 this dream why um just to be awkward it's a bit mean in there yeah the crewel well oh man crewella too that's that is high what's the subtitle gonna be do you think what right lights bitch oh wait did the first one do well well enough to justify sequel apparently i mean it's a disney movie so despite its quality it probably did quite well yeah um fair enough and there were people apparently who liked the fashion in it oh yeah the fashion was my favorite part it's my favorite part it was the the way that fashion was portrayed in that movie is indistinguishable from randomness which is why i loved it so much my favorite kind of fashion is it because cruella with an r oh oh that's they might do well here thanks i hate it oh that's so horrible might they might just do it what would you rather see cruella too or captain marvel too i'm getting both so that wasn't the question j i think i would rather see captain marvel too cruella was like that was a really unpleasant experience at least captain marvel too is connected to a universe that like makes the good i might have projects i don't have that much investment in it anymore well yeah i was about to say that i invested in that one though i guess the thing is is that you can absolutely do a story with captain marvel and you could still do a story with the one that we've got in the mcu like there's a story that you can tell that i don't know what story i'm interested in for cruella you know well um what if cruella decides to apply for a management slash ownership of a local chick filet i feel like you could do a story about trying to become a manager of a chick filet because yeah because chick filet they're very particular about who they give you know management rights to you know who they franchise that out to they're very particular they have a they have a very good reputation when it comes to food service staff quality and the logistics of getting all those people fed and i would take care of this yeah you have to be really like tip top ship shape if you've ever gone to a chick filet it is almost always busy and the parking lots are designed in such a way that they can have multiple lanes of drive-thrus there are people the way that they have their system set up is atypical for most fast food places where people they'll have workers there generally like the film is just cruella narrating this to the audience yeah yeah she could put her a little spin on explaining the chick filet logistics and tactical manual to the to the average moviegoer who might not understand that a lot goes into making a chick filet work smoothly while also producing delicious chicken sandwiches you used to work at chick filet no no this is just rags this creative imagination it's just it's wonderful this is actually has nothing to do with imagination i've just noticed whenever i go to a chick filet right i you just sort of notice that it's ran in a different way than other fast food places uh often a lot of the times it'll be young people who are passing out food and taking numbers marking down which car needs what young people are disgusting yeah they are actually quite um that no here's that's the weird thing though they're actually quite not disgusting as far as young people go that is weird they're they're polite yeah they're polite and they're nice and they want to make sure that you have a good time the last one that i went to down in hearst texas uh about a week or so ago yeah i'm sure many of you have been there uh but there was this old guy as like the lobby greeter and he and he was just going around saying hi to everyone making sure things were okay asking how their day went and he'd pick up some stuff and adjust the chairs and he was just going around and his job was just to make sure everything was all right with everybody and that place was packed and boy they screwed them in and out this this podcast is not sponsored by chick filet just so we're live already well yeah yes and we are actually sponsored by quib gift though we are sponsored by quib gifts everyone if by the way if you put in your referral code efab at quibgift.com you will get 20% off your next uh month's worth of quib gift uh quib gift subscriptions yes but that's only for the first uh 93 people who uh sign up that's true seven have preemptively signed up because no 93 was no 93 was the number fight don't do this to me live fringy don't do this to me live fringy that's we have to appear we have to be here united brings trying to cover it up the reality is the seven of us here right now signed up because it's such an amazing deal so now it's down from 100 to 93 it's called insider trading and it's not illegal if you're not a government employee I think so I think it is I don't I don't know if we don't tell anyone using using referral codes isn't illegal but owning stock options is which I guess it's a problem we don't own stock in quib gift well you don't because yeah you give us not a publicly traded company it is um it's ran by the the quib family of course of which it gets its name the namesake of quib gift not the gift of family just so we're clear yeah quib and surprises international org quib core is your favorite member of the quibs flat quib oh I don't know them personally it's hard it's yeah and I feel like even if I did it would be hard to choose right like I wouldn't want to say really do it with real people here yeah I in a forum such as this I don't feel it would be appropriate to pick and choose our favorites amongst the quib the quib it's not about any individuals it's about the gift of quib uh gift uh quiblet yes when it comes to the quib family the whole is greater than the sum of its parts absolutely and isn't that just a wonderful kind of an insult no it isn't no I think that they would agree I think for instance if you put like the seven of us right individually we are very powerful however if you combine us we were we are powerful plus an unspecified sum of power what if we squabble and bicker and and and fail to achieve our goals due to that I mean I guess in this hypothetical maybe I suppose that probably wouldn't ever happen but in the event unlikely as it is that it did I don't know I hope that I die never knowing I can arrange that oh by like not telling me just take you out to the woods and I'm crying as I'm stroking my gun oh you don't know about the e-fap lore I get like a plus 10 terrain bonus in the woods that's not where you want to take me oh I'll take you to the desert then that's sort of still the wilderness in general all right fine I'll take you to don't take me to the desert that's where the Tuscan Raiders are and they're going to brutal the gun trains are in the desert if you take him he'll be so fascinated if you take him to Chick-fil-A he'll be so fascinated by how the whole thing runs he'll just be distracted and you know you can get I'll just be happy to be served by these wonderful pleasant people who give me delicious chicken sandwiches what one last good memory before you get put down yeah that's nice down like they've been carrying me around like you carry a dog around and then you put it down so it could go wherever it wants to go yeah that's yeah yeah that's all right look at it that way that's nice that's good I I appreciate people who can respect my independence mm-hmm welcome to eva everyone hello everyone episode 169 haha nice we're doing a sex fap in celebration of the sex number high five you guys 169 is a sex number yeah is that worth there's just a guy with an erection watching yes as you 69 with someone else it's a 169 that's what the kids call it yeah precisely what it is nice um what a what a special efap we've decided to do today where we are we're gonna we're gonna have a nice long chat between all seven of us all seven there's something that links the seven of us you see something nobody's all coming I figured it out between the weeks of figuring out what well efap episodes we're gonna be doing and I was like I think we all like stories I looked into it oh I thought this was about that's true yeah my parents are architects and so as a result I've grown up with a love of stories I get it I'm I can't wait to put you down so that I can go to different stories climb them stairs pass through the final story the we're gonna take you down a couple stories rags we're gonna take you down I'm gonna take you that's that's what architects say to each other when one of them's a little too haughty and and the other ones go we're gonna take you down a couple stories yeah you know like spiders say that they're gonna put don't in each other's eyes and architects say that they're gonna take each other down a few stories it all winds up it's pretty cool the whole culture there yeah um now I've I've put all of our names into a custom list randomizer so that I will ask questions and then it'll just tell us who's going to be answering in what order and that's the most structure I want for this in any way shape or form other than that everyone's job is to interrogate everyone so when someone says yeah I like this why is that a job where were you yesterday between 9 and 11 p.m 9 9 11 where were you on 9 11 I was in school I was in school I was playing because some of us J were you even alive when 9 11 happened yes I was alive when 9 11 happened but no I wasn't old enough to remember now a lot of people stopped being alive when 9 11 happened that's true that's because it's a tragedy it's a terrible tragedy what happened yeah 9 11 yeah yeah ask us on about that I agree I know who that is assen chicken man Mr. Hassan man we're on a roll already oh yeah so the idea here is I have provided four incredibly complicated questions to everyone here and uh they're pretty they're pretty broad you know and you can interpret away an answer as you wish but let us discover of the first question which you don't even know which order I'm asking them except doom appropriately because he's the one that inspired me to change it um so let me let me let me get there we go here's a list now what have we got oh well looks like well you know I'll just uh just share the list with you I feel nervous like I'm in like I'm in high school again and it's math class and I don't want to get called on because I don't know what the fuck numbers mean well I'm not going to hit you well I'm not like them rags I won't beat you but this this is the order that we've been provided by the gods of random listings um okay so question number one what is the most important element of storytelling J I think that it is cohesion and efficiency in conveying information to an audience wow you have to answer just straight up like that it's like you knew I was gonna ask you fuck you I've never heard these questions before I'm just very smart oh I had a feeling yeah um what do you mean by cohesion then so as far as I see it right when you're a writer um when you're writing this little little story to entertain a little cuck audience no um one of the main things that you're doing is um you're conveying information to the audience right that's the purpose of everything you're doing is you are sharing information through loads of different methods right if it's on screen then you can you can show them stuff and then you can they can also hear the words but you know if it's you know in prose you've got so many different methods of just word choice um things like that to communicate to your audience um any information that you want to and I think the effectiveness of how you communicate that information is one of the most fundamental aspects of storytelling that you can't really do without you can't just have one five minute scene to show that a character is angry right you show that a character is angry while you also characterize them in other ways while you also show how other characters are reacting to it while you also have cohesion with the world that you're building and you have cohesion with that's it's it's it's important stuff I disagree that's the end of my sentence it's time someone else has turned to hop in your critiques are poor well because you the second one you said was um like efficiency was I'm assuming that's getting the information across efficiency of information right is that like brevity um I suppose so but more so um accomplishing more than one thing with the same scene um you know you don't just have a scene that well you can't you can just have a scene for characterization but it's also important to think okay can I get um world building and plot in this same scene where I'm getting characterization because I don't know like a lot you probably think you know um I've seen a movie where a scene exists purely for exposition and plot and it's like oh can we get other stuff here as well though can we like maybe spend some time learning about the characters because I like the characters was one of the things about like good dialogue writing is achieving more than one thing yeah if you can if you can advance the plot while also developing character or tying it into theme or uh using like subtext to like apply more than what you know than what is on the surface like there's a lot of ways to try and condense it down or achieve yeah more than one thing at a time in all of the stories I've consumed as well I don't think I've seen anything that's painfully bad where I'm also able to go man look at all of the stuff this one line is doing though like yeah it's it seems to be a hurdle that um that it really takes talent and understanding of other forms of writing what other aspects of writing to really uh hop over that little hurdle um well is it so is it always preferable to have more things achieved not necessarily um not necessarily no but you you want to have a reason for what you're doing and when would you say like it makes more sense to limit it to one thing or fewer than than more when you really want to have a scene to have focus um you don't want anything I was the office thing right um because it is sort of um if you're using because like I was I was I was ready to say like yeah when you want to see to have focus you know you don't want to be bothering with world building right now but like the whole point of it is that like um it's like you want to focus on character for a scene if um if it is done naturally and with cohesion then you're not going to be distracted by the fact there's world building going on at the same time because the world building is just a natural result of all of the character that you're seeing as well like you know the turn of phrase that a character might use is also cohesive with the world and and not just their frame of mind that the the writer is trying to convey at that one time uh I think I guess it's it's always important to never lose sight of cohesion within your story um and then have things being congruent with each other as a result of your hyper focus on one aspect so if you are trying to characterize you know if you're trying to character if you're trying to characterize a character that your world suffers or that your plot suffers then you've got you know an issue but if you if you just if you've just got a scene where oh no world building happens to be relevant here um even though I think you're probably always going to get some form of world building in the attitudes of your characters let's say um oh let's say no plot is happening in this scene right no plot is happening in this game. No plot is happening in this game. She's got two characters talking. Oh just me? All right. Wait, where are you up to Rags? What's that? I don't get it. I'm just doing what I'm told but it's fine I was the only one who did it's not worthy of mention further you can carry on. Did I say say? I did say say the night. You did. Let's say that no plot is happening in this scene. No plot is happening. You know what Jay? We're the only ones having fun so I wouldn't even worry about it. You enjoyed the bit. Yeah my fun is watching you do it. I was so ready for more than one review all of you little little cucks and just join in there and it's just it's just my faithful little rags doing it. I sound described from that one Rags. Rags just got our back. I think as long as every scene has gratuitous sex and attract by Aerosmith you're probably fine. Yeah that's a good rule of thumb yeah. I don't want to close my eyes. Oh my god it sounds like the room. I was thinking of that. The one like talking about cohesion I don't think it's necessarily achieving a lot of stuff in one scene is a really valuable skill to have as a writer but it's not always necessary. It's just necessary to not forget aspects of your story and to let them suffer just because you're focusing on something else. Everything is an interwoven tapestry. I think it's particularly important in film because the main constraint is time. You just do not have very much time and a story needs to accomplish a lot of different things so pretty much always I mean I can think of exceptions like the beginning of Wally's an example where there's not that like it's very character and world building focused and very little else is going on. Like there's almost no dialogue. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve with your film. Yeah but I mean the number of exceptions are pretty small. I mean I know from having to try and write myself that this is exactly something you're paying attention to. It's like okay we've got plot goals and character goals right and this scene needs to be interesting on its own and all these things need to happen all at the same time. And if you aren't usually accomplishing a bunch of different things at the same time the scene probably sucks. It just kind of stops in its tracks right. It's just like what are we doing here and like you don't want to reach a point where at the end I always feel like when you think about a lot of the best stories very few of them waste time. Like it's very it's very rare that you think about yeah we could have done without that scene. Like I think about a lot of the best films. It's like man you're really making effective use of like every moment of time that you have to advance in some way. Yeah that's that's gravity. Yeah I guess it's the idea that like a moment wasted is it's like well you could have used that moment to push us a little bit further to add like a little bit more I guess supporting evidence for like some main points or to start building up maybe like an adjacent like thematic element to run through the story. It's you know like you don't want to waste time essentially. Yeah one of my hotter takes about film is that when you're watching a film I can usually tell whether it's like exceptional within about like 30 seconds even if nothing in particular is going on because like they will have gone so far out of their way to try and pack as much as possible into that 30 seconds right. And yeah like great films make incredibly good use of their time in terms of storytelling and conveying information. That's not that's not pacing that's not you know as many things as possible have happened within 30 seconds it's just the amount of information that you as the audience are learning right. Yeah because like you know country for old men is very little is being communicated it's just the way it's you know the way things are being communicated is incredibly good right. Yeah where you can draw things from will tell you what you're in for. Is that like I is that the point that you're making Jay like that the way in which it's coming I mean honestly I think I was struggling to chew I was struggling to choose just one aspect of stories and I thought hey if I say cohesion that's kind of all of them isn't it. Kind of because yeah that's all about world and theme yeah everything needs to be cohesive. Yeah I mean treating it as treating it as an interwoven thing as you can't just well you can just do one at a time but understanding that most scenes are probably going to be more effective if you're doing more than one. If you're and doing and doing one in a truly you know effectively written story taking care of one of these things is going to help you also take care of the others because the characters you know it's going to be going to be informed by the world in which they live and they're going to be informed by the events of the plot they're going through all that kind of jazz. It's going to be hard to have a really amazing scene that's like advancing the plot without also reinforcing the characters yeah you know setting an interesting tone and like matching up with pacing and yeah. I mean I'm sure there are examples in the wild of like scenes that have advanced the plot that have like nothing to do with our main characters that we're actually focusing on and it's just like I don't know we cut to the we cut to the king of the land who is not a character in the story but he's making an important decision and it's shown here that how you know that the decision he makes and some very important to the story you know I'm sure that that's happened in in great stories but usually you know you're in a situation where if you're seeing plot happen to the characters that's informing your impression of the characters and your understanding of them. You can't just have plot happen to the characters and not learn about the characters that doesn't work. And something that's going to something is going to kind of come up with this question is that there is very little if anything that applies to every single story. It's like most of the things that you could think that would be good almost all the time like you can find an exception yeah but like you I like to think of things in terms like actionable intelligence it's like how useful is this to think about how much does this help me write or how much does this help me understand films and yeah that's that's definitely up there in terms of things to pay attention to for sure. Unless anyone wants to poke a prod a bit more on Jay we could move to the next contestant. Stop poking and prodding me. Hey Rags. Hello. What is the most important element of storytelling? Well I thought about this for an amount of time and I think when we talk about most important kinds of things of really any kind it's important to go super super foundational almost maybe to levels that you don't typically even think to think about because they're sort of assumed and take it for granted but I think that the most important thing that a story needs to have in terms of its elements is that it needs to be comprehensible. Everything that you pull from a story everything that you pull from the world around you has to be noticeable you have to be able to detect it with your senses and then you have to make sense of it after that but everything from logic and consistency and internal non-contradictions and stuff of that nature it all flows downstream from you being able to sort of grasp what it is you have your brain has to recognize it for as a thing that needs to be decoded and translated. If it's not comprehensible then nothing else really will matter even in dreams right dreams are nonsensical and weird and they're not quite right and they just don't work like normal but even then there's a part of you that comprehends what's happening in a dream even as as bizarre as it is it's a rearrangement of details and places and things and stuff that you're subconscious is mish-mashing together but you still understand it in some way and in some level and I think that a story needs to make sure that whenever it puts something out whenever it has a character doing a thing or it exists in a place or portrays the passage of you know time and events leading to other events there has to be a level of a brain must be able to take that and recognize it for something that's happening. Think about brain. Yeah brain. I wish directors at amateur film festivals understood that. Yeah I was actually gonna point that out this is such a problem with indie films sometimes like a lot of times people will think oh you know most films are linear in chronology right I'm gonna do a nonlinear film because that's more interesting and then you just can't tell what the fuck is going on and it's confusing. When it's comprehensibility as a how do you think that comprehensibility applies or changes when we talk about different mediums of storytelling like a book versus a film or a video game. Oh it's so hard to tell because like Jim's Joyce is not very comprehensible right but people have regarded it as one of the best options. I mean I guess it's a question of like so comprehensibility it's like so what what happens when I decide to write some prose that is a little more tricky right like why how do I present the argument that I shouldn't tell everything as total matter of fact if uh comprehensibility and like achieving maximum comprehensibility is like the most important aspect of storytelling. I might have worded it a little poorly I think it's because it's not really something that we think about because it's so we take it for granted so much but if someone like oftentimes we use the words making sense and nonsense in ways that are a little bit higher tier than what we really mean like when you see someone who's now no I think a dream sort of is a decent enough example where dreams don't make sense but they also kind of do and where you draw the line and yeah you understand what's happening in a dream and a lot of times you don't even recognize you're in it so it makes some level of sense so it's not really not completely unsensical and we want a story because you have you have to use really an idiom medium whether it's using text in a in a book or images and sounds in a movie or in the game as well if you can't convey that information and if the person just can't grasp what you're actually trying to tell them not and I'm not meaning that in terms of themes or anything even in universe we're just talking about this is still in the meta of being able to just convey these sorts of things to another person if you can't even do that then it's it's kind of all for nothing unless it's only something that's meant