanos repeatedly makes their sacrifices absolutely meaningless (Quill shooting Gamora, Wanda sacrificing Vision). Thor's heroic moments with Stormbreaker lead to absolutely nothing.

Ironically, tying into the idea that Thanos is the actual protagonist of the movie, he's literally the only one who seems to learn lessons, make sacrifices, and actually win. Giving up Gamora for the Soul Stone is essentially the key to his victory (and it's arguably what helps him gain the Time Stone as well, which in turn is what allows him to recover the Mind Stone). HE'S basically benefiting from the Power of Narrative that has always helped the heroes in the past.

Granted, he's going to lose like a motherfucker in the next movie, but part one exists more or less to build Thanos up as high as he can possibly go.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I_Abibde posted...

-- ... I thought Black Panther was great, but everybody in my family has the same thought about it: "We liked it a lot, but we definitely don't feel like the target audience."

This, so very very much.

And this line of thinking ties into both of the following responses I'm about to post:



The Wave Master posted...

Black Panther is incredible. Full disclosure I am African American, and that movie is in my demographic.

However, the love and care taken to make it the movie feel completely modern, African, and traditional at the same time is amazing.

That was part of what made me overly conscious of the movie not being "for" me, as it were. The parts where they were deliberately contrasting the high-tech, super-future elements of Wakanda with the more traditional, tribal influences sort of made me overly aware of my own white maleness (which is something I usually don't care about, "privilege-shaming" SJWs on the Internet be damned). Mainly in the sense that I couldn't decide whether or not I should be offended by that fusion in the sense of it being somewhat racist ("Obviously, everyone in Africa is going to wear teeth necklaces and have plates in their lips and bang on drums and throw spears around regardless of how high-tech or advanced they are!"), or if it was completely acceptable by the logic that it somehow balances past traditional influences with modern ways of thinking that Africans and African-Americans can be proud of.

My response was mostly to shrug and try not to think about it, because I felt like it kind of wasn't my place to worry about it, but I did remain somewhat overly aware of it, and wonder what actual African-Americans and Africans in general thought about it.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I liked Black Panther. Not so much to explain to me its staggering box office success (it's still in theaters as it's coming out on home media!), but it's probably the best Marvel film focused on a "B-tier" Avenger

I feel like the explanation is very obvious.

When Wonder Woman came out, it was praised to the moon. After having seen it, I can say it felt like a mediocre-at-best superhero film that didn't even remotely deserve half the praise it was getting. At least some of that was definitely the result of it being the first real DCU movie that wasn't hot garbage, so people were desperate to love and praise it, but a large part of it was absolutely stemming from the politicized idea that a "feminist" icon was starring in a movie that somehow struck a blow for female empowerment, etc etc.

It kind of goes without saying that Black Panther is getting the same sort of upsurge. People are praising it (and spending money on it) more because of what it represents (either deliberately, or because of what they read into it) more than because of what it actually IS. It's the first mainstream black superhero movie, and it actively addresses issues pertinent to the black community, so it's going to pull the same sort of politicized praise.

Which is not to say that it doesn't deserve at least some (or a great deal) of the praise, because it IS a good movie. But I don't see it being the best Marvel movie ever by a wide margin, which is what the reaction implies.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Killmonger is definitely one of MCU's better villains (and it helps that I like Michael B. Jordan a lot

I'd agree with all of that. He was definitely the best part of the movie in multiple ways, and Jordan is definitely great (shame about the FF, though).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

The Wave Master posted...

Holdo and Rose are still huge problems. Mainly because Holdo could have used a droid to accomplish the task at the end of the movie.

I actually feel terribly ashamed because this didn't even occur to me.

I'm going to deflect the shame by suggesting it never occurred to me because I never really thought of Holdo as a worthwhile character anyway, so in my brain she's actually less worthwhile than the average droid.

But yeah, now that you've said this, I'm never going to be able to watch that part of the movie again and not be annoyed by it.



The Wave Master posted...

The Leia stuff is fine too. It's a mixed bag, but still enough worthwhile that I'm not going to fan boy rage and declare it the worst thing ever.

My biggest complaint with Leia is that she has that thing that some older actors get (which I think may be tied to ill-fitting false teeth), where they kind of lisp their words and it sounds like a speech impediment. Leonard Nimoy had it in his final Star Trek film.

That's more or less why I said earlier that I think she as the actress was "too old" for the role. Ford and Hamill sort of just manage to skirt the problem, but when I see her in Last Jedi I don't see her character, I just see an old, tired actress.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family