Subverting Expectations: The Megathread - Or How Baby Dick Creators ‘Sort of Forgot’ What an Anti-Climax Is

[UnsufficentBoobage]

Cruella

The best thing is that, among the complains on tumblr, I saw multiple unrelated claims that Cruella was picked due to "fatphobia" not letting Ursula be picked.
As if Ursula is any better.

The thing with "no cool new villains" is also that fanbase kept vlaiming the fun traits to be queer coding, and we cannot have evil person come off as gay. So into the trash they went.

 

[Berrakh]

As if Ursula is any better.

At least her being "wronged" was always in the backstory.
And making the villainesses hot is a big part of making them sympathetic in these re-imaginings.
I agree with tumblr actually. I am that much of a free-thinker!

 

[Mooger Meng]

I don't care if this is me bringing up AoT again, I'm just gonna say it:

I did not see Eren turning into a tree at the end, let alone him being the one that killed his mom, and that he only did that, and basically everything he does in the entire series, including genociding 80% of the world, because he couldn't nut up and tell Mikasa he loved her.

I know I made a joke about the latter in the thread, but I didn't think for one second that I was gonna be right, or that he went that fucking far with it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad about it. I actually love it, and think it's the funniest thing in anime history, but fucking hell, I'm still in shock that it actually happened.

hold the fuck on
what
that is retarded

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

SSSS.Dynazenon might have one of the lamest subverting expectations moment I've seen. I'll spoiler it since it is still ongoing:
The main heroine has a massive complex over her sister seemingly jumping from a tower to her death, though the police ruled it as an accident. There are a lot of hints it wasn't accidental, that the sister had problems with her family, her club played cruel pranks on her to get youtube upvotes (with one of those clubmates being their teacher), that her boyfriend wasn't there for her. We follow this plotline like 60% of the show runtime, and it's a fucking mecha show. In the latest episode the heroine is trapped inside a mecha kaiju that traps its victims in their past (arbitrary as fuck) and she gets to meet her sister in the day she died (this mecha can extrapolate the past apperantly) and she learns that.... it really was an accident and the sister wasn't depressed or murdered.

This really comes as the creators just fucking wasting the viewers time, that discovery didn't really give anything to the story, the themes, or advance the character besides removing her only characterization. At best you can say there is a theme of not sticking to the past, but even that's very partial to the cast and is generic as fuck. To pour salt on the wound, the mecha fight afterwards had the robot take few minutes to built himself into its ugly super form, only to take out a knife that makes a circle of death that instantly killed the mecha.

Fuck this show and fuck Trigger.

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

Copied a lot. Kimba = Simba. Dead parents are stars in the sky that talk. Rafiki/den'l the babboon. The character of scar/claw. The actors doing the voices thought they were doing an homage, but were then surprised disney claimed it as the first disney original story.

It's still obvious theft. All art is theft, maybe, but when you deny it and it's this obvious, it's more egregious.

There are even old Disney memo's where they call him Kimba, not Simba.


It's just an expression of the inclinations of the people that write it. Subverting expectations is becoming a tired meme/trope because entertainment industry is run by people that love to subvert. I wonder what people that are.

After all, game thrones writer and the showrunners each belonged to that group. Martin's work itself is overrated. One of his big criticisms of Tolkien was that when Gandalf died he should have stayed dead. Okay mr let's bring catelyn stark and jon snow back from the dead.
Another was that Tolkien never went into Aragorns tax policy.
But looking back on game of thrones, the whole bank/debt or social upheaval and sparrows didn't play any meaningful role in the overarching story. It was Martin's Tom Bombadil in a sense. Additions that were out of tune with the overall work.

Mostly people overlook what makes story work. To get a story to work people need to get invested and people get invested by nothing better than an enticing mystery. This is why murder mysteries are a quintessential story: you know the stakes are high and you're promised a step by step unvealing of mystery. It's how game of thrones begins, with the death of jon arryn.

But murder mysteries have only the machinery to get people invested. To have people come back to a story you need to have eternal truths or have an archetypical story that resonates with our humanity.

Game of thrones fucked it up by fawning too much over dany. They didn't really manage to play with her flaws, which was also warped by both the actor's and audience infatuation with the girl power. When she arrived at the steps of Qarth for example, she is unreasonably haughty. They are also wrong to take her in; doing so destabilizes them and costs them everything. Besides dothraki stealing them blind before the coup, she also ends up taking their ships and wealth as her just reward. If things like this were examined a little differently and came back to haunt her, then her story of a mad queen could have worked.

