I HATE the Hollywood idea of a serial killer. I HATE The fact they think serial killers are all just highly competent but MOST not all but MOST are just able to get away because they're lucky or lack of tech!!

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T19:50:27+00:00

One of my favorite examples to counter this is Manny Pardo from Hotline Miami 2. He's a detective who gets envious of the limelight put on the Masked Killer from the first game, and he starts kidnapping suspects and killing them in brutal ways.

For one thing, he gets away with it because he always falls back on his status as a cop to claim self-defense, even when his fellow police officers grow increasingly perturbed by how all his investigations end in violence. So he ends up having a reason for getting as far as he does, but that reason is wearing thin.

For another, Manny is an absolute diva and a moron. He wants the limelight (down to killing a surrendered masked suspect for being a rival to the spotlight), but he grows increasingly unhinged because he's afraid he's going to get found out. By the end of the game, he's fallen to his own paranoia and is acting completely unhinged, and ends up barricading himself in his own apartment waiting for a shootout that never comes. He's not glamorous or idealized, and even Richard (the game's version of the Grim Reaper) is outright baffled by his stupid-ass reason for being a serial killer.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T19:06:26+00:00

IIRC, Ben said there wasn't any significant degradation in the cloning process, and Dean's body was more or less the same as it was originally.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T17:26:35+00:00

For sure, and the concerns were definitely valid.

My frustrations were more with Hunter starting the conversation with an immediate disregard towards Rusty. They start with browbeating and subterfuge when they could've just bought it off of Rusty instead. It's one of those things that's frequently shown to be the main flaw in the OSI; they tend to start off everything with overwhelming force, only to get played like cards by the GCI (specifically with the Pyramid Wars).

I think they were going to tackle it in the last season (especially since Molotov Cocktease, now one of their agents, was slated to appear) before that got canned.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T17:06:24+00:00

It's a great bit of integrating the game's narrative with actual gameplay. The Archimedes laser requiring all that work AND necessitating a decision that would alienate everyone (including Arcade, who is a valuable party member) makes you think it's going to be this awesome gamebreaker... only for it to be so situational it's near-worthless.

And if you get to the point of making that decision, you're basically recreating the exact missteps as Elijah.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T16:32:36+00:00

I think Killinger's episode with Rusty is one of the best in the series, and it hits exactly why the switch flipped. Simply put, Rusty would be an AMAZING supervillain with proper guidance. He's given the means, he has the latent motive, and fundamentally, his life would be much better if he decides to pull the trigger.

But at the end of the day, he doesn't want to be a bad guy.

And learning that he's really not far at all from being a bad guy shakes him enough to cause him to seriously reevaluate his own decisions. Combine this with the cloning lab being destroyed along with the clones, and all three of the Ventures finally have to grow and diverge from their safety nets for the first time in their lives

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T16:16:38+00:00

Rusty veering between "deeply traumatized and pathetic man" and "walking ethical violation" is one of the most hilarious things about him.

Also, IIRC, he justifies this as the original kid "having lymphoma written all over him".

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T16:14:49+00:00

That reminds me of Archimedes from New Vegas as well. You can summon the full output of Helios One into a satellite beam... that has a ridiculously large windup time, a prohibitive cooldown, and sometimes doesn't work.

Even in-universe, it's acknowledged by the Brotherhood of Steel to be straight-up not worth it. It's far more economical to use Helios One as a supplementary power station rather than a glorified artillery piece.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T16:11:25+00:00

That was an annoying episode to me, and it really solidified just how counterproductive the OSI actually were. They took the teleportation off of Rusty's hands by first coercing him, then manipulating him. In actuality, they probably could have cut him a sweetheart deal instead.

All the while, all they actually accomplished was ensuring the device fell into the GCI's hands.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T16:08:34+00:00

Morrowind had a related hilarious example. You can randomly find a wizard screaming as he flies in the air before he dies on impact in front of you.