for yourself and even then I don't even know if you could design something incomprehensible for yourself because you're the mind that kind of created it for yourself so you know where it's all coming from I guess um a question I would have is the show don't tell right that's always the appeal to the idea that there is something to be gained from not presenting something directly rather hinting at it subtly through the way that a character reacts to something being said or the subtext like the way that they respond to a situation or something that's like kind of just unspoken about the world how do we reconcile the idea of conveying information in a way that's clear and easy to understand with the fact that a lot of the best stories will convey their information in an indirect way um that is more effective at getting the like more more more I guess for lack of a better word interesting to watch or read I think we're still going a little bit to um like whenever you whenever you're watching a story and you see a character do a thing or say a thing that has a meaning that is not yet apparent yet or that character is operating on information that the viewer doesn't have yet whenever you have verbal or dramatic irony in a story or a situation that's all still going past like all of that is built off of an even more foundational concept of things being comprehensible you understand that a character is speaking you understand that there is a space in which a person or an object is existing you understand that your senses can detect all of these things and you can make sense of them through what you understand about the world and language and what objects generally mean or what their purpose normally is I guess um what I'm getting at is like if we take starry night and we put it against like a hyper realistic super super detail just like baroque painting of a night sky could someone make the argument that the baroque painting is more comprehensible than starry night and that if so that there is something to be said about it being stronger comprehensible sure but I would say that we're talking about elements of a story and I think that an image is not the same story that a typical I would say that like if you take a piece of art that it is a story like a painting is a story in a sense yeah I would say there are two different things in the way that a like a surrealist it's all right so surrealism is generally the the artistic movement and the style of surrealism is often described as internally contradicting and nonsensical even though if you have one it's not contradicting in the same way that a story can be contradicting if you're talking about generally imagery like you could have two symbols that are next to each other that mean different things and that could be explained to someone as this image is contradictory but that is used in a different sense then if you're watching a story and two things will contradict each other at different points in the film that is a different form of that kind of concept so in terms of a story like a a narrative structure that exists within a movie within a book within a game I think those are kind of a different they're different but similar to how a single still image can tell a story right I mean I'm inclined to agree because like when we talk about stories it's you know the fundamentalist is is a series of events and I guess it's a bit different to think about what a series of events means in a still image in terms of what you pull from it yeah as a series of events yeah I mean it's still image can convey a series of events I think I think it can I guess it's interesting to think about the difference in the way yeah it can in a different way fun like if you like linear storytelling right where it's like this is the first scene this is the second scene this is the third scene but then I guess it becomes more interesting to think about like a non-linear story a story that is presented you know like you crud a lot you know from beginning to end in terms of time but but like it jumps around a different time in the story yeah even even things that are like told in non-linear fashion or in very strange you know structure sets for movies or really any form of media um I guess I don't know if I could say any blanket stuff on how that sort of relates to this I suppose it might be just I'd have to see specifics or and even then all of these things would rely on is the information able to be understood but what would be an example that you'd give for like incomprehensibility and are there degrees of incomprehensibility that we'd be talking about when it comes to stories let's say someone all right uh I can just make a quick example here quick question would you define like the character's not knowing which way is up as an entire faction in star wars would that almost be incomprehensible because it's just like an impossibility or we talk about something strange it's strange you bring up this example because while I was just kind of idly thinking about this concept that's something that sort of popped into my head and I asked really does it make sense that somebody doesn't know which way is up well I guess if you get super basic and technical I guess it makes sense that somebody wouldn't know which way is up I guess it's possible that someone could do it I mean that that is a that's a concept that could be that that could be an attribute of someone's state of mind but it doesn't make sense in the same way that these people in this situation would not know which way is up so I guess it depends on how deep you want to go with it like it's not it's not one of those um like explicit kinds of like I guess if it's I guess we often I feel like I need a phrase or a word to sort of really get into the nitty gritty of what I'm talking about in terms of making sense as a concept or being comprehensible because of the way about clarity about clarity um kind of things have to be clear in a sense that you have you can comprehend them but if someone is like let's say you had one person who was like actually speaking just gibberish and making noises right that's not comprehensible there you're there there's there's really not anything being conveyed there it is just noise it's interesting to say that though in the context of an event I was going to say in the context of like an exorcism that would be comprehensible in the sense that we know what's happening but we don't know what this person means or is trying to say necessarily like there's degrees of comprehension there I guess yeah like I was I was going to follow that up with a person who's just talking to you normally and they're still making noises and sounds but you can recognize that these noises and sounds relate to the concepts of objects and abstracts and you can understand what they're trying what information they're trying to get across like how these two things are similar but vastly different and how you can interpret them and what they actually mean I was curious about um especially in relation to using the way comprehension but how does Lovecraft sort of move into this then when being represented in stories I don't know I suppose it depends on the the specific thing especially because if it's Lovecrafty and stuff like how do you truly convey to someone the something incomprehensible all right especially to the point where it makes you go and say you know spooky tentacles that's very great and how do you really get that idea across well there's a good example I guess arguably you probably couldn't and it relies on the person to think of an abstract thing that doesn't really exist and how powerful they can sort of lose themselves in that imagery whatever it is to that person I think the father is a good example here because it's it's very clearly communicating to the audience the experience of having dementia and kind of losing your mind in a way but the actual like the actual parts of story in some sense aren't comprehensible or there's something unclear and that's kind of the point that's how it accomplishes the whole the reason that the father works is because of the parts of it that you can comprehend so that you know that something else is wrong you wouldn't be able to have that sense of of of cohesion from his life missing if you didn't understand the other aspects that were leading you towards that conclusion right so your ability to comprehend what is happening is how you make sense of the incomprehensibility of what's happening like we stick with him throughout that story as well he's quite consistent with us yeah yeah the same way that mauler brought up it's really kind of strange at this point but mauler brought up specifically the not knowing which way is up thing in the same way as I was thinking about this the father is specifically another example that I floated around in my head where the character I actually forget his name in the in the story Anthony Anthony he in each one of those isolated events those instances for lack of a for it to use a gamer term each one of those instances he yeah it's the wrong inward instance but he he he recognizes people as people maybe not the right ones but he can recognize that they're talking to him he can respond to them he knows that he's in a space and can move around yeah but each one of those instances isn't connected in a way that is comprehensible to him but each one of those isolated he can sort of like exist and it might it might not all make sense to him especially the context of it all but he can still sit on the couch and talk to this person and respond to them and think about the things that they say and he recognizes that he's in a place I think it's really important that you point out that he can still recognize a person as a person because that's the kind of thing that that has to be there have to have to be more basic consistencies like that that make the story comprehensible you know he doesn't he doesn't start he doesn't mistake like some guy for the fridge yeah if you got if you if you if you took it to that level of absurdity the story probably wouldn't be you probably wouldn't understand the story as a viewer yeah like you wouldn't know what's even being it would be hilarious but there is an aspect of you you have to be able to get these ideas across and you have to be comprehensible enough to where just other people can get it there is something to get there's something to latch on to that that ears can hear it that eyes can see it that it can be felt and that it can be translated into ideas which is generally something you don't even think about doing because it's so common place and it's so basic that it's it's I don't even know if I can think of an example of a story where it's not even at that kind of level but it's all foundational to it well the the other question I was going to ask is like I'm assuming your answer is only going to be that this is tough to figure out a lot of the time but you know like do we need to explain what a gun does in a movie so that everyone can comprehend it and it's like probably not but should we explain what sci-fi weapons do though when they're brand new this is this is the level of meta knowledge that we take into movies that's yeah it's inescapable really like oh like oh the meta knowledge of knowing English oh all the care you take that information with you the film doesn't even tell you what these words are you know it you have to I think it's just a necessary aspect of being able to tell a story in these mediums I don't think it can function without it if we just just through utility oh absolutely it's just hard to draw the line I suppose right it is yeah it if you yes stuff that isn't I think there's a decent most of I think most of us even the people we cover on eFap even the people who disagree with us I think there's a a general agreed upon line and it's a thick line it's not I don't think it's a thin line I think it's a really thick line of stuff that is acceptable meta knowledge guns are a good example we know what guns are and what they do but if you presented us with some strange piece of sci-fi technology that doesn't look like a gun and it doesn't seem to be treated like one we don't know what it is what it does I think most of that we could generally agree upon yeah even if we get like weapons that look like fleshy or like abstract they're still being handled like a gun like they don't put them on their feet and start using them with their toes or something yeah and you have the benefit if they don't necessarily have to explain them if they show them to do things we will pick that up and we'll assume that is what their limits are I immediately think of the Rick and Morty I was just thinking about that imagine the magical guy has this little flimpy thing and just holds it like a gun you killed my gun or South Park where they have walkie-talkies that's actually I don't want to just say how fucking great that example is it's the time copy pulls a thing it's like a squelchy thing and it looks like he's a bit like a gun that they I think they put their hands up right because they don't know what it is they're just yeah no what is that and then you like kind of cocks it yeah well I like this one because it's not it's like in universe it probably doesn't make sense that this thing is that is entirely well no it makes sense it's not it doesn't contradict anything but it seems unlikely to me that something would exist that's so fundamentally different from a gun that it's fleshy and gooey and killed there's an appropriate word to use for it but it's still cocked like a normal gun like a normal gun is how they communicate to the audience what it is and what's going on and you know it's it's it's it gets away with that because of the tone that it's going for really I think well that's a question how do jokes factor into the idea of comprehensibility if like for instance it not comprehending it is the point well yeah like if a joke if the joke is that that doesn't make sense is are we talking about why works you can probably extend this to just absurdist content in general things that are that are like that Xavier renegade angel kind of just wacky absurdity right where you can have comprehensible it's a very very clever show but it takes place in this sort of strange absurd world you know where individual parts you can recognize as commentary you could understand the lines you know what the characters are saying and you could see how they behave the ways they do in this crazy wacky world but the whole thing is just it's it's a it's a loose kind of what we would call nonsense in a way there has to be something to latch on to I think is probably the the best broad answer that I can give off the top well yeah I think in all the absurdist comedies they still start grounded almost always to give us a canvas before they start making things insane yeah you know Rick and Morty has Rick and Morty who are point of view characters that we can understand the perspectives of yeah it's yes it's not you know a flimpy gun interacting with a wet crumbo even something like the holy mountain even something like the holy mountain starts off a lot more grounded than it eventually gets to um but yeah I guess why not let's let us move who is next in the in the randomizer it was free sorry just to add to that the um uh regarding comprehensibility the love crafty and approach to horror is an interesting thing to bring to that because uh I think part of the reason that horror works is because there's a layer of incomprehensibility on it where you the the monster or whatever the threat is doesn't really fit within the bounds of logic you don't really know what the characters are up against yeah and uh the as I think the the thing that always must be comprehensible is like what the main character is going through and the experience of the people in the story is like you're latching on point yeah not necessarily all the things the main character is like seeing and reacting to but you have to just understand where they're at all the time at the very least there's some things where like we were talking about incomprehensibility is kind of the point I think what alien strength was back in the day before we got rid of was like when it burst out of um his chest I think all the characters are horrified by the blood and guts but also just the the scenario this yeah this creature just burst out of his rib cage like what in the fuck um yeah and sometimes that works horror fucks this up all the time because they put they show too many other cards and like they'll show the big dumb CGI alien with like a stinger sound and say oh my god fuck on like I wish you would just like use the the power of the audience's imagination here to kind of enhance the horror rather than just like show me yeah I wish you earned that reveal that we've been waiting for yeah instead of rely on the fact that fear of the unknown is incredibly powerful and effective and so yeah unexplained is not the same as incomprehensible exactly true that's true yes it makes me think of um near the end of alien where Ripley spots it like hiding in uh among like pipes and different like storage things and you can't even quite make out where it what it is if you know what I mean because it's covered in what looks to be similar things to its own body um yeah right so I'd go as far as saying I guess that it's good it's the line at that point between unexplained and incomprehensible because at that point you're just like terrified of whatever this fucking thing is and what it might be able to do yeah I agree with that I think with the thing with Lovecraftian horror is that you can't quite explain it even if you tried yeah it relies on a very I guess the whole it relies on you not knowing what it is you're supposed to be afraid of in a sense which isn't which is an odd place to be in when you're trying to communicate things to an audience as a storyteller it's almost at odds with the whole point yeah well let us move to the next person someone said like what's the point in randomizing it if you're asking everyone the same question I was like because I don't know what order to ask everybody we're not only asking everybody the same questions well yeah technically we asked the same first question but it always is branching off I like how much we branched off so far it's neat the the value as well dear chatter and the random order is that by listening to other people go first that's making me think about yeah that's great bastard in which case I'm wondering how bringing what is the most important element of storytelling um I think that the most essential element of storytelling is character I think the character is is sort of like at the heart of storytelling um so much so that I think even if you were to have a story without a character you could even go so far as to say that like the POV of the narrator or even the POV of you factors into it but I mean in a general sense I think that what we want and get out of storytelling is facilitated principally through seeing characters in a situation and how they react to it and how they grow or potentially don't grow from the experience the like at the core of pretty much like all great stories is strong characters um I in a in a I guess uh like if you were to boil it down to its basics it's like people reacting to situations or other people is essentially what a story is about if we are to say that a story at its most base element is cause and effect a causes b causes c causes d um but I I think that the the the investment and the reason why we're interested in the reason why we get something out of it is to see people react to those situations and not not necessarily people write it because of course you could be like robots or aliens or um animals um but I think it is ultimately person with traits how do they respond to this situation or how do they respond to that situation uh how do they respond to situations that are challenging for them how do they respond to situations that are easy for them how do they respond when uh somebody else uh who they like or dislike is challenged or has something happened to them um it's like that exploration of reactions to things and how that changes us or the characters rather is like what it's kind of like what I'm there for um that transformative element of like how characters change across time what they learn yeah you can absorb a lot of value from that I think that's that's what uh that's like what that's kind of what we're there for yeah can a story exist without characters that was gonna be my question yeah like koya koya kawaii whatever I I guess it I guess the thing is is like if there was a story with no characters um just does the the narration p o v count I think it does uh there's no idea it's going to be giving perspective on stuff that happens almost inherently by the choice of words even that that was kind of where I was getting at is like is there is their character in prose is their character in shot composition uh is their character in sound like what what what get why are we is the decision to focus on something does that is that indicative of a perspective in a certain sense like why are we seeing this story but also like what what even story can you have without any any like entity to perceive it so I guess like a rock falling off a cliff and landing with another rock I think that's I think that's kind of where I would get at I guess is that like story is the reason why story means anything is because of perspective um if there were no people there wouldn't be there wouldn't be stories there just be things happening yeah you can have like a I don't know you could have what if if every mind in the universe disappeared would books still be stories why would Harry Potter still be a story without people and meanings to interpret from it it would just be ink on a page it's like the perspective is what gives it um the meaning as a story you can have like a non-narrative audio visual experience like uh Oyanoskatsi but I don't think I would call it a story um I mean it's like you're you're experiencing something if I were describing the events of world war two in like a really clinical fashion and mainly just nations not even really mentioning any individuals like where they move what damage they sustained and stuff I'm assuming that would be considered a story and then at that point the character at best I suppose as you've said would be the narrator uh well I guess uh maybe the nations themselves I guess the characters a collective of nations right yeah like like like and glorious bastards more basic and glorious about it you go ahead go ahead yeah I was just going to say and glorious bastards I think it's a good example of where the actual bastards themselves don't have much individual character that's distinct from one another they sort of exist as a collective like there's there there are unique things about the individual members but the the traits of the group itself are shared by almost everyone and it's way more important than any individual so yeah like characters can be groups yeah yeah in some cases um characterizations are elements of world building so every single character that exists in a story will have certain qualities right and that that's sort of what defines like the world building of a Woody Allen movie for example or like the things that are true about every character in that film that aren't necessarily going to be true about other stories so yeah characters have to be like one individual person even with nations you could actually get to the point of progressing to the story and everyone starts to feel like particular countries are underdogs one of them super aggressive one of them is greedy like yeah what is the character of a location you know like New York has a character that uh that you can pull from it as a location or like a quiet town you know is that just the same word or does it if you're talking about nations in a war you have entities with clear motivations there and I think it's perfectly valid to call those characters yeah because yeah like a character like having an agent with a mind is different of a character in a way that you could say oh this building has a lot of character to it well it depends how fundamental do we want to go I mean you as an individual are comprised of billions of living cells and there are organisms within you but like we don't really think about those little entities when we think about the whole that is you could you just extrapolate that more to like the whole that is a city or a nation yeah all right I don't I I think a mind is distinctive enough from a from a building or something constructed that isn't an agent to make a very difference I guess what I mean is like when we talk about the consciousness of an individual versus I guess like what you pull from a collective like a town right like a I guess the reason why I would say that it depends on how vaguely we wanted to find character but I mean you could say that like South Park that the town of South Park has a character it's this weird absurd town filled with neurotic crazy people and a small group of like kids who are much more observant and perceptive of the world and so it's often the interactions of like the core kids so Stan Kyle Cartman and Kenny who all have their own distinct personalities often having to interact with the town like the character of the town and so I think I have a clear example of a story that some of the people in this call know that doesn't have any characters in the conventional sense and that is it's not it's not really a rigid story but Stellaris yeah it's the closest thing we have to characters like sometimes we get told that like a person did a thing they're not characters in in the sense you know that they're treated more like events more so than anything you don't get that perspective of what they're like as people most of the time well one of the factions is technically one character that's true cloned I guess now I'm stuck I'm starting I'm wondering if like