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Hakkesshu posted:The whole point of the psychic squid is to create one of the most horrifying, alien things humanity could ever conceive of, surrounded by the graphic deaths of all the characters we've seen over a dozen times throughout the comic. The movie ending takes the coward's way out and sterilizes it, making it leave very little lasting impact or emotional gravitas. It's a strange thing to argue for something being more violent and visceral when 90% of the film has much more of that than the comic, but when the time comes to using it in a non-gratuitous and actually meaningful way, the film chickens out. Not that I'm arguing that Snyder should have gone all-in on gore, just the original uses arguably some of the most striking and memorable imagery in a comic, while the film has a giant nondescript hole in the ground. The movie was almost three hours long, the last thing it needed was yet another subplot to pad out the runtime even more. I think not having to sit through all the stuff with the all the artists vanishing and also introducing the entire existence of human psychics and everything else involving the giant squid was worth not having a single scene of a giant squid on a pile of rubble just so people who read the comic could clap and go "yay, it's that thing from the comic!" and also nod knowingly at the tasteful visual homage to the worst domestic terrorist attack in history that just happened a few years ago. The end message is still the same, that humanity is able to overcome its differences and unite in the face of an alien threat with unknowable power but that it's not going to last forever and ultimately countless lives were sacrificed for nothing, especially if Rorschach's journal winds up immediately blowing the deception wide open.
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Oct 20, 2019 15:37
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Preston Waters posted:Ah yes, clearly this place is filled with people who like making GBS threads on the author of one of their favorite pieces of literature. This show wouldn't exist if Alan Moore had his way, I'll happily poo poo all over the dude doing almost nothing but use other people's characters without getting permission and then crying crocodile tears over people doing the same thing to stuff he worked on but doesn't actually own. Also based on his Chapo episode the culmination of his lifetime of soul searching and philosophizing is basically Calvinism only with some woo woo quantum physics = magic bullshit tacked on.
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Oct 31, 2019 20:37
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A part of me hopes Manhattan never makes an appearance at all, mirroring how big his absence is felt in the real world. The ways characters argue about him (like whether or not he can look like a normal human), wonder about where he is and what he's doing, and can't get over him are all mirrored by the audience waiting for the iconic character to finally make his appearance.Antifa Turkeesian posted:It’s a different anniversary each time, increasing by 1 each segment. But we don’t know if it’s days, months, years, or what. It probably took some time to work out the leather spacesuit. In the first episode he says he is going to write a play and then in the second episode he has not only written the play but had it performed enough to be familiar with and annoyed by the clones' acting quirks. In the second episode he has the idea of using corpses for materials when pulling the dead clone out of the incinerator, in the third episode he has made enough human leather to make a spacesuit out of. There is definitely significant amounts of time passing between episodes. Though on the other hand him riding up to an apple tree only to be disappointed that it's growing tomatoes seems like something that would have happened like day one rather than on the eve of his second anniversary at the place so that kind of dream logic about the passage of time does support the idea that he's trapped in some kind of mind prison or extradimensional space. Especially since we know he's stuck with anachronistic technology so he wasn't checking on the handiwork of his own genetic engineering or something. Canadian Surf Club posted:On another note, everyone was losing it that the police were depicted as the good guys in episode one. Now we have them black-bagging people and threatening them with dogs in scenes reminiscent of Guantanamo or Chicago's Homan Square. I liked how Laurie comes through and pretty much shows them all up to be small town petty tyrants, but the FBI isn't much better itself. Every new episode makes me laugh harder at the people who were declaring this show to be obvious fascist pro-cop propaganda before the show even aired, especially the ones who were yelling it at critics who had actually seen the show and were assuring them that they had no idea what they were talking about and it wasn't an issue. I had hoped they would shut up and go away after they were proven wrong instead of just latching onto whatever new thinkpiece declares the show to be terrible but alas. AndyElusive posted:I'm just here to read reactions to and jokes about the comically enormous blue dildo with attachable balls. So many people who don't watch the show have latched onto this as proof that the show is objectively terrible and is disrespecting the legacy of the comics and it's hilarious. It's like people trying to say Watchmen was a bad comic based entirely on the fake political cartoon on that one page. https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/1191357930689445888
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Nov 5, 2019 02:16
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10 Beers posted:There can't be that large of an amount of time between episodes, right? Chief dies in the first episode, cops find him, go hunting the Cavalry and have a gathering at his house in the second episode, his funeral is in the third episode. Nothing about that suggests huge time lapses. The Veidt stuff doesn't have to be happening at the same time as everything else. And this wouldn't even be the first time a big HBO adaptation of a decades-old piece of science fiction had a seperate plotline that was being shown asynchronously from the main plot and wasn't revealed to the audience until the end of the season.
