Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[Prak]

It's implied that Strange gave Thanos the Time stone because it was part of the one way he foresaw to defeat Thanos.

Which is incredibly stupid, because, at best, it means he only looked at futures which didn't involve destroying the stone. But also, he apparently didn't look at futures in which Tony just shot Starlord in the fucking head like the insufferable prick he is. Or even futures in which he just froze the prick in time so he couldn't fuck up the plan.

I mean, fuck, Strange could have brought them all back to Earth, and then the whole crew could have fought Thanos there. He could have used the Time Stone to go back in time and plug Baby!Thanos. He could have gone back in time and stole the Gauntlet at the moment of its creation, and then each stone as they were supposedly put in good care. Then he could have used the fucking thing against Grimace.

I already don't like MCU Strange because I think the particular characterization is shitty, but now I hate him because of just the blatant lack of imagination.

[Longes]

What's weird is that Dr. Strange movie final fight already showed us how Strange can fight and win against impossible villains. He can, at any moment, make a save and then replay the fight as many times as he wants until he wins. Why can't he do that against Thanos?

[Prak]

I got the sense that he was sort of preplanning that by viewing the various futures. But you're right. In his own movie, Strange overcame impossible odds by irritating Dormmamu into giving in. And there's no obvious reason he couldn't have just wasted Thanos' time until he gave up.

[virgil]

He can, at any moment, make a save and then replay the fight as many times as he wants until he wins. Why can't he do that against Thanos?

Did you miss the entire scene where he tried over 14 million times and only ONE of those attempts seemed promising?

As for the other tricks; who's to say Thanos didn't know how magic worked on at least basic principles, even if he's not a full-fledged sorcerer? When Strange started reversing the clock in his movie with the Time Stone, others were unsticking themselves without stuff like the Reality Stone to interfere.

[angelfromanotherpin]

What's weird is that Dr. Strange movie final fight already showed us how Strange can fight and win against impossible villains. He can, at any moment, make a save and then replay the fight as many times as he wants until he wins. Why can't he do that against Thanos?

The Dormammu thing involved weird circumstances, bringing a chunk of time into a dimension which natively had none, and probably isn't readily replicable in our own time-space continuum.

[Occluded Sun]

What's weird is that Dr. Strange movie final fight already showed us how Strange can fight and win against impossible villains. He can, at any moment, make a save and then replay the fight as many times as he wants until he wins. Why can't he do that against Thanos?

Some points:

1) He used that tactic in a realm which had no time of its own, and presumably didn't have to worry about how the cycle would interact with the passage of time on a wider scale.

2) He didn't win that battle, ever. He was killed each and every time. He won the war by negotiating with the eldritch monstrosity he was fighting, who had no power over or even basic understanding of time.

3) It's also implied that living out strategies beforehand was intensely stressful for Strange, and he's unlikely to use the technique when the benefits gained are less than the required cost. It's almost always the case, it seems, that it's better to expend resources trying to overcome a challenge than looking forward to see whether any given tactic will work.

[Occluded Sun]

While watching Infinity War, I found myself wondering why Vision wasn't trying to use any of the Mind Stone's powers, besides making a nice energy beam with it. Or why Thanos wasn't using the Stones he had collected, beyond the fairly basic applications of each we see.

It occurs to me that it took generations of mystics to learn some of the things the Time Stone can do. Quite possibly neither Thanos nor Vision understands the full potential of their stones. But I wish they'd spent a moment making this explicit in the film - a single line could have done it.

[virgil]

While watching Infinity War, I found myself wondering why Vision wasn't trying to use any of the Mind Stone's powers, besides making a nice energy beam with it.

He does have density control, going from super dense to incorporeal, and is likely where his flight comes from (rather than repulsors, as is standard for Stark-tech). I imagine his shapeshifting features are related to the stone as well. I he could likely do the mind control trick if he headbutted someone, but that's not a real option if you have morality.

[Prak]

he could likely do the mind control trick if he headbutted someone, but that's not a real option if you have morality.

I think that depends mostly on whether you find the idea of headbutt-based mind control funny enough to override your sense of morality.

