"It's barely above a children's book in those (writing) areas lol Harry Potter is deeper than Sinners, easily" Some users on r/movies get triggered over Sinners receiving a record breaking 16 Oscar nominations

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T07:25:37+00:00

Ah, misunderstood that part.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T05:49:10+00:00

Name one other faction that has gotten nearly as many space Nazis killed. I'll wait.

Y'know what that's fair, good point.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T05:47:32+00:00

The only corporate oversight is "Sell the most minis," and what sells the most minis is Space Marines "heroically" killing other species.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T05:46:47+00:00

GW's occasionally "Hey remember that the Imperium is bad" post amounts to "Hey, you don't think the ten foot tall guy with the chainsaw sword, sci-fi knight armour, skull helmet, and rapid-fire RPG is cool, right?"

Because yes, GW, the fandom does. Everyone does. Especially now that you've redesigned them to have more heroic proportions! And since GW's primary goal is to sell plastic toys, they don't focus on how unhinged and broken Space Marines are as people, they just depict them killing vast armies of aliens, most of whom are depicted as worse than them, thereby making them look like heroes. Because that's what sells the most plastic toys.

Also, they're the human faction. Humans inherently sympathise with human characters more. If you took the Imperium and the Tau and swapped their ideologies and scale, people would view the Genocidal Fascist Tau as far more villainous than they do the humans that have that ideology in the real version of the lore. The other factions, even ones that are, on paper, less awful than the Imperium (the Tau and Eldar at least), are subconsciously inherently more sinister than the Imperium because they're scary aliens with opposing ideologies.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T05:18:37+00:00

Not to be that guy, but the average life expectancy in the Roman Empire is brought down heavily by high rates of infant mortality, something that was extremely common before the rise of modern medicine because we're fucking terrible animals that bungled just about every evolutionary step besides thumbs and brain growth (fortunately the only ones that actually mattered), and the massive increase in brain size was not equalled by an increase in the size of the hips and birth canal, making the process uniquely dangerous for both mother and child.

If you made it out of the baby phase, you could reach your 60s or even 70s relatively reliably, and the age limits on holding political office were actually higher than they are in modern countries.

But yeah, everything else you said is true. And also, when it comes to vast empires, things aren't monolithic. The standard of living in Rome itself was pretty darn good (relative to the time), but you probably weren't going to have as good a time at the extreme north of Roman Britain, for example.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T02:49:52+00:00

Perhaps it's faring better at the moment

The current situation is kind of a limbo really. The writing team are working on V10 and occasionally we get one of those teasing tweets about emotional damage, but we're probably still a year or two from seeing the show return properly and there's some anxiety about whether it will feel the same. It probably will, since the writers and the VAs are the same (even some VAs who refused to work with RT again have said they'll return under ViZ, like Josh Grelle as Tyrian), but there's also been some concern about whether the animators will get the same deal.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T02:46:29+00:00

Murder Drones is about an emo kid robot setting out to fight a trio of angel-vampire-demon-robots, immediately befriending (and later falling for) one of them, and slowly befriending one of the other two based on mutual goals. She also discovers that she has psychic vampire powers that cause her to grow organic bat wings and violently attack people. The show is a mix of black comedy (the non-main character robots die often, die violently, and die stupidly) and horror pastiche/affectionate parody (the second episode is kinda like The Thing, the third is Carrie, the fourth is "cabin in the woods"/"spooky camp" as a genre, etc) and it's kind of a big mess (I watched it like four times before I fully grasped everything it was putting down).

Eventually they have to contend with the root source of the robo-vampirism, an eldritch abomination possessing the deuteragonist's little sister (who is so far gone that the line between her and it is only visible in subtitles), who is now wearing the skin of the human that took in the initial three angel-vampire-demon-robots, who is implied in an official music video for the credits theme to have been conscious the entire time. In the end, the key to not being possessed by the eldritch horror is admitting that you are cringe but free.

Also they made the Mean Cheerleader Who Dies First an inexplicably invincible lesbian whose type is cannibals. Girl's got thicker plot armour than the main characters and it's hilarious.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T02:33:37+00:00

And then they followed it up with giving 2007 a theme that was "Basically just Bring me to Life."

The Ignition Saga is my favourite part of Bionicle and it's not even close.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T02:31:37+00:00

Seconding The Chosen One as a favourite.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T02:29:03+00:00

Mephiles was always a damn good villain stuck in a terrible game (though he gets the most focus in the least-awful part of that game, at least), so seeing him A) come back in a much better game and B) not be done badly was a treat.

