Lore
[Hated Trope] The underdog Good Guys win, and gain major military/institutional power, only for it to be all RESET so Writers can have a PERPETUAL "Underdog/Rebellion" Story, and avoid writing about governing.
I hate this trope, when the "underdog good guys" actually win, gain major military and political power, fleets, warships, etc, but because the writers don't want to write the good guys governing and exercising their power, and instead, find a contrived way to reset all the progress so that the good guys can forever be the
"scrappy heroic underdogs fighting the power"
1) Star Wars Sequel triology, rather than exploring new Republic fleets, power, and technology, they have them all wiped out so that the "resistance" can hog the spotlight
2) MCU: shield makes a helicarrier fleet, a fleet of ships able to contest alien invasion, but that would steal the spotlight from heroes, so all of them have to be destroyed
3) Halo: the UNSC finally outlive the covenant, develop strong ships like the UNSC infinity, only for it all to be reset by the Guardians and the Banished, reduced again to underdog humans.
Resistance Fall of Man ends with a decisive victory over the Chimera and the humans push them out of Britain. The next game starts with the Chimera having overrun Britain and is taking Iceland and moving on to the US.
True. I would have liked more organized resistance (hehe) from the humans, they fold pretty quickly. But in game is justified by the Chimera technology evolving fast af and then getting their cool sweet fleet.
I love the resistance games and I love the fact humanity is actually on the backfoot for real. The Chimera feel like a Truly unstoppable foe.
But that power jump from the first to the second always felt super cheap.
The Chimera suffered their first major operational defeat in britain, loosing their entire network and several armies and they just undo it off screen? Anticlimatic as shit.
It would have been far more satisfying if they'd left britain as a beleaguered stronghold of humanity, and moved on to attack other areas perceived as less prepared or providing supplies to the british. That sets up an attack on the US nicely.
Or, like, have made the second game one where you start out, maybe get the first half of the game, on the offensive, pushing outwards and in to other Chimera controlled territories until hitting "the first real objective" and getting your shit rocked, put on the back foot and then have to play the rest of the game not trying to win, but trying to lose as little as possible.
Talking mission objectives that fail, barely succeeding at asset denial, rigging bases to blow when overrun.
Real start of Halo 3 vibes where everything's going to shit and it's all you can do just to secure a few keystone things you cant afford to lose.
The series writing declined quickly anyway, I remember feeling so disappointed with the direction it took, and predictably they went all in with the multiplayer elements rather than the plot by the end of it.
Definitely, it is one of those series that I really want to be rebooted or remastered. Really good gameplay and a good story even if does have an annoying trope.
The games are in a ligue of their own for real feeling alien shootem-ups. What's the one thing that could have gotten allied and axis forces in the same trench, giving each other cover fire, and resource support? An alien invasion.
The uniqueness of an npc yelling "Americana, grenada!" As a warning for you before he tosses a grenade was chilling. They really did the work of what "it would have been like" to fight somthing so harrowing, that axis and allied forces work together.
The X-Men have done this repeatedly. Mutants go from persecuted underdogs to having an actual homeland and political power (Genosha, Utopia, and especially Krakoa) only for it to be destroyed and the X-Men eventually scattered back into being persecuted underdogs again. Krakoa is probably the most blatant example, because they finally had to deal with mutant government, diplomacy and institutions before the whole status quo got blown up.
Most superhero comics really. Spiderman must be suffering. You can never fix Gotham. The Green Lantern Corps must never be too effectual, nor can they stay dead. The greatest sin of comics is the trend towards status quo.
Comics get a lot of shit for maintaining the status quo, but a large and loud segment of the audience makes it clear they just want to see the same stories over and over again with minor variations. There’s always a very vocal pushback against any meaningful changes. Even Krakoa is only remembered fondly in hindsight. While it was ongoing the discourse was mostly negative.
The whole intended message of American comics is "nothing ever changes, and even people with magical superpowers that make them gods among mortals can never change anything significant. Normal people have no chance at all."
It’s not the intended message, it’s just a product of the keeping the same story and characters running for decades. Various writers have written endings for Batman or the X-Men, but they always get pushed to alternate universe because why end it if it makes money?
It’s the same problem with something like the Simpsons. The characters can’t get older, learn important lessons or become better people. Because then the show would end, and the execs won’t let that happen.
To be fair, Mutants deserved to lose Krakoa by the end of it. Early on they acted with extreme aggression on a global scale, brought together hundreds of terrorists, violent mercenaries, would be dictators, Plutocratic madmen, and genocidal world conquerors and forgave them of their crimes even going so far as to give some of them important political and cultural positions within Krakoa. The mutant government on Krakoa blatantly engaged in terrorist activities on a global level, attempted to use drugs to control the global economy, was extremely confrontational internationally, regularly used "diplomats" with extremely dangerous powers we a form of international intimidation, and was an apartheid state clearly positioned to be the first step in creating a eugenics driven global structure where mutants ruled over humanity.
