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.

[Apochrypha]

Shit, probably Dragon Age? I stopped liking it because of all the pandering from the devs, but the world building in that series is pretty good. Except for the fact that said devs are lazy as fuck and don't put any effort into the games' content, and every game post-Origins has been a rushed mess.

Like, what's the deal with the Qun? other than the teensy details they give us we know nothing. Or the other Dwarven cities. Or half races. I had to resort to reading the comics because I was so thirsy for content at one point...I really won't be playing DA4 because I already know it's gonna suck.

Don't even get me started on Inquisition. Fuck that game.

 

[Colon capital V]

Toy Story 4 (while being the 4th entry to the TS storyline that should've ended at 3) COULD'VE been an interesting premise. It could've been an interesting film that explores purpose, consciousness, why we're here and what to do when a toy simply doesn't want to be alive when given life.
But instead it's just some dumbass Roadtrip film for the firsthalf trying to babysit a suicidal spork, and the other half a RomCom that has Woody say 'fuck you' to all his friends and family in the end. I don't think it would've been better than 3, but I think with a premise like this executed well I think it would've garnered some level of admiration separate from the previous 3 films.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

The universe of Futurama sounds like a vast (and silly yet disturbing) place.

Same goes for one of Urusei Yatsura (the one with Lum), minus the disturbing.

that motherfucker is like the Reaper for sci-fi properties I swear

I like to call JJ "The Cleaver of Continuity" after he screwed up both ST and SW.

 

[R00T]

That game Obsidian made that people didn’t like because it was too woke, Tyranny. It really wasn’t that bad. Aside from some cringe dialogue, which be real every game made has some cringe dialogue somewhere it was actually really fun. Getting to craft your own spells gave you some freedom of approach, and the setting was really cool. The idea and mystery of the giant towers spanning the land felt really unique. I still remember the first time you get to the top of one and the writers just sell the awe of the moment.

Shame it was just an okay game and everyone thought it was super woke (the woke stuff was just meh, and you could really look past it).

 

[make_it_so]

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.

To get what you described you need to go with World War Z (the book, not the movie).

Speaking of shows that shat the bed, HBO's Westworld fits that to a T. What started out as an interesting exploration about consciousness and the question of who we are versus who we could be became a generic dumb "humans bad" screed in which the audience is inexplicably expected to side with robot Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Mystery Box is once again behind an interesting premise veering off into a dumb direction that goes nowhere.

 

[Next Task]

There's a recent German film called The Ordinaries, about a world where people are characters in film. Leads can make their own score for their emotional moments, support roles have limited dialogue and range, you can be a Miscast, or an Outtake. One character can't control his editing, so he jump-cuts; he sells illegal sound effects. At one point a lost Cameo turns up, asks for directions, and leaves. That sort of thing.

It's all very meta, and the film is decent enough. But the concept just has so much potential, so many ideas you could develop. They would have overstuffed the film if they'd gone nearly as far as they could, but there's so much there it could be great to see explored, beyond it just being a stratified society. Preferably by non-Germans.

 

[DOUBLE_WHEEL]

-snip-

When I got it I thought it was going to be a mouth of sauron or the witch king simulator, my biggest issue with it was that you can't be as evil as you really should be able to be. Maybe the evil of the setting was too nuanced for me or the devs didn't really want you to be playing something that evil, but I did like the bronze age setting.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

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.

To get what you described you need to go with World War Z (the book, not the movie).

Zombie media does have that issue. I remember trying to watch The Walking Dead and dropping it on like the second episode because I realized it wasn't gonna actually deal with the zombies but be more of a show about the survivors alone and not explore and of the consequences.

World War Z was a lot better but still had many flaws. The way Solanum works doesn't really make any sense even with some hard stretching of science, and the people in charge are too incompetent to be believable most of the time. Not that I expect that IRL governments and society wouldn't be absolutely retarded but the ones in WWZ aren't retarded in a plausible way. For example: the Battle of Yonkers has plenty of things that do indeed make sense for incompetent leader fuck ups (too much anti-armor not enough anti-personnel ammo, over reliance on tech wanting to show off to the public, making random grunts wear CBRN gear for no reason other than propaganda) but some which are simply such wild violations of common sense (why have foxholes at all? why bother with tank emplacements at all? why didn't they mass deploy snipers since they knew about the headshot thing already?) that it can't be excused.

The movie is a non-starter by the way, and should not be considered even related to the book. Sponsored by Pepsi

I find that 28 Days Later is probably the best we have ever gotten to this sort of deep analysis of the actual effects of a zombie apocalypse, and that is partially because the movie only focuses on the single dude who wakes up and his experiences alone as he tries and get by so it has some excuse to not lore dump, but it still tries. The way he meets survivors, how they prepare to leave London, it all feels plausible and thought out. I even like the ending of it even if some people think it is a bit cheesy I find it wholesome.