[Wiseman]

Jesus Christ RWBY has gone seriously downhill. The last season was a complete letdown with the few elements that were interesting (Raven) completely overshadowed by the mediocrity to lameness of the rest of the series.

It can't remember it's own setting elements (remember that faunus were supposed to be heavily discriminated against? The writers sure didn't.) and completely forgets major character traits (Cinder was obsessed with revenge against Ruby. Heck, it was specifically called out as a weakness earlier in the same season, yet in the final battle she barely even acknowledges her)

[Hadanelith]

You're not wrong. The fanbase is getting pretty restless. At this point, I'm struggling through it for the characters I like, but if the next season isn't an improvement, it's going to be time to retreat to fanfic.

[Username17]

My absolute favorite bullshit movie conspiracy theory is the deplorables who claim that Solo isn't doing well as "backlash" against the last three movies having too many vagina-havers in them. Like, TFA, Rogue One, and TLJ all did much better at the box office than Solo, but they are claiming that Solo (which has a white male lead) is doing badly for a Star Wars Movie because people are angry that Star Wars movies in general don't have enough white male leads. It's just so fucking implausible.

Anyway, I probably won't see Solo until it comes out on a streaming service, but that's because I don't really think I'm a Star Wars fan anymore. And oddly, that is because of The Last Jedi. Not because I saw it and it had too many girl parts or whatever, I didn't see it at all. The director said something that actually just broke me being a Star Wars fan full stop.

The issue is that apparently in The Last Jedi someone uses a hyperdrive to make a Relativistic Kill Vehicle. This is of course an obvious tactic in the sense that it has a fucking name and Wikipedia pages and shit. It's also extremely trivial to do if that was remotely a possibility, because every X-Wing has its own hyperdrive. If this were a thing you could do, the fight with the Death Star would have involved one X-Wing doing a suicide jump and that would have been that. Heck, one has to ask why hyperdrive torpedoes aren't a thing. We use torpedoes sometimes in that setting, why aren't they planet destroying relativistic kill vehicles? Much of Star Wars expanded universe physics revolves around various justifications for why that wasn't a thing.

So introducing a relativistic kill vehicle is a really big deal. It's like a "calling all actions in all previous movies into question" deal. It's a "this is a thing that very specifically wasn't part of the setting" deal. And introducing such a thing is every bit as much of a slap in the face to every fan of the series as Midichlorians was in Phantom Menace. Possibly more so. And someone interviewed Rian Johnson, and this is what he had to say for himself:

First of all, has this been done before, period? I’ve got to reserve the right for Pablo to build it back into canon, if he’s like, "Yeah, this is a thing and they outlawed it." I think there’s various ways you can go with it. But it’s not like it was the plan to do this. It’s a spur of the moment thing. It’s this idea that she gets and she sits down and f**king does, and it obviously takes everybody completely by surprise. It takes Hux by surprise. The fact that Hux doesn’t see it coming means it’s probably not a standard military maneuver. I think it was something that Holdo pulled out of her butt in the moment.

This is so offensive on so many levels that I immediately went through several stages of Star Wars grief. Like, fucking seriously?! He just dumped that shit into other peoples' laps and figured they'd retcon some explanation at a later point? He thinks Relativistic Kill Vehicles are so fucking clever that no one in the Star Wars Universe, a Galaxy-wide civilization that has privately-owned hyperdrive ships, planet killing weapons, and has been at near continuous war for three generations, has thought of it? I had to be told why and that you couldn't do that in this setting when I was ten fucking years old!

Anyway, that was just it. Once I got all the way to end of Star Wars Grief, I reached acceptance and through it enlightenment. Rian Johnson had told me explicitly and totally that there was no future in being a Star Wars Fan because the setting was simply going to be remodeled at a whim by people who didn't care about what I cared about. I couldn't know anything about the Star Wars Universe because nothing in the Star Wars Universe was consistent or true about itself. I could just stop being a Star Wars Fan. I could simply accept that Empire, Hope, and Rogue were the three good Star Wars movies and that all the others were somewhere between OK and pretty bad. I didn't have to care about the canon or imagine how the universe worked. New Star Wars movies could come out and I could just not watch.

