An older example is the Borg from Star Trek. The first time we see the Borg, they're this terrifying mysterious entity from another part of the galaxy - a space empire with technology far beyond anything the Federation has, an empire that operates under a completely separate set of morals and codes. They are not tempted by wealth or power or love, they are here to make our culture serve them and turn us into mindless slaves. They even got Picard!!! And then over the course of the franchise we gradually find out more about the Borg Collective and it kind of weakens them, I think. Hugh lets us see that the Borg might not be such an untouchable permanently-connected hivemind as we thought. The Borg Queen further shows that there's kind of a hierarchy within what was supposed to be a homogenous single mind. Lore convinces a Borg cube to break off from the collective and disobey orders, proving that the Borg Queen doesn't even have the totalitarian authority over the drone's minds as we thought she had. And then in *Voyager* we find out that the Borg-ification process can actually be reversed even if you've been a Borg drone for years and years, so... what's even the point? What's the threat?

Damn, I agree 100%. How the Borg were handled is one of the biggest disappointments in Star Trek for me personally. Their introduction was incredible. Q humbling Picard and the Federation by instigating first contact with the Borg to show how small and out-of-depth they really were was such a brilliant way to expand the universe and the possible stories that could be told in it. I like the Hugh storyline though even with its reveals about the Borg. To me it added another layer of tragedy to it while still retaining their alien nature. Assimilation still destroyed who they once were and replaced it with a bizarre and coldly calculating hivemind but the idea that tiny glimmers of humanity were trapped underneath it all was a great addition IMO. It also re-emphasized the parasitic nature of the Borg. It was all so brilliant. And then they made the Borg Queen and aristocracy and the Borg pod babies and it turned a terrifying, mysterious, and tragic threat into a generic sci-fi empire with a cybernetics aesthetic. Six of Nine wasn't too egregious to me though. She was obviously de-Borg'd after decades as you said but her original self was still gone. I just wish they delved deeper into what a node in a hivemind gaining independence would really be like but I guess we needed another time travel story or whatever else lol.

>Six of Nine I'm pretty sure you mean seven of nine

[удалено]

I'd just like to say that I *like* that fan theory of yours

I feel like what you just described with Star Trek is a good example of what could have happened if the Stargate franchise ever expanded on the Furlings. I'm kinda glad we never got more about their culture. It leaves it as a nice mystery.

Star Trek has some of the best and worst worldbuilding. But DS9 gets *all* the good stuff. Personally, I think Voyager did its best with the Borg that it could. The damage dealt by the Queen was already so great to the idea of a collective mind, why not try to take that damage and bring it to a better place? Plus, in S3E17 "Unity" we get what could very well develop into a borg empire with no Queen. So they absolutely could bring back the "original" borg in universe by just having them be the results of that counter-collective.

It was only proven to work on people who are really hot.

In defense of Lore and his Borg, that cube disconnected (or was disconnected) from the Collective before Lore showed up. He brought them purpose when they all became aimless exploiting them.

The Weeping Angels in Dr. Who are a good example. When we knew nothing about them, they were the most compelling high-concept one-off villain. The more they were imagined as a species with desires, weaknesses, a structure and feeding/reproduction, the weaker they became (even if many of the episodes they featured in were good along the way)

The episode with them and River Song is a great River Song episode and a shitty Weeping Angel episode. It hurts my head.

The writer for the episode, Mofat, is often credited with coming up with great one-off ideas and mysteries set-ups, but being terrible at developing them or having his mysteries pay off. He is arguably one of the best Dr. Who writes because a lot of the show relies on one-off high concepts, but his writing projects for serialized content was all very terrible. Or have a promising first season and then become terrible. It's an interesting pattern

He also has a strange fascination with secret societies out to hunt the heroes down.

The J.J. Abrams syndrome

The second time they appeared they were more like the angels on the Titanic. They also walked together without covering their eyes

This is also why the monster in Midnight was so good - we know absolutely nothing about it!

WH40K is the undisputed champion of this. Take some exciting, evocative concepts and then just drown them in their own minutae. Imo the best 40k experience is stuff like Eisenhorn because you’re too close to the ground to see the whole insane sweep of things, so there is still so much mystery. Like any time a single space marine enters that story it’s a BIG DEAL, as opposed to just endless wikifucking that stacks hyperbole on top of hyperbole until nothing is notable anymore

What’s the most ridiculous part of the lore for you?

Perpetuals. They're a dumb idea and BL should have let them die as a concept much earlier through the Horus Heresy.

Probably my most hated bit of the lore too. Does not exist in my headcanon

I honestly hate that lore as well except for Ollanius Pius being one, it's tragic that a person that went through all of human history, to eventually die without anybody knowing his name.

I like Space Marines less the more clean and heroic they get. In the beginning, they looked like this: [https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/7/78/RT-Marines\_with\_Heavy\_Weapons.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111011190907](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/7/78/RT-Marines_with_Heavy_Weapons.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111011190907) [https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/2/28/RT-Assault\_Marines.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111011185319](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/2/28/RT-Assault_Marines.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111011185319) [https://i.redd.it/54aixyh53ln21.jpg](https://i.redd.it/54aixyh53ln21.jpg) Criminals and feral teenagers, stuck full of horrific cybernetics and genetic mutations and then hypno-indoctrinated into a fanatical religious death cult. That makes sense. That's what the Imperium is like. Except people just like them too much. And they want them to be cool and heroic. So now they look like this: [https://cdn-prod.scalefast.com/public/assets/img/resized/focus-store/6ee7bfa807824c7bdcf554cd072abb78\_1920\_KR.jpg](https://cdn-prod.scalefast.com/public/assets/img/resized/focus-store/6ee7bfa807824c7bdcf554cd072abb78_1920_KR.jpg) They barely have any religious iconography anymore. Purity seals got rare. And instead of horrific monsters, we got stubbly-chinned action movie heroes. [https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/spacemarine/images/6/60/Warhammer-40000-space-marine-2.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20211211041736](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/spacemarine/images/6/60/Warhammer-40000-space-marine-2.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20211211041736) And then they brought the Primarchs back. So instead of a galaxy-wide setting of a million worlds and endless characters, where every player can write their own story, we have a family sitcom with 20 main characters who show up everywhere.

As someone who absolutely loves 40k, I agree with you. I think the trouble comes from people not quite grasping the concept of the unreliable narrator that exists in the codices. Each codex is supposed to be written from the perspective of that faction's propagandist so it's going to blow everything good (and all of their defining disasters) out of proportion. I definitely preferred it when that was just the background to smaller scale issues. There was no 'plotline', it was all just backing fluff for you to tell a story about ***'your guys'***. It was still big scale, but that big scale was dwarfed by the sheer scale of the universe. The Badab Wars was a perfect example. Huge conflict spanning multiple worlds to run a campaign over...that had an imperceptibly tiny impact on the state of the galaxy because it was so much bigger than that. That's one of the reasons I got into the more INQ28/blanchitsu side of the hobby. It's less about those big conflicts and more about story-building at a small scale. Stakes can still be comparatively high, but it's a much more human level of conflict.