28 Weeks Later, on the other hand, proceeds to shit all over and take one step forward in budget and special effects and 20 steps back on everything else. Everything you could say about the Battle of Yonkers on the WWZ is taken to a much worse level here. None of the things going on makes sense, the way they don't have everyone with communications to ensure they can all keep talking, the way the idea for re settling London is "cram everyone in a single building without any sort of internal bulkheads to isolate a outbreak", the lack of surveillance security on the halls and such, the fact there is apparently no one also watching the whole thing from outside... It is obvious a contrived mess because Hollywood couldn't understand how to make a sequel work well and didn't trust the audiences enough to understand a realistic anti-zombie base much less a realistic failure of it. Only really the opening sequence of that movie is any good.

 

[Mouthwash Enema]

Mobile Suit Gundam in general but more specifically the Iron Blooded Orphans series. A 300 year long war between humans and sentient giant monster robots that nearly drives humanity to extinction but is saved solely by 72 unique Gundams named after the demons of the Ars Goetia. The show takes place entirely 200 years AFTER this. You see none of the actual war and instead get a subpar story about child slaves revolting against their masters who then get roped into some faggot's dumbass revolution that ultimately fails and they all pay the price for it.

I hate being a weeb sometimes.

 

[skykiii]

Lovecraft.

Other than some retarded woke nigger series that focused almost entirely on blackety black shit and had basically nothing supernatural, the entertainment industry hasn't even tried to adapt his work. The closest we've gotten are Stephen King's "The Mist" by Frank Darabont and some weird anime music video I found on YouTube a few years ago. I don't know why nobody's adapted his writing yet. Not every movie has to have a happy ending.

/thread

The funny thing about Lovecraft is he's one of those guys you adapt more accurately by not adapting him.

The guy had a circle of friends who he allowed to write in his universe, and their work is considered basically canon... and the funny thing about most of it is that the connection is limited to a little bit of name dropping (sort of like the Necronomicon appearing in Jason Goes to Hell) but otherwise the authors do their own thing.

And actually, the "haunting" and "supernatural" segments of Unsolved Mysteries feel more like Lovecraft than most media that actually features Cthulhu. That's the contradiction: to "adapt" Lovecraft you literally have to use his critters and hallmarks, and yet those don't properly convey what his work is.
.......................................

Anyway, I actually came to the thread to suggest this one:

There's an anime franchise called Saint Seiya. The idea is that the Greek/Norse/etc. pantheon is real, and they reincarnate in human forms, with loves and rivalries and connections that span lifetimes, and its kinda unclear to what extent everyone is a literal god versus just being a human capable of wearing a magical suit of armor that reacts to their "cosmo" (which some interpret as this anime's version of ki energy but I believe its more complicated than that).... there is SO MUCH fascinating stuff...

....... And yet the storylines play out as a by-the-numbers shonen series. In fact it starts playing out a bit like a Legend of Zelda game as most story arcs come down to "the current incarnation of Athena is cap[tured, there are these eight pillars or eight shrines or eight whatevers that if they're not destroyed, something bad will happen. The saints split up in order to take out the structures and end up in one-vs-one fights, and it always comes down to Friendship and Heroic Determination." Some of it is kinda cool but on the whole the franchise feels like a whole lot of wasted potential.

.......................................

In the Western Animation thread I once mentioned Thundercats as a sort of case of this: the setting of Third Earth is very interesting as its so far past the apocalypse its come back around to being primitive, and part of the premise of the show is our heroes are having to survive on this strange and primitive world which makes it a lot more engaging than a simple good vs evil struggle.

.... And yet for some reason whenever the show is rebooted, that aspect is usually the first thing to go, because for some reason the creatives only see Thundercats as a struggle of good vs evil and totally miss the "survival on a primitive world" part--usually its turned into just a generic fantasy planet with towns and kingdoms and shit.

I posted fuller thoughts here. But yeah in this case its more like "the original cartoon had an interesting aspect that for some reason everyone ignores."

 

[R00T]

When I got it I thought it was going to be a mouth of sauron or the witch king simulator, my biggest issue with it was that you can't be as evil as you really should be able to be. Maybe the evil of the setting was too nuanced for me or the devs didn't really want you to be playing something that evil, but I did like the bronze age setting.

i can agree to that i guess. it's been a while since i played it so i don't remember what the pinnacle of evil choices were necessarily, but i enjoyed being an agent of the state insofar as it was useful to you. multiple times i evoked the higher authority and used that as a cudgel, while other times i let things slide if i felt it was in my immediate benefit to. the roleplaying potential was good for what was there. in addition i liked how no one had a clue what was going on outside of their immediate situation.

