Stories that "Dropped the ball".

[Wary Wolf]

The Drizzt series after 'The Spine of the world". Or rather, Spine was more or less the turning point. Admittedly the rest of the books in "The path of Darkness" Series were ok (Jarlaxe!), and the "Hunter Blades" trilogy were tolerable, Spine was just mediocre.

It's a shame, as Salvatore seemed to be trying to experiment with narrative flow, which is commendable, but the whole story ended up being a sort of Franz Lieber rip-off (NLeiber's great and all, but Salvatore's characters were a bit too similar). The 'romance' story was also iffy at best. Didn't like having the hero of the first series become all angsty either.

I guess with a series running as long as it had, it was bound to slip a little, but to me it hasn't really recovered. Still, I regularly enjoy rereading the first three series, with maybe Sea of Swords and Hunter Blades if I've nothing better to read.

And at least Salvatore's Cleric and Jarlaxe/Artimus series hold up really well on their own.

 

[jhoroz]

Holy shit, that show got worse?

No, it got better

The third act is full on crazy over the top bullshit that the series has been building up to and its only Silent Pony's fault for not understanding and appreciating that.

 

[sonicneedslovetoo]

snip

Dunno if I did that snip right but Amen to that.

Why is nobody mentioning the Star Wars prequels?

Anyway I read a lot of fanfiction and the most common theme for bad stories(that I can get through the first chapter of) is that they'll swerve randomly near the end because the author hasn't planned it out. I'm not going to name names because that would be rude but one story the Author started taking acid and decided to spoil the entire mystery of the story inside of the authors notes in a plain statement. Not even inside the normal story, the end chapter notes unspoiled without warning and it went completely against everything they had been setting up in the story up until that point.
Then another one ended with a random suicide for the main character out of nowhere. it was setup so badly inside of one sentence in the chapter before the end that I had to start explaining to people what they missed because they had no idea what was going on.

Neither story was particularly bad(they were actually both pretty good stories) up until that point but those twists were so badly done and out of left field that they completely destroyed the story for me.

 

[Wary Wolf]

Heh, well Salvatore got stuck with doing the novelization of Attack of the Clones. Did a fair job. A lot of the film novelizations are borderline fan fiction. He actually tried to put depth into characters.

The way I look at the prequels to Star Wars was the idea that probably the death of Anakin Skywalker was a good thing. Its surprising that some one as bad ass as Vader could be born from such a psychopathic angst burger. Shame that one of the most iconic villains in film got such a average backstory.

 

[GrumbleGrump]

Why is nobody mentioning the Star Wars prequels?

Why would they? That dead horse has been beaten so much that its atoms are spread across the entire world.

 

[MiskWisk]

Sword Art Online: Why name a show after the first arc of a story, if you are only going to visit that setting in one of 4 current arcs?

Even though I actually really like SAO I have to kinda agree here. Although I have to also correct you slightly: the first arc is called "Aincrad".

This isn't a case of "oh the second arc was rubbish so it should have been replaced with more of the first arc" either, because I'm one of the apparently few people who have a soft spot for Fairy Dance (despite what it did to the best character in the series, Asuna). But I really wanted more Aincrad arc with those super-high stakes and an actual conclusion to it, beating floor 100 and a climactic battle and all that. Cutting off like that was just ugh. -_-

I'll throw in another agreement with you. While I think I had more issues with Fairy Dance than you, I still didn't find it that bad, more generic fantasy at that point. Thankfully, I have fanfics that have managed to surpass the source material even if it took a bit of spelunking to find.

OT: Final Fantasy VIII. Okay, this is my least favourite FF on the PS1 but dear god did it get convoluted. I look back on my memories now and find all I remember is a near impenetrable time travel plot that took up far to much of the story and the GF's wiping people's memories which was only hinted at in a small off hand comment that was so buried in text an oil drill couldn't reach it.

 

[happyninja42]

OT: The movie Here Comes the Boom. Kevin James stars as a loveable, but hapless highschool teacher, where the funding is drying up, and they're going to have to cut a lot of extra curricular programs. So, he decides to try and raise the money by doing amateur MMA fighting. Your typical sports movie, of the underdog taking on the established powerhouse. It was genuinely fun and moving to me all the way through it, and they actually made me believe that Kevin James could be a fighter. (Seriously, the dude got pretty beefy for the role. He wasn't super cut and defined, but he had clearly lifted some weights, he was like a bear.)

And then the ending happened.

