Comments by "Miriam Weller" (@miriamweller812) on "The Critical Drinker"
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Problem of Anakin's fall was, that the fall itself was much to quick and for the wrong reasons, that ruined it.
And Rey is even worse, because she GOT flaws, they simply don't mean anything and don't cause her downfall at all, what's even worse than having an actual "shiny knight" character.
A big problem of many female characters today is:
a) writers seem to think, that have to overcompensate and do not just make them strong - what often enough is at it limits when it comes to male characters - but even stronger, making them just to big to work anymore.
b) they don't just become the knight instead of the princess, they become princess AND knight.
c) even worse: they also become the dragon, because for some reason, when it come to such female characters, psychophath behaviour is seen as 'strong' and not crazy - what is of course an absolute terrible message.
Even if they don't go fully the road and the female characters is still just a side character, it's interesting to see, how those often start incredible strong, just better than everyone else, but since they got nowhere to grow from that point, they often just vanish behind the needed growth of other characters or are badly shoehorned in. At best, they just stay perfect from start to end - what is of course just boring.
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Never got what people liked about it. It's an awful place, run by a pretty totalitarian monarchy that is even more questionable than those we got in RL. The background means, that they were there the whole time, this super scifi nation and just let for example the colonialism of Africa and all the slavery happen without care. The whole cultural mixture is also quite odd. I mean, when you would do the same in Europe for example, long befor the industrial revolution, you wouldn't let them run around like Wikings or whatever, since something like that would of course have a massive impact in absolute every way, including cultural and set apart this nation from others in their whole devolepment over the centuries.
It overall felt kind of racist I must say, like "yeah, those Africans, they would stil be that way even with high tech and act like savages".
I mean, what would people say when you take the same in Europe for example and when that thigh tech nation wants a new king (why ever it would have a king to begin with) it's decided by a bar fight. Would raise some eye brows, but hey, it's Africans, they would for sure do something that stupid, right?
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@theunknowncommenter725 And that's exactly how you shouldn't handle magic. As a bad excuse to just write whatever you want.
Yes: you don't have to and even shouldn't explain everything regarding magic, since the mystical part of it is the fun of of it and the way for example Harry Potter uses it takes most the interesting part out of it, even more when further ruined by a childish story in which all adults are simply braindead (and for example something like a polymorph potion is treatead as if no other wizard ever heared about it and alike)
But of course, you, as the writer, should still have the concept of your setting and the laws of its world in your mind. What is possible, what Isn't and why, no matter if you explain it or not, but in the end this will make sure, that your world and plot will still follow the consistency. And it not clear, there is no problem with having a character come up with an idea and have some other character tell, why this isn't possible or too risky or whatever (and please without them doing it anway and that 1:10000000 chance still working because plot armor, that's even worse...).
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Female characters are often just powerfantasies, just having everything, somethign you normally make up when you are maybe 10 or younger.
This includes that everyone else is stupid even more those you dislike. Again: like in the powerfantasy of a little kid.
It's not even that stoic characters for example are a role model. They are often not good personw, with a hell lot of failures and problems, who even lost control over their lives or are outright broken. But then they still stand up and do what has to be done, not because the world bends around them and gives them what they want, but by fighting for it.
That's what makes the characters interesting. You don't really want to be them, but they can be an inspiration.
People come up with anime or whatever to touch you "never give up", but those heroes you got there are just chosen from the start, massively increase in power and the sheer wish to the best makes them the best in the end. That's not message, that just nonsense and people should be thankful for that, because if wishful thinking would be able to do that, this planet would be even more in the dumpster.
The stoic hero isn't like that. The stoic hero knows his place and that it isn't a good one, that the odds are against him and that going through with it would not be rewardful, no joy, just more pain - and is still doing it, because it's right (if it wouldn't be right, he wouldn't be stoic, but a psychopath...).
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It's one of the ore jokes of the "strong character", which just starts at the top so overall you simply can't do much to make them look actually competent, because then you would have left no plot at all.
They are powerful, educated and act smart? Well, congrats you got an Utopia where nothing bad happens thanks to such wonderful characters.
If they at least would got with this - you actually COULD write a story around that for example that even such a god or goddess could be unable to stop all that fear and greed inside humans which will very likely go against such power, even if it never did anything bad to them in contrary.
