FOURTEEN YEARS AGO this forum did a thing to close out Naruto thread 7. That thread is apparently mallwared at the moment so I can't click on it, and a lot of the images have fallen away due to the death of photobucket and imageshack... but we as a community got together to create a song, taking turns one line at a time to pick an appropriate image to a lyric to hit the final words on the last post of the thread.

And then I made an AMV throwing together all those into a video and stoile footage from some existing videos to make this overnight.

Most of the people that were here then aren't here anymore, but those were the days.

I've always associated this song with this place since, any time, any place I hear it, I think of Arlong Park.

The big difference with Jimbro is that he had multiple arcs (Impel, War, Fishman, WCI) and cover story before joining. It took him a damn decade but he had exposure along the way, and there was still TIME in the series .

Anyone that's still left there's just... no more time if Oda is to be believed at all about his timetable. (Yeah, he's not going to make it in three years and we all know that but...) Anyone not travelling with the crew right now isn't getting the bonding or the antics or the color spreads or the real life giant bronze statue... whatever their official classification they're just going to be one of dozens of old recurring characters returning for the final war.

The surprise twist (off camera) turn just doesn't sit well with me. It's absolutely Oda's job to surprise and go directions we don't expect... and I'm even okay with Yamato deciding to stay after all that in concept... but the actual execution was really really botched. That major character shift was NOT a moment that should have been off camera.

This is the first time I feel kinda straight up lied to rather than carefully misled.

Combine this with the clumsiness of the Gear 5 Nika exposition dump, and how much Oda whiffed the Kaidou finale... it's just been a really awkward dozen chapters.

OPLA reactions by non-One Piece fans are SO entertaining.

I love seeing people fall in love with the world of One Piece. And so many times already "Luffy has POWERS?"

Also, it made me way more appreciate and understand the purpose of the Garp storyline. Yeah its weird for us vets to get all that so early, but it grounded the world and allowed for a lot of exposition, and a big plot twist cliffhanger 4 episodes in.

Also the reactions to the snails.

@Shiebs said in Greg: Teacher of SUPER " OP " course !:

Greg is Oda alright?

I just saw this

https://www.cbr.com/one-piece-hiatus-one-month/

His idol and friend just died. Maybe that's got him thinking and he's taking a week off to do a final chapter now just in case. There's also live action, new anime, and probably an upcoming movie to deal with. And the man is almost 50, doing weekly comics is a game for folks in their 20's. And he's plotting out the big finale for his 30 year series. ANd he's got a family. And...

There's a million reasons for the man to be taking longer breaks, there's no reason to worry unless there's a reason given to worry.

When Oda kills a character, especially a main one, he makes you feel it and know.

Outside of maybe Pedro, who I still don't believe, it's usually obvious.

Garp is fine.

@andre said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:

I think they're going to lose people every day as out of context images leak until they put out a trailer. I really don't get the Netflix strategy of waiting just a few months before a show comes out to release a trailer.

Because Netflix has 78 bazillion shows and they can't show love to any of them as a result.

They really need to drop their method of dropping whole seasons at once and go to weekly for new projects. Give it time for people to pick up on it and develop watercooler conversation. Have a show be a topic for 2 months instead of two days. And then they won't have to cram out so many shows.

So... two years of this nonsense.

Everyone was right.
And everyone was wrong.
And everyone is disappointed.

What the hell was that, Oda?

Already gone on at length about... that... in the spoiler thread and the discord so I won't repeat myself.

I'm not against Yaamto sticking around Wano, that makes some sense, but give more than a one panel mention of an off-camera discussion with Luffy if you're going to have a major swerve like that. Carrot's farewell was equally a non-thing with no follow up (Unless she shows up stowing away next chapter.)

Also I guess I should apologize to any Hancock/Perona/Rebecca/Carrot/etc supporters I might have been rude or dismissive to over the years, regardless of what happens next. If I was mean or rude or an awful person, I wasn't insulting you, I was insulting your stupid full of holes theory.

And now it was my stupid full of holes theory too.

Whatever your feelings on Yamato, that was EXTREMELY sloppy and rushed. Is this a film red thing? A last minute decision to cut one more person to speed things along? Just always a red herring to make a Wano character fans actually liked? Any way you slice it that was handled badly.

