2nd part of Durarara 1st season.
Seriously that show had a original characters and a cool storyline that they just threw away for a wave of unoriginal, convenient plot points. I had high hopes that this would be an anime that distances itself from the other crap, but they just had to have those crappy plot points of:
His joker best friend just happens to be the leader of the second toughest gang in the city and his love interest is the vessel of the demon sword
Dammit Durarara, I gave you such a chance to be one of my favorite animes and you killed it with not even a finished season.
Out of curiosity, how does that ruin the show? A big theme of the show is that everyone has secrets; hell, they explicitly say that in the second episode, and demonstrate it during the first meeting of the Dollars. So if every character has these hidden depths, why would the protagonist and his friends be exempt? Granted, it is a bit of a huge coincidence, but again, it's a show built around how people's actions affect each other, knowingly and otherwise, so coincidences are already pretty prevalent.
OT: I've complained about this game before, but Golden Sun: Dark Dawn's entire plot is absolute contrivance. The game kicks off with a fetch quest across the world, in which you happen to activate like four separate ancient artifacts, one of which is the villains' superweapon, basically by accident. Also, the bird feather you spend the game trying to get is somehow essentially linked to the villains' scheme, but they're too lazy/weak to deal with it themselves. Then you beat them by activating another artifact that counters their artifact and then you go back home with your bird feather. Compared to the plot of the first two games, there's no room for character growth or smoke-and-mirrors plot twists or anything. Just a collection of dungeons with loose reasons to travel to each.
Also, there's like three or four Points-of-No-Return throughout the game, so fuck that noise.
Bottom line, it ruined the anime for me. The premise I perceived for this anime was interesting environment that we were witnessing around the main character. They had alot of characters that had little to do with Mikado so it was cool for the story to be focused on everyone, rather than him. Those plot points seem to shift the plot directly to Mikado, making this anime into a just a predictable anime where Mikado must do the thing to save everybody. It's too much of a coincidence for an anime that seemed to stray away from the usual and give a sense of realism in Japanese life, albeit weird supernatural stuff. It seems like alot to infer, but really at that end, it became every other main character anime that I didn't bother with. I may not be ruined in the sense it is still another okay anime, but it was ruined because I expected more great plot and was given the usual bland at the sudden last minute.
In a modern Japanese town, a group of teenagers learn that all rumours and coming true, and people are slowly beginning to disapear - not die, or even go missing - but slowly start becoming invisible, unnoticeable, simply being forgotten, ceasing their very existence, or the fact they ever existed. Good premise, right? Then it quickly cuts to a LETS POSITIVE THINKING DESU and pulls an Indigo Prophecy.
It turns out what's causing the whole malarky is a set of mystical skulls made by the Mayans, said discovery being made by a teacher at the main character's school who learned this from a psychic child who is now a serial killer and has the same name as you except there's a "Do" in there instead of a "Tsu" or something, and Nyarlaphotep is actually behind it, except he's not, the whole thing manifested from the fact that all of the main character's (except, like, one, and the only bearable one. Y'know, the girl who wears pants?) daddy issues, and the final boss in Animu Hitler weilding the Spear of Lognisus, the spear that was stabbed into Jesus's hip, thus killing a main character, and a big damn Deus Ex Machine happening and resetting everything.
im one of those horribly masochistic people that even if i've hit the point of 'DONE!!' i continue watching/playing/reading... just so that i'm utterly justified in my spite of whatever i'm putting myself though...
hemlock grove... saddly i was suggested this because it has 'a really cool take on werewolves and is awesome!!' by a friend of hubbys... 1st episode i feel like i'm watching the wal-mart value version of Twilight -.- it didn't get any better...
Season 2 of Code Geass quickly turned into this for me for the level of psychotic stupidity... the end completely made up for it... like seriously, if that damn thing ended 5 minutes sooner it'd be in the bottom bin along with hemlock grove...
final fantasy 7... cloud and sephiroth -.- oh i beat the game, to a bloody painful death with a glass covered baseball bat that was on fire... but i beat it... but never again will i touch it unless i'm going to utterly destroy it again... the levels of stupid derived from the so called 'main character' and his bitchy-ness... FF13 quickly fell into this categorey as well since its basically the same game, same plot, same emo-ness, only in a shinier package...
bartholen said:
"A lonely, weak kid is bullied in school and has no friends. He tries to fight back but he keeps getting beaten down, and nobody will help him except his cute childhood friend. He wants to gain courage and strength, and then he meets a mentor who will teach him courage and strength, but he's a hopeless screw-up and doesn't know how to do anything but keeps on going because he wants gain courage and strength and courage and strength and protect the ones he cares about and courage and strength and OH SHUT THE FUCK UUUUUP!!!"