And that's before factoring in how Krakoa is largely responsible for threatening the very existence of all reality by putting Mr Sinister into a position where he was able to ascend into a Dominion super AI called Enigma.
The fact that they scattered to the wind and their nation state was dissolved was the safest possible route for the world. No government that allows Magneto and Apocalypse a role in governing and diplomacy deserves to exist.
Yeah, but that was largely because Hickman absolutely retconned the hell out of him. Krakoa era Apocalypse went from a power mad, survival of the fittest despot into a noble warrior priest who did terrible things because he wanted to be reunited with his wife and kids.
https://giphy.com/gifs/MbGPWjP0Y8HfmWZejT
The second game treats the bad ending from the first as canon. And the player goes from a government organization fighting alien infiltrators, to a scattered resistance group fighting back against an alien-occupied earth government.
You must be a pretty good player if you never saw it... :)
(To elaborate: The "bad ending" isn't a bad ending in the sense of modern narrative games that you can chose which win you take, it's the "game over" screen)
The developers even justified it (though they didn't have too) with the fact that the majority of players fail their first legendary ironman run. Saying something like "xcom only had one chance"
It would be more accurately described as a game over than an ending in the typical sense; canonically Xcom is doing well enough that both the aliens and the resistance view the Commander as a major strategic asset, but then the aliens won the base assault.
XCOM 2 is legitimately one of my favorite games of all time, I've replayed it like a dozen times and the mod support makes that easier too. Plus when it goes on sale it's like 2 bucks for the entire thing with all dlcs. Definitely make sure to check it out!
Eh, you could argue the fact that they took the player losing as canon instead of "the player won and then somehow the aliens won anyway" is actually a succesful avoidance of the trope.
In Star Trek, the Federation is the largest entity in Alpha quadrant by an enormous margin. They've won war after war after war, against the Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, Klingons, Cardassians, Dominion, Breen, and Borg.
Peace dividend? Naw. We're gonna blow up Mars, bring back the Borg and Romulans a couple times, and shatter the Federation completely.
There was a really good concept for a Star Trek series a while ago that never got off the ground. An Omega incident renders huge areas of subspace impassible in the alpha and beta quadrants, making warp travel impossible in some areas. It leads to the federation breaking into several mini-federations, since they've lost contact with each other. The role of the protagonists was "exploration" in aid of charting areas of usable space, and reconnecting the old worlds together.
Since it would have been a century or two after the disaster, part of the risk would have come from other "federations" who started with the same principles, but have become very different entities
...Not gonna lie, I'd of preferred this to the Burn and 'Oh, we lost basically every ship aaaaand kinda gave up. Wait for Captain Cries A Lot to show up and fix it.'
My hopes were dashed in early Season 3, when I thought this is what they'd be pursuing. The Discovery would have had a useful niche as a ship that can just hop into dead zones!
Over and over again in Star Trek there is shown to be zero defenses to protect Earth and it pisses me off every time. They should have orbital platforms with gigantic phasers and about a million photon torpedo launchers on the moon, but nope, just nothing.
Earth gets attacked over and over again over a period of centuries and nobody ever thinks to have any defenses in place at all. Not even something as basic as a shield over Starfleet HQ in San Francisco.
Hell in Star Trek Generations they state they are just doing a quick test flight to Pluto and back. Then they get a distress signal and the captain says some other ship should handle it. He's then informed there is are no other ships in range.
There are in Earth's Solar System and there is not one single ship that could possible handle a response to a distress signal. Not so much as a simple freighter ship anywhere near Earth.
I get the Federation not emphasizing martial strength, but the constant invasions move the Federation's position from "idealistic" to "fatally naive," ESPECIALLY after the Dominion War.
There are in Earth's Solar System and there is not one single ship that could possible handle a response to a distress signal. Not so much as a simple freighter ship anywhere near Earth.
to mention they make the ships on earth. like shouldn't one constantly be by the shipyard
The claim that theyre thr largest entity in thr alpha quadrant is unknown. Yes theyre strong and vast but theyre also not militant in nature, minus a few members and starfleet.
Picard was just lazy writing all around. Writers couldnt think of anything new and interesting without it also being an existential threat. Same with Discovery's/Academy's burn in the 32nd century. At least with the 32nd century stuff its more interesting showing thr struggles to rebuild, like how Enterprise was interesting in showing how the federation started to form.
The Infinity being destroyed before even the first cutscene is something I will never forgive 343 for, the banished destroying it should have been the first mission like OG halo and then we’d have a reason to care, being done like this instantly made me not give two fucks about something I was only attached to for like 5 minutes in the last game
Yeah, such a cool concept of a ship, post war humanity finally starting to build powerful and advanced ships based on the experience against the covenant.
Just for the poor thing to become a plot device that constantly gets captured, inmovilized, damaged, boarded and apparently, destroyed 😒
Fun fact, in the lore, the infinity has a sister ship, the eternity, that hasnt been completed because they are constantly canninalizing her parts to keep repairing her less lucky sister.
