Quotes / Franchise Original Sin

On Anime and Manga

[Soul Society] is pure shonen storytelling brilliance, and I only have three tiny issues with it. [...] These are all such minor issues that if we were talking about Soul Society by itself, I wouldn't even bring them up, but I do because they're the seeds to problems that will eventually grow throughout the series and have dramatic effects on later arcs.

— Super Eyepatch Wolf, "The Fall of Bleach: Four Years Later"

"And all of this is to say that Toei are the undisputed masters of taking a couple of pages of manga and turning it into a fully fledged quote-unquote 'episode.' And that practice may have been forgivable up until Dressrosa, but when you are throttling an already slow story, then the experience can become quite noticeably excruciating."

— The Grand Line Review, "The Dressrosa Disaster"

"Now, let's be clear here- this structure I laid out wasn't 100% consistent all the time. It was a core aspect of the series often enough that you'd get used to it, but that doesn't mean there weren't a few duds and nonconforming elements. In fact, not only did those duds exist, but they gradually became more frequent as we approach the arc that broke the series."

— Oceaniz, "The Arc that Broke MHA"

On Film — Animated

Shark Tale was crude and celebrity-infested and pop culture reference-ridden to the max, showing how DreamWorks completely forgot why Shrek worked as well as it did. It didn't have these three elements because they make for a winning formula for animated movies. It had them because they made for a winning parody of Disney. Shrek works because it acts crude on the outside despite having a really strong emotional center you'd never expect. Just like the main character. Shrek tells a beautiful love story for characters who have been denied beauty or love in classic fairy tales, many of which came from Disney. This is the fundamental core appeal of Shrek. So when you rip that core out and plug it into a terrible mob movie about talking fish, of course it doesn't work. The crude humor has no underlying purpose anymore; it's just there to be crude. Everything Shark Tale wants to say is vapid and meaningless, and that's because it leans too heavily into the Shrek mold. And this Shrek mold is honestly what's holding DreamWorks back as a studio.

— Schaffrillas Productions, "Why Shrek is an Enduring Classic"

"A lot of people were apparently surprised by how childish and pun-based the writing was. To them I say, again... all the Rankin/Bass specials they love are the same way!"

— Peter Paltridge, Platypus Comix review of A Miser Brothers Christmas

On Film — Live-Action

But Les Misérables (2012) was a harbinger of things to come. And for every truly bewildering decision made in Cats the warning signs were always there.

— Lindsay Ellis, Why Is Cats?

Michael Myers was an absence of character. And yet all the sequels are trying to explain that. That’s silliness — it just misses the whole point of the first movie, to me. He’s part person, part supernatural force. The sequels rooted around in motivation. I thought that was a mistake.

— John Carpenter on the Halloween sequels

"[What people forget about the Original Trilogy is that coincidences, or in Star Wars, 'The Force,' constantly put people places and brings characters together in ways that seem ridiculous. But it's a large part of the mythos. Consider that Leia put a message in a droid that was found by her long lost twin brother on a random desert planet. Just sayin'.

— Cinema Wins, "Everything GREAT About Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace!"

"This Marvel movie went all-in on the comedy and people really liked that. The thing about James Gunn, he's very good at including heart in something as silly as Peacemaker, which is, you know, very silly. And I think a lot of Marvel movies after Guardians tried to do that and did not do it as well, and we were left with, like, a lot of quippiness. Which is one of the major criticisms you hear a lot about Marvel, is that they undercut emotional moments with jokes. Not to say James Gunn doesn't do that- he does do it often- I just think that the success of this movie led to a whole lot of that, with not a great hit rate."

— Ryan George, Screen Rant Pitch Meetings, Guardians of the Galaxy Revisited

"Critics really enjoyed the first Rush Hour film, but hated the sequels, cause they said Chris Tucker was too loud and talked too much. Did you see the first film?! And don't get me wrong, I can totally understand not liking these movies, but claiming the others are doing something that the first one wasn't, when it so clearly was? This is just confusing!"