The exact reason why I couldn't stand either History's Greatest Disciple Kenichi or The Breaker which I read about 20 chapters more out of morbid curiosity than actual interest. Bunch of whiny-ass shounen shit.
that's why i've run out of hope for most shounen... they seem to all just run together with the same plot, subtext, and less and less changed with each year _._
The Conjuring REALLY irked me. I went into it thinking I knew what it was about (a legend in the field of paranormal research) and it turned into the type of movie I can't stand.
That movie is about 8 times better if you accept that while the plot starts nicely it devolves into the overdone family haunting in a typically old house with a history of murder but despite this however I think it deserves an Oscar because of one man. The face of law, the face of moustache. The Ghostbusters with sex appeal. OFFICER BRAD.
Yeah seriously though that movie was bad and they showed their biggest scare (match goes out and the hands clap) in the trailer. It didn't even try to scare you towards the end.
On this though pretty much ever character in a horror ever makes me go just stop.
Well I think the first bit is covered under the blanket statement of muggle tech doesn't work around magic, but even if it did, the culture of the magical community comes across as far too conservative for them to look to muggles for help. As for the second, I thought a bungling ministry was actually quite clever, firstly it made sense within the universe as I felt it was a believable result of the again fairly conservative and somewhat backwards thinking culture that seems to pretty strong in the magical community, and secondly, to me at least, it does justify certain story elements, like why Dumbledore turns to Harry and the Order of the Phoenix instead seeking ministry help to hunt down the horcruxes.
its interesting that when you really think about it...Wizard society is so fucked up I would NOT want to be a part of it (interestingly it may or may not be intentional, at first it starts out as whimsical but when harry gorws up...surpise even the seemingly perfect wizard world is flawed)...which makes it ironic they veiw muggles with disdain
Cameron's avatar is a good example. Not only is Jake Scully a literal war criminal now but the Navi are likely doomed after killing so many humans. There is no way Earth will not retaliate and this time a combined arms expedition rather than a mining security crew will be bringing the hurt. Scully's ONLY job was to PREVENT all of this and get us the unobtanium with minimal, hopefully zero, loss of life. He has guaranteed this cannot happen leading to losses on both sides. We are supposed to root for this guy?
To be honest, I think the logical step for the miners if they wanted to try to mine again would be to just nuke the LZ and not take any chances. Gets rid of the big-ass tree, and the locals, and now they have a crater they can begin mining in. And the miners were already in environmentally-sealed machines, so it's not like there would be too much of a loss on that front either. But I agree, the blank-slate jarhead Scully failed to hard, I almost with the dues ex machina at the end had killed him.
Other than the previously mentioned " Forced Romantic subplot" it has to be
Sword Art Online
It's episode 15, the killer mmo thing is resolved( due to some wonky factors that I'm not gonna discuss here) and the main protagonist Kirito visits Asuna, the main heroine; who is in a comma even though the MMO thing is over. Okay, nothing bad, nice little mystery and suspense thrown in to open the new storyline, it's all good. Then, they introduce this storyline's antagonist,Sugou. Look, there are many different ways to show that your antagonist is well, a antagonist; being a molesting asshole is not one of them. This show repeatedly shows this fact, all the way to the final episode and I was screaming and facepalming every single time.
I always got the impression that she was making an ironic observation there... That of all men, the best father figure John could have was one of the machines that tried to kill them. I didn't get the impression that she had feelings for it, and she definitely hadn't forgiven the machines. As for trusting it, well, I never thought about it... but alot happened in those few days? I'm not sure how much she trusted it (but obviously more by the end).
Mind you, I'm not looking to start an argument, I was just surprised that you found Sarah's monologue crossed the line, so to speak.
Yeah, I also got that sense as well. I suppose on that front I just felt that it was a surprisingly level headed reaction for a fairly unhinged woman who has hated and feared these machines for well over a decade. The part that really got me though was how we see the terminator and John practicing high fives while Sarah is going on about how the T800 will never turn up late for ball games or whatever, it just struck me as the film trying to impose some humanity onto the machine via the monologue of a woman who should, by all logic, despise them. On a side note, I also feel the movie made the creation of Terminator 3 necessary by going on about how they can't leave a single bit of terminator tech behind (otherwise humans will find it and use it as a basis to create Skynet) and then just abandoning Arnie's detached arm to be found.
Vault101 said:
its interesting that when you really think about it...Wizard society is so fucked up I would NOT want to be a part of it (interestingly it may or may not be intentional, at first it starts out as whimsical but when harry gorws up...surpise even the seemingly perfect wizard world is flawed)...which makes it ironic they veiw muggles with disdain
Yeah, I think that's probably at the core of why I do really enjoy the Harry Potter universe, how it feels genuinely human that most of the magical community seems to feel their abilities put above muggles somehow, resulting in this odd anti-progress mindset. I do agree, as wonderful as the Harry Potter universe seems from the outside, it would be a hell of a frustrating place to actually live.
