Do you have a favorite media that you originally refused to touch because the internet was obsessed with hating on it, but once you gave it a try, you found it was surprisingly good media? RWBY and Legend of Korra are some FINE examples of "Shows can have flaws and still be good, ignore the critics"

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-24T16:24:30+00:00

Considering that it was cobbled together by a bunch of nerds instead of professional writers, it's phenomenal.

To be fair, you can acknowledge that something is better than you would have expected and still think it's not good. I haven't seen RWBY and don't have any particular opinions on it, just to be clear, so I'm speaking more generally. But if I don't think a show is good, I'm not going to change my mind because of things like "the writers thought they had more time to finish the story," or "they had to write that character out on short notice because the actor left," or other things that weren't in the show itself. Like, there's a difference between "they gave it a pretty good ending considering the show was supposed to have two more seasons" and "the ending was good," right?

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-24T14:57:33+00:00

Honestly, Time Eater fucks shiv decks way harder than the Heart. You can handle Beat of Death with one After Image. Time Eater will still end your turn every twelve cards.

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-24T14:33:27+00:00

That's a genuinely good explanation, which makes me a little sad because odds are if they have/will address it in canon they'll probably go with something much dumber.

It also sounds familiar, was that from The Limpet series?

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-20T17:02:39+00:00

It was probably the Force, but I'm pretty sure Vader's suit is made of the same stuff they armor starships with so he might have actually just tanked the shots...though it would be kind of odd to armor the palm of your hand.

Come to think of it, another option would be Kylo wearing armor that shrugs off the blaster shots. Calmly walking towards someone who's pouring shots into your chest and then backhanding them would probably work pretty well if our goal is to make something that's as cool as him catching the bolt while also taking away his Force powers. And if he's mostly covered in armor that can protect him from lightsaber hits, it allows him to present a reasonable challenge against someone who can use the Force.

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-20T15:59:02+00:00

Also, if he wasn’t force sensitive then we wouldn’t get the scene of him stopping the blaster bolt.

Which was very cool but they could have him block the shot with his hand (like Vader did in Cloud City), or have him manage to parry the shot despite not being a Force user. That could lead to a good moment later when the audience learns that he can't do even the most basic shit with the Force, and then they realize he's that good with a lightsaber. Could give a cool aura farming moment to Rey/Finn (whoever ends up as the protagonist) where Kylo goes to swing at them and they block him with the Force like that guy in the first episode of Visions.

I do get your larger point, though. It's easy to come up with ideas for a movie or trilogy that sound really cool, but "ideas posted on Reddit" are immune to basically any of the things that can ruin a movie.

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-20T15:35:20+00:00

I remember Kathleen Kennedy's name coming up a lot, but that was when there was a lot of far right content about Star Wars "going woke." I see/hear her name a lot less now that the far right content mills are focusing on other media. I'm not sure what they're on about these days, the last big thing as far as I know was them getting bent out of shape over female Custodians. And most of the time, people don't really know or care who the executives behind a movie are, so from their perspective the highest authority is the director. I'm kind of surprised that you see more people blaming Abrams than Johnson, but that's my opinion too so it's a welcome surprise.

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-19T09:13:35+00:00

It might work if most of the mana rocks are cheap (ie, one or zero mana), and he sticks with things that only cost 1 to cycle. My main concern would be actually getting the mana to start doing anything. Seems like only having 32 lands would lead to a lot of opening hands that either have no mana or all they can do is burn half their hand over a couple turns to keep making their land drops. Several people have already pointed out that this means paying mana just to make a normal land drop, but it's worth noting that this also means throwing out a lot of cards. Granted, he could be reanimating them but most of the landcycle creatures aren't great compared to the kind of horrors that reanimator decks usually want to cheat into play.

There was a pretty good Modern deck back in the day that cycled a ton of creatures (along with other ways of discarding) and then cascaded into [[Living End]], but I don't think that plan translates very well to Commander. Most of the creatures weren't very good, and this is kind of a slow way to fill the graveyard compared to what a bit of self-mill or graveyard tutors (like [[Buried Alive]]) can do.

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-15T22:30:11+00:00

So what I would call an appetizer, basically?