Spoiler

The money that he raised to pay for the programs was stolen, so instead of just having to actually show up for the final fight, to top off the money simply for participating, he had to WIN, because the cash prize for winning was exactly the same amount of money that he needed. So he goes up against the world champion MMA at the time,.....*sighs*...and wins. This...this was just so wrong to me. They shouldn't have done it this way. The whole movie he talks about how he doesn't care if he wins, that it's just a means to an end. That his real goal was getting the money for the school, he didn't care what his record was. So I think that the better lesson, would've been to have him fight his best, and lose, realistically this is what would happen going up against the world champion MMA heavyweight. BUT, have the champion, who of course would've heard why the guy was fighting, donate the winnings to the school, as a sign of respect for what the teacher was doing. He could jokingly say something like "Hey, the amount of good PR I'm going to get from doing this is going to net me a few million alone in endorsements. Besides, I'm already rich, what's another 50k?" Then he could smile, thump Kevin James on the shoulder, and walk out. And it would be able to teach the lesson that sometimes, even if you lose, you can win. But NO, they had to do the classic underdog ending and have him come back from behind and stomp the champion, and save the day himself. It just, really disappointed me by the end. I was loving the movie, but then they did that and I was just...meh.

Wow, I wasn't sure anyone else had seen that movie. It was one of those that came out and was forgotten after the opening weekend, but I quite liked it too, at least until the ending. Not that the predictable-as-the-tides conclusion was enough to ruin what was a very likeable little movie overall. It just could have done with a more effective and less eye-rolling message at the end.

Yeah, I caught a trailer for it, and it included that song by 30 Seconds to Mars, which REALLY worked well on me. The chanting and war drum thumping, as the children sing about a "battle call", coupled with the images of Kevin fighting in the ring. It really worked to fire me up for this underdog story. And I always want to see what I call the SNL people do stuff outside their one popular thing. Like Jim Carrey, or Will Farrell, or Adam Sandler, who became famous for 1 SNL character, and then milked that character for the next 30 years until we all hate them. I don't like their normal stuff, as it's all the same shit, but when they do that "one different thing", I usually want to see it. The Truman Show, Stranger Than Fiction, Reign Over Me, etc. So when I saw this, and thought it looked like Kevin's attempt at a semi-serious role, I was excited. And he did really well! I really can't complain about the movie at all, as far as his acting, the tone of the movie or anything, it was really well made....they just, really disappointed me with the ending. As I said in my first post, I think the ending would've had more impact if they did what I suggested, but in the end, it wasn't a terrible movie. It was just, typical underdog sports movie.

I mean really, this trailer is just really good, and hits my "defiant glory" button really hard. Especially at 1:30 when the music kicks in. But I'm a sucker for anthem songs, and stories about fighting for something bigger than yourself.

 

[FalloutJack]

Batman

You're going to have to validate that statement. It is essentially impossible to to berate the whole entire everything of most popular superhero in America, so you'd better have one dilly of a story to tell here.

OT: Final Fantasy VIII. Okay, this is my least favourite FF on the PS1 but dear god did it get convoluted. I look back on my memories now and find all I remember is a near impenetrable time travel plot that took up far to much of the story and the GF's wiping people's memories which was only hinted at in a small off hand comment that was so buried in text an oil drill couldn't reach it.

Like Naruto, FF8 never had the ball, except the Idiot Ball. Biggest Idiot Balls in the world...

 

[MiskWisk]

Batman

You're going to have to validate that statement. It is essentially impossible to to berate the whole entire everything of most popular superhero in America, so you'd better have one dilly of a story to tell here.

OT: Final Fantasy VIII. Okay, this is my least favourite FF on the PS1 but dear god did it get convoluted. I look back on my memories now and find all I remember is a near impenetrable time travel plot that took up far to much of the story and the GF's wiping people's memories which was only hinted at in a small off hand comment that was so buried in text an oil drill couldn't reach it.

Like Naruto, FF8 never had the ball, except the Idiot Ball. Biggest Idiot Balls in the world...

But they were at least coherent in the start. By the end of both the writers had to be on something like LSD.

 

[Coruptin]

Why is America portrayed as an enemy of Japan in so much Japanese media? We're on friendly terms, all things considered, and we certainly wouldn't ally with China and Russia against them.

America did ally itself with Russia against Japan in WW2, and bombed the fuck out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And Dresden. So it goes.

**this will be heavy sarcasm**

indeed, why would a country we were at war with and dropped 2 nuclear bombs on, which in turn forced said country to fundamentally change as a result, ever see US as a bad guy in their media?

boggles the mind I tell you, truly shocking.

why do we use nazi's and russians and communists as the bad guys in our media?

Are you implying that being forced to drop the nukes was comparable to the scale of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or the Empire of Japan?