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Nov 5, 2019 14:42
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I just realized that another parallel to The Black Freighter with Veidt's subplot is that in BF the man sails home on a raft made of corpses while Veidt tried to escape his prison with a suit made from corpses.Comrade Fakename posted:Lol at this take when literally the next thing that happens is that Laurie looks depressed and then goes and has sex with a real live human who (and I have to admit that this hasn’t been confirmed yet, this is just speculation) doesn’t have a colossal blue dick. I don't read comic books or regularly interact with the comic book community but without fail every big comics person I see on Twitter is an angry dipshit who seems to hate comics and completely misses the point of almost every piece of media they consume, the only real change over the years has been that now there are a lot of women and minorities that are angry twitter dipshits with bad taste as well.
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Nov 5, 2019 15:24
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Nail Rat posted:Even if she did, why the gently caress would she quote that. It's nonsensical except to be like "yeah we still remember Rorschach too" She's talking to the man who killed Rorschach.
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Nov 5, 2019 20:37
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Codependent Poster posted:Veidt is definitely a prisoner and probably on Mars, but I can't think of a good reason Jon would put him there instead of just killing him. Maybe because Veidt is still contributing something that Jon thinks is necessary. The most out-there thing I can think of is that the Veidt we're watching isn't the actual Veidt but is himself a clone and this whole thing is part of some weird experiment to see if there is a possibility for Veidt to reform or change. He's the one person to ever successfully get one over on Manhattan and as a person who has become bored and dispassionate by never being surprised anymore that's the most valuable thing in existence to him and since his inability to relate to other people eventually made him unable to function he has a vested interest in understanding how a person could learn to empathize and be content with the world they're given rather than constantly push at the boundaries and thoughtlessly kill anything in their way. Manhattan probably has a whole cosmic zoo full of Veidts all in their own different little lab rat mazes.
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Nov 5, 2019 21:26
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Forceholy posted:Yeah, I'm getting that vibe as well. Dr. Manhattan could be a huge red herring. Petey did mention that she quoted Ozymandias after she revealed that huge structure in the middle of Tulsa after buying Veidt's company. For like a second I was rolling my eyes at someone unironically quoting the Shelley poem in a way that goes completely against the meaning of it and then I remembered that OZY Fest exists and that I overestimated humanity. 
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Nov 6, 2019 17:25
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Milo and POTUS posted:Hahaha gross This writeup for it is amazing, that specific kind of weird impotent flailing and rallying around vague broad concepts people were doing before the actual 2020 election started gearing up and they had actual candidates and platforms to rally around is such an odd cultural artifact despite only being last year. feedmyleg posted:Imagine the poor marketer who has to justify the founder's misreading of that poem after the fact. The actual About Us page that's from is even worse than you can imagine.
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Nov 6, 2019 18:08
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lurker2006 posted:I think Moore was aware of this plothole, one of the supplementary articles included at the beginning of the issues was focused partly on hand waving it. If I remember correctly it argued that the Russians would never willingly acquiesce to a foreign agent after the betrayal and dehumanization they received at the hands of the nazis, and a mass launch of thousands of ICBMs would be beyond even Manhattan's capability to prevent. If the work itself provides an explanation for why then it isn't a plot hole, it's just plot. DaveKap posted:I forget. Why can Manhattan get "tricked" if he can also see "all times at once." Like, he sees his fate and just lets it happen? Tachyon generators in Ozy's basement, so basically  . They were also why Manhattan was convinced that a nuclear holocaust was inevitably on the horizon, because a nuclear exchange of that magnitude is one of the few.things that could generate enough quantum interference to block his ability to see.Man, even without the giant squid Watchmen had way more comic book superhero bullshit than it's devotees like to pretend it did.
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Nov 7, 2019 06:45
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This is accurate in that Rorchach is an egotistical psychopath whose inability to see nuance or make compromises actively prevents him from bettering the world and his pithy little catchphrases are laundered by terrible people who completely miss the point of his character and just think it sounds cool and deep.