 

[I Love Beef]

Battle Arena Toshinden.

"Eight Traveling Fighters...." we get the gist of it. It's an underworld fighting tournament.

That is actually controlled by a secret society running a megaconglomorate in Europe and has run things on Earth since the 15th Century.

I came across the wiki the other day and apparently, someone got their hands on official materials. This may be more of an iceberg moment, but Toshinden is like this "Crossroads of the Coming of a New World" New Age Romanticism sort of story where in the modern day, legends and old legacies return to the world and clash over the direction of the future. It triggers my 90s nostalgia and that time when we could imagine anything could happen.

The problem is that Toshinden, though once very popular, didn't get off the ground like its other contemporaries at the time. Its games were far from improved than Soul Blade (though considering the shit that was actually terrible considering fighting games in the 1990s, Toshinden is at least the benchmark of a working and palpable fighting game), the anime was basic but flat for anyone looking for anything more and didn't use its world to its greatest effect, and there's a lot of stuff that could be expanded upon and fleshed out, like the nature of the powers the cast wields and greater enigmas like who Master is. It could had been helped with people the cast come to meet in their travels before going to the Toshinden Tournaments.

But, the world it presents is actually potentially amazing. Lone warriors and outsiders of a world seized by corporate powers that control what the everyman is allowed to do wandering and going on modern day adventures like the A-Team and Renegade. An underground fighting tournament sponsored by the head of the criminal underworld, broadcasted live on pirate TV channels and witnessed by not only the rich, but anyone able and interested to hack in and view it. A world where magic is real and so are legends, and where they duke it out in the shadows.

This shit was like the Fate series of the 90s, so to speak. If it was rebooted today, Toshinden would still work. With all of the shit like Harvey Weinstein and Maxine Ghistwell showing Hollywood has a flesh trade and the world being in the crapper financially, it couldn't be anymore relevant. Hell, with how the Farms are practically one foot underground on the internet, I feel badass already talking about Toshinden.

 

[ZipDisk]

Steve King wrote a direct lovecraft story in one of his short story collections, namechecks the goat with a thousand young.

That name felt like reading something oily and profane. I thought it was amazing and looked it up.

King also used to write amazing notes about the stories in the books, so you could look stuff up yourself.

To add one myself, Mass Effect. Giant, lived in universe that has plenty going on.

No. Doomsday plot. Everything is on the brink of forever. Become communist cyber shits, eventually fall to the same cycle, or break everything.

I'm reading a fic right now that is a total curbstomp, the Salarians panic at how fast humanity is advancing and drop the entire bag of dirty tricks. It ends up with Sur'Kesh depopulated.

But a fic just about humanity rejecting the treaty of Firaxen would be great. The curbstomp kind of ruined it. And I love HFY fics.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

To add one myself, Mass Effect. Giant, lived in universe that has plenty going on.

Mass Effect does have a lot of issues. I heard that originally the point of the Reapers was not to be the assimilation and harvesting of sapient life but actually a attempt by a early civilization at stopping the End of Everything. Basically, the use of Eezo was meant to have a effect on the local space time and constant use led to alterations on the very fabric of reality itself altering fundamental constants of the universe over a huge area. Meaning that stars would start going nova too soon and harder, radioactive decay got more hardcore, and the expansion of the universe on the area sped up.

That would have been a lot more fascinating and led to a much bigger ethical conundrum than what we got.

What is the fic name by the way? Also a sucker for those.

 

[Spunt]

Lovecraft.

Other than some retarded woke nigger series that focused almost entirely on blackety black shit and had basically nothing supernatural, the entertainment industry hasn't even tried to adapt his work. The closest we've gotten are Stephen King's "The Mist" by Frank Darabont and some weird anime music video I found on YouTube a few years ago. I don't know why nobody's adapted his writing yet. Not every movie has to have a happy ending.

/thread

Lovecraft is one of those settings where the fanfiction is better than the original. HPL himself couldn't write very well - "What I saw was an unutterably awful, truly indescribable horror, so indescribable that I literally can't describe it because I can't write but trust me, it was horrible and maddening and indescribable! Also, niggers."

I'd add Kenshi and Fear and Hunger to the list. Kenshi's setting is incredible, and explores ideas and premises that I've never seen handled properly in SF or fantasy, but not just being post-apocalyptic but what has been described as "post post-apocalyptic" - the downfall of the spacefaring empire was millenia ago, the AI revolt that followed was so long ago that the robots (who all wiped their memories so as to not go mad with guilt) no longer know who they are or what their purpose is, causing outbreaks of murderous insanity. It's great. But the game is so fucking hard to get into. It's not that it's hard (it's not as hard as it's made out to be in my experience), it's that it's janky, glitchy and looks like shit unless you mod it half to death. It's also really, really grindy, if you're running a settlement you're doing a lot more micromanagement than you should because it really needs a job AI system like Rimworld but instead has jank and a terrible UI.