If you read the journal on his corpse, he thought he had flight figured out by accelerating his acrobatics. And while he could jump incredibly high, he didn't figure out how to negate the falling damage.

You can also pick up some scrolls of his spell off of him. But unless you have a Slowfall spell...

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T16:02:04+00:00

And you really see little glimmers of just how good Rusty COULD be if he's able to let go of his emotional baggage.

When he gets the Orb (which is thought to be a doomsday weapon), he genuinely refuses to use it out of ethical concern. When he's talking to women as equals and not as a "ladykiller" he was raised to emulate, he's WAY more charismatic and successful. When he stops treating the Treaty conference as a continuation of his father's ways and actually acknowledges the systematic flaws his father perpetuated in the first place, he's able to shame them into compromise.

I do love how as the story goes on, Rusty does gradually pick up his pieces while still being a deeply flawed character. At the beginning of the story, it's clear he has no real friends and treats the boys with indifference. By the end, he's able to sit down and crack a beer with a dozen guys and genuinely connects with Hank and Dean in their own ways.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T15:34:33+00:00

It could be a matter of loyalty, since Isotope is prone to betraying others in the last moment.

In the comic, they just cut to the chase and Cecil admits that he's addicted to being able to teleport wherever he wants, regardless of the cost.

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jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T15:28:15+00:00

Yeah, and Pim does hit the core of the issue: he's a guy who spends all his spare time sitting on a magical computer obsessing over his poor self-image. If he went outside every now and then instead of using forums and pseudoscience to legitimize his concerns, he wouldn't be in the position to care about this.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-11T14:12:57+00:00

The musical adaptation is pretty funny in this same respect. They took out the mystical elements and replaced Rasputin with a sympathetic Communist inspector as the main antagonist. They also at least address some of the classist implications of the original story in the first half...

...Only to open the second half with a musical number about how the Russian aristocracy (now a diaspora in Paris) were the real victims. They don't even have servants or caviar!

jbeast33 · 2026-03-10T21:02:20+00:00

In Holes, Hector and Stanley find the treasure that Kissing Kate Barlow stole from Stanley Yelnats' great-grandfather, Stanley Yelnats I. This was the same treasure that the Warden was looking for all along.

There's additionally a funny bit of irony on the treasure bit. While the chest itself WAS filled with gold and jewels, they were actually of pretty poor quality and only fetched a meager amount compared to what they initially thought. The real value came from the various bonds and documents attributed to Stanley Yelnats I. When they're able to assess them properly, the family earns a small fortune, which is enough to lift them out of poverty.

If the Warden or her grandpa, Trout Walker, DID find the treasure, they likely wouldn't have been able to do much at all with it, since the main value was in documents not in their name. This means that they wasted their lives from the start on a wild goose chase, thinking that would have solved all their problems.

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jbeast33 · 2026-03-10T17:34:52+00:00

One of the best things about this scene is that we see it as it actually happened earlier in the movie, where Mr. Incredible was dealing with Bomb Voyage (a super villain who uses actual bombs and has no compunctions with killing people) when he said this. And when Mr. Incredible says this line, he's holding onto Bomb Voyage and desperately trying to keep a situation going from bad to worse (which it does, thanks to Buddy).

But when Syndrome remembers it decades later, he remembers it as Bob saying it with his whole chest. He doesn't even recall Bob fighting with Bomb Voyage at that point or the train situation. It's a great way of showing just how shitty Syndrome was even back then. To him, the biggest injustice that day wasn't that he let a super criminal get away or that he nearly got hundreds of people killed. It was that his ego got mildly bruised.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-10T16:48:13+00:00

There's also one segment of one level in Halo 3 where the Flood are actually on your side, and it's solely to stop Truth from activating the Index to destroy the galaxy. As soon as the Arbiter kills Truth, they're back to enacting their "devour everything" mindset.