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Nov 10, 2019 23:46
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exmarx posted:lube guy rules Lube guy is like something from a parallel world where Mystery Men was actually funny, he rules.
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Nov 11, 2019 16:27
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With how original and creative this show is it does annoy me that the "menacing asian woman plutocrat who use a literal ticking timer as a tool of intimidation" thing was lifted more or less directly from Mr Robot.Ballz posted:
We see Veidt's clone babies are fished out of water. Sewers are full of water. QED lube man is a clone
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Nov 11, 2019 16:48
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Tehran 1979 posted:So, yeah, this has reached terminal mystery box velocity, so time to check out. I'm sorry for whatever led to "mystery box" becoming such a poisoned and meaningless term as "plot hole" to you and hope that in the future you don't have to watch five hours of a show before deciding whether or not you are enjoying watching it.
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Nov 11, 2019 17:37
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:I'll have a large fry with that, also Nieuw Amsterdam posted:Sir, this is a Taco Bell. You're talking about the Watchmen show in the thread for talking about the Watchmen show, chill out.
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Nov 12, 2019 19:40
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The show has so much diversity that frankly I'd consider it hugely disappointing if the sole character with Vietnamese ethnicity existed purely to be an inscrutable Other who acted as a mouthpiece for some Vietnam ethnostate that transcended time and space.
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Nov 13, 2019 07:30
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Jay-V posted:This made me think. If we assume that each anniversary (and number of cake candles) where we see Ozy represents a year since the last time (i.e., it was 2013 when we saw him in ep 1, 2014 in ep 2), then he would reach present-day 2019 in episode 7, or three episodes from now. We don't need to assume, he literally says he's been there for four years in the latest ep.
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Nov 13, 2019 22:21
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:That's the line they tossed out so people would give Lost Guy another chance You know the time you spent vomiting your baseless conjecture on everyone could have been spent actually learning who "the Lost guy" is so you would at least know what you're talking about in any degree whatsoever.
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Nov 17, 2019 00:17
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Gorn Myson posted:Bare in mind, we are talking about comic book fans here, the same sort of fans that say "Snyder's Watchmen movie missed the point of the comic" and then fail to elaborate on what that means but they all agree with the sentiment. Snyder's Watchmen movie missed the point of the comic, instead of being a serialized work of printed sequential art in 1987 it was a series of still images projected in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement in 2009.
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Nov 17, 2019 21:13
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The opening of this episode made me realize that for as fully-realized as the alternate history stuff is in every other sense they just couldn't be bothered to make new songs. Movies, television, and comic books are all new and different after the point of divergence but pop music is a universal constant because you absolutely have to have a slow distorted version of Careless Whispers playing during a scene of carnage and trauma just to make absolutely sure that the audience Gets It.Revol posted:American Hero Story is supposed to be a lie, right? But I believe the original comic did say that he was gay. It absolutely did, and the weird joke that the entire genesis of superheroes was a gay guy into rough trade going out and beating up people in a costume to get off is pretty homophobic 80s artifact in retrospect. Servaetes posted:Wade's gonna be okay, right...? Nonsense, Watchmen would never have a disaffected man who always wears a mask and sees the world in moral absolutism and is shaped by a severe trauma in his life be blown away immediately after having his worldview shattered by the revelation about the origin of the extradimensional squid attacks. 
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Nov 18, 2019 18:40
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Nieuw Amsterdam posted:The first thing Veidt did when Rorschach and Nite Owl showed up was to confess and give all the details how he did it. Which makes the people complaining about how the expository video in this episode is unrealistic or treating the audience like idiots even funnier, being an egomaniac who loves explaining his plans is kind of Veidt's whole thing.
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Nov 18, 2019 19:00
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Darko posted:I love Irons' goofy take on the more comic-like version, though. Honestly I just assume they had a camera crew follow Irons around as he does his normal day to day life and just edit out the weird homophobic tirades. GoGoGadgetChris posted:Why bring up Lost? Why claim it's a Big Deal? Calm down This isn't a cliffhanger, if you can't handle an episode ending without everything being resolved maybe serialized television just isn't for you.
