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Mooseontheloose posted:I am not sure if this exists in other countries but in the US there is a huge trove of media that says to be successful you must be an rear end in a top hat and tortured. Zuckerberg, Jobs more recently on the non-fiction side but also the MCU Tony Stark, Dr. House, loving any AMC/HBO lead character and we assume that to be successful we have to emulate said behaviors'. You're very much not wrong though.
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May 8, 2023 18:20
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Captain Monkey posted:Yeah, Rick is basically just able to Science whatever solution he wants, so he's smart in that way but he has no ability to recognize or understand the consequences of his actions or empathize in any way with anyone else, so all his solutions are technically perfect but are inhumane, awful, and incredibly short sighted. I'm in the 'the show would be fine if not for it's fans/creators' camp. I've seen most of the episodes and it can be pretty funny, but it's definitely not a life defining show like some people act. I haven't watched it, but from what I know isn't Rick and Morty just an edgelord take on Back to the Future?
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May 8, 2023 18:29
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Jedit posted:I haven't watched it, but from what I know isn't Rick and Morty just an edgelord take on Back to the Future? That's the premise basically, but it continued past that and became more, and Doc Brown isn't just a tinkerer who accidentally solved time travel, he's an omnipotent science wizard. And Morty is a dorky loser with no friends, whose only real redeeming quality compared to Marty McFly is the fact that he's not into incest.
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May 8, 2023 19:03
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Mooseontheloose posted:I am not sure if this exists in other countries but in the US there is a huge trove of media that says to be successful you must be an rear end in a top hat and tortured. Zuckerberg, Jobs more recently on the non-fiction side but also the MCU Tony Stark, Dr. House, loving any AMC/HBO lead character and we assume that to be successful we have to emulate said behaviors'. Buddy there's so much anime like this.
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May 8, 2023 19:11
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Captain Monkey posted:And Morty is a dorky loser with no friends, whose only real redeeming quality compared to Marty McFly is the fact that he's not into incest. Hey now, Marty McFly wasn't into incest, just... every female ancestor of his was.
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May 8, 2023 19:11
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Captain Monkey posted:That's the premise basically, but it continued past that and became more, and Doc Brown isn't just a tinkerer who accidentally solved time travel, he's an omnipotent science wizard. And Morty is a dorky loser with no friends, whose only real redeeming quality compared to Marty McFly is the fact that he's not into incest. Morty created a giant space incest baby, even if he wasn't into it.
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May 8, 2023 20:01
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Mooseontheloose posted:I am not sure if this exists in other countries but in the US there is a huge trove of media that says to be successful you must be an rear end in a top hat and tortured. Zuckerberg, Jobs more recently on the non-fiction side but also the MCU Tony Stark, Dr. House, loving any AMC/HBO lead character and we assume that to be successful we have to emulate said behaviors'. Also Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Dirty Harry, Die Hard, etc etc etc.. Basically any smartass character who exists in a fictional world which was designed so that very specific problems occur which only a person with their exact skill set is capable of solving, and whatever happens they always turn out to be correct in the end. It's all a version of "Great Man Theory", the concept underpinning libertarianism and every other variation of 'rugged individualism', aka Main Character Syndrome. It's a power fantasy where the protagonist is the smartest man in the room and everyone who disagrees with them and calls them an rear end in a top hat is just holding them back from doing what needs to be done and in the end everyone else will be forced to admit that they were right all along and that they're not assholes, they're simply well informed realists who know that you can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. It's a super comforting fantasy for contrarians who think they know better than anyone else.
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May 8, 2023 20:35
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the_steve posted:Yeah, no matter how much they tap the "Rick is a bitter shell of a person and is the source of his own constant loneliness and misery", he's still a functional god capable of rewriting most of reality on a whim while spending entire episodes clowning on everybody else, and it's really easy to project the idea that "If I had all of his brain powers, I also would not make the same mistakes he does so I would have the best of both worlds." You don't even need to be that invested. Rick is both the source but also the solution to all of the problems he makes, and because it's an animated sitcom where the status quo is god, there's never going to be a situation he won't be able to just science magic his way out of so things go back to normal just in time for the next episode. There's no lasting consequences to anything he does. So regardless of how much it's framed as 'he's just making more problems for himself', they don't stick.
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May 8, 2023 22:34
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All of that great man nonsense is good for fiction because it's fiction. Why the hell would I want to watch a movie where the main characters do not have the ability or skills to influence the plot and they just spend the whole time losing?
