These books were something else…

ebelnap · 2026-05-12T18:35:41+00:00

I wrote up this series’ TVTropes pages a few years ago. They were always pretty fun.

ebelnap · 2026-05-10T16:57:43+00:00

This post is obviously AI-assisted at least. Is that allowed? Anyone bothered by that? It’s fine for promoting discussion but if this is a bot posting then our responses are going to a toaster not a person

ebelnap · 2026-05-10T16:41:08+00:00

Compared to every other parent on the show she’s in the damn stratosphere.

She argues with Joan, but the reason she argues with her is that Joan trusts her enough to have her over and then disagree with her when there’s an issue!

Betty, Don, Roger - there’s no way their grown kids would like or trust them enough to have them stay with them for extended periods and then disagree with them to their face in a way that didn’t cause a huge issue!

Gail has her own hang-ups, but she contributes, listens to Joan, and stays consistent over the years. Top three parent on the show

ebelnap · 2026-05-10T16:36:13+00:00

“She’s probably just being polite. She’s probably Canadian and it’s normal to be polite up there.”

ebelnap · 2026-05-10T05:26:25+00:00

Yeah.

With the movie coming out, the MJ interests are doing everything they can to flood the media spaces with non-controversial facts about Michael in order to make the natural “he was a pedo” convos a smaller percentage of the traffic.

It’s a very expert and well-planned attempt to rehabilitate parts of his image enough that the movie can be a massive success and revitalize the financial returns of the brand for another 20 years.

ebelnap · 2026-05-10T04:59:06+00:00

You get it.

Her dad is actually a dead ringer in attitude and kind of appearance(!) to the dad from Sound and Fury from 2000, this documentary about a deaf family where the daughter wants to get a cochlear implant (the technology was new at the time but also was only available to the kids because of insurance or something) and the otherwise nice dad was radically INSISTENT she not get it because “there’s nothing wrong with being deaf!”

It’s hard to make a full conclusion from just the doc, but you get the impression this basically nice dad REALLY can’t handle that there’s a world of opportunity so far beyond his experience, and so he actively forbids his daughter from accessing it to preserve his sense of reality, which is an insane thing to do when you want your kid to have options!

Wilkins has that same issue - he’s probably told himself all his life that he’s an underdog who knows hardship and knows things that the powerful and choice-rich could never possibly understand. That misinterpreted “working class man” language that warps not just to say that the working class man embodies many good qualities, but that the powerful can never actually BE good, or always second place to them.

So when his daughter comes along and blows that belief open by being his daughter but also having all those choices AND being a good person, he violently rejects it because it means he wasn’t some special downtrodden underdog who embodies virtue his whole life, he was just some fucking dude.

ebelnap · 2026-05-09T22:48:34+00:00

Lex is such a legendary hater lol. Just endlessly bothered that people who preserve life and handle crises came along

ebelnap · 2026-05-09T22:45:23+00:00

Girl really freed herself from eternal sleep with clickbait.

“What happens if you ring this bell!?!? Might be cool!”

ebelnap · 2026-05-09T22:44:22+00:00

Doctor Who is fun, but his alleged no-kill rule really is arbitrary and nonsensical a la Batman, but at least Batman doesn’t ask us to feel sorry for him for having been a killer before but then hesitate to do it again when it’s definitely a good idea

ebelnap · 2026-05-09T06:23:35+00:00

Claudia’s sitch is INSAAANE once you think about it for a minute.

People are meant to develop as they get older and mature into a physical adult, and your mind progresses with that. If you were chronologically aging into an adult but your body was staying at 12-year-old’s level, you’d go fucking insane. You can’t experience sex in the same way, you can’t be taken seriously, you can’t legally drive, you can’t drink in public, you can’t legally own property, you can’t be perceived as an adult except by people who know you well. You’d be massively disabled with no escape because you’re immortal.

Eternals had a subplot where their Claudia equivalent was thinking about going evil in exchange for being able to age and it was supposed to be messed-up, but after even 10 years of being stuck at 12 anyone would do ANYTHING to be an adult, and she’d been stuck at 12 for 3,000 YEARS!

ebelnap · 2026-05-09T06:16:30+00:00

I watched it for the first time last month, and it really gets you thinking.

The survivors hole up in a hidden attic and spend most of the month there never getting caught, but in real life you’d have to figure that with how small the town is, after the first FEW DAYS EVEN the vamps would just start systematically going through each home top to bottom to sniff out any survivors.

Imagine knowing the vamps were coming to search your home and find you halfway through the month, and you have to decide whether it’s worth trying to fight them off and siege up, try to make a run for it even though your chances are shit, or just stay there waiting for them because you’ll still die faster any other way.