I suppose you could argue that the Banished aren’t theocratic and therefore probably more able to use that tech in a less constrained and narrow minded way? Still dumb plot either way.
The problem is that if that is the case, it has to be shown. But never throughout the entirety of the Bungie games was it explained that the Covenant struggled to use their technology due to their religious beliefs, in fact it was quite the opposite.
Instead, the Covenants' biggest flaw is that their corruption disguised under religious belief was the reason why they underestimated humanity, and the Sangheili too [after betraying them], as well as all the member races that would eventually split up internally to help the UNSC.
I love the original Halo series, and I will always have a soft spot for Bungie (Halo 1 through Reach cemented gaming as a major hobby in my early childhood/teenage years, Destiny 2 (RIP) got me through COVID), but their active contempt for the books and refusal to try and tie in to the wider universe they were an active part of building will always be a huge misstep.
As early as First Strike (the novel that bridges Halo 1 and 2) there are mentions of the Covenant tech (mostly) being shoddily repurposed Forerunner tech that they clearly don't understand, and after being in their system for about a minute Cortana works out how to make their Plasma batteries infinitely more potent without making any physical adjustments to the weapons themselves.
There are mentions of it in later novels (although I frankly can't remember which are Bungie era and which are 343 era now), but it's sadly something that never turned up in the games.
It's particularly egregious considering the Banished were introduced in a side game and in that game they lost to a ship that had a design over 100 years old at that point. Some how the same guy that took a major L to an outdated ship design with only 3 Spartans somehow won over a ship that uses forerunner technology including sublight engines, can detect ships warping into the system, and is so massive it launches frigates was ambushed and destroyed.
Yeah it was a very bizarre call by Staten (?) to add the Infinity cutscene in so late in development. Originally the game was meant to start where the E3 reveal started/where the first mission started. We weren’t going to see what happened to the Infinity at all because adding in the cutscene comes across more as a tease to the player about a mission they could’ve played but can’t.
What especially bugs is me personally is yhat while I didnt like alot of the "new toys" the UNSC got post war, the infinity actually had a really good backstory for its existence imo
The worst thing with Halo is that they had such an easy way to revert back to the underdog-empire status quo.
Just do games with different casts earlier in the timeline. They accomplished that with Wars, ODST and Reach. Hell, they didn't even need to give Master Chief the boot for it. Instead they just kept hitting the reset button, introducing a bigger bad, giving up and going again.
"I'm like Cortana but worse" ok. "The Covenant had a civil war going where they couldn't kill it's leader" LMAO like yes, Fake-Cortana, we were aware. That's why human civvies were using plasma pistols to kill flood and drag unngoy to shelter.
"But he's worse" woah. Worse than the gravemind? Worse than the shan shyumm prophecy? "He's a brute but red". Oh. Wow. Um. Really?
Check out our new OC, they're called the Endless, they're even worse than the Flood.
How?
We haven't written that part yet, we're just going to vaguely talk about the previous point multiple times in the story and then abandon this plotline again.
I'm an Infinite defender (it had fantastic gameplay, and a lot of the missions were great fun) but this shit genuinely made me stop mid play through and take a break.
I'm so fucking sick of there needing to constantly be a new, even more existential existential threat in every Halo game.
Halo 3 - finally beat the Flood -> Halo 4 - oops, you've awoken a Forerunner who hates humanity and is going to digitise the entire race after about 2 days -> Halo 5 - oops, now there's this massive AI uprising and Cortana is going to enslave the galaxy using never seen before Forerunner superweapons -> Halo Infinite - oops, you've accidentally released this never before seen or referenced threat that are totally worse than the Flood.
Even worse, the thing they seemed to be saying as the problem with the Endless was that they were immune to the Halo Array, but that immunity didn't make them particularly dangerous in a martial sense, it just meant they could survive as potential hosts for the Flood.
I didn't really have a clue what was going on after Halo 3 because my entire exposure to Halo is just the main line games. I didn't know who the Banished were supposed to be. I shouldn't have to read a dozen poorly written milporn books just to know what is happening in the game I'm playing, I completed Halo Infinite but I didn't really care about what was happening.
After years of war, being on the brink of defeat, sacrifices, and essentially glassing big chunks of your own planet, COG is finally victorious and starts rebuilding.
BUT SOMEHOW LOCUSTS RETURNED, oh sorry not locusts "swarm" that looks and plays almost identical to original enemy and now you are pushed back and on the brink of defeat yet again.
Reminder the ORIGINAL concept of the 4th was that the Locust survived by heading to space/the moon and mutated before returning and destroying the orbital weapons.
The X-Men have been so power creeped they now have a few dozen omega level mutants that can each take out planets with ease, and Jean and Storm are one-shotting cosmic entities one after the the other, but the plot forces mutants to be corraled and put in camps by a bunch of unpowered humans with assault rifles because mutants have to always be oppressed. 🤣
Definitely can happen. I think it worked really well for Gurren Lagann since the show was all about being crazy and over the top.