Another problem is that her rage is too justified in most cases for her fatal flaw being an unjustified one. Eddard's arc works as a subversion, as there is something very sensible about an honest man drowning in a pit of vipers.

Dany's arc doesn't because in order to subvert expectations she has to go against her establishrd character. And when people have to go against their character to serve the story, then you know you are destroying any repeat viewing of the work.

We may not know why iago poisons othello's thoughts, but at least he's consistent in doing so.

And you may not know why all movies and series seem to be about subverting expectations but at least when you look at the people that write them, an eternal story emerges.


You've reversed cause and effect. Mamet made interesting theatre in part of his family's fun with dialogue. Both his movies and theatre had this kind of labyranthine dialogue that was honed over the years by the linguistic games his family played on daily basis.

His book on acting (true and false) has numerous answers that this thread asks about the nature of storytelling and the failure of soaking everything in irony.

Whedon is just a modern incarnation taking irony to its modern conclusion, but the problem was already well identified by david foster wallace.

Spoiler: compilation of disney is full of bs

Disney claims that they had no knowledge of kimba until they did press tour in japan. This is BS.

1. Early disney concept art had simba as a white lion:

View attachment 2209615
View attachment 2209625
2. Roy Disney referred to Simba as Kimba in a memo

3. Roger Ales worked for a year in Tokyo animation studios at the height of kimba popularity where he was in everyday commercials as mascot

4. T wo of the lead animators on the film admitted to familiarity with Kimba, and Fred Ladd (who imported Kimba to the US) alleged at least one other animator was a known Kimba superfan, and there were Kimba masks in the Disney studio.

5. Matthew Broderick's statement that he always thought he was signed on to do a Kimba remake of the show he knew as a kid

6. A lot of shots and scene framings were the same:

I could go on, but I'm satisfied.

One reason people do get confused is that the white lion movie (not the series) came out AFTER lion king and stole things back, making some comparisons unfair.

But that doesn't change that lion king was heavily inspired by Kimba.

It took more from kimba than hamlet. There's only two plot points that it takes from hamlet, the plotting murderous uncle and the ghost of the father asking for revenge. It's much less than the book full of both visual, name and character elements taken from kimba.
No wait the ghost doesn't ask for revenge like hamlet, it asks him to become king, just like in kimba.


As I said, they even referred to him as kimba in some of their older memo's.

The whole kimba/simba thing is a perfect example why you don't deserve anything better than derivative subversion of expectations in your pop tv shows. First someone shows the numerous examples of a loved classic, the lion king. Expectations Subverted tm! They stole it! Then someone makes a video of why it wasn't stolen at all because there is a lot of story in Kimba to work with and that there are some errors in the comparison. Expectations Subverted tm! People lied that it was stolen!

But in the end it's pretty simple.

1. Disney claimed it was a complete original
2. They even called simba kimba in their memo's
3. They took no less than 4 characters from kimba, numerous scenes, backdrops and didn't even change scar/claw's left eye scar.

You should love me subverting your expectations again. But you don't because it conflicts with the original theme, of lion king being an amazing piece of work that would stand the test of time and you can't admit to it not being an original work.

Comparisons to shakespeare are interesting too because most of shakespeares plays were stolen too. Yes, he improved on the original work, like Disney did. Like Kubrick did with his movies. But don't be a faggot and pretend they invented the whole story (and in case of lion king, also visual elements) themselves. Just pay homage the way kimba's creator paid homage and said he was inspired by Disney's bambi.

Did you actually watch Kimba? Because I did, even after the YMS video, and apart from a few similarities, even if people were correct about the comparisons, it would still be cherry picking at best. The most similar it ever got plot wise was ONE episode of the 1989 series, a series that didn't even air in America until 1998, 9 whole years after its airdate. And even that took up like 5 minutes of the episode and was based on fairly common revenge tropes.

Seems like disney is mostly interested in trying to rehabilitate villain types. Doesn't seem to work all that well.

It's not even just Disney. Even DC and Marvel seem to love giving their villains "redemption arcs".

Here's the thing. They're called bad guys for a reason. They don't need redemption arcs. It's so fucking stupid and gay. I fucking love villains. Scar is one of the best villains ever for his sheer evilness and suave persona courtesy of one Jeremy Irons. Killmonger is one of the MCU's most memorable villains for a reason. Hell, that movie actually had the balls to say that Killmonger being kind of right didn't make him any less of an awful person.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Did you actually watch Kimba? Because I did

Yes.

it would still be cherry picking at best

It's possible to copy something and also change things. If you look at say time machine 1960 or time 2002 film they are almost completely different stories... based on the same novella. You say that is cherrypicking too, especially if they changed the name and denied the link.