this is why I like this conversation I'm wondering if character is describing what I mean or if it's more so just fundamentally perspective that like that like it becomes a story through perspective I think it's well how would you define story well I guess that's the thing when we were talking about this when I because if we talk about like the most inextricable element from storytelling it is a sequence of events like it is a then b it's not a like there's it seems like some some kind of progression of some sort is like fundamental the ones you pull it from that like if this if I just say Bob like is that a story versus Bob walk to the store it's like that that becomes a story by virtue of he did something that was like a and then b but I mean if you just say Bob there is a story Tammy incredibly loosely there is a story implied by like Bob oh that's someone's name someone must have been named Bob right well there is a sequence of events you can infer to be a little pedantic Bob going to the store isn't a story you telling me that Bob went to the store is a story because I would say that that's that's that's the reason why I'm starting to lean more towards perspective right because the story I would say is an account of events not the events themselves in the same way that a map is different than the place well I think that was what I was getting at right like if there were no human beings there would be a universe that has caused an effect going on where things happen but it's like but no stories would be told because no one's telling them I guess they wouldn't be described as stories anymore because there was no there was no entity or perspective to to interpret it and I guess it's like when we think about stories in the conventional sense we are thinking about people in a situation reacting to things it's like their worldview their values are the perspective that they are bringing to the story and to see those perspectives challenged um that's like that's like what we're there for and so like when we think about great stories we're usually thinking about stories where people are put in difficult situations or I mean the suicide squad is a really strong example right it's a story with a pretty nonsense plot that the characters are all reacting in ways that make sense given what we know about them I think um I want to as well to enhance your point about it being about perspective is that I think um that you totally can have um like if I said if I told you a story about um some like beautiful natural formation that then um stood for like a million years like a geology textbook like like well yeah I suppose so um it's this beautiful natural thing that stood for a million years and then it was just um destroyed uh you know out of the blue random avalanche came down just from freak chance wasn't likely to happen but it did and it was destroyed and it's like it's definitely you can take from that story but you can only take stuff from that story because you have the perspective like this is an old thing like without without beautiful uh in that story I feel like you've not really got much that you can take from it it's like oh a thing you it was there and now it's not anymore okay yeah that's an account like Scarlett Johansson crossing the avalanche um well so yeah Jay you're saying like so if if we had instead described series of rocks have been moving around in different positions and some have fallen as a result of wearing up and tearing up of air and water damage or something like that that isn't a story until I start adding stuff like the beautiful rocks were destroyed by I mean I guess I mean you can call it a story if you want but it's like I don't see the value in it until that you and oh the potential value in it until you start adding someone's perspective on the events well one of humans can do a lot of interpret it right like I suppose I hear something to add to that we we let's give the rock a name you know like if we go we tell this we tell the story like a rock you know a rock got eroded versus a rock called you could Dwayne Johnson so yeah to make the point clear Dwayne Johnson is a rock and the rock got eroded by the water like if it was like people are going to immediately personify the rock because it has a name it's kind of a related subject that probably gives my perspective on this so my definition of art is the intentional communication of the unspeakable so there's two important things there one it has to be intentional right so I wouldn't consider a tree art but if you take a picture of a tree that's art right because you made choices about how you're going to take the picture and you know there's if you take a professional photographer there there's going to be something about the way they take the picture that's going to be way more meaningful than how an idiot like me would take it you know I don't have any idea how to properly take a picture of a tree to communicate things right and then beyond that there needs to be something that you're communicating that isn't straightforward right so like bob crosses the street I mean I don't even know if I would call that you know it's just it's just relaying some very very straightforward information with nothing left out but if I'm trying to evoke an emotion in you I couldn't just say you need to feel anger right it's like you know that's been left out that I haven't said why he went to the shops that we don't know why he went to the shops or how far it was to get to the shops or what time of day it is I mean there's tons of things that there's tons of things that could happen it's just you need to be communicating something at least in my opinion that isn't you know just a base level relaying of information well I got some element of the experience I'm fine with the necessity of an agent but I like so if someone just drew a square on the wall that isn't art because it's too basic or I mean it is it is it communicating something okay when you say okay in the context and the meaning of the square right that's what I was going to say so is there something about it that isn't relayed by saying there's a picture of a square on a wall like if the answer to that question is yes then it's art that's my answer is it would it be possible to not have it that way can I is it even possible for someone for an agent to draw a square and have it not be art then well I guess here's one like I mean an architectural like a floor plan that is entirely technical and exactly precise in a way that you look at it and you know exactly what it's like I feel like I'd still call that art right there's an artist tree to the creation of that uh that plan I'm telling you that as a child I made one of those for fun so yeah I guess I was a really fun child I had lots of friends I think I think like stuff that is matter of fact can still be art like I don't know that um I guess I would agree with Rags I agree with the first definition that like artist is like defined by the fact that it's like an agent exerting something on the world but uh I'm not sure that I think stuff can be spoken and still be arts that is communicated I feel like but I feel like you're on the right track to something I just think that there's it's more fundamental but I'm not quite sure what it is do we say part of it was that they intend meaning to be drawn from the thing uh just that yeah it's like it's created for an audience like that you're trying you're creating something with the purpose of evoking a reaction I don't agree with that I feel like we can have art if there's one human being in a room and he's the only human being in in existence like if he drew a a box like even if he is the only person who will ever see it it would still count as art what would he count as the audience then he would be the audience um um so I guess at that point it would be that what I was going to say is I think a person can accidentally create art though um well I guess the idea would be that um that when we talk about intentionality it's not like the intentionality to create art but like that there is that there is an agent who made a decision to do something right like it's like it has to be made by somebody maybe it's like the more fundamental just I just want to just to be clear right so like someone's just doing a fucking some kind of job where they're clearing paint off the walls or something stripping it stripping it all and then they they look they take a few steps back and go oh shit and they've accidentally painted like the Mona Lisa by doing it I would just be curious what it would be classify that as I would do I think I think that it becomes art the second that they decide to um that they decide to um note it as something unusual or worthy of being seen right if that's the case then would I like looking great rags what are you wait hold on because yeah I was about to say if I go outside and see a nice looking tree well yeah just so just that let's let's go back that become art I think I think maybe let's go back just a little bit um so to the wall thing um because I I'm gonna hold fast to the an agent being required mm-hmm I don't know where I sit on whether it's intentional or not but I think the question here will be in this example of the wall in the paint and then there was an intention to do something thus their scraping of the paint and whatnot does the intention require that they were attempting to express themselves or can the expression of their work maybe not their personality but just by them doing work that is sort of an expression of yourself in some way does the intentionality come from trying to express yourself or trying to just do the thing and incidentally something that is artistic or merged from that I feel like that there has to be incidental art that that just has to be something that exists um like it I feel like that's that has to happen right where you can do something inadvertently that creates something that appeals to you aesthetically then so moving to let's take the let's take that example which is very very hands-on and let's change it to something where there's a little bit more of a removal between the quote unquote art and artist um somebody let's take this construction worker and he accidentally bumps into a bag of gravel and it spills out on the ground and it creates a picture of a human face right logically possible just unlikely and now it has occurred um is that art I mean that's what I was asking too because I'm not sure what I think yet I think I don't know I think in the loosest possible sense that the act of um that in itself is an art but the act of noticing it and framing it as something special that becomes uh art in a very loose sense so when I was thinking about this a lot this is years ago literal decade ago I asked a lot of people the question is a tree art and my experience was that there was a 100 percent correlation between whether someone believed in a material creator deity and whether they said yes basically anybody who doesn't believe that there's like that the tree was created by god to be like 20 or 30 enough people to where it's non-trivial so like if if someone thinks the tree was created by god to be beautiful they'll usually say it's art and or in my case they all said it's art and if someone doesn't believe that it was created that way nobody would say it's art right so like does anyone disagree with that like do you think that a tree is art just because it's beautiful no no I think that um what you can say is let's say um some let's say some person comes and finds like a beautiful tree standing somewhere right and they say they say someone else hey come over here and look at this beautiful tree I think that in the act of doing that is in a way art yeah yeah I feel a bit pretentious but that's what I think that's the picture of a tree exactly we are dealing with a horrifically broad term that's why it's tough yeah that's difficult with art yeah can you like so yeah your your definition of art is what again the intentional communication of the unspeakable and the purpose of this is the unspeakable means that there's something that's being communicated that isn't like there's a reason you have to create art to express it you can't just say it so like if I draw um whoa can I not sorry actually I uh finish finish what you were saying first um so so like if so like my example is if I just go take a shitty picture of a tree there's probably nothing there that I that you don't get by just saying it's a shitty picture of a tree but if you were to find it like a professional photographer who did who you know went out of their way to try and create something beautiful there would be something there you can't just say it's a picture of a tree you need to look at it right and it like if I'm evoking an emotion in you I can't just say you feel anger that has to be evoked by creating a stimulus that would you know arise anger within you and and you can't just say oh you know um it makes you feel angry that that wouldn't communicate the same experience you have to actually go look at the art like basically there's a reason you have to make it as art you can't just express it directly there's something indirect um that elevates it above other things like me just drawing a square on a wall like it's not going to evoke anything in anyone and you can understand the whole thing by me just saying I as an unskilled person you know scribble the stupid square on my wall there's nothing that's left out right but if you had someone who's an apple what if it did go my question would be can we go more fundamental than that because I think like I I think um if someone like draws a square in terms of what it is in reality it is like atoms on atoms in a universe filled with atoms right like like fundamentally it's just like it's it's um it's just things but the perspective of an individual who looks at that change like when when we say the unspeakable is that not like could you just say that it's like fundamentally is perspective right that the the interpretation like the human perspective on anything as opposed to what it is which is just things happening in reality I'm saying that I'm saying that if I write down a grocery list this is an art because there's nothing that's well there's no meaning here besides you know I need eggs and you know free like whatever imagine a hundred years from now like if we lived in a post-scarcity society right and someone looks back on that shopping list and they start thinking about man he had to like compile a list of you know like could you imagine a hypothetical scenario where like someone sure but it's what we based on differing information well I don't know that I would use the word art but again the act of displaying it in a context completely different from the context in which it was created would be part of what made that you know it's like a picture of a tree you know it's not just that there's a tree there's a way that it's being displayed and interpreted that would give it a meaning beyond you know just being a tree you said just being a shopping list if I took a shitty picture of a tree nothing is achieved compared to me saying it's a shitty picture of a tree but like what if someone says like they look at your picture and they go oh and you go what and they're like I get it it's that's pretty awesome man you're like I have no idea what you're talking about and they go well isn't this about like the nature of shelter and what it means to be oh and you're like no and so I'm assuming you're saying the component of your intention has to be there uh I mean first of all we're describing an event that is like preposterously unlikely I think but it's not even necessarily about my it's not even necessarily about my intention you think it's unlikely that you could take a photo of a pick of a tree and that someone could find meaning in it I think it is unlikely that if I randomly took a picture of a tree with no understanding of photography that you would find any meaningful number of people who would call it art right you can always find someone I don't see how relevant how many people found it art or not so I mean it's an inter subjective thing so it's pretty relevant I don't know if this is a tangent but um in relation to the the shopping list someone in chat said that's not art the shopping list is a primary historical source um if we just have like a historic if we have something that was like a matter of fact like document retelling of something and then we just like jump a hundred years into the well I don't even know if we need like a time jump right like if I write something down the font that I use expresses my personality yeah that was my immediate thing right why did I make the decisions to put this information here why didn't I include every single piece of information like the movements of the ants on the floor like doesn't like surely an interpretation I mean is it isn't as fundamental as just like an interpretation of like something anything at all um I guess the problem is that how do we factor in like would that make a tree art just by virtue of it existing and me noticing it I mean so the the purpose of the definition isn't necessarily to try and we might have slightly different goals my purpose in this definition is to give direction to artists and art analysis so it's like well what would separate great films from good films from bad films from terrible films right it's like well you know it's what is trying to be communicated in the methods of communication and like the uh how successful it was right it gives you direction there if you're sitting down to write a story um I can at least say from my perspective my definition gives me an incredible amount of direction right it's like well what am I doing well first of all I need to be intentionally communicating like I don't want to rely on just randomly scraping the wall with a paintbrush and you know something falling out it's like I you know I want to be doing something purposeful and beyond that I want to be trying to communicate something that isn't straightforward something that would require art right something that you would need art to express not like a grocery list right more like a story that you know evokes emotions and and and themes and all sorts of things in the audience's mind and suspense and all these other things right so the definition gives direction both for analysis and for actually creating art I mean that's that's what the purpose is for me and it's like you can sort of poke at the edges of it and try and find oh well maybe there's some things that don't fall under I mean I personally don't agree right like I I think maybe the act of displaying an accidental paint scraping could be artistic but just random I don't I don't think like scraping paint off a wall is art I don't think just a tree is art right and it is true that if you I mean there's examples of people who create art in isolation for only themselves I'm much more willing to follow those first two than I am you're taking a picture of a tree you're as far as you're concerned it's like meh it's no different than me saying it like I find that strange well I mean okay you can say that it's shitty art I guess I mean like yeah because there is there is there is there is something there right but there's just by your own definition right you would have taken that picture you would have moved into a position you would have decided what stays in the frame and what doesn't yeah that's part of the craft I think I think uh I guess to to clarify like I'm not I think I think this particular conversation right now I'm not trying to figure out like what makes for good or bad I guess I'm trying to figure out what the fundamental is because when it comes to the craft of storytelling for instance like I don't think that you can just like pound the keyboard and just have a bunch of like letters on the page it's like this is writing this is a story like it's you know like when we think about storytelling it's like we try to go more fundamental right a sequence of events accounted for you know there is perspective there are characters and theme and world I guess and so like in that sense I would agree with the idea that like some kind of working definition or adding things on to try and help you guide you in a direction is valuable like right now I'm trying to figure out if a tree is arts like that's actually what I'm trying to figure out right now I'll try and keep an eye out for hyper relevant super chats but someone's just asked like what about when animals commit to making images and especially ones that don't even understand what they're doing necessarily like when an orangutan gets handed a stick and a knife and he starts carving it into like a little like a different looking stick right surely well I mean the make elaborate displays to attract a mate with their nests but it's entirely for like some practical utility yeah I would actually thinking how much do they want to fuck well yeah I would actually designing a car for efficiency but then it's like well yeah but it's also incredible to look at what if I would tend to become an artist just to fuck right like is that any more valuable yeah don't don't denigrate my screenplays but no like I would actually tend towards maybe it is right I mean like we can't fully understand the cognitive experience of an animal right I have a dog I'm around him all the time I don't I don't know or want to know what's going on in that dude's head but I mean it's it's completely it's completely possible that I mean there is something there right I mean it could be that you know an elephant scribbling paint on a thing um it means more to them than just a random thing that they did right well I mean we can pretty clearly say that it does I guess that's the thing though we can go basic to the like an ant like is an ant colony uh is that art would you count an ant as an agent would you say that this is this this act warrants us saying that this is a an expression of any part of their being in any way I don't know that I would consider an ant an agent and I don't know that there is an there there's any function of the ant colony aside from a pragmatic purpose would you consider a dog an agent sure well why a dog and not an ant I mean I'm also fine with yeah I'm also fine with saying that a dog is much more likely to be an agent than an ant is um I guess this depends at this point like how pedantic we want to get because you could say that like was it called like uh like I don't know like plankton or cyano plankton or whatever it's called like or just bacteria these are things that are alive in the same way that we're alive I guess just is it like consciousness is is that what we're going for I think it's more than just consciousness at that point we're going to have to start rolling back we've gone way too far I think we can I think we can all agree though yeah I think we can all agree though that like a human being is definitely an agent and a a single cell bacteria is not an agent yeah and there's a whole there's a whole world in there where you could spend all your life and never get the answers so yeah and I'm fine with I'm comfortable just saying people yes dog maybe ant no I'm saying ant no yeah I'm fairly comfortable saying ant no but I do think that there was a point of complexity where a sufficiently advanced brain becomes an agent but that's obviously getting into a different but I mean again if we talked about how like a town can have a character can an ant colony the combined efforts of thousands of of individuals certainly when David Attenborough if I can write something commentates exactly that's David but is that David Attenborough's character or is that no I'm talking about if you'll be like their desperation to reach the pond in time they'll have to defend their queen you know just stuff like that yeah well I would say that that is his storytelling you know I mean he's definitely a storyteller he's giving him the even David Attenborough David Attenborough could film someone taking a shit and then playing the binding of Isaac and make it fucking compelling so absolutely basically anything right yeah I would say the difference between like a town having character and us as characters is it's almost like the it's an agreed upon general attribute that a thing has instead of a thing itself because of what it does I mean could just add about an ant colony generally agreed upon attributes of like the ant well we could in the sense of that this ant colony has a certain character to it right is different than the ant colony is a character because it's it's not even alive it isn't an agent however based off of generally agreed upon aspects and attributes of that ant colony's construction generally it is agreed upon that it has a certain like I said attributes that we could say which which we call something having character we use that word to describe generally agreed upon attributes yeah but those things are commented on by outside right and yeah like it has to be because because you could say the same thing about like a galaxy right it's like billions and billions and billions of individual like pieces like stars planets nebulae um like all sorts and then you could boil it down even more right so like atoms and and different um different uh elements and stuff but like ultimately like what gives that meaning is again like a human perspective the milky way galaxy exists because we have to find a galaxy is this but like that's because of us otherwise it would just exist as this thing it doesn't really have a story without us to put in meaning into it so you could say the same thing about I guess like the hypothetical story of the ant colony that has no characters other than the ants in the colony itself or even not describing the ants but just the colony but it's like the pov of the narrator and then the pov of you is like what gives it form which brings us neatly back to characters I was actually gonna say we're still on point technically yeah um this is all