I like complaining about things. Let's complain about things together.
What is the most ridiculously stupid professional narrative/plot you've read/watched/played through in recent memory? I'm talking nationally published books, high-budget Hollywood movies, popular TV shows, Triple A games, etc. Not fanfictions, newgrounds flashes, or somebody's youtube channel. I mean people that really should have known better, and probably have enough money to not care about a single thread on an internet forum. It doesn't matter if other people liked it; if it was dumb to you, it was dumb in some respect.
EDIT: Please also disregard reality shows. We all know they're dumb.
Please, no arguing with other people's complaints! Let's try to accept that people don't like things that we like sometimes!

My thing is this: Remember that Maze Runner movie that came out a while ago? I didn't see it, but I read the books it was based on. And holy wow, it was the most unsatisfying read ever. For three books, the story did virtually nothing but raise new questions with a bunch of bizarre nonsense, and then hand-wave them away with a single "answer" that attempted to explain everything but only raised more questions. Throughout the series, the author tried tried to insert the really old few-for-the-good-of-many moral quandary but completely screwed it up at the end. I could go on but it would go into spoilers and I've given the main points.... and it's been a while since I read the books, tbh.

So, that's my pitch. Now let's see if this subject sticks.

9 years ago*

Comment has been collapsed.

Popular TV shows? Too many to count. I'm not even going to list the dumb MTV ones, but the History channel has a lot of dumb ones, like Ancient Aliens and The National Geographic channel's Bigfoot show

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Oh, dang, you're right. I didn't even think of stuff like that. I was thinking fiction TV shows. (I know the shows you listed are arguably 'fiction' also, but you know what I mean)

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Finding Bigfoot for sure....all those trivia questions with the answers presented as facts...

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Under the dome (Season 3). I loved the first season, the second one was ok, but the third one? I just kept watching it to laugh about it haha :P

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Really? I have s1 & 2 and just really trying to find the time to catch up on s3 but dropping the series now.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The show got cancelled, and tonight they will air the last episode of S3 (who knows, it might have a good ending :P).
S3 storyline makes no sense, you won't miss much :P

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

OH really? lol. I guess no ragretz

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed. I wanted to watch the show (it was on TV on daily basis about a year ago)- it looked cheap, but I am a curious person. After a couple of tricks I couldn't stand the narrator anymore and never watched it again.

PS: Other than that, everything on KanalD

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Skyrim.

Apocaliptic Dragons all over the place? lets play a racist game about "independece", and off course all the aincients hided their treasures at the end of dungeons with conviently placed exits at the end.. those ancients.. not very clever

Actual representation of a skyrim dungeon

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Covert Affairs should just have ended after season 4.
Long story made short :The first four seasons are a good spy series showing how a newbie evolves into a hardened veteran who's seen and done it all. They form a coherent whole with what feels like a logical conclusion to it all. And most importantly: Personal issues play into subplots, but on the whole don't overtake the spy business as the main plot.

Then comes along season 5, trying to start off a sequel story. And all of a sudden the personal issues take center stage and the spy business turns into a backdrop for a romance drama.

Continuum also deserves mention.
Even though there's plenty in-universe explanation for the complete shift in focus that starts off season 3, that doesn't excuse the fact that season 3 just turns out to be quite dull plot-wise.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I'll go with anything in "recent" times by David Cage since I don't even need to play his games to think their plots are stupid...

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I don't care if a movie's logic doesn't match real-life logic. I'm down for some good entertainment, and I'm a fan of speculative fiction and fantasy, so I'm fine with a movie creating its own rules. But once those rules are created, then it's important to me that they stick to those rules.

Remember the movie Minority Report? There was a red ball/brown ball dichotomy set up so that the movie could open with a tense few minutes of wondering if the hero would be able to save the victims-to-be in time. If the murder-to-be is a crime of passion, then the system spits out a red ball and the heroes only have hours to stop the crime before it happens. If the murder-to-be is premeditated, then the system spits out a brown ball and the heroes have a couple of days to stop the crime before it happens. Our hero is then implicated in a murder with a brown ball, giving those chasing him days to try and stop the murder before it happens. When the moment of the murder occurs, however, it is not a premeditated murder, but a crime of passion! The system should have spit out a red ball, and given the investigators hours to stop the murder, not days.

Even great franchises, like the Marvel movies, aren't immune to this either. I'm a huge fan of them, and see them in the theaters when they come out. But whenever they break their own rules, it really gets under my skin. In the first Iron Man movie, we find that Stark Industries has come up with a new electrical propulsion system. The opening scenes show us that since the rockets no longer needs to carry massive amounts of chemical propellant, they can be made much smaller and still be as effective as their larger counterparts. And this electrically-powered propulsion system is what Tony uses to fly in his Iron Man suit. I can accept that, since it's internally consistent, and the arc reactor gives virtually unlimited electricity to power the suit. But in later movies (I believe I noticed it in the Avengers and every movie after that), Iron Man leaves a contrail in the sky behind him when he flies. A contrail would only form like that if his suit was flown using some chemical propellant. Why abandon the electrically-powered propulsion system when it worked so well? And where on that suit is Tony managing to store the amount of chemical propellant necessary to fly further than a few feet, much less the long-term sustained flight we see in the movies? Perhaps it was added because leaving a contrail behind you when flying looks "cool", but seeing it absolutely destroys my ability to lose myself in the story.

Something similar happens in Ant-Man. They establish in the movie that when getting bigger or smaller, the mass of an object doesn't change. Which is why the hero is able to punch "with the force of a bullet" when he is a few millimeters tall; he might be tiny, but still has all the mass he normally would. But then that means a random ant is able to carry a 180 pound (about 80 kilograms) weight on its back without trouble, and fly with that much weight on its back? I know ants can easily lift twenty to fifty times their body weight, but that ant doesn't weigh five pounds (about two kilograms)! Or there is a scene when a character shrinks rather heavy piece of equipment in order to carry it around in his pocket later in the movie. If the mass of an object doesn't change, how is the character even able to lift the equipment, much less carry it around in his pocket without being noticed?

Like I said, I don't care if the rules you set for your universe don't match the rules in our universe. It's entertainment, and I want to be entertained. The writer and creators can set whatever rules they want, but once they set up those rules for the audience, they shouldn't go and break them later in the story. It's jarring, and it ruins any sense of immersion in their universe that I might have been experiencing.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The Law and Order SVU episode "depicting" Gamergate: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2015/02/12/law-order-svu-takes-on-gamergate-cant-press-reset-button/
All gamers are mysogynysts! That means you too shitlord.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

But..."I read on Kotaku itโ€™s better than Civ 5 with the 'Brave New World' expansion pack!"

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Yeah that's about as credible as Bing search engine recommending Edge browser.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sign in through Steam to add a comment.