Star Wars - PTTSD

[karaddin]

Just now, Ran said:

Tried to watch the first One Piece episode but the hotel TV where I was staying had motion smoothing on and it just looked whack. May give it another try, but I've a feeling it's whimsical pleasures will not be in my wheelhouse.

Yeah if you can't buy in to the tone I don't think it can work for you, although it's doing the best job of making that style of tone accessible that I think it could have done. I don't know that I'd say whimsical though, it's goofy but there's a *lot* of dark subject matter that I wouldn't associate with whimsy. I tend to go with goofy which possibly isn't any better for communicating that lol.

It's funny and absurd and operates under different rules to the real world, but there's an emotional sincerity to it that manages to make these exaggerated moments land as genuinely tragic/moving and it's the heart of the story. If you aren't feeling that sincerity then I don't think the moments are going to land.

That's obviously talking about the manga/anime as a whole, the live action hasn't had time to get to much of that yet.

[sifth]

18 minutes ago, Ran said:

Tried to watch the first One Piece episode but the hotel TV where I was staying had motion smoothing on and it just looked whack. May give it another try, but I've a feeling it's whimsical pleasures will not be in my wheelhouse.

Not sure if whimsical is the right word to use for it. Sure it sums up Luffy pretty well, but like the manga, this series has a lot of heart. I absolutely love how the live action show is handling the flashbacks, for example. Don't get me wrong, changes are made, to make this tv show work, but those flashbacks, are like seeing the manga/anime come to life and have been insanely beautiful and emotional.

When I saw the trailers for this show, I was expecting it to be horrible, possibly worse than Bebop and it somehow, someway, turned out to be the best live action anime/manga adaptation, since the Rurouni Kenshin film series.

edit: also the music is great. I loved how in one scene, they were playing Family, in the background. It nearly got me teary eyed for a bit.

Edited September 21, 2023 by sifth

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Fandom claims to have invented a metric to measure the most valuable/important franchises across different dimensions (i.e. we look at how much traffic respective wikis get) just the other day.

Their 2023 ranking places SW at #1 after the MCU, Harry Potter at #6.

Bear in mind, One Piece and Barbie showing up feels like there's some built-in recency bias (aka media pickup friendliness).

 

As much as I love SW, the franchise is much more older and skews towards an older audience in popularity today. MCU and other comic book stuff is more relevant and popular amongst today’s youth for sure. 
The damage the STs have caused in negating the old EU and pissing off large segments of the fanbase with their horrendous quality and thin world building dosent help either.

Edited September 21, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Fandom claims to have invented a metric to measure the most valuable/important franchises across different dimensions (i.e. we look at how much traffic respective wikis get) just the other day.

Their 2023 ranking places SW at #1 after the MCU, Harry Potter at #6.

Bear in mind, One Piece and Barbie showing up feels like there's some built-in recency bias (aka media pickup friendliness).

 

ASOIAF/Game of Thrones doesn’t appear and “Shadow and Bone” is on the list?  I love Leigh Bardugo she is a super sweet person… but per this list she’s bigger than GRRM?

Really?

[karaddin]

Yeah I hadn't actually clicked through prior to my previous comments. Those top ones are more reasonable than the rest of the list lol. I loved the hell out of Elden Ring but it's got that at #10 and I can't even call it a franchise when it's only had a single instalment.

Most valued IPs within a very specific population seems more accurate than anything more wide ranging.

[Slurktan]

12 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

ASOIAF/Game of Thrones doesn’t appear and “Shadow and Bone” is on the list?  I love Leigh Bardugo she is a super sweet person… but per this list she’s bigger than GRRM?

Really?

Its heavily weighted towards video games.  There are no good ASOIAF video games and likely never will be as there isn't any more books coming and with how the show ended the interest isn't there.  Also I mean this list has Elden Ring on it.  Great game but its a standalone, not even part of a franchise lol.

 

EDIT: Also why Star Wars is ahead of Marvel.  Star Wars has had two really good video games come out the last 5 years.  Marvel has not.

Edited September 21, 2023 by Slurktan

[Heartofice]

Yeah a lot of recency bias there, but still, if I was in charge of the DC or Star Trek franchises I'd be sweating a little bit there. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

9 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah a lot of recency bias there, but still, if I was in charge of the DC or Star Trek franchises I'd be sweating a little bit there. 

I love Star Trek.  Always have.  Always will.  
 

 

[HokieStone]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Fandom claims to have invented a metric to measure the most valuable/important franchises across different dimensions (i.e. we look at how much traffic respective wikis get) just the other day.

Their 2023 ranking places SW at #1 after the MCU, Harry Potter at #6.

Bear in mind, One Piece and Barbie showing up feels like there's some built-in recency bias (aka media pickup friendliness).

 

I have never in my life heard of "One Piece", whatever that is.  And "Disney" is #10?  What is defined by "Disney"?

[Heartofice]

3 minutes ago, HokieStone said:

I have never in my life heard of "One Piece", whatever that is.  And "Disney" is #10?  What is defined by "Disney"?

I assumed it means 'Disney movies'.. stuff like Little Mermaid.. Mickey Mouse.. that kind of thing, although Disney are a huge beast gobbling up other franchises so it's hard to define them. 

 

[karaddin]

One Piece is a Japanese manga (and anime adaptation) that's had a successful first season live action adaptation on Netflix. The series description would be something like it's the story of a boy with a rubber body that sets out to become a pirate and find the legendary treasure the "One Piece" hidden somewhere in a mysterious and dangerous stretch of ocean on a mostly oceanic planet.