been about what even it makes for a character um that to then lead into what I do which I don't know if everyone's happy we could then move into the next contestant no wait wait wait um this makes me think of that scene in American beauty where the bag's blown around in the wind and then the the guy films it on tape and shows the girl and it has that music playing over top it um but like I wonder like if was it art before it was put on film is like is the medium a necessary component of it or did that guy find art in that bag blowing around just in the fact that it was there and it looked so elegant to him I think yes that's a good point and the reason that I would say yes is because if art is an an expression you know if you if this is an agent expressing some aspect of their being then it necessarily requires a medium well what happens if I like if I if I'm making a film and then I commission an artist to do like a poster that's going to be in my film and then the poster ends up in the film and it's like a really important part of the film did it became art as soon as it became the poster and then it became a different type of art when it became contextualized within the film yeah I would say so yeah because you could have that poster and that poster yeah yeah that it could be the poster could be on the wall you could take a picture of a poster and get an extra layer of an image you could film it as you threw it through the air you could fold it up into a cool hat that you wear at parties and it that same physical high rags give it to me um I am not a purveyor of hats I cannot help you in this endeavor my hats are made only for myself someone in chat has said something that has made me think they said what about stage plays now what what what happens when we talk about art that is like non-permanence like like a stage play that is performed in front of no cameras and then after it happens the script gets burned all the people all mediums are non-permanent oh yeah right I guess if we go big enough I mean usually screenplays I think it's fair to draw a distinction so like performative like something that's performative well maybe yeah I'm assuming we all agree like the act of acting is a form of art right it's an expression yes you are you are expressing yourself through the medium of your body's locomotion and that is that art it's like yeah I you know we could ask a lot of questions about where we draw lines on all of that for definitions as well I just don't if you want to go down that road scale good on sexing art no that is a war crime however to be clear it isn't a war crime in the first Wonder Woman because it's not a war crime the first time um so I I'm I'm not sure um like I find all the takes here really interesting but I'm not sure I agree with the consensus here I I I'm not which one really well I'm not I don't yeah is there a consensus I don't everyone disagreed with me well I I see some overlap here between all of you where you like you think art needs either an artist or a medium or both and I don't really think it needs either necessarily I mean it can and a lot of it does obviously but I think people can find art in anything isn't then isn't then the I think that is well so the problem with that as it becomes a word that's meaningless is art is everything yeah I think that might be a different I think you might be using the word art but referring to a different concept that almost sounds like people can people can find people can find meaning in anything but yeah if art is just anything then I mean like technically speaking it has no meaning right because of the signified is everything so the fire doesn't have a purpose the way I think of art is if it moves somebody that's my my fundamental definition of something like we were talking about trees for instance like if like you're saying just looking at a picture of a tree's art but just looking at a tree is an art but I can personally can look at a tree and find art in uh like say for instance it's like bursting out of like the cement or something or there's some kind of like for sure mechanical thing that nature is kind of forging its way out through and you can take that as a statement on the resilience and what brute force of yeah I think I think it's a beautiful rotation wrong but you think happening itself yeah could you say your explanation of that is the art yeah okay because it sounds like you're you've replaced meaning with art like you wherever you find meaning you're looking at art automatically right like whatever whatever you can impart because yeah I think that's an interesting one right is like the story that you've told about the tree like that which is you the agent and the medium of your language you you pulled it from something that you didn't create but like you created the interpretation of it and like by virtue of creating that interpretation that is that has like become the art yeah because I don't think any of us here well maybe other than duma but I don't think any of us here are too definitive on the definition of art as you can see we're all still kind of figuring out the sounds and I'm pretty sure yeah I'm pretty I'm pretty set on the broad concept of um agent and expression as the two necessary components of course that subject to change but I'm pretty I'm pretty solid with that one well I'm not sure but I'm also not bothered by that I like the idea that I keep thinking about it every once in a while it's not really changing much of anything about my day to day you know not having a definitive definition of art because often you don't get challenged to this level right like it's rare that you're gonna find something that's always like oh this painting of a dod has been sold for billions of dollars it's like hard what why like the toilet you guys can clip that moller calls himself a film critic but he doesn't even know what art is true I think if you ask 20 film critics what art was you might get 10 well look at what's happened today I get 20 different answers well it's because art is just one of those of itself it's so broad and everyone thinks of it in the wrong way so you don't have to explain yourself because everybody no no one criticizes or pokes apart someone else's definition when everyone works off of this broad ambiguous kind of concept that in each one of their individual minds is overlapping enough with everybody else's broad and ambiguous definition that it doesn't matter it's a it's a great way to start an argument is to define something no it isn't yeah we may not we may not all be able to like agree on what art is but we can't all agree but I we can't agree that right spot so it makes it better true I would say though that I don't think art requires an observer yeah I don't know I don't know I don't agree with that but this is a long conversation to me to me that's the key honestly is somebody observing it moved by it yeah well I feel like it's just the thing of if we all cease to exist is there art anymore I don't know I don't know if like I would say yes because it adheres to the fact that there was an artist who express themselves in a medium and that makes it art and whether or not anyone knows about it whether or not minds even exist to perceive it I I still don't think that takes away from what it is well so yeah because the thing that's making me wonder is like I don't know like a human makes a painting and then he just disappears immediately and then like a billion years later another agent comes to be and then finds the painting and is able to interpret it it's like so was it art and then it wasn't art and then it became art again as soon as he existed like this yeah when the last mind in the cosmos dies is it did all art suddenly disappear yeah I don't know I don't know if you're um talking in terms of just a practical sense of like okay is it art if they're always there to observe it at that point it doesn't fucking matter what it is no one's there yeah it's a bit like the tree falls in the woods kind of thing yeah exactly well I would say that the tree falls in the woods if that doesn't fucking matter no one's there yeah that's not addressing the question Jay yeah and it does make a sound obviously but um I what that question is really asking you is defined sound pretty much yeah we have one of those yeah sound exists independent of minds and observers so we'd know that the tree would make a sound I suppose well you're asking someone if they think that the word sound to them means the perception of sound in the human brain or the vibration of whatever medium it's carrying through well yeah it is hearing but I mean the question the answer this question might change depending on um languages and dialects that you're asking it in I mean I'm I'm sure yes if the meanings of all the words we use change then yes the sentence would not mean the same shut the fuck up rags I do agree Jay you will have no hats from me wow no I'm going to steal his hat he's a beanie a beanie's a hat I do like beanies is is metal is your headset a hat how big does a headset have to get until it's a hat how much of the head does it have to cover three seventy three percent all right so metal what's the most important part of the story no way yeah metal he was gonna say something I was just gonna say it's a tie a ball on it I still think that character is the most important part of the story okay now dooma can I ask metal the question yeah dooma there's no power here I will not answer that question well what's the most important part of the story uh I think for me since we've watched so many bad stuff these past couple of years uh it is takes me back takes me back to well to speaking of tomorrow boba fat episode three reaction coming out oh coming out okay I have to watch another bad thing yeah I heard that's terrible it's so bad it is it's the work so awful I don't mean to go ahead well I'm used to being fucking interrupted all the time show up now no it's pretty much consistency and that counts for storytelling and characters together it goes from from all this all the shitty shit I've seen so I'm gonna say that properly so all the shitty shit yeah all shitty shit yeah so if we have a character it's can do thing a and then all of a sudden it can do the character can do thing b and everyone is sitting there like wait why can you do that like why is that a thing let's talk it's take no way home for example when strange suddenly has a spell to make people forget things it's like oh that's like super useful in everything that's happened before I guess that's on the greater spectrum though because we have like a whole universe that already happened but also people can just fight all of a sudden like in bad woman when all of a sudden whichever bad woman it is like oh you you can fight all these people now and you also know how to do all these things and you're also allowed to do all these things makes like for a really frustrating experience and it's just interesting to think about because we have so many things now that don't make sense at all continuity wise for characters and storytelling but I feel like a lot of people don't care about that at all yeah I feel like they don't either yeah I think we're in an unprecedented era for fucking consistency being thrown out the window out of curiosity though I'm assuming you'd want to make caveats like there are times where an inconsistency can be used to give us information such as if Dr. Strange did turn out to be Mephisto we could then praise the writing because we could be like there was plenty of clues that he was out of character because it's not what he would do that sort of thing I think we mentioned that a bunch of times and in the e-fab over it right about it so like oh if he would have been an evil man that would have make sense would have made sense there he would go that way to use that and fuck up the universes I guess or dimensions or whatever it was but in that case we just we just had Strange doing a really stupid fucking thing and destroying the the established character that we have if um in Dr. Strange three not even two they actually did establish retroactively that he was Mephisto in No Way Home the whole time does that then fix No Way Home or does it fix the wider story but No Way Home still suffers as an individual story because it didn't give you that context that's interesting question yeah I I think that's the judgment of how much net meta knowledge is allowed to factor in really isn't it um because at that point I would go down the range being Mephisto becomes Mephisto knowledge so a lot of us you can we talk about objectivity a lot it's possible to be objective and be incorrect right while still working with all of the information that you have at your hands and I think this is probably uh in a similar kind of place where if you're working off of all of the information that you could possibly have at any given time and ensuring that all of your biases have been removed sufficiently um you can still say with objective commentary that is correct that they're I guess correctly objective instead of objective that is correct commentary that like Dr. Strange obviously this doesn't work here and then it's not that it retroactively became a different way so much as it is retroactively we discovered information that showed we were not correct in our conclusion but that's why conclusions are always tentative but I guess like in the in the case of Strange if we go with what Marla said I think it's still wouldn't make sense in that context because why would he have stopped the spell at the end then oh obviously I'm assuming this is an abstract thing like we're pretending hypothetically it does fit like all of it fits I just thought about that example you just needed to cause some universe flumping and not all of it like we get all the explanation we need to make it all work I mean I guess it's fine I guess would be awkward for the time I don't I don't know how I would see that I would probably need to think more about it but if it all makes sense if it all makes sense at the end I guess that would be fine so I was just gonna um actually it sounds like you're on that topic so continue so the way I would probably try and do it is the same conclusion I reached with I was doing Dark Souls 2 people were like if all of these things you say about Scarlet of the first sin as a critique of Dark Souls 2 aren't applicable to Dark Souls 2 the base version then like how do you reconcile that you're saying like this doesn't work this doesn't work and then I just decided okay fine I'm talking about Scarlet of the first sin that's specifically what I'm talking about and if you you know are wondering what my opinions are on the base game it's just like I don't know if they're applicable or not that's not the version I'm playing in the same vein I think that being critical of no way home as an individual piece remains but the MCU is a story that's evolving all the time and I think you could even in a valid sense and this applies to everyone's reviews of everything basically like critiquing snook and how he fits into the story in TFA and then someone's like you have a TLJ makes it all make sense and then you watch that and you're like oh yeah it does actually like well are your criticisms of TFA still valid and so I think it depends on how many of like the the payoffs dependent on your understanding at the time um and I so I would still say like no way home needed to give us more context to have been able to understand that I think it's still a flaw from no way home as it stands on its own that we have to simply believe that the Doctor Strange is fucking moron but in the wider context of the MCU perhaps I would argue once that third Doctor Strange comes out that um there was ways they made it work and that you have to have some patience with this wide story that you compactly consider all at the same time which is getting more and more complicated with the TV shows and I'm not sure how much um you can push that before it becomes ridiculous as an idea a lot of this comes down to your how fervently you adhere to the concept of conclusivity um which shouldn't be you know some things can be more dare I say more conclusive than others uh based on the information that you have but if everything's tentative and you're working with the best that you've got then it makes it a lot easier to make statements based on the information that you have what happens if we take a book that was complete and then we later chop it in half uh two separate things and we've burned all of the copies of the original book how do we draw the line in terms of like if the book is utterly incomprehensible in its first half but the second half reconciles everything sorry so we have one book that's chopped in half it is one book and we cut it in half as two books and all copies of the first book uh as as a soul book are destroyed what are you asking about the first just do we know it was a one book before do we know the story isn't over there's a difference between being incomprehensible being incomplete right yeah I mean like we have examples of this in history right you'll you find a document but you only find part of it I mean you're just being incomplete historical artifact I would think well I guess what I'm saying is people think dude yeah the first half is incomprehensible I guess we're talking about the idea of you know you can rely on stuff that comes after to reconcile issues and stuff like that let's say that we have a book that was written as one complete book at 600 pages we chop it into two 300 page books uh part one is incomprehensible part two explains everything and it's perfect and all copies of the first book are destroyed they cease to exist and nobody nobody has access to them anymore um how to like does that mean that the first book is terrible and the second book is fantastic and fixes everything or how do we draw the line I mean like I suppose if if you erased information from the cosmos then I don't know what grounds you could have to say that it would not be terrible and like in general I think it's how consistently it tends to be thought the fact is in you know like you have situations like r plus l equals j where it started being hinted at like 20 years ago or whatever it didn't really get confirmed until like three years ago right yeah but the reveal is completely consistent with the information that we had whereas if you have like a more of a star war situation it seems like things if the things that are being established in the later work are inconsistent with what was established in the earlier work then I think you've got a problem and I do think we should draw a difference between like having mystery boxes in their most positive and pure form of like happy thumbs up and as a reveal like oh cool versus you know wait how did they do all of that it's like well maybe you'll find out some of the time you know like what no I mean how did they all survive that encounter it's like maybe you'll find out in episode three like no that yeah if you essentially treat every issue in a story as it's unfalsifiably bad because of a potential explanation that's just not helpful yeah it turns out if every character how did this character do that well they could secretly be some mega super mutant from the future with magic powers it's the same thing as that yeah actually notice people doing that a lot it gets really frustrating that's the extension you can take it to the means basically like the sequel trilogy we can still contextualize that to make all of it make sense without yes and then ray woke up and it was all a dream that's the easiest way yeah to be like see like now none of it doesn't make sense and you're like right the correct one move what I try to do with film analysis is to look at like what is the most logical thing to happen given the information that we have not is it conceivable that something could happen given the information we have because that gives you a lot of room to justify like basically anything I basically gives you infinite room really I can see them a lot I think it can be complicated right it's like when we talk about for instance contrivance like we I think we would all agree that a contrivance is not as significant as a whole like a whole is irreconcilable yes this passion isn't here yeah yeah whatever that's like definition i'm true right yeah and the contrivance is like a stretch right so it's like I can believe that that's possible unlikely impossible yeah it is and then we ask for it's an extreme one I guess that's the thing right when we talk about degrees right stories will have contrivance well actually I don't want to say that most stories are going to end up with some level of contrivance because it's like difficult to write a story to get it to the places that you want like that's the challenge of storytelling I'm like you will get potentially yeah it's always on a it's always like on a spectrum right it's a right though um I think your goal as a writer is to just create the most logical outcome of pieces that you set up and you don't have any particular like individual payoffs that you're going you're aiming towards then I don't think that you're going to have any contrivances at all really uh I guess um when we think about it it's it's the idea of like how much can you get away with in terms of contrivance and how do we draw that line yeah I was just going to say that like my um my first screenplay is a good example because it's completely consistent and there's no plot contrivances and it's completely realistic it's also boring right it's like trying to do something interesting is yeah trying to do something interesting is where you run into problems we've talked about the uh the accountants story of the accountant who does the books and it's all yeah we talk about variables which is often why we reward stories like you know which makes more sense lord of the rings or maybe office space and it's like well probably office space I guess but I don't know if that's that fair because lord of the rings is dealing with an insane level of variables to maintain and timeline yeah all the species and when you're not relying on the real world as a point of like a story that like Breaking Bad is not going to have as many variables as the book of Boba Fett however you know the book of Boba Fett is pretty worthless in terms of its plot and character so maybe I need a better example like I mean it's pretty good art direction though well I guess uh yeah I well I don't know about that I don't know I don't think I'd agree with those nifty bikes that's why I said it yeah I was gonna say he's aware I guess we use to my only my only knowledge of this is you guys shitting on it I haven't actually well I mean I I guess here's a proper relevant one right it's like 12 angry men is a really great film that has very very very low variables we've got an incredibly limited setting it is a real world like contemporary setting with normal people uh and a pretty pretty like normal it's you know like it's it's all grounded versus if you take something like Blade Runner where it's like so the story itself is like fairly grounded but we are in a science fiction setting we've got like more variables at play in terms of like replicants and space travel technology and things like that and it's like well how impressive is it when Blade Runner achieves what it does with all of the complex things that get thrown in that will make it just naturally harder for any writer to make it work because you'll create you're inventing so many new things versus a story that relies entirely on things that exist in the real world real world systems of government apparatus technology you know I mean the fact that before sunrise is consistent means next to nothing I mean it's two people literally walking around a city with a handy cam having one conversation I mean hard for it not to be consistent I mean I wouldn't go that far it depends on what I'm saying yeah like it yeah I wouldn't take away from the fact that the variables alone in character but the way to look at it I guess is like if Bill and Bob are both juggling Bill dropped one ball while Bob dropped five it's like oh man Bill's better than it's like Bill was only juggling two Bob was juggling ten thousand it's like oh yeah exactly in that case Bill has done shit like he couldn't juggle two uh which is we come across that quite a bit where we're like when the when the when a story deals with very few variables but can't even control them it's like oh good job as opposed to yeah like the more characters you throw in the more world building additional world building science fictional fantasy or whatever that you throw in that's got to be worth something in terms of if you can nail it it's like wow good job man like that was actually really hard you made it very hard for yourself and you did a great job versus you had no excuse I feel that way about Boba Fett I know that Boba Fett is a sci-fi fantasy but at the same time it feels like the variables are very easy to control I think the variables are easy to control because of the stakes of the story and also that it's in a universe where a lot has already been laid out for you you just gotta follow the rules that have already been made for you yeah because you want to be careful what you give the audience as well because it's going back to Boba because it's the most recent example as well just I don't give a shit how he got a stupid fucking stick like wow wow to me so we need an origin story for Boba's stick yeah I'd rather get an origin story for Plank yeah exactly but if you convey info or story or well building that in the grand scheme doesn't matter just because so we have in that case a reason why he has the stick even though that could be easily inferred in between what happened he found a stick he found a stick yeah or he just took it from one of the Tuscan raiders he found in the desert because he was in there it's yeah exactly that's you need to be careful don't don't do too much don't be I guess