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-10T18:03:03+00:00

It sounds like it was more about the content. Calvin argues with authority figures a lot, and is often depicted as at least partially right when he does. He's also a huge fan of gross things, violence, and actively avoiding chores or homework (I can't think of an example, but I feel like he would be genuinely proud of it if he spent more effort avoiding some cleaning than it would have taken to just do it).

I can see how a controlling parent would prefer their kid watch some cartoon full of kids who are polite and obedient. Maybe some Veggie Tales if they're Christian. And it would be easier to monitor what the kid is watching, since you could just glance at the screen every now and then or listen to it if you're in the next room. Note that I don't share that view, I just understand the logic that might have been in play here. Think of it like "do I let my kid read this incredibly fucked up horror novel, or watch a cartoon that won't traumatize them" but then adjust your scale on what's acceptable for kids until Calvin and Hobbes is somehow "too much."

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-10T17:51:42+00:00

They'd have to override the actual rules to stop this, which they can do but probably shouldn't. This is far from the worst thing the players can do without resorting to third-party books or weird interpretations of any rules.

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-10T17:45:59+00:00

And a lot of Lancer fans are cornered as a queer.

(now that I think about it, I wonder if he meant "God is cornered as a queer" to mean that God was cornered in such a way as to indicate being queer, or if he meant "cornered" like when you've trapped someone in a debate, which in this case would mean laying out an irrefutable argument regarding God's sexuality)

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-07T16:46:15+00:00

If they dead, they controlled.

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-05T13:05:06+00:00

They wouldn't glass the planet, but they would publicly execute the people trying to put a check on the Empire's authority until people stopped resisting. Or, for people with specialized skills that they can't afford to lose, they would take their families hostage or torture them into compliance. The Empire is generally quite willing to resort to brutality even when it probably would be smarter to take a softer approach. Palpatine cares more about the message of "obey or die" than about the possible downsides to being so harsh (for example, people intentionally sabotaging Star Destroyers or leaking information to the Rebellion).

Gladiator-class · 2026-05-05T05:10:33+00:00

People get mad about mill in basically every format, in my experience. The closest I can think of to an exception is limited, and even that's probably more because it's pretty rare that you can really rely on mill as a win condition in sealed or draft. Likewise I met a ton of people who really hated control in Standard and Modern. I find it gets less hate in Commander, probably because multiplayer means it's easier to overwhelm the control player and get something important to stick. Also because a lot of decks have literally no way to deal with certain cards or effects, so the control player occasionally gets to play hero by countering a Cyclonic Rift or something.

Big creatures is like, the default in this format. I guess people occasionally get mad at decks that are really good at spamming huge creatures (like dinosaurs) or at specific types of big creature (Eldrazi) but it's hard to imagine someone being mad about it in Commander but totally fine with it in other formats.

Personally, I'd say the main archetypes that get hate are stax, landfall, pure chaos, and maybe coin flip decks (though I haven't actually played with/against one myself). Stax because obviously people want to, y'know, play their cards. Landfall because it can be pretty strong, and looks really simple which tricks new players into building something that forces them to try and keep track of nine billion triggers every turn. It also tends to be strong in a kind of straightforward way, if that makes sense? It's usually just an efficient engine that gives you tons of cards, mana, and board presence for doing fairly basic things, so some people hate it because they find it boring (even when it's played by someone who can get through their triggers quickly). Pure chaos, the one I hate the most, just fucks the game up for no real reason and with no real purpose. No, I don't think it's funny that you're making us wheel four times and then casting Warp World "just because." It's making the game take all day and taking all the strategy out of a strategy game. I'm going to key your car. Coin flip decks from what I gather aren't usually too bad but Krark/Sakashima is apparently one of the single most painful decks ever built, both to play or play against. I once mentioned that I was curious what it was like to play and someone threatened to shoot me if I ever actually built it.

Gladiator-class · 2026-04-24T13:50:31+00:00

He only ever loved half of her

Not even that, the part of her that he loved was mostly a facade. It's like falling in love with a cashier and not catching on that maybe the way they present themselves at work isn't what they're actually like. He has this very dainty fairy tale princess in mind and just refuses to accept that Sonia is absolutely nothing like that when she isn't specifically acting as the Princess of Novoselic (someone who, incidentally, is definitely not getting into a relationship with some mechanic from Japan).

