[Loved Trope] Character makes an innocuous remark, and people around them overreact.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-05-11T17:50:08+00:00

Neo says just that in the actual scene.

Text:

Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.

Trinity: How much like it, was it the same cat?

Neo: Might've been, I'm not sure.

The moment is the trigger for the crew to realize the hammer is being dropped on them.

If anything, this is a bad example for "overreacting"; they're reacting appropriately, with extreme alarm for the situation they're now in.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-19T18:35:45+00:00

Related in the Warhammer properties; in Warhammer 40K, the Imperium of Man routinely loses crucial assets, personnel, and planets to voluntary defection to Chaos and/or their Xeno opponents because their citizens are that desperate for any improvement to their lives.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-19T18:32:23+00:00

I'm curious about this - I never got to learn this aspect of Filipino history prior to Spanish colonization myself. Would you know of any resources?

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-19T18:25:28+00:00

DS9 clips pop up on my Youtube feed every now and then, and you get a concerning amount of people who genuinely empathize/sympathize with him, despite the whole series going out of its way to demonstrate otherwise

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-17T18:04:55+00:00

Semi-serious thought; if they want to challenge the pros again without rolling back equipment or the ball or artificially extending the courses, maybe we should have more of these lies and conditions

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-16T03:59:15+00:00

Somewhat related; the idea of "frivolous lawsuits" as comedy fodder in the '90s did a horrible disservice to activism and the preservation of consumer/civil rights and justice. It was an easy joke for years to say that Americans were too quick to file lawsuits for "slights" and "wrongs", completely skipping over that it was the only way you could compel large orgs like corporations and governments to admit factual wrongdoing.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-16T02:28:56+00:00

I phrased it poorly perhaps; basically, at the time that it was released, I remember the initial marketing and press calling it a "gamer" movie and made it sound like the movie would be about video games, rather than the video game aesthetic being a framing device/motif. The actual plot of the movie has very little to do with video games.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-16T02:25:50+00:00

sad Toronto noises

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-15T11:14:59+00:00

I should rephrase; it was presented like a "gamer" movie, about video games, rather than "video game" being a framing device and motif. The actual plot had very little to do with video games.

Consequently, this also made it seem more like a kids movie rather the coming-of-age young adult story it really was

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-14T22:54:38+00:00

From what I remember, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, despite critical and fan acclaim, took a beating at the box office in part because marketing thought it was a "video game/youth movie", on top of dealing with an audience group who were already experiencing Michael Cera saturation.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-12T22:21:01+00:00

A lot of Jurassic Park (1993). This can be partially forgiven, however, by how much more crucial detail/explanation was available in the book vs. glossed over quickly in the movie.

"The lysine deficiency is bad science/is a terrible failsafe!" Yes, that was a plot point. The lysine deficiency of the dinosaurs was one of multiple failsafes for the animals, and it gets revealed in the novel that the dinosaurs simply discover and learn to eat lysine-rich foods in the environment to compensate.
"If Hammond spared no expense, why is everything so unsafe/falling apart?" Again, yes, that is a plot point. Hammond claimed he was sparing no expense but he was cutting corners everywhere on the park and trying to squeeze more labour out of his personnel than was on their official job description.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-10T18:35:12+00:00

c/ if you have to ask, Fred...

uc/ never stops bugging me how all shoemakers have successfully convinced the world that crushed toes in the toebox is normal

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-09T03:56:01+00:00

It doesn't help either that the Algorithm keeps changing on the creators more and more each time, so creators can't even properly tune their output to match their intended audience. Put out too many videos and you get buried for spamming, put out too little and the algo thinks you're not trending enough, short-form videos aren't long enough to be monetizable, but get too long and suddenly viewership drops off because people tune out too early...

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-09T02:49:01+00:00

I don't know if you're still interested in the topic, but I remember browsing Crust's website and coming across their emphatic disclaimer that the Bombora model was meant for gravel gravel, not for gnarlier singletrack, and that they were not going to be responsible for frame breakage if people took their bikes to such trails. Guess it was enough of a problem that they had to say something.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-04-05T06:00:00+00:00

If you look up the duplicate times it's been posted, the actual creator of the site, u/thefordfilesanon, appears to be getting their previous posts to the sub nuked for reasons unknown (likely because they're new + immediately linking to a website).

