Media with Universes (or Premises) more Interesting than their Content - idk where to put this thread so it's going here. Be warned: highly autistic content may lay within.

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The Owl House: had an interesting premise and a handful of good characters, but was all sadly thrown out the window for tumblrbaiting.

The show had a pretty interesting premise on paper- a horror comedy series about a normal girl who gets transported to a hellish dimension, comes across a woods witch, and makes a deal with her to work for her in exchange for being taught cool witchy shit. You could probably make a fun magical slice of life series with that premise, but unfortunately the writers threw that premise in the trash approximately five episodes in and made it a tired Harry Potter/Little Witch Academia bootleg, only focusing on the comedy half of horror comedy, stupid high school drama, and the world's blandest lesbian relationship where one half of the ship had the sole personality trait of "main character's girlfriend". After an entire season of stupid quirky teen drama, the show then proceeded to attempt to pivot and be a Lore Show where they slowly revealed the main villain's deal (him and his nephew/brother/son/clone Hunter were one of the few good parts of the show, frankly), but the tonal whiplash between the two seasons was extremely evident and just ended up making the show feel super unfocused, and the heavy focus on making everything ~quirky~ and gay as fuck instead of anything fun or meaningful between the main characters just ended up putting the nails in the coffin of the series.

Rest in purgatory, Owl House. You could have been good had your self-sabotaging creator's brain not been rotted by tumblr.
 
A Song of Ice and Fire: Most are familiar with the medieval politics and dragons but unless you dive deeper and read supplemental materials, there's weird shit I would have love to read more about like the ancient abandoned city where anybody who tries to settle will just straight up die. We're supposedly entering Lovecraft territory once GRRM finishes with Winds of Winter but, yeah...

The Elder Scrolls has crazy lore and I appreciate that it tried to create lore that wasn't another Tolkien clone. You got Roman Aztec Samurai, a giant time-fucking robot, people who realized the true nature of reality and could shape it as they see fit, and a bunch more I forgotten. Instead, Oblivion and Skyrim decided to rip off Lord of the Rings because that's what was popular during development (okay, I'm being reductive there). I think Skyrim was the game that didn't embrace the craziness that much because the Shouts were glorified spells.
 
Sugriva dijo:
Warhammer 40k. The universe and lore is super interesting, and sometimes I'll just spend hours reading random wiki pages because it's so fascinating to me. However I have no interest in the physical game, which sucks donkey balls according to my friends who actually play it. In fact they barely even play it any more, despite constantly dropping hundreds of dollars on new models.

You'd think video games is where people like me could get their 40k fix, and well there are a couple decent ones, most of them are mediocre to outright bad.
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I always liked going through books from world of darkness stuff and Shadowrun, even though playing tabletops is never as fun as it is portrayed by pop culture media but very tedious. I just like the concepts, monsters and cool art, i like DnD monster manuals too, its how i got into researching mythology, always liked bestiaries and i love Keith Parkinson's work, gives me lots of nostalgia but i am not really that into playing any DnD campagins
 
LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV] dijo:
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I have a similar feeling for palladium games Rifts setting. The world and source books are really cool to flip through and it has an interesting setting of horrible postapocalyptic magical earth, but Palladium has done nothing with it beyond a crappy Ngage game and a pretty fun comic.
 
Star wars has a whole galaxy filled with all sorts of weird yet cool stuff while also having a huge timeline filled with lore but all we really ever get is crappy stories filled with the Skywalker family and his retarded friends. Also they only really focus on one tiny part of the timeline for the most part, removing all the stuff that isn't in the era of Luke/Anakin which is gay because it's the most boring part of the timeline. The futuristic Star Wars comics Star Wars: Legacy got one in a half series before being shelved and never touched again. There are only a handful of stories that take place in the old republic and yet there's a lot of lore from these two time periods and that lore is much more fun to read then a story about Luke killing another group of Stormtroopers.
 
R00T dijo:
-snip- woke -snip- Tyranny
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I saw the wokeness in Tyranny to be really shallow. The entire backdrop of the story is that Kyros is evil for seeking to impose a progressive (relative to the bronze age) world government for everyone else's own good. The themes of all the stories, especially when an Archon is involved, are how compromising on your values for any reason leaves you powerless to stand up to a tyrant who subjugates you "for your own good". When those are your core story themes it's really hard to see the wokeness that does exist in Tyranny's characters as being much more than a coat of paint.
 
