u/Midi_to_Minuit

I found Gameoverse to be enjoyable but as I thought more and more about the show I found its scriptwriting to be really rough in basically every manner bar jokes (and even then, not all of the jokes find their target). In order of when the issues appear:

1. We know so little about Kit’s family/prior life that I’m not sure if the non-parent relative shown in the intro was her sister, aunt or best friend, yet the show's introductory scene (and the emotional core of this episode) rests upon us caring about them. It's reminiscent of the hackneyed 'dead wife flashbacks' found in stuff like John Wick, but most of those at least show the dead wife doing something.
2. This could work if the show focused less on the family and more on some potentially interesting feelings she has about them, but we don't get that either. Kit's family are Some Dudes and she has the Big Sads about them.
3. The above point is a large part of why Kit's PTSD is unimpactful. We know in a detached, abstract way that your entire world disappearing would suck: her reaction isn't illogical by any means. But the audience knows nothing about the world she misses and lacks any reason to care about it: thus, all the proceeding grief falls flat.
   1. I imagine the idea is that we care about it by virtue of Kit caring about it, but for that to work, we have to care about Kit beforehand. Alas, the traumatic flashbacks are introduced so early that Kit herself hasn't been fleshed out at all!
4. Miss Info and the Paper Guy's dynamic (he's too forgettable for me to remember his name) borrows a lot from Jessie & James, which is mostly to their benefit: they're funny, stupid but just competent enough to annoy the heroes. Bizarrely, though, the Big Bad Guy who commands them both is...also really dumb! This isn't inherently a bad thing, and at the very least he did get a chuckle of out of me, but it means that the entire trio is bereft of menace. Early on in the episode, Kit is petrified at the thought of the villains getting their hands on one of her friends and its accidentally hilarious because the show introduced them to me as bumbling morons.
   1. Even from a pragmatic perspective I'm not sure what she was afraid of. The villains don't lay a hand on anyone and didn't seem to have any interest in Kaboodle.
   2. the collectables of note forward progression in some way, but they seemingly served no purpose. We see a big town near the start of the episode but I have no idea what they're for, and since the game has a level select, there is no 'hub' area. The levels seem entirely empty except for bosses too--what game works like that? I know this seems pedantic, but the show is premised upon exploring video game worlds, so the worldbuilding should at least nominally resemble real videogames.
5. Flapper the Dolphin feels neither like Ecco the Dolphin, a 3D platformer, or any sort of game period. Save for the coins in random places, a visual gag about title screens and another gag about level select screens, the setting kind of just feels like an underwater planet.
   1. To elaborate, what do the coins in FtD do? Pretty much every 3D collect-a-thon has the collectables of note forward progression in some way, but they seemingly served no purpose. We see a big town near the start of the episode but I have no idea what they're for, and since the game has a level select, there is no 'hub' area. The levels seem entirely empty except for bosses too--what game works like that? I know this seems pedantic, but the show is premised upon exploring video game worlds, so the worldbuilding should at least nominally resemble real videogames.
   2. Flapper himself seems entirely unmotivated to beat up the bad guys without the Paper Guy's intervention, which is very strange. What's in it for him? Bowser kidnaps Peach, Eggman enslaves the planet: where's Flapper's Big Platformer Bad Guy?
   3. Platformer protagonists don't have a set personality by any means, but Flapper manages to feel like none of them. It would've been pretty funny to style him after the 90s "we're cool and hip unlike Mario" mascots, like Sonic and co, but instead he's just braindead and kind of preppy.
6. A really big flaw in Gameoverse's execution of its concept is the absence of a player--there's levels and bosses and what is ostensibly a protagonist, but at no point does it feel like a game being played (if anything, Kit and Gobbles, who should be NPCs, feel like the players). Given that the interactivity of videogames is the sole dividing line between games and movies, the lack of a real player makes it really difficult for anything in this episode to feel like an actual game.
   1. If you've watched Wreck-It Ralph, compare and contrast that with Gameoverse and you'll see what I mean. Travelling between games via cable VS travelling through a nondescript cosmos. The characters freezing in place when paused VS pause buttons not existing. So on and so forth.
7. The climax of this pilot (whereupon Kit falls into despair and Gobbles gives a big speech to cheer her up) is egregiously bad and the main thing that inspired me to rant about this pilot. It's a perfect microcosm of everything wrong with the show.
   1. For starters, the prose is absurdly rote and is generic to the point of feeling like parody. None of the show's dialogue is exemplary but this legitimately reads like Dora the Explorer. If you don't remember the speech, I encourage you to think of the most stereotypical "don't give up!!" monologue ever--you're probably doing much better.
      1. It's rather illogical, too: Gobbles is trying to show that Kit unfairly blames herself for everything but she really was responsible--at least in part--for Flapper siding with the villains. It was her job to convince him to trust them and they did a terrible job of it. Like it is straightforwardly her fault lol. 'None of what you ever did was your fault' is fucking wild.
   2. This is Kit and Gobbles third conversation together! When Gobbles mentions how he's "learnt so much from Kit and the others", it almost seems like he's lying through his teeth. Additionally, the bravery and courage he praises Kit for has not been demonstrated by her at all. Miss Info and Paper Guy aren't threatening enough for her to be brave in fighting them, and she doesn't fight them.
8. Even if the aforementioned problems didn't exist, the fact that the show's veritable Darkest Hour isn't Dark eviscerates every single shred of emotionality or pathos that the scene could've otherwise had. As a refresher, Kit's breakdown and Gobbles ensuing 'friendship is power' speech occurs due to the bad guys managing to convince Flapper to join them and running...a few feet away. Kit could have literally just run (perhaps even fucking walk) towards them to stop them from blowing up the entire planet/game but she chooses not to!
   1. You could attempt to defend this by saying that the idea is that she is intentionally giving up far too early due to her trauma overwhelming her that much, but this scene doesn't have any specific triggers for her beyond "the bad guys are doing stuff". More than anything, she comes off as lacking any drive or adrenaline whatsoever. And this does not make up for this scene's nonexistent tension.
9. The scene where Flapper's world, and everyone within it, is annihilated was, genuinely, really fucking funny due to how the show plays Flapper's horror and distraught completely straight. Tonally, it's one step removed from this. The pilot is simply far too rushed for this scene to have any weight.
   1. It doesn't help that Flapper is a non-character, either, because what personality traits did he even possess that wasn't "head empty"? You would be forgiven for thinking that he was incapable of complex thought altogether. This is even worse for the actual game that Flapper resides in, as the pilot fails to give even a minute's worth of characterization to either Flapper's friends or Flapper's world. None of the NPCs so much as speak! The overall effect is that this is the literal flattest finale that the episode could have had, and it is genuinely baffling.
10. Finally, Kaboodle spending 90% of the pilot separate from Kit and Gobbles seems like a poor way to introduce this trio; surely you'd want to establish how the three bounce off each other from the get go.

