u/Yougart_Man

Miro Haverinen created a magic system that is evil, repulsive, broken, and completely indifferent to human dignity. It is absolutely unhinged and I love it for it.

Invoking magic means committing acts of total physical and moral corruption to court ancient, sadistic deities.

• Demon Seed: You don't summon a spirit from another plane; you literally use a corpse to use its rotting body as fertile soil, birthing a malformed human-monster hybrid mid-exploration to fight on your behalf.
• Brain & Heart Flowers: Survival requires you to butcher another person, plant parasitic seeds inside their freshly slain body, and wait for flowers to sprout out of their organs so you can harvest their stigma so you can heal up.
• Flesh Puppetry: You are casually severing limbs, stuffing them into your pack, and using dark magic to make those severed, lifeless limbs dance through the air, beating your enemies to death.
• Blood Golem: You are constantly forced to mutilate yourself. Summoning a creature of blood requires tearing open your own veins in the heat of battle.
• Casually altering reality to duplicate shit. You rewrite creation to turn a single piece of moldy bread into three, or to force plain water to become wine.
• By invoking a single word (PHASE), you start teleporting five steps in front of you. You literally ignore the solid atoms of the earth itself, chancing the very real nightmare of rematerializing fused solid inside a brick wall forever.
• You paint a circle in human blood to teleport to a waypoint or step through the Moon God's shimmering portals and end up in the Backrooms and then to your location.

The most terrifying aspect of the magic is that when these spells are unleashed, they ignore durability to completely. There is no shielding, and no willpower strong enough to resist the absolute nature of the gods. If you get hit, you die or get maimed.

• You are forcing the victim's body to literally rot alive in real-time.
• You manifest a cloud of pure, concentrated, industrial smoke. It fills the lungs of everyone in the room and damages their eyesight.
• You pull the literal iron links that tormented Chambara for centuries straight out of the ether, the literal chains that held a god in place.
• Red Arc fires a concentrated bolt of divine lightning straight to the brain, instantly giving the target brain damage. Black Orb hurls localized, dense spheres of pure anti-existence that shred target limbs into meat before the victim can even process what hit them... and it hits multiple people.

The Older Gods and the Ascended Gods aren't benevolent. They are indifferent and don't care about your happiness or suffering. Channeling Gro-goroth should mean hurling a ball of destructive dark mass that shreds a person in half a second. Channeling Sylvian should mean forcing flesh to mend and mutate at the cost of terrifying, horrific rituals.

The magic isn't scaled down for human safety, and I love it for it.

I was replaying the game as an adult and I noticed something that as a kid or teenager you do not notice, but as an adult, it hits you like a brick to the face if you know the law.

The literal dumpster fire that occurs in Chapter 5 of Bully (Canis Canem Edit).

Dr. Crabblesnitch is a pompous, self-righteous hypocrite, Bullworth Academy are a collection of alcoholics, criminals and idiots. But when Gary Smith orchestrates the town-wide smear campaign and frames Jimmy Hopkins, leading directly to Jimmy’s expulsion, the administration does something so incredibly boneheaded, that it is criminal.

Jimmy is a 15-year-old, placed into the legal custody/care of a private boarding school by his mother and his new stepfather. His mother literally dumped him there so she could go on a year-long honeymoon cruise. Bullworth Academy is, for all intents and purposes, acting in loco parentis (in the place of a parent). They hold the legal duty of care for this teenager.

And what do they do when they expel him?

Do they call his mother? No. She’s in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, probably getting day-drunk on a yacht.

Do they contact Child Protective Services? No.

Do they arrange safe transport to a juvenile shelter or a legal guardian? No.

Crabblesnitch essentially slams the heavy oak door and tells Jimmy to get the fuck out of the school or he is trespassing.

• You are barred from classes. (Fine, standard expulsion stuff).
• You are barred from the Boy’s Dormitory.
• If you set foot anywhere on school grounds, you are treated as a hostile trespasser.

Using real world logic, Jimmy is literally homeless, he is wandering the streets of a horrible industrial Rust Belt town. As players, we know Jimmy has unlocked various "hideouts." But let’s cut through the game mechanics for a second and look at what those places actually are... they are unsanitary, unheated, abandoned, or gang-infested shacks.

The administration of Bullworth Academy kicked a 15-year-old out with no legal guardians present and forced him into being a squatter. Bullworth Academy got astronomically, impossibly lucky that Jimmy Hopkins is an absolute badass, because if he was a normal guy, he dies in a week or so and the school would have been sued to death.

If Jimmy gets hit by a car while wandering the streets at 2:00 AM because he literally has no legal bed to sleep in, who is responsible? THE SCHOOL THAT LOCKED HIM OUT.

If Jimmy gets shanked by a meth addict, who is responsible? THE SCHOOL THAT LOCKED HIM OUT.