But that's not what such "powerful characters" are about. So they just start there, already at the top, but since you got that standard boring plot, well, they are forced to be idiots.
And it's not just the powerful protagonists, powerful antagonists also got the same problem.
Overall, what is even worse than a strong protagonists is a weak protagonists put against powerful antagonists and still succeeds for no fucking reason, because everyone else, including the antagonists are dumb and they got the plot armor making them succeed not matter what dumb shit they do.
In general this is always the same problem:
An author just absuing his or her omnipotent power over their universe to make happen whatever they want without a single care to give it a reason.
It's simply lazy. Way more about laziness than incompetence, because especially when you work in a team, you can't be that incompetent to write such garbage.
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What I hate the most about how women in war is sold is, as if fighting in a war is a privileg, a glorious carreer, something everyone wants to be, to become that hero, while in reality, to be in a war is just living hell and soldiers are lambs sacrificed on the altaras of insanity for the greed of evil people - or against the greed and all it has caused.
That an army can't work, when you can't trust the person close to you and its physical abilities just adds up to this. Yes, of course women can fight, too. In WW2, those german soldier who survived tell you with tearas in their eyes, that when they finally managed to get past that FLAK cannon that had been used to shred the comrades at their side, that the soldiers they had killed there had been women - who simply fought against an army that was there to annihilate all of them. Women can fight and did fight in history - and there was NEVER anything glorious about it, as it wasn't for the endless millions of men who were just thrown away as if their life got no worth at all.
When a tourist visited the SU after the 2.WW and saw many, many, many women doing all kind of typical male jobs there, he asked, where the men are who should do these jobs. The guide, also a woman, told them: "They died, freeing you from fascism." Not a story. Reality.
To sell war, fighting in wars, killing in wars, dying in wars as heroic, it's the most ugly part and even more when you then put a pretty female in there, looking like a model, who just gloriously slaughters through enemy lines with all rule of cool BS.
I got nothing against action movies, but there is a difference between some cheap entertainment and propaganda...
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I don't get the whole "evil cliche soldiers" part in the first place. For what? Even more, because they clearly don't even act like well trained soldiers, more like some guys you hired in a bar.
I also just hate when they throw around with scifi technology, but completely random.
For example: when you got ultra high tech drones which can easily build you a city, guess what you also will have? Ultra high tech hunting drone swarmes, which will wipe out whatever you want. Or you just use one of those nuke level flamethrowers shown at the start. Good luck escaping thos things, which just obliterate everything in 10+ miles radius.
Also:
1. What's the point to flee the forest tribe, when you just carry the same problem to that sea people tribe?
2. Why the fuck care for the sae people tribe, when you can just torture the forest people tribe - as if he wouldn't combe back, when they start doing this.
3. When you got a whole freaking army around including a general around, why the fuck go with some stupid whale hunters?
By the way: Why not just armor your stuff enough that freaking arrows can't penetrate it. I mean, really, it's arrows. Even if it's bigger arrows, it's not compareable to enough a firearm can do.
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Just focus on the meaninful dialogs to establish the charaters - and not random nonsense. You can have some of that to flesh out the character more, but the focus have to be to show(!) who they are. Even when you got a manipulator, then your focus must be on the manipulation, even if you only reveal it later, but people must be able to think back to the scenes with that character and realise, how he manipulated the people around him or her into making them do what he/she wants. Acting trustworthy. Friendly. Not suspicious, not for example pushing odd solutions going in a very strange direction without ever be questioned. A manipulator would look at something and ask an innocent questions - making the solution he wants appear in the head of the manipulated, indirectly, without mentioning it themselves. Or they would manipulate others to bring it in, to not be the direct targer of possibe suspicion. For example manipulate dwarves into bringing things up.
It would be fine, when the audience think, that you can't trust that dwarf, since he seems to be greedy and tried way too much into going into a very specific direction. But that's the point, this is exactly how manipulation would work. Distraction. The manipulator got no problem with people hating on that dwarf, he would likely be the one pushing it and even rightfully, since th dwarf could indeed be greedy and by that was so easily manipulated into unvoluntary helping the manipulator. He would end up as a victim and the audience might even cheer about it, as will be the protagonists, having won against such evil - just to follow exactly another evil's plan, blinded by their arrogance about how smart and powerful they are.
