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The story goes that the original plan was for him to be a mutated wolverine, but somebody else at marvel tried that origin story with another character and got yelled at for that being stupid, so they just said he was a mutant and left the rest of his history blank. Bits and pieces hinted that he had a big weird history in the past, but for the most part, his history was left blank while all the other X-Men got more elaborate backstories. Cyclops got a space pirate dad, Nightcrawler got a shapeshifter mom, Storm got a history of being a mind-controlled street rat in Cairo before she became a deity in Kenya, but Wolverine was just some guy. The floodgates opened for more backstory when the Weapon X program was established in 1991, and that later spiraled into Wolverine being an immortal highlander as old as time itself or whatever the latest iteration on his backstory has been. I think too many backstories was one reason why I got Wolverine fatigue. Nobody ever wants to bring back Cyclops's weird criminal adoptive dad Jack O'Diamonds who had diamond hands, they want to see Wolverine assassinate archduke Frans Ferdinand.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 08:08 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 18:59 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:The story goes that the original plan was for him to be a mutated wolverine, but somebody else at marvel tried that origin story with another character and got yelled at for that being stupid, so they just said he was a mutant and left the rest of his history blank. Bits and pieces hinted that he had a big weird history in the past, but for the most part, his history was left blank while all the other X-Men got more elaborate backstories. Cyclops got a space pirate dad, Nightcrawler got a shapeshifter mom, Storm got a history of being a mind-controlled street rat in Cairo before she became a deity in Kenya, but Wolverine was just some guy. The floodgates opened for more backstory when the Weapon X program was established in 1991, and that later spiraled into Wolverine being an immortal highlander as old as time itself or whatever the latest iteration on his backstory has been. I think too many backstories was one reason why I got Wolverine fatigue. Honestly his current backstory isn't even that complicated Though that does remind me of the idea Alex Ross came up with in Earth X of Wolverine being a direct descendent of Moon Boy or something along those lines(Earth X had a lot of interesting concepts but honestly a lot of them were a bit daffy)
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 08:55 |
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I don’t think his past being mysterious was even a big thing until the 90s. For most of Claremont’s run, he’s just a guy who has been a lot of places and done a lot of things, and some leprechauns tell him that he’s a mutated wolverine. I don’t even know when him being extremely long-lived became part of the character, but it seems like his past being a mystery that appears as a frequent plot element is a post-Claremont thing that coincides with him becoming more popular than the rest of the X-Men. I want to say that a lot of his weird backstory, including being extremely old, started coming out in his runs in Marvel Comics Presents.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 14:52 |
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Yeah, MCP was an X-Men solo spotlight series for a long time, starting with Wolverine.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 15:27 |
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Karma Tornado posted:there was a brief pop culture fascination with Australia after Crocodile Dundee made like three hundred million dollars in mid-eighties money and everybody wanted to hop on that gravy train.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 16:09 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:The story goes that the original plan was for him to be a mutated wolverine, but somebody else at marvel tried that origin story with another character and got yelled at for that being stupid, so they just said he was a mutant and left the rest of his history blank. Bits and pieces hinted that he had a big weird history in the past, but for the most part, his history was left blank while all the other X-Men got more elaborate backstories. Cyclops got a space pirate dad, Nightcrawler got a shapeshifter mom, Storm got a history of being a mind-controlled street rat in Cairo before she became a deity in Kenya, but Wolverine was just some guy. The floodgates opened for more backstory when the Weapon X program was established in 1991, and that later spiraled into Wolverine being an immortal highlander as old as time itself or whatever the latest iteration on his backstory has been. I think too many backstories was one reason why I got Wolverine fatigue. That's a good point about all the X-Men getting cool and weird backstories. (Colossus had a Cosmonaut brother who vanished in space. Banshee had a super villain brother and a castle in the west of Ireland. I don't know when they added his background of being an Interpol agent.) But even back then Wolverine had an air of mystery to him. The connection to Japan was a Claremount/Byrne invention and that got expanded upon massively. And they also had Department H and Alpha Flight trying to forcibly rendition Wolverine back, so that's another big part of his mysterious past that has been in existence for a long while.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 20:40 |
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The Question IRL posted:And they also had Department H and Alpha Flight trying to forcibly rendition Wolverine back, so that's another big part of his mysterious past that has been in existence for a long while. I love how loving terrifying 616 Canada is. Kidnapping people on foreign soil, if you get stuck in a Donner Party situation you end up a wendigo, etc. Like I think Canadian intelligence services are shown doing nefarious poo poo more often than American ones.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 20:45 |
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Skwirl posted:I love how loving terrifying 616 Canada is. Kidnapping people on foreign soil, if you get stuck in a Donner Party situation you end up a wendigo, etc. Like I think Canadian intelligence services are shown doing nefarious poo poo more often than American ones. And Wendigo itself is part of the Great Beasts, because Canada needed its own pantheon of demonic entities.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 20:58 |
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Canada needs that robust security state to protect the greatest marvel the modern world has ever known: the Calgary Stampede. All the X-Men love it, Spiderman taught kids not to do drugs there. I think Ghost Rider liked it too.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 21:38 |
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How much cannibalism is there in real-world Canada? Because the Wendigo comes up way too often. Canada also gets to build up all the weird creative decisions from over the years while people feel awkward and uncomfortable about calling back to things like Juggernaut having started out from being blessed by an ancient elder god in a temple in Korea, or Mantis originally coming from Vietnam or Iron Man starting out after having been kidnapped by Vietcong because things like "the mystic orient" feel less comfortable now and maybe racist, but mystic and strange and maybe fascist Canada is fair game.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 21:58 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:How much cannibalism is there in real-world Canada? Because the Wendigo comes up way too often. No idea, but the two real world examples I can think of involved being trapped in a snowy environment, so I think it happens.
