Good Idea, Poor Execution

[ar-ninetysix]

I've been lurking and I'm surprised no one brought it up yet, even if it might be an obvious one that doesn't need to be mentioned. Disney's sequel trilogy for Star Wars, Episodes 7-9.

Listen, I actually like the films as is, and can easily forgive some of the most unnecessary and convoluted plot lines bc I've got low standards.. but there is no denying that the whole thing could've been so much better.

J.J. Abrams had a plan for all three films, but Rian Johnson was shoved in for The Last Jedi and he decided to do his own thing, even going against the spirit of what J.J. had going on. And due to the backlash the film got, J.J. had to direct the next one so he could "fix Rian's mistakes" and cram two films worth of plot into one. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, that's bc it is! General consensus was that it was an awful ending to the Skywalker Saga. Too much was happening back to back, and there's no space for characters to truly breathe- and speaking of which!

This is where I get offended even with my low standards tbh

None of these characters feel they had much thought behind them with the exception of Kylo Ren, who actually got an arc. It was a poorly executed arc, but it's more than anyone else got lmao the real sad part is the biggest wasted potential in all the films. Finn. They did him dirty. I'm just saying Finn would've been a far better Jedi protagonist then Rey, especially with his background as an ex-stormtrooper.. At least he's got a bromance with Poe who's kinda.. just there. He flies and shoots good, he gets promotions. I got nothing else, sorry.

And as for Rey herself? Honestly.. she's kinda bland. Generally a good person, and wants to know more about herself. Not really one for revenge, not really one to give in to the Dark Side. The Force comes so naturally to her, it's kinda underwhelming when she learns new stuff. Never really gets injured in the entire trilogy until the very end, where they immediately fix it like nothing happened. I'm not asking for a limb to be chopped off, but come on. Also, her and Kylo worked better as this student/teacher dynamic, not enemies to lovers.. just- overall, mild and bland.

---

So... yeah. I don't dislike the films. Force Awakens is fun all-around as a remix of A New Hope. The Last Jedi is ambitiously different, just like Empire Strikes Back. Rise of Skywalker would've been better with a longer runtime or split into two films. There's a lot of scenes in all of the films that are great, but the rest is definitely not up to the same standard. Definitely more focused on spectacle than anything else.

[DokiDokiTsuna]

Listen, I actually like the films as is, and can easily forgive some of the most unnecessary and convoluted plot lines bc I've got low standards.. but there is no denying that the whole thing could've been so much better.

Oooh, all of this and more...

I kinda blacked out the memory of the new trilogy because I was so massively disappointed...at the time I was just starting to take an interest in Star Wars, and I thought this would be the definitive experience for a new generation of fans like me.
I went to see all three films in theaters, even...and 2 minutes into TRoS I went "oh no" and it was all downhill from there. So much potential, squandered...

It's interesting that THAT was supposed to be a last-ditch effort to save the trilogy, because I think it was without a doubt the worst film of the three. The first one was a fine start; I actually liked the second one, too-- although the story was a little weak (especially the B-plot), it definitely contains most of my favorite scenes in the trilogy, and I thought the plot threads it introduced had the potential to wrap up nicely in the next movie.

Unfortunately, we got...what we got. :[ If what you say is true and Abrams was really trying to "fix" things, I think he would have been better off continuing from where TLJ left off (y'know, as you're supposed to do in a movie SERIES) and leading the characters to a satisfying conclusion, instead of trying to throw a hard reset and cram all the rest of 'his vision' into one super-rushed movie.

And even if it hadn't been rushed, I don't even like his ideas. Palpatine returns? Wow. T_T Rey is a Palpatine? Why?? Kylo Ren switches sides? Yawn...
Finn is completely forgotten and left out of the plot? AAAARRRRJJAKLF;JS;HFNDKHAFUSISH--

lmao the real sad part is the biggest wasted potential in all the films. Finn. They did him dirty. I'm just saying Finn would've been a far better Jedi protagonist then Rey, especially with his background as an ex-stormtrooper.

This, this, this! TT_TT I will never forgive the trilogy for doing this to him (and by extension, to John Boyega...but that's a discussion for another time). My God, what we could have had...I would have accepted him being the deuteragonist, even, but by the end of the story he wasn't even much of a side character...

I would gladly trade ALL of Kylo Ren's character development for more Finn. Let Ren stay as Vader's whiny bitchy grandson; I enjoyed him that way! Or use the trilogy to START his character arc by giving him a change of heart at the last minute; so we can focus on our actual protagonists! I just ಥ_ಥ

[NickRowler]

I do think the manga is a bit more bearable than the anime. I will say that if you hate the Frieza arc, you would loathe the Buu saga. That went on for way too long.

I will say that despite being into Dragon Ball and DBZ as a kid, I have never been a fan of any of the new stuff, be it GT or Super. I don't know, I sort of wished the whole thing completely ended at the end of DBZ. It's cool seeing the kids as teens/adults in GT but the plot was so dumb.

[Fafnir]

yeah, i tired watching super, but the whole first arc with beerus and the yacht party was just sooo dumb. I quit it after that.
maybe it got better... doubt it. Agree, they shoulda just left it alone

[Fafnir]

To bring it back to webtoons. I plowed through "Fight like a girl" on Tapas.
I was so hooked... then it reached the end, and just like... crapped the bed. hard.
One MC just, totally dissapeared from the comic with a mysterious past left unexplained, tonnes of plot threads left hanging, and the creepiest ship ever was the one they decided to push. I was so dissapointed.