too consistent like it's okay there's things in there you can infer I guess too good I put it in well I think it's too consistent that's probably this is over explanation at that point right I think this is a big challenge that arrived it's like it's kind of like the challenge of trying to create stories is you want to make sure that it all follows and makes sense but like probably some point that you want to make and it might be hard to like make that and that's like the challenge of storytelling I guess is to try and make the point that you want to make with the story the arts in the sense or like the meaning of the art against all of the the ways that we get there the ways that this communicated that you know the the building blocks basically which means John is next oh my god what is the most important element of storytelling why is it merchandising chimps sidekick yes preferably a cop resurrected from the dead and is somebody's ex-partner I like it and he has a cat phrase yes attitude catch phrase ideally incorporating the word banana each time wow these beat shifter enough to drive me bananas Mahoney and then he actually starts with bananas and screeching at the top of his legs punching Mahoney stop it so I'm about to say the meme word are you ready themes and I was hoping someone would say it I'm hard yeah so when you said character fringy I don't think that's really far off from theme because I consider characters as vehicles for themes and I don't think a theme always has to be crystal clear but I think there's something needs to be there and all the best movies like all the movies that are really resonated with me have they usually have a theme that's quite clear and you know respectable I was just watching Ratatouille the other day and I fucking love that movie it's and its theme is crystal clear I mean they laid out in the first scene talent can come from anywhere right yeah well there's a number like a film can have multiple themes right but it's typically there's one at the top and then you have another bunch of them that kind of branch off of that and all the plot beats kind of explore the nuances of those themes and in the case of Ratatouille it's not only is it a high concept you know a rat the last thing you'd want in a kitchen becomes the finest chef in Paris like you can immediately you hear that logline and you're like okay cool I'm on board I get it uh but beyond that the theme is like talent can come from anywhere not and they explain this in the movie as well that can be talented yeah right yeah the critic ego has the speech at the end he writes his review of Gusto's restaurant yeah he says not everyone wants and dies not everyone can be a great artist but a great artist can come from anywhere like as long as if you want to do something and you put your mind to it and you're willing to learn you can be great no matter where you from who you are and uh that always stuck with me like that's one of the best I mean there's a lot of things I like about that movie but the fact that it's the story that it's telling is so clear I know what it's about and I leave the theater going I was actually about something and I can really get on board with that message you know we're talking about uh story earlier being a series of events I agree that that's an essential component of it but to me the other essence essential component is a meaningful series of events what is what does the string of events mean because other without anything holding it together it's just a bunch of stuff happening you know and a bunch of stuff can happen where it's like exploding cars and tits and a sex scene and a montage and I'm just like okay like that was I guess enjoyable on some kind of popcorn brain dead level but I'm I'm not really leaving the theater with any kind of um I mean it's a theme or a movie doesn't have to be like profound and life-changing or anything or have a you disqualify it as a story if you don't find meaning in it um hmm I think so yeah okay if it's just a bunch of stuff happening I wouldn't say that's a story because like if I were in the same situation I should be like it's a story but I don't care about it I just don't find it very valuable yeah it's a story that just doesn't really have a meaningful theme to a purpose or a message I guess that um I agree that the theme is basically the point of like why we tell stories is the lessons and values that we can pull from narrative and like characters is like the empathy vehicle that helps it easy like become more like comprehensible and easy for us to understand but I would say that there are absolutely like stories that I guess the problem is I feel like you could put like you you could put a theme onto any story and then the conversation would just be how well executed is the theme right like the theme of transformers is I don't know um be nice to your car because if you don't it might come out and machine was worked together to do yeah well I could say that and it's like I guess if I had I could work really hard to try and pull that theme out but it's it's bullshit right as opposed to like the themes of um the the themes of ratatouille where it's like it's pretty clear that this is the point because there's so much in the story that supports that theme and I guess that's where the conversation becomes how well have you executed your theme because I do think that there are degrees to which themes are well executed and poorly executed yeah right no totally totally fair point I I agree with that like uh this reminds me I talked about this on the podcast before but I had a friend uh or a fan of mine email me asking for story advice we've got fans no need he wanted to he wanted to write a story that didn't have a theme deliberately or uh I think that's what he said yeah and he he was asking me like how would you do that and I'm just like well I wouldn't do that so I'm not really the guy to ask for advice on that kind of approach to me that's kind of essential to it but uh you're right in that if I were to just write a bunch of stuff happening and deliberately try and not put a theme in there I think there's going to be a there's going to be a message embedded in that no matter what even if I should pull from it absolutely I think yeah that's the second character I was going to bring up was the how do you stop there's always going to be someone who can find something in whatever story even if it's one you've deemed like meaningless because I'm almost thinking like what Fringy just said that someone can pull something from it I'm almost feeling like the phrase should be some like a theme that someone can put into it right well I guess the thing is is that when you think about writing a story a lot of the time at least in my experience there is like intentionality of like trying to have a point I guess a lot of the time like usually like whenever I think about a story I want to tell there's usually like a point of some kind not necessarily a point of like this is correct but like wouldn't it be interesting to think about this concept like something to do without I don't know fear or or heroism or like these are and I feel like it traces back to like the epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest stories ever told the theme is like to like death is inevitable right and that's like one of the themes of that story is like one of the first stories we told it seems to just be like a really important part of why we tell stories is some sort of message it's it's the whole idea of like parables and fables like asops fables and things like that is some sort of message about that you can apply to your life that's like what we're there for well as and as much as I appreciate the fuck out of messaging and themes and stuff is it not valuable in and of itself to be like you know what I'd like to just see wills and vampires fight each other in a story with some characters I don't need a I don't need to draw meaning out of it beyond that totally true I love movies that are totally absolutely shallow and are just a string of action sequences I would still say that all my favorite ones have some message that I consider respectable you know where it's like it's some it's some archetype that has like recurred over and over that you can apply to your own life in some way like the highest pedigree it can reach without a theme do you think without a theme uh parade uh does have a theme yeah I don't think it's without theme I'm not quite sure what it is I need to what I envision as a problem here is that you might cite an example and then someone they might be in chat will be like what do you mean there's a theme in that this thing yeah didn't you notice am I weird I guess uh because yeah because like the Red Redemption is a movie that pretty much everybody watches for the really awesome action scenes but I'm pretty sure that like you could pull a theme from that film because it does have a narrative it has characters and it has a plot um and it has stuff to do with like what's that what did chat said I totally disagree with all the action devoid of story is a disgusting waste of time this guy has fun at parties I mean I'm assuming I'm not alone in having watched action scenes devoid of context because they're awesome I'm assuming you guys right like if you watch like dragon balls and compilations hell yeah they're really cool I like to enjoy my toxic masculine uh entertainment I guess that's the thing is like if you look into the story that doesn't have much of a theme but it's incredibly incredibly incredibly impressive incredibly impressive yes incredibly impressive on a technical level like it's got incredible fight scenes amazing visual effects great cinematography awesome music like everything is working but it is just like a fight scene I feel like that's got to be worth a hell of a lot in terms of just the craft of you know because I yeah I guess in filmmaking filmmaking is like I guess storytelling is the umbrella term but there's also like more to craft than that in the same way that like with art there's like paint strokes and brushes and and like uh color you know how color plays into it like the technical aspects of the crafts like for instance really great pros describing nothing could be that could be really interesting in terms of like theme was like that it doesn't really have a theme at all but it's just super impressive uh in terms of the the technical crafts yeah that's gonna be awesome the the questions today though revolve around like what is the best of a number of elements of storytelling the best what the best story the best character I would say when we're talking about the best stories the cream of the crop are the ones that have are tied together by themes you know every scene you you you see it like relates to something unifying and it's everything is driving towards one central thing or like one main thing and a bunch of sub themes as well what would you I don't know is like a film that you really really like and value that you don't particularly care about the theme to be fair all he has to do is cite one that he enjoys but not for it doesn't have to not have a theme just one that he doesn't enjoy for its themes it wasn't that I think it was the themes being the most important aspect of what makes like a story the greatest you know like if you had especially if themes are more just emergent from characters and setting instead of more intentionally baked into the material um because I wonder does a does a story like if we take the Lord of the Rings right and if we take all that that encompasses what the character is behaving and their dialogue and the plot carrying out as it does um is that story only as good as it is because of the themes that are present in it or if if all of those themes were more like again passively emergent would that make the story worse well I mean I would I would say that like Lord of the Rings the themes are not passively emergent like it's it's pretty clear what the theme of the Lord of the Rings is it's like okay so someone didn't see them well then but they loved it I guess that's an interesting thing to think about it is it like did they actually appreciate it but they can't put their finger on it or do they are they like holy they well I well they could just talk about the characters the dialogue yeah just purely pure characters this character does this and therefore he does that and so he says these things and that's consistent with I always say and he learned from this and so he did that they did that about the entirety of the Lord of the Rings but they're they just had they just didn't see the themes they just didn't notice them it just didn't occur to them that there were themes in it and then you mention it and they're like oh yeah I guess if you want to yeah I guess there was yeah if they're talking about the things that they like and are great about the characters could you make the argument that like just by virtue of doing that that they're going to talk about themes somehow like if they talk about how much they love the relationship between Frodo and Sam in terms of like their friendship they're just like virtue of talking about that they've kind of talked about theme so so in that I said well the one ring is a representation of the theme lmao rags is wrong on this one what what am I wrong about I'm asking a question about uh I'm describing a hypothetical individual well yeah I think and we're getting closer and closer to the point because if we can't separate the meaning you derive out of a character's story from theme then at that point uh yeah I guess everyone's appreciating theme no matter what in some sense yeah but to answer the question about specifically the friendship between Sam and Frodo for instance is the friendship that they have and are displayed to have different from the theme of friendship I guess that's the thing right it because it because I think you can tie throughout that whole film right that it's basically friendship good is like the theme of lord of the rings that like working together good because I think because when I think about these two characters my mind in no way goes to friendship as a theme I am completely honed in and focused and notice these are two characters who are very good friends based on all the things they do and say and I like that I'm compelled by it that's right um I think the themes go in subconsciously though you know like if you're not appreciating if you're if you're not if you don't acknowledge them on the surface and you don't leave the theater knowing what the themes are if they're there I think they go in well into your brain the only way we can figure that out then at that point is like rags is telling me how much he enjoyed Frodo and Sam he assesses them as characters perfectly their journeys and what they mean to each other and then I go well sounds like you loved as well this the the idea of fellowship and how we can come together to beat any foe sort of thing I could let's pretend hypothetically rags was like uh oh I like so yeah the theme doesn't have to be anything complex or profound you know well I'm just asking that word not even a phrase I'm suggesting that rags in the hypothetical does not give a fuck about the theme whatsoever but he's very definitive on what he's enjoying about the content as a story well I often think of themes as like statements or yeah maybe to find some sometimes defined theme I guess I don't know if theme and meaning are exactly interchangeable maybe that's the dictionary yeah you can go to it you can go I'll let you phone a friend if you like but as someone yeah as someone who's because I mean a theme is the thing that you think is most important I I feel you should have some kind of a definition for it theme so the definition of theme according to Merriam-Webster is a subject or topic of discourse or of artistic representation b a specific and distinctive quality characteristic or concern two a melodic subject of a musical compositional movement three are written exercise so I guess it would be definition one a a subject or topic of discourse or of artistic representation yeah one for a unifying idea that's the one I'm inclined to I feel like just something that ties everything together and like I'm saying it doesn't have to be anything big or profound or life-changing or new like often they're not new they're historically recurring over and over again you know right I think do you describe it as oftentimes the point which I I would agree that's what I generally would say is the theme is the point of the story it's like if we have a story that has characters plot and world building like the actual stuff that's in there the theme is like the value that you pull from it in terms of um like a point or a lesson or a virtue um I feel like that's the best I could do with the definition for theme anything else feels like it might leave stuff out um and I mean you think because a lot of the time themes of stories are like be brave or be kind to people or um failure is the best yeah no no no it's the greatest teacher failure is yeah it's a completely different thing watch the movie no I didn't watch it if not then I oh I envy you then I envy you how many times have we seen TLJ too many I think I've only seen it beginning to end it might be just the one time I certainly only watched it I've definitely seen it more than once for making those yeah I think that's what's wild I've only actually seen it beginning to end one time and it was at the theater the rest is a massive collection of clips and references and things of that nature I feel like it's always like a good example of and I mean there are a lot of examples of it right like that you can come into a story with the intention of conveying a certain theme but the story itself can betray that theme yeah absolutely you don't just earn it by default like the idea having the theme emerge in your head of like I want to tell this story with this point that's not that's not like anything necessarily you've got to put in the work to make that theme something of value work you I think so I think that um and I think that's what makes theme valuable and like stories where it's really great is man you work so hard to achieve this theme and make it cogent and there are so many references in the film that I can point to that are um that you know that we then support my interpretation of this theme like I appreciate all of the answers so far I don't disagree definitively with any of them and themes like the interesting thing about that one is that it's one of the most commonly like it's going to be between that and character for me to build a story up from the ground because it is the two that you need everything else to comport to as far as I'm concerned well a plot will like design itself once everybody is clear and the world is just just trying not to fucking contradict yourself okay well I think it's the standard thing right it's it's very rare that people say man what a great plot I love that plot that plot yeah so cool I love how that event happened and then that event happened but you do find other events the characters were pretty lame though these people people do say that on occasion like um I guess with twists and turns and but usually I feel like the social network is a very plot-driven film social network has strong characters though yeah those characters are awesome like that that would be what I'd be pointing to there I don't mean you think about it like Steve Jones which is also written by Aaron Sorkin it's like that's another one where it's like the plot is not that important at all it's like characters seeing these people interact with each other yeah it hardly exists you typically don't find people saying oh what a great plot but shitty characters but you will find everyone somewhere people saying what a great world like what an incredible world what what great character world seems to carry you quite far sometimes it can I think it can distract from not having any characters uh but I mean at that point it's the character of the world almost feels like or the potential of imagine this and yeah yeah this character in this world that'd be so cool like what if this character met the Balrog what if this character was present at this battle one of my uh favorite modern examples of theme holding a whole movie together is uh the second new spider man far from home um where you have this idea of controversial here I don't know what you guys maybe you guys hate it I don't know I really like we I think we all um this is one of the positive about it while having reservations about it yeah plot right let him say the thing and then we'll kill him yeah we're not gonna kill him this is fine we might I'm impressed I'm impressed that that film manages to have this kind of uh light fluffy comedic feel to it all but it's it's so tied together by its theme of truth it's just really simple that's about it and then a bunch of kind of sub themes and questions branching off this central idea of truth like the difference between truth in fact uh the difference between the truth and a lie uh the truth in service of a lie a lie in service of truth um what the greater good of of like a broad situation is like uh the uh that what you were when Fringing you're talking about characters being so important like I I totally agree characters are up there with theme for me because when you I think when you're brainstorming for stories I mean for me usually it's theme or character that comes first and with spider-man far from home if you tell a story about truth like that comes along with certain characters and Mysterio is such an obvious character a villain to go with when you're telling that kind of story but or maybe the character came first where it's like okay we want to do a movie about Mysterio what do we do with that it's like okay well with Mysterio comes these themes of what's real and what's not right because that's kind of the essence of that that villain yeah I uh it's I don't I guess I don't want to because I know one of the the future topics is going to be but one of my favorite characters and just like stories in general part of the reason why I like him so much is that he's so rich for like theme there's so much you can do in terms of theme exploration with that character they're just like man what a great template for like for telling stories about these particular topics I I definitely agree that like character and theme often go hand in hand because it's like the lesson that the hero learned is usually like the theme that you want the person to walk away with the challenges that they face and hide in but often not always necessarily sometimes it might be the villain right well it's just a great it's a great way to it's a great way to teach a lesson isn't it to show a character learning it through empathy right yeah that's like a strength of storytelling is it it leverages like human empathy to uh to get to a to a place um I think I'm not telling yet I think that movie does a really good job of exploring all the nuances of its theme through its plot without feeling too forced like for example like Peter gets photographed in that compromising with his pants down with that woman and it's a fact you know on in a photograph that that happened but the truth is not that he was making out with that girl or anything and the guy has that photo and he's using it against him to hook up with MJ and he's kind of like saying Peter is a bad person even though I I kind of think that that character knows that he caught him in a compromising position that wasn't quite what it seemed but he didn't care because he wanted to hook up with MJ so he's being a little bit deceitful there but he's claiming to be on the side of truth and then you know Peter gets the ridiculous god glasses and he can see the uh you know everyone's sending their texts to each other through their phones on the bus and he sees that uh the guy is about to send the image to MJ I think over the phone and he he's I think he stops the process of delivering the message with the glasses and it's like should he have done that should he not have done that because he has this godlike power and it's like you could consider the idea of like he's abusing his power but no if it's in the service of a greater truth that like this guy is like going to um manipulate the fact in order in order to hook up with MJ and leave Peter out of the picture like it's he's not giving MJ a fair representation of what's actually going on and um what else happens in that movie obviously all this stuff with Mysterio like like I love the whole nightmare sequence him literally not knowing what's real and what's not real with the whole like like Mysterio's deliberately trying to throw him off warping him back like showing him showing him what's like obviously fake but then putting him in what looks like the real world but it's still fake and then like psyching him out um anyway yeah that's that's like a recent example of a film that I feel is really held together like every almost every scene in that movie is just like oh yeah I can see how this relates to its theme and you know it doesn't have to be anything new or profound or complex it's just like it's got this theme of truth I get it and this scene is about this aspect of it this scene is about that aspect of it and it all comes together really nicely they set up the spider sense which of course that's like the silver bullet for a character like Mysterio like that would be his downfall yeah so okay you guys can flame me alive now if uh I don't know I think I think we all agree here it's the chat is going to be playing you alive well so I mean because it seems like the general consensus we've arrived at far from home is that plot's pretty weak like plot is quite weak but I still think that the character for Peter and like Mysterio is working okay um the only thing I would have to add is that um on its own I don't think truth is enough um to really constitute a strong theme well what we need is