 

[Elfgore]

Heaven's Lost Property. It's a harem series which never really took itself too seriously, until the last dozen chapters or so.

Spoiler: Spoiler for second movie and last manga chapters.

We start with two of the antagonist's minions, who commit suicide for their master. The one, by one, by one. Every main character we've seen to that point is killed. Eventually, all that is left is the protagonist and a rather mysterious and sadistic student president. The protagonist beats up the bad guy and stops the world from ending. Then, it turns out his best friend from childhood was an angel dreaming into our world and died of an illness. The first thing the angel did was to make an android version to remain on earth. Then the protagonist goes to a giant pillar that can grant any wish, that was suppose to have no wished remaining. Only his club leader had hacked into it and gave room for one more. He then wished for everything to go back to normal. The story ends with everyone coming back to life and all are happy.

The story just went completely dark for no reason, then none of it mattered in the end.

 

[maninahat]

Big O, right from the get go, by taking a premise of a billionaire playboy who's job it is to settle disputes between an entire planet of people suffering from Amnesia, and then somehow shoehorning humongous mecha battles into the second half of every episode. There are so many ways you could carry a story on the memory loss thing - but giant robot punching ends up taking precident. It's not that there isn't a place for giant robot fist fights, its just that it feels totally inappropriate for the concept.

 

[Lightspeaker]

Are you implying that being forced to drop the nukes...

Considering that over the past over the past couple of decades its become somewhat apparent that in all likelihood you probably didn't actually NEED to drop the nukes because Japan would have surrendered anyway given the conventional bombing campaign and everything else...yeah I'd say nuking the hell out of a couple of cities was the wrong thing to do. Some would argue a war crime in fact, an act of state terrorism. But because the Allies won the war nobody got in trouble for it.

...was comparable to the scale of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or the Empire of Japan?

Pretty sure that atrocities don't cancel each other out like that. Its not a game of "who is the most morally upstanding". The Holocaust in Europe and the Nanking Massacre in China, for example, were both awful, terrible, monstrous things. But this isn't a children's nursery and you don't get to say 'well he started it' to excuse when you do a terrible thing. An immoral act is an immoral act and it can be criticised as such, as illustrated the backlash against the bombing of Dresden DURING the war.

Flip it around. If Germany had had nukes and dropped them on...say...London and Moscow is there any doubt in the fact that if they'd still gone on to lose the war that the people responsible would have been the first up in front of the court at Nuremberg and charged with crimes against humanity?

 

[Catfood220]

And to make things worse, I really liked the follow-up Christmas episode, right up to the end where you can see the stitch in the plot where Jenna Coleman's contract was renewed. It made me mad that we were that close to getting rid of her >:<

In that case it may make you happy to learn that this is the last series of Doctor Who that she will be in. Heard her on the radio the other day talking about her exit.

 

[Hunter.Wolf]

For me it was SAO's first season, it was an interesting take on the "trapped in a computer game virtual world" with very high stakes and fantastic action scenes, it was so good and exciting up until it totally dropped the ball midway and Kiritio went Neo for no clear reason whatsoever other than character armor (yeah cause pure willpower can override computer code somehow !!!).

That deus ex machina was so poorly made it pretty much killed the rest of the series for me (and the crappy sleazy dumb villain in the 2nd half didn't help at all), i did watch it to the end and the 2nd season too (which was slightly better) but the initial excitement was gone, the only thing that made me fall in love with SAO again was the story arc titled "Mother's Rosario" in the 2nd series, a great heartfelt story that removes Kirito from the role of untouchable Neo incarnate and places the more human Asuna in his place, and the results are beautiful, the story explores very mature themes and topics (i'd be giving away the story if i mention them here) and it ends with in a very sad but sweet way, long story short it's the best SAO had to offer since the first half of the first series.

That's the example of "dropping the ball" that really impacted me the most.

=================================================================

Attack on Titan: I went into that anime wanting an 'Us vs Them' kind of story, and then they just had to throw that random curve ball, and have people be Titans. I haven't been following the manga or anything, but I hear that all Titans are actually humans, and I just find that to be typical anime bullshit.

Really !!!, a generic "Us vs Them" setup!!! ... blah ... that has been done a thousand time, it would have added nothing if the Titans where all just dumb brainless monsters and that's it, and it's quite obvious from the very FIRST episode that not all Titans are stupid and there is something human/intelligent about some of them, this twist makes things way more interesting and tense.

The idea of an intelligent/human titan is scary seeing how much damage they can do and to add intelligence and subterfuge makes it really scary and tense as hell (a human/titan operative can pop up anywhere, level an entire sector of the city then vanish just like in first episode that kicked everything into motion).

