It's a shame only villains can have interesting backgrounds/motivations in TV/Film now because a trans woman spending her entire life trying to fund research into parallel universes to find one where her partner is still alive would be one hell of a story.
Almost like the Other is fundamentally evil while all the evil done by Our Institutions is merely an error, an aberration, not indicative of their True Nature.
The like first half of the first season was like perfect, and then it was just boring misery after that. When the personal tv show generator ai is ready I need it to make like 5 seasons of stoned and jokerified tech guy who likes edgy monologues, hanging out with eccentric hackers, having weird adventures with his cool drug dealing gf, using Linux, and occasionally going to work at a super normie company whose clients are sociopaths.
What I didn't need was the annoying "crazy plot twist" writing, the fact that the cool drug dealing gf almost literally got fridged, the trans-people-are-dystopian trope, the slow death of all the best characters, and the significant reduction in cool hacking scenes after season 1.
Yeah, I stopped after season 1 and about 3 episodes of season 2, roughly with the same issue.
It's like a rite of passage to dislike one or two of the shows you used to love. My username is based on Ready Player One, which was the coolest book ever to middle school me :kermit-pain:
Those are excellent skills to have in this cyberpunk dystopia we find ourselves in, comrade. :rat-salute-2:
Is this how game of thrones fans felt?
As someone who was a fan of GoT initially but grew more and more disillusioned as they diverged from the books, by the end I was just jokerfied. I remember reading the leaks for S7 and S8 and thinking "holy shit that's so stupid, yeah it's bad now but there's no way these can be right", and then slowly seeing it all come true and just laughing hysterically.
I remember liking season 1, 2, and 3, and then just being massively disappointed and even confused by the point of the show by season 4.
It's my lib favorite. It's absolutely a visual masterpiece and I loved it, but yeah, the politics get progressively worse as the show goes on. The thing is, it's so well made that I can enjoy it even though you can definitely notice how all the truly dangerous edges have been sanded smooth. It has good intentions, but it's also the greatest representation of "what no theory does to a mf" that I've ever seen.
spoiler
The whole 5/9 thing could have been extremely significant, but it became essentially just an adventurist escapade with horrible consequences for the people, which were mostly fixed by the system by the end of the show, because the system works, you know? There's some bad apples, but capitalism can be okay if it's done the right way, trust me bro.
The problem (for you I assume) it’s kinda bait and switch of “we live in a society” into “mind palace do be like that”. It’s about hacker guy, not about the world.
which is interesting, but completely divorced from the scale of societal repercussions shown in the show, esp in s1.
The ones disappointed with the closing arc of this show wanted a corporate espionage thriller when it was ultimately about
spoiler
one man's struggle with mental trauma born from sexual abuse
I thought it was beautifully presented and several of the episodes in the final two seasons are some of the finest TV ever made.
But you see, revolution is a side plot to hoodie guy head space and interactions. Revolution is side piece, which, due to its appealing imagery, overtakes its backdrop status to primary interest, and thus you get annoyed by its incompleteness.
It’s kinda like if in breaking bad walterwhite started usa ground invasion of mexico, at that point his character is suddenly not that interesting
On the bright side, that show had a lot of great camera work.