you need I'm so more so um exploration of that idea is what makes it valuable rather than the consistency with which it's just present in the story right a good example is Wonder Woman 1984 the theme of that film is that the truth is good that is the theme of that the truth is beautiful but it's off I don't think that I don't see that as a bad thing though and it's simplicity like I'm okay with no no no no no truth is beautiful it's a simple theme also that's not true I don't agree with that the reason why I use that one as an example is because that is clearly the point that the film wants to make but like my it is so poorly conveyed well it the film makes me think no that's the opposite of what's true yes I'm arguing against the film's problems makes me think no the truth is so often ugly and you've got to accept that shut up the truth is not always a thing of beauty fuck off I agree with that yeah sometimes it's very ugly that uh at the end everybody gets the power to have like wishes and stuff and the film kind of almost posits that everybody is going to make incredibly selfish vain cynical wishes and we just like ignore the wishes that people would make I wish my kid didn't have leukemia or something yeah and then like Wonder Woman gives a speech about how basically you should just like passively accept your shitty circumstances yeah leukemia is beautiful that's the truth and it's beautiful no it's even worse no it's even worse than leukemia is beautiful it's the fact that your son has leukemia is beautiful which is even worse you need to rise up against children with leukemia yeah and it's beautiful that you will choose to not help him yeah right like it's it's the same thing for a shit it's really really bad in 1984 is like such a bad movie that basically like all normies who watched it didn't like it either yeah except high top films and so here's the director is going to make a rogue squadron film so well that's not happening anymore I don't think oh is that cancelled that's on hold indefinitely I think yeah what is that is that a Star Wars how do you can just go to director a million Star Wars projects who cares oh so like the the interesting thing I think that we're discovering here as well is that we had a lot of praise for movies that do well with binding everything through theme but ones that fuck themselves up through theme like they seem to crash and burn as a result of that real hard like if they're trying to make an overall point and they sapakoo themselves uh on trying to make it TLJ being another fantastic example can you think of an example of one of those movies where they they butcher their own theme but the film is otherwise really good oh well I wasn't referencing that necessarily but I think that when we talk about TLJ and 1984 and stuff a lot of people will gun for the theme first because it's such a like all encompassing failure was the idea that like your film has kind of been destroyed by it's such strong adherence to a theme that doesn't appear to be like you need to tell a different story if you want to get to this theme you know or you need to make like significant changes honestly you need to live in a different with at least in the case of when we need to thought for you need to live in a different reality if you want to get to this theme like I don't accept this theme right I guess it's the idea that Wonder Woman 1984 that was clearly like the theme they went for but it's just like oh it is you have films and stories that execute a theme well but the theme could be well someone in chat has got a good example that you could probably talk about Starship Troopers right like the intention of the of the story versus like what you actually pull from it and I guess in that and with that example are you talking about how it's like the attempt is to make the like the attempt of the director was to convey a political message however the actual material of the world is really awesome all the time it's like it's like a satire of fascism but like if you just look at the movie on the surface it seems to be like supporting yeah but it's really utilitarian state but it's actually a satire well it it was supposed to be it's supposed to be but unironically the system of Starship Troopers is great and I would have no issue living under that political system because it's kind of amazing clip it and there's a lot of really really excellent yeah that's the same people think that yeah things that that's the thing that people don't get about Starship Troopers people see people see long boots and trench coats and they're like oh this is about how fascism is bad but there's no fascism present in that movie at all it's like extremely opposite I watched um I think Sargon made his video in response like he said it was spurred on by seeing red light media talk about it and he was like no because they they oof I'm about to say something pretty harsh but a lot of people will say the surface take is just a fun action movie while the deep take is that it's anti fascism and then people will say no the surface take is that it's anti fascism the deep take is that it's actually pro just like it's just a story about an interesting civilization that is got a lot more going forward than what people would claim in a sense it is anti fascism because it shows a very non-fascist fascist system that works excellently and is awesome so in that sense sure um but yeah because I know it's just such a unusual take for a lot of people just watch Sargon's video on it it's very interesting it's very good he goes through a lot of misconceptions I guess the reason why I brought that one up is the idea that the the intended theme of the creator seems to be dissonant with how it actually pans out in the story well yeah something is because like I bring up because everyone's just so familiar with it but like TLJ tells us you as a person will improve through your failings like it's like one of the most important parts of learning is through and it's like oh that's an interesting and important message sure Poe doesn't fail and he gets chastised and then by the end of the film he makes the wrong decision and he's rewarded and the film is like this is growth it's like that is not growth that's regression growth of a tumor so a bad storytelling and you know this applies to oh my god it applies to characters in all different ways like like luke is just we're just told he failed miserably and it's just like it's completely out of character but simultaneously he came through because he learned from his failure that learning from failure is important I don't know like it point being that uh the theme is so explicit and yet it's in congruent with what the event's taking place and I suppose that could be applied to starship troopers I'd have to watch it again to see if there's any over it sort of you know like the equivalent of Yoda saying the line like one character says fascism is bad and that's what you guys are yeah I suppose I'm next oh boy randomizer I chose is arguably it could be a little bit close to metals but I chose continuity and I chose it because it seems to me that whenever anyone talks about a movies sort of or where there are stories praiseworthy elements or critic worthy elements like this it's going to be regarding some level of continuity it's something it's how things are connecting to other things and I just think it's like the binding gel for basically every single component that could ever be in it I don't I don't know how to get more fundamental than that without breaking into like like the atoms conversation that I've been at one point but um the way I see it is that every person that's ever complimented the way a story works they're usually going to be referencing how at least one thing connects to another thing but usually lots of things put together um so yeah is anyone got any questions on that or I think that's I think it's more relevant now than ever the idea of continuity and it goes back into like respecting your lore and where you came from not to use it as a just a stepping stone well I think I think we'll go even more based on that if a story is a sequence of events then it makes sense that continuity is like basically a fundamental element right yeah I think taking this back to law is um is going to be the thing that um a lot of people who want to misinterpret what you mean when you say continuity you're going to immediately think of or is like oh of course the the nerds they think continuity is the most important part of storytelling well hey guess what it actually doesn't matter if Boba Fett uses the same kind of gun he used a new hope or he wasn't in yes you know um base then the idea I'm definitely not just talking about law yeah it's more fundamental than that yeah any appeal you make to something that you like in a story is going to rely on what it was in and how two pieces of information like connected together right it's never going to be it's never going to be you know what Bob it's going to like I like that Bob you're not going to say that you're going to say I like that Bob did this or I like that this happened to Bob and this is how we reacted to it it's it's always going to be an appeal to something that yeah like um I like like the most fundamental stuff like oh well something really simple I like that this character will read in the scene was like oh okay that that's cool um but it's probably going to be with some in relation to most likely something else in the story right um if the idea that a character wearing red is meaningful there's probably something set up that makes that the case what red might mean to that character or the specific clothes that they're wearing and what they mean in the context of the world or something like that because on its own that's not going to be a meaningful event someone just asked what's the difference between continuity and consistency an example I was just thinking on my head this might not be the best way to put it but um if you know Anthony walks through into a room and there's supposed to be a painting and then you know seconds later there's no painting you could call that inconsistent but it's in continuity with what we understand to be is POV well you can have can have um well consistent inconsistency right where you have um something that is established to not always work the same way something that is established to be random or something that's established to be unreliable yeah and um I wouldn't want to depreciate any of the other options that have been given today it's just more so that I I assume that continues that that is like embedded in all of them um yeah to make like some people are saying like oh I think purpose is the most important it's like well yeah I think purpose is really important too but I would also put that without continuity I don't do any of these things really yeah I would definitely include continuity into consistency to some degree just when we have something like oh this bomb is 13 kilometers away and they get there in like one minute which is impossible for what we know that's like huh that makes sense yeah and also character actions need to be connected to characters other actions right or else you don't have a character yeah you know if a character is established as being cowardly you can have a catalyst and over time they can become brave but if they're established as being cowardly and then all of a sudden they're brave for no reason it's kind of like uh brah yes non-contradiction has a necessary temporal component to it all right then does that mean we only have one left for this first question only only two and a half hours yeah that's the most important element of storytelling so I think I have a pretty atypical answer it's going to take me a minute to explain but not bagels my answer is suspense so usually people think of suspense as being something that's only really discussed in like a thriller or a horror movie or like very specific contexts but if you're if you're thinking about what should I be writing right what should I be actually doing in a story you know what matters for the audience usually one of the most important things that people will say is you know what happens next you need to be they need to be captivated they need to be interested and invested in what's going to happen in the future and basically I think all of the reasons that that happens are suspense so my conception of suspense is basically that you have a question in the audience's mind that's being teased at and what's really important is how much they care about that question and how well you're able to establish that there are multiple different possible outcomes right so a character wants a goal the more you care about that character the more you will care about them being able to achieve their goal and then the question becomes are there good reasons that they might achieve it or fail right and the more you care about the question and the more you're able to tease apart those different possibilities the more suspense you're going to have about that particular question is the character going to accomplish their goal so an example to kind of illustrate this I think is one of the most common questions that a story will be teasing out is is this character going to die and like an action film for example if we just look at the MCU people are generally speaking going to care more about Iron Man or Spider-Man dying because people generally speaking like Iron Man and Spider-Man a lot relative to other characters and then you could also look at problems with teasing the idea of certain characters dying or if you have a character like Thor or the Hulk that have like an absurdly high power level most people aren't really going to think that they're going to die so if you try and tease the idea you know is the Hulk going to die I mean the answer is probably no but you know Iron Man is just a dude in a suit so it is perfectly conceivable that Iron Man could die right so you have really good reasons for or against the question and they really care about the question and this is basically how I when most people go and write a story plot is usually sort of the centerpiece of everything if someone asked someone what are you writing the first thing they would probably talk about is the plot if you looked at their notes it would probably be organized in terms of the plot I actually organize things in terms of suspense so try and figure out what questions I'm teasing at and try and make them as interesting as possible and try and make sure that there are multiple possible outcomes that I'm able to you know tease the suspense right I think it's probably a pretty atypical answer I don't even think a lot of people think of suspense as being a part of a story but I have found this to be sort of the ultimate answer of why I find most films to be as compelling as they are relative to other films so they're like incredibly suspenseful these questions I really care about and it's actually conceivable to imagine multiple different outcomes I would say one good way to sort of put that into I get one way to describe it would be good suspense is when you have an audience that is convinced and believes in the idea that whatever happens next is going to be reasonable and will make sense the audience has been given this confidence that bullshit ain't just going to happen for no reason but they also need specific things to care about so like a character accomplishing their goal is something right and I mean in a general sense if you have three characters in a story and only one of them has a goal there is a sense in which it could be more interesting if another character had a goal you have another thing to wonder about or mysteries for example mysteries have kind of been sullied recently in film because there's this really horrible habit of yeah exactly writers will just come up with something that sounds interesting but they don't know where it's going and it's just terrible so like that idea has kind of been sullied but the idea of a mystery is just exactly the same thing there's there's this question very often it's about the backstory of a character or about something about the world that hasn't quite been teased apart there's like a maybe a sense of dramatic irony or whatever and I mean that can be a very very powerful element of storytelling it's just unfortunately not been done particularly well in the last 10 to 15 years on account of certain people yeah I mean when you think about like sort of the cognitive experience of watching a film what actually is going on in your head what what is it that you find so compelling about watching certain movies I think this is the most engaging aspect I mean for me anyway it's sort of these these questions that get brought up and making people care about them and sort of teasing you in different directions and like a good example of this is the reason that a lot of romance films are really bad is because they don't do this you know the outcome is sort of presupposed you know they're going to get together just you're just sort of waiting for it to happen there's a very critical problem I think that the genre has is that there's no real suspense there's not really much to wonder about there isn't any way that you're actively involved intellectually and like trying to figure out where this is going you just kind of already know when romance films are actually able to establish that suspense in my opinion it's when they become really really really good a lot of the time so I have a question how do we factor in the value of suspense in a film where you after you've seen it basically when you come back to watch for the second time you know what's going to happen I mean I I can this is a bit different from other people I think I don't spoilers don't affect me that much there's a sense in which I can watch a movie that I've already seen a hundred times and I'm still kind of experiencing it for the first time I like I guess it would be the idea of like if the value of suspense is the idea of like oh what's going to happen what's going to happen what happens when you know already because you've seen it I mean if you've been given spoilers I guess the question would be do you think that there was something more fundamental to analyzing how well it works that is beyond the audience reaction to that suspense uh yeah but I mean I I still experience this even when watching a film you know many many many times it's like it's not sure I mean I can only speak for myself I guess what I'm I guess what I'm asking is do you think that there was like an identifiable craft to suspense that we can talk about in terms of how well it's done divorced from the audience reaction like the first time versus the second time of the third time I think that suspenseful films should maintain most of it on repeat viewing or with spoilers like on the surface it seems like they shouldn't but in my experience they do and I think that's true at least of a lot of people I can't know for everyone right but if there wasn't a if there wasn't a compelling question it would I mean I would sort of ask that you know it's like why why are you watching it again right if you if I guess uh usually like when I rewatch a film I do have a quite different experience the second time around it's like first time around you're like you are asking the question like oh where's this going to go you're like pondering you know based on the clues the all of the different directions that could go in usually the second time around when I'm watching a film I'm like oh that's yeah and that that ties into that at the end wow that was clever like that's really good man this is so well structured in terms of like getting all of this information out in this way it's like I think my experience the second time around tends to be more analytical of like I guess the craft of the writing because now that I know where everything's going you can start to see how purposeful it is you know like you start with the end in mind absolutely because you start with the end of mind you start building towards it in a way that's really cool I guess I'm just asking like yeah I so I I agree with that almost completely like so like right I mean I would say that you're understanding why the film was able to be that suspenseful like so for the for the favorite movie question I my like spoiler alert the reason that I'm choosing that I'm not not going to say it but the reason I'm choosing the movie is because it is profoundly suspenseful right and I've seen the movie over a hundred times and every time I watch it I see another reason that it had that effect on me the first time that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't gone back and rewatched it right I mean so it's like even if you don't have the same there's like obviously I'm never going to be able to recreate the theater experience of going there opening night and seeing the movie but I remember you know how profound that experience was and even rewatching it I still have I would say like 40 to 60 percent of the level of magnitude of that experience but it's also like you said there's an analytical element of understanding how was it able to evoke this much suspense how was it able to be this uh in grossing right can a story be good without suspense uh in this sense I would guess not but I mean again this is a this is probably a more broad definition like I said most people would only think of suspense in terms of like being like a thriller right so I mean actually no finish finish what you were gonna say yeah I was just gonna say like most people would only think of suspense as being something you would talk about in a thriller or horror film so like when I talk about suspense and romance films people find that to be really weird until I go out and explain exactly what it is that I'm talking about and then I guess hopefully it makes sense to people then but I mean in the sense that I'm using it I don't know how you could even construct a story really um well the story is man is sitting at his computer like just typing browse on the web and he does that for about 36 minutes and then he suddenly gets shot in the head and then the following like 60 minutes is just him lying there as blood starts to pull on the floor could you say like could you say that it won't just be suspended that because as soon as he gets shot you have no idea what's gonna happen next okay so this this is this is gonna seem like kind of a pedantic answer um but there are a lot of questions that are sort of implicit in any form of film so like if in the opening of a movie you're always wondering who are these people and what's going to happen that's just sort of always omnipresent sort of regardless of what's happening so you would be wondering is he just going to keep typing right what is going to happen it would it would very rapidly approach zero because you wouldn't care about this person um and with no development like this is like the I mean the level of suspense would like literally approach zero I mean you'd probably turn it off um because you would change the parameters to uh we we can see what he's doing on the computer and there's like a whole bunch of stuff that he's doing on the computer that can tell us stories about his life and his interests and his relationships with people but he doesn't really talk he only ever conveys through the computer and then some like so maybe he's sending a message to his girlfriend like yeah you know we could go out for dinner tonight we can only get shot in the head and then it's him lying on the keyboard and from that point on we see we see on the computer like it's maybe it's open on social media and like his girlfriend starts up you know it's like hmm it's with these not responding and then there's a phone call right like we just add these parameters but it's still a story in one room and the guy just sitting there and all that happens is that in terms of what happens to him is he's typing on his computer he gets shot and then like sounds like this sounds like a pretty cool like art film I actually really like this idea as I'm saying it this feels like it could be a really cool story so I mean yeah so there is so like when as soon as you establish okay he has a girlfriend you're wondering what's the nature of their relationship and there's probably going to be some element of their interaction that's going to imply something so like one way that you can make romance films more interesting is to imply something that would traditionally be bad or traditionally be good and then later reveal that there is an element the opposite of what you were expecting so you get the expectation of you know what is the nature of their relationship oh it's good because they said something that would seem to be on the surface to be good right but you could sometimes it gets explored more later and you realize oh now actually there's a negative part of this relationship that wasn't previously established and then you sort of have a conflict it's like okay we have reasons to think the relationship is good and reasons to think the relationship is bad so we inherently have a conflict that needs to be explored and and potentially resolved right so I mean yeah there's like there's always going to be some level of question it's just going to be I mean part of it part of it doesn't kind of interesting right but I mean I think I think there kind of always has to be suspense in the way that I'm using the term it's just that a lot of the time it's not going to be terribly and it's not going to be noteworthy this way to put it um no I I agree I don't consider it uh like uh atypical to to to announce the importance of that like suspense suspense and tension in a film is is key like it hinges on juxtaposition and it transcends genre I know what you mean about like it commonly being attributed to like thriller and horror because like with like suspense everyone brings up the Hitchcock example of the bomb under the table right which you would only see in like a