If Oda's THAT willing to change course just a chapter after the characters make it clear they're doing one thing, and they change their mind the next... there's no point in debating this stuff or trying to prove anything or debunk or argue if Oda is willing to completely throw things to the wind on a whim. So i think, barring Carrot stowing away next chapter, or responded to people mentioning this exact post....

This is going to be the last time I post in this thread. Because while this has always been a dumb pointless thread... now really what's the point?

So long Nakama thread. You were a waste of everyone's time.

It's always been pretty clear to me that Baratie is the arc where Oda got comfortable and knew the series was going to be a long runner. The previous arcs all had REALLY SHORT flashbacks of just a few pages, while Sanji's is full blown multiple chapters and really nails it. The world is expanded immensely with the intro of Mihawk, (and ZOro's long term goal tangibly introduced at the same time) and the fight with Krieg goes on for a while.

Arlong Park is the arc most people feel it really hit on all cylinders, and that's true... but Baratie is definitely the point it started breaking out of the five year plan that would have had the entire crew assembled within a year or two. If Oda hadn't started getting comfortable in Baratie, Arlong wouldn't have been as epic and as many chapters as it was.

"Who is this live action for?"

Everyone that dismisses comic books and cartoons no matter what. Everyone here is already a convert, we know how good cartoons can be. But outside of anomolies like Frozen, animation just is NOT as wide stream as anything live action. Like the new Spiderverse movie has made like 600 million! Fantastic, huge improvement over the first!

The most recent live action Spider man almost 2 billion. Nearly 3 times as much. Even the lowest grossing live action Spidey, Amazing 2, made 800 mill.

Look at the top 200 highest grossing movies of all time. 26 of those movies are animated and they're almost all sequels. The other 174 slots are live action. (And in the top 50 its like, 7 films, none in the top ten.)

WE all know animation is great, we don't have to be convinced. But the general public its always just kids stuff and they'll never give it a chance.

If you want to reach a NEW audience, you need to do live action. Same with Last Airbender.

Yeah, it's near perfect in its animated form and live action won't improve it. But there's millions and millions of people that might be willng to watch it and get the same story we already love, that have ignored the animated one for 15 years... just because its animated and "for kids".

Just how it is.

Also, One Piece is currently a 1088 chapter, 102 volume, 1070 episode anime with 14 movies that's been running for 26 years and has AT LEAST 4 years to go if not another 10. . You can't convince anyone to start that at this point. I used to introduce friends to the series and I don't anymore, it's too much a commitment.

But an 8 episode mini-series? That will get to what most people consider THE high point hooking moment in that time? I might be able to finally convince some of my friends to give it a shot just so they finally understand where I've been coming from all this time.

The live action isn't for the pople who already know the property. They're along for the ride ANYWAY. Its for the people who would never have touched it otherwise.

"But it's already a best seller and perfect in its medium".

So was Lord of the Rings. So was Super Mario. Sometimes it doesn't matter if its already the most popular influential thing, it can still reach a new audience. And, as someone who has read LotR 4 different times in my life, about once a decade, and grew up on the animated versions... I love the movies way way more, for a wide variety of reasons.

@Captain-M said in Volume 105 Predictions/Discussion:

@Lord-Gaimon Feels about on par with personally making a map of a whole world that canonically has 20 million+ islands.

To do this in full detail would require multiple complete laps of the Grand Line and scouring the Calm Belts for more Amazon Lilies, in addition to going through all four blues that haven't yet been touched, and probably circumnavigating the Redline as well.

It's an absurd, hyperbolic task, and almost all work done toward it has been offscreen, only confirmed via the SBS that Nami is still drawing maps every day. I couldn't even tell you the last time it came up in her dialogue.

But this is a shonen manga and it's her stated goal, so there's no reason to doubt it's gonna happen one way or another.

I always figured that in terms of Nami's dream, mapping out the single most impossible route to the final sland is the big lynchpin that no one else can do. That's the dream fullfilled moment.

All the little side islands are her life's work afterward, passion project.