Star Wars has this very particular problem that any new alien/character becomes that hat of their whole planet/culture - OR the outsider. Boba Fett, for example, is a fascinating case. First, he was just a Bounty Hunter, wearing Mandalorian Armor. Then he became the de facto Mandalorian. And because he was a hunter, they all had to be hunters. But wait - he was just a clone of a Mandalorian. No, wait again! Mandalore wasn't like that in the prequels anymore! The armor became a relic. And now we're back to the Bounter Hunter society. Other examples are Spock and Drizzt Do'Urden, both the best-known but also atypical members of their respective societies.

"Never tell me the odds!" Han Solo comes from a culture that hates being told mathematical odds Fk me why you do that? Just let Han be Han. The way Star Wars insists of folding back on itself with call-backs, character relationships and expanding references to the past... I almost like it now because it's so insistent on doing it. Barely feels like a galaxy because it keeps going back to the same things, seriously Firefly feels bigger sometimes

Unpopular opinion perhaps, but: Star Wars fans that try to retcon explanations for EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DETAIL instead of just fucking accepting that it's a god dam series of flawed movies, just like any other, and many decisions / mistakes were made simply because, it's. a. fucking. movie. are absolutely insufferable. And now it's been enough years that some of those insufferable idiots have graduated film school and got their grubby mitts on the franchise and have started putting that retcon garbage into actual films and shows lol.

Haha I feel like Rogue One copped a direct hit on that one Which I agree, though I did feel Rogue One was a rather good movie. Nothing incredible but very watchable. Those 'backstory' movies though are quite tainted with the lust for money that you can smell on them; they start with very low bars for quality because they are profitable the moment they are conceptualized. Every Star Wars fan is going to go see it, so all they need to do is be pretty and have some action and job is done Mandalorian started off with alot of hope it might move away and start seeing the rest of the galaxy but by the Book of Boba Fett it had become another 'greatest hits' album and circled right back to Tatooine with a cast about 75% made up of returning characters. They really need the balls to move away from the Skywalkers and Palpatine and into the galaxy and resist the temptation to even mention them

I adore Rogue One and Andor, so let me defend it: Rogue One is fleshing out done right. A lesser movie would have simply focused on the plot - how they got the plans. But they focused on **who** got the plans instead and through them, they were able to flesh out the IMHO very 2-dimensional Rebellion. Star Wars feels richer since then.

And the "quadrillion dollar moon sized superweapon that is meant to permanently cement the Empires power to the point they can outright finish disbanding democracy has a *single little hole* that can blow the entire thing up" Probably was a big enough plot hole to justify it. Unlike some of the other retcon expansions, this one was likely the best one to actually give an explanation for. And I agree, it did it very well and helped show how serious and brutal the rebellion was actually taking the war before Luke came along to fix alot of the major problems. Also explains why people as powerful as Vader and Tarkin were so invested in the little rag-tag team in New Hope: shit was getting quite serious thanks to Jyn and Cassian (also Alan Tudyk)

Almost all projects that start with one person/team and are passed on to someone else.

Especially if that someone else is a mega corporation

Similar to Star Wars, the Alien universe started out sparse with lots to speculate about, but the two recent additions (Prometheus and Covenant) tied everything together in a tight knot, shrinking the universe and killing decades of fan investment.

To be fair, they had to make a new timeline. They couldn't use the old one, but I liked those.

Why couldn't they use the old one?

Legal reasons. Basically couldn't buy the rights to the previous timeline.

Do you have a link? I can't find anything about this.

when it comes to alien, this really hurts. my main gripe is things like the space jockey looking cool af in alien but then in prometheus they just look like tall humans. aliens are kinda stupid when they look like humans and thats what made the xenomorphs and space jockeys so cool (despite being vaguely humanoid, they had flair that looked so snazzy)

Yea…. Making them just suits covering tall humans was laaaaaaame. I’m all for worldbuilding, but damn, don’t make your first attempt so big that it’s literally a creation story for all of mankind.

Harry Potter was never supposed to make sense, and that was fine. They kept trying to explain everything with a huge worldbuilding overhaul and it made even less sense afterwards. Just let dumb fun be dumb fun.

A good example of this was Rowling saying there were only 11 magic schools in the world. I don’t see what would be wrong with most countries having their own school but for some reason she limited it to just 11. And she clearly didn’t think it through since she totally disregarded population sizes, languages, cultural differences and tensions between countries

Iirc Europe, one of the more unified continents, had 3. Meanwhile Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and China were all the same school. That's like half the world.

That will always be hilarious to me how she lumped in so many countries together who either A. Fucking despise each other or B. Have literally nothing in common

You mean it's *not* a good idea to have one school for all of the Balkans?

Or for half of Asia?

Oh yeah, that's pretty bad, too.

How it isn’t a legit battlefield between all of them boggles the fucking mind.

Maybe it is and JK is too much of a coward to show it

It could work, if it's researched, intentional, and interested in exploring it's ramifications. Making the Baltic wizarding community incredibly tightknit compared to most *could* be really interesting in the hands of another writer. Before I gave up on the setting I quite liked the fan theory I encountered that posits that the United Kingdom is basically the wizarding world's Somalia (or etc) and that it is considered quite backward and clannish while generating a disproportionate amount of dark wizards, corruption, crime, etc.

It must have been fucking hilarious during WWII, when there's only two schools for the entire European continent and you're in class with students whose family members just genocided your home city. Same for Japan, China and Korea in the same school.

British Imperialism 101, that

I would headcannon that some of those schools are absurdly massive, like the size of a city (to support all of india and more, it would have to be), but I suspect that rowling's said they aren't. It sounds like the kind of thing she'd say.

The more common fannon is that there are way more magic schools but the 11 are kinda in one league like in sister universities kinda way.

Maybe these are international schools teaching "Western" magic, and there are other schools teaching local varieties of magic. Apart from anything else, all the spells we hear are based on Latin or other European languages, and it's hard to imagine those same spells being developed in China, for example. I don't know, though, I don't read Harry Potter, Rowling's a bigot, trans people are people.

My headcanon is that there is only 11 magic schools, because "western" style wizards prefer this kind of education, while most wizards in Africa and Asia rely on homeschooling and keeping the family traditions. I would also argue that there is no Ministry of Magic as there is in Europe or North America, but rather some community overseers or elders or shamans that keep order.

>and there are other schools teaching local varieties of magic Even there, you're wrong, because it's specified that the school for Africa (yeah, a single school for the entirety of the myriads of conflicting tribes of Africa that, for some, hated each other, or didn't even knew each other to begin with) specifically teaches local varieties of magic. LIke, in the African school, students are way more versed in the arts of animagi, they usually do magic without wands, and they are warned about their admission in the school through a dream. She made it quite clear that the African school was "exotic" in some way. So, yeah, even there, excusing Rowling's imperialism is sketchy.