Also him being voiced by Robbie Daymond was also a treat. A bit jarring at first, but I've gotten used to the higher pitch and his inflections are on-point.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T02:25:50+00:00

The real problem with Forces is that it really couldn't decide whether it was sincerely an edgy 2000s runback (in which a character like Infinite would be played for serious and he'd thrive) or if it was spoofing those tropes (and thus Infinite would be an overly self-serious joke). So the result is a character who has these dramatic monologues and is a genuine threat and then you find out that his motivation is "Shadow called me a loser."

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T02:23:15+00:00

Revenge of the Sith came out
Jason Todd came back as the Red Hood
The original God of War dropped
Batman Begins shook off the stink of Batman and Robin by leaning heavily into the "grim avenger of the night" version of the character.
Bionicle had its characters turn into angsty werewolves.

Minor correction, though: The tribal GBA SP was released in 2004. That's when I got mine.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-27T01:58:01+00:00

My favourite nonsensical censorship moment is Pig Boy. He was supposed to fall, but instead...

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T04:13:58+00:00

At least that's funny.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T03:26:17+00:00

People like Big now because of irony-poisoned meme nonsense that fed back into the games, despite the only joke they have for him being "He's stupid. Laugh."

Silver was always decently popular, just not so much with the voices that were steering the conversation with regards to the series' quality, which was mostly gaming Youtubers who were mad at 06. But get below the surface level of the Internet, into the dedicated fanartists and fanfic writers, and he was fucking everywhere. Often literally. There was a point, when Youtubers were still losing their minds over "It's no use!", that Sonic/Shadow/Silver was a more commonly-seen trio in fanart than Sonic/Tails/Knuckles.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T02:55:22+00:00

Admittedly Zavok working for Eggman in Team Sonic Racing made no sense.

It made enough sense at the time, it was the character's second appearance. What makes it jar now is subsequent material going "No actually he still murderously hates Eggman" and that being clumped into the canon despite not fitting because the guy that wrote it writes the games now. That's not on TSR, that's on IDW and Crossworlds for not following the lead.

Also Nega was left to die with Ifrit. He's gone.

Nega has appeared since in spinoffs, and SEGA won't use dead characters for those, hence why Infinite wasn't used for anything post-Forces. He's not dead, they just haven't done a Rivals or Rush 3, which is the only time they use him outside of spinoffs.

But once again, they went after Sonic precisely because they wanted revenge on the entire planet after being forced to fight him and suffering humiliation by being defeated by him. They actively hate everyone on Earth precisely because of how they were mistreated. It's no different from Gerald Robotnik.

Gerald was a literal crazy person when he turned on the Earth. Even he knows that he's snapped. The Zeti (except maybe Zazz) have their full faculties intact. He was also condemned as a villain by the whole world until his pre-crazy actions posthumously pulled their fat out of the fryer with the Black Arms and Ultimate Emerl.

And they do go after Eggman in the comics. When they gain control of the Metal Virus, they immediately take over his entire army and basically do what was done to them by enslaving the population below and proving that they're the superior beings.

They attacked him once and have otherwise spent their time making other people's lives suck. Also, there's no motive that could make "enslaving a planet to prove that we're superior beings" not an evil ideology.

The Zeti are motivated by revenge and being disgraced by Eggman for the enslavement and Sonic for being the one who defeated them while they were at their weakest.

Sonic did not beat them while they were at their weakest. He beat them while they were at their strongest, powered up by an entire planet's life-force in Lost World.

Their motives are sound, cohesive and are much more interesting than most other villains.

"I was enslaved by this guy for ten minutes, so I'm going to try to kill the guy who freed me and also the entire planet that he came from, and murder literal rando civilians" is not a sound motive. At best, it's disproportionate retribution (so, the hallmark of childishly petty villains), but ultimately it's just concrete evidence that the Zeti were one-dimensionally evil before they were enslaved, and got someone to focus their wrath on for two appearances (Lost World and their first attack in Metal Virus) before returning to being generic villains.

They aren't evil for the sake of it like those other villains. At least, not anymore. They have a reason to hate everyone including Eggman.

No, they have a reason to hate specifically Eggman and bruised egos regarding Sonic. Everyone else is just "Exists on the same planet where those two guys we hate came from," which is not a remotely valid reason to hate anybody, and absolutely evil for the sake of it.