— Doug Walker, The Nostalgia Critic, "When Are Critics Wrong?"

On Live-Action TV

I'm about to harness the Venn diagram of Glee fans and Oasis fans with this next comparison: If Seasons 1 and 2 are their Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory, Season 3 is their Be Here Now. It is a bloated, messy, exhausting season, even though it's mostly more of the same plotlines that have defined the series so far.

— Mic The Snare, "Here's What We Missed on Glee"

The point is that while it might be more satisfying in a timeline to say that all History Channel content was once the golden standard of journalism, and then it just fell off the rails, the truth is that from the very beginning, History featured the sort of content we associate with it, just to a more benign and less comedic degree.

— Quinton Reviews, "The Decline of History Channel"

"Sherlock is an overproduced, overwritten, over-pissed pile of garbage, and the greatest reason ever made to dodge paying your TV license. But what's so wrong about it? And why do so many people like it? Or rather, why did so many people think they liked it until Season 4 came out, and everyone collectively realized that it was bad and always had been?"

— H Bomber Guy, "Sherlock Is Garbage, And Here's Why"

On Music

"Nirvana popularized the hokey 'here comes the part of the song where we have a tantrum' school of '90s rock that's played a major role in hiding Courtney's powerful voice ever since, and they were pioneers of the 'you can tell this song is serious because we're playing it really slow' school, as well."

— Chuck Eddy

Anything you love about music, no matter the genre, can usually be traced back to one seminal recording that introduced a trend or technique that forever changed the way people make music. On the flip side of that, of course, is the fact that you can also pinpoint those moments in music history where, even if no one realized it at the time, things took a turn for the worse. Interestingly, because the masses generally aren't inspired to copy that which they don't enjoy, the awful trends in music tend to start at the same place the good ones do, hidden within great pieces of work.

Identifying these wellspring moments is especially easy with rap music, since it's only been around since the '70s. Less source material to sift through makes influences easier to spot. And when it comes to rap music history, some of the very worst the art form has to offer started with some of the finest albums the rap music genre has ever produced.

Here are four classic rap albums that accidentally destroyed rap music.

— Adam Tod Brown, Cracked, "4 Classic Rap Albums That Ruined Rap Music"

"When Skrillex emerged in 2010, the rage which flowed from the UK dubstep scene towards him happened not because he defied some unwritten rules about what the tropes of dubstep should be, but rather because he personified everyone's worst anxieties of what we could already see happening all around us. [...] Skrillex was the cold bucket of water to the face that made us realise that the enduring legacy of dubstep would not be the memory of it which we had in our minds; it would be the parts of the scene which we'd all been wishing would go away."

— Timbah.On.Toast, "All My Homies Hate Skrillex | A story about what happened with dubstep."

But hey, so what if the production sucks. That's not new to Metallica. 1988's ...And Justice for All is one of the most beloved metal albums of all time, despite the fact that it famously sounds like total butt. And all the fans said their "comeback" album, Death Magnetic, sounded better on Guitar Hero than it did on the actual CD. If the songs are there, then the fans will put up with some iffy mixing choices. And they did not put up with this.

— Todd in the Shadows, "TRAINWRECKORDS: St. Anger"

Prism was the album right before [Witness] and it did have a bunch of hits, but... come on, anything [Katy Perry] released after Teenage Dream would have been huge. There's a phenomenon that I call the 'delayed flop', where something becomes successful just through hype or momentum, but it turns out no one really likes it and you end up paying for it on the next installment. I mean, let's look at Prism: Its biggest hit was "Roar"; closest thing to it from the previous album was "Firework", which was obviously better than "Roar". My favorite Prism single was "Birthday"; "California Gurls" was obviously better than "Birthday". The other number one hit from Prism was "Dark Horse"; I didn't love "E.T.", but "E.T." is obviously better than "Dark Horse", now often called one of the worst number ones of the decade. And you barely hear any of those songs anymore. Witness was probably always gonna suck, but Prism had already put Katy in a losing position, even if it wasn't clear at the time.

