Remember Lucas' Lesson! (Longish)

That makes you wrong, in a very physical way

Anakin is just way too emo. You'd stab him after an hour just to get him to shut up.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

That's why I dropped the regen effects - now I just do the animaiton, and the green numbers appear - even the sounds are gone.
But that horrible chest thumping animation for Integration is still there

I think less violent ways could be found

You mean, like drugging him?

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

Note that I am not actually defining what constitutes bad taste and bad manners and am not telling you or anybody else what is good and bad. I actually have a much more optimistic view of human creativity than Theodore Sturgeon, but I don't think that every human being has an inner Rembrandt just waiting to come out, either.

What I'm claiming is that instances of bad taste and bad manners will occur, regardless of what you or I personally think what these constitute. I don't make any specific value judgements here, I'm putting forward a statistical proposition (not quite "90% of everything is crud", as Sturgeon put it, but I'm wagering on a non-zero percentage still).

By the way, I also happen to think that putting up with this is worthwhile because of the many significant benefits the freedom of character customization confers.

For instance, seal him in a black body suit and helmet, but forget to turn on the vocal systems. Or give him a sealed chamber and tell him that's the only place he's able to remove his helmet and actually talk - unfortunately, there aren't any communications systems inside.

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No, not that either

Anakin on drugs would be quite a sight to see. Whether or not anyone would want to see such a thing depends on the kind of drugs and his reaction to them. Personally, I think Anakin on a 'roid rage would be hilarious as long as it was observed from a safe distance.

Would antidepressants make him not evil anymore? What about the mood stabilizers that bipolar people often take? If he got completely drunk, would he just mutter about his dead mom and cry all night (even though he does that anyway), or would he randomly kill imperial peons for no reason whatsoever (see previous statement in parentheses), or...?

I guess what I'm getting at is this: What would Anakin on drugs do? Do we even want to know?

Pretty sure he was on painkillers after the duel with Obi-Wan

Hell, I wanted to stab him as soon as I saw who they cast for the role. I don't even know the guy, but his emo plus that look were just murder for me. Then again, I also wanted to stab young Obi Wan, but adult Obi Wan I find to be one of the coolest characters I've seen, upstaging large ham Samuel L. Jackson by several orders of magnitude. Then again, the various Clone Wars series have made him a lot cooler still, as well as actually doing Anakin a lot of good. He's actually a pretty decent, impressive character there. On the other hand, Genndy Tartakovsky tends to have that effect on pretty much everything he touches.

Above all else, I REALLY hate how Anakin was written. All he did was add to the fake, grating drama that the prequels suffered from, something Han Solo would have probably laughed at. The sequels managed to avoid this, as the "Oh, woe is me" only really started creeping in at the end of The Empire Strikes back, giving us the majority of two episodes of decent quality and characters.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I don't know if it's how he was *written* (in most instances) or "What ended up on the cutting room floor." I mean, the final "switch" where he gives Sidious his pledge to follow him was just... poorly done. It wasn't just acting or writing, it was the whole package.

On the other hand, the second series, with the relationship between Anakin and Padme? The book had more detail that had things make sense - from padme's family pressuring her to step out of politics and lead a normal life, having a family, etc. to the two of them developing ... well, an actual relationship. The movie? It goes from "Oh, you're that cute Orphan Annie" to "You're a kinda creepy stalkery sort" to "ZOMG gotta jump you NOW!" with no real rhyme nor reason.

A lot of development would have helped - and a lot of it was sacrificed for speed and effects. I generally enjoyed the moveis, TBH, but... yeah, they could have been better.

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It might be a generation thing, I think

Yea, all that nasty emotional stuff getting in the way of the special effects

We only need one Shinji Ikari. No more emo is allowed.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

I kinda find the pre-suit version a little hotter

No, all the "nasty" emotional baggage that makes these people feel like a blown-up roll of cheese. Star Wars and the The Empire Strikes Back had more than enough "emotional stuff" in them, it's just that most of it was believable and even deserving of sympathy. It had characters I actually liked.

