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.

[Cedric_Eff]

A lot of it really should've shown up in the show itself, because it's only hinted at and would've been interesting to explore. But the writers seemed intent on making it just UC but with genetically modified people instead of Newtypes. So you only ever see the various Earth nations in the background (beside Orb) and their internal relations are only alluded to. It's clear the Atlantic Federation was meant to represent the US/NATO, but what about Eurasia who was alluded as being "discriminated against" by the Atlantic Federation when it came to certain affairs? Exploring that would've made a lot more interesting of a plot than all the junk with Orb and given some more depth to that one villain from Seed Destiny.

Thats why Im sad that Astray isn’t focused on as much.

 

[Bionicle of War]

For me it would have to be Lexx.
You have universe spanning intergalactic civilizations, thousands of years of space travel like in Star Wars, parallel universes, religious warfare, giant living starships powered by eating planets, Von Neuman machines, Cronenbergesque biotechnology, heaven and hell as planets, giant insects masquerading as religious figures, even an antichrist figure. Unfortunately, all this is mostly just a backdrop for crude humor and sex comedy, though it does occasionally go in interesting directions and its usually pretty funny in an absurd sort of way.

 

[Tragi-Chan]

For me it would have to be Lexx.
You have universe spanning intergalactic civilizations, thousands of years of space travel like in Star Wars, parallel universes, religious warfare, giant living starships powered by eating planets, Von Neuman machines, Cronenbergesque biotechnology, heaven and hell as planets, giant insects masquerading as religious figures, even an antichrist figure. Unfortunately, all this is mostly just a backdrop for crude humor and sex comedy, though it does occasionally go in interesting directions and its usually pretty funny in an absurd sort of way.

It’s the one cult sci-fi series that I honestly think would be well served by a modern reboot. I always find it a hard sell because there are lots of fascinating concepts, but the special effects weren’t great even in the 90s, the main characters aren’t that likeable and the whole thing is horny to a cringeworthy degree.

 

[Space Police]

It would be pretty cool if there was a prequel to GaoGaiGar that showed the development of Zonder Metal and the fall of the Trinary Solar System, sort of like how Gundam The Origin showed all the mobile suit and political developments prior to the One Year War. Most Sentai and Metal Hero shows have similarly interesting premises that are ignored for the usual MOTW plot. It would be really cool to see all these wars on alien planets before they take the battle to Earth.

 

[Dysnomia]

It’s the one cult sci-fi series that I honestly think would be well served by a modern reboot. I always find it a hard sell because there are lots of fascinating concepts, but the special effects weren’t great even in the 90s, the main characters aren’t that likeable and the whole thing is horny to a cringeworthy degree.

790 trooned out after sustaining damage and resetting. He became obsessed with Kai instead of Zev then found out the human brain matter used to create him was from a woman. Always remember, a troon destroyed Earth for retarded troon reasons. I don't think this would fly in current year at all. His "I'm a woman" nonsense and insane post-troon behavior was just way too realistic.

The show is 100% rebootable because the cycle of time is talked about repeatedly. Right before everyone thinks they are about to die in the last episode Zev says "See you in the next cycle of time".

I'd like to see it come back some day. And I'm 100% ok with 790 not trooning out again. No matter how realistic his behavior was.

 

[JesusChristDenton]

@The Foxtrot
Late and I can't properly reply but I always assumed that the Animatrix was in universe machine propaganda made to glorify and justify all the horrific shit they did to humanity. What with portraying them as "SELFISH ORGANIC CHUDS THAT CONSTANTLY OPPRESSED AND ABUSED US FOR LITERALLY NO REASON WHATSOEVER" and all.

 

[Hepativore]

Farscape started off pretty well with the first two seasons and I liked the fact that the main characters traveled in a biomechanical and sentient ship, with a non-humanoid pilot who was literally "wired in" to the ship as a form of symbiosis.

The problem is that the show really started going downhill after that as it just started becoming more and more slapstick and also had some weird BDSM thing going on with many of the outfits worn by a lot of the baddies. They also built up the villain, Scorbius to be a serious threat when he first appeared, but they kept using him so damn often and shoehorned him into everything that he suffered from major villain decay.