You're right, the plot is the part that is most different (yet retaining elements like talking to dead parents in the sky who say you must claim the throne).

I mean even something as simple as who are the good and who are the evil animals, carbon copy. One bad lion, hyenas. But the animals that are in bith are on the same side. Even leaving out everything else, that itself is indicative of being inspired by it.

I really just don't get the willful blindness.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

hold the fuck on
what
that is retarded

and people still defend that shitty show.

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

Yes.


It's possible to copy something and also change things. If you look at say time machine 1960 or time 2002 film they are almost completely different stories... based on the same novella. You say that is cherrypicking too, especially if they changed the name and denied the link.

You're right, the plot is the part that is most different (yet retaining elements like talking to dead parents in the sky who say you must claim the throne).

I mean even something as simple as who are the good and who are the evil animals, carbon copy. One bad lion, hyenas. But the animals that are in bith are on the same side. Even leaving out everything else, that itself is indicative of being inspired by it.

I really just don't get the willful blindness.

There's more than one bad lion.

Hell even if we look at the most surface level comparisons, the closest you can get to actual ripping off is Claw/Scar. And yet Claw is a pretty generic villain. Hell, in the 1998 English dub of the 1989 series, the company in charge purposefully went with a Jeremy Irons like voice, probably to fan the flames of the controversy.

But what people don't get is that if Scar was indeed a ripoff of Claw then he wouldn't be anywhere near as iconic as he is. Scar is a fantastically well written with a clear goal in mind and Claw's motives change depending on who's writing him. Oh, and Claw is an actual pedophile too (stay classy, Japan).

It's not willful ignorance. Its people seeing this controversy for what it really is. If people are so insistent that Kimba is the better property then why isn't Kimba more popular? Why weren't more people seeking out Kimba before the YMS video? And what's even the point of defending Kimba in a way that pretty much only guarantees people see it as a worse version of what they love if it is indeed the better thing.

What's even sadder is that this is basically what Kimba's legacy has been reduced to: that thing The Lion King allegedly ripped off. It's legit bullshit.

 

[Lemmingwise]

And what's even the point of defending Kimba in a way that pretty much only guarantees people see it as a worse version of what they love if it is indeed the better thing.

I'm not defending kimba. Lion King is a vastly superior work. Better art, better story, better music, more streamlined too.

Eyes wide shut is a vast improvement over traumnovella, particularly due to the addition of the billiard room scene.

Romeo and Julliet is an improvement on the Pyramus and Thisbe story.

Perhaps a better example is even if the developers of starcraft denied being inspired by Alien. There are so many comparisons. But to top it all, in the demo version, the zerg are called xenomorphs. It's just like the disney executive referring to simba as kimba. It's a slam dunk as it goes for proof. Combine that with the Disney claim that none of the people involved were familiar with kimba and it's just obvious lies.

Something can steal/be inspired by a previous work, and be vastly better, as in the case of simba/kimba.

Kimba still deserves some of the honor. There are a number of things unique and charming about it. It makes sense to steal those things and present them to an audience unfamiliar with them.

And it's better to discover it through simba than not to discover the original at all. I'm sure kimba's legacy in Japan remains undiminished, too, or in the animators hearts who were inspired by it.

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

I'm not defending kimba. Lion King is a vastly superior work. Better art, better story, better music, more streamlined too.

Eyes wide shut is a vast improvement over traumnovella, particularly due to the addition of the billiard room scene.

Romeo and Julliet is an improvement on the Pyramus and Thisbe story.

Perhaps a better example is even if the developers of starcraft denied being inspired by Alien. There are so many comparisons. But to top it all, in the demo version, the zerg are called xenomorphs. It's just like the disney executive referring to simba as kimba. It's a slam dunk as it goes for proof. Combine that with the Disney claim that none of the people involved were familiar with kimba and it's just obvious lies.

Something can steal/be inspired by a previous work, and be vastly better, as in the case of simba/kimba.

Kimba still deserves some of the honor. There are a number of things unique and charming about it. It makes sense to steal those things and present them to an audience unfamiliar with them.

And it's better to discover it through simba than not to discover the original at all. I'm sure kimba's legacy in Japan remains undiminished, too, or in the animators hearts who were inspired by it.

Kimba isn't even that well known in Japan either. Even in Japan, Osamu Tezuka is better known for Astro Boy.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Kimba isn't even that well known in Japan either. Even in Japan, Osamu Tezuka is better known for Astro Boy.

One of the top 3 baseball teams used them as a mascot for 4 decades.