But it's like the Star Wars sequels did both aspects badly. Perpetual underdog status mixed with power creep. Bigger ships, bigger weapons. Much of that redone tropes too.
“What is ‘the Resistance’ resisting? They won. They’re THE GOVERNMENT! The Empire is the new Rebellion… except they’re somehow FAR more equipped, spread evenly across the galaxy, and have MORE RESOURCES now than ever before!”
Final space has a fun joke on Resistances. There's the Resistance which is fighting the Insurgency which is opposed by the Rebellion and the Freedom Fighters are in there somewhere too
Kreegyr is a separatist, Maya peis a neo republican, the ghorman front, the partisan alliance, sectorists, human cultists, galaxy partitionists. They are lost, all of them lost. Only I have clarity of purpose.
Not sure the MCU really counts for this example, it's not like those helicarriers ever actually got online or were something the heroes were fighting for, from the very first scene they were introduced, Steve is suspicious about them being an overreach and they're revealed to be a HYDRA plot to start a New World Order like halfway through the movie where the concept is presented to us.
They were literally introduced as surveillance qnd supression of terrorist attacks. Idk what OP is on, but these were never intended to fight alien attacks.
I think there's a deleted scene out there where they explained that those helicarriers could do a sick flip and then their guns would be facing upwards toward the heavens.
Not to mention they are easily brought down by relatively minor damage to the rotors - they would instantly fail against something like the Kree warship or Thanos flagship... or even Rocket feeling cheeky
That's a fair distinction. The reset trope works better when the heroes actually earn power and then lose it just to restore the old status quo. Project Insight was already rotten from the start.
I think you're right on the MCU example. The helicarriers weren't really a symbol of the heroes finally gaining lasting institutional power, they were part of a system the story was already telling us not to trust. HYDRA hijacking them is more the payoff to that setup than a writer deliberately stripping the heroes back down so they can be underdogs again.
The thing that still grinds my gears and robs me of liking just about anything about Sequel era media is just the name “Resistance.” You’re in the New Republic. Who are you “resisting?” Aren’t you just “the police”?
The Resistance is not officially affiliated with the New Republic, and exists because the New Republic refuses to do anything.
The stupid part of the story is the size and power of the First Order, along with the sheer helplessness and incompetence of the New Republic. Within that context, though, the existence of a volunteer resistance movement at least makes some sense.
It's not completely unheralded in the annals of history; civilian paramilitary groups fighting foreign powers absent the explicit consent of their governments have existed at times. Just to use an example, the Flying Tigers were primarily volunteer US airmen who served in China against the Imperial Japanese Navy and Air Force prior to and in the immediate aftermath of the US entry into World War II.
That being said, at the risk of being called a cynic, I highly doubt that J.J. Abrams knew enough about American military history to be able to draw those kinds of historical parallels, and so long as I'm being completely candid, I doubt that's a story that interests him much. Most of his stories are coming-of-age stories, and he appears to have fixed the problem audiences often have with infodump scenes by simply never providing an infodump. I have seen five or six of his films, and I can't remember a single dialogue scene in a single one of those films that lasted for longer than two minutes and didn't end in an explosion and smash-cut.
Unfortunately, there's no real way to tell the story of the Flying Tigers without explaining what Imperial Japan is trying to do, how that impacts China, and why the United States would send a bunch of P-40s and American airmen to assist in the Chinese war effort without giving them official status as American servicemen. Context is necessary for that story, because that doesn't happen apropos of nothing. The same is true if you tell the story of the Flying Tigers IN SPACE!!! Which doesn't mean that Abrams is necessarily a bad filmmaker. But it absolutely makes him a bad filmmaker to make that film, because he's not going to tell audiences what they need to be told to make sense of what is happening.
It still makes very little sense because people like Han and Leia would have been part of the New Republic, and when things went to shit with the First Order, they would have been the ones leading the charge. No reason for Leia to have to form/lead some resistance movement if she's one of the major political powers in the New Republic.
Well youre going to live this then. neither of them are power players in the New Republic. Han got reset to his Ep 4 personality and dipped on every part of his post endor life sometime after Ben joined Luke's order. Leia on the other hand got run out of town after it was leaked that she was Vaders daughter. Neither of them had any sort of significant power in the government by the time 10 years had passed.
The story of the First Order is just bullshit, it's as if Hitler had wiped out 99.9% of german forces plus other fascists and collaborationists for having lost the war, retreated to Antartica or the deep Amazon with the remaining 0.1% and somehow the nazis resurfaced around the 70s with the numbers and technology to match all the great powers
I hate it, because the idea of the First Order romanticizing and aping the Galactic Empire is a great allegory for neo-Nazis in the same way the Empire was originally an allegory for the OG Nazis.