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May 8, 2023 22:41
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Aramek posted:All of that great man nonsense is good for fiction because it's fiction. Why the hell would I want to watch a movie where the main characters do not have the ability or skills to influence the plot and they just spend the whole time losing? Everybody liked Game of Thrones when it was like this. The characters don’t spend the whole time losing, but the story is driven by sociological factors rather than the genius of particular characters.
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May 8, 2023 23:20
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ishikabibble posted:Technically, yes. But that gets lost in 'Rick is a cool badass who will shoot/kill/blow up anything that causes him trouble'. This raises a question of whether the artist has any responsibility to make sure you know The Bad Guy Is Bad.
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May 8, 2023 23:52
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Mooseontheloose posted:I am not sure if this exists in other countries but in the US there is a huge trove of media that says to be successful you must be an rear end in a top hat and tortured. Zuckerberg, Jobs more recently on the non-fiction side but also the MCU Tony Stark, Dr. House, loving any AMC/HBO lead character and we assume that to be successful we have to emulate said behaviors'. This is part of the reason for the Shakespeare authorship debate. Apart from being a genius writer he was a pretty normal guy, and some people find that unsatisfying. Maxwell Lord posted:This raises a question of whether the artist has any responsibility to make sure you know The Bad Guy Is Bad. If your "bad guy" comes off more as the "cool guy" that's a failure of writing. Of course a significant number of people read Lolita and thought "you gotta hand it to Humbert Humbert" so you'll inevitably have some number of people miss the point unless you give the bad guy no redeeming features whatsoever. The Moon Monster has a new favorite as of 00:06 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 00:03
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ishikabibble posted:You don't even need to be that invested. Rick is both the source but also the solution to all of the problems he makes, and because it's an animated sitcom where the status quo is god, there's never going to be a situation he won't be able to just science magic his way out of so things go back to normal just in time for the next episode. There's no lasting consequences to anything he does. So regardless of how much it's framed as 'he's just making more problems for himself', they don't stick. I think it's fair to say that the Status Quo has shifted a fair amount in R&M, but the writers try to not let that get in the way if they want to do a one-off episode. In theory, there should be more Chad Jerries and Virgin Ricks around, because the walled-off multiverse doesn't exist anymore, but I get the feeling the writers also know that if they start doing stories like that there will be a LOT of push-back from the fanbase. I mean, considering Roiland got dropped like a rock, and the show still has a few seasons left on their contract, I could see them turning towards Rick eating even more poo poo than he has in recent seasons.
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May 9, 2023 00:30
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The Moon Monster posted:This is part of the reason for the Shakespeare authorship debate. Apart from being a genius writer he was a pretty normal guy, and some people find that unsatisfying. It reminds me of that 360 game, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, where a writer was brought on to fix the initial script - in the original script there was a scene where Monkey deliberately killed another slave in cold blood instead of helping him up off of a ledge that he was hanging from - the developers thought that that made him look like a badass, but the writer's take was that it made him seem like "A bit of a oval office"
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May 9, 2023 03:04
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Jedit posted:I haven't watched it, but from what I know isn't Rick and Morty just an edgelord take on Back to the Future? In practice he's way more Reed Richards, and they absolutely lean into that.
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May 9, 2023 03:17
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Ghost Leviathan posted:In practice he's way more Reed Richards, and they absolutely lean into that. Surely you mean Professor Impossible?
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May 9, 2023 03:48
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Jedit posted:I haven't watched it, but from what I know isn't Rick and Morty just an edgelord take on Back to the Future? In addition to the above posts, he's also Dr. Who Not a lot of time travel overall, though.
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May 9, 2023 04:14
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The Moon Monster posted:This is part of the reason for the Shakespeare authorship debate. Apart from being a genius writer he was a pretty normal guy, and some people find that unsatisfying. I mean that’s the thing. People admire Humbert, people joined the military after seeing Full Metal Jacket, people didn’t get that the 1997 Starship Troopers was satire. People are kinda dumb. You don’t judge any work by what other people make of it, you look at the text itself.