A prequel to The Twenty-One Balloons could be so much fun as a series.

You have external business dealings, internal politics (you can't tell me all 20 families agreed all the time), restaurant drama, steampunk as written in the 1940s, and a big volcano in the background. The alphabetical ethnic restaurants and the large cast would be a way to get some obligate diversity in there without it being dumb as hell; the family running the E-Egyptian restaurant/house could be Egyptian and it'd all be fine goddamnit. Oversaturate everything and get the lady who food styled Hannibal involved for all the food porn.

The rights would probably be cheap because I've never met anyone else who's read this.
 
Helluva Boss could've been action kino if Viv didn't abandon the premise of "dysfunctional team of demon hitmen kills people on Earth" in favor of gay melodrama and constant character assassinations.
I enjoy most of the characters as they are, without the baggage of shitty writing attached to them, but the show itself has lost me a long time ago.
 
The majority of capeshit fits this category. Many of interesting premises and worlds that are fumbled 100% by the need to tie everything into an expansive universe, regardless if the character fits.

X-Men is the most glaring in how the Marvel universe butt-fucks its entire concept. It is a little hard to have a group of heros facing prejudice in the same world where other heroes and aliens are praised and have it make any sense. Spider-Man is another character that seems to have gone far beyond what the point of his stories where as he gets more involved with aliens, the super community, and now multiverses. The idea of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a dead one.

DC has been better about tying shit in, and JL/JLU is arguably the best expansive superhero universe, but even they suffer. Superman has been DC's bitch boy for far to long as he is nothing but a platform for the universe rather than his own. Batman is in the same boat as Spidey, though less so, in that all the alien, magic and multiverse bullshit really remove the character from his element as a Noir detective.

Superheroes and their worlds are one of those things that really hurts them long term unless you have extremely good writing like the DCAU or are just a Saturday Morning cartoon with little thought. The best heroes work way better separate from the universe, while the others very clearly need it to survive in any capacity. They are just over-bloated, make writing and power levels overly complicated and take away the uniqueness of individual properties.
 
Halo has so much wasted potential, it could have some great games but we all know how they ruined it. The whole universe has great lore and they could have done a lot with it. Now it's not much different than any other shooter besides different character models and is a cash grab scam like the rest.
 
Tsukasa Kadoya dijo:
The Walking Dead.
I would LOVE to see an anthology series with each episode showing how different areas of the world reacted to the walkers.
Did Africa unite? How did Russia end up? What about Japan? Or how about Israel (our greatest ally)?
Its too bad we were saddled with a series that shit the bed and like 4 spinoffs that all suck.
Zombies may be old hat now, but how the world reacts is far more interesting.
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Read World War Z. The whole book is a fascinating exploration of that question.

South Africa develops THE anti-zombie military doctrine the whole world adopts, using real-life race war plans.
Russia does retarded Russianisms, gets most their population killed, then comes back as an Orthodox ultra-theocracy with women breeding factories.
Japan's high population density pretty much gets it destroyed.
Israel's excellent intelligence service tips them off, they turtle up and come out unscathed.

Other fun ones:
Cuba's high doctor-to-population ratio helps it early on, it contains the disease, swells with refugees, goes capitalist, and becomes the financial superpower.
Tibet swells with refugees from its neighbors and becomes the population superpower.
There's a whole chapter just on the ISS astronauts stretching themselves to the absolute limit keeping Earth's space telecommunications running.
North Korea just fucking disappears underground.
Paris still has zombies wandering its catacombs years later, it's the highest-fatality urban combat theater.
The United States has "hero cities" like the Soviet ones from WW2.


Nothing against Dishonored as a game, but I feel like I'd rather have a well-written novel set in Dishonored's Victorian whaling gaslamp fantasy world.
 
The movie 9 (from 2009), It's the post apocalyptic 1930s animated movie with the killer robots and the bean sack people.
We are only ever seen a small window into the war that destroyed the world and much of the story was only revealed by it's supplementary materials.
It's a pity that we never got a follow up.
 