Plus, the show felt the need to cram in an awkward romance between Aeryn and Crichton which ticked off the boxes of every cliche and it became the main focus of the series with the end of the third season and all of the fourth. They also had to make sure to shove in a pregnancy in there because of course they did.

The newer main characters that were added in season 3, Noranti and Sikozu were annoying.

If Farscape could have continued in the direction it started with of being a deep character-driven science fiction setting with interesting concepts instead of Three's Company In Space, then it could have been much better.

 

[TopTierHealer]

Ugly Americans is another show that had a good premise, instead of every conspiracy being real, every mythical figure/fairy tale creature was real and had to deal with the modern world and all its idiosyncracies. Rather unfortunately told from the perspective of a bland and uninspired social worker (who quite obviously is modeled after Jim from the office), but had a lot of promise and an interesting set of characters to play with all things considered. Worth a watch if you're into that sort of thing, despite its shortcomings.

UA was one of my favourite shows from back in the day. It's a shame about its cancellation but understandable. Maybe in 10 years it would have gotten a Netflix deal. The thing about the setting I liked the most was that demons were treated as a joke. The in-series explanation was that demons have tried to bring the end of the world for as long as humans can remember and because of their nature have failed spectacularly every time. It's become such a joke that once every 4 years there is a big parade/reenactment of "what if the demons actually won and brought hell on earth" and they still manage to mess it up somehow.

Other interesting setpieces of the universe? Vietnam never happened and instead it was a world war against zombies. Somehow humanity didn't win but didn't lose either. Vampires control all the blood banks, Grimes' wife left him for one so he became a staunch Van Helsinist (who wrote the controversial book, Mein Vampf). Grimes' family tree involves ancient egyptian sorcerers (or I think he was too lazy to take care of his mother so he entombed her as a mummy). Hell was gentrified and part of it became "new hell" which is just a giant shopping mall and "old hell" with all the fire and brimstone. Souls are a real thing that exists somewhere between the stomach and the duodenum, because humans in the XXIst century are such assholes they are minuscule but Mark was such a saint that it caused him a hernia and he had to go on a sinning spree to reduce it to a normal size. Souls are treated on par with a financial asset and Mark shorted his own soul position before devaluing it.

All wizards lay eggs and train their egg for 50 years before retiring (that was the obligatory Harry Potter episode). One of the episodes that spoofed Lost (the ending being a "it was all just a dream...or not?) had Frank being an undercover cop before hunting magical creatures - apparently his mentor has been on a 35 year undercover operation posing as the secretary of the lord/CEO of hell to take over the position. Grimes managed to fuck it up.

Tying back to the "demons are fuck ups" theme the Department of Integration was created by demonic agents with the express purpose of increasing the ration of non-humans to human population on Earth and create a system where humans would be extinct and if they tried fighting back the whole system would leave them broke, destitute and dead (now that I think about it maybe it was very much ahead of its time). Because doing good was seeing as a social faux-pas by the demons, the funding was slashed and given to the security and deportation department. Demons can't win because by their very nature they don't know how to, they are the universe's eternal losers.

Finally, we never saw a depiction of heaven or God or anything like it. I liked to speculate that Mark was either a saint, a reincarnation of one or a half angel of sorts. It would explain his never-ending patience, resilience and good-will for all creatures human or not.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

The first Horizon game's backstory fascinates me. Would love a game about Operation Enduring Victory. The fact that HADES was activated by some random shit going on in space was also really neat and I'd love to see that expanded on. Not sure if Forbidden West expands on it.

 

[TopTierHealer]

The first Horizon game's backstory fascinates me. Would love a game about Operation Enduring Victory. The fact that HADES was activated by some random shit going on in space was also really neat and I'd love to see that expanded on. Not sure if Forbidden West expands on it.

It expanded on something else

 

[The Foxtrot]

Late and I can't properly reply but I always assumed that the Animatrix was in universe machine propaganda made to glorify and justify all the horrific shit they did to humanity. What with portraying them as "SELFISH ORGANIC CHUDS THAT CONSTANTLY OPPRESSED AND ABUSED US FOR LITERALLY NO REASON WHATSOEVER" and all.

