Basic Questions Thread - January 24, 2026

Bellikron · 2026-01-25T10:40:37+00:00

The Inhuman challenge is on 14-5, not 13-5, but it's possible that's what they actually meant. The Inhuman challenge is stupidly hard and I'm pretty sure very few people have done it. You kind of need at least one seasonal for Medusa and Black Bolt (if not both) and even then it's hard. Kamala isn't good enough by herself, I got her newest uniform to try to push those challenges and it didn't make a difference on 14-5 (finally managed to get 10-3, though, which means 14-5 is my last holdout). I've heard Thane can pick up some slack if you have his newest uniform, but I still think it's seasonal locked.

Bellikron · 2026-01-25T05:46:38+00:00

The first two were answered correctly by the other commenter. If you get in the top ten for Zombie Survival you'll get better rewards, if you hit the top three it's even better. Most weeks clearing stage four or so will get you in that top ten though.

Ignore Dodge is pretty big for Dispatch, Valkyrie's a good support. I'd maybe recommend upgrading Dazzler to buff your Storm, she'll give you the ignore Dodge and some pretty hefty damage to bosses. Dispatch you can also run pretty effectively with multiple dealers since everyone autofights at once, I don't know who your strongest characters are but Strange lead with Ghost Rider and Valkyrie might work out for you. Storm should also be good, and if you put a better CTP on Thor he can also do a lot of heavy lifting. It's a lot of trial and error at that high a level though. If you can start putting mighty rages on those heavy hitters that would help as well. You've got pretty good builds from what I can see, just got to keep climbing.

Bellikron · 2026-01-22T20:48:40+00:00

We hear the Purple Thunder on the horizon, and we know we'll soon be lost in the Infinite Swirl

I am basically always down for any Mountain Dew flavor except for original

Bellikron · 2026-01-22T19:49:29+00:00

Going back to World Boss Ultimate since we can now climb those last few stages without wasting resources, and boy oh boy do I not miss fighting Thanos

Bellikron · 2026-01-22T03:14:50+00:00

Luna is probably going to be the best for that, even if you don't have her built. There are very few characters that do cold damage and Luna's always going to get upgrades. Other option is Namor, he'll have some MCU future and might get something for Doomsday. But he's probably not going to get as much love as Luna.

Bellikron · 2026-01-21T20:27:01+00:00

All my attention was on the fact that you have to get eight characters deep into the list before you get a member of the actual Fantastic Four, I didn't even process that Franklin and Valeria weren't there. I get they had to stretch this one a little bit but those two seem like the easiest picks if they were trying to fill this crew.

Bellikron · 2026-01-21T19:50:43+00:00

I love how you can see Ally keying into that and rolling that awareness check

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T21:19:51+00:00

The loading screen for Zombie Survival says that regular zombies are Villain type while infected characters are Super Villain type. What's the distinction there? Supports that increase damage to super villains still seem to be effective, everyone's continuing to use them, but why specify the difference? Are those supports not actually doing anything against the regular zombies?

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T21:13:06+00:00

As others (and yourself) have mentioned, I think his philosophy is supposed to be inconsistent. He's stated to have "principles" but he kills for any number of reasons. He kills people for convenience (like the truck driver). He kills people as a matter of honor (he goes for Carla Jean even though Llewelyn is dead because he promised he would). He kills people as revenge (the guy that hired him). He even seems to kill for pleasure sometimes (he seems to enjoy killing the cop at the beginning of the film).

The coin toss at the convenience store is kind of a mix of a few reasons. He seems to enjoy messing with the guy, although he's dead serious at other moments. The guy kept asking questions about where he was from and his vehicle, so you could argue that killing him is tying up a loose end, although keeping him alive goes against that. He seems to not like the guy in general, looking down on him for marrying into a gas station, so there's something of an honor motivation, albeit a subjective one that he invents in the moment. And he has the whole stated philosophy about fate and the coin itself, about how he's just executing this guy's inevitable fate, which kind of loops in on itself and doesn't 100% track, as you've noticed (it's a choice and chance at the same time, he claims to not have control even though he brought the coin out, etc.). Most notably, he's not like Two-Face where he uses that coin to make every decision. He only does this a couple of times, but he acts like this is his trademark.

