Moments when a piece of entertainment completely rocked you.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Jul 25, 2018 1:14 am

Iduno wrote:I caught part of an episode of a terrible-looking horror TV show during lunch one day, and found out it was called Supernatural. Now I've watched most of the first season, and it's as terrible (they found the house of the dead guy they found in a newspaper from across the country, because EMS was still parked there) and also addictive as I'd hoped.

It's better when it's not just Christian mythology (the first 2 or 3 episodes were very good), but it's all the half-assedness you'd expect out of discovering, investigating, and solving a mystery in 40 minutes. And all of the goodness of legends showing up in a monster-of-the-week format.

There are somehow 13 seasons of this, and I can imagine it goes downhill at some point, but for now it's an excellent combination of so bad it's good and also regular entertainment.

The main strength of the show is the character personalities. The plots, especially early on, get very dumb, but the characters are very engaging and entertaining. Also pretty.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jul 25, 2018 5:39 am

As you might expect with 13 seasons, Supernatural has good seasons and bad seasons. But if you're having a fair amount of fun with Season 1, there will be a lot to hold your interest.

-Username17

rasmuswagner · Post by **rasmuswagner** » Wed Jul 25, 2018 5:39 am

Prak wrote:
The main strength of the show is the character personalities. The plots, especially early on, get very dumb, but the characters are very engaging and entertaining. Also pretty.

That's probably where it lost me. I mean, Supernatural clearly should have been something I loved, but eh... the relationship between the Winchester Brothers was just too much of a turn-off.

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Thu Jul 26, 2018 2:04 am

Re:Unsong, Scott touches on a lot of interesting ideas into but the actual plot in which those ideas swim is terrible. Things just sort of happen and characters move in and out of focus without coherency.

This is because Scott two story ideas in mind (a technothriller with name magic and a theodicy solving apocalyptic epic) and just sort of vomited out both simultaneously. It's the sort of mistake you'd expect from. Despite an abundance of well executed scenes and interesting concepts Unsong is ultimately literary ambergris. Even if it pleases the senses it is ultimately excrement

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:21 am

Talentless Nana caught my eye as a deconstruction of the whole "special school for kids with varied super power training them to save the world from monsters that normal humies can't fight", in that the kids themselves are the potential monsters due to their dangerous powers, so they're kept in check by being isolated from society and bombarded with lies, while one of them is actually an infiltrated humie just pretending to have powers with the job of detecting if any of the super students is becoming too dangerous/smart and find a way to get rid of them in a way that doesn't reveal the reverse masquerade.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Sat Aug 04, 2018 4:38 am

Who is America? is impressive. I don't find it funny, but Sacha Baron Cohen is a master at what he does: making people look like fools.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sun Aug 05, 2018 2:11 am

Iduno wrote:I caught part of an episode of a terrible-looking horror TV show during lunch one day, and found out it was called Supernatural. Now I've watched most of the first season, and it's as terrible (they found the house of the dead guy they found in a newspaper from across the country, because EMS was still parked there) and also addictive as I'd hoped.

It's better when it's not just Christian mythology (the first 2 or 3 episodes were very good), but it's all the half-assedness you'd expect out of discovering, investigating, and solving a mystery in 40 minutes. And all of the goodness of legends showing up in a monster-of-the-week format.

There are somehow 13 seasons of this, and I can imagine it goes downhill at some point, but for now it's an excellent combination of so bad it's good and also regular entertainment.

There's a Scooby Doo crossover in Season 13. That's really all you need to know.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Wed Aug 29, 2018 10:20 pm

I really liked the Polish show on Netflix called Ultraviolet. It's what Wisdom of the Crowd should have been more like.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Aug 31, 2018 10:06 am

So the overlord anime had so far shown the main lich protagonist in a more ambiguous light than the light novels. Sure, he and his minions murderized a lot of humies in two and half seasons, but they were mostly clearly evil humanoids like slavers and raiders and medieval mafia so no biggie, right?

And now in the 3rd season we reach the moment when the lich protagonist decides to lure a bunch of adventurer parties in to his dungeon to murderize them and so start building up a reputation.

Including the cute magical girl that was adventuring to earn money to take care of her little sisters.

Specially the the cute magical girl that was adventuring to earn money to take care of her little sisters.

The anime-only viewers reactions were glorious for those that had already read the light novels.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Fri Aug 31, 2018 11:40 am

Overlord is a fascinatingly dumb clusterfuck of a story, in that it obstinately refuses to be a story and instead bounces around schizophrenically between being various kinds of (metaphorical) porn, mostly of the powerwanking and gratuitous tragisads varieties. The various arcs of Overlord have as much narrative continuity as my Pornhub visits; none at all. In one arc the MC is committing genocide, because that's an arc about wanking to how powerful the MC and his lackeys are. In the next arc, the MC is giving candy to children and putting them on the VIP "free badass bodyguard" list, because this is an arc about villagers working hard and surviving with the help of the supercool badass MC guy. In the next arc, the MC is using an alias to hire adventurers to attack him so he can murder them in the pursuit of a final plan so vaguely defined its final steps may as well be "???" and "profit!", because this is an arc about how sad it is to orphan children or whatever.

