:stop-posting-amogus:
Love clocking in at the Torture factory at 9AM sharp every day
Yeah. If I'd known what I was getting in to I wouldn't have watched it. And I wouldn't advise other people do.
I do love Gasper Nöe's bombastic hardcore-style filmmaking, but I'm glad he's made a lot more movies now so I can rewatch those instead.
I never watched the show because I read a bunch of the comics and it was just so pervasively miserable and unpleasant I was like "Why would I subject myself to this?"
I don't know if it is a trope but watching Brendan Gleeson piss for thirty seconds turned me off prestige television for good.
Lately I've just been turning shows and movies off if they have a scene of graphic torture or sexual violence. No thanks, I have enough nightmares, I don't need to see that shit.
any attempt to improve crapsack world somewhat is naive and probably worse”
Liberalism and it's consequences...
I hate it when people in historical dramas have anarchronistically fashionable clothing and haircuts. I get it, nobody would take Brother Hummberbutt seriously if he had a dumbass-looking tonsure but nothing ruins my immersion more than a bunch of vikings with eyeliner and an undercut storming Saxony or whatever.
Fucking leather pants everywhere in pre 1700 dramas. Put the men in the damn hose!
Leather pants, leather vests, leather armor, leather anything. Most people in most places at most times did not use leather for clothing because leather sucks for clothing. It doesn't move well with the body, it doesn't breath, it doesn't insulate well. Wool is such an awesome wonder material that even in the modern day with all our cool materials science even the best synthetic fabrics are only a moderate improvement over wool, and they often have tradeoffs for that.
Yeah, linen too. Although pre-modern linen, like wool and silk, can't really be got these days for any price. Heck, try and find a regency-era cotton muslin, can't be done.
Linen is so much better than cotton it's not even a contest. We really did pick the absolute worst of all the available fibers and then used it to make everything. I have some linen medieval clothes and they're the most comfortable things I've ever owned.
Oh yeah, and even it's a pale imitation of the stuff they actually had then (unless you got it hand woven, which is eye-wateringly expensive). Look at the drape on ancient statues and try and get that!
That said, high-quality cotton can be very good, and a linen Regency dress doesn't quite drape right, so a good cotton voile is the best you can get. I'd also like someone to make some accurate 1710s Chintz pls, even if it's just the pattern (glares at Ikea, somehow currently the world leader in 18th-century fabric styles)
Linen stains easily and is difficult to wash. I got some linen shirts and they are awesome in summer, but sheesh what a pain in the ass they are. Your white shirt gets a little spot on it and that's it, time to buy a new one. You can soak it in Oxy Clean, chlorine bleach, pre-wash stain remover and it won't go anywhere. It's in there for good.
You know what women and everyone else who wants to bang men like? Shapely beautiful calves highlighted by well fitted hosen!
Likewise; PUT CODPIECES ON YOUR COSTUMES YOU COWARDS!
My take is that many directors and showrunners lack the intestinal fortitude to do actual period clothes and hairstyles because they're intimidated by how cool and good period styles look.
"Left wing revolutionaries with legitimate grievances win because the plot demands it" on the other hand is a trope id like to see more of
Best we can do is revolutionary with genuine grievances committing heinous crimes to make them the bad guy.
Yeah, same. The first and second fights in Black Panther come to mind.
Sometimes the hero just kinda wins, and my mind goes "You coulda done that the whole time?"
That's a trope in so many anime's and whatever the giant robot series are called. The whole fight is just for funsies until the hero robot uses it's super attack and destroys the bad guy in one shot.
The good guy loses to the bad guy at first, then wins the climactic second fight
It's a well known fact that the best way to when a fight is when you're exhausted and wounded!
wo people of similar capability fight? The winner is just who the screenwriter feels like!
