VindictiveJudge @ VindictiveJudge @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This has been a problem for far, far, longer than you think. The silver age definitely had it, the golden age probably did, and I wouldn't be surprised if it cropped up in the proto-superhero stories, like Zorro. It's a consequence of having a long-form story where the narrative's status quo isn't allowed to meaningfully change and characters either aren't allowed to die or aren't allowed to stay dead. Recurring antagonists also can have much richer characterization and more complex relationships with the protagonists, which makes writing stories about them more appealing the more often they appear.

The usual trajectory for a new superhero or new incarnation of an existing superhero is to start off with street-level problems, then get a nemesis that has strong ties to those street level problems, then have the dynamic between the two grow in prominence to eclipse all other parts of the plot. The Joker, for instance, always starts off as either a mob boss with a gimmick or a serial killer with a gimmick, not far removed from the mundane crime Batman always starts with, but always winds up with a fixation on Batman and spawns stories designed as some commentary on Batman's no-killing rule. Again and again and again, dozens of times over the decades.

Why? Because the dynamic between the two characters tends to be fascinating and results in audience engagement.

Europeans and Asians also have roughly 2% Neanderthal DNA on average, so it's likely we absorbed a significant chunk of their population into our own.

The Tower is bad, but The Devil may be worse. Once you know what Yorinobu is up to, the one ending where he's stopped before he can pull it off is pretty bad.

Lightfall sunsetted everything I was using that wasn't an exotic. Completely destroyed my build.

Yeah, the Culling of Stratholme broke him, but it wasn't the wrong decision. And Uther and Jaina turning on him is part of why it broke him.

so long as you’re in immediate danger.

*not in immediate danger

Kane Westwood lives in death!

At what point does it become a grass roots movement?

Worse. The network went under and they finished up the show with the remaining budget, cramming the front half of what was supposed to be season 5 into season 4. They didn't get picked up by TNT until after they filmed the series finale. After unexpectedly getting renewed, they filmed a new season 4 finale and pushed the already filmed finale back to the end of season 5. And JMS had to scramble to fill content now that half of it had already been used.

Going to be completely honest, Dexter isn't worth finishing. The first few seasons are fun, but the show struggles to actually go anywhere until the final season, at which point it goes straight into a ditch. I think I lost any lingering respect for the show around season 6 and kept watching due to sunk cost fallacy and nostalgia for the first couple seasons. I haven't watched the spinoffs, but the only one that's finished so far apparently followed the same trajectory over much fewer episodes.

The first Klingon BoP in the movie was originally a stolen Romulan prototype in an earlier draft.

Babylon 5 is literally the only show I can think of with full length seasons and seasons that don't have episodes wasted on filler, and that really only applies to seasons 3 and 4, when the showrunner personally wrote every single script. He also wrote all of season 5, but there were production issues that messed with the pacing of the front half. The stress of writing 22 cohesive and relevant episodes every year was also getting to him. Somewhere in the 10-14 per year range feels like the sweet spot to me.

That said, a season needs to come out each year, not every other year. When there's too much time between seasons, the audience and the writers start losing track of how little time has passed in-universe and then characters start getting over things oddly fast.

Putin's made it clear that Trump doesn't call the shots in their relationship. Trump's ego can't handle that, so now Putin is his enemy. We've been seeing Trump slowly figure this out over the course of the year, starting from him saying he could end the war in, what did he say, a week? He clearly wasn't let in on the invasion plan, either because he can't keep his mouth shut or because Putin thought the war would be over before the election.

Of course, with how senile he's becoming and his probable recent stroke, it's unclear if this will stick or he'll forget about it in a day or two.

Fun fact: The bible says that only God knows when the world will end, so everyone that says they know when it ends is technically comitting sacrilege.

*than

In this case it actually matters.

Intimidation rolls work, too.

Someone should have reminded Darwin of that.

The cool S.

When life gives you lemons, make more of them?