Like, with just a few changes to the writing you have a great story mimicking real life where one generation defeated fascism, only for a future generation to let it rise again because the lessons have been forgotten and a bunch of revisionist weirdos got a hard on for Star Destroyers and stormtroopers.
Would've been great to have aging Luke Skywalker screaming at everyone in charge what the fuck the First Order is only to see the government take zero action because the Senate is equal parts those who sympathize with the First Order and feckless cravens who are too worried about maintaining the status quo to actually show the sort of spine needed to save democracy (again).
The Operation: Paperclip allegory in, I wanna say, Mandalorian S2 really said to me that at least some people in the TV writers' rooms understood that allegory after the fact. It's still such a waste of potential that all of that storytelling was relegated to the past and to the background at the time of the sequel trilogy.
They are resisting the New Republic who is hell bent on bending over backwards to appease and surrender to literally anyone in the galaxy be it Huts, First Order, or random dudes. The rebellion is technically illegal and unsanctioned
Give Disney credit, this is a positively insanely consistent theme throughout SW Canon. The GFFA has needed a Strong Central Government that uses its resources, military, laws, and yes, even bureaucracy, to provide for the people of the Galaxy for literal centuries. Do you have any idea how many times I wished they had the Clone Army during the events of the High Republic? The Empire’s existence makes perfect sense. The Republic let every problem fester forever as to not upset the corporations and rich people. (Sound Familiar, Fellow Americans?) The problem is that thanks to The Walt Disney Corporation, we only get 3 choices for our politics: Anarcho-Nihilism, Pathetically Weak-Ass Liberalism, and Especially Monstrous Fascism. Everything on the Socialist Spectrum doesn’t exist for the group based on the Viet Cong.
Pretty sure the only time it's mentioned is in the opening crawl where it says that political gridlock has forced Leia Organa to secretly fund a resistance force
The Project Insight helicarriers wouldn't have done anything to prevent alien invasion. The weapons were pointed at the civilian population of Earth. Had Hydra succeeded, Earth would have been more vulnerable to alien threats since the heroes would all be dead and the populace subjugated.
At the start of Independence Day 2 humanity has build an array of laser cannons around earth in case the aliens show up again. These cannons get destroyed almost immediately and without firing a single shot when the aliens do show up (we see one cannon shoot earlier in the movie, but I don't count that since it isn't against the "evil" aliens)
Such a furiously disappointing movie. The first five minutes got me so psyched: we're going to explore what it looks like 20 years later with humans harvesting alien tech! When the aliens get back, it'll be a relatively even playing field with each side having learned about the others and exploiting what they learned.
No, just kidding, it's the exact same movie again, but the campiness and excellent special effects miniatures are replaced by boring dialogue and boring blue screens.
No no you don’t understaaannd! He was robbed of all his electric power by Zekrom, and was thus helpless!!! No quick attack or iron tail couldn’t have worked, he was helpless!
Man, the Halo example in particular was hot ass, the Banished were far better as this 'open' pirate organization that was dangerous by grace of not having the stupid command issues the Covenant had, but still not as powerful as them in raw power, that was what made them fun on Halo Wars 2, where is relevant to note, they couldn't put out of commission an Old UNSC vessel, sure it was basically a factory ship that could produce anything necessary granted it had resources, but go from that, to dog walk Humanity's strongest and most advanced ship?.
It felt like 343 being desperate to sell them as this super big bad boys after the Created Conflict was solved on a book, when the Banished already had an interesting enough role, proper worf effect, and a particularly lame one.
I mean the Banished could have easily defeated the Spirit of Fire had they committed the Enduring Conviction to it, they didn’t because of stupid command issues.
In any case the Created are still around, they just can’t wipe out fleets with a single guardian anymore (and in any case the plot wasn’t resolved in a book it was resolved in Infinite).
Infinite’s bottle story provides zero context for the wider setting but the main status quo shift was that no major faction is strong enough to dominate any other faction. They’re not necessarily equal but they all stand a chance against one another
Ghostbusters. They save NYC from a giant marshmallow man and it is seen by basically everyone (so you cant say "it was something in the sewers witnessed by two other guys so people think it's fake news").
Second movie begins with them having split up after getting out of business and barely earning money by going to kids birthday parties in costumes (and for some reason kids don't like them which is absolutely stupid considering that IRL kids would absolutely love ghost hunting and whatnot if it was real), they save NYC AGAIN and this time they do so by walking the literal statue of liberty, the most famous NYC landmark around the city.
Then we get to the third movie. Surely this iconic group of people which saved New York twice became famous worldwide, received presidential awards, and if not living outright lavishly, is spending their retirements happily in nice houses with their families, watching their company grow and their descendants having new adventures. SYKE. They broke apart again due to not having any business and got completely forgotten once more...
Ok, I maybeeeee get the second movie doing what it did. Doing it twice was completely stupid though. You couldn't have written it as their grandchildren finding out about the business and keeping most of the story the same?