If he had died of hypothermia sleeping on a cold couch in an unheated garage, the entire administration of Bullworth Academy would be facing reckless homicide charges.

When an institution takes in vulnerable person, they assume a strict legal Duty of Care under the doctrine of in loco parentis. When residential facilities have summarily expelled or discharged troubled youth without proper safety protocols, notifying guardians, or ensuring secure transportation, and those youths were subsequently attacked, exploited, or murdered while stranded, the courts did not buy the "well, they weren't our student anymore" defense.

Crabblesnitch wouldn't just be facing a board review; he’d be sharing a jail cell. The lawsuits alone would have bankrupted the academy. Jimmy’s mother, as terrible and absent as she is, would have smelled a massive payout from a mile away.

Bullworth Academy didn't just fail Jimmy Hopkins academically or morally, they literally committed a fucking felony. This detail completely reframes the entire tone of Bully, Bullworth Academy is a legal and moral void, they dumped a 15-year-old child onto the pavement, locked the iron gates, and told him to get lost, they actively tossed a vulnerable person to the wolves and prayed the town would swallow him whole before anyone came asking questions.

I know, it's a videogame, but it is extremely dark if you think about it using real life logic.

Yup, a rant about a portuguese movie about an event that happened in real life, get ready for a history lesson boys, because this movie is awesome, hilarious... but the real life event was like 40% way funnier.

Maria de Medeiros made an absolute masterpiece with Capitães de Abril. It hits the emotional beats, pays immense respect to Salgueiro Maia, and manages to turn a bloodless military coup into a compelling, deeply personal story. If you read snobby film critics or historical purists talking about this movie, there is always an annoying subset of posers who whine by saying "Why is this silly?" or "It should have taken itself more seriously as a political thriller."

If anything, Medeiros pulled her punches. Because if you actually sit down and read or watch the documentaries about the event, this wasn't a political thriller or a badass moment, it was an absolute circus. It was a live-action Monty Python sketch performed by armed men operating on vibes, caffeine, bad radio signal, and complete, unadulterated desperation and insanity.

Medeiros actually undersold the sheer level of surreal comedy.

The movie vs the real life event

It does include the absurdities: Salgueiro Maia’s armored column has to pull over on a rural highway because a key vehicle broke down, and while they're sitting there looking like idiots, Major Gervásio shows up in a loud, bright red sports car. The young conscript soldier (Daniel) spends half the revolution dodging military duties to meet his girlfriend, puts a carnation in his rifle, and gets caught making out inside an armored car. People call that "Hollywood romance fluff," but that was literally the demographic: exhausted 20 year olds improvising on the go and being a bunch of accidental comedians.

Manuel and his crew taking over the Rádio Clube Português is presented with high tension, but the real-life setup was a comedy of errors. The signal to kick off a national revolution was literally two songs on the radio: First, Portugal’s Eurovision entry from that year (E Depois do Adeus), a generic, sappy pop song, to tell the officers "get ready." Then, shortly after midnight, a banned song by Zeca Afonso (Grândola, Vila Morena) meaning "GO GO GO."

The green light is literally a Eurovision pop ballad dropping at 10:55 PM. The secret police didn't even realize a revolution was happening because they thought the DJ was fucking around.

In the film, Maia’s column faces off at the Praça do Comércio against loyalist tanks led by Brigadier Pais and a frigate in the river pointing heavy weapons at them. In any standard movie, this is an epic firefight. In real life and this movie? It was an absolute farce. When the loyalist commander ordered his tank crews to open fire on Maia’s men, the tank crews... just looked at each other and said, "Nah". Then the loyalist officers tried to get the naval frigate to shell the square. The guys on the ship checked their radio, realized nobody knew who was actually in charge of the country anymore, and decided that firing heavy artillery into the capital city’s main tourist square was stupid.

The Armed Forces Movement had broadcasted on the radio: "EVERYONE PLEASE STAY INSIDE YOUR HOUSES. REMAIN CALM AND DO NOT GO OUT."

Civilians were showing up, thousands of them. They read that broadcast and thought, "Oh sick, a parade!"

They poured out into the streets by the tens of thousands. They started hand-feeding the soldiers. They brought them coffee, cigarettes, pastries, and carnations from the nearby flower markets. The soldiers didn't have plugs to put in their gun barrels to show they weren't going to shoot, so a restaurant worker named Celeste Caeiro started handing out carnations... which gave the name of the revolution, yup, like that scene from Fant4stic where Reed says "Say that again?".

The third act of Captains of April focuses on the siege of the GNR barracks at Largo do Carmo, where dictator Marcelo Caetano was hiding. Medeiros handles this with dramatic weight, showing the tragedy of four civilians killed by cornered secret police firing from windows.

What she skips over is the actual surrender, which is one of the most hilariously stupid moments in European history ever.

