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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:You know, I’m just going to say it: “Wade Watts” is a real suspect name for Cline’s protagonist when the real Wade Watts was a black preacher and civil rights activist in Oklahoma who was friends with MLK, was Oklahoma NAACP President for a number of years, and followed a doctrine of Christian love that most famously converted a KKK leader away from racism. Seems reaching. Ernest Cline is an idiot, but I've seen no signs he's racist other than in kind of an ignorant fetishistic way towards the Japanese where he never really got out of viewing them the way 80s movies did. I mean it's not like he's actually a white man named Jason Pargin who's spent his entire professional career using an Asian pseudonym
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Feb 14, 2018 16:29
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:It’s a good point and another example of what’s missing from RPO. We I mean the aesop at the end is supposedly to enjoy reality and don't do so much escapism but The self insert wouldn't have won if he wasn't an obsessed nerd who magically memorized literally all of western 80's pop culture The world is essentially post apocalyptic and there's nothing to do but access the free virtual world (except there's still like, sponsors for e athletes and people can afford to buy luxury goods and also have the ability of watching 80's commercials while gorging on dorito chips when they're supposedly on a super limited income) So the book doesn't even have a consistent logic to it
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Feb 14, 2018 17:00
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at all the silly references but as someone whose childhood was firmly in the 80s the missing pieces of pop culture are as obvious as Teela missing her snake armor (hey, I took her in the pool a lot!). I probably said this earlier in the thread but RPO has the same issue as Twilight: the author’s wish-fulfillment protagonist wins everything but doesn’t grow one bit as a character, and the otherwise mediocre story suffers for it.
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girl pants posted:I have often wondered why we keep getting reboots of TMNT and GI Joe but not Barbie We got an MLP reboot and have barely begun to recover from the damage. Girl toys are just too strong.
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Feb 14, 2018 17:06
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Samuringa posted:We got an MLP reboot and have barely begun to recover from the damage. Girl toys are just too strong. Tell me you don't want to see a gritty reboot of Barbie. Imagine the basement of the Malibu Dreamhouse full of superhero gadgets. Imagine the Barbie Jeep with a howitzer.
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Feb 14, 2018 17:10
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girl pants posted:Tell me you don't want to see a gritty reboot of Barbie. Imagine the basement of the Malibu Dreamhouse full of superhero gadgets. Imagine the Barbie Jeep with a howitzer. 
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Feb 14, 2018 17:20
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chitoryu12 posted:Also he has Indiana Jones having more movies after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but none of the other "holy trilogies", which ends up being seriously lol after Fury Road revolutionized action films. And there was apparently no more Star Wars movies after the prequels. Mr. Sunshine posted:I got the Joe Haldeman "Peace and War" trilogy for my birthday. The first book, "The Forever War", is a sci-fi story about the weirdness of waging war across thousands of light-years against an alien enemy you cannot understand. Due to relativistic fuckery, a single battle that takes a few hours for the participants takes decades or centuries back on earth. The protagonist participates in a total of three battles. Every time he comes home the society he encounters is more and more alien. When the war ends he's the oldest human being in the universe, and has been at war for a thousand years. In one of the editions Halderman wrote in the foreword that he could change the year but he specifically wrote the book as a comment on the Vietnam war so the he urges the readers to pretend that it's an alternate version of nineties instead.
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Feb 14, 2018 18:29
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Alhazred posted:And there was apparently no more Star Wars movies after the prequels. At least TFA wasn't announced until a while after the book's release in 2011, but Fury Road was publicly known to be in production with Tom Hardy as Max at the time of writing and filming was ongoing when the book was released. Even the tiniest glance at his reference material would have helped with that issue. I know he could technically be writing a universe where Fury Road never existed, but I don't want to live in that timeline.
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Feb 14, 2018 18:46
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...as opposed to the normal timeline Ernest Cline wrote?
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Feb 14, 2018 18:53
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Seems reaching. Ernest Cline is an idiot, but I've seen no signs he's racist other than in kind of an ignorant fetishistic way towards the Japanese where he never really got out of viewing them the way 80s movies did. I don’t think that post suggests he’s deliberately racist (although he totally is very racist accidentally - those Japanese characters, yeesh). Only that the naming of that character might have been subconsciously influenced by a local hero, and that this might open up some interesting casting possibilities for adaptation.