thriller movie proud of us for not mentioning it yet and now I did um but like the juxtaposition can be anything not just the presence of a bomb in people who are oblivious you can juxtapose ideas characters scenes sequences um entire acts um you can juxtapose themes ideas like there needs to be like clashes going on and that keeps people compelled on the edge of their seat this is part of why Game of Thrones was so compelling for a while I mean it's a real shame it was canceled after four seasons but you know I guess we'll never know what was going to happen all right but like the one of the good things about that show was that you would have a lot of characters that are morally gray meaning that they would do some things that are would seem good and some things that would seem bad and sometimes their perception of what is good and bad is different than yours their perception of good and bad is different than the other characters in the story and that gives you a lot of questions right it's like well is it I mean you can't even necessarily figure out is this you know is Jamie Lannister a good or bad character the answer to that question is going to change considerably over time right so it's like like sort of my view is first of all most people find Jamie Lannister to be pretty compelling right um and then there's all these questions about um how things are going to affect him how we actually think about him what's his relationship to the world and do these things get teased and changed over time I mean almost all of them in the beginning of the show he is you know one of the most talented swordsmen uh you know and and the world is established and then he gets his hand cut off and it's like okay well his entire identity just got robbed of him and you're wondering where exactly is that going to go it goes in a certain direction at once and then another direction later but the fact that we really care about it and there's all these questions related to Jamie right and all the questions are changing they aren't they aren't static things um there's a consistent development of his character at least over the four seasons that we got right um the development of Jamie is pretty suspenseful in that way I don't think most people would describe I'd say it's atypical because I've read like all the screenwriting books it never gets talked about this way so I mean it's atypical in that respect but I think that it's a good explanation of why that character is so compelling um right there's a couple things right so you maybe think about a lot of different things um first off one of the things you said when Fring was describing the example story of the gunshot guy was um the suspense isn't quite there because we don't even know who he is and at that point does that not reveal that there's another component that's necessary beyond suspense for example like you know his name is Bob that's all we know and he's like you're gonna die between one and three days from now and the film is just him on his computer and then he gets shot so like someone could be like that was suspense for as hell I had no idea when that gunshot was coming but then you're like well we don't even know who he is and at that point I would probably come in and be like so you're saying the characterization is or character is more important than suspense then right because it comes first or is it that you consider suspense to involve a lot more components that might be assumed from just like the emotional experience because the other thing I was gonna ask was like what if just we had another person that's cool right now said well then comedy is is key I think that we always need a comedic element we always need someone to be able to make light of the situation we need that because emotionally it's something that I don't know whatever reason they want to come up with all they did the same thing for thrilling like it needs to have a thrill element to it or horror chimp sidekick every movie needs absolutely I'm curious why suspense gets to be the king in that regard okay so the way that I interpreted the question is what's the most important element of screen or like storytelling to me right because I can't really know what it is to other people now it's the most important thing to me because like I said when I write this literally replaces plot as the thing that I care about like when I when I think about possible things like possible plot events or character developments I'm immediately going back to the questions that it's evoking and the audience is mine and this is like the primary thing that I think about when I'm writing it's more important basically than everything else and I think that the absence of suspense is a good explanation of why a lot of things that I perceive to be deficit are deficit is because they haven't built an adequate amount of suspense so like it it's the most important to me because it's the thing that I personally think the most about it's the most crucial thing to my writing process right but in terms of other people I mean you know I can't know the idea isn't like this is the best way to write right it's just you know it's my way to write where I assume all of us have been trying to avoid getting too circular like ending with I I think this thing is the most important because I think it's the most important where I'm curious what makes you choose suspense rather than any other option and do you encompass characterization within suspense oh man again I'm trying to avoid a it's a very long explanation for that so as you might have guessed from having a formalized definition of art I actually have a lot of formalized ideas one of them is pretty all-encompassing I'm going to try and boil it down so that we don't end up on a 30 to an hour minute tangent but I think that when I when I analyze a story or when I think about writing there's four primary things that I'm thinking about and you could roughly say that their means of communicating information and then affects that communication right so plot is a way that you communicate something but the point isn't really the plot itself the point is well how does the plot allow you to express themes or how does the plot allow you to advance character how does the plot allow you to evoke emotion how does the plot allow you to build suspense in the audience's mind stuff like that the plots of vessel through which other things happen and when you're talking about the effects that you have on the audience the main one people usually think about is emotion and it's kind of hard to talk about because I mean hard is hard to talk about right but everybody knows you know everybody has a sense really of when a film is particularly emotional right there's sort of a number of things that I think are really important to try and achieve as goals when you're talking about effects of a story you know it's like what is the story ultimately trying to achieve what do you want to happen in the audience's mind affecting emotion is one of those things suspense is another one of those things basically the reason that I chose suspense is because of all the different things that I think a story can accomplish I think that suspense is the one that is most useful to focus on when you're writing or at least most useful for me to focus on and I think that it tends to drive everything else right so if you aren't invested in something if you don't have a sense of suspense for what's going to happen your emotional investment is going to be blunted for example if you if you are very very investment is more important than than suspense well I mean suspense and investment well I mean suspense and investment are going to be almost identical in the way that I'm using the term so like I'm using suspense to mean that the the movie has put a question in your mind and is teasing at it that's basically my conception of suspense so any form of investment is going to be suspense in the way that I'm using the term right you kind of consider that theme as well though right if it's putting a question in your head uh it's okay they're both cognitive experiences so they're under the same category but I would consider themes to be a bit different are there non-cognitive experiences uh cognition is distinct from affectation so yeah it's what do you mean I mean those are areas of psychology so approximately speaking the emotional experience of a film is what it makes you feel the cognitive experience is what it makes you think about and you could if you wanted to say that the same thing but I think there's you know if a film makes you feel angry in a film makes you think about the nature of power and how it relates to society I think those are distinct meaningfully distinct right so I don't think that the emotional process that I had leads to like the the anger right yeah they're all connected I'm just saying that you need you need to be able to break down parts of the experience to talk about it I mean you know obviously all these things are going to be connected and these things are going to be caused by plot and character and all all of that right but you kind of need to separate you need to assign things their own words to try and understand things things that might be distinct in some way so to me anyway and this is by the way one of the things I thought about less is themes but I typically I typically think of themes as something like communicating something that you would sort of see in the form of an essay where you're saying like maybe you're talking about revenge right and it's like well here's what the movie has to say about the nature of revenge or the nature of love right or anything like that when I think about the themes in a film that I'm really connected to I can always sort of write an essay of what I think it's trying to get me to think about it related to that particular thing an emotion isn't like that I can't like write a motion about like the anger that I feel when I watch Kill Bill and see you know the woman's house get burned down right it's just a visceral feeling of anger it's not like necessarily about something right so yeah like I said it's very complicated to try and establish all of this because it's like a whole thing but yeah like I think of suspense as being sort of part of the cognitive experience of basically having anticipation for the resolution of a question that's been established right so I mean you could think of it as sort of the um I think broadly that could be applied to almost everything in storytelling though right yes yes it absolutely the way I use suspense can be applied to themes or characters or plot or anything that's sort of what I'm getting at it's a way more broad most people just use suspense in a very narrow sense I use it in a very much more broad sense yeah first I thought you were referring to just an experience specific emotionally experiences like events in films where all stories where we're uncertain of a particular thing as opposed to you know it sounds like what you're saying is like it can be a part of basically every single thing that happens yeah so like if I mean so themes usually aren't just established in static there's an exploration there right so you could have the beginning of the establishment of a theme and then you're wondering where the movie is going to go with it that would be sort of the same thing you could have a character that has their backstory established but there's a component missing that could drive you to wonder what what what exactly is the missing component especially if attention has been drawn to it then reasonably speaking most of the audience is going to be thinking what's this thing that's purposefully been left out it could be like a mystery like in Lost where they're like oh what's in the hatch right I mean it could just be about like like I said is Iron Man going to die I mean basically any question that you would have that that you would expect to be in the mind of the audience based on the elements of a story would be categorized as suspense in the way that I'm using the term it's just like what are you basically like what are what are you anticipating maybe anticipation is a better way to put it I would have used anticipation just to get it out of the weeds of the word suspense and what people link that to generally sure maybe maybe that's better because I guess anticipation and petition system since has it's that seems like the kind of thing that can be super duper broad because you can anticipate practically everything but the idea that every like the the idea of a really good well written episode of Peppa Pig is suspenseful is like yeah I guess in a way but that's not really you kind of it's almost like you want to reserve that word for certain things colloquially described that way like yeah yeah I can't wait to see what happens to until Peppa you know I mean the word isn't really what's important it's just that like people people could theoretically if you don't feel suspense watching Peppa Pig I don't know that I do like all episodes of Peppa Pig are good I should have just said I didn't need to qualify the good ones I guess really yeah exactly that's my point yeah kind of what I'm getting at I don't want any technique badmouthing in this house yeah kind of what I'm getting at is that when people are watching a movie you could reasonably wonder about anything but almost everyone is going to have pretty similar questions right and and I think that that's a lot of what drives sort of the engagement immersion and suspension of disbelief particularly is sort of being fascinated by these questions and really invested in them right and if you weren't invested in the question like you know is Iron Man going to die for example could you really be all that invested in the story generally it's probably not you know your investment in these questions is almost perfectly correlated to your investment in the story um is everyone comfortable with moving on to question two question second question nice I hope anyone need to grab extra provisions for our journey into question number two oh man three hours on one question I was about to say like maybe we could speed this up it'll take as long as it takes and you're all welcome to leave whenever you want I have randomized once again this is our order um oh boy I'm first up question two Pringie what is your favorite story of all time and why um so I don't tend to settle on a favorite story because it usually seems to oscillate between um different stories um but I think the one that I have chosen to talk about one of my favorite stories is hot fuzz um yeah well hey you have uh you have both of you just go together so it's okay because metal is so he's got plenty of time to have a different that's you got three hours to think of a different one um so one of the things that I find you could watch a new movie in that time and it could be your favorite um when I think about the stories that I really like um I often think about the the amount that you were achieving with the time that you have which we were talking about earlier um like how much you're achieving with the idea that you have are you like fully maximizing the potential of this concept with the time that you have in the characters you have and like the actors you have and and everything like that hot fuzz is like one of the most tightly constructed like films stories pieces of writing just like ever it's it is like unbelievably tight in terms of um how much we're achieving with how little time that we have uh when you think about that film like the structure and and how like there are so many lines that are that are put in the film that are like reincorporated lighter on that have like a great meaning or recontextualize as a joke later on like the number of recurring lines that just keep popping up again and again and again um the uh the the like the actual story itself like the core plot how despite the fact that it's a really absurd like premise it's all supported with all of the little clues and hints and piece of evidence of things that characters say throughout the film like a film where plot and character are like super well interlinked in terms of developing our characters alongside the plot as it's happening like using the plot to propel that story having the little tid bits of everybody's characters inform the plot like they're always little clues and the things that they say the things that they omit um like glances things like that that are all informing the uh the underlying narrative um it's a film where you know it is a comedy and it is like an absurd premise but we are doing meaningful uh things in terms of exploration of character like Nicholas Angel we've got a guy who's always on the job but he can never like he can never take his mind off the job uh and then he moves to a town where it's all meant to be incredibly mundane but as it turns out it's not like that's the thing that he's constantly it's sort of like getting nudge towards us like ease up you can't switch off you know like you need to try and relax and unwind but then as it turns out like his instinct is like really correct but it's it's like the marriage of him and um I can't believe I'm blanking on Nick Frost's character Danny um uh you know that those two working together and it's like that fusion of that you know ultimately leads to resolving the conflicts um it's really strong on character especially with all of the side characters they're all like super well characterized everybody feels so distinct everybody says exactly what you expect them to say like that's a film that has like how many speaking characters like 40 or 50 who like keep showing up all the time and they're all like incredibly well realized and distinct from one another with their own little jokes um and I guess you know like it's a funny movie that movie's really funny and if it was like one of the films that makes me think about uh the marriage of comedy and drama and like how you can make it work because I believe that you can make it work and it's probably one of the strongest examples and then of course from a filmmaking standpoint it's awesome like the camera angles and the visual jokes and the sound design oh love that movie love hot buzz and I like how it's all held together but by that basic idea of a greater good right because the you have this the antagonist is this cult collectivist town who are literally in robes yeah exactly and it's like when when is it good to come in and have that third act where you basically shoot everybody in it's like well if the whole town is full of brutal cult murderers then I guess it's okay to have that bad boys style action third act which is just spectacular right the movie is hyper subversive in that regard how like for the because it's you know it's meant to be like a a parody but also kind of a celebration of like dumb action movies yeah it's an incredibly intelligent action dumb action movie like right hot buzz is like so well written and so deliberate like everything is so deliberate and I feel like that's a common thing that you see in really great stories there's a sense of deliberate less like 12 angry men has it like strong it's very deliberate like the decisions that are made in terms of like who's gonna say what and when and how things relate to each other saving private Ryan is super deliberate in terms of like a structure and what it's trying to go for uh as a story and like who does what and the this and like the order that the scenes play out I think that's just like a really good sign of I don't know if I necessarily describe it I guess you could like a confidence a confidence in the story that you're trying to tell that generally you achieve with like a lot of work it seems like a lot of thought was put into it um and you can see that in hot fuzz with all the joke recurring jokes it's just that I'm pretty sure that I spend a year and a half working on that script and I can totally believe it yeah I can't remember the length of time I just know that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg basically locked themselves in a cabin and just like worked the whole thing out on a like I don't want to do that again again again again giant pads of paper on like an easel they're just like let's just build this break for break that recent show that I feel like oh man like I'm pretty sure hot fuzz has like several Chekhov's guns but the one that immediately comes to mind is the swan we set up the swan but there is a swan on the loose in that first chase swan dude stealing in this shot yeah they see this he sees the swan he chooses not to go for the swan to get the bad guy that swan saves the day in the car it's really good and there's so many of those throughout the film like the the fascist hag joke really fuck off grasshopper yeah on theme to um the balance between work and play this throughout the film yes absolutely represented him fully by Simon as a character or Simon Pegg's character but also um butterman's wife being the big motivation for him and he leads like everybody that she put everything into her work she failed and so she killed herself and so I think both both those fail at my work both those leads at either end of that theme like you have Simon who takes his job way too seriously and then the other guy doesn't take his job seriously enough they kind of learn from each other they achieve a balance at the end yeah nanny learns about what it means to take seriously and and angel learns like to let loose sometimes and that's fully epitomized when he returns into town with the god damn angel wings for the shotguns and I mean you know we haven't talked about much but like it needs to be said like one of the funniest movies like ever it is one of the funniest movies ever made do you have any criticisms of it for me I don't I love that movie uh I guess I wouldn't say this like perfect because they're probably like one thing that doesn't follow but like it's it's pretty air tight it's like all set up and all pay off yeah it's so tight the best you could do is like man in this shoot out it's I guess it's lucky that nobody hit like the good guys but I mean that's super trained well angel is super trained professional cop and it's set up at the beginning of the film that he's really good at this like even having to get into fights and confrontations with people like but again I don't give a shit about that like that movie is so fucking good I love that pet peeve in storytelling it's not happened that many times but Hoffa's faking out someone being dead uh annoys me so like Danny getting shot was like incredibly moving to be so like how what a fucking tragic ending um and then they're like at the graveyard with with angel I was like yep there he's gone that fucking sucks that over the shoulder shot where he's obstructing the first name or yep they do that too that they're like no kidding it was this moment you're like oh fuck off I think that's like tongue-in-cheek though like I don't know I'm sure it was like it's kind of cringe on purpose well yeah that's what I'm saying it's not it's a pet peeve pet peeve yeah right I mean if that's all you could pull for me you can't really say that well so okay perspective yes I can how the fuck did they forget about him the guy with that gun he was the the town what uh like the fake out death is bad for yeah because that's what that's what's led that's how well not for the fake out specifically but the that event wouldn't have happened had they not forgotten about I forget his name blunder bus guy um but they actually account for him when they spray the cameras we can't see shit um but they also forgot that he exists when they take everybody in yeah so because I knew exactly who to go for uh in the town yeah they shouldn't have forgotten him and by doing so it leads to quite a dramatic moment which yeah but hey if that's the worst there is no that's the thing half us is I think usually it's in my top five I don't know if it's higher than that top five for sure it's definitely my top five but I like I said I tend to oscillate between films in terms of figuring out what the best one is oh does it compare to the other uh installments of the trilogy I think it's considered the best one better than yeah then shown of the dead I think that's I think it's the best one hence why I picked will stand is still cool everyone well that is good underrated I still only have seen it once but I really it's only underrated because everyone is pairing it to hot fuzz yeah which is unfair it's like a whole lot of hot fuzz compare it to uh compare it to most other films you're doing way better right um but yeah those are my notes please write more head girl well I haven't even seen well you know why uh I don't know if rags I don't know if you've seen it yeah but uh red light media did their like part one of movies they saw in the year that they didn't cover for a main video I've not seen it yet no they mentioned is it late night in soho or last night so that's right right they mentioned that and jade bike like both agree it explicitly say got the same problem as baby driver where uh production wise just top notch nothing but appreciation but story and characters not not fantastic and then they both say like he needs to work with cyberpag boy that's like oh no because I haven't seen it but I was hoping it would be good yeah I haven't heard great things about it it hit a lot of disappointment but I've already seen from the trailers that like the the production is going to be impressive it seems like the concept is carrying it for sure all right okay so that's me and I know basically nothing about it myself I didn't mind the characters and baby driver but they were kind of working lacking some sneakers sneakers what I'm sorry say so that one more time jay you can't work with Simon Pegg because Simon Pegg is busy working on truth seekers truth seekers got cancelled we're fine it did thank god oh thank god I haven't seen it so I can't it's horribly bad it is it is like go like hey Simon Pegg Nick Frost could