Mechamorph said:
I could not have said it better myself and it encapsulates the bone I have to pick with the Harry Potter series. I guess everyone has a different threshold of disbelief and different things that will bring them out of it. It is true that the Wizarding World as a whole are pretty much sticking their heads in the sand and humming to themselves as time passes them by. Too many useful things in the Muggle world are strictly chemical or mechanical for the blanket "magic makes technology not work" statement to cover. A gun is a controlled explosion propelling a small piece of metal very fast. Fully mechanical watches have been around for four centuries. Pepper spray is just a bunch of chemicals in a can with a nebulizer. If magic makes technology like that not work, it is either a sentient and probably diabolical force or fire should not work either. Those raised as wizards are culturally blind and willfully so. However if someone came into their world without their prejudices, there really isn't a reason that person would not look to Muggle technology to give them an edge over other wizards. You know, like our protagonist? Granted he was a small child at the time but even small children know enough that they can spot the loopholes in the attitudes of the Wizarding World.
And as the poster above said, the whole plot is justified in that there is nobody Dumbledore could have turned to. Everyone else is incompetent to the point of caricature. The most effective army against Voldemort is made primarily of schoolchildren which seems to imply that sometime after puberty competence drains out of people like a sieve. Unless rampant stupidity and incompetence abounds, even in the context of them being wizards, the plot cannot literally happen.
Edit: Credit where credit is due, I thought it was brilliant on the part of Rowling to include a prejudice against Muggle-born wizards. Magic Nazis aside, Muggle-borns were the only people who had any reason to interact with the modern world and probably the only people comfortable doing so (given that the Professor of Muggle Studies needed Harry's help to make change in a store...). They sometimes have strange ideas they preach to people like Democracy, Progress, Efficiency, Meritocracy, etc. Ideas that threatened the status quo. Little wonder that the established wizards would look down on them and discredit them on any level they could.
Yeah, I'd go with that overall. Surprisingly, most of the series' problems come from it's lore, like muggle tech not working just because and all that wandlore nonsense in the seventh book. Like I said above, what I love about the series is that it does feel quite human in many ways, somewhat unfortunately it also sometimes feels like Rowling is warping the lore into a shape that best tells the story or conveys the concept rather than using lore that feels like it fits and makes sense within the universe.
Recently it was the Burial at Sea Episode 2 DLC for Bioshock: Infinite. To keep it spoiler-free as possible...
You have to go back to Columbia through a tear to get an item from the office of Fink (the inventor of vigors) office. On the way through, you run into the revolutionary Daisy Fitzroy talking to the Lutece twins, and the game is absolute pleading to you, on its hands and knees, kissing your feet, shouting, no, Fitzroy is actually a good and complex character, forget how really stupid and insignificant she was in the first game! I made up this new pact she made where she has to be a complete dickknob for the greater good! Isn't she a good character now?
Spoiler goes here, in case you forgot what Daisy did in the first game.
After you help Fitzroy and the Vox Populi initiate their revolutions, she turns on you. For no reason, really, she actively said she had treated Booker as a hero of the revolution, but since Booker was alive it 'confused the narrative'. So she turns on you.
Then, oh boy, you get to a moment in the game where you're forced to watch her kill Fink. Then, for whatever reason, she tries to stab a kid, probably Fink's son, only to stop because Elizabeth stabs her.
No no no, says Irrational, actually she was sacrificing herself to make Elizabeth into a killer because... she had to grow up into a killer and... it wouldn't have worked unless she tried to kill a kid and...
I get this with Hunger Games. People tell me I over think it but the whole class based society makes no sense. Why are the treated so badly. So what they once rose up, why did they rise up what is the difference between the capital and the districts. It is not a racial thing or they are aliens they look the same. Also the districts make useless stuff, the capital has such advanced technology that a coal mining town which acts like one from the wild west and not a modern day open cut mine would barely provide them any power. Finally the districts rise up within a matter of months, they fully organize and communicate with each other which is just crazy and the president thinks getting rid of the main girl will just make hundreds of people stop being mad about decades of being treated like animals.
I just find it very contrived and instead of speeding along to the conclusion they are stretching it out with two movies for the final book. Hurry up with some actual back story.
final fantasy 7... cloud and sephiroth -.- oh i beat the game, to a bloody painful death with a glass covered baseball bat that was on fire... but i beat it... but never again will i touch it unless i'm going to utterly destroy it again... the levels of stupid derived from the so called 'main character' and his bitchy-ness... FF13 quickly fell into this categorey as well since its basically the same game, same plot, same emo-ness, only in a shinier package...