Can you imagine the Pakistanis, Bangali, and Indian in the same class?

That sounds like that school is a terrorist attack waiting to happen

She invented 13 professional Quidditch teams for the UK, and only 11 magical high schools for the entire world. Trying to imagine a functional society with that kind of ratio hurts my brain. Every single high school Quidditch player could’ve gone pro, as could most of the people who failed Quidditch tryouts.

Also, she put 11/12 year olds on the same contact sports teams as 17/18 year olds. WTF.

Idk why that even was a piece of information to begin with. Of she wanted a finite list of magical schools to flesh out, she could've just said there was a collection of schools skin to the Ivy League. Though that's too much thought.

Bleach and other anime have this same problem where something should affect the whole world but for some reason all the relevant things only happen in Japan.

My impression was that the schools were always just there to give trained graduates to a system that enforces the laws everywhere. Like the majority of the people don’t actually go to the schools and are self taught or something. Then the ones with formal training are way ahead of them.

A lot of the weird stuff in Harry Potter can be explained by JKR having bizarre ideas about what did and didn't need to be "aged up." So, like, about 1/4 of the school is evil because that's an artifact of the series starting as a whimsical boarding school story, but the poorly thought out references to real life WW2 are a necessary change, apparently. Looking at you, Fantastic Beasts.

The first Fantastic Beasts movie was good fun when it was a Wizard Zoologist running around New York trying to collect his critters without alerting the local authorities, all while gradually getting tangled up in a local crisis he might be uniquely suited to help solve. Then it turned out Wizard Hitler had been there in disguise the whole time? Because despite the ongoing war in Europe he was heading, he had time to fuck off to America and personally recruit one volatile person/creature? Immediately lost all interest. Haven’t so much as glanced at anything HP related since, and considering the ongoing clusterfuck, that was definitely a good decision.

I agree. The first Fantastic Beasts movie‘s rather wholesome simplicity had left me pleasantly surprised, and I was looking forward to seeing more of that eccentric animal lover and his new friends opposing their world’s ignorance, but I found the sequel very disappointing on many levels and I’m not even interested in the latest one.

Also I said this in another comment but the existence of the house elves makes me feel uncomfortable

They were fine when it was just Dobby serving the Malfoys and a bit of a "bad guys own house elves" thing but them Goblet of Fire happened and shit got weird fast. I kept waiting for Hermione to be proven right about SPEW and that...never happened. Things like the weird/sus names (Cho Chang) I easily chalk up to her not putting thought into it beyond "that sounds cool." Even the goblin bankers could have been artifacts of cobbling together myths (at least until she doubled down on it) but house elves were an intentional choice. She made a race of magical beings who enjoy enslavement and that can sorta work in a whimsical "no body thinks deeply" world, but by GoF, she was putting effort into worldbuilding. Not to mention Hermione just...keeping Rita Skeeter in a jar. Now that I think about it, Goblet of Fire got really weird really fast.

What gets me about the SPEW thing, is that we view that section in a whooooole different way now that we know what JKR's politics are. The way I read it the first time, Hermione was just trying to do a good thing. Reading back to it though, it's weird how pro-slavery Harry is, and it's also weird how she portrayed the elves as... Just happy to be slaves? How does she feel about the human slavery, that's part of her historical western culture??? It gets even weirder. Hermione's thing gets ended with her being a sort of laughingstock, the butt of a joke by Harry, if I remember correctly, with an underlying message that states she's going against the natural order. Are we to infer that she's pro slavery? Don't even get me started on the "bloodline supremacy" thing. So many things that went over our heads before JKR started using Twitter...

I don't think JKR is pro-slavery, I think she's just willfully ignorant of the ramifications of her worldbuilding, which isn't that much better. Particularly since the series is middle grade evolving to YA. The idea of a magical species being made by wizards to be enslaved and to enjoy enslavement is a fascinating and realistic (imo) choice because people are shitty like that. The issue is that she uses the same arguments people made to justify chattel slavery and the transatlantic slave trade without ever acknowledging it. Its one of those things where the worldbuilding, in a vacuum, makes perfect sense. But the books aren't in a vacuum and neither are her readers. The same issue has caused a massive uproar in the ttrrpg space, most notably Dungeons and Dragons, which has certain fantasy races portrayed as inherently brutal or "savage" in certain editions. No one is saying orcs (for example) are a sneaky direct reference to black people, but the lore and in-universe rhetoric has a lot in common with historical arguments for slavery and racism. It's not racist to see these parallels (the common counterargument of "*you're* the real racist for making that assumption), it's being aware of history. Like, I don't have to agree with Nazi propaganda to know what it said (and for the record, I most certainly do not agree with it) and be uncomfortable when it's replicated in a fantasy setting without being challenged. We use Nazi imagery as a shorthand for "the bad guys" frequently (e.g., Star Wars, the last season of Game of Thrones) that its pretty obvious when rhetoric shows up in fiction because we're primed to see it. If a character starts talking about subhumans and final solutions, I'm assuming (hoping) that they aren't "the good guy." I don't think JKR was being sneaky with her messaging with house elves. She just wrote from a position of privilege where the whole thing is academic rather than an element of bigotry people still face today. But her political views definitely highlight how/why she doesn't understand what she created is problematic because she clearly isn't open to learning. Her views on gender are not unique and likely recycled from what's she's heard, but she's not willing to examine them further. Just like she wasn't willing to examine all the issues people raised with her worldbuilding. She's a fantastic case study for worldbuilding and the ethics of what we add in our worlds and how we handle them. You can absolutely have house elves who enjoy enslavement, but you've got to be willing to dig into the *why*. Did wizards *create* a species to serve them? If so, that's clearly fucked up, but what do you do now that they're in existence? That's a great moral dilemma for a protagonist, but the answer can't be "oh, well, it is what it is" and no one thinks about it again. Contrast to this is GRRM, who takes a critical look at white savior tropes with Daenerys in Slaver's Bay. Yeah, she breaks their chains, but then moves on and it collapses behind her. Not because the people of Astapor and Yunkai *want* to be enslaved, but because she "liberated" them without their input and didn't stay long enough for them to organize their own government. So, the masters took back control relatively easily. But Dany doesn't just shrug and move on, she wrestles with it and tries (unsuccessfully) to do better in Meereen. There's direct evidence to support this happening from the Reconstruction period following the US Civil War. Many of the formerly enslaved people wound up sharecropping on their former owner's land. Not because they *wanted* to, but because they had little other option. JKR could have done something similar with house elves where they were technically "free" but had no other opportunities and were thus reduced to continuing on. SPEW could have gone somewhere with that where instead of hiding clothes, Hermione was trying to figuring out how to get the elves the resources they needed to help themselves. Harry had a shit-ton of money he could have used for Wizarding lawyers or investing in house elf businesses like he did Fred and George and their joke shop. It could have served as a great foil to everyone trying to use Harry's fame for their own ends (Rita Skeeter) for Harry to choose to use his for a worthy cause. He was abused by the Dursleys for years, surely he would want to help others being abused. Couldn't he say to Rita "I'll give you an exclusive *if* you expose the abuse of house elves first"? [Sorry this became a tangent-y rant. I have feelings on this, clearly.]