(this is all assuming Luffy doesn't destroy the red line and flood the world and screw everything up. I hate that theory but if he resets the map then that changes everything for Nami.)

Same with say, Sanji finding All Blue. He finds it and then... what? Just stays there forever? Sets up a shop? Tells other people where it is?

Zoro beats Mihawk and then becomes world's greatest swordsman. Then what? He passes out and dies? He fights off nobodies and gets bored like Mihawk does? He just stops training then and lets that skill decay? He spends the rest of his life on people not worth his time? Or he travels around looking for new challenges and talent to inspire? Does he start looking for all the great swords like Tashigi?

Brook wants to meet Laboon again. He could have gone backwards from Thriller bark if that was all he really wanted. Instead he wants to finish the full round the globe trip. But after that then what? Spend the rest of his life hanging out in a harbor with the whale?

Usopp is become a brave warrior. And then..?

There are goals, which are achievable and have a final stopping victory point, and then there are DREAMS which last a lifetime, The dreams don't have that stopping point.

It's maybe significant the Jinbe hasn't had a stated dream. Its implied "ease racial tensions" but that's clearly never going to fully happen, that's an impossible one, so he's not going to say it out loud. "Travel with the Pirate King and show humans and fishmen can be friends while I have fun for the first time in my life?" There we go!

"I want to be a writer!" someone writes a book and gets it published. If they REALLY want to be a writer, they don't stop there, they keep writing more. That's how dreams are.

Now that Luffy is a Sun god and Blackbeard is an avatar of darkness with moon symbolism?

Nah. Gorosei are playing their hand and showing off their powers now. They are also now dying and being replaced and just had a major failure that gave away the secrets they've been hiding for centuries. THey haven't been physically beaten yet but they're falling apart.

It's always been three ancient weapons and thus a likelihood of three armies. Blackbeard and Imu can be co-final villains. But Blackbeard is still the threat that has been built up slowly for decades as a parellel to Luffy, has an explicit crew to provide 1 on 1 fights for a big shonen finale, had the power to turn off devil fruits and make it a pure physical fight, and is a pirate.

The World Government toppling is the last major story thread, but that's for Dragon and the reforming marines to carry the bulk of. Who is going to deal with the pirate villain except for Luffy?

Maybe Luffy and Blackbeard team up to punch out Imu. Maybe Blackbeard steals Imu's power and throne so he can be king of the world and thus a bigger title than just Emperor. I dunno.

It'd be different if we'd only seen ONE of the elders in their final monster form but we got all five at once and aside from their immortality they were mostly dealt with and handled after a little trouble. Imu will be stronger still, obviously, but you don't use up all five of them at once if you plan on saving them for anything.

It on average takes about 3 years to make an animated film start to finish normally. 4 isn't unheard of, especially started from scratch on a new IP, but 5 is really unusual if the sequel was greenlit right away and they kept the same creative team.

Expecting a 6 year total cycle for a pair of film described as "being developed at the same time", when they had already developed the characters and visual style, wasn't unreasonable,

Until it turned out they'd done literally nothing on the third one and had been abusing the animators.

@Cockycent said in Marvel Movies Thread - Holy Shitballs:

I have to disagree with "no one would have expected". The pressure for creatives to address or comfort fans comes from fans and the studio. Fans have been craving not only a sequel, but Miles Morales content in general.

Is Spiderverse 2 had been a standalone, resolved most of its plotlines, and didn't end on a cliffhanger... it'd sit better. Then waiting another 3 or 4 years would be fine.

It's entirely the making it half a story and the explicit promise there will be more that creates a promise, and a demand, for a follow up sooner than later.

Same with something like Game of Thrones or Kingkiller Chronicles. If George Martin or Patrick Ruthfus had finished their stories, no one would care when the next book came, and would just be happy when it happened. Ending on cliffhangers with no resolution though? That's when it gets wonky. Meanwhile Guy Gavriel Kay takes 3 years per book and no problems. Brandon Sanderson is writing an expansive universe that's taken 20 years to get this far and is going to take another 20 years to get through but no one complains because he has regular output, updates, and communicates with his audience.