Fear and Hunger has incredible lore and setting and one of the best art styles I've ever seen in any game of any kind, but the game itself is a buggy, unstable mess. That's a really bad combination with its hardcore permadeath mechanics, you can lose hours of progress to random crashes. The sequel is better on a technical level but doesn't quite have the same atmosphere as the original.

 

[Sugriva]

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.

 

[crowabunga]

Just about everything from the Transformers franchise I've seen (I have yet to read any comics, so some of them may deliver).

Mechanical alien life forms capable of effortlessly blending in with technological (and in some cases even biological) environments? A galaxy-spanning alien guerilla war hidden behind a self-imposed Masquerade, undertaken by the post-apocalyptic diaspora of a mysterious machine world? Giant robots?

Ok, well, we need to sell toys. Here's an inconveniently large cast whose conflict possesses a pathetic sense of scale that somehow manages to inversely correspond with the cast size: after all, we can't give showtime to background characters or a broader context if it means devaluing the toy commercial! Even in series that acknowledge a larger context like Beast Wars and Animated, they are more often than not going to focus on a main cast who are being marketed, and are also limited in tone and subject matter thanks to the age of their target audience.

Most series also ignore the "in disguise" portion, making something as absurd as transformation unnecessary in the context of the universe itself.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

Just about everything from the Transformers franchise I've seen (I have yet to read any comics, so some of them may deliver).

Oh yes, you’ll love the comics. The 80s Marvel and the first IDW series were great in their own ways.

The universe that I thought had potential and yet was squandered was RWBY.

Generic action anime style series of 4 girls training to be hunters of monsters called the Grimm, using impractical but creative weapons.

First 3 seasons were a school arc as the characters got to know each other and develop bonds. Then it ends with multiple characters killed, the school is destroyed, and the RWBY team separates.

I thought that the series would become darker. The characters were themed around fairy tales so it could have been about the revelations of the darker side of those tales and even a character study. One of the protagonists was a hotshot that now lost an arm. I thought that could have led to a story about recovering from PTSD and dealing with visible consequences of brash actions.

Nope, instead they meandered on with the same generic anime plot of find a macguffin, defeat villain of the season, and prepare for next season’s tougher villain. Add in a bad 2016 US elections analogy in one season and have a forced-by-shipping lesbian couple and it leads to a bad to mediocre animated series.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

Mobile Suit Gundam in general but more specifically the Iron Blooded Orphans series. A 300 year long war between humans and sentient giant monster robots that nearly drives humanity to extinction but is saved solely by 72 unique Gundams named after the demons of the Ars Goetia. The show takes place entirely 200 years AFTER this. You see none of the actual war and instead get a subpar story about child slaves revolting against their masters who then get roped into some faggot's dumbass revolution that ultimately fails and they all pay the price for it.

I hate being a weeb sometimes.

In this same vein The Entire AD Stella timeline (Witch From Mercury for the uninitiated). G-Witch itself, especially in its second season is pretty good, but the premise kinda holds the world back a bit.

G-Witch at its core is a Yuri Romance set to the backdrop of beautifully animated mechs fighting with some of the best sound design in recent memory. The issue is the Yuri romance isn't good. Like the two mains have no chemistry at all.

There's a channel I like to watch called Skipmaker on youtube who in his Community review pointed out that Troy and Britta, who were supposed to be dating, had less chemistry in their entire relationship than a single scene where Britta and Jeff just look at each other and say nothing.

It kinda shows that the writers probably didn't care that much for the Yuri Romance and jumped on it because its seemingly been a trend in Anime the last few years. The best written character was Guel by a country mile and in any other anime he would have been the Main Character in addition to being the absolute star of G-Witch.

Anyway I'm rambling a bit, but I really would like to see more of the Ad Corporate War stuff and all the sketchy shit they get up to while abusing Earth and its people. G-Witch was received very well so hopefully we get more, just hopefully without Suletta and Miorine.

 

[Polyboros2]

RWBY

Fable based anime world where you have Fortnite character combat Hogwarts, each with their own unique special snowflake powers and melee weapon gun. That other corporations keep trying to ram it into their own product despite the scorned and spiteful fanbase I think shows the perceived potential.

If Rooster Teeth's monumental mismanagement hadn't been behind the property from the start (and critically during the transition of Monty's death), and Oum sold it to a real company, I honestly think RWBY had the potential to be a massive franchise.

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.

The All Guardsman Party(a noncanon fluff up of a TTRPG campaign green text) is the best 40k story ever told.