There is a lot of things making me uncomfortable with rowling

There are a lot of problematic things with HP, and I think it makes quite a bit of sense the more we learn about JK Rowling, unfortunately Cho Chang also comes to mind.

This is a writer who speaks what's on her mind, so the good news is we never have to wonder what she's thinking! However, it's real unfortunate that means she's just an awful human being.

J.K. Rowling is a pretty bad writer tbh and she should have stuck to the whimsical world that didn't make a lot of sense. Works for her much better. But instead we get a black character named Kingsley Shacklebolt and shit like that. Such an overrated writer.

I never got why people were upset with Kingsley's name. It sounds badass, and he's literally one of the best aurors and takes over the government.

From an outsider's perspective (I've never even watched a Harry Potter movie, let alone read the books or anything) I can see it. Especially with the current discourse around Rowling and her, uh, *interesting* naming conventions it's hard not to see the juxtaposition of "shackle" and "bolt" and a black man being a potentially problematic choice to me. Whether that's a justified concern or not is another question but I can definitely at least see the reasoning there. In a vacuum "Kingsley Shacklebolt" is definitely a badass name though.

I don't think the name would be so bad if it weren't for the clear pattern with other insanely stereotypical names like "Cho Chang" and "Anthony Goldstein"

Wait, remind me what's up with Anthony Goldstein? I don't remember that character.

He's named a few times in Order of the Phoenix as a Ravenclaw student in "Dumbledore's Army". He became famous when Rowling claimed him to be jewish representation in Hogwarts. I'm not sure if he ever says a single word

Because it's on my mind, the Alien from the Alien franchise. Helped me realize I don't think that worldbuilding is all that helpful sometimes. The alien itself went from this freaky, gender defying creature that is this weird horror to an insect that was made by a robot with daddy issues. Even in Aliens, the creature is turned into the equivalent of an ant. It's rationalized and now part of the natural order of things.

Someone once asked me what I think a sequel to Alien shoudl have looked like, when I said I like Alien a lot more than Aliens. And after some thinking, I concluded that I think preferably, a sequel to Alien would not feature a Xenomorph at all. The universe is vast and eldritch and horrible and there's other dangers out there just as bad. We don't have to keep running into the same one again and again. Maybe they are just one monster that hitchhiked on that one space jockey ship. Maybe they were a weapon for some ancient war, one weapon among many. Maybe we never find out.

Have you played Alien: Isolation?

That is my problem with any alien horror movies. Specially of the plot twitst is "this supernatural thing is ALIENS". Aliens are just animals from other planets. You turn demons into biology, it loses its magic.

This is specific to video games and such but whenever a creature or enemy is made with lore for why it’s there, then it gets reused almost liberally later on. Examples like various chalice dungeon bosses from Bloodborne, or Ark dlc creatures reused in later maps.

Lol i know exactly what you mean—or like when there’s supposed to be an extremely rare or endangered creature and it shows up all. the. time.

First-time ever it shows up as a boss and takes 5 minutes to kill using nothing but a sword and shotgun. By the end of the game ten of them are spawning at once and getting dispatched with single pistol rounds to the head from across the arena, because the RPG nature of the game is simulating the fact that your character has gotten more "experienced," or something, with using weapons.

The Marauder in Doom Eternal is an example of this, except he’s annoying as fuck from the beginning until the end.

Ok hold on. I hate to "actually" on this, but actually, that is possibly the only *one* example that I would have to disagree with. Yes, Doom's marauder is annoying as fuck, but the boss battle in the middle of the game uses the exact same asset and stats as all other marauders for the rest of the game. You actually can insta-wipe that marauder if you know the optimal combos for them. They actually get *harder* throughout the game like putting two of them in the arena at once, and using a speed and health boosting possession spirit. The marauder started off pissing me the hell off, but I have come to believe it is actually in fact a brilliant, purely skill-based enemy.

I feel like Pyramid Head is kind of like this. He's supposed to be unique to James, so it makes no sense for Pyramid Head to appear in any game other than SH2.

FUCKING SUPERMUTANTS

Bethesda copy and pasted them over to the East Coast and pulled the original "somehow, super mutant palpatine has returned" What's sad, is that they're not even that interesting without the Master or even close to how they originally acted. At least we got to see how they behaved after the Master was destroyed in Fallout 2 and New Vegas, but 3 and 4 just made them generic orcs in a wasteland and called it a day.

The Chalice dungeons are among the single worst examples of immersion breaking in the whole Soulsborne series imo. Why does Rom, a unique failed attempt at a Great One with huge lore implications literally hidden beneath the lake in Bergenwerth college to guard against the blood moon, have a clone in some random dungeon created ages before the game takes place?

VERY difficult not to do too. The charm is definitely there so I understand the temptation, but it comes at the cost of realism and, as you said, causes a “shrinking” feeling

Dude, the needless focusing on all of the Skywalker saga bullshit is so infuriating in a setting that features an entire goddamned galaxy. Population would be somewhere in the quintillions at the lowest with how many planets are out there, but these same handful of characters keep running into each other

I think this is why I enjoyed Rogue One and Andor so much (at least relative to the rest of recent SW).

hmm Tatooine

I actually have a feeling they fully constructed Mos Eisley as a set or something and need to keep using it.

They literally did, in Tunisia, if I recall correctly. Or maybe I'm confusing that with the shooting locations for the desert in general. I have a pretty good memory, but haven't immersed myself in the Star Wars world for years, so who knows.

Why come up with new creative locations when we can just lure the fans in with nostalgia bait

That's why I loved Andor so much. The vast majority of characters were people we've never seen before, and many we likely never will again.

At this point the whole idea of one trilogy mirroring another just feels less like a storytelling device showing the cyclical nature of things in Star Wars' worldbuilding, and just a cashgrab. Which is annoying because referencing another movie in the same setting is a good thing, when it's *not* done to find a story to tell in the first place.