I personally think they were the ones that are responsible for Dark Star in a desperate bid to starve Humanity out. Think about it, why the hell would we want to blot out the sun with nanobots, tiny machines, in a war where we're fighting sentient machines? All to destroy their solar power generation? Because a "nation" composed entirely of robots runs on something as horrifically inefficient as solar power, even though the Machines are shown to very quickly adapt Nuclear Fusion as their primary power source after Dark Star goes live?

Or, what's more likely, the Machines decide to blot out the sun because they were getting their shit rocked hardcore by the combined might of every single Human military force on Earth, and they knew that by removing sunlight they would be able to destroy Earth's biosphere and make the planet virtually uninhabitable for organic life. With no sun, plants die, so more complex life dies and the oceans freeze, which means most people on Earth are no longer able to survive long-term, annihilating industry and manpower pools, turning the tide of the war in favor of 01.

However, I doubt that Humanity just went "We're #SoSorry, we surrender to the superior species!" and went gently into the night. I think that Humanity launched whatever WMDs we had left at 01 as a final "Fuck you!", maybe even reprogramming the Dark Star nanites to EMP the shit out of anything trying to exit the atmosphere, and permanently crippled the Machines' ability to do anything but bleakly exist on a dead and isolated world.

They might have "won the war", they might have enslaved Humanity and become the "masters" of Earth, but they're the masters of a cold, dead, useless husk of a world they cannot leave or heal. A world they chose to destroy. And they are eternally coping and seething that Humanity's had the last laugh.

EDIT: Which, if this is true, then it also makes the entire Zion cycle even more pathetic. The Machines lost the "real" war with Humanity, so they're pulling a CWC and effectively simulating a "war" with Humanity, but one where they can always win by virtue of being oh so much more advanced and obviously superior than those monkeys...or by completely engineering the entire conflict and setting the board up so they can never lose and thus pretend they're superior.

Once again, the Fleet of Particular Justice just showing up and glassing Earth in this context would be the best outcome.

 

[JesusChristDenton]

Pretty much @The Foxtrot!

"No stalker human, it is YOU who blotted out your sun. Enjoy being trapped in the matrix, stalker."
"No human, YOU are the one who committed atrocities against us. Fear being turned into a living battery, stalker."

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

Buffy. Great idea, terrible execution.

 

[The Purple Ghost]

Xenoblade Chronicles X is my go to. Despite being nintendo-shit the main games are all great - but the Wii-U spinoff X fits this thread perfectly
You get all Los Angeles put on a spaceship and crash land on an alien planet.
The people of New-LA now have to chronicle the new lifeforms, map out the land, start up manufacturing and all round just turn this situation into a new home (with Mechs). I find it really comfy with a strange sense of doom and optimism.

But jfc are there some gameplay and story choices that just make playing it pretty bad. So much more cool things could have been done with the setting

 

[2mm and 99 others]

It expanded on something else
Ver archivo adjunto 6528773

I don't get why people criticize the unimportant details on this woman, like the fine hairs on her face, when she's uncannier than many 3d face reconstructions of early humans (and has the most unflattering hairstyle she could get with that).

 

[Michael Wade]

Type moon and its creator Nasu is extremely bad at this. They have a really lore rich real world mixed in with magic and monsters. A sort of Harry Dresden/Secret World/World of darkness vibe where order is maintained by two opposing factions: The Mages Association and the Holy Church.




The association is dedicated to all things magic. Controlling, concealing, and preserving it from decline as humanity progresses into the technological age. They are not classical Hogwarts good guys. Mages are generally prideful assholes that will allow almost ANYTHING in the name of magical research as long as it doesn't break the masquerade or natural order. They are not all 100% evil, but they tend to be very self-important and don't unilaterally do good as an institution unless it means preserving the world or maintaining their power base. Magic is extremely complicated in the world of type moon. if you want to throw a fireball you don't just throw a standard issue spell. You must have the right genes, the right formulas and have the logistics worked out perfectly. When it's all said and done you basically can do any standard spell a 1000 different ways. So, every mage is unique and has their own special talents. They'll go down like anybody else if you shoot em in the head, but there's a lot of different possible countermeasures you can't always account for. And yes, they do have a school for magic and wizardry, but if Hogwarts is considered a public-school experience, the clocktower is more of a private school, they don't just let anybody in. Although if your magic is really really special, they'll cut out your brain and put it in a jar till they can figure out how to reproduce it.