Lets be fair here, up until he has his brain fixed, Cloud was pretty much insane and delusional. He's understandably a bit messed up. Yeah Clouds not the happiest character in the world, but I don't see why so many people say "oh he's a whiny emo" he's hardly got a massive reason to be happy. Also, calling ff13 in anyway similar to ff7 is a...complete fabrication. I know you don't mean it literally, but even if you'd played neither, you could discern that from the wikipedia summary.
Naruto.
He recently became ninja jesus because he was the chosen whatever and a deus ex machina bullshitted him powers to save the day of someone who wrote themselves into a corner. So much for "hard work vs genius".
Every time when a character in a zombie or virus outbreak (or similar) plot discovers she has the exact same symptoms as the infected, but doesn't notify immediately anyone. This is a weak attempt to craft suspense into a boring plotline and it all too often.
"Oh no: I'm turning into a zombie. Hope the infection goes away, eventually, before anyone notices..."
This is all the more annoying when the character is a scientist specializing in the field (Helix, I'm looking at you!). When black goo comes out of your nose in a quarantine zone, you better get checked and not "do it yourself"...
Many a movie and series has lost me the moment this shit starts to happen.
Well, first off, "G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra". At first it seemed like a pretty OK action movie, but the plot got stupid so fast it was just horrible. The plot and the characters just got worse the longer into the movie I got. I finished watching the whole thing, even though I wanted to just turn it of halfways, just to see how horrible the ending was.
And then there's "Dreamcatcher". It started off as a pretty good movie, but last 20 minutes or so, it felt like the writers ran out of ideas, or just had to wrap up everything as fast as possible.
The first Twilight movie has already been mentioned, but I'm just gonna say that that was the first time I really felt I wasted almost 2 hours of my life.
The entire season 4 of Fringe. Marty Stu is back in full force, the entire place is haunted by multiple Jesuses, and Big Bad turned into a Saturday morning cartoon villain.
Tomb Raider 2013. Lara if you keep undoing everything I did I am going to piss off.
Skyrim. No, I am not killing my buddy dragon. I will destroy your cult if you insist.
The Walking Dead. An idiotball was a one off thing, then everyone somehow got their own.
Naruto.
He recently became ninja jesus because he was the chosen whatever and a deus ex machina bullshitted him powers to save the day of someone who wrote themselves into a corner. So much for "hard work vs genius".
This is doubly hilarious because originally Naruto was the hard-working-everyman, gets-stronger-through-training-and-ingenuity shounen hero to Sasuke's naturally-talented-superpowered-genius rival character, and by the end Naruto turns into the specialest snowflake of the whole world while Sasuke required a dozen or so deus ex machina powerups from outside sources (while completely disregarding his "genius") to keep up his status as the rival.
The entire last two years(!) of the manga has been just one long chain of "What were they thinking?!" moments...
Anything involving "it was a just a dream". No, if you're going to pull the rug under the viewers after they've emotionally invested in the characters and their struggles, you basically wasted our time with invalidating all of it. A notorious offender; RepoMen.
Bringing people back to life. In any setting. Consequences be damned! Seems especially problematic in any Disney film. Death has no meaning to Disney!
Inconsistent application of functional dynamics of a movies reality. As others mentioned, if you're going to be all freaky with science, put some rules in that insures some level of suspended believability for the sake of the story. But let's not be all wishy washy because we can't think of a better way to advance the plot. Notorious offenders; Harry Potter, Star Trek Voyager.
The only specific instance I can think of at the moment is The Dark Knight Rises. "We've got this nuclear FUSION reactor beneath the city! Oh no! The villains came in and turned it into a nuclear FISSION bomb in a matter of minutes with no specialized equipment!"
The thing that bugs me about that is that Bruce Wayne basically says "yeah, so I built this reactor in the hope that I could produce cheap power for the city, but I thought that it might be turned into a bomb...so I just left it here."
One of my many gripes is with The Last of Us and how I don't see how it could happen. You see, they are fungus zombies yet in the beginning they have the same vulnerabilities as human beings. As in you can shoot the running morons anywhere in the body and they will die. Are you telling me that the armed forces of the world, the CDC, people in America (where the this game is set) who have guns as well as any chump with a cricket bat, couldn't contain and control this outbreak within a couple of months? Sure it would be a bit of a pain in the arse, people would die, but I don't see how this would cause the downfall of society. Sure you could argue that there were a lot of outbreaks at the same time and the army was taken by surprise. I refuse to accept that a well organised group of people armed with explosive weapons against a bunch of sick people who main weapon is...running...could possibly lose.
You kill the infected and then use a flame thrower on the fungus that caused the outbreak.
Even if its gets so bad in areas that clickers turn up, they are even easier to beat, you sneak in a bunch of soldiers well trained in sniping and silent close quarter combat and let them loose.
If that game was realistic, it would suck that Joel's daughter died, but Ellie would grow up in a normal, slightly more cautious world.
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