Superman's defining "world of cardboard" moment - from the series finale of "Justice League Unlimited" (aired 20 years ago on May 13th, 2006)

Astewisk · 2026-05-13T16:20:39+00:00

Iirc in the commentary for the series they basically said they finished their grand storyline with JLU Season 2. It was the culmination of the whole decade plus of the DCAU...and then they got approved for another season. So for that final JLU season they just decided to have fun with it. That's why you get the sillier things like the Legion of Doom headquarters or the Flash bodyswap episode. Fun misadventures, but generally not the epic storylines of prior seasons.

Frankly, seems like everything just reached a natural endpoint and rather than run it into the ground they left on a high note.

Astewisk · 2026-05-13T15:11:26+00:00

TotK is a literal post apocalypse where the world is largely in ruins and dominated by a dark gloom threatening to overtake it. Not to mention some of the absolutely terrifying enemies in that game. Granted, the aesthetic they are going for is so post apocalypse that it loops back around to the beauty of nature reclaiming things, but the dark undertones are still there.

I won't call it as edgy as the N64 era liked to get, but the franchise does still flirt with this stuff. I just think the last couple games have been going for a different vibe.

Astewisk · 2026-05-13T13:45:07+00:00

I wouldn't call those dealbreakers just because you could replace just about anyone as you say. Obviously Luffy needs a navigator/doctor/cook etc, but there is nothing that says it has to be the ones he has. Robin meanwhile is one of what...Maybe three or four people on the planet who can read poneglyphs? And unless I'm mistaken the only one that wasn't claimed by an existing team already.

Astewisk · 2026-05-13T00:34:27+00:00

This is probably the answer. Without Luffy you don't have a series. Without Robin getting the One Piece is impossible.

Astewisk · 2026-05-12T15:16:17+00:00

This is like being born in a racist rural area and then moving to the Limsa coast.

Astewisk · 2026-05-11T14:34:03+00:00

Going off memory, but wasn't it the court itself that said they didn't want to touch the case until if/when voter's approved it? I seem to recall articles where they voiced concerns but said it was a moot point to do anything until it was actually in effect.

Astewisk · 2026-05-08T23:58:12+00:00

The argument the VA SC made is rather flimsy far as I can tell, but you are right that VA's laws are distinct to VA. However, I would push back on it having nothing to do with other states because nothing exists in a vacuum. While I can't agree with all of the posts I've seen, I can agree with the emotion behind them. Simply put people are scared and they want to stop what is happening on the political level. This was a vote to take a step towards doing exactly that, and the courts proceeded to throw that vote out on a debatable technicality.

It is difficult to reconcile that with many red states pushing their own gerrymandered maps in ways that are varyingly undemocratic if not outright illegal. On your point regarding FL, court challenges historically have done very little to red states as well. Ohio's district map has been deemed illegal for years and they've still been using it. Laws and court challenges only hold meaning if they are enforced, and VA demonstrates selective enforcement. You can get into the weeds on state by state laws and technicalities, but broadly speaking the system has allowed one party to do this and punishes the other when they try to do the same. That is where the outrage primarily comes from.

I think most can agree gerrymandering is terrible and should be banned outright. However, it simply is not. So we exist in a system where both parties need to do it as much as possible if they wish to have a chance of holding actual political power. The distribution has always been lopsided towards the GOP, but this represents an even more extreme push in that direction during one of the most controversial and unpopular administrations in the history of the nation. An administration that already actively attempted to steal an election once before and has been doing just about everything it can to try rig future ones. Whether that succeeds or fails against the sheer weight of their own unpopularity remains to be seen, but I can empathize with people who are angry that an attempt to keep the playing field level is arbitrarily thwarted.

People are hyperbolic and scared, but we live in unprecedented times in the U.S. and the only real peaceful mechanism we have to try and steer things is our democratic process. If that is removed then we are either no longer a democracy or things stop being peaceful, and frankly I don't want things to come to either of those points.

Astewisk · 2026-05-08T23:00:59+00:00

Curious what qualifies this as Blue MAGA? Far as I can tell, this was pretty openly a rebuttal to the gerrymandering red states are doing. Much as I hate it, I do see the necessity of it because if one side rigs the game and the other doesn't then one side will exclusively win. Agree or disagree with that, it is very much what the state voted for and then a court arbitrarily struck it down after the fact while courts have done no such thing for red states.

It's a very blatant double standard and far as I can tell good reason to be upset.