The Holy Church on the other hand is basically a more reasonable version of Iscariot from hellsing. (Nasu took direct inspiration actually) They kill heretics, monsters and vampires that use magic for evil and are straight up a huge force for good in the world. They not just some handpicked Vatican strike team. The holy church is essentially the other half of the Vatican and dwarf the mages in terms of manpower and resources. They have enough know how to turn people into cyborgs and mass produce holy weaponry. There are bad eggs here and there, with some extremists thinking that all mages should be killed, but otherwise, they are chill and will go to bat for anybody being hurt by mystical forces. They also have their own super badass group of secret assassins called the Burial Agency. Consisting of 7 members that do all the special wetworks jobs and go after all the vampires they can get their hands on. Faith is optional for membership and baptisms are mandatory. (Also the 8th member slot has a high fatality rate.) The churches biggest overall negative is an unwillingness to be involved in human conflict. There's also some interesting drama when it comes to holy magic use, because the church enforcers use holy sacraments that strictly speaking might not be considered all that different from mage magic. But it's mostly academic, as they are limited to anything that hurts evil and cures the injured.

There's a bit of an uneasy cold war/ armistice between the two factions. In the past they had full blown wars going on with the inquisition, and now there's still a lot of unofficial battles and conflicts that flair up every now and then. Ultimately both camps don't want to set the world on fire so there's an uneasy peace going on that allows for a very interesting setting.


So what's the problem? The problem is Nasu doesn't do jack shit with this. There was a good starting attempt with garden of sinners covering some mage drama, and Tsukhime setting up the vampire/church drama. But everything derailed at exactly the point when Fate Stay Night became popular. What was supposed to be a one-off sideshow conflict of magic users summoning heroes from across history to fight to the death became a fucking Pokémon phenomena. It become so ridiculously popular that it's completely overtaken the world in general. We don't visit new locations and learn about new mages/priests or even mystical monsters anymore. Instead, the whole focus has become on who will win a mostly pointless contest of summoned champions were everybody has rock-paper-scissors superpowers. It's just insane how underdeveloped and unexplored the overall setting is in favor of these small-scale big contest battles. Battles that typically show you a handful of side piece mages and maybe one or two church agents.

I'll give type moon some credit. They did recently do a good series that finally went to the trouble of pulling back the curtain what goes on beyond the grail wars with a magic investigator

But man it really is an undercooked verse. Don't even get me started on how shit continuity is or how the whole Gaia living planet lore fucks everything up.

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.

They have been a lot better about this game wise, Especially with rogue trader and space marine 2. Honestly I think the verse has enough novels and material to work that anything unexplored can be picked up on later on. The sheer volume of books speaks for itself.

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.

It was much better before the dark times.... Before Disney.

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.

The novels actually did a great job exploring the covenant mindset and what the UNSC Really was like before the war. They were particularly excellent at showing how outclassed and desperate humanity is to just simply slow down the covenant. Victory is nothing more then a desperate pipe dream as various suicidal and attritional operations are launched at the overwhelming power of the aliens. So much so that blowing up an entire fleet before halo 2 is considered a minor set back. The verse is borderline crapsack if your not master chief.


I want to say they were really good up until they got to 343 and some author had a hate boner for dr Halsey, despite her questionable methods saving the entire human race. So your good up until post halo 3 id say.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Re: Matrix

I remember hearing that original drafts of the movie had the humans being used not as power sources but as wetware organic processors for the machine empire. This was dropped because WB thought that audiences would think it too insane and the Wachioskys agreed.

If true WB deserves to get fucked and the Wachowskies deserve to both join the 41%.