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They should have cut out that romance, it was more annoying than anything else, especially how she acted. HE broke his back, almost died, lost his job and fell into a brutal depression and she acts as if it was the other way around and he just dropped her and even tortures him further for her personal amusement/"revenge".
Meanwhile it's not even clear what ever she did beside being a pretty female, but that's enough for him to fall on his knees before her as if she are a goddess.
It got better at least, but in the end: why? Why wast so much time on that to begin with?
Also why even the whole start, when it's pretty clear how much in love he's still with her, instantly going back as soon as she calls (at least he thinks he's doing that), while she plays the little, pissed of child for a while, but in the end also still loved him anyway and was just a feminist "I need no man" rage trip.
And that is stealing so much time in a movie that overall clearly doesn't take itself seriously anyway and should be all about stupid fun.
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Well, stoicism is how society wants men to behave - keep their mouth shut, do the job with no care for themselves.
It's an odd thing, neither just bad nor good. It's of course good to take up a challenge, do the job, but the abuse of it, to reduce people, male people to tools who don't value especially their own life is also a very, very deep hole.
This said: that's also what make the stoic characters in movies interesting, because they simply aren't the super hero who is easily solving the problem, they often DROWN in all the problems, which incluids their stoic behaviour, they struggle, are broken, got nothing left - it still stand up, often doing the right thing.
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It's a big problem with many fantasy writing (and super heroes are in the end just that: fantasy, not even something like Iron Man got anything halfway scientific left - beside the whole problem, that you don't solve a single problem by just blowing stuff up). Maybe Batman gets close enough, since in the end he's still a human being, though as soon as you combine that with other DC heroes on fantasy level, this also quickly becomes absurd. Same for other on that level like Captain America, who in the ened is simply a human with a bit more strength and stamina.
Powerlevel are all over the place and the sole reason it worked a bit better with Marvel is simply them making it mor cartoonish than DC did, though all the massive problems since start were ignoreable enough for many viewers.
In the end: it did not even get much worse. It's still the same problem since start, writers just give a fuck to actually spend any effort into creating a halfway working story line with good protagonists AND antagonists who both use what the got to reach their goal.
Even the Avengers movies were in the end pretty garbage from the start.
Those alien armies were always a joke, pretty much every single antagonists an absolute idiot, their plans never making any sense and when the last Avengers movie just use an absolute ass-pulled version of time travel in the absolute worst you can use the already questionable concept of time travel = to just solve all your problem, hell, in comparison to that even that Universe of Madness movie made much more sense, becasue as stupid as the reason for the shitshow of Scarlet Witch had been, you could explain it with the book making her stupid evil. Doesn't really make the movie any better, but it's at least better than reducing one of the most iconic MC villains to an idiotic brute so the protagonists don't even need an actual plan or whatever, just some plot armor time travel nonsense.
Why not just use the original? Was way more fitting, especially for something like the infnity stones which are a ridiculous plot to begin with (and their power level is also all over the place, even inside the same movie...).
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@kateris1976 Still a stupid copy/past form better death game stories. The whole setup of Hunger Games is ridiculous and having good written antagonist is just as if not even more important than the protagonists.
The antagonists of Hunger Games are retarded just as their idea of the Hunger Games.
Concept like Battle Royal are fucked up enough, but if you got a fascistic regime, it could be believeable enough, that supposedly unruly teenagers are pushed into a game of survival as example and punishment, even more when it's a low budget thing.
Hunger Games meanwhile are a gigantic waste of resources and all that to just randomly murder children, what will push people to uprise, the exact opposite of what you want as a dictatorship.
Would even be easy to fix, just cut out all the fancy high tech stuff (when you got a nation with such high tech, why the fuck would they even care to feed far less effective slaves?) and put those in the Hungers Games which DID uprise as example what happens to those who break the law and go against the order. Voila, already far better.
Now don't make the antagonists retarded and instead let the protagonists need to have an actual plan and cut out that nonsense, that the other children or district are evil, because they actually try to win - or at least let your protagonists not kill at all and just try to survive and go against the game for really having a moral high ground and don't let the oh so evil dictatorship bend the rules for him or her, then you got a good base for a potentially interesting story.
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What's simply not true, just like the stories about the "male/female" brain. It's a human brain. It got a hell lot of influence from pretty much everything and your biological sex is a very, very, small one of millions.