The Star Wars series have declined farther and farther into wangst as the franchise rolled on. In Star Wars, it was almost entirely absent, outside of Luke's reaction to the deaths of his family and Obi One, which is actually pretty much deserved. The Empire Strikes Back is generally good, developing the characters of Han and Leia, but ends up with major wangs. In one word: "No!!!" To his credit, Luke still retains face for much of the Return of the Jedi, though the ending started spiralling down.

And then we have the sequels. That is just a cartwheel tumble downhill, head over heels. Episode 1 was relatively good, but over done, and it just goes worse from there. The original Star Wars movie was very representative of its age - it was largely a war movie with some humour and a good deal of adventure, sort of like Kelly's Heroes in space. Everything from then on has been watered down little by little, even in the old sequels, and I would still take Han Solo's wit and bravado over any of the characters in the new prequels, ESPECIALLY Samuel L. Jackson, who had no business being in the movie to begin with. I might make an exception for Quai Gon, because he really was the one character who didn't writhe in generic pain and came off generally decent, but overall, I'm unsatisfied with the Star Wars prequels.

And it's not because there is too much drama and not enough effects. It's because the drama that it DOES have is terrible and unconvincing. I remember Episode 2 being described as "Obi One travels to a planer. Anakin and Padme fall in live in a tent. Obi One battles droids. Anakin and Padme fall in love by a river. Etc." Not an exact quote, mind you, but it's an apt description. It's done so poorly, that a concept I should find endearing and sweet (I'm a sucker for love stories) ends up being as grating and annoying as watching that YTMND skit of William Shatner shouting "KHAAN!!!"

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I always did like the reasoning used in Lois & Clark.

Clark: Why the colors? They're pretty bright.
Mr. Kent: You don't wanna look like that psycho from Gotham, do you?

Darth Shinji is the best of both worlds.

(and his name is Gendo)

If you don't like the redemption of Anakin, then you're kinda missing the whole point of the story

I like the redemption of Anakin. Consistently throughout the series, Darth Vader is easily my favourite character, and I like how he's consistently being downplayed from this authoritarian "black knight" into a pawn for an evil emperor, and within this setting his turn is very much on the money and well played. What I dislike is Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. He goes from a kid to some sort of slogan-spewing sage on par with "does very little" Kenobi, who nevertheless gets suckered into a cheap mind game. And I especially dislike the evil emperor, not for how he's treated, but for the fact that he feels like he was pulled out of thin air. His whole shtick is sitting on a throne, talking, eventually displaying the world's first example of Force Lightning.

If anything, I'd pick Darth Vader over Anakin Skywalker every time. Vader is a dark, conflicted character, yet his conflict is very much internal and implied, rather than external and whiny. Maybe the several-decade time skip between Epidsode 3 and Star Wars, Episode 4 could be said to turn him into a much more interesting character, but the fact remains I could have seen several different ways to depict the corruption of a good jedi that didn't include a whiny, unlikable brat. In fact, of all depictions of a young Darth Vader I had back when I was a kid watching Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker's character in the prequels wasn't even close. Hell, this is starting to remind me of Linkara's list of Top 15 Worst Heroes Becoming Villains, although in this case the "worst" applies to the original hero.

Ironically, I was much more convinced of the Dark Side characters in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, as all of them were given a lot more depth both in evil and in good.

I've always believed that a good villain is someone you really want to see fail, but a great villain is someone you kind of want to see succeed. I know Anakin is someone I REALLY want to see fail, but has never been someone I could sympathise with and actually want to side with. Darth Vader is more a villain I can kind of root for, because he's both so badass and so powerful, but the transition between the two is just... Meh.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

To be fair, the prequels sucked because of both -- the availability of cheap FX let Lucas fall back on special effects rather than tightening up the script, and then fell into the special-effects version of the "font-in-mouth disease" you used to see in the early years of the personal computer after the original Macintosh came out (most noticeable in college term papers, where papers written on Macs were more creatively formatted and often used six or more different type faces... and averaged a writing level two grades lower than papers written on IBM PCs, which were more prosaically formatted) -- "If I can show a space battle with five or six spacecraft zooming around, and it's good, then showing a space battle with fifty or sixty spacecraft zooming around is ten times as good!"