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May 9, 2023 04:19
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Relatedly to the "this guy is a charming scumbag" discussion, I recently rewatched In Bruges. It's tough to say, but it has aged pretty badly. Ray is obviously an idiot and a total prick. He's also got big soft Colin Farrel eyes and the inciting incident of the movie isn't entirely his fault, he's in fact crushed by it. So: you feel sorry for the guy and he does have some moments where he's funny or clever. Except, a lot of the humor is expressed with the f-slur and generally being very cruel and unpleasant to someone with dwarfism. It's still an OK watch, it's more that the dark days of 2008 were so long ago, having the charming, handsome, tortured soul say stuff that'd get him banned from GBS is now just plainly distracting. A more recent film would more likely have some comeuppance or someone call him on it. Instead it's just kinda taken as standard, perhaps it was, perhaps it is. The only time someone gets language policed (and this movie features a legendary amount of swearing) is when Ken calls someone's children the word that Americans and Canadians ask people not to post on SA. You aren't meant to like Ray, but I think the changing context for his words has made him even worse than he seemed in 2008.
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May 9, 2023 04:32
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The Moon Monster posted:This is part of the reason for the Shakespeare authorship debate. Apart from being a genius writer he was a pretty normal guy, and some people find that unsatisfying. The funny thing about Humbert Humbert is that he even explicitly says “okay, I’m going to write this account of my terrible crimes in flowery prose so you’ll be more sympathetic to me and agree I didn’t do anything bad. Here I go…” and somehow tons of readers still took the rest of it at face value
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May 9, 2023 04:53
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One thing that aged extremely well is the pin. It's my go to well drink.
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May 9, 2023 05:00
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Kit Walker posted:The funny thing about Humbert Humbert is that he even explicitly says “okay, I’m going to write this account of my terrible crimes in flowery prose so you’ll be more sympathetic to me and agree I didn’t do anything bad. Here I go…” and somehow tons of readers still took the rest of it at face value I just blame the English.
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May 9, 2023 05:05
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Maxwell Lord posted:You don’t judge any work by what other people make of it, you look at the text itself. Have they considered not making art exclusively about pricks? well why not posted:Relatedly to the "this guy is a charming scumbag" discussion, I recently rewatched In Bruges. It's tough to say, but it has aged pretty badly.
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May 9, 2023 06:12
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BioEnchanted posted:It reminds me of that 360 game, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, where a writer was brought on to fix the initial script - in the original script there was a scene where Monkey deliberately killed another slave in cold blood instead of helping him up off of a ledge that he was hanging from - the developers thought that that made him look like a badass, but the writer's take was that it made him seem like "A bit of a oval office" Is this game worth playing in 2023? I like the studio's other work.
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May 9, 2023 06:19
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I'm not sure I'd group McDonaugh with those people - it's in the text that Ray is a terrible, cruel and aggressive person. It's not "haha! look how cool this guy is!", it's more that he's complicated and perhaps overcompensating. He's clearly not capable of reconciling the outcomes of his actions with being a "good person". The scene where they discuss how Ken has mostly killed bad people is instantly derailed when Ray starts adding caveats to the rules, like if someone is brandishing a bottle, or knows karate. He wants to find a way to excuse himself of the pain of the guilt. I think you're meant to sympathize with him - he's quite literally crippled with guilt. The language shift just makes him seem more "nasty" than "roguish" as I suspect the intention was.
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May 9, 2023 06:34
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Aramek posted:All of that great man nonsense is good for fiction because it's fiction. Why the hell would I want to watch a movie where the main characters do not have the ability or skills to influence the plot and they just spend the whole time losing? There are many different ways for characters to drive a plot forward without them being the only thing that actually matters
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May 9, 2023 07:36
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credburn posted:Is this game worth playing in 2023? I like the studio's other work. No
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May 9, 2023 07:39
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Great Man Theory comes from nobles writing history and centering themselves. Scifi and fantasy work the same way but for 13 year-olds. in many ways the two are the same.
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May 9, 2023 07:41
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credburn posted:Is this game worth playing in 2023? I like the studio's other work. It's fine, I thought the story was charming and it has some really nice art direction. It is very much of its time, but also frequently goes on sale for sirt cheap so if you're curious just try it.
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May 9, 2023 09:15
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Ciao Wren posted:Great Man Theory comes from nobles writing history and centering themselves. Scifi and fantasy work the same way but for 13 year-olds. Westerns also work the same way and were a fundamentally formative genre in US culture which still has a lot of ramifications all throughout the modern era. Eg: that whole 'The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun' mentality and everything associated with it
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May 9, 2023 09:36
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Maxwell Lord posted:I mean that’s the thing. Sure, but as someone who has looked at a decent amount of Rick and Morty they definitely hosed up pretty hard with Rick's portrayal if they wanted to portray him as a pathetic loser. I would say that's probably not the case, and the creators of the show did in fact want to portray him as primarily a cool, godlike badass.