I'm sure everyone who watched the show enjoyed the intelligent "who's done it" mystery scenario this twist created and added how it added a lot to suspense/dread and kept us guessing who are the other human/titan hybrids hidden in the population (and believe me there were hints that you could use since ep1 to guess who the human-titans were if you looked hard enough), and it also helps expand the plot since we do understand where all that came from in the latest chapters, it's quite coherent and far from "anime bullshit", whatever the hack that is it's not in Attack on Titan.


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What would real governments do? Right of the bat, as soon as those people came out from the gate, they'd send their ambassadors with their best translators to ask these guests to visit THEIR countries and ask from representatives of Japan if they mind. And all this while cameras are pointed at them. Japan simply CANNOT say no. And when they are in the USA, Russia and/or China, politicians of these countries would've started working on the guests to convince them that if one country has access to the gate it is unfair.

Yeah, because the USA "never" sent spec-ops team on operations like this in other countries to kidnap or "rescue" individuals with high value to the USA ... yeah, those guys just sit in their bunkers eating popcorn and let "smart" politicians handle everything XD

Welcome to the real world mate --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition .. read up on Extraordinary Rendition operations and how/why they are carried out, the USA isn't above this at all, as well as China and Russia, politics won't work when you don't have anything to barter with, the USA, China and Russia are in the weak position since the gate appeared on Japanese soil, they needed leverage, you sir clearly have no idea how real world politics work at all, "ask the guests to visit them" pffff .. really!!! you think that would work with what's at stake here, of course japan will refuse indirectly and make up a thousand excuses, that's how real world politics work.

And that is what I thought of right after I watched episodes that took place in our world. Politicians would've thought of something even better. They may look and act dumb, but they are not dumb for real.

There are plenty of dumb politicians out there, you give them too much credit.


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I'll go with Berserk, the anime since it just ended in mid-rape with no explanation at all. And no, I will not read the manga.

Your loss sire, your loss .. on the good side there are movie remakes of the Golden Arc (the anime) that expand the story a bit more with promise of more movies to adapt the rest of the manga soon.

And seriously how long have you been an anime/manga fan!!?, you do understand this is the way manga/anime adaptions work all the time, mostly because adaptions start before manga is over and since anime budgets are way more limited they either have to abruptly end the story when they run out of manga material or make crappy cheap fillers to sell on DVDs and cover the costs of the anime hoping their anime will promote the manga sales, only real good anime adaptions are those of already finished complete manga (like the 2nd Full Metal Alchemist series Brotherhood and the classical Parasyte manga that got an anime recently).

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Pretty sure that atrocities don't cancel each other out like that. Its not a game of "who is the most morally upstanding". The Holocaust in Europe and the Nanking Massacre in China, for example, were both awful, terrible, monstrous things. But this isn't a children's nursery and you don't get to say 'well he started it' to excuse when you do a terrible thing. An immoral act is an immoral act and it can be criticised as such, as illustrated the backlash against the bombing of Dresden DURING the war.

Flip it around. If Germany had had nukes and dropped them on...say...London and Moscow is there any doubt in the fact that if they'd still gone on to lose the war that the people responsible would have been the first up in front of the court at Nuremberg and charged with crimes against humanity?

THIS .. THIS a hundred time, thank you sir for being a decent human being, i have had a really hard time trying to explain how atrocities don't cancel each other or make more atrocities suddenly ok, what Japan and Germany did in WW2 was horrible and inhuman, but so is the dropping of the nukes, sure the moral situation of the USA and the allies is better since their end goal is ending the war (while Japan and Germany had world domination and genocide plans) it still doesn't make instantly vaporizing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and infecting millions with radiation ok.

 

[Hunter.Wolf]

Sry, double post by mistake.

 

[Sean Renaud]

I haven't read every post in this and I see a lot of Naruto but not for teh reason that spiked it for me. I get many of the complaints agaisnt Naruto but for me the problem was when they literally turned their premise on it's head for virtually no reason that REALLY impacted the story.

Naruto starts off driving home the concept that hard work and perseverance are better than simply being born lucky. This is of course best demonstrated by his rivalry with Sasuke but if you hadn't gotten the point they have Neji literally spell it out for you. (For non fans Neji and Sasuke are born with with special eyes that grant them powers that simply make you awesome ninjas) Naruto's victory is supposed to be essentially "fuck fate, I'll earn my victory!" And Rock Lee, the one born "broken" (For non fans he has some disease that prevents him from doing ninja magic, he can only kick and punch and run fast.) is the literal embodiment of hard work trumps born luck. Let's fast forward starting with Rock Lee.