Maia has the barracks surrounded. Thousands of screaming, cheering, angry civilians are packed into the square. Maia needs to negotiate with Caetano inside, but there are no cell phones, landlines are jammed, and nobody has a military PA system. So what do they use? A civilian megaphone borrowed from a local street vendor. Maia is standing on top of an armored vehicle, holding this tiny, tinny megaphone, shouting at a historical government building, telling the ruler of the Portuguese Empire that his time is up. Half the time the batteries are dying, or the crowd is cheering so loudly that Caetano can't even hear the demands!

Inside the barracks, Marcelo Caetano is panicking... about looking good. General Spínola finally arrives to negotiate the transfer of power... and Caetano proceeds to say "I ain't surrendering to a captain, fuck off". People outside are chanting for his head. Armed soldiers are pointing cannons at his front door. And this guy refuses to hand over the country to Salgueiro Maia because Maia is only a Captain. So Maia has to let Spínola walk in and pretend to be the grand savior, just so Caetano could feel dignified while losing his dictatorship. He gives up, runs away on an armored car that people rock back and forth and flees to Brazil.

What happened after is literally pure Monty Python styled comedy

I warn you, I did not exaggerate any of this for comedic effect... the movie never adapted this because people would have died of laughter in the cinema or called the movie unrealistic, because let me tell you, the hot summer ran on pure insanity.

After the dude fled, what happened? Insanity and stupidity. The movement exploded into factions who hated each other.

• The Communist Party (PCP): Old-school Marxists who thought, "Yay, my own soviet union coming soon"
• The Socialists (PS): Backed by Western Europe, shouting, "Democracy"
• Maoists, Trotskyists, and Anarchists: Dozens of student groups arguing on street corners about whether a collective farm was "revisionist" because they used the wrong kind of tractor.
• The Military: Split into three factions. One faction was literally operating on "Depends on who I am trolling".

At one point, disgruntled construction workers got mad about wages, surrounded the Prime Minister's palace, and held the entire Sixth Provisional Government hostage for two days. Did the military intervene? No, they found this hilarious and just watched! The Prime Minister literally suspended his own government in protest because his army wouldn't guard his office.

Meanwhile all of West Europe is having a panic attack and NATO is sweating bullets. Henry Kissinger looked at Portugal and essentially said: "Portugal is lost".

And then, on November 25, 1975, radical far-left paratroopers seized the air force headquarters and radio stations. They were ready for their sacred war to establish a socialist state. And what happened? They got mogged.

The absolute chad known as António Ramalho Eanes enters the story, a Lieutenant Colonel in aviator sunglasses representing the moderate military faction. Eanes’s troops surrounded the rebel bases. The radical leaders looked around, realized nobody was coming to back them up, and that the public was tired of the circus. Eanes basically told them: "Surrender, go back to your barracks, and stop this. You are fired!" The rebels decided to... give up and turn tail. The military handed the keys of the country back to civilian politicians, held normal democratic elections, Eanes won by landslide, the military dusted off their hands, and went back to standard peacetime guard duty.

Captains of April is an absolute 10/10 movie. But Maria de Medeiros had to tone reality down by at least 40%, because if she showed the full scale of the comedy, the dictator's ego, the construction worker hostages, and the guy in aviator sunglasses firing everyone until they said "Okie," the audience would have literally died of laughter.

Look, I’m sick of opening any comment section about a movie, show, or game adaptation and seeing the exact same tired binary argument: "It wasn't 100% faithful to the book, so it's garbage!" versus "The original version sucks, the adaptation is better!"

Why do people think that adaptation means doing a 1 to 1 copy of something or just going completely unhinged and doing something that doesn't look like the original work?

If we’re going to argue about that, we need a common vocabulary. I have come up with four tiers. Each has its own purpose, its own traps, and its own iconic successes and disasters.

One to One. Treats the source material not just as inspiration, but as an infallible holy text. The creators trace over the original work like tracing paper. Every line of iconic dialogue is kept verbatim, every visual beat mirrors a comic panel or book description, and the pacing follows the source material to a fault. The trap here is medium incompatibility. Novels have internal monologues and infinite prose time; comic books have static panels; video games have interactivity.

Examples?

• The average manga to anime adaptation tends to be one to one.
• Sin City is almost one to one with the original comic book, disorganized stories and all.

Almost Transcribed: It is the story, characters, themes, and major plot beats, but it knows that a movie, TV show, or game is a completely different beast than a book or comic. The writers aren't trying to change the story, they cut fluff, combine minor characters to streamline the cast, alter pacing to fit a 2-hour runtime (or a 10-episode season), and reframe internal thoughts into visual storytelling. The trap is knowing what to cut. Cut the wrong subplot, and you ruin a character.

Examples?