It's a much, MUCH better explanation for the entire plot. It fixes the blatant violation of termodynamics that is the using of humans as fuel, it makes the stakes for both machines AND humans on why the Matrix exists and perfectly explains why the machines aren't just using nuclear power and using a custom bioweapon to wipe out all humans. Hell, it can even explain why Neo can hack the machines in the real world if you just do a little more tweaking.

The claims this would have been "too fantastical" for audiences is absolute garbage. Too complicated to explain? Also retarded. Here, I can write the entire explanation to neatly fit into the exposition dump Morpheus does to neo:

Spoiler: And I didn't even need a fancy hollywood job to shit this in a few minutes

MORPHEUS: The human body generates more electricity than a 120 volt battery and over 25 thousand BTUs of body heat. But above that, it also provides the machines with something far more valuable. Processing power.

NEO: What?

MORPHEUS: You ever hear the saying about humans only using 10% of their brains? It's false, but it does contain a nugget of truth. Humans are rarely using all their computing power all at once, and even then we are often using it in quite inneficient ways by blasting neurotransmitters from neuron to neuron instead of faster electrical signals. But that doesn't matter, because it works out the same way.

NEO: No, I don't understand. A human brain isn't a computer.

MORPHEUS: It isn't? What is a computer if not a simple machine of turning instructions into actions? You are a hacker neo. You know what "Turing Complete" means?

NEO: It... It means a computer works. It means that a machine or system can compute all functions of a computer. Turing Complete means a system can solve any computational problem assuming it had unlimited resources. But how does that?

MORPHEUS: Not a computer or a machine Neo. A system. Any system, be it silicon or carbon. At the end of the 19th century that was gears, levers and springs. Mechanical calculators. Inneficient, large, challenging engineering. But given enough gears and springs you could compute anything. At the start of the 20th century a "computer" was not a machine but a human whose job was to compute data.

NEO: No... You can't just use human brains to-

MORPHEUS: You can't? Neo you know better than that. Ones and zeros, open and closed, yes or no. All computing is based on simple binary. Get enough people together with instructions to flip switches and you could do it. At the start of human civilization it was men and their own minds. At the end of the 19th century it was gears and springs. In the mid 20th century we figured out transistors and you worked with them in The Matrix. The machines simply replaced little silicon crystal gates with neurons. The is the point of the Matrix, it keeps you in a suspended dream state while in the real world the machines are hijacking your nerves and muscles and brain matter for their own needs, to turn you into this.

[Morpheus holds up a computer processor. Or a calculator. Or a abaccus. Whatever fits bets.]

 

[Vecr]

It fixes the blatant violation of termodynamics that is the using of humans as fuel

Your script segment is really good and I'll save it, but for the thermodynamics part there's a joke script:

WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD

MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn’t believe it. But then I saw the
fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed
intravenously to the living -

NEO (politely): Excuse me, please.

MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo?

NEO: I’ve kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up
at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could
possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy
into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you
had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a
furnace than feed it to humans. And now you’re telling me that their food is
the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven’t you ever heard of the laws of
thermodynamics?

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who’s made it past one science class in high school ought to know
about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?
(Pause.)

NEO: . . . in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.
(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn’t run on math.

 

[Space Police]

Valvrave the Liberator's setting is full of promise. The vehicle designs are great and there are a bunch of weird supernatural/alien elements, but they're all underused and misused. Even the premise is a blatant ripoff of Gundam. Okouchi needs to be blacklisted from anime writing ASAP.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

So yeah, wasted opportunity.

i know they did it because of the whole anniversary and it isn't even the first time someone spliced old timey public domain stuff with WotW, but wouldn't it have made more sense to make it more similar to the "berlin airlift" where it was truely an insane all hands on deck scenario, plus we have way more footage these people can splice in shitty aliens into from the 1950s.

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 just realized that if they made it a prequel and shifted a lot of it around (woody goes on a reverse journey and joins andy's toys in the end) it would have been more well liked.

a modern reboot.

someone did do one but it really only focused on the main character and their son, you can look it up online, its super popular