So in a way I actually am someone who isn't seeing Solo in theaters because of The Last Jedi. But the deplorables who want to claim credit for this about people turning against Star Wars due to some imagined beef with Social Justice Warriors are laughably ridiculous. Trying to claim that people aren't watching the movie with a white male protagonist because they are angry about there not being enough movies with white male protagonists is deeply, deeply absurd.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Not seen The Last Jedi myself, will probably see it sometime but can't say I really care anymore.

Anyhoo, wasn't a relativistic kill vehicle mentioned in The Force Awakens? In the sense of "It's very dangerous to exit hyperspace this close to the enemy base, you get it wrong and you hit them at light speed"?

[Stahlseele]

Why the FUCK would you outlaw that, if you do not outlaw the deathstar and star destroyers and sun crushers?
A Relativistic Kill Vehicle is the economically way more viable method of large scale destruction . . Especially in a universe that has thousands of really really big but uld and cheap ships that still have a working hyperdrive . .
It does not even have to be safe to use, just make some droid do it on autopilot and you are good!

[deaddmwalking]

I'm not planning on seeing Solo, but I absolutely would see Lando.

I'm of the opinion that Solo's character arc from selfish rogue to altruistic hero is complete in the original Star Wars movie. They established the character well enough that what happened before couldn't improve on the character.

A non-Harrison Ford solo trying to push his 'heart of gold' further into the past just doesn't do it for me.

But Lando Calrissian didn't get a movie to explain how he goes from classic rogue to hero. It's nice that he joins the hero, but his journey is far more interesting. How does someone go from small-time smuggler/rogue to operator of Bespin Cloud City? I also think Danny Glover has the ability to pull off the charm and wit that Billy Dee Williams originally graced Lando with. I haven't heard anyone say that about Alden Ehrenreich and his portrayal of Solo.

I'm skipping this movie because I'm going to hold Star Wars to the same standard as any other movie. It has to be good on its own if I'm going to see it.

[nockermensch]

<motherfucking hyperdrive weapon rant>

the hyperspace jump can be used as very destructive weapon. This has the effect of turning all the previous space battles in the series into a farce.

I've been thinking about that huge pile of shit for some time now. It could had been mitigated by taking like 6 minutes from the casino debacle and adding a new subplot about how that rebel ship had been fitted with a prototype hyperdrive superweapon. The Star Wars galaxy has active scientific advancement and it's actually a bit silly that all the superweapons presented so far had been created by the bad guys. You could even throw some additional lines about how the First Order knows about some superweapon on that ship (but no details about what it is) and this is why that implausible space chase happens: They're trying to force the rebels to surrender with the the ship intact, or at least keep some distance in the case the weapon is very hardcore (it is). The rebels, meanwhile, would be hoping to perfect the weapon and then use it against the First Order capital, but when Holdo sees that every hope is lost, she decides to use it right then to try to take out the enemy fleet.

This would still have several failure points (chasing somebody with an unknown superweapon is dumb, "why nobody tried to develop this weapon before?"), but at least they would be attempting to address the huge plot hole. Instead, huge plot hole is huge, and a literal deal-breaker for fans.

EDIT: ACTUALLY, having the First Order know that Leia's ship has some superweapon would also explain why, in the very first space battle of that damn movie the escaping rebels are engaged by like one Star Destroyer while like three others sit back and watch: The First Order is at first cautiously engaging the ship, to see what it can do: They don't know it's a suicidal superweapon. Damn, somebody give me a Holywood job.

[erik]

I wanted the explanation to be that Leia used force mojo to use the ship as a light speed torpedo since that would limit it and solve most problems but rebel super weapon works too. Last Jedi was my final straw as well. If I am gonna watch a new Star Wars movie in theatre then it better have rave damn reviews from sources I respect first.

Since I have kids with little to no standards for SW, beyond that there be light sabers, I will probably end up owning them eventually. But I won’t like it.