If you promise the audience a sequel, then you're also promising to do your best to get that out in a reasonable amount of time. Life happens, stuff gets in the way, creative block happens, but you do what you can do to resolve the cliffhangers that you set up.

@Cockycent said in Marvel Movies Thread - Holy Shitballs:

Same for Into The Spider-Verse. "Why didn't you animate both 2 and 3 at the same time"? Yes, brilliant idea. Across comes out in 2024, instead of 2023 and the 3rd film comes out 2026. Fans don't want to admit that their demand for films to be release every 2-3 years is just as much responsible for the exhausted creative as the studio. "Where is Invincible, how long does it take to animate".

The problem is, they CLAIMED they were working on both at the same time, that it grew to two films because their ideas were too big, and that they would be released 9 months apart.

We were told these things repeatedly. No one would have expected two animated films from the same team that close together otherwise. And that would have been 5 and 6 years after the first film, which is a decent production time to put together a ~3 hour story if it was all written and boarded at once.

But that was all just a misdirect. Because the movie ends on a cliffhanger, so someone tried to do damage control and convince audiences it wouldn't be that long a wait, but that was clearly a total lie.

And they're right, the movie probably would have done a lot worse if people had been told "it ends on a cliffhanger and you won't get the resolution for at least 4 years. Maybe 5. Who knows, we haven't even started writing it yet, and half our animators quit because we treated them so poorly."

@Cockycent said in Marvel Movies Thread - Holy Shitballs:

"Where is Invincible, how long does it take to animate".

Invincible is psychological. It does hour long episodes so the entire season is over in no time and it doesn't feel like a full season. Take the exact same content and make it 16 episodes instead of 8, and thus have it release over 4 months instead of 2, and people instantly feel better about it. Leave in the mid-way gap they had last season, and suddenly the season is releasing over the course of 7 or 8 months... and then the wait for the next season is a matter of months rather than years, and that would make a HUGE difference.

Its a trick Netflix has pulled for a lot of its animated stuff and in a world where they just binge drop things, it helps a lot.

It also took Amazon a long time to greenlight season 2, so there was an extra long wait, it shouldn't have taken nearly 3 years to do that amount of episodes. Seasons 3 and 4 should be on a much more reasonable timetable of "about a year".

I'm not saying thats THE solution for invincible, the hour long format lets them do some pacing stuff you can't do in a half hour... but the trade off IS shorter seasons and longer waits for the exact same amount of work and that's a choice they made.

It's not just an Invincible problem. Shows used to do 26 episode seasons so there was new stuff year around with a summer break to catch up on reruns, and you'd get 150 episode series in a few years and spend time with those characters year around. (And animated shows would do 13... the craziness of 65 episode animated seasons is mind-boggling but that's obviously a quality issue at that pace)

Now we get 8-10 episode seasons once every 2 years and.... it's not the same. Production values are higher and there "no filler" (which is not actually a good thing, you need down time to relax with the character) but the tradeoff is there's no time to really sink into a series and let it become a part of your life... you binge it in a weekend and then forget about till it shows up again in a few years.

@Shiebs said in Marvel Movies Thread - Holy Shitballs:

@Robby I thought Jonathan Majors performance as Kang was great, best part about the movie to me, I was looking forward to seeing more of him but I can see why they dropped him

His performance was good. But as an actual menace he was completely ineffectual and beaten very easily and didn't feel in any way like an unstoppable cosmic threat.

"His suit was damaged" and "he had no power" only make it worse.

Then you show a room with thousands of the guy? Including three of them in more-ridiculous-than-usual outfits? That just turns him into a fodder army, not a bigger threat. Everyone knows the inverse rule of ninjas. One of them is unstoppable but a dozen melt like butter. Thousands of them? Aren't going to last a minute.

@Riddler said in Marvel Movies Thread - Holy Shitballs: I did go watch The Marvels in theaters and found it incredibly meh, personally.

I'm not saying Marvels was a super amazing movie. It's middle tier Marvel at best. But it was a good time, had some great moments, and the best needle drop in the franchise. And Kamala is great, and it's failure sabotages any future projects with the character and the actress.

Amongst its peers, it shouldn't have been THE flop but after Eternals and Quantum and Thor 4 I can see why people would start dipping out and not trusting the brand by default.