[liaroger]

Spells from Hell on Webtoon, specifically the entire relationship drama arc. Antagonist asshole (who has been shown to be dangerous) tells male love interest that he kissed female love interest first (they both have some tension and are about to go on their first date but they're not together, antagonist asshole actually forced the kiss on female LI but that's beside the point), male LI gets jealous and butthurt, doesn't let female LI explain, walks off and leaves her alone with the antagonist who has threatened and attacked people. Make LI goes on to give her the silent treatment for a while, she leaves him alone to respect his boundaries but is upset about it. A friend gives her a pep talk saying she should fight for the people she cares about.

Female LI also wanted to tell male LI something important during their date, something she feels very ashamed and insecure about that would affect a romantic relationship, hence why she decides to tell him when their friendship is becoming more romantic. Obviously she never got to tell him so another character does that instead, his reaction is "Is that what she wanted to tell me? Why didn't she tell me sooner? Is it because she'd rather be with someone else and not meeee?" He does throw her a bone by texting her "happy new year" though so uh ... Awww cute romance I guess.

Meanwhile female LI angsts over how to apologise to male LI while still respecting bis boundaries and implied wish to not be contacted, I still don't know what exactly she wants to apologise for but she feels guilty while he's butthurt and continues to ignore her. She writes a letter to him and wants to hand it to him personally but plot happens and she saves his ass instead.

Now I am very apprehensive about how they're going to talk this out. I fear that the thing that'll redeem her to him and that'll solve this conflict will be that the kiss was coerced, and that she'll apologise for not disclosing information that he wasn't entitled to in the first place and that didn't affect him at the time (again, she did plan on telling him when it became relevant to him and their relationship), and if that's how it goes I'll drop the Webtoon.

Look, I'm a fan of flawed characters and complex relationships. I'm also a fan of unhealthy dynamics if the story acknowledges them as unhealthy. There's a lot you can do with them, including making them healthier as the characters involved communicate and heal. This is just not the way to go about it. Both characters' mental health has been addressed before, but their unhealthy dynamic is somehow overlooked and the female lead is only encouraged to fight for the dude that left her alone with a dangerous guy and gave her the silent treatment. All of this is just leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

Sorry for the long rant. I just got very mad about this and slightly concerned about some comments painting the guy's behaviour as reasonable, justified and mature, and some people blindly going "just kiss kiss fall in love already", and how this whole dynamic is extremely unhealthy and it's just... Overlooked. It's just not addressed properly. I hope the story will address it but I'm worried that the resolution of this whole conflict will be shallow and have a problematic message.

[AlydaB]

I agree with this one wholeheartedly. Actually dropped Spells from Hell a while back (sometime between the coerced kiss and when their relationship started) because it was beginning to drag and the characters and their dynamic were falling flat for me.

While some aspects of the art and aesthetic are lovely, and I thought the world had a lot of potential to be interesting and fun, everything overall felt "meh". I couldn't make myself care about the characters and their conflicts, and when a story starts feeling like a chore to read in hopes that it'll get better someday, I drop it as a rule.

[ddog5500]

THIS!!! 100%%%
A lot of people seem to dislike Riverdale after season 1 but I seriously think its one of the few shows that gets better with every season. Like the writing is so unpredictable it is lowkey genius. Nobody in the cast or production of the show takes any of it seriously and that's what makes it so funny.

[liaroger]

Yeah, that's how I feel about it ... I'm reading it for the art and because I kinda like Scarlet still but it feels more and more like a chore and like I'm just hoping for it to get better. So yeah, I have this cutoff set for myself, if the conflict is resolved in a problematic way I'll drop it too. ^^'
It's a shame really because I think it had a lot of potential. It just feels like the creator bit off more than they can chew with the personal and interpersonal drama. The characters have some complex mental health issues and a complex and unhealthy dynamic but it's treated like a shallow love story with simple shallow drama. It reads like the author either didn't really understand (or care to understand) the dynamic and mental health issues they've created for their characters, or like they wanted to create something more complex but Webtoon (and the readers just wanting the two leads to kiss kiss fall in love) got in the way. Maybe the story would've been better off as a more shallow romance fantasy without the complex trauma.

[KeinanX]

The ideas for Riverdale is f*cking genius! But yeah dumb show all around, (Kinda entertaining though.)

[DNoble]

I'm actually gonna drop another hot take: Super is better than the DBZ in many ways.

Don't get me wrong; it DEFINITELY has some major issues, especially in the production value, and the first like 40 episodes are godawful TV-ified retellings of the Battle of the Gods and Resurrection F movies, so my recommendation is to watch those movies (which are pretty fun, though not anything to write home about for any reason other than their animation which is gorgeous), then skip to the interdimensional tournament arc.
The reason I like that arc so much is because it actually had creative fights: an arena fight gets turned into a cage match at the last minute, so Vegeta has to deal with fighting an opponent who uses fire-based powers on a time limit before all the oxygen in the arena gets burned up. Characters actually have to analyze other fighters' tactics and take advantage of their flaws and bad habits. Gohan gets poison thrown in his eyes and has to learn how to fight blind on the fly.
It's nothing amazing or deeply creative like the 4-d chess matches you'd find in some of the super-specific-power-conflicts of modern shounen, but it introduced elements outside of 'shoot bigger laser than other guy' that made the battles feel fresher than anything from DBZ.

[DNoble]

Rian Johnson subverted our expectations that he would make a good movie.

[Stargazer31]

I think that Happy Tree Friends deserves a mention here too. It could have been good, as it was basically a real life Itchy and Scratchy, but the "cute things dying violently" joke got really stale after a while, because they didn't do anything creative with it. They just used the same old formula of "they're doing normal things SUDDENLY MURDER" again and again until it lost its shock value, which was the selling point of the show.

Although there were a few creative episodes (like the one in black and white, and the ones with Buddhist Monkey and W.A.R), most of them just felt samey after a while. It was shocking at first, then it just got bland, because they overdid it.

[system]

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