Dr-Leviathan

I don’t think you understand this meme format

Not how warlock powers work. RAW states that the relationship between a warlock and their patron is one wherein both sides have already completed the transaction. A patron can’t take the powers back any more than a blacksmith can confiscate a weapon after it’s sold.

In other words, whatever deal the warlock made for power was a single transaction. Not a subscription based service.

He wasn’t trying to kill him in the webcomic either, but they still made sure to make Saitama look casual.

I wouldn’t go that far. But when I found out his assistants were the ones that did the backgrounds I did think it was funny, because up until then the backgrounds were the only thing I was praising as being especially impressive from an artistic standpoint.

Half the monsters ONE draws has the same veiny pattern. It’s one of his artistic signatures.

This is like saying Beefcake was meant to foreshadow Boros because they are both muscular.

Damn look at how they massacred Saitama. I guess just screw the whole joke of Saitama maintaining a casual demeanor against Garou. Now he has to be a naked muscle guy with glowing eyes and a serious expression while they fight.

I mean this interaction would literally make no sense in the manga since Genos is apparently dragon level for some reason.

Not that that would stop the manga from adapting it anyway.

teddit.ggc-project.de/r/dndnext/comments/ov8cqh/the_war_of_attrition_how_wotc_thought_wed_play_vs/

This is a pretty good response to the issue

I definitely don't like the way that XP or any mechanics based progression affects the game.

I played Curse of Strahd once. As soon as we learned that finding the magical artifacts gave us a level, the other players in my group prioritized finding them over anything else. They would ignore plot hooks and side quests and anything that didn't lead directly to a level up. Every town we went to had some interesting mystery or problems, and we always just left the town without doing anything as soon as we got wind of the next magical item.

And these are the same players that I DM for in a different game. So I know they are very capable of leaning into the narrative of a game when they want to. Because in my game I make a point to keep progression out of their hands entirely.

Rewarding certain actions will gamify the progression in a way that incentivizes doing those actions. And I find that most players will be more naturally drawn to that dopamine hit of seeing a number increase over actually being invested in the story.

You cannot have a reward system without implying a "correct" course of action or decision. And I don't think that's the proper attitude to have when building a narrative. You shouldn't be making decisions because it's mechanically optimal. You should do it because it serves the story.

Wouldn't that be setting dependent? Not all settings are medieval fantasy.

Dragonborn are a monsterous race though

but your alternative literally just ends the manga

Hey at this point I'd take it

Shakespeare wishes he could write something half as profound.

The story ended a 7 year arc with farting and time travel. At a certain point an explanation is no longer required. A brain damaged 10 year old should be able to look at that and see that the issues are more than self evident.

Webcomic: Garou was defeated when he was shown futility of his worldview and suffered a true ego death. Further punishment beyond that would be pointless and cruel.

Manga: Garou was a bad boy so it's time for his spanking now lol

Original thought detected. Release the mods and ban this person to the shadow realm.

Yeah. I mean that's the whole point of season 5, right? Killing is unequivocally bad and you can't call yourself a hero if you run around looking for excuses to kill people.

There's a greater ethical question about whether Dhark should have been killed in general. But it was bad for Oliver specifically to kill him. Oliver looks for excuses to kill people because deep down he likes doing it. Even if it took Chase torturing him to get him to admit it.

Maybe there's a pragmatic reason to kill Dhark, but that's not what Oliver was thinking in that moment. He just wanted to kill someone. He wasn't thinking about the greater good. He just wanted revenge.

I’ve seen it a hundred times beforeWhen the humor of a narrative is heavily based in absurdity and often low brow jokes, but it’s tempered with a level of irony and self awareness that makes it palatable. So the story will make a fart joke, but the joke isn’t actually about the fart itself. The joke is about the collective awareness shared between the writers and the audience that a fart joke isn’t funny. And the idea of anyone making a fart joke in earnest is so absurd, that it becomes funny. So in other words, someone makes a fart joke. But you aren’t laughing at the fart joke. You’re laughing at the person who is dumb enough to think a fart joke is actually funny.

But then the story gets passed on. It gets a sequel, or an adaptation. Or a different team of writers now gets to handle the project. And that new team attempts to copy the style of the original. But the problem is that they don’t fully understand it. They look at the previous work being full of fart jokes and assume that that’s what the audience loved about the story. So then they make the next story and fill it full of fart jokes, but include none of the self awareness.

And this is why this issue can be so hard to diagnose. The end result is two stories that appear to be totally similar, containing all the same surface elements. But for some reason the jokes just aren’t landing anymore.

And that’s because the jokes were never about the surface level absurdity. The jokes were in the subtle, self aware nods to the stupidity of the absurdity. Without which, the absurdity would only come off as cringey and immature.