• The Peter Jackson threatical edits of the Lord of the Rings, they cut down tons of scenes that only slowed down the plot or only slowed down the pacing or bloated it.
• The Last of Us by HBO grabbed all the plot beats and adapted them one to one or expanded them, removing the gameplay only sections unless they were plot mandatory.

New Spin: Takes the core premise, character archetypes, or thematic engine of the source material and drops them into an entirely new genre, setting, structure, or modern context. They’re asking: "What if we took this classic skeleton and put completely new flesh on it?" or "What is the core message of this story, and how can we put it on a nother setting?". When it fails, it feels pretentious or disrespectful, like a director who thought they were smarter than the author and completely missed what made the original great in the first place.

Examples?

• Almost every adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper is like this. They mess with the setting, it is rare to see one who is super close (The Barbie version and the Mickey Mouse one are extremely close in some levels).
• The Shining. Kubrick grabbed a story about a haunted hotel turning a dysfunctional man into a total madman, and decided to just go crazy by making the main character dysfunctional from the get-go and removing the talking.
• Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. He grabbed a manga that was 50% funny and 50% serious and made it 100% serious and melancholic.

In Name Only: A studio buys the intellectual property rights to a popular book, comic, or game, and then throws out 99% of the plot, the lore, the character dynamics, and often the core themes, the final script bears almost zero resemblance to the original work. 90% of the time, INO adaptations anger the built-in fanbase and confuse casual viewers, but the other 10% you get absolute gold.

Examples?

• World War Z the movie and the game: Max Brooks’ novel is an incredible, fake oral history of a global zombie pandemic, structured as a series of political, geopolitical, and military interviews from around the world. The movie? A fast-paced, globetrotting Brad Pitt action flick about fast-running zombie swarms. It has literally nothing to do with the book beyond having zombies, the Indian-Pakistan war, the wall in Israel and the same title.
• Stalker the videogame: In the original book, aliens visited Earth, stopped by for a brief moment and then left. They just left behind their toxic, bizarre, radioactive litter in six "Visiting Zones" across the globe, the main character, Redrick Schuhart, is a "Stalker", an illegal scavenger who sneaks into the Canadian Zone to loot bizarre alien artifacts. Then the soviet movie shows up and just removed 90% of the content and but kept the depressing stuff. And then the game goes and throws away things too; the alien Premise? Gone, replaced by Chernobyl's nuclear reactor exploding and the noosphere experiment, the book is a character drama about a desperate father while the game is a tactical FPS survival horror where you mag-dump a rusty Kalashnikov into bloodsuckers and bandits, the book's Zone is outside a fictional Canadian town called Harmont, the game’s Zone is the actual Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

An adaptation ain't bad just because it's a New Spin, and a show isn't automatically brilliant just because it's One-to-One. The art of adaptation isn't about copying text; it's about understanding what makes the original tick and finding a way to make it beat in a completely different chest.

And if you are gonna say "If you're going to throw out the entire book/game and keep almost nothing, why didn't you just write an original movie/game with a new title?"

Come closer. A little closer. Yeah, right here, give me your ear... LAWSUITS FUCKING EXIST.

While Soviet copyright law was wildly different from Western law, authors still owned the intellectual property of their works. When GSC Game World started developing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in 2001, the Soviet Union had been dead for a decade. Ukraine and Russia were fully integrated into international copyright agreements (Like the Berne Convention). You couldn't just steal a famous Russian book and sell it globally in 2007 without getting sued to death. GSC Game World originally wanted to make an official, licensed adaptation of Roadside Picnic. They actually approached Boris Strugatsky to buy the video game rights. The problem? The film and adaptation rights to Roadside Picnic were already tied up in a nightmare web of international Hollywood option deals; so they went and changed absolutely everything to dodge a lawsuit.

This happened with I, Robot too. Jeff Vintar wrote an original script called Hardwired. It was a murder mystery involving a robot. Fox bought it and then it hit them... "If we make this, Asimov’s estate or the publisher is going to sue our pants off for knocking off the Three Laws of Robotics," so they bought the rights to I, Robot, glued the two together, and hired Will Smith.

Slapping the official IP title is sometimes literal copyright armor.

Yeah, I am powerscaling real life. Problem? I was bored.

Nerfs happen and people start typing. Nerf Greninja. Nerf the Golden Gun. Nerf Gojo. Nerf whatever new weapon just one-shot you across the map in patch 69.420. People act like their favorite character getting a 5% damage reduction or a slightly longer cooldown is the absolute end of the world.

If you want to talk about a real character-ruining, absolute disrespect of a nerf. Look at what the world did to the horse and the chicken.

No fictional media has ever subjected two characters to the level of systemic, generational, humiliating disrespect that history handed these two animals.

Let’s start with the horse, because this fella went from god tier to posturing.

