"You'd go to the producer or the story editor and say something like, 'How about a ghost who's an aardvark and he's been haunting ant farms?'
The producer or story editor would consult a list of all the episodes produced to date, and there was about a 95% chance he'd look up from it and say, 'Did it in Season Four' or whatever season it had been in. Sometimes, they'd say, 'Did it in Seasons Two, Four, Five and I have one in the works right now, same idea.'"
The producer or story editor would consult a list of all the episodes produced to date, and there was about a 95% chance he'd look up from it and say, 'Did it in Season Four' or whatever season it had been in. Sometimes, they'd say, 'Did it in Seasons Two, Four, Five and I have one in the works right now, same idea.'"
"So you'd have to be a total asshole not to see the obvious parallels between Nemesis and The Wrath of Khan. And I'm not mentioning this to say they ripped off that plot or anything, but what they did do was rip off that plot. [...] So, we have two homosexual villains who both spent a long time in an undesirable place. Eventually they both get their own ship, a loyal crew, and the ability to escape and continue on with their lives. However, they both give into their own crazy revenge, mess around with the Captains of the Enterprise, and fuck themselves over in the most horrible way. Eventually everyone ends up in a space battle in a nebular where communication is disrupted, as is their ability to shoot accurately at each other. Then the second-most important character in Star Trek sacrifices themselves so that a doomsday device doesn't kill the crew of the Enterprise. There is even a scene where both captains talk to the bad guys as distraction, while they secretly prepare an alternate attack."
"Even if you really love Toy Story 3 it's important to recognize that what you really love is Toy Story 2, because Toy Story 3 is an exact fucking carbon copy. If you don't know what I'm talking about, let me just list of the similarities real quick: Open up the movie with a large scale action sequence that is later reveal to be an exaggeration of a game being played by other characters. Introduce ideas and images reflecting change, and ultimately the idea that toys don't last forever. Unwanted toys are then gathered and a mistake is made, in where one or more main characters end up where the unwanted toys are supposed to be. Toys get placed in new environment meeting new characters, where one of them is a plump and seemingly kind toy with a deep voice and a cane; this toy is later revealed to be an antagonist filled by the traumatisation of feeling unloved and unwanted, taking their anger out on others. The seeming inviting toy tempts the main characters to stay with promises of being loved for generations and getting repairs where need. A delusional, factory-setting Buzz Lightyear locks up one or more of the protagonists. Overexposured flashback-sequences of characters new to the series being abandoned out in the countryside by their previous owners. Protagonists enter a large-scale industrial contraption wherein the antagonist is disposed of in the process. The antagonist is then ultimately left to the care of an owner with no care for their well-being."
"The plot of [I am Setsuna] is that the titular Setsuna has been nominated to sacrifice herself to calm down all the world's monsters or something and has to make the difficult journey to the sacrifice shop because it never occurred to anyone to put on a fucking bus service, and a party of adventurers assembles to protect her on the way. I'd like to take a moment to draw your attention to one of the user-defined tags that was attached to this game on Steam: "Story Rich." I take slight issue with it because you don't get "Story Rich" just from mugging Final Fantasy X in an alleyway and nicking their wallet. Final Fantasy X itself is only Story Rich in Zimbabwean dollars. Thankfully I Am Setsuna only nicks the pilgrimage plot device and not the rest of Final Fantasy X's plot and the player character — as far as I know — isn't a ghost footballer from the future."
Mooch: We did a version of yeshterday's strip a few times before, Earl.
Earl: That's okay with me, Mooch. Dogs LOVE repetition!
Mooch: We did a version of yeshterday's strip a few times before, Earl.
(Earl gives an Aside Glance)
— Mutts
"So we start the movie with a bunch of unlikable jackasses looking to do nothing else but party and have sex. Oooops, that was Cabin Fever again. On to Hostel: So we start the movie with a bunch of unlikable jackass looking to do nothing else but party and have sex."
"Despite the prequel setting, Enterprise fell back on telling stories that could have just as easily been told on any of the modern Star Trek shows. Seriously. Take any episode, and swap T’Pol with Seven of Nine, Trip with Tom Paris, Phlox with Neelix, etc., etc., and you’ll end up with something completely indistinguishable from an episode of Voyager. The level of technology wasn’t noticeably older. The danger (or lack thereof) in space travel was no more serious. Despite taking place before TOS, there were no meaningful differences between this show and the three that came before it."
Piccolo: Freeza did it.
Mecha-Cooler: Excuse you?
Krillin: The robot thing. Freeza did it. When he came back to Earth.
Mecha-Cooler: But, that's not the same, I-
Piccolo: After he took over Namek, like you are now.
Mecha-Cooler: Wait, he destroyed Namek!
