Fandoms and Shit-Talking [NOT 1/12/20]

1/12/20 brightersideoflife 50
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Better than anything Star Wars

Sorry I’m late to the NOT, the evening got away from me.

Friends, let’s talk about really important stuff. Fandoms and who has better taste.

I’ll start. Star Trek is better than Star Wars. It’s just known.

I was starting to come around to liking Star Wars, but then they went and made The Rise of Skywalker and that movie suuuuuucked.

Harry Potter is so overrated. JK Rowling, aside from being a horrible TERF, also stole the entire concept from Neil Gaiman.

Anyhoo, argue with me, share you own, get me riled up with insulting LoTR, knock yourselves out.

Also I’m almost done with Witcher on Netflix and it had so much wasted potential due to bad writing.

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50 Comments

  1. I am agnostic with Trek vs. Wars.  I like them both for separate reasons, but Trek definitely has better continuity going for it.  Quite a few of the Wars films were really, really bad.
     
    Stephen King is the most underrated writer on the planet.  Fight me.
     
    Arnold Shoenberg is the reason why so much shitty art and music exists today.
     
    That’s my opinion–it oughtta be yours.

    • I went down the rabbit hole of my old Art History theory books because I was like “Schoenberg? Wasn’t he the super opinionated art critic in the 1940s/50s who basically shaped 30 years of Modern American art? I didn’t know he was also a composer!”

      No, that was Clement Greenberg. No reason to believe he could compose worth shit. And his art opinions were arrogant and short-sighted. 

      • srsly, what the hell is up with that?
        At least the book versions of The Lord of the Rings was an actual trilogy of big books, The Hobbit was one book.  ONE!
        Although, I only watched The Lord of the Rings movies up until the battle where the Ents joined in.  I had already lost interest, but wanted to see some trees kicking ass.
        Lochaber’s hot take:  While Tolkien’s work was very instrumental in shaping stereotypical fantasy and stuff, he’s overrated.  The Lord of the Rings was kinda boring…

        •  Modern word processors and similar tools have really helped authors have the ability to work with edit and pacing so much better, in my opinion.

          Like type something, evaluate, and backspace the hell out of it. Not “oh well I’ve typed this, I’m committed to it now because my words are so good. I can edit it later but this is meaty and stays.”

          I admit when I read Return of the King I was like “Sam still carrying Frodo up the mountain? Okay gonna skip ahead to other characters….”

        • I actually liked that they broke the Hobbit up into three movies. They were able to put more of the book into the film. Unlike LoTR where they slashed and burned and even mashed certain characters together to make a movie out of each book. 

          • …fair point…but having teased the dragon at the end of the first one I was not amused to win a bet that it wouldn’t show up again until the back half of the second movie

            …so I might have a bone or two to pick, I guess?

             

        • …I may be alone in this…but I was underwhelmed by the ents…plus I was hoping for some huorns…like giant-redwood-sized motherfuckers…that may say more about me than the movies, though…I wouldn’t have minded them leaving tom bombadil in?

          • I love the Ents because of the representation of bravery different than many other cultures in Middle Earth. They’re basically extinct and they know it since they lost the Ent-wives, so for them to decide to still attack Saruman’s tower is so emotional for me because of all the cultures in Middle Earth, they really have the most to lose in a single fight. 

            • …the underwhelmed thing is specific to the movies…the ents going to war was pretty much the pinnacle of the whole story to me as a kid…& I may not have grown up in that respect…so I’d agree with all of that, I think

    • …it kinda did…& luke was pretty much an asshole…but it “borrowed” a few devices from movies that are better thought of, like kurosawa…slapped a sci fi context on them…& left plenty of scope for people to fill in gaps with their imagination

      …so I still remember the first two fondly enough that I was prepared to not instantly hate the ewoks…to me that says a lot

      …even if I do wonder these days if I don’t dislike more star wars than I like?

  5. I guess I’ll get started.
    I loved the original Trek, but watching it now is dated.  Especially the parts about society regarding roles of women.  It had a lot of good ideas that were carried on in other series like dealing with racism, war and injustice (except they didn’t claim to solve it unlike the next series.)
    ST:TNG used to piss me off with their endless utopia nonsense that racism, greed and war can be defeated easily.  If one reads history, humanity has been doomed to repeat the same stupid shit over and over again (see current pandemic… which is now a replay of the Black Plague and Spanish Flu where stupids, idiots, ignorant jackasses, fear mongers and reactionaries are fighting against science in the misguided guise of “freedumb.”)  I get what Roddenbury was trying to get at, but he made the assumption that defeating humanity’s ailments/issues was a given not an on going struggle. 
    I had a good ironic chuckle when ST:TNG fans were upset with Piccard (which I liked) because it showed the Federation as a flawed organization that can fall short of the ideals it was founded upon not the annoying self righteous utopia ST:TNG portrayed it as (mirroring my own dismay when ST:TNG aired when comparing it to the past aka Star Trek.)