— Todd in the Shadows, "TRAINWRECKORDS: Witness"

3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days In The Life Of… has aged so poorly in the public imagination that when I revisited it, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the album critics of the world deemed the unassailable apogee of 1992 hip-hop is actually pretty damn good, if fundamentally flawed, in ways that foreshadowed the group’s rapid demise.

— Nathan Rabin, "In 1992 Arrested Development looked like the future of hip-hop, but the future had other plans"

On Video Games

Now like with Skyrim, I enjoyed Fallout 4 and I admittedly given Bethesda a huge pass in the past because I liked their storytelling and quest progression. But that's the rub, isn't it? By taking those out, Bethesda has effectively burned its one get-out-of-jail-free card, exposing the archaic, clunky, glitch-written skeleton that barely holds together the company's titles.

— Jimquisition, discussing Fallout 76 in "Six Times Bethesda Was Massively Incompetent"

As I explained, Fallout 76 played to exactly none of Bethesda's strengths, having willfully scrapped all of the things that made their games beloved. And this is where they really screwed themselves over, because without the stuff that usually protected them from critical savaging, their faults and their incompetencies were laid bare for the world to see. Without the writing, the atmosphere, and authenticity backing them up, the lackluster visuals, sloppy gameplay, and endless parade of broken bugs had no shield, no filter, it was more obvious than ever. When I first reviewed the game, I said it was a mess even by Bethesda's usual standards. On reflection, I wonder if that's true or if it was just that Bethesda offered so little of the good stuff that the bad stuff simply soaked into my experience more readily?

— Jimquisition, "A Post-Nuclear Post-Mortem Of Fallout 76"

The technical state of Fallout 76 is so far beyond acceptable that as Jim Sterling commended in his recent Jimquisition on the subject, it honestly forces me to revisit my opinion of previous Bethesda releases. It's like when you want to cook a frog. You don't throw it into boiling water, because it will just jump straight out. What you do instead is you put it into cold water and then gently bring that water to a boil. I feel like we're the frog in the water, and Fallout 76 is the point at which we finally realize that after two decades of buggy releases we've all been cooked alive.

— Skill Up, "Fallout 76 - The Review (2018)"

But here's my take. Everyone was fine with loot boxes in their games until suddenly, they weren't. The trend towards monetizing multiplayer games happened way faster than with single-player games. And I think 2017 and Star Wars Battlefront II represented a crash of sorts, where things had gone too far after building up for too long. Overwatch's loot boxes are perfectly fine from one perspective, but on the other hand they softened the ground for what EA would later attempt to do with Star Wars. I think the parallels here with Odyssey are very important to draw. I do not think Odyssey is ruined by its microtransactions, far from it in fact. I think this is an excellent game in most regards, I just think that it's too long, and that its length ends up hurting it more than helping it. But while I don't think that Odyssey is ruined by its microtransactions, I do think they soften the ground for more ambitious single-player monetization in the future. And in the years to come, when the crash finally happens as it did with Star Wars: Battlefront II, we'll look to Odyssey as we did to Overwatch; as a warning sign overlooked and a herald of things to come.

— Skill Up, "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey - The Review (2018)"

Going back to play Assassin's Creed II in a world where so many titles are just Assassin's Creed II but a slightly different flavor has made playing it just as boring to me as playing any of those other games. For so long, though, I imagined it as if it were somehow different — as if it were somehow better than those games. With the Assassin's Creed series specifically, as each new title came out and appealed to me less and less, I kept thinking back to my time with ACII and wishing the series would have a return to form, but it already was in form. For better or worse, the gaming industry has been shaped by ACII, and maybe this isn't fair, but as someone who doesn't love the direction open-world games have taken, during my replay, I found myself resenting it. Assassin's Creed II is the face that launched a thousand ships. For so long, I thought of it as an exception to the Ubisoft rule, but in reality, it is the rule. It does all the things people make fun of Ubisoft games for doing, and it does a lot of them far more often than titles that get infinitely more crap for doing them ever did.