For thousands of years, the horse was the entire game; no horse? You were softlocked. The horse was the ultimate multi-role. You had shock cavalry crashing into infantry lines like a freight train and doing massive psychological fear to entire armies. You had horses pulling trade caravans across continents, hauling early siege engines, and turning agrarian economies up to max efficiency. Alexander the Great didn't conquer half the known world on a moped; he did it because his horse build was cracked

And how did umanity and technological progress reward the horse? By doing everything in their power to kill it.

It wasn't even the horse's fault! The horse didn't get lazy. It didn't lose its stats.

• Gunpowder.
• Rifles.
• Machine guns.
• Internal combustion engines.

Imagine being a top-tier, meta-defining shock cavalry unit for three thousand years, and suddenly some guy in a trench coat pulls up in a metal box that runs on dead dinosaurs and shoots fire out of a pipe at 600 rounds per minute.

Today, what is the horse doing? It’s eating carrots in a fenced-in square, running races, wearing a decorative ribbon at a county fair, or being a very expensive, high-maintenance organic lawnmower.

If the horse got screwed over by external tech creep, the chicken got gene edited into bottom tier.

They were airborne, feathered terror machines that could kill rats or fight off other birds.

And then humans got their hands on them.

Human developers realized that flying, aggressive murder-birds were terrible for farming efficiency. So they spent centuries selectively breeding every ounce of dignity, combat capability, and survival instinct out of the chicken build.

Most modern chickens have massive, heavy bodies attached to tiny, withered wings. They can barely clear a low garden fence. If a predator shows up, their flight response is basically non-existent.

Modern commercial chickens? They can literally get bullied, cornered, and eliminated by a regular sewer rat.

Sure, you have feral game-fowl and angry roosters out in the wild that can still throw hands and leave a nasty slash on a human leg or a stray cat. But 99% of the chicken population has been reduced to a literal walking protein source.

No anime writer has ever cooked up a tragedy that severe. No game developer has ever dropped a nerf that harsh.

Browser game played on Newgrounds (HTML5 / late Flash era).

2D Puzzle Platformer / Experimental Social Experiment.

Played around 3 to 4 years ago (around 2020–2022).

Simple 2D sprite art with a straightforward, classic indie platformer look. It was clean, extremely simple, focusing heavily on the obstacles (spikes, pits, traps) and the ragdoll/static player corpses cluttering the level.

Nothing overly detailed, meant to represent "you" as just one of thousands of disposable participants.

When you died on an obstacle, your character's corpse stayed on the server right where you fell. The corpse turned into a solid, safe platform.

Because thousands of people were playing, high-lethal areas became flooded with a massive pile of player bodies. Over time, the community created literal "corpse bridges" over deadly traps, making the level much easier for subsequent players.

If you died, you were immediately kicked out and couldn't play again for 24 hours.

The game saved a browser cookie (or local storage flag) to enforce the 24-hour lockout and stop you from immediately respawning to spam body-stacking on your own.

You relied on other players across the globe dying in strategic spots so that when your 24-hour ban lifted, new corpses might be waiting there to help you push slightly further into the level.

Featured simple, looping background music that gave it an atmospheric, slightly minimalist vibe.

All embrace me

It’s my time to rule at last

I was chosen by heaven

Say my name when you pray

What an absolutely crazy run, I turned Sweden from a minor power to an absolute powerhouse that broke Russia's back with the help of Germany. You can invade Germany and Canada but I decided against it because I was completely satisfied.

This run was so crazy because I had to save Iran's butt when they fought the ottomans alongside the Cairo Axis, allowing me to get Turkey and Iraq which proceeded to wall Russia in the middle east alongside Iran. Spain didn't collapse into a civil war, and they garrisoned everything.

Members of my anti-Russia faction: Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Spain, Turkey.

The "Pokémon with guns" meme was funny. It was an easy headline for gaming journalists and a quick punchline for Twitter. But now that the 1.0 update is out, anyone still calling it a shallow clone got their socks knocked off them.

Palworld is a total and absolute rejection of everything Pokémon has become over the last decades. Palworld accidentally rediscovered the actual DNA of the genre: Shin Megami Tensei.

In Pokémon: You, the protagonist, are essentially a coach or commander standing safely inside a designated coaching box while your poor soldier takes a hyper beam directly to the face. You shout commands. You pop a full restore from your inventory.

Now look at Palworld, or look back at the actual grandfathers of the genre like Shin Megami Tensei and classic cult classics like Jade Cocoon. In SMT, Palworld and Jade Cocoon, you are not a commander, you are the poor squad leader executing the plan the commander gave you, warts and all. If the protagonist gets wiped out, it is instant game over. You are casting buffs, taking stray hits, dodging area-of-effect spells, and sweating bullets because your demons are partners relying on your survival just as much as you are relying on theirs.