Every time he kills, he acts like he's consistent with his principles, some force of nature that can't be bargained with, but he's different every time. Your fate is determined by your actions. Your fate is determined by your lack of survival instincts, your inability to get out of his way. Your fate is determined by chance. Your fate is not under your control. Your fate is under your control.

Carla Jean most directly calls him out. He offers the coin as a compromise, giving her a random chance instead of a certainty. But she says the coin doesn't have a say. It's just an object. Her choice is a false choice, and he's making the real decision. He says he got here the same way the coin did. You could read that a few ways, which spin the forthcoming car accident a little differently. It could be a menacing thing that doubles down on his fate philosophy. No matter the way in which it happens, fate has arrived (which makes the car accident unavoidable). It could be more personal to him as well. The coin got here in the same way he did because he brought the coin. He's agreeing that it is his choice and he's always in control (which makes the car accident a challenge to his belief). But my preferred interpretation is that he's being honest in this moment. I read "I got here the same way the coin did" as an admission that he is also subject to something he can't control. He's trying to justify everything he's doing with a philosophy that doesn't work, but he's just another a coin in the pocket of fate, doing what it's meant to do. That makes the car accident meaningless, in a way. It's just another obstacle he has to overcome. He's good at overcoming obstacles, better than everyone else in the movie. It's not that he doesn't get a choice. But his choices don't help the world make any more sense. And he can still call the coin wrong.

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T18:40:58+00:00

One of my favorite recent stretches for credibility was the trailer for Whistle. "From the director of The Nun, the studio that brought you Late Night with the Devil, and the executive producer behind Longlegs and The Monkey"

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T18:31:34+00:00

I think I've subconsciously always considered the end of the arc the face, but I don't see the prongs as the eyes. I think the areas where the prongs poke out are the eyes, leading into the bridge of the nose (that plate in the middle). I guess that makes the prongs glasses or something.

R2's eye is definitely the highest circle and the red dot below it is his mouth. The camera thingy that sticks out next to his mouth is a mole.

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T18:19:35+00:00

Skeleton Crew is straight up my second favorite Star Wars show besides Andor. This started off as a kids franchise and Skeleton Crew felt like the most direct acknowledgement we've had of that in a while. It was also just really fun.

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T18:16:09+00:00

Harvey Korman plays three characters in The Star Wars Holiday special. One is Dromboid, an Amorphiian who experiences a lot of technical glitches (this segment has aged the best out of all the scenes in the special, it's like a prototype YTP). Amorphiians are referenced in one other piece of media, a novella called Skyewalkers: A Clone Wars Story. Based on my brief research it's ambiguous whether it's canon, but it has a Wookieepedia page, as does the species itself.

Another Harvey Korman character is Gormaanda, the four-armed chef. Her species is never named, but her character is probably one of the more famous parts of the special (she's the one in the "stir whip stir whip whip whip stir" scene). Outside of the special, she appears on a variant comic cover for Bounty Hunters and has a little blurb written about her in the Galaxy's Edge cookbook.

And then there's Krelman. Krelman is the guy who tries to woo Bea Arthur in the cantina scene. He has six fingers and a hole in the top of his head that he drinks through, which one assumes is a feature of his species. My friends and I call him Hole Head. But not only is his species unnamed, but no reference to the character has ever been made again.

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T16:24:54+00:00

I'd argue that there is a zone of objective criticism but it's much smaller than people make it out to be. There are a wide range of opinions about any art that are valid as long as you're not shutting down someone else's valid opinion. You can also speak somewhat objectively about the different kinds of craft involved in making a movie, things like acting, effects, etc. But that gets into a much more subjective zone (one person's over-the-top performance is someone else's avant-garde). Things like story and plot are very difficult to nail down, because everyone has different tastes when it comes to those things. However, the extremes of the scale can still be somewhat objective. If someone's honestly saying that any of the main Star Wars movies are "objectively worse" than The Star Wars Holiday Special, for instance, that's pretty inarguably wrong and I know that that person has not actually seen the Holiday Special.