Gohan: Well, this is New Namek.
Mecha-Cooler: So it's completely different!
Krillin: Shots fired!
Mecha-Cooler: (to his robot minions) Kill the bald one.
Krillin: Freeza did it.
"This is where we're gonna do some shit we already did, and just pretend you didn't see that shit the first time! That's right, nigga: we don't respect your intelligence!"
— Colonel H. Stinkmeaner, The Boondocks
"Yes, it's that old moldy plot: someone thinks their friends are neglecting them, but it turns out they're planning a party for them. I saw this story done a thousand times in my preschool TV shows and Little Golden Books, and I was already sick of it by age seven."
But the much bigger problem with Hueco Mundo is it's kind of just Soul Society again, and I was a little general with this criticism last time around, so allow me to be more specific:
Ichigo and his friends invade a land of extremely powerful death gods who are all part of a hierarchical organization to rescue their female friend who has been imprisoned for semi-mysterious reasons. They immediately encounter a large enemy who they defeat with an overwhelming display of force, before being split up and fighting their own individual battles. Uryuu fights a Mad Scientist who sacrifices his own minions. Chad is depicted as one of the most powerful members of the group before being squashed by an even more powerful enemy to demonstrate the danger of the opposing force. One of Ichigo's allies is a cute side character who eventually transforms into a sexy, powerful fully-grown woman who used to be part of the opposing force before switching sides. Former enemies of Ichigo show up to help in the final stages of the battle, and Ichigo fights first a low-ranking enemy, then a wild middle-ranking enemy with a beastial fighting style, and finally in order to save the girl, a massively powerful stoic and cold high-ranking member of the enemy force who previously defeated him, and during this battle he loses control of his Hollow side, goes berserk, before finally regaining control and saving the day, before Aizen reveals that the kidnapping of the girl is only the small part of a much larger plan.
This is not general structural repetition, these are the same story beats, and it's maybe the first indication that Bleach is struggling a little with its long-term direction.
Ichigo and his friends invade a land of extremely powerful death gods who are all part of a hierarchical organization to rescue their female friend who has been imprisoned for semi-mysterious reasons. They immediately encounter a large enemy who they defeat with an overwhelming display of force, before being split up and fighting their own individual battles. Uryuu fights a Mad Scientist who sacrifices his own minions. Chad is depicted as one of the most powerful members of the group before being squashed by an even more powerful enemy to demonstrate the danger of the opposing force. One of Ichigo's allies is a cute side character who eventually transforms into a sexy, powerful fully-grown woman who used to be part of the opposing force before switching sides. Former enemies of Ichigo show up to help in the final stages of the battle, and Ichigo fights first a low-ranking enemy, then a wild middle-ranking enemy with a beastial fighting style, and finally in order to save the girl, a massively powerful stoic and cold high-ranking member of the enemy force who previously defeated him, and during this battle he loses control of his Hollow side, goes berserk, before finally regaining control and saving the day, before Aizen reveals that the kidnapping of the girl is only the small part of a much larger plan.
This is not general structural repetition, these are the same story beats, and it's maybe the first indication that Bleach is struggling a little with its long-term direction.
"There's usually a Watsonian reason the same trick can never work more than once, but the real reason is just that, well, the writer thinks that'd be boring. And most of the time, they're right. Jumping back to Bleach real quick, there was a fairly early appearance of the Superpowered Evil Side that was very dramatic, where it popped up in the middle of a dramatic fight, and then Ichigo heroically fought it off and apologized for the interruption in possibly the funniest moment in the show, and then in a filler arc like, thirty episodes later the exact same thing happened beat-for-beat. It even starts with him catching the bad guy's sword and then looking up all "Ohh, look, I'm evil now! Lookit my mask!" And the number of people who like Bleach and really liked that first moment, but felt it got really cheap because then it happened exactly the same again but worse, kinda demonstrates that this trope really does need to be mixed up on every use or it just end up getting tired."
— Red, Overly Sarcastic Productions, "Trope Talk: Superpowered Evil Sides"
This is at least the third time this mystery has appeared in Slylock Fox: it showed up in 2013, with exactly the same art albeit with different coloring, and had previously appeared in 2011, with different art but the same basic mystery and solution. My earlier commentary on those strips in both cases was predicated on the same scenario: that Shady Shrew had enslaved sapient silkworms and was forcing them to manufacture clothes from which he profited. But I must be mellowing in my old age, because my first thought today on reading the strip was “But wait! What if Shady has actually developed a new plant-based silk substitute, liberating his fellow animals from toil? Did you put that possibility into your ratiocination calculus, Slylock? Of course not, but Shady doesn’t need your approval! Society will hail him as a hero, at least until the plants become sapient too.”