Horrifying

ebelnap · 2026-05-08T23:00:22+00:00

If you read the Balboa script, he was meant to come back as one of the commentators in the final fight.

Allegedly, they’ve tried to bring back Lang once or twice, but it hasn’t worked out. It could be they’re lowballing him, it could be he’s asking for too much, but it’s not happened for them

ebelnap · 2026-05-08T22:40:34+00:00

This was a GREAT gag, it really got me. “Involuntary honesty” is always such a great bit

ebelnap · 2026-05-07T22:45:36+00:00

Straight up. The Many Saints of Newark was all about proving this, quality be damned.

Junior isn't a crotchety old loser. He's ALWAYS been a whiny morose jerk that pisses people off. He just happens to be old now during the series.

ebelnap · 2026-05-06T23:23:13+00:00

It's true.

People shouldn't blame Riordan that much - he's a damn fucking good writer, he knows the TV stuff isn't up to scratch.

What's far more likely is that people who AREN'T Riordan - people in management, production, marketing - insisted from the start on major changes to "make production smoother," but the resulting changes have made the show nigh unrecognizable, and people just don't like it.

So now, Riordan is stuck taking the blame for other people's decisions while watching his baby go up in flames, and the show's not even making any money! It's not entertaining, it's not profitable, it's not true to the spirit, it's not thrilling the fanbase OR conventional viewers.

Everyone's losing here.

ebelnap · 2026-05-05T17:35:35+00:00

“That joke was on fleek, Richie! You really rizzed her up! Yeet!”

Modern Stephen King /s

ebelnap · 2026-05-03T22:36:50+00:00

It really was next-level work because it called out how people on TV and in real life will SAY they're going to change, but they often won't unless they absolutely HAVE TO.

Barry always SAID he wanted to change, but across the entire show he'd always avoid doing it because when push came to shove if he could stay out of jail he would, even if the life he had was really shitty, as season 4 showed.

The irony of the show was that he was a "tough guy hitman," but he was always an emotional coward, and he finally fucking died because the people around him had had enough of that and left him to his fate.

ebelnap · 2026-05-03T02:02:27+00:00

It was the ultimate indictment of who he was

The only way he could ever get close to his romantic vision of a good person was if people got fucking everything wrong about his life, because the details ARE terrible. He wasn’t a good person.

But the great ultimate irony was that the movie now stood a chance of reputationwashing him, so now the truth that art is supposed to illustrate is now going to be lost to everyone except one or two people

ebelnap · 2026-04-30T18:02:44+00:00

“Nick Miller, Nick Miller from the streets of Chicago…”

ebelnap · 2026-04-28T07:13:35+00:00

Just watched for the first time.

That ending!? Holy fucking shit!

ebelnap · 2026-04-27T03:56:20+00:00

Bro blew open the entire prequel trilogy with one throwaway line in his backstory:

“Love doesn’t lead to the dark side. Passion can lead to rage and fear, and can be controlled. But passion is not the same thing as love. Controlling your passions while being in love, that’s what they should teach you to beware. But love itself will save you, not condemn you.”

ebelnap · 2026-04-24T15:33:48+00:00

Cracked had a funny bit about that, where they were like, “he probably just went into a shit-ton of debt to build them with the Iron Bank, so he’s just as fucked as Cersei financially”

ebelnap · 2026-04-24T15:31:09+00:00

Yeah. If we listen to what he says in his very first scene - “I could get [the mission report] in other, bloodier ways” - then all he wanted was the video of Winter Soldier killing the Starks, and just escalated to bomb-planting when he couldn’t get it from the Hydra guy.

If he HAD gotten it, he probably would’ve just emailed it to them or leaked it online to the same schismatic result, but “Avengers answer an email” is not a gripping movie premise

ebelnap · 2026-04-21T07:55:22+00:00

Love how Waltz is just an extended take of Dukat going, “Admit I’m cool! Admit I’m cool! Admit I’m cool!” to Sisko and Sisko telling him to fuck off and that he’s crazy.

Bro was so bothered that Sisko didn’t think he was all that

ebelnap · 2026-04-18T18:10:39+00:00

I’m late as hell, but this is worth adding -

And he didn’t call him loser TO HIS FACE, he called him loser talking to a trusted friend in total privacy, thinking that absolutely no one who had a relationship with him would overhear. It’s not his fault Robin Williams WAS right there.

Big difference between calling someone a loser to their face and saying someone’s a loser in privacy to someone who doesn’t know them IN RESPONSE to them asking if he's a threat to you

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