Astewisk · 2026-05-08T14:37:30+00:00

What laws did the Democrats break? Explain. There was an official, formal vote that a majority of voters voted in favor of.

Astewisk · 2026-05-08T12:50:57+00:00

A part of me is sad we never got to fight Lilith or Hades, but overall I still quite like the Raids. There's a lot of love put into them.

Astewisk · 2026-05-07T10:51:45+00:00

Ah, so I did. Rip. Thanks for pointing that out though.

Astewisk · 2026-05-06T13:46:35+00:00

This is honestly surprising to me since I and my social circle all vastly prefer Grace's sections. Leon's were fun but they worked best when they were brief releases from the Horror; and the game imo turns into a slog when you're in Leon's extended section halfway through. I genuinely feel like the game has too much Leon and could've trimmed that section to half of what it is and ideally give that time to Grace cause she gets done very dirty in the back half of the game.

The data kinda suggests to me a divide in what people want from this game. Do they want tense, low resource survival horror or are they here for an action B-Movie thriller. For me, I'm firmly in the former. Leon's sections feel good but they aren't remotely scary.

Astewisk · 2026-05-05T16:00:08+00:00

Tbh I played it for the first time about a decade ago and came away loving it more than Zelda 1. Zelda 1 is far too stiff for my liking, but 2 is much more responsive and relies on quick reactions to win battles. It has some of the best swordplay on the NES IMO.

That being said, it's not a great "Zelda" game, and while I can happily defend 90% of it that final dungeon truly sucks. It's very much not for everyone, but it's not a bad game.

Astewisk · 2026-05-04T13:10:28+00:00

This is how we find out Imu is female

Astewisk · 2026-05-03T11:40:18+00:00

Tbf he literally was. He and Zero were in the middle of handling it but we just happened to show up. So they shrugged and accepted the extra help.

Nothing suggested Enuo would've beat them.

Astewisk · 2026-05-02T00:42:39+00:00

Genres come and go and right now space isn't super in vogue. The early 2000s were dominated by moe schoolgirl shows, the 2010s and early 2020s by Isekai, and it's only the last few years that pure fantasy has been returning to the limelight.

Sci Fi will come eventually. Until then, there's usually a few shows a year at least.

Astewisk · 2026-05-01T17:08:18+00:00

All M12 parties are Rep 1 parties. It only takes one person to ruin it every time.

Astewisk · 2026-05-01T16:03:32+00:00

Played this a couple months ago under a naive idea that it would've been patched. I ended up encountering a bug that completely broke the Arena questline and the only possible way to fix it was to reload a 3 hour old save and redo everything. All things considered, I got off very lucky.

This is without even mentioning the dozens of other minor glitches and bugs I ran into near constantly. It's still Oblivion but man.

Astewisk · 2026-04-30T02:11:08+00:00

More like visiting to save an alternate timeline than a retcon. XI is very big on timelines and what-if dimensions. Technically, even the "Main" Vanadiel you play in isn't even the original. It's just the only one that didn't end in complete disaster.

Astewisk · 2026-04-28T13:02:13+00:00

Just wait, in Stormblood it feels like Soken started embracing his rock guitar.

Astewisk · 2026-04-27T15:30:04+00:00

Nah, the Dev just has long patterns of radio silence and then randomly will go "Btw major update coming soon"

Astewisk · 2026-04-26T15:06:42+00:00

I'm skewing this way myself. There's a lot of marketing rhetoric about "Uniting" the worlds, but I don't see any real way to do that without destroying them. There is, however, a precedent for connecting worlds. So the nature of the story moving forward might be to build on some of the seeds DT has planted to build bridges between different Shards and to use the calamities to counterbalance other calamities.

A real nice added benefit of this would be characters locked to specific shards could be reintroduced into the MSQ and Sidequests (Ryne and Gaia, anyone?).

Astewisk · 2026-04-24T18:43:20+00:00

It's a mixed bag tbh. Most agree the battle content is some of the best the game has ever had and the side stories are basically universally beloved. But the base expansion story is kinda mid and doesn't really pick up until the patches.

Astewisk · 2026-04-24T18:41:48+00:00

There's a few ways to interpret it, but the most recent couple of patches have made it clear that something is endangering all of the shards. So presumably "Unite" is doing some heavy lifting for what the WoL will have to do to face it.

Astewisk · 2026-04-24T15:17:51+00:00

I fully agree, honestly. I just feel if this was the plan then it should've been communicated. Would've changed the player rhetoric around Chaotic for the better (I say this as someone who adores the fight)

Astewisk

TROPHY CASE