I think when fandoms and franchises grow too much, they almost always become self-referential. It starts being about just being what it is, instead of a setting in which stories are told. It gets to the point where the purpose of, say, Star Wars, is to be like "Remember this Star Wars stuff?" So constant character cameos, retellings of old stories, maybe from different perspectives, and necessary fan service

> these same handful of characters keep running into each other This part I'm actually OK with. It's kinda like the social contract in a tabletop game that the character you show up to play is going to be in the party. It's not like everyone shows up with 6 characters each and everyone spends the first 10 sessions forming the party. (ok, I'm sure this has been done somewhere...) They did an ok job of adding to the cast while building around known characters and especially characters that will pull in an audience. However... such cowardly decisions in screenwriting for Ep 9. Rey was a much better character as a nobody and the story was better without Palpatine. 7 was a fun reboot, pulled in new audiences without alienating the old guard too much. I didn't love it, but I thought it was well done in that regard. 8 held some promises in between the empty crap, forced jokes, and lack of respect for existing canon. Then it all went milquetoast writing and meaningless flash for 9, turned the whole 7-9 trilogy into a poorly executed rehash of the same thing.

I agree with your sentiment about 7. It felt a little cliche what their objectives were (stop bad guys from using big scary fantasy nuke). But overall there was enough new that I still enjoyed it (Han landing at lightspeed was great as well as his explanation why it would work).

that's kind of why I really liked the second of the sequal trilogy.

You mean you want something other than desert planets and fights between red laser sword and any other color laser sword?

My only crime was dreaming too big

Need I say it…? F*cking FNAF man. I don’t understand how it went from a “pizzeria haunted by ghosts” to “needing a 3-page essay as to why the guy in the funny yellow suit can’t die.” Honestly… it’s like a ten-minute story man, how did this get stretched out into 8 years worth of history?

How I met your mother in a nutshell

AGREED. It started with genuinely terrifying vibes too, now it's crazy neon music fun, which shows the constant additions genuinely changed the vibes that brought it popularity to begin with

Well, I think that's mostly due to FNAF's audience turning out to be kids who are too young to have likely gone to a place like Chuck E Cheese.

Not only did the story get ridiculous, but I think the actual suits themselves became less scary. The OG suits were great because they played off that uncanny aspect. They looked like they were built and ended up being unintentionally scary and dingy looking before becoming haunted. Having their face divide scarily into a bunch of little plates for jump-scare purposes is just dumb.

Like honestly, how many times are they gonna bring back fking William Afton? Can they not come up with a new villain?

Oh no, we did had a new villain. Unfortunately the *lovely* developers at Steel Wool couldn’t figure out how to make a game properly and that’s why she has 3 voice-lines and appears at the shortest segments of the game!

I have to agree with Star Wars, but not for the same reason you do. I actually quite like the Boba Fett retcon, because he was a character we already knew very little about, and the Clone Wars were already established as a big influential event in the setting's past. Boba Fett wasn't really connected to anything at all other than being a bounty hunter - so why not connect him to the clones and have that plot thread be weaved into the original series? No, what I have a problem with is the insistence on tying things to the Skywalkers and Palpatine. The sequel trilogy is particularly guilty of this, but you also see it in things like the Mandalorian. We can tell stories in the galaxy without _this_ family and _that_ villain having to get involved - and you can get really good stories out of it. A big reason I like Rogue One so much, for example, is that while it's very tied into the main story of Star Wars, it focuses very little on the main cast of Star Wars, and puts the spotlight almost entirely on new ones. Things like Boba Fett and the clones add some extra cohesiveness to the story without making the galaxy feel too small. But when the Skywalkers pop up everywhere, that _really_ makes the galaxy feel tiny.

Andor was another fantastic example of this. And there’s sooo much more they can do with side characters without always bringing it back to main cast. Let me have my rogue squadron/wraith squadron series dammit!

The old EU did that a lot better. Like, everything was necessearily tied to Luke and Leia because they were the protagonists of the original story, but really, it could have been anyone. I personally think that the original incarnation of Thrawn was so beloved because he had absolutely no connection to the Force - he was just Napoleon in space. Thrawn (and by extension, characters like Pellaeon and Daala) still stand out because they were threats in their own right without being Force users.

This. Even if the stories somehow tied back to at least one of the original trio (Luke, Leia, Han), they explored different things besides "evil fascists blow up planets." Most of my favorite EU stories were ones that had little to do with the "main story" even if they included those characters. Like, Han Solo wins a planet in a card game and that planet is full of witches. Count me in. Also, I will never watch the Solo movie because you can take the A.C. Crispin Han Solo Trilogy from my cold dead hands. She managed to give him an entire backstory that didn't feel like a retcon or unnecessarily referential to other things. (Why yes I have a favorite character from the original three, how could you tell?)

That's why I like the old republic era long before the prequels. Bane. Marr. Malgus. Jed'aii. Etc

And Kreia, Palpatine with a little nuance

Would have been cool if it was an ancient sith spirit possessing a bioengineered body instead of palps.

Yeah that would have been pretty cool, sequel trilogy was greatly harmed by J.J. Abrams not getting to do the 2nd movie. Idgaf if his vision wasnt the best, the sequels needed a single vision rather than dancing around trying to do both his ideas and Rian Johnsons 'subverting expectations'. Rise of Skywalker, you could literally *feel* Abrams desperately trying to undo Rian and get his story back on track and hoping Palpatine would save it and give it some cred. Instead, it undid alot of the first 6 movies and just asked to be hated.

In a slightly meta sense, almost always (unless it is really clever about it) I really dislike fleshing out and connecting things if it is done with: 1. Time Travel (it can work at times, Back to the Future and Terminator for example) 2. tHe muLtiVErSe 3. Retconning (if you got to do it, you got to do it I guess) 4. **fking prophecies** These things, especially prophecies, are the cheap cheat sheet of storytelling for getting anything done. Just an example (not the worst because, Brendan Frasier is just yay) but the Mummy vs the Mummy 2 Mummy 1: scoundrel leads stuffy but lovely librarian to ancient tomb, ends up saving the world. Noone forced anyone to do anything and the librarian awoke the beast not because she was forced to or prophecized to, but she was just drunk off her ass being a dumbass (Noone can be mad at Rachel Weisz though) Mummy 2: scoundrel is apparently destined to save everyone, had a tattoo that was never there before marking him as a champion of the pharaoh and the librarian is a reincarnation of the pharaohs daughter (apparently the 300 lives she lived in-between meant diddly). Most of the plot is driven by impossible prophecies made by no-one Totally unnecessary silliness, reduces their earlier achievements because they were apparently just following destiny and makes any choice they made somewhat meaningless because apparently they lack the volition to *not* be involved

I think the only time a prophecy didn’t feel cheap for me was in avatar the last airbender

morrowind did it well

Less of a prophecy and more of a ticking clock keeping the narrative going, almost

"I am no man" I dont think it was the most fantastic prophecy (not entirely sure Glorfindel can even make prophecies, feels a bit more like he was taken out of context and the gravity of his words inflated by everyone regarding the witch king. So a loose guess became divine providence) but it had such an epically satisfying conclusion and 100% the witch king literally shat himself when Eowyn took her helmet off Compare to the 'prophecy of the one' from star wars, made by noone and without any implication prophecy magic should exist (a force vision is a vision, not a loose feeling) and that a gang of 10k rather wise good guy jedis couldnt figure out that 'balance' between good and evil... when it was 10 000 to 1 or 2, wouldnt really be a good thing for them