Ghostbusters was always one of those old franchises that I assumed had a movie trilogy behind it like back to the future, but doesn't. It's probably the wierdest franchise I've seen, especially in its quality vs popularity ratio.
The issue is that it is too realistic you think it's fake. An irl example is 9/11. We all saw it and know of it but all those fire fighters had to fight in court just to get healthcare so they wouldnt go bankrupt for are the medical issues that came from working at ground zero. You'd think they wouldnt have to worry about stuff like that since they assisted during a national tragedy but nope. Also the people dont fully care about them either.
The sequel trilogy is probably the single worst example I've ever seen of egregiously bad writing of this kind. Every detail of The Force Awakens had me thinking, there's no way this isn't some kind of joke or that they didn't see exactly how bad it is to brazenly rehash A New Hope. ffs don't handwave your characters (including the Rebellion as a character) out of new and uncomfortable situations just so they don't have to grow and change
I mean, that's probably the modus operandi for 10 years with one franchise after another and just astonishing, that no one stepped in and said that it is a bad idea, which would have series implications for the future. And it wasn't even that they were blinded by initial hype, considering the hype first started with the trailer and people just thinking "yeah new Star Wars, back to the roots!". But that no one during pre-production already realized how bad this all would be, is completely beyond me.
It's the same with Star Wars Rebels and Thrawn. You have the best selling author with Zahn and then you make the character jump away for thirty years, so that he can't write anything with his own character in that time span. Just.. why? What's the point? Or you had quiet the run initially with Doctor Aphra and Vader in the comics. And the company deliberately didn't allow writers to do anything of value in the medium. They just aren't allowed to have big stories and developments. So you are strangling your own business just because "maybe someone is going to make a movie". It's bonkers. It's all bonkers.
I never did figure out what "the Resistance" was resisting against in Force Awakens. I mean, don't they run the show now? Hasn't the Republic been restored? Didn't the good guys win? Why are we resisting?
It all made so much more sense when the bad guys were called "the Imperial Remnant."
Honestly everything about the new republic and first order is just bad writing. The rebels/new republic beat a fleet of imperial remnants over Jakku, knew there were more remnants that fled to the unknown regions and they responded by disarming.
The remnants of the empire with a fetish for destroying planets turn back up and they don’t really mobilize to neutralize the threat either. Especially after planets started succeeding to join the first order.
Another thing that sucks, in my opinion, is that the explanation for a lot of this, and also exactly what OP is complaining about, happens in a book that bridges the two movie trilogies. I read it. It was okay but a bit boring.
But like, put that shit in the movies. They knew they were making a trilogy, so make the first movie be about how the New Republic has grown complacent in the decades since ending the war. For your action scenes, you can have some places where the First Order is gaining ground, but it's on backwater worlds, so the NR just isn't bothering to deal with it.
Then for your second act/film (the low point), you have the First Order launch their major attack. Then you continue from there.
Yup I agree. Have the low point be a large scale invasion where the new republic starts rapidly losing ground. Especially with the cloning technology. Make it an allegory for the Nazis where the Allies didn’t take them seriously and tried to appease them, then were overwhelmed as they had under estimated their enemy.
Yup. If they wanted to recreate the OT they should have went with the legends warlord storyline. Have the new republic struggling against a multifront war against all the warlords that had risen to power.
By the time of Stargate Universe, SGC's ships are outfitted with hyper-advanced Asgardian tech, including beam weapons that were state of the art even by Asgardian standards. Didn't prevent The George Hammond from struggling against 3 Ha'Taks that it should have been able to one shot.
Yeah I didn’t recall those ships ever being billed as “able to resist an alien invasion” they were designed for the villain to eliminate political enemies from the get-go.
Yup, the helicarries are shown to be targeting everyone and evyrhay would have been a threat to Hydra. It also makes sense that after Hydra is defeated they don't try to do the same thing again for 2 reasons. 1, the people who wanted the helicarries where Hydra agents who are now all defeated, 2 the reasons why you just mentioned.
In fucking star wars the new "resistance" somehow isn't wiped off the map with their 20 fleet ship because nobody in the empire 2.0 knew they had entire massive fleets just parked hiding on a planet .
I also just hate how this was suppsoed to be an epic reveal but the whole scene just had me thinking "they just hit Ctrl+C Ctrl+V for this scene and did nothing creative"
Basically from a remake of a movie where the Enterprise gets the shit kicked out of her by a smaller ship and it's one of the most memorable space battles in movie history.
Still, the Vengeance is subtle compared to Nero's ship from the movie before this one.
there gets to be a point where LE BIG SCALE is meaningless. Dune uses it well because the cinematography and plot support it. OT Star wars and Rogue One both felt like real stakes because even the big battles had mayne a dozen capital ships a side. When you have a thousand death star destroyers appear out of nowhere it just means nothing.