That's kind of how fights go in real life. If two people of equal skill fight, whether it's with guns or swords or any other weapon, it's about 25/25/50 that one wins, the other wins, or they both die of their wounds. And it all comes down to who makes a mistake or gets unlucky first. And in real life most fights with weapons are over fast. Humans just can't maintain the necessary reaction speed and focus needed for sword fighting for that long, someone is eventually going to do the wrong thing and then they're dead.
I totally agree with you on shaky cam. And along with that; Close in shots so you can't see the actual fighting, rapid cuts so they can disguise how the actors don't actually know how to fight. IMO the best fight scenes are overwhelmingly the ones where both actors are clearly in frame and the audience can actually see the fight happening. If your fight choreographer can't tell a compelling story while both actors are clearly in frame then hire a better choreographer.
That's a thing I really like about most Chambara films - Most fights are decided in one or two strikes. Fights go fast and you win or die.
I have seen a trope where you have the hero practicing a "special technique" earlier in the movie, and then the fight resolves when they get a chance to use their secret technique and the bad guy isn't able to counter it.
Again, this is why I like samurai movies a lot. A lot of Western swordfights are just guys whacking at each other for minute after minute, but in a lot of classical samurai movies they get all their talking out of the way before the fight and the actual fight happens very quickly.
I really like This swordfight in The Deluge. The way they're fencing tells you a lot about their character, They take breaks to show reactions of the characters without interrupting the pacing of the fight, it has believable pauses and tempo. And then when it resolves it resolves very quickly.
Jackie Chan films have long, extended fight sequences. Love them. I don't even mean the comedy parts where Jackie grabs a teapot and uses it as a weapon either, I just mean the regular fighting. SO nice to just watch it and the camera never cuts.
HATERS: :wojak-nooo:
ME (my spurs are going jingle, jangle, jingle):
:matt-jokerfied::arm-L: :arm-R:
:china-stars: :china-stars:
Me: hacking and wacking and slashing. Hack, wack, choppin that meat.
I hate it when the plot of a game forces you to lose your inventory and gain it all back in one dungeon
I havent played any since 3, so I avoid exposure to that :cool-bean:
Forced losses in general are awful, especially when there's a massive gameplay disparity that makes it nonsensical. FO3 was awful about this, and literally the entire plot of Cyberpunk 2077 hinges on the player - who at that point had just effortlessly cut through dozens of heavily armed and armored soldiers and who could very well be able to literally stop time and move at super speed - just letting themselves get beat up and executed by a paunchy old guy and his sluggish security guard.
Remember every Japanese RPG with guns? You'd get machine gunned in the face 900 times and then during a cinematic, someone shoots the supporting character once and they dramatically die
Oh hey can we get some Phoenix Down? No.
Holy fuck I just realized this is literally Kiryu
I mean he's still better than all the other tropey sad/mad dads so it's fine
Not really a trope I guess but I hate being able to predict what happens in a movie/tv show. I don’t mean in a literal sense, I’m not a fucking clairvoyant, but just getting a general “vibe” for how most mainstream Hollywood bs is structured. Really takes me out of just enjoying shit.
Couple movies you might like based on some things that I've enjoyed recently:
- Parasite (2019)
- The Handmaiden (2016)
- Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
- Monster House (2006)
Oh yeah Parasite and Everything Everywhere are incredible. I’ll give the other two a try. Thanks!
I went into Everything Everywhere All At Once knowing nothing about the film. I thought it was going to be a slice of life film about the Asian-American experience and a mother trying to reconnect with her daughter.
spoiler
It is that, but it's also a movie where buttplugs are used to give superpowers
Legit question, what's the point of reading/watching something if you know all the tropes and "twists" that are also tropes already?
Even if you know where things are going to end up, the journey can still be a lot of fun. If the storyteller is really good then "knowing" the end can even heighten the tension. In Romeo and Juliet you know everything is going to go to hell, but finding out how is exciting. In a war movie you might "know" that all the protagonists are going to die, and the tension becomes whether they'll be able to complete their goal before they die, or even just examining how they conduct themselves in the face of certain death. In a romcom where you know the characters are going to end up together you can get to a point in the third act where it seems like they're going to be separated and the tension becomes finding out how they resolve the conflict and get to live happily ever after.