Probably doesn't help that execs got nervous and cut half an hour out of the film and it shows. They very clearly spent more time on the singing planet originally, and there were the bones of a "Kamala gets disillusioned" arc that were pretty blatantly edited around. I'm all for a breezy perfectly paced 90 minute movie but when even the earliest and shortest Marvel movies are 2 hours and this one was only 90 minutes, something happened to it in the editing room. You can tell from the trailers too, they didn't want to show anything past the first 20 minutes, someone didn't know how to deal with the movie.

No movie deserves to do well by default, obviously, but in a franchise that has regularly cleared 600 million on every film for over a decade, (aside from covid era films) it sucks that one was the complete failure when Quantumania was so, so much worse. It didn't deserve to be THE big bomb that gets pointed at as a huge failure that lets assholes go "ah ha, woke is broke!

Another Trump assassination attempt. Apparently.

No shots fired, but a guy had a gun with a scope and was waiting outside the fence for Trump to golf on through. Trump was 300-500 yards away when suspect was arrested,

Apparently he was well hidden and would have had a good shot within a few minutes, only got caught because SS spotted the gun barrel poking through the fence.

He is a white republican that voted for Trump in 2016.

If the entire 2 hour movie had just been a 5 minute recap from Luis summarizing it before the next Avengers film, it would have been infinitely better.

https://cheezburger.com/12209157/ant-man-meme-gives-a-recap-of-all-the-horrors-of-2020-so-far

@Time-Control-Magician said in Marvel Movies Thread - Holy Shitballs:

Worst than Kung Fu Panda 4?

That and Star Wars 9 were disappointing, but I could see where there was potential and how it could have been good if one person on staff had been able to suggest something slightly different. The movies weren't good and I'll never rewatch them, but they weren't insultingly wasting my time either.

This was outright bad and insulting and made me feel bad for the actors and there's just no way to fix it without starting over from scratch. The plot, the effects, the "comedy", the "character arcs", the emotional stakes, the editing, the music choices, the lackluster villain who was supposed to turn into THE big threat, the super science robot ants, Modok in his entirety, the massive swathe of secondary characters who I guess were supposed to be importantant but only had 5 seconds of screen time before the big rush at the end where they did things we were supposed to be invested in?
Everything was wrong. There was not a single thing in there where I can go "oh I see why they really wanted to do this scene" or "there was a lot of potential there but..."

Like it felt like there were in-joke memes that they were responding to like "you're just a guy that talks to ants!" and "I'm just a dick!" that without the original joke meme... don't work? At all? Like they were trying to do Deadpool style fourth wall breaking but it just didn't register or work in any way because the guy writing the comedy just wasn't funny.

The director was the same for all three movies so it probably wasn't their fault? I looked up the writer and their only credits are Jimmy Kimmel, and the fourth season of Rick and Morty, which was the worst season by far. That... probably explains it.

WHo thought it was a good idea to loop the Welcome Back Kotter theme for minutes at a time? TWICE? Yeah its a happy upbeat song but the lyrics don't fit anything at all. Maybe it's just because I actually know the song, it's lyrics and the context that it felt really badly placed to me? It's no Immigrant Song or Like a Prayer (epic version) to be sure.

Or to cut the BEST and most memorable character in the Ant-Man franchise, Luis?

Just a miss on every possible level and it's both good and unfortunate that it was the last Marvel thing I caught up on because man, THIS is the reason the Marvels flopped. How well franchises do is partly based on how good the movie before them was and after this utter piece of garbage, I can see a LOT of people saying "I'm not watching any more of these. I'll make an exception for Guardians 3 and Deadpool 3 but then I'm done."

Like, even if Jonathan Majors hadn't gotten into trouble forcing them to change their Kang plans, the absolute utter disaster of this film would have. No one would have wanted to see more of this loser after this. That may be why Loki made a point of hyper wrapping things up instead of trying to build him into an even bigger threat.

Also, final petty note, at the end when I realized they chose that dumb title because quANTuMANia is just... oof.

FINALLY caught up on all the Marvel movies and shows.

Quantumania was bad. Really really bad

Easily the worst movie I've seen in years.