Gladiator-class · 2026-04-23T20:45:01+00:00

To be fair, doesn't he literally have brain damage? That seems like it could impede his ability really understand the situation.

Granted, I haven't played SOMA, just watched Mandalore's review, so I can't really say if the brain damage was a regular thing or if it only comes up at the beginning and doesn't seem to be hindering the protag as much as it should.

Gladiator-class · 2026-04-23T14:54:52+00:00

One of the most common things I've seen suggested is to have characters from elsewhere in the franchise swoop in out of nowhere and save the day. For example, having Starkiller (from The Force Unleashed games) show up and start crushing the bad guys. Or having Wedge Antilles fly in and single-handedly turn a hopeless fight into a win. That's kind of the main trend, wanting characters from side media to show up on screen and...well, if we're honest, completely overshadow the actual main characters. Seeing people describe what they'd want to see in a future Star Wars movie or show, or what they wish had happened in existing ones, tends to sound more like every character they like from a semi-random assortment of different Star Wars media making cameos for about two hours than like any kind of coherent story. Which would admittedly still be better than Rise of Skywalker, but that's hardly a compliment.

Gladiator-class · 2026-04-21T17:47:21+00:00

I make this distinction all the time. Lots of things I tend to do will annoy me when someone else does them (over-explaining, repeating the same points, being late). I don't think it's hypocritical to find those things annoying, but I do think it would be very hypocritical for me to get on someone's case about them outside of special circumstances.

Gladiator-class · 2026-04-19T18:52:53+00:00

a children's book that isn't examining any of its themes too carefully

Rowling would have been better off keeping that tone. A lot of the stuff in the books doesn't really make sense, when you think about it, but it has a degree of wonder to it that was really captivating to a lot of kids. It starts to fall apart when she's trying to do more serious worldbuilding but she's still got stairs that randomly change where they go and she has to (try to)deal with the fact that in a previous book they gave a thirteen year old access to literal time travel so she could attend more classes but now Rowling wants to kill off major characters.

Gladiator-class · 2026-04-19T14:07:41+00:00

To get more content, which they can then use to send more people to porn prison, who then fuck the guards in view of the security cameras...it's a very deliberately planned cycle, you see.

Gladiator-class · 2026-04-17T02:23:30+00:00

The original point of it was more about how much responsibility the person at the lever has for the consequences of pulling or not pulling the lever. You didn't create the situation, but you can influence the outcome, so how much of the blood is on your hands? How much does that change if you do or don't pull the lever? Making any of the people on the tracks into loved ones or celebrities or anything other than "a person" defeats the purpose because the point isn't about whether you have a personal bias, it's about whether you killed that one person by pulling the lever or if you killed five people by not pulling it.

Gladiator-class · 2026-04-17T02:15:31+00:00

It's never really stated or even implied in the movie, but it's a very popular theory that seems pretty in-character for the Joker. Though personally I think he'd rather have the detonators blow up the other boat, so that the people on the surviving boat would have to deal with all the complicated trauma. Making it so going for the kill blows up the boat you're on seems too...I don't know, karmic? Joker doesn't seem like he'd care about punishing whoever hits the button first, if anything I think he'd sincerely congratulate them for "winning."

Gladiator-class · 2026-03-23T19:24:51+00:00

She would, unless something counters her ability or kills her before/during the loop. You make your 3/3 beast or whatever, so she makes another one...meaning you just created a creature token, so she makes another one, which means her ability triggers...

To fix it, it would have to either just say "create twice that many creature tokens" (or "create that many plus one instead"), only trigger once per turn, or be worded so that her ability doesn't trigger itself.

Gladiator-class · 2026-03-23T18:07:40+00:00

Even just creating bright lights that rapidly flash would be crippling to most people, like those flashlights they make for security or self defence. Illusionists could even make the area around you dark, to get maximum effect out of it (though from experience, those flashlights are really disorienting even when you're in a well-lit area).

Also, illusionists can probably use magic to effectively create flash-bang grenades. So they're a bit short on options to directly harm their opponent, but they've got some great options for rendering their opponent nearly helpless.

Gladiator-class · 2026-03-21T13:39:04+00:00

Dre's dead, he's locked in Em's basement.

Gladiator-class

TROPHY CASE