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# ? Nov 24, 2021 22:08 |
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there's that Amazing X-Men arc where a worker accidentally got hurt and blood ended up in some hamburger and everyone who ate it turned into a wendigo
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# ? Nov 25, 2021 05:53 |
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So there's a scene in the latest Young Justice where Orphan is preparing to behead Lady Shiva but Batgirl convinces her not to because she would drat her soul or something. I hate this stupid trope, I thought superhero comics had grown out it. If Orphan had executed Shiva, Shiva wouldn't have won anything other than some sort of vindication and Orphan would certainly have not lost anything. And if you're a vigilante superhero who operate outside the law, you would probably need to kill your enemies sometimes just to survive. poo poo, the Avengers kill enemies all the time and think nothing of it, but we still got DC Comics pushing this rubbish.
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 00:29 |
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Kurzon posted:So there's a scene in the latest Young Justice where Orphan is preparing to behead Lady Shiva but Batgirl convinces her not to because she would drat her soul or something. I hate this stupid trope, I thought superhero comics had grown out it. If Orphan had executed Shiva, Shiva wouldn't have won anything other than some sort of vindication and Orphan would certainly have not lost anything. And if you're a vigilante superhero who operate outside the law, you would probably need to kill your enemies sometimes just to survive. poo poo, the Avengers kill enemies all the time and think nothing of it, but we still got DC Comics pushing this rubbish. Gargoyles actually addressed this in a very mature way for a Disney cartoon from the mid 90's by having Goliath point out in an early episode that it's one thing when it happens in the heat of battle but an entirely different matter when the enemy is unable to put up a fight
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 01:54 |
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I don't think we should expect the kids cartoons to operate the same as the big budget four quadrant blockbuster movies, it's not like the Avengers on Earth's Mightiest Heroes or Avengers Assemble are murdering foes left and right. However Young Justice did that thing where it moved to HBO Max streaming and suddenly has a bunch of blood and gore so it's in this weird limbo where it's not for children anymore, just manchildren, so....
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 03:12 |
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Finished watching Hit Monkey tonight and I enjoyed it except for the very end where they decided to keep things open for a potential season 2.
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 05:33 |
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drrockso20 posted:Gargoyles actually addressed this in a very mature way for a Disney cartoon from the mid 90's by having Goliath point out in an early episode that it's one thing when it happens in the heat of battle but an entirely different matter when the enemy is unable to put up a fight
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 14:42 |
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The United States posted:I don't think we should expect the kids cartoons to operate the same as the big budget four quadrant blockbuster movies, it's not like the Avengers on Earth's Mightiest Heroes or Avengers Assemble are murdering foes left and right. Didn't that start when it was on DC Universe, though? I think the main problem is that Young Justice is basically the closest thing we have to a superhero telenovela. That poo poo is heavy on the dramatic, light on the melo. It's good enough to watch, but I wouldn't wrestle anybody to get extra seasons the way I would for other shows. So instead of a more reasoned defense for not executing an already-defeated enemy, we get the "IT'S TO SAVE YOUR SOUUUUL", the same way Conner and Megan can't have a remotely chill relationship and Beast Boy has to have PTSD and depression in the most exaggerated ways possible OnimaruXLR fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Nov 28, 2021 |
# ? Nov 28, 2021 15:49 |
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I think it's a good principle to just be against summary executions in general. I think a lot of the ways that stories come down to heroes struggling over the use of lethal force can be incredibly artificial, often "nonlethal" fighting styles can get incredibly brutal, but nobody loses sleep over making it so a man can never walk again or leaving somebody with injuries they could easily die of. There's also a weird way that fighting to the death is somehow much more acceptable when the killing stroke is pushing them down a bottomless pit. There are arguments that when reform is impossible and prisons are physically incapable of containing people, then killing becomes a much more logical option, but often those situations only exist because comics need justifications to be able to bring back supervillains after they've been defeated, and in that case, putting in long scenes of characters agonizing over the decision to not kill is less of a real moral choice and more of a contrivance to keep the medium going.