[Wiseman]

Possibly just as well, Star Wars Rebels has gone full gonzo, introducing people turning into magic spirit wolves, time machines made by force gods and hyperspace tentacle whales.
[insert obligatory joke about undoing TLJ]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN87WeC52_k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQeYwubOHpY
https://youtu.be/2OLNHU9xBCM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWNCT4k8Bc8
https://youtu.be/ICDpyiZ3-V4

[Emerald]

So introducing a relativistic kill vehicle is a really big deal. It's like a "calling all actions in all previous movies into question" deal. It's a "this is a thing that very specifically wasn't part of the setting" deal. And introducing such a thing is every bit as much of a slap in the face to every fan of the series as Midichlorians was in Phantom Menace. Possibly more so.

What makes it even worse is that TFA introduced the (also incredibly stupid) idea that you can hyper-jump through shields and within gravity wells. So that means you don't even need X-Wings to kill capital ships but can just launch hyperdrive-equipped missiles from a planet's surface...and those two things put together also render every single Star Wars movie irrelevant and nonsensical.

Episode I: There's a heavily-shielded droid control ship controlling the Naboo occupation forces? Don't send your elite squadron of fighter pilots (and one plucky sort-of-protagonist) to deal with it, just hyper-jump an N1 starfighter into it.
Episode II: There's a Separatist army being built on Geonosis? Don't clone an army and send them in to deal with it, hyper-jump a few Jedi starfighters through the shields to rescue the protagonists, then hyper-jump a few more to take out the factories.
Episode III: The Separatist fleet got all the way to the Republic capital but can't get through the planetary shields around Coruscant? Don't bring the Republic fleet in to defend the planet, just hyper-jump a few dozens of your bazillion vulture droids into it.
Rogue One: The Scarif base is protected by a planetary shield? Don't send an infiltration team to steal the Death Star plans alone, just hyper-jump an invasion force through the shields to insert the team, then hyper-jump a few U-Wings into the planet afterward.
Episode IV: The Death Star's shields are strong enough to prevent a fleet attack? Don't send fighter squadrons for a long-shot attempt to take it out with proton torpedoes, just hyper-jump some X-Wings into it.
Episode V: The Rebel base is protected by an energy shield "strong enough to deflect any bombardment"? Don't land a ground assault force, just hyper-jump some shuttles into it.
Episode VI: The Death Star II is protected by a shield projected from Endor? Don't sneak through the shields to land a ground assault force, just hyper-jump some X-Wings into it, and maybe some A-Wings and B-Wings for good measure.

Seriously, some dipshit took a look at a series of movies whose climactic mass battles invariably revolve around "The shields are too strong, we need to bypass them somehow" and "The massive [ship/station/etc.] has too much firepower, we have to take it out before it destroys all the good guys" and made it trivial to bypass shields and take out massive ships/stations/etc., and not a single fucking person called them on it.

I've been thinking about that huge pile of shit for some time now. It could had been mitigated by taking like 6 minutes from the casino debacle and adding a new subplot about how that rebel ship had been fitted with a prototype hyperdrive superweapon.

...holy crap, that might just have worked. It patches over the gaping plot holes you mentioned, it's actually something novel (the good guys being pushed to the breaking point and taking a page out of the Empire's playbook) instead of just a retread of ESB and RoTJ like the rest of the movie, and it gets across "the galaxy is really screwed now" much better than either the casino planet or the final stand on Discount Hoth

I mean, I don't think it would have saved the movie for me, since that would have just rendered all future Star Wars space combat irrelevant and nonsensical instead of all past, present, and future space combat, but it would have been a major step up from what we got.

[Kaelik]

*pushes glasses up* In the expanded universe books, it is made clear on many occasions that hyperspace transports things by giving them zero extra velocity and just dimension shifting, so you actually have whatever your original mass was, and you can't fucking relativistic goddam anything.

Also..... don't they have fucking interdictors, why wouldn't you have one of those in your fleet..... chasing down the enemy ships hoping they don't escape?