    My biggest wrath is for DS9 or as I jokingly call it ST:B5.  DS9 is what really killed my Trek nerddom.  It was terrible until the Dominion War as my DS9 loving friends say, but I would remind them that the plots were cribbed from Babylon 5. 
    B5 has its flaws too including Amiga powered SFX and some stilted dialogue (especially when it came to romance) but I enjoyed B5 because it was humanity (and aliens as different humanity) who were still jerks and assholes, but tried to be better often at terrible cost.
    If you liked DS9 and thought B5 was ass, I ain’t gonna change your mind.

    As for the rest, well… I can’t say much because I didn’t watch Voyager and the rest outside of Piccard.

    As for the JJprize.  I started one of the first epic nerdfights on Io9 when I pointed out that the scene of Jerk Kirk gazing upon the  Enterprise being built on the ground was pretty fucking stupid (even if the scene was supposed to be for emotional impact.)  Went as far as going all physics on people.  Something about requiring 10^12 J of energy to put a 300000 ton starship into low earth orbit from the earth which would do terrible things to the Earth’s atmosphere.
    Anyway, JJ’s 2nd movie starring White Khan not Khan “mystery” really pissed me off.  The OG Khan (a Sikh with a Muslin surname) being played by a Mexican American actor made more sense to me than Benedict playing white Khan.  It was just a sense that JJ viewed Trek fans as total fucking idiots.
    Didn’t bother to even watch the last film even on Netflix.  Maybe in 20 years Paramount will be desperate enough to reboot it again and I might watch.
     

    • Yeah I never understood why you’d have a starship building yard on the ground. Do that stuff in space or maybe a small moon or something where there isn’t the gravitational pull to overcome takeoff. You want to build shuttles and small craft on the ground? Okay sure. Maybe. But not the giant ships!!!

      • It’s why I laughed when Lucas let massive Star Destroyers land on the ground.  It was marginally easier to accept midochlorians than that.
        I gave a lot of side eye to my friends who were caught up in the visuals to fire off a “It’s cool, so shut the fuck up” whenever I made fun of it.

        • Did you sacrifice 2 hours of your life to Rise of Skywalker? I was doing fairly well with ignoring all the stupid parts until they decided to do a mounted calvary attack with horse-esque creatures on top of the flying starship.

          Like we’re supposed to believe that captain wouldn’t be like “turn the ship 90 degrees left or right, I don’t care” and then be like “bye Felicia! have fun with gravity and get the fuck off my ship!”

        • I always get a kick out of scenes of big spaceships crash landing on planets, or for that matter getting hit by meteors in outer space. No way. At the speeds and masses involved those events would leave nothing but dust specks and smears of organic matter.

    • I’ll sign on to most of this. TOS is still fun, but very dated. TNG can be preachy, but I love it. I disagree a little about it portraying total utopia though – there are definitely still issues with the Federation. DS9 was super dull. The recent movies suck. 
       
      But why didn’t you watch Voyager? It gets shit on, but it’s probably my second favorite Trek after TNG. It had some bad episodes definitely, but overall it was fun. I think it’s the most similar to the original series in tone. Plus Janeway. I adore Janeway. 

  6. I loved the first Star Wars & loved the Star Trek tv show.  All the Star Trek movies I saw except Wrath of Khan were awful!  The best space related tv show of all time was 3rd Rock from the Sun followed by Mork & Mindy.  

  8. No love here for either Star Wars or Trek, or Potter. But I own the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and have no regrets over that. Will probably re-watch them this winter.

  9. I’m that weirdo who doesn’t like Star Wars or Star Trek…
    related, I really hate it when sci-fi (or fantasy) have “warrior races”, one-climate planets, and other similar nonsense.  I really hate Klingons – I remember hearing some bit about how they have two (?) hearts, and you have to stab both of them to kill them?  That’s not how hearts work… two hearts might help if one of them gets a heart attack, but it’s not going to help for trauma.  I’ve got two Carotid arteries, but I’ll bleed out damn quick if you only open up one of them.  And their Batleth(sp?) weapon is dumb.  Like, offensively dumb.  There’s a reason why humans haven’t made something similar and practiced killing each other with it, because it’s dumb and it doesn’t work, and if you try to use it in combat, some rando with a basic-ass club or spear is going to laugh at you, and then kill you, and rifle through your pockets.
    I’m fun at parties…

  10. i think ewoks : the battle for endor was the best star wars movie
    i actually liked jar jar


    /me also has the size to get away with saying those things
    (i actually have nothing special to say about star trek….love that show…..the cybermen are awesome….will robbinson is kind of a useless twit tho)
     

      • …I guess I was thinking the formula with the kid who goes to some sort of school/university of magic & has to overcome a nemesis that’s fixated on them was pretty much set by the earthsea books & has become a genre mainstay

        …but sure, her stories are pretty great too…& predate rowling’s stuff considerably…also love the animated version of howl’s moving castle, so there’s that?