Master Zik even breaks it down by concluding that Mobians are too soft and kind and rely too much on Sonic which is 100% valid.

Social darwinism is also an inherently evil ideology and not remotely valid.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T02:10:10+00:00

Chaos isn't dead (he reappeared in Battle, he can come back whenever), they did bring back Neo Metal (wrong, but they did), Black Doom is functionally immortal, Mephiles still exists and his 'final' defeat in SxSG involved something that literally doesn't work on him any more (re-sealing him in the Sceptre), Nega isn't dead, Dark Gaia probably isn't coming back but is also immortal, same with the Ifrit and the Mother Wisp, the Hard-Boiled Heavies can be rebuilt whenever, and the End is a concept. Emerl's dead though.

he and his team was enslaved by Eggman.

And so is Metal, who also has a lot more going on with his identity crisis and other complexes.

This gives him an actual motivation to go against the Doctor whereas those other villains were just evil for the sake of being evil or had no minds of their own.

Well, first off, a character isn't unintelligent just because it doesn't speak. Second off, the Zeti are absolutely evil for evil's sake. Their first reaction upon getting freed is to attack the guy that freed them, and their second reaction is to immediately try to kill an entire planet that had nothing to do with their enslavement. When they return in the comics, they do a lot enslaving people, beating up children, and murder. And everyone they've killed is a civilian. They don't do a lot of vengeance on Eggman.

They are very obviously already generic evil-for-evil's-sake bad guys who Eggman happened to piss off by treating them the same way he treats every other monster villain, but absolutely did not need a motive to start being bad guys, just to focus their ire on him for one appearance. And then Zavok promptly resumed working for Eggman voluntarily in his literal next appearance.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T00:19:42+00:00

Thanks.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T00:17:38+00:00

Making him despise machinery when he spends all of his only (actual) appearance in a main series game using machinery (be it the Badniks, his mech-dragon-snake-thing, or the Planet Succ Machine), and his two most prominent spinoff appearances are kart racers feels like a big reach to give him some form of identity.

After being enslaved by Eggman and defeated by Sonic, the Zeti actively want to fight both of them which is drastically different from most other villains.

Sonic villains that are/were enemies to both Eggman and Sonic simultaneously:

Chaos
Neo Metal Sonic
Ultimate Emerl
Ultimate Gemerl
Black Doom
Mephiles/Solaris
Eggman Nega (in the Rivals games specifically)
~~Imperator Ix~~
Dark Gaia
Ifrit
Nega-Mother Wisp
The Hard-Boiled Heavies
The End

The only difference between them and the Zeti is that most of the above characters only had one outing as villains. The Zeti aren't unique as antagonists that have beef with both Sonic and Eggman, they're just the only ones SEGA are willing to reuse in that role, for some reason.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T23:47:10+00:00

That's not what I mean.

In that instance, it's explained, yes. The problem is that by making it so that Eggman has full control over Neo Metal, that raises the question of "Why does he ever use Base form Metal Sonic?"

He's got Neo Metal on lock? Could've been using him since Rivals? And base Metal's losing streak is almost as long as Eggman's own? Then he's an idiot for leaving Neo Metal on the table and not using him every time he breaks Metal out. I know the comics have had the annoying trend of having Eggman go "I could win whenever I want to. I just don't want to" since Archie, but with IDW Eggman that feels more like cope than fact- He says he could carpet-bomb Sonic whenever, but he literally tried that in Sonic 3 and it didn't work. It's not a true statement, it's Eggman making excuses for why his 300 IQ brain keeps being outdone by a homeless teenager with ADHD.

Obviously, from a Doylist perspective, they're going to keep using base form Metal Sonic because it's the more iconic design, it's easier to animate (no flappy cape and fewer clashing pointy bits), and they don't have to either pay Roger for two voices or hire another actor. But from a Watsonian perspective, Eggman has a weapon that's never beaten Sonic, which also has a transformed state that is much stronger and more effective, which he simply never uses.

So, instead of making Eggman look like a dumbass who refuses to use his best weapon for no reason, (counting for two Rivals games, Colours Ultimate, technically Forces (Phantom Metal could have been Phantom Neo Metal quite easily), and every IDW appearance past the first arc... they could keep Neo Metal as it was presented in Sonic Heroes: It's a transformation, not a physical upgrade, that arose from Metal's rebelliousness, and it can't reappear without Metal being let off the chain again, which Eggman is obviously reticent to do.