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Feb 14, 2018 20:24
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Darth Walrus posted:I don’t think that post suggests he’s deliberately racist (although he totally is very racist accidentally - those Japanese characters, yeesh). Only that the naming of that character might have been subconsciously influenced by a local hero, and that this might open up some interesting casting possibilities for adaptation. Yeah, to me it’s in the systemic sense where Cline never had to think about lack of representation or the implications of how he named his protagonist (I still think an editor should have caught that, it’s a hell of a coincidence) or the twist concerning the best friend.
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Feb 14, 2018 20:35
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girl pants posted:I have often wondered why we keep getting reboots of TMNT and GI Joe but not Barbie I know you mean in terms of big-budget movies but there was a recent series of Barbie animated shorts that were actually pretty funny and self-aware 
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Feb 15, 2018 16:17
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What on earth makes you think they stopped making Barbie stuff? I heard the last cartoon was pretty amusing, it has one character who acts like a 50s girl and is depicted in black and white. Most of these children's franchises never stopped, you have to get into relatively obscure/cult stuff for a kids' franchise that genuinely did drop off the face of the earth and is kept alive only by nostalgia, like TaleSpin, or a lot of non-American animation. Generally, as long as kids keep buying the toys and/or watching the shows, they keep making them.
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Feb 15, 2018 16:49
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Holy poo poo Talespin, thanks for that memory jog I wonder if the board game is still in my attic
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Feb 15, 2018 19:46
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Inescapable Duck posted:What on earth makes you think they stopped making Barbie stuff? I've never seen a big budget Barbie movie aimed at adult women, have you? That's what I'm talking about -- they just keep making Transformers and GI Joe and TMNT movies and they're not exactly for kids.
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Feb 15, 2018 20:25
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girl pants posted:I've never seen a big budget Barbie movie aimed at adult women, have you? That's what I'm talking about -- they just keep making Transformers and GI Joe and TMNT movies and they're not exactly for kids. Because manchild nostalgia is a larger market than womanchild nostalgia.
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Feb 15, 2018 20:31
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PJOmega posted:Because manchild nostalgia is a larger market than womanchild nostalgia. Is that you assumption, or fact?
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Feb 15, 2018 21:00
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I'd say that it's likely given how male-coded entertainment was often treated as unisex while female-coded entertainment was explicitly for girls. I'll bet you can find more girls who have good memories of Transformers than guys who have good memories of Barbie.
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Feb 15, 2018 21:07
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There actually has been some kind of comedic, psuedo-ironic Barbie movie in development for a while but I don't know how likely it is to actually happen. Barbie has the problem of getting connected with the image of a sexist, patriarchal version of femininity- impossible proportions, constantly smiling, the whole "Math is hard!" incident, etc. So you'd have to do any high profile Barbie project with a certain amount of self awareness. Maxwell Lord has a new favorite as of 21:34 on Feb 15, 2018 |
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Feb 15, 2018 21:28
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Maxwell Lord posted:There actually has been some kind of comedic, psuedo-ironic Barbie movie in development for a while but I don't know how likely it is to actually happen. It was going to star Amy Schumer, but she dropped out.
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Feb 15, 2018 22:40
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girl pants posted:I've never seen a big budget Barbie movie aimed at adult women, have you? What, you mean Gone Girl doesn't take place in the Barbieverse?
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Feb 15, 2018 23:19
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girl pants posted:I've never seen a big budget Barbie movie aimed at adult women, have you? That's what I'm talking about -- they just keep making Transformers and GI Joe and TMNT movies and they're not exactly for kids. They are called rom-coms.
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Feb 15, 2018 23:25
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Serious Cephalopod posted:Is that you assumption, or fact?
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Feb 15, 2018 23:38
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PJOmega posted:Because manchild nostalgia is a larger market than womanchild nostalgia. Probably why the Jem and the Holograms movie failed Well that and it sucked
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Feb 16, 2018 00:30
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A distinct lack of kicking over potted plants.
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Feb 16, 2018 01:26
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Jem and the holograms was the only one I could think of lately that happened. It wasn't true to the original and it starred young girls, not adult women. I don't think it was taken seriously as a project at all. But "Girl's Trip" was a black woman's movie, and assumed ahead of time to be a failure. It still did well in theaters. I get "women's toys don't sell movies" seems like a good assumption, but women buy half of all movie tickets. It's an assumption that should be seriously tested.
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Feb 16, 2018 01:42
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girl pants posted:I've never seen a big budget Barbie movie aimed at adult women, have you? That's what I'm talking about -- they just keep making Transformers and GI Joe and TMNT movies and they're not exactly for kids. There is a Barbie movie in production, although, yeah, it's the first one, and we've had plenty of the others. Serious Cephalopod posted:Is that you assumption, or fact? I'd say it's the entertainment industry's assumption, in much the same way as they assume women don't want to see action movies with female stars, even as women across social media ask them, "Where's our drat Black Widow movie already?"