I guess you guys are lucky. I just spent an hour typing up an unhinged rambling autistic spiel about my dream single player RPG set in the EvE universe and it got eaten and I'm not doing it again

So I'll just say I want a single player RPG where you play as a third gen Capsuleer/unJovian that was crafted by the Jovians from the DNA that they've been harvesting from Capsuleers (the player characters in the MMO who can control spaceships with their brains) with Extremis-esque technopathy that lets them interface with/control machines even if they aren't Capsule-tech equipped. Since they aren't limited to Capsule tech they'd also be able to interface with the technology from a technologically superior invading force once they had time to figure out how it worked. Start with a busted shuttle saved from the scrapyard and work your way up to an enemy dreadnaught/titan
 
kill six billions demons is one of the most interesting fictional media i have come across, sadly the author is infected by the tumblr strand and it only gets worse through the story. It is really weird how he manages to make a fictional universe of incredible depth and unlimited potential and still decides to make a lesbian romance.
 
Basic Blond Boy dijo:
The majority of capeshit fits this category. Many of interesting premises and worlds that are fumbled 100% by the need to tie everything into an expansive universe, regardless if the character fits.

X-Men is the most glaring in how the Marvel universe butt-fucks its entire concept. It is a little hard to have a group of heros facing prejudice in the same world where other heroes and aliens are praised and have it make any sense. Spider-Man is another character that seems to have gone far beyond what the point of his stories where as he gets more involved with aliens, the super community, and now multiverses. The idea of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a dead one.

DC has been better about tying shit in, and JL/JLU is arguably the best expansive superhero universe, but even they suffer. Superman has been DC's bitch boy for far to long as he is nothing but a platform for the universe rather than his own. Batman is in the same boat as Spidey, though less so, in that all the alien, magic and multiverse bullshit really remove the character from his element as a Noir detective.

Superheroes and their worlds are one of those things that really hurts them long term unless you have extremely good writing like the DCAU or are just a Saturday Morning cartoon with little thought. The best heroes work way better separate from the universe, while the others very clearly need it to survive in any capacity. They are just over-bloated, make writing and power levels overly complicated and take away the uniqueness of individual properties.
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I’d love to see a work that examines what it’s like to be an ordinary person in the DC or Marvel universe. Like, at any given time, thousands of people might be wiped out by a monster, or aliens might invade, or the entire goddamn universe might reset. You’re trying to live a normal life in a world where literally anything can happen, and does, every day. How does science work? How does the economy work? Why does anyone live in a major city?

Anyway, I’d like to nominate an obscure John Travolta film called White Man’s Burden. The premise is that black people are the dominant culture in the US and whites are an oppressed minority. That’s an interesting premise - how was history different in this universe? Successful slave uprising? Apocalyptic event in Europe? But no, it’s just a standard thriller, just with a palette swap.
 
  • The West World Series on HBO. It started out as a kino meta-western (fucking love western-themed shit like New Vegas and SBR), but I hated when it devolved into cyberpunk city shit and "le humans are the real monsters" shit. It should'nt have went on for so long.
  • I sound fucking autistic here for mentioning a kid's show, but Adventure Time. The lore and characters you need to keep up with got out of hand, especially if you're a kid watching it. I stopped watching it as a tween because all of the shit going on that I wasn't bothered to look up.
  • The Monument Mythos series. Maybe I'm just retarded for looking too far into a webseries that throws random alt-history shit at you, but it got boring towards the end. Even the Nixonverse stuff got ridiculous.
 
Generic Anime Girl dijo:
  • The West World Series on HBO. It started out as a kino meta-western (fucking love western-themed shit like New Vegas and SBR), but I hated when it devolved into cyberpunk city shit and "le humans are the real monsters" shit. It should'nt have went on for so long.
  • I sound fucking autistic here for mentioning a kid's show, but Adventure Time. The lore and characters you need to keep up with got out of hand, especially if you're a kid watching it. I stopped watching it as a tween because all of the shit going on that I wasn't bothered to look up.
  • The Monument Mythos series. Maybe I'm just retarded for looking too far into a webseries that throws random alt-history shit at you, but it got boring towards the end. Even the Nixonverse stuff got ridiculous.
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Yeah westworld should have been a mini series, the first season works pretty well as a standalone
 
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