      • …you’re not wrong…& I do like gaiman’s stuff…but as hannibal said she did kind of cobble the thing together from a number of places, arguably

        …I could probably buy that she wasn’t aware of timothy hunter as a character but less so that she’d never heard of the wizard of earthsea

        …although equally plenty of people have borrowed that formula & been less lucky when it comes to the lucrative side of the thing…I’ve just never understood why those of all books seemed to be a “fashionable” read for some when there were so many arguably better ones that those same people were/are content to ignore

  12. Wow. I should have just skipped this whole thread. I had already missed it, but am bored at the end of my day at work and am off tomorrow. Needless to say I’m already on the drive home in my head. 
     
    So yeah…loads of potent spicy takes here. 
     
    I agree that The Mouse just shat all over SW with the most recent movies. I am actually going to try to find a way to watch them without dialog. Just SFX and score. Could be much better. However I am still a fan of the overall universe and consider the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoon series to be exceptionally good. The Mandalorian is also good TV. 
     
    As for Trek, the points about utopia are valid. I agree that TNG can get a bit too preachy. ToS while for its time was ground-breaking, has not aged well. 
    But DS9 is my jam. Avery Brooks simply nails Captain Sisko. And I love that in DS9, Trek gets messy. All those preachy, high minded ideals get thrashed trying to live on the fringes of space. I have not watched B5, so I can’t say how the series plots overlap. 
     
    I enjoyed the HP books and films as their respective artforms. JKR really does need to stop tweeting. She was humorous for like 6 months for the scorching disses against Hair Orange. Now, not so much. 
     
    If there is any single fandom that I cannot stand, it is people who lift their trucks, and especially those who tune their diesels to “roll coal” as it is called. The mere suggestion that their actions should have consequences is met with the most astounding tantrum. Then again, the overlap of MAGAsshats, Qunts, and Smurf-Lives folks who also own large trucks is basically a circle. 
     

    • As a casual fan of Star Wars, I didn’t mind how their Disney overlords influenced them. Like I was meh on the first of the trilogy and then The Last Jedi was pretty damn good (with the glaring exception of the real villain not being announced to be Toxic Masculinity), but man the Rise of Skywalker burned it to the ground. 

      • …I don’t want to sound overly bitter but I generally refer to kylo ren as diet vader & as far as I could make out his super-power was apparently meant to be petulance

        …which was all the more sad given the force awakens was substantially a re-tread of the first movie when I guess I’d been hoping for some brand new tires before the wheels fell off?

    • I love it when you get those lifted trucks that slow down to a crawl every time there is a speed bump…
       
      And that “rolling coal” thing is just mult-level stupidity… Spending time and money to reduce the performance and efficiency of your vehicle, just to “own the libs”  On top of what they are doing is basic bullying, and should be considered assault.  They like to complain about “snowflakes” being “triggered”, but the mere existence of a hybrid car or a bicyclist upsets them enough to do this?

    • …I didn’t see all of either when they first aired but having watched a fair bit of both at one stage or another I can see how you might want to stand up DS9…it did have some good stuff whether or not it owed a fair bit to babylon 5

      …but (without wanting to start anything or anything) I’m honestly curious about the clone wars thing…I like what I’ve watched of the mandolorian & I haven’t watched much of the rebels show but I caught a pretty good chunk of the clone wars series & it didn’t really measure up to the billing it seemed to have got from a lot of people (at least for me)

      …most of the time it made me wonder why the clone troopers didn’t rise up & refuse to be led by the jedi who seemed to have no actual aptitude for anything that might imply they were suitable for leading troops into any kind of conflict…the more I watched & the more troops they got killed for seemingly arbitrary reasons with no apparent compunction or respect for the lives they were burning through the less I felt like the “good guys” were all that good

      …so I guess I’m curious to know if that was just me not giving it a fair shake or if you’d consider that to be a recognizable description?

      • @SplinterRIP 
         
        Your assessment is not wrong. And that is one of the many points being conveyed throughout the series. War is hell and it’s always the good people dying for no reason. 
         
        The other important stories are how Anakin simply does not jump head first into the Dark Side as is shown in the Prequels. His fall was a death by a thousand cuts as he sees all the suffering and chaos caused by the Clone Wars and the Jedi’s inability to lead in battle. There is also the loss of Ahsoka. Which her story arc I find superb. And losing her is an important step Anakin takes down the path that leads to becoming Darth Vader. 
         
        There is more to the Darth Maul story told in CW and Rebels as well that is worth seeing. Along with more details of Obi Wan’s life. 
         
        Basically these series fill in loads of worthy details about several characters that the big movies did not do a very good job addressing; either due to lack of time or Lucas’ ability to tell a coherent story. 

  13. Despite being geeky enough to have gone to sci fi conventions for 10 years (havent been in a while though), and yes I dressed up, I never knew half of what I was looking at. The general rule was, if you can’t identify it, it’s probably anime. But I never got into Star Trek, Harry Potter, or comic books. I also tend to be late on the stuff I am into. And if I find something annoying, I just won’t see or read it on principle. Mostly tho, if you’re riding an elevator with Legolas, Boba Fett, Lady Gaga, Dracula, and the alien from Alien, you all have something in common even if it isn’t that specific thing.

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