By the end of the series Rock Lee has only one significant victory under his belt, vs Sasuke at the beginning of the Chunin Exams. He loses to Gaara in the semi-finals. He loses to Kimmimaru in the Rescue Sasuke Arc, he spends most of Part II simply not doing much (as does everybody not with Naruto) he does little in the Ninja War and his Master despite getting some of the best blows in on Madara ultimately still serves only as a delaying tactic for others to get back up and fight.

Naruto who is presented as a hard luck case turns out to have by far the greatest pedigree of any ninja shown. One one half of his family from his mother he's related to the Senju Clan. We're not told how far the Uzimaki's are from the Senju. That means the 1st, 2nd and 5th Hokage are essentially his cousins with an unclear number of separation. Probably not that far. The 4th Hokage is his father and a ninja so legendary that Naruto is actually recognized by a few foreign ninja who've never seen him! His "drawback" demon who might break out and kill everybody if he lets it out turns out to be a pretty decent guy once you get to know him and is certainly not some homicidal , genocidal maniac. Oh and Naruto is actually the reincarnation of one of two legendary ninjas.

The entire last arc basically boils down as such "Were you born better? Do you have a monster sealed inside you?" If the answer to both these questions is no you don't matter. Kabuto comes up a long way and loses. Basically after trying to tell us that hard work conquers all the real moral of the story is that's it's better to be lucky than it is to be good.


The other is Soul Eater for a similar reason.

The entire show has focused heavily on team work. First between Meister and Weapon (The weapons are living beings who can transform into weapons in this series so it's like a partnership) and later with your entire team via a process called soul ressonance. (Which is just standard Anime power of friendship crap) No problem. Except you get to the end and every single team attack we can think of fails one girl (her gender isn't the important part) stands up decides she's done being afraid and beats the final hazard in one on one combat! You can't spend 50+ episodes telling me that Team Work makes the Dream Work and then have the finale be "I am the chosen one, alright?!"

 

[Scars Unseen]

Why is America portrayed as an enemy of Japan in so much Japanese media? We're on friendly terms, all things considered, and we certainly wouldn't ally with China and Russia against them. That's less realistic then them portraying our leaders as stupid (which they are). Maybe they miss their days of empire. It's not the first time I've heard of this, though.

Snip

The reason is nationalism. Japan doesn't hate Americans, but there is a polarizing split between those who are in favour of the current state of alliance with the US (where the US has multiple bases in Japan, is obligated to defend it if attacked, and Japan is legally required to be neutral) and those who hate it and want Japan to be 'independent' once more. This split is so polarizing that legislation which would make an attack on a Japanese ally be considered an attack on Japan itself (and thus make deployment abroad much easier) only passed the lower house due to the opposition storming out, and had tens of thousands of protesters out in the street against it.

How Japan should treat relations with the US is basically one of the major issues of politics over there.

Oh it gets better than that. That same bill caused a fist fight in the diet. A fist fight. Between Japanese legislators. The implications of this bill may be serious, but you gotta admit, this:

Spoiler

is pretty hilarious.

Anyway, I don't think there were any real problems with GATE so far unless you view nationalism in entertainment to be a problem, in which case... yeah...

My candidate for ball dropping is Charlotte. It started out so good(well, there was that baseball episode, but it's Jun Maeda, so of course there's a baseball episode), and then mid way through it started rushing through as many plot twists and time skips as it could in what is possibly the most rushed pacing I've ever seen in an anime. It's a shame too, because the material is good; it just needed to be a longer running show.

Well, if I'm lucky they'll do the same thing that Angel Beats did and adapt it into a visual novel later.

 

[jademunky]

And seriously how long have you been an anime/manga fan!!?, you do understand this is the way manga/anime adaptions work all the time, mostly because adaptions start before manga is over and since anime budgets are way more limited they either have to abruptly end the story when they run out of manga material or make crappy cheap fillers to sell on DVDs and cover the costs of the anime hoping their anime will promote the manga sales, only real good anime adaptions are those of already finished complete manga (like the 2nd Full Metal Alchemist series Brotherhood and the classical Parasyte manga that got an anime recently).

Oh I know, I just don't see the problem with creating two separate continuities when the show outpaces the manga. I've been a casual anime fan since I was a teenager but have never been able to enjoy manga.

Also, I worry a little that since Berserk, the manga itself is still going on (after how many years?), it's creator might not have an actual plan for wrapping up the entire story. If I ever do get into a japanese comic book, it would likely, however, be that one.