There were a few other nitpicks I could've gotten into but I think I've typed enough to make my point clear lol. I think Gameoverse is severely lagging behind Glitch Productions other pilots and I hope future episodes have significant writing revisions. I'm aware that RubberRoss and Egoraptor wanted the pilot to be a complete story, but there were an infinite number of ways to do that without making the first episode feel like a season finale. There are indie shows that tell full stories in less than a third of this pilot's runtime.

One angle I haven't seen anybody else take in regards to the shows admittedly-somewhat-lecherous presentation is how woefully underbaked it is. Putting aside discussions about whether the fanservice is misogynistic or not, my main takeaway from the show is that the fanservice really needs to pick a lane.

As it stands now, Gameoverse is both:

• a borderline G-rated show with a saccharine, action-figure aesthetic and a setting/plot that, on average, isn't much more dramatic than Spongebob
• a show willing to dedicate a part of its pilot for "oh no! I'm stuck in these tight ropes with my bikini! and my boobs are very big!"

In my opinion, these two things work against each other really hard. The 2000s smack-our-toys-into-each-other presentation annihilates any potential the show could have for being actually sexy, because the horny-power-fantasy route demands committing to the bit! I do not want half-assed Disney XD catgirl hackery, I want Bayonetta stripping herself for her attacks! I want Magneto skins with penis bulge (yes, really)! If a piece of media is going to be unabashedly perverted it should be perverted with passion!

And on the flipside, the ambient lechery of the whole pilot undercuts the kids show vibe that the rest of it is going for. Gameoverse is unambiguously aimed at the O.K. KO demographic, and it does a pretty great job of capturing the kids action cartoon vibe, but the fanservice makes the pilot extremely confused. The people who'll appreciate 'Lets put Missinfo in bikini bondage' (a) would want a less juvenile show and (b) want her with less clothes. And the people who are into the rest of the show's vibe would just be put off by the fanservice--something that the show's reaction on twitter demonstrates pretty clearly!

My main advice for the show is to pick a lane. Either the fanservice should be toned down so that the show remains cohesive, or they should be toned up so that someone out there might actually find it hot. Centrism is for cowards.

(This isn't a very insightful post but that's what rants are for, right?)

I finished Blood of the Virgin today (best 20$ I will literally ever spend) and seeing this monologue made me stop reading the book to take a break and walk. This isn't even the full thing, but its the part that hits the hardest even without context.

The first part of the monologue got me so excited that I literally grabbed my phone to screenshot it when I first saw it (if you can't read it I'll type it out below this post).

https://imgur.com/a/3GHGcBo

And this is the rest of the speech; it's not necessary reading since the first part is the best, but it's still unbelievable.

https://imgur.com/a/WrdkqvZY

If you type down "author:midi_to_minuit" in this subreddit you can see that it's trivially easy for me to type up paragraphs worth of nonsense here when necessary. I point this out because, as annoying as it is to make a post that's literally just "here's a speech, see it for yourself", I genuinely don't know what else to say about it beyond pointing out two specific lines of dialogue that I don't think I'll ever forget.

This tortured artist thing is over. You're fifty years too late.

Nobody is looking for someone that looks like you. The space you consume flatters no one.

Fuck.