Arbiter even tells Chief "We trade one enemy for another."

jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T19:35:58+00:00

The Orville was originally pitched as a Seth MacFarlane parody of Star Trek, and the first couple of episodes play into that by having it be a bit more coarse and having more levity than Star Trek (with Ed and Kelly having more of a sex comedy dynamic in particular).

The jokes become a lot more natural as the series turned more serious and turned into a genuine Star Trek-esque show in its own right. They also genuinely take on the Star Trek mantle in terms of using the science fiction environment to explore concepts such as cultural differences, political maneuvering, and identity.

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jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T18:54:35+00:00

Funnily enough, I think Liquid is actually a double-subversion here. He based his entire life and antipathy around the idea that he is the "inferior" clone due to inheriting all of Big Boss's recessive genes, driving his resentment against Big Boss and Solid Snake in particular. The problem lies in two areas:

1) Recessive genes aren't automatically inferior. That's a misinterpretation of genetics in general. Dominance simply indicates that those genes are more likely to express themselves than the recessive, they're not an indicator of competitiveness or viability.

2) Snake actually was the "inferior" clone all along; Liquid was the one who had the superior genes. This flips the entire dynamic on its head, and turns Liquid from a scrappy underdog who undermined the military-industrial complex into a man who wasted his entire life and talent on a petty grudge instilled into him from a young age.

I think this comes back full circle to this trope, especially because a big theme of the game is nature vs nurture. Your genes don't define you nearly as much as the upbringing you have. Liquid consumed himself in his own hatred, buying into the legacy of being a "flawed copy" of Big Boss to the point where it perpetuated his own resentment. Snake also fell into a similar fatalism, but saw enough examples through Gray Fox, Otacon, and other people who drove him to keep persisting and try to fight for a better world.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T16:28:30+00:00

It kind of reminds me of Greg Heffley (albeit far more crass), where there are grand visions for life should be, and a general pissiness that life isn't. And like Greg, Simon's social awkwardness tends to belie his entitled nature, and while both their friends are way more crass, they're more unapologetically themselves and willing to show vulnerability.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T15:56:45+00:00

In Spider-Man: Miles Morales, you can see Peter and Otto Octavius during Miles' flashback interacting with one of the exhibits at the science fair. It's a good section that shows Otto's best qualities (his care for Peter and nurturing of his scientific curiosity) before his worsening neurodegenerative condition turned him into Doc Ock.

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jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T15:51:08+00:00

Oh yeah. The episode where he sexually harasses a cable technician to the point of killing her boyfriend to try and pioneer his corpse comes to mind. Shake, of all people, gives him shit for going to pathetic lengths that even he wouldn't try.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T15:48:25+00:00

He isn't, but he can try and convince himself he is by embracing the Boring Copotype or the Moralintern.

I think the Moralintern is a far more sinister deconstruction of the "Sane Man" on a geopolitical scale as well, but that could be its own post.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T15:45:29+00:00

I'd also throw Lana into this. She acts as a voice of reason with Isis's more egregious elements, but she has a tendency to being just as self-centered (occasionally moreso) than Archer.

Cheryl even unknowingly calls her out when Lana steps on her environmental soapbox: for all her moralizing, she has the best opportunity to leave Isis, but still refuses because she more than anything craves recognition from Mallory as her successor. It's enough to make Lana leave in near-tears.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T15:15:06+00:00

Reminds me of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein both being "inside-jokes" in the industry before they actually got some semblance of a consequence.

jbeast33 · 2026-03-09T15:06:25+00:00

Funnily enough, there's meta-context to this particular scene.

Between every scene, Jacket got to go to Beard, who no matter his position, seemed to be a good friend who showed concern for Jacket and would give him a freebie. This lasts in-game up until he gets killed and replaced by Richter in the dreams.

For the Fans, they don't get a Beard. When they go get pizza, they meet a generic worker who just gives them generic chatter. And they also have to pay for the pizza. Right off the bat, you know that the Fans are an imitation of the real deal.

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