Baseball is the most popular sport in Japan.

They also for a number of years had ads for various products using kimba.

So are you going to continue to put tour foot in your mouth?

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

One of the top 3 baseball teams used them as a mascot for 4 decades.
View attachment 2242211

Baseball is the most popular sport in Japan.

They also for a number of years had ads for various products using kimba.

So are you going to continue to put tour foot in your mouth?

You're basing that on baseball and a handful of commercials.

 

[Lemmingwise]

You're basing that on baseball and a handful of commercials.

Better than basing it on nothing, like you.

 

[Berrakh]

For me it's wild how people will adamantly say Lion King ripped off Kimba but deny that Witcher ripped off Elric.
I'm not weighing in on LK and Kimba per se but Witcher and Elric are far more specifically similar so it's surreal to witness.

 

[Truthboi]

Did you actually watch Kimba? Because I did, even after the YMS video, and apart from a few similarities, even if people were correct about the comparisons, it would still be cherry picking at best. The most similar it ever got plot wise was ONE episode of the 1989 series, a series that didn't even air in America until 1998, 9 whole years after its airdate. And even that took up like 5 minutes of the episode and was based on fairly common revenge tropes.

It's not even just Disney. Even DC and Marvel seem to love giving their villains "redemption arcs".

Here's the thing. They're called bad guys for a reason. They don't need redemption arcs. It's so fucking stupid and gay. I fucking love villains. Scar is one of the best villains ever for his sheer evilness and suave persona courtesy of one Jeremy Irons. Killmonger is one of the MCU's most memorable villains for a reason. Hell, that movie actually had the balls to say that Killmonger being kind of right didn't make him any less of an awful person.

Honestly redemption arcs can be fine depending on the villain. The issue with these studios is that they give redemption arcs to the wrong characters who do not deserve them in anyway which is a major issue for redemption arcs in general is they redeem people who are terrible people. Like it's okay to give a villain depth but that shouldn't be a reason to suddenly make them a hero.

Speaking of villains the opposite issue happened in a movie I recently watched which was Seoul Station, a Korean animated film that was partly connected to the movie, Train to Busan. The issue with that movie in it's villain is that The villain was presented as the main character's father throughout most of the film without even showing a hint of him being someone he is not which was her previous pimp. The only foreshadowing given is that they never talked to each other or were eager too and that he found out about his daughter's current state from Korean craigslist. The plot twist literally comes out of nowhere and is only there for shock value. It also harmed the movie by it making the last act a psychological thriller rather than a zombie film especially with a last-minute villain who we barely know about. The only positive thing I can say about it is that it could've worked if we knew more about the main character or his true self.

EDIT: It doesn't help that throughout the movie the fake dad was portrayed as a heroic man willing to help others and even was risking his life multiple times for his old whore who can't pay him back any money in the middle of the apocalypse. There were even scenes by himself where it seemed he was caring or acting like this when he didn't need to. It felt like one of those twists that are only there to trick the audience rather than reward the ones who paid attention to some of the smaller details that hinted towards it.

 

[Oats12345]

Did you actually watch Kimba? Because I did, even after the YMS video, and apart from a few similarities, even if people were correct about the comparisons, it would still be cherry picking at best. The most similar it ever got plot wise was ONE episode of the 1989 series, a series that didn't even air in America until 1998, 9 whole years after its airdate. And even that took up like 5 minutes of the episode and was based on fairly common revenge tropes.

It's not even just Disney. Even DC and Marvel seem to love giving their villains "redemption arcs".

Here's the thing. They're called bad guys for a reason. They don't need redemption arcs. It's so fucking stupid and gay. I fucking love villains. Scar is one of the best villains ever for his sheer evilness and suave persona courtesy of one Jeremy Irons. Killmonger is one of the MCU's most memorable villains for a reason. Hell, that movie actually had the balls to say that Killmonger being kind of right didn't make him any less of an awful person.

I find a great example of a villain who was welled like, but the writers were smarts not to redeem.

Was Ba'al form Stargate. Baal was a villain who was recurring for six seasons. He ends up helping SG1 many occasions and has a fun dynamic with them. He's loved by the fans too. But at the end of the last stargate movie they finally kill him off. Fans including I were not upset. And I'm glad he wasn't redeem like I see so many villains now getting.