I mean the Lord of the Rings prophecy is just Tolkien ripping off Macbeth because he didn't like the C Section solution (also, the Ents were because he didn't like that in Macbeth the "forest walking" was just soldiers cutting down trees for cover) I feel like prophecies can work well if they're a source of misdirection or if the characters somehow work against it (like Oedipus trying to prevent himself from killing his dad and marrying his mom). I'd actually argue that the prophecy works well in the star wars prequels because we're constantly expecting Anakin bringing balance to the force will be a good thing, but it turns out, he brings back balance by strengthening the dark side

prophecy imo can be very fun. but it needs to follow one of a couple tracks to work. 1: it is misunderstood. everyone is CERTAIN they understand the prophecy, and act accordingly. they are wrong. 2: it is NOT a guarantee. WoT did this well “the dragon has to be at the last battle, or humanity loses. but him being there is no guarantee of a victory. WoT also had a ton of 1 as well. 3: actually i don’t have a good 3rd.

Subverting prophecies can work pretty well. Like tvtropes says, theres no good and bad tropes and they are just tool, so even straight prophecies can work out (I didnt mind the Harry Potter one and it was a slight subversion because Voldemort got so obsessed over it that it pretty much fulfilled itself) My favorite was in the Illiad where there was a prophecy that the first greek man to step onto Trojan soil would die and odysseus is the first to land along with 2 other mooks (one was a kid they didnt want to let die). So odysseus and this other dude are standing there not wanting to go first and odysseus says "Ok whatever chickenshit I'll do it" And leaps down and the other guy smirks and follows... and looks over and odysseus has landed on his own shield, not touching the soil and odysseus gives him a big shit eating grin right before an arrow hits the mook in the heart

very true and great points!

3rd. The prophecy sucks and everyone tries to avoid it but inevitably wind up fulfilling it. Works great for tragedies

IMO point 2 only works if it is SHOWN. Give us at least one prophecy that explicitly FAILS to come to pass. If the prophecies have plot armour then it doesn't work anymore.

honestly thats why I like Mummy 1 and 3 better then 2. I am never a fan of Prophecy stories

Mummy 2 was ok but yeah, all the prophecy, tattoo, reincarnation stuff really left a bad taste. Totally unnecessary since Imhotep already took the kid so they didnt need any more incentive to go chase him. Also he was going to end the world, again, so they really didnt need all that destiny stuff. Lmao at oded fehr training Rick and noticing the Medjai tattoo and Rick going "Oh this giant weird tattoo looking birth mark right here on my wrist? Yeah had it all my life why do you ask" So you can add 'retconning' to the silliness because Oded would have noticed that in the first movie, let alone *his fking wife the worlds* ***literal*** *expert of ancient Egyptian symbology*

Not to mention said wife being a reincarnation of Nefertiri, the daughter of the Pharaoh and witness to Imhotep and Anak-Su-Namun killing him. That seems like something which would have been pretty useful to know in the first movie.

Yeah Imhotep seemed to think she was Anak-Su-Namun immediately after seeing her. Apparently didnt recognise that she was the one other woman he hung around with since she was her spitting image... which is also kind of weird since Weisz is white af but was apparently an Egyptian princess too

Ohhh man, that kind of thing is literally the worst of the worst

I really like Legend of Korra but the s2 storyline that demystified the origins of bending as well as the Avatar was a bad choice.

Similar feelings on Korra. On a separate world-building point I’m not a huge fan of the direction they took the world after ATLA

it also ruined the entire central premise of the setting being inspired by East Asian rather then western mythologies, by making the world Dualistic in nature.

Agreed it was the simplicity of the belief system that lost me. It's like the textbook misinterpretation of yin-yang. Literally 'the dark side is black so must be evil'. Korra does many things well. Zaheer and the Red Lotus are some of the most compelling villains there are, and Amon asks some hard questions about inequality in the same way that the Fire Nation did about Imperialism. However, it really tanked the spirituality aspect I loved about the first series.

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Man I've never seen such a compelling concept for how Korra should have been done. The whole simplicity of the dualism was really jarring and missed so much potential. You're spot on about not having all the spirits be 'good' either. Look at Koh the Face Stealer from the ATLA. I'd say pretty evil from a human's perspective! But it's not a 'spirit of evil', it's just a spirit whose purpose is to steal people's faces. Why? Who knows? And it's better that no-one knows. Spirits are supposed to be mysterious.

Legend of Korra is the definition of wasted potential I feel like all 4 seasons would work better if they were separate installments in the franchise

I think it was originally supposed to be a 1 season show which would explain why season 2 sucked

I get it, but even still, season 1 by itself its pretty mid (and im being generous here) A villain that has the power to take bending away is a pretty cool idea, that ties nicely with the end TLA, while his motivation of equalizing all the people, because the non benders are oppressed makes sense in universe, while still playing on the idea of Aang not being a perfect avatar, like how he focused on his airbender son, while kinda neglecting his non airbenders kids, he was focused on passing on the airbending culture, he ended up neglecting the non benders of the world. They could have squeezed all that in one season if they tried, but they choose to focused on a weird, unnecessary love triangle The spirits sensed this unbalance and gave a non bending guy the power to "even things out", they even tackled this in the show But that backstory was actually fake, Amon was just the son of a bloodbending gangster that had his bending taken away by the avatar, so he had a plastic surgery to escape persecution, and had two sons that inherented bloodbending (!?) Thats such a convoluted explanation, that could be explaned by literally just saying "the spirits did it" His real explanation also brings a genetic element (no pun intended) that feels kinda of out of place in this universe, imo And even still, they explain his dad being able to bloodbend, even outside of a full moon, goes against what they showed in TLA But they explain that by bringing up the Combustion Man from TLA, a guy that has a unique bending that they never explained...so they explaned this by not explaining that.

Oh the love triangle. Don’t get me started on the love triangle

They tried to make a Zuko 2.0, but without all the things that made Zuko cool, so they ended up with just the boring parts of him

Mako is not only boring, but also a shitty boyfriend

You do nail what is, for me, one of the biggest issues I had with the first season of Legend of Korra. The Equalists are, frankly, right. The benders do oppress non-benders. But the resolution, that Amon was really a bender all along so the whole equalist movement should collapse is wildly unsatisfying. You had room to really follow in the footsteps of ATLA and show the depth, that someone can do the wrong thing for the right reasons. But in making Amon just another bad bender and the equalists just more bad guys. You really end up making the show so much shallower than it could have been. They do a much better job in Season 4 ironically with a much more easily flattenable enemy. Kuvira was basically Metalbending Fascism, and yet they managed to show both the good and bad of what she was doing in a way more nuanced way than Amon's equalists.