The show just completely 100% abandons contrivances like "character" and "motivation" to just... wank to things. Sometimes to wank to how powerful the MC is, sometimes to wank to how the MC is a kind and benevolent god, sometimes to wank to how cruel and sad the world (and the MC) can be. Consistent characterization and clearly defined motivations would just get in the way of swapping between all of those things, so the story just doesn't have them.

And ultimately all of that would be forgivable, in a "so bad it's ironically good" kind of way, if it weren't so goddamn boring about it. The main character's motto is clearly "the banality of evil," in that he commits evil with all the banality of a salaryman clocking in his 9-5. For all anyone could tell, the motherfucker could have a spreadsheet full of kind deeds and misdeeds that he needs to balance or else his boss will yell at him and that's the reasoning behind every decision he's made. It's like he's playing a bioware game and trying to finish it with a neutral alignment score - balancing out all those impulsive or accidental acts of kindness/evil with random acts of evil/kindness not because it makes sense for his character to do any of those things, but because there's some bizarre metanarrative which requires it.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Mon Sep 03, 2018 8:24 pm

I recently finished the revival season of Twin Peaks. It's a genuinely remarkable achievement as a piece of surrealist art, and it still manages to be, for the most part, coherently plotted. I'm not quite sure why Showtime decided to give David Lynch this much creative freedom, but he knocked it out of the park.

Count Arioch the 28th · Thu Sep 13, 2018 3:12 am

American Horror Story: Apocalypse had its season premiere just now. It's got my interest, I am eager in seeing where they go with this.

SlyJohnny · Post by **SlyJohnny** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 5:39 pm

The last two episodes of OOTs have been pretty good. It's an intelligent way to raise/clarify the stakes. http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1139.html

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Thu Sep 13, 2018 6:15 pm

Iron Fist S02E03.

Not quite good enough to redeem Season 1 on its own, but give me three or four episodes of that quality and I might actually start arguing that it's worth enduring Iron Fist Season 1 to get there.

rampaging-poet · Post by **rampaging-poet** » Sat Sep 15, 2018 4:16 pm

DSMatticus wrote: -snip Overlord stuff-

The main character's motto is clearly "the banality of evil," in that he commits evil with all the banality of a salaryman clocking in his 9-5.

Super-late reply here, but I just want to point out this is literally true in-universe. He really is a salaryman who thinks his job is to to commit evil. All the random acts of kindness are his way to convince himself that genocide is just a day job and he's not really a murderous sociopath, right?

There was even a bit of that in the arc being discussed. Before the group he's lured to their death can set out for his deathtrap, he asks them why they'd take the job. When the answer he received was universally "money, duh," he didn't pry any further. He just mentally filed them away as greedy robbers and pressed on with the plan. I don't think he really wanted to know who those people were - he just wanted some way to justify their deaths to himself.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat Sep 15, 2018 7:20 pm

Yes, that is his dayjob, hence the comparison. But no, Overlord is not self-aware about the moral inconsistency of its main character in any interesting way. Overlord is just a bunch of shit that happens because. The humanity of the protagonist is controlled by a metanarrative; specifically, the metanarrative of 'what the author felt like writing at that moment.'

Consider the tone of the scene in which he murders the random adventurers he hired to attack his home so he could murder them. That is not a scene about internal moral conflict and how far one can twist themselves into justifying their actions. That is a scene about power imbalances and wanking to them. He toys with them, because he is powerful and being powerful is fun. He lashes out in anger over petty offenses, because power gives you the privilege of doing so and being able to do so is satisfying. The questionable morality of the scene gets a throwaway line that does nothing to change his behavior and never pays off. The tragedy of these characters dying is purely for the viewers' benefit. Arche and her family are never coming up again. In the canon of the light novel, her parents sell her sisters into slavery and they die, off-camera, and nothing ever becomes of it ever. There is not and never will be an "oh, I'm not sure I should have done that" moment. And the arc before this he showed a kid around his doom castle because kids are cute and that's as deep as it goes.

Overlord is basically a joke evil D&D campaign turned into an anime that takes itself a little too seriously. NPC's that don't get names or screentime don't matter; they're either currency or comic relief. NPC's that do get names/screentimes are either going on the shitlist and need to be murdered in some violently comical fashion or they're the party's new BFF. It is a whimsical and indulgent powertrip by oridnary people pretending to be over-the-top villains. Except then it has arcs like the one in question, where there's a bunch of sads that has zero payoff to the story and isn't happening in relation to the main character at all, which does not fit the "this is a D&D campaign I played once" mold because everything from a D&D campaign happens in relation the main characters.