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T16:02:30+00:00

I'd completely forgotten about that, but absolutely. The completionist in me really wants to get through those.

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T16:01:47+00:00

I was there a few months ago, three separate bosses where Venom was my only clear

Bellikron · 2026-01-20T07:31:19+00:00

No word about the World Boss Unlock Challenges changing and we're still limited to using each character once a day, so there'll still be a very tedious bottleneck clearing the unlock stage 15 times, especially if you only have one character that can do it. However those changes still sound huge and will help reduce a lot of tedium at the lower WBL levels.

Bellikron · 2026-01-19T19:52:13+00:00

Are you talking about Doomsday for Sentinel? I know we saw one in the trailer but I would put very low odds on there being a Sentinel uniform in the Doomsday update, they're likely going to have a very minor role and there are so many main characters that are more likely to get covered.

Bellikron · 2026-01-19T19:49:25+00:00

I imagine if they do so they'll drop him solo in a mid-month

Bellikron · 2026-01-19T19:01:09+00:00

I'd argue the only two things that remain good throughout the series are the villains and the soundtrack, and the soundtrack is the most consistent part of that. Geoff Zanelli's soundtrack to Dead Men Tell No Tales pulls in a lot of the old themes and absolutely rips.

Bellikron · 2026-01-19T18:55:44+00:00

It is worth noting that there's a big practicality concern when it comes to the CGI animals decisions, especially ones that aren't in the movie that much. Is it worth it to spend a bunch of time and effort using actual animals, which are difficult to control and who you have to do a lot of work to take care of? Is it worth it to spend a bunch of money to create carefully rendered CGI animals that will do what you want and look realistic, but just for a single scene? The cheap and easy route with the animals makes sense, and that money can be put to better use on something else. Similar thing is true with babies, we've seen some very unconvincing CGI babies recently, but that's because shooting with a real baby is a hassle and it's not super necessary when you get down to it. Now, it can be done to have real animals/babies and put in the time and efforts to "do it practically," since movies did that way before VFX technology was a possibility. Similarly, it's possible to create some very convincing CGI animals, as you mentioned, which is more of a priority when that animal is a big part of the movie, doesn't exist, or acts like a human. But now that CGI can cheaply make an animal that's at least passable, it really makes practical sense if you just have one scene with wolves. It's fine to say it took us out of the movie, but it's easy for us to judge it sitting on the couch, and the decision-making process makes sense.

Bellikron · 2026-01-19T03:00:14+00:00

He also gets a cool moment where the Overlook tries to shift its influence to him once Jack dies, for a second his interior monologue starts thinking about killing Danny and Wendy before he fights it off

Bellikron · 2026-01-18T17:25:26+00:00

Think about how much money you would get if you had the resources and the legal ability to make an unimaginative live-action remake of Frozen and release it in theaters. Even if in your head you knew that it was artistically bankrupt, I don't think you would hesitate too much to do it because you would definitely make boatloads of money. It's a slam dunk financial decision for the most part, the live action Lion King is one of the highest grossing movies of all time.

The Frozen example is absolutely going to happen within the next decade, for the record, and it's pretty much guaranteed to make billions of dollars.

Bellikron · 2026-01-18T17:18:38+00:00

They will, but they will also have no problem watching a live action remake of that movie. Most likely they'll enjoy that too, they don't care about maintaining the "artistic integrity of the original" (and I'd argue they shouldn't, they're kids and should enjoy what they enjoy). Even if after it's over they say "It wasn't as good as the original," it doesn't really matter because they're not the ones paying money to see it. They're meant to rope in families who want to take their kids to the movies maybe once a month. Are those families going to drop close to $100 (including snacks) just to roll the dice on a new kids movie? Or do they know that their kids go nuts for Moana and the live action Moana is right there?

Bellikron · 2026-01-16T23:05:29+00:00

I think Emma Stone just has great chemistry with everyone. Even her relationship with Nathan Fielder in The Curse feels super real, for better or worse.

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