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 17:12 |
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One tiny thing I love/hate about supervillain incarceration is how hand-wavey the whole idea of "power dampeners" is. Like this total game-changing tech exists for prison but isn't weaponized in every other situation? Or how, other than mutants with an X-gene, everyone's powers apparently have some fundamental common element to them that cops can just go "Ok Sarge, we got a guy who can transform into the actual literal Moon, a girl who's the personification of the concept of revenge, and this other guy who has a pantheon of evil gods warring for control of his personality." "Yep, put 'em all in the manacles. We're good."
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 17:36 |
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Also there’s a variant of that technology specific to mutants in Marvel comics. Like, how does that work on somebody with wings, or who’s really tall or something? I think there was a twist in the 90s X-Men cartoon where everyone’s powers were suppressed with nonspecific energy fields, and then Wolverine busts out his claws, because they’re not technically a mutant power.
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 17:46 |
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i know nothing of their recent history, but i did read the original Batgirl not long ago, which ends with Cass learning Shiva is her mom, and Shiva tried to goad her into a fight to the death, which Cass wins but flat out refuses to kill Shiva. so this yj thing sounds like a huge turnaround
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 17:52 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think it's a good principle to just be against summary executions in general. I think a lot of the ways that stories come down to heroes struggling over the use of lethal force can be incredibly artificial, often "nonlethal" fighting styles can get incredibly brutal, but nobody loses sleep over making it so a man can never walk again or leaving somebody with injuries they could easily die of. There's also a weird way that fighting to the death is somehow much more acceptable when the killing stroke is pushing them down a bottomless pit.
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 18:16 |
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Also there’s a variant of that technology specific to mutants in Marvel comics. Like, how does that work on somebody with wings, or who’s really tall or something? I think there was a twist in the 90s X-Men cartoon where everyone’s powers were suppressed with nonspecific energy fields, and then Wolverine busts out his claws, because they’re not technically a mutant power. The healing factor that repairs his hands after claws pierce them is though, right? But yeah, the line is pretty fuzzy between where a superpower for a character is something that can be turned on/off or it's become something innate to their physical form. Sandman is for all intents & purposes a poltergeist. Take away his "power" and is there a functioning, normal human body of Marko remaining? Or an inanimate pile of sand?
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 18:31 |
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There was a DC Elseworlds story some time ago where a black cloud takes away all the superheroes and supervillains powers. Only human superheroes like Batman and tech superheroes like Blue Beetle still operate. But Green Lantern loses his powers -- isn't he a tech hero? I hated that comic, it was too nonsensical, even by superhero standards.
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 18:36 |
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Kurzon posted:There was a DC Elseworlds story some time ago where a black cloud takes away all the superheroes and supervillains powers. Only human superheroes like Batman and tech superheroes like Blue Beetle still operate. But Green Lantern loses his powers -- isn't he a tech hero? I hated that comic, it was too nonsensical, even by superhero standards. Yeah, Act of God, which had a confusing idea of what exactly counted as a "power" since characters where their ability was just intrinsic to their race lost them. Like Aquaman could no longer breathe underwater and J'onn lost the ability to do pretty much anything. Also people act wildly out of character like Diana becomes Christian and Clark breaks up with Lois and then gets together with Diana and they have a kid together.
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 19:18 |
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Kurzon posted:So there's a scene in the latest Young Justice where Orphan is preparing to behead Lady Shiva but Batgirl convinces her not to because she would drat her soul or something. I hate this stupid trope, I thought superhero comics had grown out it. If Orphan had executed Shiva, Shiva wouldn't have won anything other than some sort of vindication and Orphan would certainly have not lost anything. And if you're a vigilante superhero who operate outside the law, you would probably need to kill your enemies sometimes just to survive. poo poo, the Avengers kill enemies all the time and think nothing of it, but we still got DC Comics pushing this rubbish. Nah, I think it was fine. The Bat-family is all about not killing, and Cass was trained to be a killer. Her refusing to become a killer is a sign that she's better than how she was raised, and is embracing her new family and turning her back on her old one.