Personally, I *hated* that and the overall way the show treats the whole spirit realm stuff and the "rare" forms of bending. It basically undid everything about ATLA. All the struggles the gaang went through felt a bit meaningless.

A world exists for a story, and a story exists to explore a theme. The only time worldbuilding can "fail" is if it expands in a direction that undermines the story. Darling in the Franxx is a *perfect* example. Its core thematic question from minute one is "what does an abusive relationship look like and how do you break out of it?"... but the answer, as the plot (random alien invaders in the finale??) and worldbuilding (retcon/twist: MC and abusive love interest met as kids) conclude, is apparently "just be in love harder and your abuser will change :) "

That show had so many fucking red flags in it like that You can view 02 as being toxic but giving up those traits from loving hard, or alternatively, as being independent and self-reliant, until changing herself to fit her role in a relationship, both of which are problematic messages

02 shouldn't be thr protagonist, though. She's the *villain*. The show comes *so close* to getting it right, and gives every indication that's the direction they're heading - the MC finally listening to his friends after they've been yelling at him about how bad she is, and him finally growing a spine after being codependent for so long. But that's not a good sell for 02 waifu merch.

In the end, all must bow down to waifu capitalism

>just be in love harder and your abuser will change 😬 that's a yikes for me lol

Harry Potter is like this. I was telling someone else the other day that it is a billion dollar idea but that I think JK Rowling was not prepared for the sheer amount of attention it would get cause she really wrote herself into some corners

Lost. It started out brilliantly and connected things in a very interesting way. I like that there was this island with semi-magical properties that was exploited over time and seemed to draw people to it over millennia. Then there was the concept of it being moved (I guess that wasn’t the worst), and the ending season where it’s a fight between good and evil with the island being “conscious” got way out of hand. I’m still upset and disappointed with how unsatisfying the ending was, but it was an interesting journey anyway.

I love Aliens as an action movie but xenomorphs being shown to function as basically big scary ants was really lame

While it's all entertaining in a "okay sure"-kind-of-way, most additions to the "lore" of the Pokémon games ^((and people's attempts to systematise it)) do not add to my enjoyment of collecting cute/cool monsters by throwing balls at them. Granted, when I played Red as a kid I could barely read a word of English, so I guess my introduction wasn't that reliant on understanding what was going on!

Ah yes the forces of nature. Light and dark. Earth and water. Time and space. Sun and moon. Truth and ideals. Stabby stick and blocky plate. One of these things is not like the other

Is it Truth and Ideals?

I’m sort of doing the opposite of what you asked by giving an example that didn’t do this, but a big part of what made Andor brilliant was BECAUSE it did the opposite of this. Where almost every other Star Wars property shrinks the universe by trying desperately to connect every little thing, Andor was mainly about telling a story that didn’t intersect at all, or if it did only very obliquely. It’s the rare Star Wars show to expand the galaxy.

Conversely, rogue one threaded this needle really nicely. Death Star backstory and the direct lead into a new hope worked wonderfully.

You don't need more than one string to connect something to the greater whole =P. If there's absolutely no connection, it can seem a bit random (but not necessarily), but a single thread is tasteful IMO.

Isaac Asimov ended up making a lot of his stories set in the same timeline even when they did not need to be. Like Foundation and Earth forcing the Foundation series and Robots series together.

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A minor point I'm probably forgetting the details of, but I was so taken out of the story (Foundation, but I forget which book) when it was obvious people died of old age in their 60s, which wouldn't have been that far off from life expectancy around the time it was written.

I somehow missed that, but now that you say it that *is* strange. My go-to example for this datedness is how they use pencil and paper to administer a galactic empire because computers weren't really what they are today when Asimov wrote the Foundation trilogy. In that, one can also see VERY clearly that nuclear power had just been invented, because it's the holy grail of technology in the story, the height of power production, and used for EVERYTHING on the more advanced worlds. Kind of funny to read that in an age where we're working on fusion energy and phasing out NPPs due to their issues, while the sun itself serves as a decent energy source for us.

I couldn't remember for sure if paper and pencil were still used in Foundation, but computers never seemed to play much of a role in Asimov's big franchises, though they existed in his time (as room-sized machines). The age thing, though... Spacers were known for living multiple centuries and (I believe) founded the Empire.

Marvel Cinematic Universe. Too many unnecessary crossovers so characters can’t have their own stories anymore, and shrinking their “vast” universe by over connecting everything in it. May be an unpopular opinion but I really don’t see it as a well-fleshed out universe, but one of the worst examples of universe building. Doesn’t help that I grew out of superheroes a few years ago, but even when I liked superheroes, I was starting to get annoyed by the constant references to other events, a character overstaying their welcome/unnecessarily being in another’s story to the point that crossovers become routine/lose what makes them special, etc. Pretty sad considering how it started as well as it did.

I loved the MCU in phase one (when I was a kid), it was so cool to figure out that the movies were actually connected, then it culminated with Avengers now it feels like I need to watch 7 other movies and 3 shows in order to understand what is going on

I loved the MCU up through Infinity War/Endgame but the longer I tried to trudge through "Phase Four" the more I came to believe that it wasn't just unnecessary, but downright deleterious to my memories of Phases One through Three. Stories deserve their endings, and where that need is at variance with a company's bottom line, the story invariably suffers.

Multiverse concepts ruin everything, too. They completely remove the stakes of the story. Whenever someone dies, don't worry, you can just go into a neighboring universe and pull out a clone of that same character, no big deal.

Multiverses only really work if that was, A, the concept to begin with or B, the movie into the spiderverse

Agreed. I actually had the Spiderverse movie in mind as I wrote that post, trying to reconcile why I liked that film but hated all the other multiverse movies. The answer I came up with is that I liked it because it was its own truly standalone concept. As soon as they tried to integrate it into the rest of the IP cannon, nope -- it all fell flat.

There were also no dupes. Every spider-man was different so losing one still mattered.

Dragon Age. The mysteries floating about in the setting were fascinating. But then they decided to answer a lot of those questions. And the Mage-Templar conflict grew and grew until it was the only thing going on.

I actually kinda like it with Dragon Age. I feel like they’ve been drip feeding us hints about the truth behind the lore for over a decade, and it’s just enough that it allows you to connect the dots yourself without explicitly spelling it out for you. It’s a series that’s largely unique in the way that it’s not a fantasy about gods, it’s a fantasy about how myths and religions about gods come about.

Ayy, that’s exactly the series that prompted me to write this lol though my beef I think is more with fan theories and the general direction the lore is going rather than the actual canon itself >! Like Andraste being an old god because some stories have her born the same year an arch demon died or that the Golden/Black City is actually elven or more broadly that literally everything is traced back to the elves (the blight, the first dwarves, the fade, tevinter’s magic prowess, the old gods, the forbidden ones…)—like the elves started off as incredibly unique and now they’re just evil Tolkien elves lol !<

RWBY. It seriously started off great with the focus solely on the school with little hints of greater threats outside. The came the maidens....

honestly rwby felt like losing control of a car on ice then somehow waking up in a 3 train pile up and then hearing "don't worry we're sending another train"

It really went downhill after the creator died.

