u/Dinoboy225

A bit of an unorthodox post today lol.

I’ve never really seen eye-to-eye with this subreddit a lot, but I saw a post here the other day that truly baffled me, because the OP basically said that they didn’t want Godzilla to be “anthropomorphized” like Kong was, with tons of people agreeing with them in the comments. And it finally made stuff click in my head, namely for people who complain about the “sense of scale” being gone.

In my eyes, the Titans have always been just as important of characters as the humans are, and as such should be given an equal amount of focus. It’s part of the reason why GvK and GxK are my favorites in the franchise, the Kaijus have actual personalities and character arcs; they feel like characters instead of action set pieces and have some interesting motivations and stories.

However, people here seem to want a return to G14, which was an extremely human focused film to the point that the Titans were basically cameos in their own movie. In KotM especially, the Monsters just felt like plot devices to make the story move forward, with only a few sparse and vague moments of characterization.

It just doesn’t make sense to me that people are essentially asking for the most interesting characters to get sidelined and turned back into CGI background noise.

Am I the only one who feels this? Because I feel like I’m going crazy.

I admittedly might not be the best person to talk about this because I only watched BvS exactly once about 10 years ago, and it was so boring that 10 year old me was asleep for about half of it. But I have a knack for noticing missed potential in movies and I noticed one case of it here.

I will forever believe that one of the main reasons why the DCEU failed so hard is because they rushed their way to the teamup movies instead of properly setting up each hero first like the MCU did, and Batman in particular is the one that suffers the most because of this. You see, Batman is introduced after he’s already undergone a ton of character development, which is something you never want to do to a character in a prominent role (unless they’re like a mentor or something). So we never see what happened that finally pushed Bruce over the edge, in fact, from my vague memories of the movie, I can’t remember if they even bring up Robin, the fact that Robin died, or the fact that Batman didn’t kill people before Robin died. They’re all treated like facts the audience already knows, which means that Batman is effectively introduced to us when he’s already halfway through his story. It’s like the MCU’s “Out of the Loop” Syndrome, except even worse because we don’t even have a movie to watch that would catch us up. (That said, the last time I watched this movie was like 9-10 years ago, so if anyone could fact check me here, that would be nice)

Imagine if, instead, we got a solo Batman movie that built up his relationship with Robin, only for Batman to lose Robin in the end, and as a result, he finally crosses the line and kills the Joker (which also allows us to drop Jared Letdown from the future movies as a bonus), that would definitely work much better at setting up his character.

As a bonus, imma fix the infamous “Save Martha” scene too. Literally all you gotta do, is change the line to “Save my mother”. That’s all you gotta do lmao. Just from that, it would remind Batman of what started his journey to becoming the Dark Knight in the first place; the murder of his own parents. Then Batman kind of lets up and has a moment of clarity to realize what he’s doing (without the dumb “why did you say that name!” Line Lmao).

TL;DR: We needed a Batman solo movie before BvS.

My reasoning? Donkey says “I’m comin’ Elizabeth!” Just before he passes out in Shrek 2.

(This is a half-joke lol)

Funny question I thought of because this is a complaint I hear about the Hellaverse. So how often do your characters swear, and how does that factor into their characterization?

Ignis Anima: Considering her cold, calculating personality, Ignis is surprisingly foulmouthed, but she’s foulmouthed in a “professional” way. She’ll keep her cold, stoic tone even while dropping an F bomb or making a surprisingly crude statement, making for some rather funny line delivery for an otherwise serious antagonist. For example, “Denizens of Hell, I would appreciate it if you shut the f#ck up and listened for a moment.” This plays into Ignis’ “silk hiding steel” personality, as that calm, composed personality hides a sadistic monster just under the surface.

Pumpkin Spice: Pumpkin swings hard into the other direction, despite his hammy nature, sadistic personality, and habit of making unnecessarily violent threats, Pumpkin rarely ever actually swears, and even when he does, most of the “swear words” he says are surprisingly mild (notably, the dirtiest phrase he ever says is “what the hell”, and he only says this once. There’s also the time he threatened to take Alastor’s “nutsack” off, but that barely even qualifies lol). Given that his inspiration comes from 80s and 90s cartoon villains, Pumpkin’s surprisingly clean mouth makes quite a bit of sense.

Monev Condameister: Given her anger issues, Monev is plenty foulmouthed, especially when she’s mad. That said, when she’s angry, the line between “swearing” and “incomprehensible gibberish” becomes increasingly blurred.

Roxanne Tits: Who would have guessed that the pretty little moth femboy is the most foulmouthed of them? He’s like Adam but even worse somehow. Case in point, Charlie has him do a “no swearing” challenge as part of his redemption therapy. Roxy fails it 5 times in as many seconds.

When you look at the judging system and look at the advantages of a crusher-bot, they line up almost exactly.

Damage: The most important category, and Crushers are perfect at exploiting it, and arguably are even better at it than spinners are. A spinner has to hit the opponent several times to finally knock something loose and mess up the opponent. When a crusher bites into another robot it is almost always going to damage something important. Just look at Razer’s battles over the years. Whenever it successfully punctured the opponent’s armor, it pretty much always immobilized it or at least severely hampered it with just a few bites.

Control: As a subcategory of grabber, Crushers are great at exploiting this as well. Quantum for example is great at grabbing the opponent, and taking them on a very violent tour of the BattleBox.

Aggression: Unlike spinners, Crushers don’t need to take a few seconds to spin up before they can deal damage, in fact, the way their weapons work kinda requires them to stay on top of the enemy for the whole match, making them perfect at scoring those.

You want any more proof that crushers aren’t outdated? In 2018, Spectre, aka Quantum with a reskin, won King of Bots, and did very well in the competitions afterwards.

But… you read the title. They’re only almost perfect. So let’s go over a few of the problems.

Durability: Hydraulic systems are heavier than most other weapon systems, so that doesn’t leave a lot of room for redundant components or tough armor for the rest of the bot.

Reliability: From what I’ve seen, crushers are somewhat less likely to outright fail than other weapons, but they run into this problem sometimes where they can’t seem to crush with full capacity, like Razer’s fight with Onslaught, or, more recently, Petunia’s performance in 2019, where it failed to fully crush anything. (On a side note, if someone could explain what causes this, I would be very thankful). There’s also Razer’s early years, where it seemed to just randomly break down for no apparent reason on several occasions.

Skill: Because they’re control bots and not spinners, crushers are naturally more complex to operate, requiring more precise driving and positioning, compared to other weapons that just need to get under the enemy to get the weapon working.

In conclusion: I think if a crusher bot could fix the issues while honing in on what works, then it could be a very serious competitor that could perfectly exploit the rules. Just remember, in Robot Wars, Razer was a crusher, and it was undoubtedly the bot to beat if you wanted to win. So far, it looks like Quantum is hot on the trail of making a successful crusher, but we’ll have to see how it does in the future.