[maglag]

My absolute favorite bullshit movie conspiracy theory is the deplorables who claim that Solo isn't doing well as "backlash" against the last three movies having too many vagina-havers in them. Like, TFA, Rogue One, and TLJ all did much better at the box office than Solo, but they are claiming that Solo (which has a white male lead) is doing badly for a Star Wars Movie because people are angry that Star Wars movies in general don't have enough white male leads. It's just so fucking implausible.

Anyway, I probably won't see Solo until it comes out on a streaming service, but that's because I don't really think I'm a Star Wars fan anymore. And oddly, that is because of The Last Jedi. Not because I saw it and it had too many girl parts or whatever, I didn't see it at all. The director said something that actually just broke me being a Star Wars fan full stop.

The issue is that apparently in The Last Jedi someone uses a hyperdrive to make a Relativistic Kill Vehicle. This is of course an obvious tactic in the sense that it has a fucking name and Wikipedia pages and shit. It's also extremely trivial to do if that was remotely a possibility, because every X-Wing has its own hyperdrive. If this were a thing you could do, the fight with the Death Star would have involved one X-Wing doing a suicide jump and that would have been that. Heck, one has to ask why hyperdrive torpedoes aren't a thing. We use torpedoes sometimes in that setting, why aren't they planet destroying relativistic kill vehicles? Much of Star Wars expanded universe physics revolves around various justifications for why that wasn't a thing.

So introducing a relativistic kill vehicle is a really big deal. It's like a "calling all actions in all previous movies into question" deal. It's a "this is a thing that very specifically wasn't part of the setting" deal. And introducing such a thing is every bit as much of a slap in the face to every fan of the series as Midichlorians was in Phantom Menace. Possibly more so. And someone interviewed Rian Johnson, and this is what he had to say for himself:

First of all, has this been done before, period? I’ve got to reserve the right for Pablo to build it back into canon, if he’s like, "Yeah, this is a thing and they outlawed it." I think there’s various ways you can go with it. But it’s not like it was the plan to do this. It’s a spur of the moment thing. It’s this idea that she gets and she sits down and f**king does, and it obviously takes everybody completely by surprise. It takes Hux by surprise. The fact that Hux doesn’t see it coming means it’s probably not a standard military maneuver. I think it was something that Holdo pulled out of her butt in the moment.

This is so offensive on so many levels that I immediately went through several stages of Star Wars grief. Like, fucking seriously?! He just dumped that shit into other peoples' laps and figured they'd retcon some explanation at a later point? He thinks Relativistic Kill Vehicles are so fucking clever that no one in the Star Wars Universe, a Galaxy-wide civilization that has privately-owned hyperdrive ships, planet killing weapons, and has been at near continuous war for three generations, has thought of it? I had to be told why and that you couldn't do that in this setting when I was ten fucking years old!

Anyway, that was just it. Once I got all the way to end of Star Wars Grief, I reached acceptance and through it enlightenment. Rian Johnson had told me explicitly and totally that there was no future in being a Star Wars Fan because the setting was simply going to be remodeled at a whim by people who didn't care about what I cared about. I couldn't know anything about the Star Wars Universe because nothing in the Star Wars Universe was consistent or true about itself. I could just stop being a Star Wars Fan. I could simply accept that Empire, Hope, and Rogue were the three good Star Wars movies and that all the others were somewhere between OK and pretty bad. I didn't have to care about the canon or imagine how the universe worked. New Star Wars movies could come out and I could just not watch.

So in a way I actually am someone who isn't seeing Solo in theaters because of The Last Jedi. But the deplorables who want to claim credit for this about people turning against Star Wars due to some imagined beef with Social Justice Warriors are laughably ridiculous. Trying to claim that people aren't watching the movie with a white male protagonist because they are angry about there not being enough movies with white male protagonists is deeply, deeply absurd.

-Username17

That's a rant of beauty right there, and indeed makes a great job of explaining how much the franchise has fallen.

[erik]

The shield bypassing didn't bother me as much because I somehow mindcaulked that it was incredibly dangerous and unlikely to work, Han had to do some crazy math to pull it off (since like nothing is automated in SW-verse outside of droids), and I figured his triggering of coming out of hyperspace was more like telling a personally-crafted script to process his command to drop out of hyperspace at X moment, and before that point he could have just aborted.