In Palworld, you are rolling away from a charging boss, managing your own stamina bar, firing guns to annoy the boss, and actively using your Pals to attack or bait.

You share the danger. It creates a completely different psychological loop. Every victory feels earned because you survived the crossfire right alongside your squad.

Remember the last time a Pokémon legendary encounter actually terrified you? Me neither. Usually, it involves walking up to a static overworld sprite, pressing "A," watching a five-second cutscene, throwing a Quick Ball, and putting a deity in a tiny plastic sphere to sit in a PC box forever. The stakes are non-existent, and the environmental impact is zero.

Then look at what Palworld did with the 1.0 update, specifically encounters like the fight against Panthalus.

Fighting Panthalus is a genuine survival boss fight against a kaiju-sized legendary beast. The creature actively warps the battlefield, tearing up the arena with localized typhoons, unleashing massive water tornadoes, and hurling devastating tidal waves.

You have to use the terrain. You have to watch your spacing. You have to coordinate real-time defense because one mistimed dodge means you and your entire squad get destroyed. It feels like an actual legendary beast defending its domain, not an oversized plush toy waiting for you to catch it.

Pokémon maintains an illusion. Everyone is vegan or eating mystery rectangular bento boxes, Pokémon love working for you for free out of pure friendship, and the economy revolves around badge-collecting and gym promotions.

Palworld threw that out the window. And frankly? It makes the world feel infinitely more lived-in and reactive. You are wrestling with logistics. Your Pals aren't just battle tokens; they are part of your industrial and survival ecosystem. They farm, they smelt ore, they defend the base.

You can kill, you can eat, you can enslave, and you can build an empire out of the earth. It gives the player the ability to be utterly deranged.

But there's a thing Palworld lacks.

Pokémon has intricate competitive math, EV training optimization, and decades of legacy. If you want a turn-based spreadsheet simulator with deep competitive eSports viability, Pokémon has that locked down.

But if you want an adventure? If you want a game that makes you feel like an actual explorer, a squad leader fighting for survival in a dangerous world alongside terrifying creatures? Palworld is the superior game.

Palworld didn't invent the wheel, they just found grandpa and decided to do it again with their own spin.

When Disney released Sky High in 2005, it came out as a mid-budget family superhero movie.

It did decent numbers, became a nostalgic staple for Gen Z and Millennials, and then was forgotten until My Hero Academia made it have a surge of popularity.

I recently stumbled across a piece of fan art on Twitter.

A modern webtoon/manhwa-style redraw of the movie's climax, where the sweet, popular girl Gwen Grayson reveals her true identity, as Royal Pain. Seeing that plot twist illustrated with anime aesthetics, complete with a hilarious, modern "HAG MAXXING" meme panel at the bottom, made it instantly click for me.

Disney was at the wrong time, used the wrong method, and put it in the wrong place. They were sitting on a franchise gold mine and treated it like a disposable one and done.

The premise of Sky High is so silly that it is perfect, it became the exact foundation for one of the biggest anime and manga franchises on the planet: My Hero Academia (MHA).

Had Sky High been launched as a comic book series or a serialized animated cartoon in the 2010s, it would have been the perfect medium for it.

If you pitch the two stories side-by-side, they are functionally identical.

A society where superpowers (quirks/powers) have become modernized, commonplace and integrated into everyday life, creating a new social hierarchy. A prestigious, high-tech academy specifically designed to train the next generation of heroes. A young boy (Will Stronghold/Izuku Midoriya) has no powers of his own at the start of the story. The protagonist must navigate the intense social Darwinism of his school, find a way to awaken his power, and prove that his worth as a hero comes from his heart, not just his genetic lottery.

My Hero Academia took this exact blueprint and ran with it for over hundreds of chapters and a massive multi-season anime and a few movies. The serialized format allowed that premise to breathe, expand, and fully explore. Sky High was stuck being a 100 minute long movie, it had to sprint everything.

The absolute best concept in Sky High is the sorting system. On day one, students are put in a gym, forced to demonstrate their powers in front of a menacing gym teacher (Coach Boomer, played by Bruce Campbell), and immediately segregated into two social classes: Heroes and Sidekicks.

This is a dystopian nightmare, and a serialized cartoon could have spent seasons dissecting the psychological damage of this system.

Will’s friends, who have highly creative but lame combat based powers like glowing in the dark, turning into a guinea pig, spitting acid, and turning into liquid, are instantly treated as second-class citizens. They are literally forced to take different classes and accept a life of being second banana.

Warren Peace could have been a kickass rival. He is the son of a superhero mother and a supervillain father (who was put in jail by Will’s dad). He has fire powers, a brooding attitude, and works at a Chinese restaurant. In the movie, his entire redemption arc had to happen way too fast.