That's actually the main point of what gender was about: to disolve the idea that an individual is just all about being male or female - what simply NEVER was true.
We just love to make up stuff about it.
There IS a biological sex which exists for just that reason: sex. Reproduction, what make it necessary, that a baby has to grow up somewhere and can't just be divided and glue together in the end. You can add some other points to that, like on averags different in strength - though overall in modern days, it's not like we need big muscles for much. Such clearly biological differences are fine and true.
But beyond that we make up a hell lot of additional rules. For example that men shouldn't show or even have emotions. What is just insane, but overall: we want to waste men and tools ans soldiers, so it's good if men don't have feeling about that or any kind of self value, what could make them thing about "hey, why do I throw my health and life away like that?"
The less value men see in themselves, the better for a society that wants to abuse them.
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@NowAndToEternity Most peopel are stupid and stupid peopel love to hate on things to feel better. ~shrug~ Funny enough, most stupid peopel love actual stupid things, because, well, it's on their level.
Most super hero movies are utter bullshit and only tolerable when you just see them as cheap, dumb entertainment and often enough not even then. But oh do people love that shit full of plot holes and idiotic characters and of course protagonist who are mainly just dumb and incompetent, solely losing by that - what just ruins EVERY story, because a good story needs both, well writen protagonists AND antagonists. If one of that fails, that's already enough to make a story bad.
Flash handled that well. Even the Kryptonians were a serious force which in the end couldn't be beaten. A step most stories don't dare to go anymore, to let the protagonists fail.
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In contrast to the just overall bad remake, this one would be easy to fix, especially because they simply put too much into it.
1. Cancel the whole 'secret lab' plot line (and all characters mainly involved there). It went nowhere, what includes the whole ghost containment unit, what played no role at all at the end.
2. Let Melody focus on the Firemaster. If you want some vague girl/girl romance/friendship/whatever this was supposed to be, just make the character female. Since the Firemaster bloodline is the nemesis of the Ice God, this would have made much more sense.
3. If necessary, let Phoebe stay the sudden outsider, maybe by going agains the whole "must bust all ghosts" thing and try to study ghosts more (to stay with the "against the family" thing), what then leads to her going with an offer from Melody to show her how being a ghost feels like - what is then abused the same way by the Ice God and Melod betraying both, Firemaster and Phoebe (redemption can stay the same).
4. With Melody focusing on the Firemaster, don't try to make it a bad copy of the Keymaster from the first movie. Keymaster and Gatekeeper were both just sacrifices, so there was no need for any power developement. With the Firemaster bloodline playing such a big role at the end, you can't just start with shady clown then go with a funny clown, stupid clown -> superpowered savior "developement".
Starting with selling stuff Grandma's stuff can be fine, maybe money probs, depressed (since obviously no family left and also seeing how Grandma had big secrets going on never telling about it), but at least keep some character and good will, so when he/she wants to sell stuff but realises that there could be more behind it, that there is some investment from that side - what could be abused by Melody to get what she needs for her master.
Overall not even big changes, but would already cut away a lot of unncessary weight and focus more on the core characters.
While you per se could cut Melody, too, it's fine to have a minion like her, since the big bad is a bit too big bad to play much of a role from the start.
Other question would be if you want to start something like the whole Firemaster plot, but overall, since the stories of demons and ghosts, cultists and sorcerer and so on in Ghostbusters DO get a long way back for quite a while, the idea of some ancient Ghostbusters who used mystical powers isn't a bad one.
But if you do that, do it right - and don't make a clown story out of it. That's just sad, especially with the whole bad ass background, including his Grandma at start (obviously not only surviving the wrath of the God Prison, but managing to seal it again.
Overall odd anyway, that she just dies without telling anyone at all.
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@Snp2024 Not really, you can easily have good action without "jack ass" scenes. Many, many movies show this.
Often enough the over the top action stuff makes it look more stupid, because, yeah, normally humans would have a big problem with surviving his unharmed.
And all the car races are just ultra boring meanwhile anyway, especially because they don't really make sense and by that destroy the suspension of disbelief.
It's always the same: the race blindly through a city either completely void of cars or a clear path through them, so it's like "oh noes - ah, who cares, they make it anyway, as usual" and of course never any action of the police or even military, when someone is wagering a little private war inside their city. The drivers act like they are some magical beings who can see in the future, because they just know everything even before it happens. I mean, fine, then make a fantasy movie out of it.