I understood how they let Lucas go full retard. He at least earned the right to piss in his own soup.

I even get that for TFA they were being extremely risk averse and trying to do a redo of A New Hope. I didn't appreciate that decision, but I understood it.

What galls me is that Disney is hiring an idiot writer who doesn't seem to have even watched the original 3 movies for TLJ? How can you blow off hiring decent writers on such a valuable franchise? Having some remedial understanding of the canon seems obligatory. I'd feel much better giving creative control to Mark Hamill.

That said, TLJ did make a fuckton of money. Maybe it doesn't matter that it's a shitpile that shits on everything that preceded it, and that it has the worst Star Wars rotten tomato audience score of 46% (which makes it a middling comparison to the Ewok movies). But it probably does matter. I think the branding hype and the idiot critics who gave it a 91% rotten tomato rating carried it enough to make money, but not enough to carry the movies to follow. I think Frank is right that that shitty movie was the final straw for a lot of people and they won't be watching another Star Wars movie on hype and branding alone. With TLJ it was the second time in my life I didn't enjoy a Star Wars movie in theatre. The last time I refused to even watch the other two prequels. I'm content to pass on the next one too.

Oh and I groan when I hear newscasters speculating that people are getting worn down by having an overwhelming 1 star wars movie per year, when there is the obvious fucking rebuttal of Marvel. If the movies were good, then people will keep watching.

[Pariah Dog]

Well good to see I'm still not missing much by continuing to delude myself with "THERE WAS ONLY THREE STAR WARS MOVIES LALALALALA"

For another show that has lost me, Legion. Its like someone took some LSD, started watching David Lynch movies and then stumbled across the character of Legion on Wikipedia and decided to make a show about it.

[Wiseman]

*pushes glasses up* In the expanded universe books, it is made clear on many occasions that hyperspace transports things by giving them zero extra velocity and just dimension shifting, so you actually have whatever your original mass was, and you can't fucking relativistic goddam anything.

Also..... don't they have fucking interdictors, why wouldn't you have one of those in your fleet..... chasing down the enemy ships hoping they don't escape?

They do. There was an entire rebels episode about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s3sgDhDcIA

[Emerald]

*pushes glasses up* In the expanded universe books, it is made clear on many occasions that hyperspace transports things by giving them zero extra velocity and just dimension shifting, so you actually have whatever your original mass was, and you can't fucking relativistic goddam anything.

Yep. There's a reason it's referred to as "jumping to" or "exiting" hyperspace, not "accelerating to" or "decelerating from." They even go into some handwave-y detail about tachyons and imaginary mass and stuff as a (very slight) nod to actual physics, which further reinforces the hyperspeed-objects-cannot-harm-realspace-objects point.

Also, the very first we hear about hyperspace mechanics is Han warning Luke about being very careful with your calculations to avoid flying into a star, in the tone of "and you might get yourself killed," not in the sense of "and you might make a star go nova and kill a bunch of people." You'd think they'd revisit that point if it was intended to indicated a possibility that any Joe Schmoe with a freighter had a weapon of mass destruction at his disposal.

Also..... don't they have fucking interdictors, why wouldn't you have one of those in your fleet..... chasing down the enemy ships hoping they don't escape?

Obviously, despite having as many ridiculously huge yet ineffective dreadnoughts as they want, the Discount Empire has no interdictor cruisers, because that's totally logical. (And yes, interdictors are NewCanon, so there's no reason they couldn't.)

I think Frank is right that that shitty movie was the final straw for a lot of people and they won't be watching another Star Wars movie on hype and branding alone. With TLJ it was the second time in my life I didn't enjoy a Star Wars movie in theatre. The last time I refused to even watch the other two prequels. I'm content to pass on the next one too.

I'm one of those. I'm not seeing Solo in theaters and have sworn off giving Disney any more money for Star Wars anything anymore, after having bought every Star Wars comic, video game, book, DVD, etc. under the sun in the pre-Disney days. And my friends generally share my tastes and look to me for "Is this Star Wars stuff any good?" judgments, so they're all doing the same.