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Nov 18, 2019 21:12
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I'm really curious what the final viewership numbers for this show is going to be because if the actual Watchmen show is out-performed by Watchmen For Idiots (The Boys) I'm going to be incredibly disappointed.
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Nov 18, 2019 22:35
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Nov 20, 2019 20:28
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Zaphod42 posted:I guess its kinda misanthropic but I don't think most people really have a strong sense of values or ethics, and just avoid tough problems. Our society makes it easy to avoid. And then its all too easy to justify whatever actions in the moment or after the fact. A lot of psychology is basically doing things on accident and then convincing yourself that you did it on purpose and must have been right to do so. Rorschach monologuing from the roofs about how the people are wicked and depraved and beyond saving because they don't preface literally every discussion of a work of fiction with a disclaimer that they understand that it is not something that is supposed to be imitated and that their enjoyment of a character comes from them as a fictional creation that is entertaining and not a realistic role model of good behavior.
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Nov 21, 2019 16:31
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tin can made man posted:Nostalgia as a Veidt fragrance line isn't exactly obscure; there's a whole literal page of interstitial material about it Literally the opening of the movie is Comedian watching a commercial for Nostalgia by Veidt.
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Nov 21, 2019 18:40
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Alan Moore was right to publicly fill his dipes about this show existing because now that we're 30 years past the point where comic book nerds will latch onto anything even remotely literary becase of how desperate for validation they are this adaptation eclipses the original on every level. Rest in piss.Scooter_McCabe posted:Oh yeah no way would I have come up with anything this good, which is why I didn't become a script writer. Dipshit. Glad you agree your posts are worthless trash, please remember that any time you ever feel tempted to smash the Submit Reply button in the future. Dipshit.
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Nov 25, 2019 07:33
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Adrian Veidt spent his entire life, billions of dollars, and millions of casualties trying to change human nature and meanwhile the KKK was able to invent flawless subliminal mind control with a warehouse of scraps and 18th century mysticism before he was even born. This entire show just can't stop owning him.
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Nov 25, 2019 15:06
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Nieuw Amsterdam posted:This is not a show with a lot of random poo poo in it. Fred Trump also marched in pro-fascist demonstrations and was such an infamously terrible person that a western serial of the time named a villain after him, something Ozymandias would surely appreciate with his love of referencing Republic Pictures serials.
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Nov 25, 2019 17:57
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Skitz posted:Also great Reagan stuff: The Dollop episode 400 (It's a two-parter but I only linked the first one). One of the funniest, most enjoyable, most The Dollop are rampant plagiarists, instead of patronizing two unfunny dudes who read other peoples content word-for-word and yell over it just read the poo poo directly. https://twitter.com/josh_levin/status/1165614548289753090 https://twitter.com/josh_levin/status/1165614564735619073
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Nov 28, 2019 18:14
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podcast eps I've ever heard.
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KoRMaK posted:What's with the panda theme for that cop and the connections to looking glass's pamphlet in 1985? Never got touched on The only real meaningful thing we've seen him done all season is oppose letting the cops act violently, he's literally a teddy bear. They probably went with a panda because they're cuter and generally seen as less dangerous (plus it lets them avoid the race connotation of someone named Black Bear) but regardless he's a big friendly stuffed animal among a bunch of violent action figures.
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Nov 29, 2019 23:21
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KoRMaK posted:As stupid as it was of a question and response, seriously how do you hold computers back? Technology isn't a linear progression like a game of Civilization where things are always moving forward in a widening fan forever, culture almost entirely dictates what is made and what becomes popular especially once it reaches the point where it requires significant manufacturing like a personal computer does or infrastructure like the internet and cell phones. There is right at this very moment a working vaccine for Lyme disease that just doesn't get made because it's not profitable outside of being sold for veterinary use thanks to America's privatized medical system and anti-vaccine culture. The gorilla glass responsible for smart phones and modern touch screen devices was invented in the 60s and basically just sat in a drawer somewhere until Apple found it looking for materials that would work for the iPhone. To tie into the themes of the show, the entire proliferation of white flour in America was driven largely by xenophobic and racist fears of 'impurities' making their ways into food just as the modern backlash against gluten is driven almost entirely by weird class signifiers and a distrust of or lack of access to modern medicine. Also the internet is a major tipping point for how information moves and proliferates freely and with the squid incident occurring right on the cusp of the point where internet as we know it took off it would basically destroy that opportunity for the forseeable future since even if you had people deciding it would be nice to have a spreadsheet machine at home there's not much else you could do without a network to connect it to or commercial software and hardware to buy for it. The best you might have is something like the magazines and physical mailing lists of the 80s microcomputer scene in Europe and Japan assuming the government didn't bust those open as soon as they popped up.