Royal Pain (Gwen Grayson). Her character design, personality and twist reveal are elite anime material. Her backstory is tragic: she was a brilliant technopath (Someone who can control and build machinery with her mind) who was relegated to the "Sidekick" class because her powers weren't flashy or combat based. So she decided to be a villain.

It’s the exact same critique of hero society that My Hero Academia explores through its villains. But because Sky High was a 2005 Disney family movie, Gwen is reduced to a standard villain who wants to turn everyone into babies and make an army of villains. Will's sudden existential dread, realizing he's been making out with a middle-aged villain who went to school with his parents, is played for a laugh. In a serialized comic, that kind of psychological drama, paired with the hilarious fandom banter would fuel internet culture, fan art, and community engagement for years.

If Disney had greenlit Sky High as a Saturday morning cartoon or launched it as a comic book series instead of a theatrical movie, it would have been famous. My Hero Academia didn't succeed just because its concept was good; it succeeded because it used the medium and the space that Sky High was denied.

Also here's the fan art. Absolute comedy.

I have been thinking about it, and if you watch the 1977 movie on its own, it is still a very awesome and special effects heavy movie full of action, but plot wise you feel like you entered mid-way into a movie with no context of what happened the hour before.

And when you look up why, it is very easy but extensive to answer. Lucas was forced to cut down stuff for timming, causing the viewer to miss a ton of vital context.

The deleted "Tosche Station" sequence has Luke Skywalker hanging out with his friends, Biggs, Camie, and Fixer, complaining about his life. According to documentaries, the pacing of the first act was very slow, it delayed the introduction of Darth Vader and the droids, and it risked making Luke look like a whiny, aimless farm boy rather than a proactive protagonist.

But it ignores the massive narrative damage it did to the entire original trilogy. By removing that scene, they accidentally gutted the foundational political context of the entire franchise until the Prequels.

Let’s look at what actually happens in that deleted Tosche Station scene. Biggs talks to Luke outside the power station and reveals that he won't be at the Imperial Academy commission, that he will join the Rebel Alliance. When Luke asks him why he would risk everything to do that, Biggs states that the Empire has started nationalizing commerce and that he warns that the regime is turning free citizens into "tenants, slaving for the greater glory of the Empire," and that if they don't act now, the Empire is going to get involved in every single aspect of daily life.

Without this scene, how is the Empire actually introduced? They wear white plastic armor, they shoot at a Princess, and they have a tall guy who breathes heavily. Then Grand Moff Tarkin casually walks into a Death Star conference room and drops that the Emperor has permanently dissolved the Imperial Senate, and the regional governors now have direct control over their territories.

Then The Empire went from "creepy space cops chasing a rebel corvette" to "dissolving the galactic government and blowing up peaceful planets".

Even the opening text crawl does not give you enough information.

The crawl tells you what is happening right now, but it completely ignores why it started.

But with a slight adjustment, Lucas could have given the 1977 viewer enough info to understand the stakes, tease the larger galactic history, and prime the audience for the Tosche Station context, all while staying brief and cinematic.

Like this:
Democracy is dead. In the ashes of a devastating galactic war, the peaceful Republic was betrayed from within. Orchestrated by a secret SITH cult, fear drove the Senate to surrender absolute power to a new, ruthless Emperor in exchange for a false promise of security.

In response to this creeping nightmare, a desperate Rebel Alliance has formed. Striking from a hidden base, Rebel spies have just won their first victory, stealing the secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the planetary-destroying DEATH STAR.

Custodian of these stolen plans, Princess Leia races home, pursued by the Emperor's most sinister agents....

It lays out the exact mechanism of the political coup, how fear drove people to trade freedom for security. Most importantly, by stating that the Empire is actively seizing control of galactic commerce, the audience is perfectly ready for the movie now.

Also there was a book that came out the year before which gives plenty of context, but it clashed with the movies (How the empire functioned, earth animals, Blue Five, etc).

The prequels were pretty much needed, because otherwise you have three movies with essentially no backstory.

https://preview.redd.it/y3lnz585ibch1.png?width=1919&format=png&auto=webp&s=146a229d981b8f8c175de14ad8ad27eff50ce877

I was playing as Uruguay, formed Great Uruguay and joined the allies. The allies were incompetent and could barely push, I manage to kick Italy out of Africa but then the soviet union fell and ruined my run.

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Darth Vader and 111,000 Imperials crash land in 1933 Kuwait. Can they conquer the Middle East and softlock WWII?

An anomalous hyperspace malfunction tears Darth Vader’s flagship, the Executor, and three Imperial I-class Star Destroyers out of the galaxy, crashing them violently into the deserts of Kuwait in 1933. The local Bedouins and British outposts mistake the catastrophic atmospheric entry for a massive meteorite.