— Razbuten, The Games I Wish I Never Replayed

"Like it or not, the game was breaking new ground. Unfortunately, they broke that ground directly over Hell."

— James Tyler of Cleanpricegaming, describing how Grand Theft Auto V introduced microtransactions to full-price retail games

"The thing about Half-Life is that most shooters at the time still had guns that floated three feet off the ground and gently spun like a barber's pole, and nothing else had ever felt so absorbingly real. So we can indirectly blame it for every monstrous thing done in the name of 'realism' ever since. Starting with its own multiplayer mod, Counter-Strike, game of choice for the first generation of realistic military shooter guttercunts, whose hate-filled whims now dictate half the fucking industry."

— Zero Punctuation, Half Life

"People complain about things like Dexit today in Sword and Shield where you don't have access to all the Pokémon. This started specifically with Ruby and Sapphire and the changes they made with Pokémon Colosseum and XD. If you are against things like the Dexit move that happened in Sword and Shield — and people campaigned against that — then you should be furious at what Ruby and Sapphire did back in the day."

— RTGame, "Controversial Pokemon Tier Lists"

In Thief (2014), the rope arrow can only be used in context-specific locations that the game highlights for you. This has been a source of complaint amongst fans of the originals. But the original Thief game also restricted the use of the rope arrow to context-specific locations. Just in a much smarter, more organic way. See, in Thief: The Dark Project, you can only use them on wood surfaces, so if Looking Glass don't want you climbing a specific wall, they simply don't place wood in the area. The player is forced out of using the rope arrow, but in an entirely believable and natural way that never feels gamey or patronizing.

—Dom Giuca, Thief vs. AAA Gaming

You know, there was a time when Acclaim Entertainment was actually a marketing innovator. It invented the big, splashy product launch with the console release of Mortal Kombat by running TV commercials and fantastic promotions in a concept called "Mortal Monday". It worked, and Acclaim made lots of well-deserved money. The problem was, Mortal Kombat ruined the company. It had only taken six to eight months to port a great arcade game to a home platform, so Acclaim assumed that six to eight months of development time along with a gigantic marketing campaign was all any game would ever require to keep the company rolling in dough. It did the same thing for Mortal Kombat II, and it worked again.

Acclaim has been trying to recapture that magic ever since. The company is left constantly wondering why a game with an eight month development cycle doesn't sell, and why it has a hostile relationship with its developers who keep trying to explain why cutting three months off the schedule to make the quarter is a really bad idea.

—GameSpy, The 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming

Case in point, Sonic Frontiers. Start the game and you step into a washed-out, rainy landscape, carpeted with realistic overgrown grass that blows aside to reveal the forgotten ruins of a once-great civilization, haunting music plays, and we feel exposed in an atmosphere of loneliness and sorrow. And then, scene set, we take control of our blue cartoon mouse in sneakers with eyes the size of hubcaps. Sonic the Hedgehog has been the fucking emperor of tone issues for a long time now. It didn't start with him snogging a realistic human in Sonic 2006, but that may have been the peak of the infection; without doing any proper research I might theorize that Shadow the Hedgehog was patient zero.

—Extra Punctuation: We Need to Have a Conversation About Your Tone

Sister Location is, as I would describe it, the best worst [Five Nights at Freddy's] game. It has a lot of deeply compelling elements, but it also marks the beginning of many trends in the series that I would come to dislike. [...] It tips the domino in a direction I'm not particularly fond of, and its gameplay is so lukewarm that this may as well just have been an overblown side-novel. But this video is about the qualities of FNaF's narrative, and in that respect it's some of the finest work in-show, if not genuinely the best.