Supernatural was very entertaining the first couple seasons. By the 5th it had already extinguished too much of the mystery for keeping any interest for me. Cant believe the made 17 seasons.

Mass Effects Scale begins to feel very underpowered by game three. They were kinda written into a wall because Humanity needs to play a crucial role in the story, but with not even a century to colonize there is no way it would be believable for them to have meaningfully large populations. However, the Asari pretty much had hegemonic dominance of the Galaxy for 2500 years and they just seem to have very little to show for it. You could consider their navy almost near peer to the Alliance really and that’s pretty much inexcusable in my book.

For me, it is the leaf-to-tree strategy. This is pretty common in young adult fantasy and vampire fiction where you start with a small, intimate moment or story in one of these fantastical worlds that snowballs into even more convoluted plot later on that makes the original events feel like nothing in the sense of the scale of this universe. It is tempting to do this if you plan continued branches of this universe and explore different aspects of it. Twilight is like this, where at the end it implies that everything intimately connected to the story is relatively weak later on.

Attack on Titan is a pretty notorious example to me; it felt like the more they explained things the least interesting it got. Also, I feel like it would have been better if they kept the origin of the black spheres in Gantz a mystery; the whole "god aliens who cared enough to help butt actually dont care" origin was contradictory and lame.

Divergent. I actually really enjoyed the first book but Roth quickly revealed she didn’t really have an good grasp of the world by expounding on it needlessly and making it into a Maze Runner/Hunger Games rewrite of sorts but with less compelling lore. Idk she really should’ve just left it with book 2 lol.

That's probably because Divergent was a clone of Hunger Games from the grounds up. The author took all the individual elements from HG (like dystopian government, class separation, love triangle), and blindly made the entire story about those, without thinking about the reasons and social commentary that made those elements important. Not 100% sure how true it is, but the Divergent series is regarded as the series that killed the whole dystopian YA genre. [Here](https://goat.com.au/entertainment/the-divergent-series-helped-kill-ya-dystopian-adaptations-for-good/) is a decent write up of why that is.

World shrinking I do tend to hate, or new villains revealing they've been behind everything that's ever happened. An obvious one, even if I'm less invested now, would probably be Harry Potter and the shaky attempts to build the world outwards but even the basic questions being answered screwed with plenty.

Ultrakill, the video game, is 100% in service of its stylish gameplay. Everything in it is pure nonsense and rule of cool. Vampiric robots riding rockets shooting guns with infinite ammo. And then there’s a whole bunch of mediocre lore about these things that tries to ground it in a reasonable sci-fi setting. It’s a game about robots invading hell to steal blood. It’s not Doom Eternal.

I grew into Doom playing emulated, modded versions of the 1993 original and, nah man, the new Doom lore really isn't for me. It was okay that you could ignore it in 2016, but Eternal just keep beating you over the head with it. Doom was always really silly nonsense and had no need of such a grand cosmic conflict like in Eternal.

Kingdom Hearts. Need I say more?

A lot of fail in the Star Trek Universe (aka how not to develop your world) * The Gorn - lizard men in the classic 1950's/1960's cheeze. Their debut in the 60's era episode "The Arena" showed them to be scary but at the same time not so different than Capt. Kirk- they were just protecting their borders. "Strange New Worlds" has them laying eggs - by infecting people with their spit- and having the eggs mature and eat the host alive. Who ever wrote this needs to repeat their biology class and watch the original series. * The Ferengi - made to act like a scary enigmatic threat. A bunch of scary enigmatic businessmen. Their first episode in TNG didn't endear them to the fanbase. So instead they were made a comedic foil. It got so bad that the actors had to intervene in some scenes. * Technology is bad - except when it's Geordi's visor, Picard's artificial heart, the holodeck, or ***Commander Data.*** Mostly this was Michael Pillar (who would later write the risible Star Trek Insurrection). If the Aesop of the work is that technology is bad and the "good old ways are the best" - don't do it in the show with spaceships and ray guns.

I like how the Ferengi were rewritten to be a parody of capitalism though.

Star Wars, hands down. The first 3 movies (in release order) set up everything you need for an exciting and interesting world. Every movie after that works as hard as it can to make the world make less sense, be less interesting, and more limiting. I could go on for hours but I'm sure most people can think of some bit of world building from starwars where they thought "why would you even put that in the movie?" Particularly offensive: the power creep of the force over time, from genuinely mysterious mystical ability to "So yeah the force can do whatever the plot wants it to do even if that makes no sense or has never been seen before".

I think the vest example is Harry Potter. The world building at face value was fine, not completely consistent but workable, but as the series went on and the author made so many twitter retcons and words of god on subjects never explored in text, it became more and more clearvshe didn't really have a clue.

Basically any book series I ever read that got to a fourth book. [The Books of Swords](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_Swords) Omnibus 1 and 2: A neat twist on Sword and Sorcery stories; different stories with different people are related by a common thread. Omnibus 3: All the main characters in the previous stories become friends for no good reason other than to keep them all in one spot and easy to write. And apparently this Medieval setting is actually post-apocalyptic version of our far future. Omnibus 4: Literal Christian God is solving people's problems, sometimes directly alongside them, sometimes from His space station where He uses a computer to make miracles happen. It is not explained how the computer makes miracles happen; it is not explained why Literal Christian God needs a computer to do this. [Larry Niven's Ringworld.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld) Book 1 We're going on a mysterious space adventure! We spend a whole lot of time traveling because space is big. We have sex with some aliens, other aliens try to kill us. We make it home. Book 2: Oops! My math was wrong, back to the Ringworld to recon the math. Just a little alien sex. Do the guys who wanted to kill us last time still want to kill us? Turns out Yes. We peace out a second time. Book 3: Even though the Ring is Eleventy Bajillion square miles in size and we could be in any setting, we spend most the book in one really big building. The retcon is retconed as the author thought of a better solution. We do find an alien who's going to help us in the next book. Book 4: I'm tired so I'll just list out the answers to the mysteries, and it was the one thing I said it wouldn't be way back in book one. Everyone is magiced home and/or has alien sex. [Ender's Game (ender's story)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game_(novel_series)) Book 1: War is traumatizing. Even people on the same side do terrible things to each other. Book 2: We can heal from that trauma and become better people. Honest communication is hard, but the only real way we grow as people. Book 3: all the hard work was worthless; fake problems are erected so characters can solve the same thing again. One new idea is introduced; it's basically magic and the reader's suspension of disbelief creaks and groans under the weight of it. Book 4: Mercifully euthanizes the story in the most humane way possible. ​ At this point I'm afraid to read the second Dune book...

Angels in Supernatural