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 19:28 |
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Kurzon posted:You're thinking too much in abstract moral terms. I think superheroes, realistically, would be obliged to kill their enemies to survive and to get things done. A superhero, for instance, should kill his enemies to prevent his enemies or their buddies from later taking revenge him. A dead villain is no longer a threat, and his friends will be too terrified to try and avenge him. Dude what the gently caress
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 20:10 |
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Codependent Poster posted:Nah, I think it was fine. The Bat-family is all about not killing, and Cass was trained to be a killer. Her refusing to become a killer is a sign that she's better than how she was raised, and is embracing her new family and turning her back on her old one. Well, part of it was that Cass DID murder somebody as a little girl and thanks to her body language deal she knew exactly what it felt like and was horrified which is why she works so hard to make sure it doesn't happen to anybody else. It doesn't feel like YJ has that so it kind of throws Cass off center?
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# ? Nov 28, 2021 20:12 |
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Lobok posted:The healing factor that repairs his hands after claws pierce them is though, right? I remember that! “Nothing Mutant about these!” Then he screams in pain and….falls down a waterfall? I remember watching that thinking his bones are metal, he’s fine.
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 01:28 |
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That's because the prevailing notion at the time was that the claws as a whole were part of the Weapon X mods, right, not just existing bones they put the metal on?
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 03:36 |
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I thought it was kinda hokey that Batgirl was willing to throw herself between Cass and Joker just so Cass wouldn't have blood on her hands (How'd she even know that was a kid, what if she was just a really small assassin), but I didn't mind that they didn't want her killing Lady Shiva. Mainly cause Lady Shiva despite everything else was super polite and I could believe she really would've left Cass and her friends alone once they left the island.
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 03:40 |
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Gaz-L posted:That's because the prevailing notion at the time was that the claws as a whole were part of the Weapon X mods, right, not just existing bones they put the metal on? Yeah. The bone claws revelation - that he apparently always had claws - doesn't come around until Magneto sucked the adamantium out of him if I remember right.
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 03:51 |
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Superhero Kill is never a meaningful discussion because it presupposes the villains can't be stopped in any other way but also that killing them will stop them despite literally everyone involved having come back from the dead at least once. It is stupid pro death penalty propaganda nonsense that exists only to try to create justification for when murdering a prisoner is OK
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 04:03 |
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OnimaruXLR posted:Didn't that start when it was on DC Universe, though? I disliked Young Justice from the start. I just could not get into it, based on the writing and the way characters would speak and emote. Every time I watch a fight it just seems lacking in general, too. Which is really weird because Greg Weisman's work is generally awesome and I am almost always entertained seeing it. But here all the show's emotive delivery seems to fall flat.
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 06:16 |
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Honestly my main problems with Young Justice(only really watched Season 1) were; 1) Robin despite being Dick Grayson was written more as a bad parody of Tim Drake 2) Superboy and Kid Flash are both nerfed to such a degree that more often than not both felt completely superfluous as members of the team and neither really had compelling enough personalities to make up for it I was a fan of some of their ideas like Zatara being the League's original magic expert or Milestone characters like Icon and Rocket being part of the universe though
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 06:34 |
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I really enjoyed season 1 of Young Justice but season 2 is losing me. That said I’d gladly trade that first season for more Gargoyles.
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 06:46 |
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I remember Young Justice as being kinda bland, overly serious, and not having a particularly interesting visual style. Passable, but not really something to write home about. Then it got more serious, added an absurd amount of characters, did a bunch of weird offscreen character changes, and it got really hard to follow what was happening evil energy drinks?. Then it got cancelled, and Greg Weisman talked about how he had plans for the series to go on for like a decade and that seemed like a monument to hubris in over-planning and not paying enough attention to the short term. And when it got picked up to be continued, I still sort of blame Greg Weisman for whatever deal with the devil he had to make that happen, because at around the time it got renewed, everything else in the world started going horribly wrong.
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 07:14 |
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In fairness that’s a pretty good descriptor of most of Weisman’s projects.
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 07:36 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 18:59 |
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Young Justice season 1 had its ups and downs, but overall I think was pretty good. I found it hard to get into season 2 because of the timeskip and the focus on a ton of new characters while sidelining some of the season 1 characters and every loving thing was "all according to the Light's plan" no matter what. Season 3 I think was also way too bloated, and I just read summaries instead. But I really like season 4. I think what they're doing with putting the focus on one or two main characters and giving them a pod of 4 episodes to tell a story really helps. So we still see some of the other characters who aren't involved, but it's not as messy as if they were trying to juggle all the storylines at once.
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# ? Nov 29, 2021 08:21 |