—NezumiVA, Did Five Nights At Freddy's Ever Have A Good Story?

By no means did Heroes start this. Sonic games have notably suffered from time constraints even as far back as the precious classics. However, being well past the advent of 3D and having far more glaring jank than its older bretheren on TOP of its smaller scale... it's not hard to see why Sonic Heroes is the point where people grew a little less patient with this limitation. Unlike the prior two games, there was no Sega console to sell. They simply wanted to get new Sonic out onto their former competitors' platforms as soon as possible so that they could get MORE stuff out onto those same platforms. This, in my opinion, is Heroes' crucial mistake.

— JebZone, "The Timeline Where Sonic Succeeds"

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that asks whether a ship, after having its pieces removed and replaced one by one, is still the same ship. If you replace every individual piece in the Ship of Theseus, is it still the Ship of Theseus? For the full history of the question and proposed solutions, feel free to consult the internet. However, for the purpose of this video, I'd like to ask a different question: If you were a passenger aboard the Ship of Theseus, at what point would you realize the ship you're standing on isn't the same as it once was? When would you realize that you're standing on a different ship? The answer is quite obvious. Maybe you'd start to notice that something feels different as the internal parts are slowly swapped. However, I believe you'd only truly realize once the exterior is replaced. Once it appears different externally to the naked eye, that's when you say "this isn't the Ship of Theseus anymore", failing to take into account the fact that internally, the ship had been changing this entire time.

— SpookyDood, "FNAF: The Theseus Effect"

I'm gonna say something that's gonna sound controversial, but if you give me literally 60 seconds, you'll be like 'Ah yeah, you're probably right': Silent Hill 2 is the worst thing that ever happened to Silent Hill. [...] Okay, so for people who don't get it, Silent Hill 1 is about the cult. Silent Hill 3 is about the cult. Silent Hill 4? You might not know it; it's about the cult. Silent Hill 2 is 'The town is a crucible for your trauma. You can work through your trauma through the haunting of Silent Hill, and it could be anything'. So that attracted just the fucking stupidest, worst writers to be like 'I'm gonna write my traumatic redemption story using scary monsters!' And none of them know how to do it!

— Pat, Castle Super Beast clips: Silent Hill 2 Remake: Reap What You Sow

On Web Video

In ‘So Long, Weird Song’ Doug asks if "World War II with monsters" is "too silly" for a movie that also complains about "how high school bites", which, of course, again, is predicated on that actually being the message [of The Wall], which it isn’t, and indulges in a deeply misplaced level of literalism by describing the [Goodbye Blue Sky] sequence as "World War II with monsters" as though this were a direct-to-video Pacific Rim sequel.

Now, this kind of literalism is a pretty regular part of Doug’s normal bit, it just really falls apart here. It’s one thing when it’s aimed at corporate franchise schlock aimed at kids, but it’s just really obviously misplaced and inappropriate when applied to a deeply earnest piece of art that is overtly symbolic, unapologetically symbolic in its attempt to communicate what this real event, that really happened, felt like to live through.

— Dan Olson, The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall

On Western Animation

And so, The Simpsons delivered classic episode after classic episode. Like the touching, poignant "Lisa on Ice"; the genius, season-spanning cliffhanger "Who Shot Mr. Burns?"; and the irreverent, hilarious "Last Exit to Springfield". These and so many others are some of the finest pieces of television ever crafted and cemented The Simpsons not only as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, but as a bona fide worldwide cultural phenomenon. The Simpsons, it seemed, was unstoppable.

And then... Season 8 happened.