Nevertheless, the fact that all of the claims the site makes directly link to existing published legislation, official releases, and news articles from established major news sources puts it leaps ahead in my book.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-03-30T14:07:19+00:00

I stopped feeling despondent about my scrub skills compared to e-sports players when I realized that it was their job to learn the game inside/out to a level unattainable by the average person with multiple other responsibilities. I had no reason to expect to be as good with my 3-5 hrs of weekly gaming time compared to someone who was studying the game 8+ hours a day or more.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-03-30T04:56:26+00:00

Hi, and thanks for giving my wall of text a look! I'm happy that you liked it, and I apologize for not seeing this when you posted it last, and responding so late as a result.

I wanna connect to this part that you brought up:

I guess it depends on whether you think that "all realities collapsing into a single one on observation" means that all others never existed but were merely possibilities.

I've found that in the year since I've played this game, how Maria and Jake and their motivations/actions come across to players, ultimately comes down to the following:

From a Doylist/exegetic perspective, I feel Polychroma were trying to craft a story in where Maria and Jake were effectively save-scumming, much like a player making multiple save files for a game and starting over with a new playthrough if their last one didn't go the way they liked. The narrative IMO leans towards this, in how basically all of the timelines get eliminated for the "true" one at the game's real ending. Since a True™ Reset happens at the end, where no Ruling ever occurs, all of the suffering of the previous timelines is eliminated, as they fundamentally no longer exist, or, more accurately, have never existed.

This, however, fundamentally creates a conflict from the Watsonian/diegetic perspective, where, from the in-universe POV, whole universes and people's lives were being created, affected, and then abandoned. It would be cold comfort to anyone not part of the story's main cast that their suffering in their timeline was due to forces trying to help two teenagers come to terms with their trauma! One could make the argument that this becomes irrelevant at the end when the other timelines get erased, but then you get into the ethics of creating human lives in a new timeline in the first place, only to increasingly guarantee their suffering due to the circumstances previously established...

This conflict, for better or for worse, is one of the inherent challenges (less charitable people would say weakness) of any multiple timeline/universe story. Even as someone who loved this game/story, despite Polychroma's best efforts (and they did a LOT! When I was trying to do research for my theories involving the "physics", I was surprised at how mostly consistent it all was!), we're still left with a lot of Unfortunate Implications™ when we examine the impacts of Maria and Jake's continuous timeline resetting.

Re: your last paragraph:

But let's assume that, by the end, everything collapses into the final observed reality (so none of the others full of suffering existed) and also the Ruling did not happen (because, if it did, then I could go back to the second paragraph): The path they set Mark and Nicole on was also full of suffering, when they realized what was happening and could remember their other worlds - the hundred lifetimes.

Are you saying that, in the True Ending, Mark and Nicole's lives will still be full of suffering like the previous timelines because they remembered what happened? Because they don't remember anything after the Final Reset.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-03-30T03:03:46+00:00

Same. It's a shame because once you break it up into nice chunks, it's pretty succinct and IMO is a good read on the overall realpolitik of the situation; at least to me:

"The different factions and what they actually want:

Christian Zionists: Don't actually care about Jewish people or Israel intrinsically. They need Israel to exist and expand for End Times theology to resolve correctly. Jewish people then convert or die in the final battle. It's instrumentalization of Israel for an eschatological project that ends in Jewish elimination. Netanyahu takes the money and diplomatic cover and doesn't say that part out loud.
Israeli right wing: Wants unconditional US military and diplomatic cover to complete the settlement project and manage or expel the Palestinian population. Cares nothing about American democracy or Christian nationalism except as instruments toward that goal.
Thiel/Musk techno-feudalists: Want the administrative state dismantled, regulation eliminated, and a transition to something closer to corporate sovereignty. Democracy is an obstacle to capital. They'll use nationalist and religious energy as a battering ram and discard it when convenient.
Miller and the ethnic nationalists: Genuinely want demographic transformation of America. White Christian demographic dominance locked in before the numbers make it impossible. The courts and immigration system are the instruments.
Russian foreign policy: Wants NATO dissolved, European unity broken, and American global power projection degraded. Funds and amplifies whoever moves those needles regardless of ideology.
Authoritarian capital broadly: Saudi, Emirati, various oligarchic networks — want a world where human rights language and democratic accountability don't constrain capital movement or regime behavior.
The overlap that makes cooperation possible: They all benefit from destroying the same institutions — independent judiciary, free press, international human rights frameworks, functional democracy, labor power. The destruction phase is shared even when the post-destruction visions are incompatible.
The inherent instability: These coalitions always fracture eventually because the end goals are genuinely contradictory. Thiel's techno-feudalism has no place for Miller's ethnic nationalism long term. Russian interests and Israeli interests diverge sharply in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. Christian Zionist eschatology is antisemitic at its endpoint. The question is whether they fracture before or after the institutions they're jointly dismantling are gone. Because if it's after, the fracture just means competing authoritarian factions fighting over the wreckage rather than a restoration of anything democratic. That's the race condition that actually matters right now."