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Nov 30, 2019 20:48
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Or how the technology to make humans functionally immortal exists today but too many people feel ~icky~ about living for longer than a hundred years so welp... It really doesn't, there's just a lot of fragile people who are terrified of the concept of the death and the super wealthy are willing to bankroll crackpot "futurists" to massage their ego by assuring them that Atheist Rapture is right around the corner just so long as you keep spending money on their "research" and saying ten Cyber Hail Marys at every press release.
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Nov 30, 2019 21:59
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:Zack Snyder's storytelling is either bland mediocrity or fetishistic excess, depending on the scene. This means literally nothing. Just completely opaque word salad.
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Dec 8, 2019 05:13
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I am so glad that despite weeks of whining and diaper-filling by Taintrunner I was not spoiled on the events of this episode just because an obscure exclusive video for an industry event had spoilers in it six months ago.
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Dec 9, 2019 07:22
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The Watchmen movie did the effect for Doctor Manhattan by having Billy Crudup perform in person covered in blue lights so when they used CGI to replace him with a bald muscular blue man the blue glow radiating from him and reflecting off of the environment and other actors would be a 100% practical effect and they would still be able to use motion capture to have his actual performance on screen. I feel like they could have done the same thing only superimposing the actor over footage instead of using a CGI double and been a million times better than just having Cal Abar doing his best Tobias Funke impression and calling it a day, especially considering every frame of Looking Glass' mask is a special effect.
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Dec 9, 2019 07:39
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Niwrad posted:Lindelof writes shows for reviewers. What does this even mean? Fly Ricky posted:This is the best take. It's been years since thread titles got weekly updates to lovely dad jokes or impenetrable references to something posted in the thread and this forum is much better off for it. Forceholy posted:It's called Hatewatching. We live in an age where there is more good TV than anyone could actually watch, going out of your way to waste a dozen hours of your life on a show you hate just so you can smirk to yourself and crow to a bunch of anonymous strangers online about how much better and smarter you are then them for not liking it is some emotional self harm mental illness poo poo. Pirate Jet posted:Definitely not understanding this influx of “uh it’s a superhero show it’s just supposed to be dumb fun” takes Literally nobody is saying this, we're laughing at you for placing such vastly overinflated importance on an 80s comic book that you think anything less than the TV adaptation solving racism forever means it was a hack fraud cash-in failure.
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Dec 9, 2019 18:51
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Preem Palver posted:Because instead of making the show about the actual KKK or being a commentary about white supremacy in the US, it reduces real, lived trauma to lovely comic plot conniving about how a fictional KKK was actually behind everything but it's solved now because Trieu blasted them with lasers. It pisses all over the writing and themes present in the first 2/3 of the series in favor of some "actually, Red Skull was behind the holocaust" levels of dumb fuckery. Yeah seriously, it's reprehensible that a work about comic book superheroes would be so tawdry as to invoke a real historical event with all the baggage and trauma that entails, especially in the name of making some thematic point.  Captain Splendid posted:It was kind of dumb for Adrian to have his password as "Rameses II" 
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Dec 16, 2019 23:10
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OZYMANDIAS: Masks make people cruel JOE KEANE: The cops wear masks because they're evil white supremacists HOODED JUSTICE: Masks make it impossible to heal or improve, they just make you angry and hateful and let you ignore the real personal and institutional issues that need to be brought to light A GENIUS: Wow, I was totally right all along and this show really is centrist police apologia with nothing meaningful or interesting to say about superheroes or modern society
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Dec 16, 2019 23:54
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Niwrad posted:Show was about race, trauma, policing, and exploitation at the beginning. Dropped it all to be Lex Luthor vs Superman. If you don't like it when a work of fiction about comic book superheroes invokes real world issues as part of its setting and character building and then ends with a fantastic comic book supervillain plot I recommend you never read a certain comic named Watchmen that was about the cold war, Vietnam, and civil rights and then dropped it all to have a mad scientist kill three million people with a giant squid.
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Dec 17, 2019 00:06
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