Seriously, I've run Overlord as a D&D campaign from something like levels 3-15 before I'd even heard of Overlord. It was one of my players' favorite campaigns, so much so it got revisited in a bunch of different forms and generated a bunch of reoccurring characters. It looks like Overlord. NPC's inherently don't matter, so you can kill them for benefit or comedy, but their deaths don't get lavish descriptions or screentime because the people playing your villains aren't actually sociopaths. You start giving NPC's names and screentime, and some of them will end up on a hitlist and some of them will end up the party's BFF's and there is often very little rhyme or reason to it. The only thing missing is the bizarre moments like Arche, because Arche's story is a sad thing that happened off camera to an NPC the players decided not to care about.

I wonder if the author of Overlord wasn't actually the DM of whatever campaign inspired him, and Arche's arc is the DM's view of an NPC that he completely failed to convince the players to give a shit about and they murdered instantly. Arche was supposed to be their original 'in' to the politics of the empire (she's a noble), but instead they murdered her before they could even figure out she was a plot thread, so the DM threw up his hands and sent wave after wave of adventurers at them until they could justify the PC's having a big enough reputation to warrant attention from the empire. And we got the condensed, runtime-friendly version of that with a touch of the DM-only background the PC's missed.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Mon Sep 17, 2018 11:16 pm

rampaging-poet wrote: Super-late reply here, but I just want to point out this is literally true in-universe. He really is a salaryman who thinks his job is to to commit evil. All the random acts of kindness are his way to convince himself that genocide is just a day job and he's not really a murderous sociopath, right?

I believe it's more that he's literally just making stuff up as he goes along as his minions worship him to a degree that they have trouble even dreaming that anything their master says/orders could ever be wrong. He was a salaryman, now he's the corporation boss and none of his workers dare say he's wrong about anything. And the protagonist really wants to maintain an image of authority so he can't just admit when he's at a complete loss of what to do and so just improvises.

Like the lizardfolk arc where at the end he just orders to kill all the lizardfolk anyway, and when Cochythus speaks they may make worthy slaves, he still orders to butcher their champions anyway to show who's the boss.

It's even more evident in the most recent book he organized a war between a "holy" nation filled with clerics and paladings and a coalition of nearby monster tribes where the lich is supporting both sides. The story makes a big effort of greying things out with the humans bickering among themselves and then their paladin champion Smite Evil failing to harm one of the monster champions, basically screaming "hey, not all monsters are evil".

And then protagonist just changes his plans at the last minute in a whim, like going from "and now we watch all the humans in this village die" to "nevermind, I'll rout the attackig monster army instead" during the battle. Just a whim, but of course even his smartest minion believes it's all part of their god's master plan and a lowly servant could never begin to understand his designs.

All in the meanwhile he's also trying really hard to promote his new Runecraft TM line of items, including ordering his main minions to point out how powerful they are in the middle of battle "that could actually harm/slay me!" and even jumping in the path of Runecraft TM arrows.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Sep 21, 2018 8:03 am

Gundam Build divers may just be the most realistic Gundam ever.

-MMO game.
-Half the players make characters with bigger butts/chests than their real selves and/or just fully embrace their furry personas.
-Bugs and hackers everywhere.
-Mods are super incompetent, literally spending half the series failing to notice anything wrong with the game so the players have to try to find a way around the bugs on their own.
-The top guilds have 99% of their players being retards that don't make any effort for getting out of the way of the enemy warning Aoe glowing areas.
-Grognards going "MHU OLD RULES! My edition of the game was better!"
-The game has so many bugs that the singularity happens and a true AI is created, and when it is found most of the players reaction is "delete that, we're too addicted to this MMO to even consider pausing the servers for some time to try to solve this".
-Patrick is in every episode.

Just shame about teasing us with what looked like a mecha musume for the second season since one of the older girls was shown in what looked like power armor and got my hopes up for some Super Fumina style action but ended up just being an in-game skin with no special effects. For one episode.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Sun Sep 23, 2018 6:03 am

Oh, I just finished The Dragon Prince and I just love it. I love that they actually animated real sign language. I love the sense of humor (snow elf). I love the animation style. I love the story. I love the details that matter (the braid).

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Sun Sep 23, 2018 6:08 am

Good to hear. I was thinking about watching it myself.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Mon Sep 24, 2018 12:10 am

The one thing that sucks about the Dragon Prince is that there aren't more episodes.

That's...really about it.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Mon Sep 24, 2018 1:23 am

Agreed.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Mon Sep 24, 2018 3:11 am

I thought Dragon Prince was very charming, but not especially standout in quality. Then again, that's about where I rank the early episodes of Last Airbender, so it wasn't disappointing. The only thing that bothered me was the choppy animation.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sat Sep 29, 2018 2:29 am

Just watched Disobedience. Slow, subdued, hits you over the head with its themes, but still compelling enough that that I paid attention for an hour and a half, which is better than most movies these days. And not just because of that scene.

McAdams and Weisz really did a great job

Hiram McDaniels · Post by **Hiram McDaniels** » Sat Sep 29, 2018 7:52 am

CapnTthePirateG wrote:The one thing that sucks about the Dragon Prince is that there aren't more episodes.

That's...really about it.

I know...I want to see more of that world. What's with the elves who have space faces? Love the fluff behind magic.