Grand Moff Tarkin assesses Earth. It is a primitive, politically fractured planet rich in crude oil but lacking interstellar infrastructure. With communications to the Empire severed, Tarkin looks at Lord Vader, surveys the landscape, and decides: "Fuck it, we ball."

• The crew has 111k total personnel survived (Navy, Stormtroopers, bridge officers, and surviving Clone veterans).
• Initially, all ships are completely grounded. However, their internal power grids, computer systems, and fabrication bays are functional. All ground vehicles (AT-ATs, AT-STs), speeders, TIE Fighters (usable only as atmospheric air support), and armories are 100% intact.
• Earth is in 1933. The Great Depression is rampant, Hitler just became Chancellor, and the Middle East is a patchwork of European mandates and young kingdoms.

Rules:

• Disney canon feats only.
• Round 1: Can the Empire expedition survive for exactly one year before help arrives?
• Round 2: No rescue is coming. Tarkin decides to expand. Can this force completely conquer and occupy the Middle East?
• Round 3: Can the Empire successfully "softlock" World War II before it begins? Aka can they bully the allies, the axis, the USA, the soviet union into not going to war?
• Round 4: Oh they fly now. The Super Star Destroyer is now fully operational in low-atmosphere and orbit. The other three smaller Star Destroyers will take another year to fix. Can Earth stop them?

Star Wars feels less like exploring a galaxy of infinite possibilities and more like doing data entry for a giant corporate spreadsheet. Every single comic, book, game, and Disney+ show is subjected to this exhausting, suffocating checklist, especially in the prequel era, where most of the content is at.

• Does this break a random line of dialogue spoken by a background alien in 1980?
• Does this ruin the timeline of a character who needs to be in a very specific spot twenty years later?
• Is this character actually allowed to face danger, or do they have a contractually obligated cameo in a spin-off three seasons from now?

The universe is suffocating on predictability.

But, there is already a glimpse of freedom with Star Wars: Visions. It was arguably the best thing they could have done in years, because it didn't give a single damn, not two damns, not three damns about the timeline.

If you want to see how this works, just look at what’s happening in comics right now. Both Marvel and DC have always struggled with the same problem as Star Wars: the crushing weight of their own history. If Batman has eighty years of continuous backstory, how do you write a story that actually shocks people? How do you make a reader genuinely believe he might lose?

Marvel tried this with the Ultimate Universe, it went well... until the writers decided to go completely off the rails with Ultimatum and create one of the lamests and mean-spirited comics ever made.

DC solved this by launching the Absolute Universe.

The concept is beautifully simple:

Take the core DNA of these legendary characters and drop them into a completely separate, parallel continuity. No baggage. No pre-established destiny.

Absolute DC, Batman isn’t a billionaire with a high-tech cave and a butler; he’s a working-class mechanic using raw fury and a giant ax to fight a corrupt system. Superman wasn't raised by loving Kansas farmers; he’s an alien outcast with no safety blanket.

The point isn't just to make things edgy, the point is to make things unpredictable. When you open an Absolute comic, you genuinely do not know if a major character is going to make it to the end of the issue. The safety rails are completely gone because nobody on DC is gonna say "No".

This brings us to the absolute biggest issue plaguing modern Star Wars storytelling: The ilussion of stakes

Because Lucasfilm tends to tell stories between movies, almost every single project is a prequel to something. And prequels are where stakes go to die, especially when it comes to the franchise's biggest heavy hitters.

Vader fights a cool new Jedi, but we all know the Jedi is either dying or running away. Vader cannot die.

Why? Because he has to walk onto the Death Star in Episode IV, and eventually get redeemed by Luke in Episode VI.

Now, imagine an Absolute Universe. Vader shows up in a new, gritty, alternate-continuity comic series. He’s hunting down a remnant of the Jedi Order. But this time, he does not have plot armor. Imagine the sheer, unadulterated shock value of a story where a rogue Jedi actually manages to jump Vader, corners him on some on a planet nobody cares about and straight-up cuts his head off.

What does Palpatine do now that his primary enforcer is dead? Does the Empire fall apart into warlord factions decades ahead of schedule? Does the Rebel Alliance form differently because the big bad wolf is already gone?

If Vader is in actual, tangible danger, this raises the stakes by tenfold. You can't just scroll through the pages knowing he's going to win because of a movie that came out in 1977. If anybody can go out there and kill him off, then every battle matters.

Without the rigid definitions of the Lucasfilm Story Group, you can take all the classic archetypes and completely flip them on their heads to match this unpredictable landscape

An Absolute Universe kills nostalgia dead.

To be totally clear, we don't need to delete the current canon. There are plenty of fans who love the meticulous, interconnected puzzle of the main timeline, and that’s fine. Let that universe keep chugging along. Let them keep making shows about the marginal gaps in history for the fans who want that.

But Star Wars was born out of a spirit of rebellion, risk-taking, and wild imagination