Archived Discussion Main / MoodWhiplash

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Out of curiosity, how has the webcomic Shortpacked! not been mentioned here? I'm not 100% confident, so I'm not including it, but it really does seem to flip between zany humor not out of place in Penny Arcade and serious drama. I guess in that way it's not too different from Sluggy Freelance, but the timescale is much shorter; the mood isn't preserved for more than ten strips at a time, it seems.

Charred Knight: When the hell did we start listing crap like this. No one gives a crap about Bob's watching habit.

Bob: Moved it to Mood Whiplash. We've got a proper place for stuff like that now.

Genji: How about Super Paper Mario? It takes a severe turn from goofy to dark around Chapter 6. One minute, you're fighting samurais whose names are all different Mario and real life puns. Then, the world gets sucked into the Void and reduced to nothingness, Dimentio sends all of the heroes to the underworld, and the stakes suddenly become much higher. It gets a little brighter from there, but then the final chapter reveals Dimentio's treachery, the relationship between Count Bleck and Tippi, and the sacrifice they ultimately have to make. There's still humor, but it doesn't appear as often as the earlier chapters.

Random Troper: Of course, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door has its share of Mood Whiplash too, especially in the later chapters. Chapter 5 has Bobbery's tragic backstory, followed by Large Ham Flavio's long-winded storytelling, and then the attack by the ghosts. And then Chapter 8 has Mario and company confronting Lord Crump who attacks with The rather silly-looking robot Magnus von Grapple 2.0. Things get serious when the previously comic villain Crump appears to die!. He is blasted off into space, his last words being a loud scream... 'GRODUS!!!!!'. And then Tec, Princess Peach's computer ally, is dying. Its last act is to blow up the X-Naut's base.. Of course, one mustn't forget how Bowser and Kammy Koopa drop in ... literally ... during the otherwise dark and serious confrontation with Grodus. The villain of most of the other Mario games ends up being the comic relief in this otherwise dark portion of the game.

• A small clarification: The Crump battle is not actually Chapter 8, but the end of Chapter 7. But it still fits.

• 95% of the first Indiana Jones movie is a fairly light-hearted adventure with not too much of a body count. The last 5% features God melting the faces off of an island full of Nazis. Which would be bad if they weren't dirty, stinking Nazis.
  • Er.....93% actually. You forgot about the guy getting impaled at the beginning and the death of the giant mechanic.
    • And the Nazis threatening to torture the girl with a red-hot poker. "Light-hearted" indeed.
    • *Shudders* The airplane propeller scene... I'd say that was about when I fully realized where the movie was going. Still didn't prepare me for the infamous melting scene, of course...

Raiders of the Lost Ark never presents itself as a light-hearted romp. It starts out with several rather gruesome deaths and continues to feature many fatal action scenes, rampaging Nazis, and threats of divine destruction. Even the cute monkey is not safe.