The eighth season of The Simpsons is... odd. It's still home to a lot of classic stories, in particular the episode "Homer's Enemy", which is the all-time highest-rated episode of the entire show. But when you look at this season closely, things were beginning to change in subtle but meaningful ways. The rock-solid narrative commentaries of the earlier seasons were gradually giving way to stories that were growing increasingly more nonsensical. Homer became a heavyweight boxer. Bart started working at a burlesque club. Marge got involved with both the Mafia and the Yakuza. And the family hired a magical British nanny. And I like all these episodes, but what they represent is the start of a pivot away from satire, straight into the absurd. A pivot whose full significance would only truly come to light a season later with the infamous episode "The Principal and the Pauper".

— Super Eyepatch Wolf, "The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened"

I think in some respects, season 10 is a misunderstood season of The Simpsons, in that it's lumped in with seasons 11 and 12 and how we apply some of the weirdness of those later seasons to this one. How we think of the jockey elves or Homer in that panda suit later on and link it up with the Loch Ness monster right here, or that nonsensical alligator and how it's like Vincent Price showing up on a bus. I mean, you definitely get glimpses of the future when watching these episodes. But it's not like they flipped a switch between Seasons 8, 9 and 10. These early years had irrelevant opening setpieces and throwaway B-plots, and so did Season 10. Earlier seasons had these final acts that veered into unexpected directions, and so does Season 10. Structurally, I don't think the show suddenly moved towards this radical, overly-absurdist direction.

— TheRealJims, "The Simpsons Season 10 Retrospective"

Season 11 does feel more dated than in previous years. Yeah, we had stuff like Clinton vs. Dole and the Homerpalooza lineup that very distinctly live in a certain time period, but rewatching season 11 constantly reminds you what a different world Y2K was compared to today. It's a world where Mel Gibson's problem is that he's just too loved, where Robert Downey Jr.'s having police shootouts, they put Oscar winner Spike Lee on the rocket to the sun, here's fresh-faced pop superstar Britney Spears handing out an award with Kent Brockman. Maybe this dynamic was the exact same way in 1992, and the show was always a peek into pop culture bizarro world. It's possible I don't remember these Boomer celebrities well enough to think about it.

— TheRealJims, "The Simpsons Season 11 Retrospective"

However, the show has a number of flaws. They were small and ignorable when the show initially aired, but since have grown to be impossible not to notice.

— Red Van Buskirk, "The Steven Universe Rant"

Other

It's my opinion that what really killed RF2016 was RF2011 to RF2015. During those years we failed to deal with problem behavior as it started happening.

— Kristina Tracer, "Rainfurrest 2016 Post-Mortem"

The Trust Thermocline is something that, over (many) years of digital, I have seen both digital and regular content publishers hit time and time again. Despite warnings (at least when I've worked there). And it has a similar effect. You have lots of users, then suddenly... nope. And this does effect print publications as much as trendy digital media companies. They'll be flying along making loads of money, with lots of users/readers, rolling out new products that get bought. Or events. Or Sub-brands. And then suddenly, those people just abandon them. Often, it's not even to "new" competitor products, but stuff they thought were already not a threat. Nor is there lots of obvious dissatisfaction reported from sales and marketing (other than general grumbling). Nor is it a general drift away, it's just a sudden big slide.

So why does this happen? As I explain to these people and places, it's because they breached the Trust Thermocline. I ask them if they'd been increasing prices. Changed service offerings. Modified the product. The answer is normally: "yes, but not much. And everyone still paid." Then I ask if they did that the year before. Did they increase prices last year? Change the offering? Modify the product? Again: "yes, but not much. And everyone still paid." "And the year before?" "Yes but not much. And everyone still paid." Well, you get the idea.

And here is where the Trust Thermocline kicks in. Because too many people see service use as always following an arc. They think that as long as usage is ticking up, they can do what they like to cost and product. And (critically) that they can just react when the curve flattens. But with a lot of content products (including social media), that's not actually how it works. Because it doesn't account for sunk-cost lock-in. Users and readers will stick to what they know, and use, well beyond the point where they start to lose trust in it. And you won't see that.

— John Bull on the Trust Thermocline

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