My description of what the story ultimately becomes about has spoilers about the world building but not really much about the story

Spoiler

It's the story of how the drive for freedom can only be contained by an authoritarian government for so long, no matter what extreme measures they take, along the way it's exploring the nature of heroism, found family, the ethics of scientific progress when you know it will be abused, the legacy of racism based slavery and a lot of other themes.

The main part is surprisingly on point for discussion in a star wars thread lol.

 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

You know one practice that Star Wars can pickup from comic book franchises guys, is have multiple parallel universe worlds…I mean as a hardcore legends EU fan I’d love for them to continue creating legends content alongside the new canon stuff…and it would be a win for Disney in keeping the entire fandom happy and selling more merch.It’s not like Lucasfilm can still pretend that they’re unique in maintaining a single continuity across all media as they already decanonised everything once and are retconning that decision anyways in bits by bringing back Thrawn. I’d give anything to have Mara Jade or Bastila on the big screen! 

Edited September 21, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

36 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I love Star Trek.  Always have.  Always will.  
 

 

I’m not a huge fan but I enjoyed Star Trek Beyond a lot, haven’t seen any of the other newer movies, and only seen the whale movie on tv from the older series which was also very good.I absolutely loved all seasons of The Orville however, if you’re a ST fan it’s a must watch !

Edited September 21, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

I’m not a huge fan but I enjoyed Star Trek Beyond a lot, haven’t seen any of the other newer movies, and only seen the whale movie on tv from the older series which was also very good.I absolutely loved all seasons of The Orville however, if you’re a ST fan it’s a must watch !

Watched all three seasons of “The Orville”.

[Corvinus85]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah a lot of recency bias there, but still, if I was in charge of the DC or Star Trek franchises I'd be sweating a little bit there. 

 

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I love Star Trek.  Always have.  Always will.  
 

 

Any idea if the recent ST shows have increased the fanbase at all? Paramount has invested a lot in creating several shows. 

[Heartofice]

21 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

 

Any idea if the recent ST shows have increased the fanbase at all? Paramount has invested a lot in creating several shows. 

Maybe the opposite? I dunno, I'm not close to it, but I've certainly lost all interest.

[sifth]

I’ve always preferred Star Trek to Star Wars. Trek just has the better message. 

[Werthead]

15 hours ago, JGP said:

I've read this from a couple angles, including upside down, and I just can't parse the emphasized. Comic book adaptations have branched out into animation, tv, film, and toys. Very many toys, and all sorts of merchandizing. 

Not sure what the point they were making was, but my observation over the years has been that there are two types of franchise.

Both types have a great Original Instalment, which is the thing that gets everybody on board. It's the OG story, characters and creator, and everyone agrees this stuff is great.

Type I is the franchise that has been able to successfully move past the Original Instalment and create new stories and new characters that maintain interest over long periods of time and attract new generations of fans later on, often with new creatives involved. I would say that Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Alien, Marvel, DC, Tolkien and ASoIaF/GoT (though only tentatively) have all reached this point.

Type II is the franchise that is incapable of moving on. The original author intended a limited arc and wasn't expecting the thing to get so huge, and when it did and they tried to expand it, they were unable to do so because it wasn't designed to support that expansion. The original story is still great and new people can read that, but attempts to expand beyond that have ended in failure. I would say that Harry Potter, Dragonlance, Babylon 5, Terminator and Dune are all in that bracket, with possibly something like Watchmen as the ur-example. That's not to say that the new instalments don't sell (Fantastic Beasts made bank, but dropped off steadily), but they are creative failures and a lot of the extended stuff is ignored. Often with such franchises, the creatives eventually get desperate and decide to reboot the franchise with a new take on the original story rather than trying to add to it.

It's more complicated than that, and there's nothing necessarily stopping a Type II franchise eventually becoming a Type I if someone comes up with a sequel story that really works years later, but that almost never happens (maybe Blade Runner, where there was a bunch of novels in the 1990s that tried to expand on it to no avail, and then suddenly the Villeneuve movie opened it back up again). The reverse may also happen if the premise has the legs to sustain a certain degree of expansion but at some point it starts straining and doesn't work any more (Alien may be in the that wheelhouse).

6 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

ASOIAF/Game of Thrones doesn’t appear and “Shadow and Bone” is on the list?  I love Leigh Bardugo she is a super sweet person… but per this list she’s bigger than GRRM?

Really?

GoT had no new instalment this year (House of the Dragon was last year and next year, but not this one), whilst Shadow and Bone's second season aired.

[fionwe1987]

On 9/20/2023 at 7:48 AM, Werthead said:

Although at this point I think they should just recast and say fuck it.

From your mouth to Hollywood's ears. But I'm not convinced they will do this. Generative AI makes a tempting case to now rehash actors from specific time periods, so you can do sequels, prequels, and all kinds of other quels and pay fewer people. I've seen few signs that society will get it's act together and stop such nonsense. 

6 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah a lot of recency bias there, but still, if I was in charge of the DC or Star Trek franchises I'd be sweating a little bit there. 

Hmmm I dunno about franchises using this kind of data to assess themselves. Chatter quantity might be component of the measure here, but I think the staying power for a franchise has less to do with the volume of conversation (which can be a result of bad creative choices) as opposed to whether the shows are doing something to truly hook said fan. 

ETA: totally forgot to add, I enjoyed ep6. Felt like the world of SW breathing a teeny bit more. 

Edited September 21, 2023 by fionwe1987

[fionwe1987]

3 hours ago, sifth said:

I’ve always preferred Star Trek to Star Wars. Trek just has the better message. 

It also has a more thought out world. You can think of endless ways of cross-species interactions in different contexts, as they join together or break up as the Universe throws it's usual curve balls. It's instinctively easy, for me, to get into a story like that, and Trek has taken this basic idea and done some truly impressive storytelling.