There are only so many formats of story you can tell. I find it especially bad when I'm the same age as a director. We grew up watching the same movies, so it can be really obvious what tropes they're drawing on.
I hate when trained fighters/soldiers stop what they're doing in dangerous territory to hash out personal drama or otherwise act like angsty undergrads. Honorable mention goes to "putting down your gun for no reason and walking into another room because the script demands you be unarmed for the jumpscare that's about to happen."
I DESPISE the trope of "everyone forms a shield wall/firing line but then breaks in to indvidual one on one fights as soon as the enemy comes in to contact." I hate it so, so much. I walked out of one of the Hobbit movies when the Dwarves formed a proper shield wall against the oncoming goblins and then the Elves jump over the fucking shield wall to attack. I was so excited because finally a fantasy movie was going to show a shield wall in action and then they were just like "lol no fuck you".
Like IRL, at least in early medieval England, battles were won or lost on who could maintain order and morale in their shield wall longer. If one side's wall lost cohesion the other side could push the weak spot and collapse the whole line, and if your shield wall collapses you're basically dead meat.
They could have so much tension and drama. Trying to hold the line when a spear could come through a gap in the shields at any time is terrifying. People are throwing rocks and axes and firebombs and all kinds of shit at you. If the enemy cavalry breaks through and hits the back of your line you'll die without ever knowing what happened.
But instead they do these ridiculous 1v1 hero fights while everyone is running around in circles like idiots.
Off the top of my head....
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Rape as a lazy shorthand for character development.
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Mental illness as the sole/main factor behind the bad guy hacking ppl up/destroying the world etc.
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Abhorrent fascist/genocidal plan dressed up as having a point but being too harsh when 5 mins critical thought shows it to be total bollocks as well as outright evil.
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Hero character Grizzle McFuckface has to attend therapy against their will or their badge/superhero pass/space ship gets revoked. They hate it, by the end of the episode they grudgingly admit that maybe its helpful and that's it. Job done.
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Planet of the hats/2d fantasy races. Because we can't get away with pretending real cultures and ethnicities are barely human savages fit only for killin' with maybe One Good Guy so we whack some funny prosthetics on em and ship over the racist tropes more or less unquestioned. The only instances I can think of where it's sorta justified might be something like the Guald from stargate who are actual parasitic vampiric organisms.
Abhorrent fascist/genocidal plan dressed up as having a point but being too harsh when 5 mins critical thought shows it to be total bollocks as well as outright evil.
That's not unrealistic, look at the MacArthur's plan to nuke Korea and China, the Georgia Guidestones, the bunkers in New Zealand.
Oh yes sorry shoulda clarified. It's not the abhorrent evil nonsense, it's how the media in question rarely bothers to refute the abhorrent evil on grounds it's nonsense and won't work. Bit like how Thanos's plan was seen as 'well he's got a point' because the flawed assumptions behind it are never addressed.
Honestly Thanos could have solved 'overpopulation' without even the magic wanking glove. Access to education, healthcare and egalitarian policies distributing wealth all lower birth rates and waste. He coulda just scoured the galaxy and supported every single burgeoning but beleagered socialist or protosocialist state with a spaceship that massively outguns anything even modern tech today could throw at it.
He could have just doubled the amount of resources!
Of course the whole thing is ridiculous because with even a cursory understanding of ecology you'd know that populations will grow until they reach the carrying capacity of their environment.
The cowards should have stuck with Thanos being in love with Death.
Did they ever mention why they changed it? Literally no point in cramming in Malthusian eco-fascism in place of a completely serviceable plot, unless the bazingas at Marvel had a private boner for it. They could have even had the spoopy sexy skeleton lady for extra sex-appeal.