 

[Save the Loli]

SSSS.Dynazenon might have one of the lamest subverting expectations moment I've seen. I'll spoiler it since it is still ongoing:
The main heroine has a massive complex over her sister seemingly jumping from a tower to her death, though the police ruled it as an accident. There are a lot of hints it wasn't accidental, that the sister had problems with her family, her club played cruel pranks on her to get youtube upvotes (with one of those clubmates being their teacher), that her boyfriend wasn't there for her. We follow this plotline like 60% of the show runtime, and it's a fucking mecha show. In the latest episode the heroine is trapped inside a mecha kaiju that traps its victims in their past (arbitrary as fuck) and she gets to meet her sister in the day she died (this mecha can extrapolate the past apperantly) and she learns that.... it really was an accident and the sister wasn't depressed or murdered.

This really comes as the creators just fucking wasting the viewers time, that discovery didn't really give anything to the story, the themes, or advance the character besides removing her only characterization. At best you can say there is a theme of not sticking to the past, but even that's very partial to the cast and is generic as fuck. To pour salt on the wound, the mecha fight afterwards had the robot take few minutes to built himself into its ugly super form, only to take out a knife that makes a circle of death that instantly killed the mecha.

Fuck this show and fuck Trigger.

What were you expecting? Dynazenon is the exact same shit week after week and this episode is pretty much the exact same premise as that one episode in Gridman (yes, I know it's a trope, but this episode literally has the exact same style but Gridman did it way better). The writers seem to have forgotten how to write a mecha show, like when the super ultra upgrade for the main mech comes in a totally generic fight so no surprise that instead of giving us something like "oh shit Kano is the main villain" we just get an admittedly touching reunion and that's it. But hey, be glad the show did a different episode for once than the usual schlock.

The circle of death/"circular" is a cool weapon though even if this is yet another samey fight scene.

 

[AnOminous]

For me it's wild how people will adamantly say Lion King ripped off Kimba but deny that Witcher ripped off Elric.
I'm not weighing in on LK and Kimba per se but Witcher and Elric are far more specifically similar so it's surreal to witness.

I think it's pretty obvious they "ripped off" Kimba, for varying values of "ripped off." I don't think it was necessarily copyright infringement. And obviously, the Lion King franchise is vastly superior, as much as I liked the original Kimba when I watched it as a kid. When I first saw The Lion King, though, not even knowing the meme, my thought was "this is ripping off Kimba." It just struck me as really obvious.

It just seems really hypocritical for a company that aggressively defends its own intellectual property to be so cavalier about that of others. They could at least have acknowledged the influence. Would it seriously have killed them to license it for what would have been a pittance to them?

Incidentally if you're ever in a situation where you want to go to Broadway but have a kid along, the play is well worth a watch. It's a genuinely epic production.

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

I think it's pretty obvious they "ripped off" Kimba, for varying values of "ripped off." I don't think it was necessarily copyright infringement. And obviously, the Lion King franchise is vastly superior, as much as I liked the original Kimba when I watched it as a kid. When I first saw The Lion King, though, not even knowing the meme, my thought was "this is ripping off Kimba." It just struck me as really obvious.

It just seems really hypocritical for a company that aggressively defends its own intellectual property to be so cavalier about that of others. They could at least have acknowledged the influence. Would it seriously have killed them to license it for what would have been a pittance to them?

Incidentally if you're ever in a situation where you want to go to Broadway but have a kid along, the play is well worth a watch. It's a genuinely epic production.

See, if you want to argue that it was extremely fucking stupid of Disney to deny that anyone on the team who worked on TLK was ever aware of Kimba, then yes, I absolutely agree with you. "Common sense" and "Disney" don't exactly go together well in the same sentence. I absolutely agree that Disney had to have been at least a little influenced by Kimba. There's no question in my mind about that.

But as far as ripping off goes, I'm sorry but that is complete bullshit. I watched as much Kimba as I could find after the YMS video and I think even that video underestimates just how different these two properties are (I mean that as a compliment, keep in mind). Kimba is a slice of life approach to a lion cub's adventures ruling the jungle. The Lion King is a hero's journey tale that ends with Simba taking his rightful place as king.

Let's not forget too that The Lion King was basically conceived as a love letter to African culture. Kimba on the other hand has depictions of said culture that range from unflattering to downright racist (but more on that later). And even ignoring that, Kimba is too serialized to be a love letter to anything, let alone Africa.

 

[Berrakh]

I think you can wring a good movie out of the Last Jedi if you 1) cut the number of gotchas in half, force the script to evaluate which are actually necessary 2) have a more kinetic final confrontation. You can keep Luke being an apparition if you want but have him at least damage the Walkers. With the force, making them fire on one another, and have him survive tight spots. This would make the reveal that he's a projection not obvious because it would be lampshaded by the tropes and approach to risky situations Star Wars usually takes.