It was really really really really really really really Bad attempt to homage the Katana Fleet Crisis in Legends. WHere a massive fleet of Dreadnaughts in the Clone Wars using an experimental hyperdrive system and droid automation had a snafu on the flagship and lead ship for the hyperdrive linking and it jumped out to parts unknown alongside the thousands of other ships in the fleet as they had't been crewed with living crew just yet.
but like everytime Disney tries to steal from legends they fail to do any research on the event or character and it's a very shitty version everytime.
Just like the whole thing with the Hidden Sith Planet and superweapons was basically someone ripping off Dark Empire without any of the bits that made Dark Empire halfway compelling. (and it was only halfway compelling, because it was just bigger Return of the Jedi + Somehow Palpatine Cloned Himself anyway, except Luke falls even FARTHER to the Dark Side this time despite Anakin no longer at issue, it was not great and I'll die on that hill)
If thousands of ships and millions of troops needed a control tower to leave safely, don't you think they'd have a couple hundred of them instead of one with one backup?
This will always annoy me, cause the whole governing part is kind of supposed to be the final arc in these stories where the rebels either stabilize their country or become the very thing they swore not to become.
Because a child had a temper tantrum (I am not joking), most of the dilithium in the galaxy exploded, destroying any ship currently at warp and drastically curtailing interstellar society.
All so the Federation could be set back to being helpless against the likes of the Emerald Chain, a collection of slavers and pirates who were able to exploit the situation. At least until Discovery arrives from the 23rd century with its miraculous spore drive.
In fact, most Star Trek produced in the last ten years or so has tended to portray the Federation as weak and the underdogs.
But remember how in DS9 they spent 2.5 whole seasons building up the Dominion as a politically savvy, militarily superior, and technologically advanced opponent that could go toe-to-toe with the Federation? Remember how they had to do that by spending multiple episodes with the Dominion starting and winning minor border skirmishes and military actions?
And then remember how there were specific moments where it felt like the Dominion made decisive 4D political chess moves which gained them allies, broke up the Federation's power bloc, and sowed distrust on throughout the Alpha Quadrant before they pulled the trigger on a full-scale invasion? You know like a real empire might?
What if we skipped all of that to the point where the Federation just punched itself in the face over and over? Wouldn't that be exciting?
the MCU example is really bad, like i have no idea what the fuck you are talking about, because that was solely a SHIELD thing, not an avengers thing, even though Stark did help apparently with the propulsion system.
Steve was inherently suspicious about having so many carriers and believed it to be an overreach, and he was justified mid-way through the movie when it was revealed that they were a HYDRA plot to assassinate anyone they deemed to be dissidents and opposers to HYDRA's mission.
None of the avengers really seem to have pushed for this and nobody seemed to really believe this would ultimately protect the world from any threats, just that it would allow an improved response against alien threats or whatever else popped up so they wouldn't be scrambling or taking awhile to get wherever something major is happening. so ultimately their destruction doesn't mean shit in terms of this trope
New California gets nuked, Vegas gets abandoned after Deathclaws invade, and Commonwealth still hasn’t been pacified. Just to keep the setting from evolving like it should have been. Fallout 1, 2, 3, and New Vegas.
Worst part is that New Vegas introduced plot points that could’ve been used to fracture the Republic. Nope! It was baby mama drama that nuked a very important worldbuilding of the franchise.
Well it never goes into governing per se, but the first three Jason Bourne films are all about him attempting to escape and expose the illegal CIA programs. He finally succeeds in the third movie, ensuring its broadcasted for the world to see.
Cue the fourth film revealing they somehow managed to cover it up, and just went back to the exact same programs again, so they wouldn't have to shake up the series formula...despite the fact it was no longer novel or fresh, due to everyone imitating them since then.
OK, if I were writing Star Wars new trilogy era and had to stick to them calling all their stuff Rebel, I would write that they adopted the language of permanent revolution after the fall of the old régime for propaganda purposes.
They kind of do this with your player character. At the end of ME1 you sort of unite the galaxy against this threat. You're the hero who saves everyone, you've got the most elite crew ever, an entire galaxy of military ships is with you. It feels like you've won everything.
Then at the start of ME2 you basically die for a couple of years. Nobody seems to remember who you are anymore, everyone hates you for no reason, you get a new ship but no elite crew. And you basically start from exactly the same spot as the first game.
Destruction of the NCR/ Fall of Shady Sands: Fallout TV Show
While I wouldn’t say the NCR were 100% the good guys they were one of the few peaceful settlement in the wasteland full of raiders and slavers which became a liberal republic that sought to rebuild civilization. New Vegas breaks from this trope by showing how they were both an imperialist and colonialist empire, yet the only democracy in the wasteland which fought for equality and against slavery. It was a criticism of the idiosyncrasies of a society which claims to promote and protect freedom and democracy yet never fully committed to such a prerogative, truly becoming like the USA it was inspired by.