I read a couple of sci-fi stories where Earth had colonized a bunch of planets in the full misery of colonialism tradition. Earth kept vastly better technology for itself and every so often "Gamers" from Earth would remote-control super powerful bodies on other planets and go on a rampage of murder, sexual violence, and terror basically playing CoD but in real life in the middle of real cities. It was so incredibly disturbing it kind of ruined some otherwise great Sci-Fi stories.
Okay look I hate running marvel defense as much as the next person but I'm not going to do the Cinema Sins and pretend like this is a plot hole. The reason he didn't use the gloves to make more planets, or resources, or invest in education or whatever is because he's been a tyrant fascist general for a long time and he wants to kill a bunch of people. It's the most believable part.
Yeah his death crush is cute, good on you guy, bone those bones.
Yeah the chuds took his plan and loved it and it's because they always do, "I can fix this situation if you let me kill enough people" is classic fascism.
This is how End Game should have ended have ended if the writers weren't cowards. Thanos does the snap and gives his mushy love speech to Death, but she's like visibly skeeved out and is like "Uh, that's sweet, but I actually have a date right now..."
And then Deadpool rolls up on a moped and is like "Hey babe let's go! I got tickets to Cats and we're gonna be late!"
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"We're in the Middle Ages so everything is dogshit brown".
People in the middle ages wore bespoke clothing dyed with the brightest colors people could afford, and some of the inexpensive and locally available dyes in Europe were quite vibrant. Even peasants, if they weren't completely destitute, would have colorful clothes.
And on top of that; The staunch refusal to put medieval people in medieval clothes. Medieval clothing looks cool! It's often fitted, people with any money would add a wide variety of embellishments. It's comfortable and especially peasant and military clothes were easy to move and work in. Most "Medieval" clothes; ugly leather vests, weird pants, whatever, are ugly and don't look nearly as nice as actual medieval clothing
And another things! Fake armor! Real medieval armor looks cool. A 13th century knight in maille looks like a badass. late medieval and renaissance plate armor looks gorgeous, and if a showrunner actually treated plate armor as conferring the amount of protection it does in real life you could have an antagonist shrugging off blows like the Terminator!
And real swordfighting! Real swordfighting is great! It's fast, it has a lot of visual flare. If fight coordinators take the time to learn it they can use real or realistic techniques to tell a story just as well as the silly flynning so many shows use!
In short, the actual middle ages are so much cooler than the dogshit brown leather vests version so many shows use.
Too hard. Fight scenes now are a bunch of 1 second cuts, flashing by so fast they can give you epilepsy. So, so much easier to film.
A little fact from your first link that I found interesting:
"Throughout most of the middle ages, maps were drawn with East at the top, rather than North. (This is how the word "orient" came to mean "face the correct direction.") A fantasy map that followed this convention would be bottom-justified, instead of left-justified."
Makes sense from a map-user's perspective. Open your map in the morning, orient the map towards the sun, choose direction, put away map, travel for the day.
Idk about that. Magnets have been known for a very long time, and if you know that magnets always point north and the world is a sphere (which was known in classical antiquity.) it's pretty easy to put the two together and know that there must be a magnetic pole.
I still think it's wild that some guy worked out the circumference of the earth thousands of years ago using two sticks and some trigonometry. I think he was right to within a few hundred miles.
I hate when a character suddenly shows up in an action scene and saves the day without any foreshadowing or build up. It's not a shocking development, it's lazy writing.
Anytime I think of that song I just hear the catdog theme song instead, and it just goes back and forth between the two incoherently and I hate it.
They're very similar, at least chunks of them are. I just get shit like "big IRON, big IRON, alone in the world was a little big iron!" popping up and I hate it so much lmao. If I really try to recall each individually I can pick out the differences in rhythm but they seem to converge a lot.
I get this for other songs too, like bits of Pasttime Paradise and Black Sabbath's Paranoid sound extremely similar to me, so it may just be that my brain tends to pattern match something in music too aggressively.