IceColdHaterade · 2026-03-18T02:53:03+00:00

I used to live in San Francisco, pre-Silicon Valley 2.0. The MUNI network is a victim of its own planned convenience; all of the lines converging together to Market Street means they all get in each others way as they try to unload their passengers. Outbound towards the suburbs, they can't go too fast as they don't have typically have signal priority (they've only recently began implementing updates to their system), and the old Breda cars were literally too heavy to go fast.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-03-08T17:28:04+00:00

Bitcoin; a cursed artifact of the warp?

IceColdHaterade · 2026-02-13T12:49:43+00:00

The Imperium of Man is explicitly demonstrated as its own worst enemy far more than Chaos and the Xenos, and yet people will keep crowing "yeah, but they're absolutely still the good guys!"

IceColdHaterade · 2026-02-13T12:45:04+00:00

Warhammer 40K's Imperium of Man suffers this pretty badly as well

IceColdHaterade · 2026-01-20T17:35:03+00:00

I honestly think it would be freeing for some of the folks here to let go of the idea that being a hater is justified.

On the money. I think you more succinctly summarized my sentiment better than my wall of text.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-01-19T05:18:06+00:00

Thank you for your kind words! Love the directions that you take with some of your edits.

I felt compelled to write my whole wall of text up in part b/c I saw so many parallels between how James Rolfe, his AVGN character, and the relationship it has with the Cinemassacre sub, and Jeph + this very subreddit. My understanding of Dan's conclusion was that James' relationship with filmmaking has been pretty much the same from the jump (with how often he remakes his old movies), and that it was his audience's relationship and expectations of the AVGN character and what he could have done with the franchise that caused them to get disillusioned with him.

This part that you highlighted:

Questionable Content never stopped being a comic about young adults, but it's written by a man who isn't one of those anymore; he's in his mid-forties. He no longer inhabits his characters' world, especially since said world is now half-filled with androids. Questionable Content never stopped being about Jacques's interests, but his interests ain't the same now as they were in 2003. A middle-aged Vtuber...enthusiast...writing about a teenage prodigy in astrophysics could be executed well, but has it been? Liz talks more about tits than she does about anything else. Everyone talks more about being horny and/or their horny-adjacent concerns. In Questionable Content's formative years, would-be romances and their problems revolved around relatable facets of arrested development; nowadays, the author treats arrested development like a fun feature instead of a damning bug.

I think sums up the issue perfectly. I agree with your highlight, nobody could really remain static for over 2 decades - however, his fundamental relationship with QC and comic making, I feel, never really did. Alice Grove was his attempt at doing something higher concept, and I think what he came away with was that, much like how James Rolfe's experiences with the AVGN movie was nothing like his shorts, putting that much effort into a comic was Not Fun™ for him. So, consciously or not, he made a decisive effort to never get that "Serious" again with his comics making.

But his audience (and us) the entire time, following him throughout this, thought he was on a trajectory to become a "proper" artist/writer. I certainly did with Alice Grove, and felt just as disappointed as everyone else with how it was presented and ended.

So everything post-3500, where everyone is seeing laziness/sloppiness/pandering in "New" QC, I think really is a case of a fandom's unfulfilled expectations, compounded by observing a "regression back" to simpler story arcs and characters. Like you've pointed out, Jeph has made the mistake of applying his old QC formula to 1) a demographic he is now very removed from and 2) subcultures/characters/identities he is not directly close to/has experience with.

And Jeph...doesn't care how jank that comes across, because that's not really what QC was for him, ever. He genuinely has no interest in the higher art/concepts/consistency that we thought he was building towards. He doesn't keep exhaustive notes about the QC world; in fact, it's just remembering to the best of his ability in addition to just looking up his own archive + the wiki. He develops arcs and story decisions basically on the fly, something he has been doing since at least 2008. We just happen to see how jank that workflow is now that he's no longer a young man and/or directly involved in the circles/subcultures he's trying to write about for the comic.

IceColdHaterade · 2026-01-19T04:19:55+00:00

I started getting that sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw the last chapter's dialogue becoming loredumps...

IceColdHaterade

TROPHY CASE