Most of the time it's not even about giving a thrilling action scene, but mainly to show off what Mary Sue the character is, where the world bends around that guy or gal.
Good enough here and there, but it was done soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo often, it lost all color and taste.
It's simply lazy writing: "now the main char is doing the impossible, but succeeds, without explanation, because I wrote it."
Lazy writing is boring - and more and more annoying.
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Got the same problem as the first one: the villains are just as evil as they are stupid, what of course just leads nowhere.
This combined with the Nawi being savages with zero technology on their own while fighting an absolute high tech humankind, makes for the usual dumb fuckery you got in many bad stories.
See, it's fine to have an evil villain whose main power comes from being ruthless and it's also fine to have an antagonists, who is maybe even extremely powerful, but got reasons to not use that power and if its just moral.
IF you have both, well, then you have to go full Holocaust, means, if these humans are that evil and powerful, well, they will just burn those Nawi to ashes, easily, without any chance, because that's exactly what happens when a brutal high tech civilisation meets one that simply got nothing to put against that power.
If you don't do that, well, you get a stupid plot, where the evil super power guy just has to never use any of their power and never is ruthless beside against some nameless C level characters to show the "I'm evul!" part, then lose thanks to that obvious brain damage. Yay... thanks for being so fucking lazy, writers.
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Sad enough, while not being that annoying, that Mario movie also shows the big problem.
While Mario and even more Luigi are big 'losers' at the start, Peach is super competent and powerful to the point, where it doesn't even make any sense at all, why she even waits for Mario, since time is clearly not on her side. She watches that stranger failing a whole day (and overall: it's actually a wonder, how he improves in a single day that much), while she managed it instantly.
And the problem isn't even that she's that good and he's that bad, that she grew up there, while he's just a normal (small and overweight) guy from Brooklyn who isn't used to all this, makes absolultely sense.
The problem is, that there is nowhere to go from there for her. She is already peak level performance, super strong, pretty, beloved, everyone loves her, even the bad guy, so... yeah, what developement could she have? Even her 'weakness', the compassion for mushroom people, only leads to her becoming even more badass, but since you somehow need the other guys to also haver their big final fight, she then has to be pushed aside for the Kongs and Mario Brothers getting their moments.
Reminded me of that other animation movie How to train your Dragon 2. You got this bad ass dragon tamer, who outclasses all others by far and oh wonder, it's his mother. But after that moment, since she already started at that gigantic level of being better than all others, she's simply shoved aside, because if she would keep being that powerful and active, it would just take away from all the other characters.
They are like that one powerful NPC you sometimes got in RPGs, who would easily finish the whole story on his/her own, so something must happen to push them out of the story, your loser troop can struggle with and grow with it.
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@ventusbruma1039 Problem of Katniss is more the whole story. Katniss herself is more a playball and isn't really doin anything special. There is overall ZERO reason that the bad guys care about her. They could kill her as they please. The whole Hunger Games concept alone shows, tha the do not care at all how the districts think about them, since they literally just take random children and send them in there. If people don't rise up by that, why should the care for Katniss, who overall didn't do shit, she simply took part in the Games and won. The reason two survived wasn't here, but the bad guys let them. And the don't need a survivor, why should they? They can simply declare that her district one, because she died last and they get the promised stuff.
The whole story makes no sense at all.
Battle Royal was a much better and believeable setting by the fact alone, that they took "bad acting kids" there. If true or not doen't even matter, it sells it well and pushed people to hate these kids and try to not be like them.
Or take Running Man. The main point of it was, that the people who were put in the game weren't all criminals and that there was no way to survive it. That was the actual turning point, to reveal that. That the main char was innocent.
Would have helped Hunger Games a lot, if criminal kids (or even better adults) would have been put into the games, as example that people shouldn't dare to raise against the regime and its laws. Katniss or her sister could have been caught stealing and then like Richards maybe blamed of worse, that they are terrorist. Then her denial to kill could have raised the question, if she really is a terrorist and this could have led to the regime trying to make her part of their propaganda of rehabiliation, where they try to make her admit that she did this terrorism act, but repents. This way it would make sense, that she was build up to that big PR figure for example.
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