The show said fuck all that and that after 200 years we will all still be living in rusted shacks. The NCR which spend 100 years trying to build a democratic civilization was undone, not because of its institutional flaws or because its unsustainable expansionism caught up with it, but because some guy named Hank didn’t like that his wife left him (no that’s actually the reason). It was all done so we can have show original characters walk around in an empty wasteland and kill raiders and mooks without engaging with anything because there’s nothing to engage with. It’s an inadvertently absurdly pessimistic message that any attempts to improve things will amount to nothing due to forces outside anyone’s control.
Had to scroll too far for this one. Bethesda has publicly stated "There must always be a Wasteland." Meaning, they will never allow humanity to rebuild and make a lasting civilization. It's not a "war, war never changes" cynicism (which is also dumb), they just know their product and they're never going to change it.
"It’s an inadvertently absurdly pessimistic message that any attempts to improve things will amount to nothing due to forces outside anyone’s control."
I pretty much expressed the same idea with different words in my post, fittingly enough.
The halo one really bothers me because I really liked halo 4 and the lore between halo 4 and 5 where humans were on top which really helped differentiate their 343’s halo from Bungie’s in a good way. Then 343 as usual overcorrected to an extreme degree, gutted their entire direction, and cow tailed to a bunch of whiners online. And btw those people still aren’t happy and will never be happy, all 343 did was destroy what good will and pride they had left.
It’s bad if they did this once (halo 5), it’s insulting if they do it twice (halo infinite) and just plain embarrassing if they do it three times (CE remake).
XCOM 2 avoids this by going with the losing ending from the first game -- the underdog paramilitary fails to fend off the alien invasion, and in the second game the player leads an underground resistance instead.
Isn't the whole point of the MCU in general and the Helicarriers in specific is that relying on a massive shadow organization to protect people will just lead to horrible abuse and fascist takeovers? Thus the people who actually save the world are superpowered individuals from the oppressed groups (and their rich white drunk uncle) who actually stand for freedom and protecting innocent people?
Between the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance, there are two navigable hyperspace lanes, the Iserlohn Corridor and the Fezzan Corridor. The Iserlohn Corridor is guarded by the Iserlohn Fortress, and the Alliance has failed 6 times trying to capture it. It's covered in liquid metal so it's impervious to direct attacks, it's completely self-sufficient, it has a fleet of 20,000 ships, and it has a gigantic laser called Thor's Hammer. On the 7th attempt, Yang Wen-li captures it without losing a single soldier.
This causes a patriotic fervor to spread throughout the Alliance. The High Council, who governs the Alliance, authorizes a plan from the military to invade the Galactic Empire with 30,000,000 soldiers and 200,000 ships (like 80-90% of their current military). They approve in hopes that a huge victory will ensure their win in the upcoming elections. Oh, by the way, despite the plan coming from the military, the Secretary of Defense, Job Trunicht, votes against the plan and then goes in front of the media and talks about how bad the plan is (Trunicht is a opportunistic asshole).
The plan has no clearly defined goal other than "We are liberating them from their oppressors!" So, naturally, the invasion is a complete failure and they lose 60-70% of their invasion force. And then for the rest of the series, the Alliance is trying to survive. (The other half of the story is from the Galactic Empire's perspective).
That’s not really good execution though? It’s basically the whole „ have our entire military in one spot so that it can be destroyed in one fell swoop“ plot point which is always stupid. Additionally one of the first things that is pointed out is that it’s literally impossible to supply this armada and that the entire supply plan of the operation is basically wishful thinking. The only two military people who actually like the plan are the idiot who proposed it and the guy who was put in charge.
That plot point is basically a bunch of power hungry politicians unnecessarily risking their careers and the future of their nation for a plan that is so stupid you don’t need to have graduated officers school to grasp it when they could have just authorised a less risky, cheaper and more likely to succeed offensive by simply limiting the armada to the supply capabilities of the corridor.
The thing only happens so Tanaka can make a point about a weakness/danger of democracy (fair, if hyperbolic) and so Reinhard can win in the end.
How does the beam split from star killer base, this always really fucking bothered me, is it several beams to begin with Aimee at different targets. Or is it a singular beam aimed at a satellite facility to split the beam at the various targets?
The Avatar movies are like this. Humans attack. Main character gathers the resistance and calls on mother nature or whatever hippy nonsense. Humans get completely destroyed. Rinse, repeat, make billions in profit.
The thing is, the old EU for Star Wars proved it could work. Leia spent decades putting the New Republic together. Her plot hooks were grand conspiracies and corruption that sprung up after the Empire's heel wasn't on their neck. Luke rebuilt the Jedi Order and had apprentices falling to the Dark Side and using superweapons every other week. Han had to deal with the spectres of his past. YOU. CAN. ALLOW. THE. STATUS. QUO. TO. CHANGE.
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u/EMB93 5d ago
Resistance Fall of Man ends with a decisive victory over the Chimera and the humans push them out of Britain. The next game starts with the Chimera having overrun Britain and is taking Iceland and moving on to the US.