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May 9, 2023 10:35
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The Moon Monster posted:Sure, but as someone who has looked at a decent amount of Rick and Morty they definitely hosed up pretty hard with Rick's portrayal if they wanted to portray him as a pathetic loser. I would say that's probably not the case, and the creators of the show did in fact want to portray him as primarily a cool, godlike badass. They basically want to have their cake and eat it too.
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May 9, 2023 10:51
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The Moon Monster posted:Sure, but as someone who has looked at a decent amount of Rick and Morty they definitely hosed up pretty hard with Rick's portrayal if they wanted to portray him as a pathetic loser. I would say that's probably not the case, and the creators of the show did in fact want to portray him as primarily a cool, godlike badass. Roiland and Harmon seem to have extremely different approaches towards how they write and portray characters so I don't think it's entirely possible to say "They wanted Rick's character to be [x] but not [y]" with any certainty, and even if they did want to highlight certain aspects in some scripts that would have changed from episode to episode anyway. There's also a whole lot of other character aspects between "pathetic loser" and "cool badass" that make up Rick's character, I think a lot of it comes from taking a character like Reed Richards and extrapolating out from that basis and coming to the conclusion "Holy poo poo this guy must be bored and lonely, but also way too narcissistic to do anything else with his life" and then figuring out how that would affect the people who were stuck with him. And a lot of the time they seem to have written in jokes because they had a random funny thought which they thought was hilarious and then doubled down on it to really hammer it home even if it wasn't thematically consistent. They love to gently caress with their audience and invert expectations and all that. Also since all that creepy groomer poo poo about Roiland came out it cast a lot of the creepy R&M gags about pedophilia and incest etc in a new light. It looks like Roiland wasn't just writing that stuff into the script for shock value, he was also walking the walk Snowglobe of Doom has a new favorite as of 11:36 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 11:19
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Rick and Morty is the Venture Bros by and for idiots. Like it had moments of hilarity, sure, but it's insane how much better of an execution Jonas Sr. and Rusty himself are of the basic concept behind Rick.
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May 9, 2023 11:26
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Rick and Morty is the Venture Bros by and for idiots. 100%
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May 9, 2023 12:09
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Rick and Morty is the Venture Bros by and for idiots. I haven’t watched that show in a long while, but I’m pretty sure the early seasons won’t have aged terribly well. Still, those writers never got caught grooming any kids that I know of; Doc Hammer and Jackson Public don’t have anything listed on Wikipedia for it at least. I’m at work so I’m not looking terribly closely right now, to be fair  Jackson Public was also the voice of Hiram McDaniels, the 5-headed dragon from Welcome to Night Vale (to connect back to our little corner of the internet).
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May 9, 2023 12:31
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Icon Of Sin posted:I haven’t watched that show in a long while, but I’m pretty sure the early seasons won’t have aged terribly well. Still, those writers never got caught grooming any kids that I know of; Doc Hammer and Jackson Public don’t have anything listed on Wikipedia for it at least. I’m at work so I’m not looking terribly closely right now, to be fair Holy poo poo, never knew that! Hiram is cool - well, most of his heads are, anyway. Venture Bros has a director's commentary, and in it the creators themselves call out some of the jokes that didn't age well. Which honestly helps it age way better than a lot of other shows.
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May 9, 2023 12:55
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credburn posted:Is this game worth playing in 2023? I like the studio's other work. It's a fun game, though kind of easy and very much on rails. The scenery is(or was for the time) very beautiful because they drew heavily from 'The World without Us' documentary that also inspired The Last of Us. And yeah, Monkey killing in cold blood would absolutely be a missed story beat. Mythologically speaking, yeah Monkey was a killer but never by intention and more because he was too self involved to care about humans.
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May 9, 2023 15:59
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Rick and Morty is the Venture Bros by and for idiots. R&M has had moments where you can see a shockingly mature understanding of the concept from some of the writers, but because arrogant, contemptuous irreverence is the engine driving R&M it can never actually hold for very long. Venture Bros. often runs away from its own premises and has worse follow-through than I do when trying to throw a baseball, but you can tell the team doesn't have anywhere near the same self-loathing despite a much more vulnerable level of self-awareness.
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May 9, 2023 16:42
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ishikabibble posted:Technically, yes. But that gets lost in 'Rick is a cool badass who will shoot/kill/blow up anything that causes him trouble'. This is one of the things Oz did really well. It made it really clear that often a character's charm and likability were masks to cover up some awful poo poo. And they pushed really hard to make it so that acts of violence were meant to be disturbing to the viewer.
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May 9, 2023 17:05
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