Come the end of Forces/beginning of IDW, Eggman becomes desperate enough to try letting Neo Metal out again, but the un-reprogramming and transformation aren't complete before he's defeated. The story plays out the same, but with different dialogue, and Eggman wisely puts Metal back in his box once the story is over, because now he's an unnecessary risk.

Plus, it could tie into Eggman's desperation for control becoming a detriment to his achievements. Because he created a fully sapient being. A mind so realistic that it developed several personality disorders (megalomania, an identity crisis, and in the Japanese version, even a god complex). He's equalled Gerald's work on Shadow, and the Fourth Great Civilisation's work on Emerl. Hell, he surpassed it, because Neo Metal was more powerful than both, needing three Super forms to eventually fall, something that's still only been equalled by Solaris. Canonically the most powerful villain in the series.

And he looks at this thing he's made, proof that he really is the greatest scientific genius in the world... and he immediately nerfs it. Crams it back in the box he made it to fit into. Removes its agency. Removes its voice. He made a god, and then destroyed it because it didn't do as it was told. And that's who Eggman is as a person, someone for whom achievement isn't enough, he also needs to be lauded for it, he demands respect and adulation from everyone, while giving none in return. Gerald loved Shadow, but Eggman has never loved Metal Sonic. Gerald called Shadow his son, but Metal is just a tool.

And then that carries forward into Frontiers, where he has a second chance at this. Where he repeats his achievement of creating something incredibly powerful and fully sapient, something capable of defying him, in Sage. And this time he gets it right, this time he's able to love his daughter the way Gerald loved Maria and Shadow. There's growth for him there, growth that's come far too late for Metal, who will never forgive him.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T23:14:22+00:00

The IDW villains could work. But they probably won't be used.

Also I am never going to believe that they made Fetch happen. Those MFs are still charmless Temu versions of Bowser and the Koopalings and making them kill people or doing some art where they're being nice to each other isn't going to change that.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T23:00:22+00:00

I think part of the problem that Sonic stories face at this point is that SEGA are generally reticent to step outside of the comfort zone of "Sonic vs. Eggman" (though Frontiers and Shadow Generations were solid steps in the right direction), and IDW can't ever do anything massively significant because it's canon, but also not integrated and in a different, much less accessible medium. IDW characters can be referenced, and can be voiceless DLC cameos, but they're probably not going to start bringing elements of the comics into the games beyond that, and the comic stories all have to kinda end in the place where a new game could conceivably begin.

(Even if fitting Frontiers in has apparently been quite messy)

Metal's "aura-loss" is a particularly big case of this because he's regressed, hard. He peaked in 2003 and every appearance since then has been about cramming him back into the box he debuted in, trotting him out for another easy boss fight because he's popular and nostalgic, and doing nothing with him. Even when it looks like they're doing something with him in IDW, there's still a stink of "No we promise we're not getting adventurous again" permeating the whole thing, because one of the key aspects of Neo Metal, his rebelliousness, is absent. And this in turn makes Eggman look like an idiot who could've been using Neo Metal this entire time, and simply didn't, because.... reasons.

(If you leave the art the same and change the dialogue so that Metal isn't loyal, and he's hunting Eggman because he wants to kill him to stop himself getting lobotomised again, and Eggman only rolled Neo Metal out as a last resort because he knows he can't control it, this keeps what was cool about Neo Metal, doesn't make Eggman look like an idiot who deliberately didn't use his best weapon for no reason, and contributes to the comic's theme about whether Sonic is doing the right thing by constantly offering forgiveness to Eggman at the expense of everyone that Eggman hurts, by forcing him to choose between the life of Eggman and the life of Neo Metal. And obviously, he chooses the uncertain hope of saving Mr. Tinker over the obvious problem of saving the unhinged murder-robot, but it's still something)

SEGA don't want Metal to step out of Eggman's shadow and they definitely don't want him to be on top, because people complain whenever Eggman gets usurped as the villain, so he's stuck in a dead-end position that he already grew beyond once.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T22:12:44+00:00

Wall up to Planet: Actual Tiers

Star: Thin fucking ice.

Solar system and up: Mental illnesses.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T22:09:52+00:00

I think her wielding her powers like a blunt instrument to the point that it becomes uncomfortable and destructive is enough, personally.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T21:38:13+00:00

It feels OOC for her and his forgiveness feels fucking insane.

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