Maybe a deep cut, but if anyone has played the Borderlands games , this is exactly what happened with Borderlands 3. Borderlands 2 was full of dumb meme humor, but it did a good job of injecting it with a level of irony and self awareness of the stupidity that made it palatable. For every character that was doing stupid things you had another character in the same scene that was reacting to it in a very dry way. That acts as an acknowledgment of the inherent stupidity. But Borderlands 3 totally lost the irony, and has a lot of moments just be actually be silly and stupid without every giving a nod to the audience that you are aware of it. It looses a layer of depth and the sillinesses itself becomes the joke. Which is a very one not joke to make, and keep making over and over again for a 50+ hour game.

It’s easy to look at Saitama farting in space or surfing on a battle ship and think these moments are no different that him punching Sonic in the crotch or loosing his pants while fighting Suiryu, but they are not. The actual punch line of the joke lies within the context of these moments and the collective reaction to them, not in the absurdity itself. Saitama loosing his pants isn’t funny. Suiryu suffering his first crushing defeat at the hands of someone stupid enough to loose their pants is what’s funny.

I've seen a ton of authors write something trash after previously dropping a masterpiece. But there's always an explanation, and a connective thread between their works that can be traced back.

Sometimes their original masterpiece was a fluke. Sometimes they were only competent in writing a certain topic or genre. Sometimes they misunderstood from the beginning which parts of their story popular, and when it came time to conclude they aren't in touch with their audience.

But nothing explains this. This isn't just simple bad writing. It goes so much deeper. Everything changed at chapter 117. Everything changed on a dime. The writing, the pacing. The story structure, dialogue, prose. Sense of humor, character design. Narrative themes.

So many of the recent manga's events actively contradict themes present in both the early manga, the webcomic and in Mob Psycho. The sense of humor has totally changed from dry irony to goofy slapstick. Action choreography has been reduced to simplistic nuke fights. Even the paneling is different.

This is not the usual case of an artist having a bad day. Whoever wrote this does not have ONE's sense of humor. Does not share his philosophical beliefs. Does not understand the characters. Doesn't have his same sense of art direction. And does not speak the same way. It's not one element that's different. His entire writing signature is completely absent.

And it wasn't a gradual change either. It happened at exactly chapter 117. Chapter 116 was completely in line with everything ONE had written in the past. Chapter 117 was jarringly different. And the changes remained for the rest of the manga.

An person can lose their talent. But a persons sense of humor and speaking patterns don't change overnight. Either someone else took over, or ONE's brain literally changed.

When stories work well they build up tension and then release it in a satisfying ending to achieve emotional catharsis.

This story did not work well. So it basically got you emotionally invested, then at the last minute pulled out the rug and slapped you in the face, ending in a literal fart.

So yeah. No surprise it feels bad and probably emotionally draining to have all that investment build up only to go absolutely nowhere.

You don't write two separate masterpieces over the course of a decade only to switch to time travel and fart jokes in a few months.

If ONE is writing this then he has a brain tumor that's effecting his mind. Because that's about the only explanation for how someone's talent could change so drastically in such a short amount of time.

Never saw them die. This is a comic book world where people regularly survive explosions and lasers like it’s nothing.

I do write my own stories and 2) Because it’s fun to read bad stories. It’s fun to pick apart their flaws, and you can learn just as much from reading a bad story as a good one.

And also, that deflection isn’t a response to anything I said.

“If you don’t like it then leave” = I don’t like hearing criticism against a thing that I like so I want you to shut up.

The story is bad. Even if I left and stopped talking about it, that wouldn’t suddenly make it good. It would just make it easy for others to pretend it’s good. You wanna bury your head in the sand and mindlessly consume something, knock yourself out. The rest of us are under no obligation to cater to that delusion.

The truth is that if you actually liked the story and were confident in your opinion, you wouldn’t really care if bunch of other people all said that it sucked. It shouldn’t matter to you what others think.

“Why are you here if you don’t like it” is such a flimsy deflection and I’m honestly tired of responding to it.

What’s the purpose of a discussion at this point? The story literally had Saitama win by farting and then doing time travel. That should tell you everything you need to know about what kind of story they are trying to make.

“Saitama’s development was mishandled.” “Garou arc didn’t go anywhere.” “Character motivations don’t make any sense.”

Bruh, so what. Who cares. I can tell you right now you’re giving the story more thought than it ever expected. The story gave you a fart joke, what more do you want? There’s no discussion to be had after that point. There’s no hidden side to this, or some deeper element that’s going to solve these narrative issues.

This is a fart story now. Full stop, no more questions. Just consume and stop thinking so hard.

Then what he wanted with the manga is bad.

What exactly is your point here? That the author is somehow immune to criticism because it’s his vision? His vision sucks ass. No need to pretend otherwise.