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Feb 16, 2018 01:49
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Jem was a weird one where they seemed to go out of their way to distance themselves from a source material in a way that would alienate any old fans from checking it out, but also replaced it with stuff that was too boring for modern audiences to care about.
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Feb 16, 2018 04:34
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It's been mentioned before but here's the link to the first episode of Life in the Dreamhouse, the actually funny, self aware Barbie cartoon from the last few years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDirUh_MHA It takes a basic premise, Barbie and her friends love fashion and she has a large wardrobe, and it takes it to it's (il)logiclal extension.
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Feb 16, 2018 06:03
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Barbie had an appearance in Toy Story 2 and major role in Toy Story 3, too.
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Feb 16, 2018 07:21
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I loved the sequence of her torturing Ken by destroying his outfits.  It feels Mattel are allowing the character to breathe which means she actually has a character now as opposed to being a plastic filler for her outfits.
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Feb 16, 2018 07:25
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Now the Ken character, oh boy...
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Feb 16, 2018 07:25
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Samuringa posted:Now the Ken character, oh boy... Yeah, I'm noticing in Life in the Dreamhouse that the characterisation is somewhat inconsistent, like in the second episode you have Skipper whining about redecorating the house for Barbie's Sister Chelsea's birthday but in a later episode she is all in on redecorating the house for the hell of it. The jokes are rather funny though.
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Feb 16, 2018 07:54
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I did kinda like that Barbie and Ken in Toy Story 3 are presented differently from the other characters, down to the sound effects and soundtrack being extra cheesy. It's almost a Robot Chicken feel to it but played straight enough to be extra funny.
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Feb 16, 2018 08:06
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Maxwell Lord posted:Jem was a weird one where they seemed to go out of their way to distance themselves from a source material in a way that would alienate any old fans from checking it out, but also replaced it with stuff that was too boring for modern audiences to care about. It was such a massive misstep. I recall a concert scene was done with a real crowd made of folks who applied by sending fan videos and there was an initial positive reaction; the story was updated to be “band blows up from viral YouTube fame” but eliminated iconic elements like the hologram tech and gave Jem herself far less autonomy than her cartoon counterpart. The main characters were also aged down significantly and we got an unnecessary origin story because filmmakers seem to assume audiences are too stupid to accept a concept in media res. Trying to steer back to books: is there a book or series of books that does this? Gets so bogged down in backstory/world building that interesting story is sacrificed or comes off speaking down to its audience?
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Feb 16, 2018 08:43
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Maxwell Lord posted:Jem was a weird one where they seemed to go out of their way to distance themselves from a source material in a way that would alienate any old fans from checking it out, but also replaced it with stuff that was too boring for modern audiences to care about. That's actually really common with bad remakes and movie adaptations.
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Feb 16, 2018 09:06
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:Trying to steer back to books: is there a book or series of books that does this? Gets so bogged down in backstory/world building that interesting story is sacrificed or comes off speaking down to its audience? Yeah, the Lord of the Rings.
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Feb 16, 2018 11:03
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Inescapable Duck posted:That's actually really common with bad remakes and movie adaptations. It is! And that drives me loving bananas. It's like they're ashamed of all the things that made the franchises popular in the first place! Say what you will about G.I. Joe, but the original incarnation of the team was basically highly-skilled eccentrics allowed to dress however they liked for the, basically, one job they had (missile launcher guy, bomb-defusing guy, laser guy, underwater guy), and it was great. The movie had a bunch of people doing their best impressions of unfurnished one-bedroom apartments wearing all-black, and Snake-Eyes, because of course.
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Feb 16, 2018 13:54
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:Trying to steer back to books: is there a book or series of books that does this? Gets so bogged down in backstory/world building that interesting story is sacrificed or comes off speaking down to its audience? Every bad fantasy novel, and 90% of the good ones?
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Feb 16, 2018 13:56
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Also sci-fi
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Feb 16, 2018 13:59
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:we got an unnecessary origin story because filmmakers seem to assume audiences are too stupid to accept a concept in media res. I know the latter half of your post was trying to get back to books, but I like how the first Blade movie did his origin; we see a pregnant woman who's been bitten by a vampire, then Blade just tells us over the opening credits that he's a half-vampire and now he kills them.
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Feb 16, 2018 14:34
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