be cool yes that's what our thought was our thought was however I'm watching it the whole way through and it's like the worst show yeah we watched the first season one of the worst shows terrible Malcolm McDowell was the only thing we liked in it I think and even then it wasn't full it was show it was so good I mean like it even managed to impress me how much it was wasting its premise was like um yeah we weren't invested in the um in the numbers radio station that played random numbers but the way they paid it off we were like man you we you wasted that we didn't realize we didn't realize that that was potential for it to go to a cool place until it didn't and we're like oh yeah um the premise is like I think internet repayment who double up as like sort of ghost hunters that's a cool idea yeah but um it's shit anyway yeah yes yes it is um but whatever you thought in your head when we told you that premise a second ago it is better than what the show actually does I promise you yeah it is it is hard to stay oh by the way it's supposed to be a comedy but it's extremely yeah yeah it is supposed to be a comedy I can tell definitely supposed to be it's just very unfunny oh there was nothing funny about it nope all righty so it's full of lampshading as well I remember that I figured when when so I'm clever so I know an answer for this that I was like I'm gonna have to try and expand a little bit beyond just uh picking up a film or something because I was like it's very well might be picked by somebody else I was like hmm how will I go about this and I just figure I'll get out of the way um Buffy and Angel put together that's probably my favorite story um we shouldn't surprise anybody but we'll discount that because of the fact that I'll be explaining it in detail to rags and metal and james one day I don't know when and that'll be recorded and then sent to you guys so you'll get all of that at that point um for now though I'll just use some backups and talk about like why they they hit hard as in stories I guess because I feel like why is it the breaking bad like works so well and is so beloved and high high regarded and it's like as far as I'm concerned it's probably because it's an extensive like character study that's incredibly well detailed and takes you from x to y with one person in a way that feels as though it could be representative of real life um I find it this especially works well with any character that you at any point in the story look back and go oh shit they probably wouldn't have done this if they were the person from season one or episode one or something like that um but you don't feel like it was a jarring experience to get to where you are now and so it's like at that point I think immersion one and you you you've got nothing but impressive things to say and to look back you try and figure out each of the notches that turned them from one thing to the next obviously with walt from I guess they're trying to be vague just in case because forever recommended to basically everybody buy everybody breaking bad seasons one through five just um the premise is it is a so oh well I was going to say I guess there's another seven seasons for you to watch if you want to do better call soul um all right yeah you don't need to we've we've talked about that right but I like it I just don't know what the point is yet I guess I'll find out the last season um so yeah like the you what a premise to like a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who's like Ned Flanders is going to die unless he can afford the money to pay for his cancer treatment and he realizes that his knowledge and expertise could be used to create math and he creates a math so pure that many people are after it and she's like wow all right and unlike truth seekers this is one that you get told what the fuck it is and you're like wow they come through on that premise pretty much 100 percent I don't know what else they would have explored that what we would have like what did they miss you know um but yeah I think the the fundamental though is just experiencing everything with walt him turning from one person to another um it's often brought up in terms of how we can root for him for almost all of the seasons despite the horrible things that he ends up doing and it's just like a fascination to think about how protagonists work or what it takes for someone to root for a a person but I think core to it is understanding almost every decision he makes and understanding him as a person and so TV shows have this ability to be able to do that more so than a lot of movies do in terms of we have so much time with him we see him make so many decisions that we can fully understand exactly what's going to happen when he goes into different circumstances or um what may happen as a result of things happening to him but it's probably worth mentioning that um there's there's a lot so like you know I love a big long character arc but then it's like well there are other favorite stories that'll have elements that aren't even to do with that and one I definitely wanted to bring up I've talked with uh I think fringing quite a few times is um stories that like run two stories at once uh they super fucking impress me examples include I am mother Xmark in a Sicario and Shutter Island I'm trying to think of more of something but I think we'll just leave it there that's good enough those are good examples the films that you watch in the first time and you can take them in for exactly what they are but then you watch them the second time and you can see there's a whole other fucking movie playing um and it's beyond impressive to me I uh I always get a big old mental boner thinking about all the components that have to run simultaneously to mean X and Y so that when you go through it um you can be oblivious to the second film but then when you just switch filters when watching it you can also see a whole other thing I suppose um an example to go with I'm trying to think of the one that I wouldn't want to who is anyone ever seen Xmark in here yes okay good um so that oh wait who that was that was me I fucking wait it's okay you know uh we don't need to do that I'll find a different way so just um the the drama is a leaf not again the drama and the suspense is built in one particular direction but then like someone on some fucking forum or maybe something clicks in the end credits scene or whatever else and you go wait was that that the whole time and then you watch it again and you're like oh fuck all of this slots completely differently and all of the big payoffs actually mean these other things these people won not those people or this event has now happened not the one that we thought um and if it all lines up and maintains continuity with both interpretations it's the kind of thing we were talking about earlier with achieving multiple things at once that's the level of achieving something with your story that fucking super impresses me um the amount of fucking quality work that would have to go into it and then because my answer is getting too long so I'm going to try and stop here I also love deconstructions at their best too long I know I'm sorry stories that are super self-aware of the place they exist in and they simultaneously comment on that while also having just a normal story as well that's almost like a running two filters at once again but I guess the example I'll give is unforgiven just one of the best stories ever made while also being a big ol commentary on the genre it belongs to it's really fucking cool yeah this that's still gotta watch that a selection of my favorite stories and why but there's still a shit ton more I just figure that we'll get through a lot of them by talking to other people which means who's next oh mr rags oh my goodness what is your favorite story why this was the most difficult one for me because like fringy said it's hard to pick a favorite story it's kind of like what's your favorite song or what's your favorite a lot of like food a lot of the times that's just sort of it's just going to change over time it's going to be what you in that moment sort of feel is you know the best for whatever reason so I'm going to go ahead and go with a pretty safe answer but I think it's one that's certainly accurate to how I feel about it but going to go with the fellowship of the ring I think there's something about the trilogy that I certainly love and it definitely has a special place in my heart in terms of when I saw it what age I was at and the impact it kind of had on me and it was one of the things that I I think it was my go-to answer when we were asked on eFap if we could go back and experience something for the first time what would it be like a piece of media I think that was like my go-to answer was seeing that again I still remember being in the theater and how much it just took me to another world but it's a very broad movie in terms of the things that it tells you the things that are contained in it it isn't it it both isn't isn't a focus story whereas there's a lot of stuff it's it's like bundling up a whole bunch of things in your arms kind of it's bringing it all together it's got great characters it has incredible world building in the way that it presents this world to people I think it's got a good structure a slow one you could say it definitely takes its time but I think it's to its benefit the the art direction and the music it all just comes together in this incredible greater than the sum of its parts movie that is only one of three and I it's my favorite of the three I think I I I I just love it the lessons that it teaches are very timeless and it teaches a variety of messages how you should treat other people how you should even look at other people the things that are more important in your life how you should be around others at the expense of yourself and your willingness to make sacrifices and what you should be willing to do to protect things that you love I I really like this film's ability to portray a world as alive and organic in the sense that a lot of movies take place in a setting a lot of the time that science fiction and a lot of the time that's fantasy what you don't really feel like this world is real you don't feel like it's a place where people could actually live a lot of the times it just feels like unfortunately a bunch of movie sets and a bunch of empty landscapes and you don't really believe this is a place you could go to but in so much of the the differences and architecture between the you know in Hobbiton and the Shire and Moria and in Rivendell and things like that it's all every place has its own not just a different look but there's something about their construction and the time it takes to get there and the events that take place there that make all of these these locations seem so very distinct and different like they take place in different worlds you can believe that we start out in the Shire and things are great and things are wonderful and we get this grounding of what is good what should be protected what should be fought for and it gives us a sense of suspense we should say of what could be lost if we fail our quest I don't think it's an it's accident or it's I don't think it's an accident and I don't think it's bad pacing that P that you know the aspect that we spend a lot of time in the Shire to set things up it is grounding in your subconscious the idea that this is the world as it should be and this is what we have to lose and then you contrast that with places like Moria Moria being almost like a dark it's like a dark version of the Shire in a sense where it's a different place architecturally the bounties of this place are different than the bounties of the Shire right or the Shire is a lot more I guess understandable and its simplicity and its its folkiness you know the the minds of Moria have a having more focus on like a bit more industrial it's dark it's a different world but you see the halls you see the the bones of the dwarves that live there and you could imagine for yourself that oh this could be like the Shire if those bad things happened right this is a place that was once great and it yeah it descended into chaos and death and it's dark it looks totally different and it does a good job at establishing you know the evils that can exist within this world you see the beauty and the the I'm gonna see you right where the naturalist I don't want to say naturist because the elves are not naturists they're naturalists very important distinction for everyone to remember in your life never go to a naturist place but this the the the world of elves men dwarves hobbits they're all distinct you feel like you go on a journey we don't just get to new places and we're told to accept oh yeah this is in this world it's just a it's just a different place you know we're just here now you never feel like oh I guess we're just in a different spot now there is a good focus it gets mocked a lot for you just oh we're just walking around it's a lot of walking but I think the walking pays a lot of service to the richness of the world and establishes how far you've gone and how far you have to go and I'm waxing on and on we'll get to characters later because there's a character in this who's the answer to another one of my questions as you might have guessed I agree I'm just wondering do you mean to say like the points you're making don't apply as much to the other two movies like are you singling out fellowship of the ring in particular here no I'm they it's tough to pick which one is my favorite well I guess it's easy because I already know the answer but you know what I mean the fellowship of the ring is my favorite of them but it's really a matter of taste they're all usually contenders and I think they all execute this very well I just I guess I just think that the fellowship of the ring has a special place in my heart and I have it I didn't go through the trouble of really trying to examine it too deeply to see which one really is the best or which one executes these ideas the best um but I feel safe to say that everything that I've said is certainly accurate a fellowship of the ring and it can certainly also be applied to the other two um fellowship is cozy it is yes it is a cozy film uh even even with the Balrog and Moria and I'm gonna hit it is a very cozy there there's a meme that I saw not too long ago of of Jim from the office and he's got the board right and the the white board and it says that when we were young we all wanted to be legolas because he was super cool and he was a capable fighter and he's amazing and then as we got older we realized we wanted to just be one of the hobbits where we're left alone deliver happy peaceful lives and that that meme is is certainly very true of a lot of us certainly I don't get all wrong oh my god fly around on fire go blow it off yeah that's cool but it is yes it's very cozy I want to live as you know I it'd be great to be a hobbit to live a that life where you don't have to worry about you know just all the pain and suffering and all that awfulness and you your your concerns are very I don't want to say not materialistic but they're very it's it's very family oriented and simple in a way you don't have you know stock markets and social media of that sense you you have it's it's it's simple and it's it's do you know Cincinnati's is no no Cincinnati's was a is an old Roman guy and he was a great military commander right and he he lived a very simple life and he did his farming and all that sort of thing and then when Rome needed him to to fight battles and win wars he accepted his duty to go out and fight and win battles for Rome and then after the battles I said oh my gosh Cincinnati's you're so great you should keep leading and you should keep doing all this political stuff you're so great you're so wonderful bonabona and he said no no no no I want to go back to my simple life and things that matter to me and my family and all that stuff and that is that's that's kind of the feeling I get with a lot of this you know the shire stuff it's very very appealing to me which is not considering how different it is from my own life with how connected I am to the world and the internet and not social media but sort of you know the youtube stuff and doing the podcast it seems well I don't know I feel like we could have a show in a in a shire tavern where we talk about stories and things like that I feel like we can do it in an alternate universe we're all just a bunch of you know fat happy hobbits you know hanging around drinking with our bare feet in our pipe weed and things are just nice and simple but I'll stop talking people want to highlight though like didn't you take any issue with when gimley wanted to kill sam and frodo oh well that's that's in the return of the king and we won't discuss that we're just trying to focus on the good things in life without gimley's horrific hobbit hate yeah when when does he try to kill him oh that's that's a reference to the greatest i don't even know how to explain it you should watch efap 93 yes okay it is amazing is that the cinematic venom one that is yes it is all righty according to the randomizer the next person to answer the question of what is your favorite story of all time if that was that even it what's your bucket doom so when i started thinking about this i thought it was going to be hard and then i just immediately had an answer and i'm sticking with it so my answer is in glorious bastards as i was alluding to earlier i think it is like without even anything else coming close the most suspenseful film i've ever seen like particularly the farmhouse sequence the sequence in the bar and the climax are just like they are spectacularly suspenseful it's pretty cool that film has two of the most cited suspense scenes in like the history of film at this point yeah i mean like i so i started working on a video about specifically suspense and inglorious bastards and i put it off because i realized it would need to be like two hours long to really do it any justice and i didn't have time to do it at the time oh dude i don't know if you're the same but crippling like removal of making projects when you feel like you can't do them justice if you love them that much you know yeah yeah it's it's kind of like that like i just wanted it to be a short thing sort of laying out more concise than what i said earlier and then applying it to like the farmhouse scene in glorious bastards but i realized it's just it's just not doing it any justice like the film is so spectacularly suspenseful and here's the thing is that those are the three sequences people always talk about but as i watch the film more i i even appreciate sort of the suspenseful elements in like the shoshana and zahler plotline right i mean it really just is i mean i've seen a lot of movies it is without question the most suspenseful film i've ever seen the characters are more of a mixed bag i think landa is like easily one of the best villains ever like maybe the i i think it's it would be a reasonable argument to say he's like the best villain ever if someone made that argument i don't know if i would say that but he's he's better villain than hitler i in that movie yeah oh my god everyone who was waiting for the rags hitla bingo there you go oh my god i wasn't even thinking about it oh no you're supporting fascism earlier so oh no oh yeah so coming together you know what are the one of the um interesting things about the film is that like i said i don't think that the bastards actually have much individual character i think they behave more as a unit and like you can say things about them individually um but most of what i would say comes from supplementary material like i know about deleted scenes and stuff from the script and and shit like that that sort of fleshes them out but in the actual film there's not they mostly sort of behave as a cohesive unit which is sort of an interesting thing um but the the part of the the like character side of the film that i find really fascinating that i never seen anyone talk about is shoshana and zahler um and there's just so like so i saw i saw an opening night and it was like the best theater experience i've ever had it's one of the reasons i like it so much um but even on my first watch i was really fixated on like the bastards and like the plot to kill hitler and the stuff with uh shoshana and zahler i was just kind of like why is this even in the movie or it is just not nearly as interesting as the other stuff and that has really changed over time as i watch it more and and think about it more um there's elements of the plot of that plot line that are even more fascinating than the other stuff because in a lot of ways it's kind of like a dark romantic comedy um you know it's like you know it's like uh she was a jews family was killed by nazis he's a nazi war hero and the entire plot line is basically like an inverted romantic comedy um of him trying to seduce her and her just you know trying to basically not get killed um which is really fascinating but there's a lot of other shit going on like in a way aside from being a nazi war hero zahler is kind of like very very attractive in a lot of ways and and he's very polite um you know he has a very high like social status a lot of the ways he carries himself if he wasn't this asshole nazi guy he would be very appealing and something that might be controversial that i think is very well supported by the text is that i think she does have feelings for him that that's why at the end she goes over and turns him over and ends up getting shot herself it's like sort of a Romeo and Juliet thing um and it's just a profoundly um um fucked up and dark and interesting plot line that i hadn't even really thought about when i first watched the film but you know it's just it's just all sitting right there um yeah i really i couldn't say enough good things about it um usually i don't usually i'm not willing to say that my favorite things are the best things but i'm pretty close to saying it's the best screenplay i've ever seen it's just amazing like the script is incredible um yeah what do you think about the revisionist aspect of it taking like that period of history and kind of turning it on its head like everybody knew hitler the way hitler died but this is kind of a fantasy rendition so like a lot of people a lot of people don't like it so i saw it with my buddy travis and we have this huge argument about this going back years um he's really he's a big uh military history buff and he really hates the revisionist aspect of the film and i get that um but to me it's just amazing right because the world never got to see the end they wanted which is for hitler to have his fucking head exploded by you know some Jewish guy blowing him apart with a machine gun which is like basically what everyone wanted to see instead he just sort of slunk off and shot himself in a bunker or some shit right it's a very anti-climactic so like the fact i i think that in a way the ending gives you a catharsis that that people wanted right it's like you you get to see the the you know the fucking bad guy pay for his crimes at the hands of the person who you know would be most in a position to dole out justice right um and i i just i can't again it's like people have different experiences i understand it's it's a more of a contentious film than the other ones you guys are probably going to mention there's people that don't like it and that's perfectly fine with me but like i can't tell you how fucking hyped i was when they started shooting hitler like again seeing it because like i i just i can't tell you how fucking hyped i was and like i had gotten a copy of the script beforehand and i started reading it and i remember like it was kind of funny because like the first thing in the script is you see feet on grass and i'm like okay tyrant you know but like as i started reading the first lines i was like i can't read it this is i don't spoilers aren't a big deal for me but i didn't want to spoil it and i'm so fucking glad i didn't spoil it because like seeing them actually fucking blow apart hitler i i really it's it's the best theater experience ever it's not even vaguely close it was so fucking hype so people don't like it fair enough but i fucking love it because i know i've known a decent amount of people who don't like it because of the historical inaccuracy stuff uh they drawl that it's disrespectful to what happened back then and they don't want to take hitler's accomplishment away from him not quite uh the arguments i have heard are included but not limited to the film like demonizes all of nazis when it was a lot more complicated than that and that um no the amount of you know i i think there's a conversation to be had there which do you mean do you mean all of nazi constructs because i feel like there's a difference to be drawn between all of nazis and all of nazi well i'm definitely not they're not referring to like all of the high command they're talking about just the average soldiers and stuff i don't know maybe maybe maybe that's a difference in like how understanding of the word has changed over time right because to me that just means like all the people who believed in nazism were painted to be bad that's just the sentence i heard that well i i really want to respond to that because i've heard that criticism a lot and i think it's an absolute dog shit criticism so there's like three major nazis aside from hitler that really get sort of fleshed out character oh aside from landa i guess i mean that even reinforces it more right so we have in the scene where they interrogate um the nazis there's one who is like really cowardly and just wants to go back to his mom it's pretty clearly not like super signed up for this whole nazi nazi shit right doesn't seem super committed to the whole thing just basically wants to be fucking left alone and is happy to like enthusiastically happy to betray them for his own interests then you've got the uh nazi commander who basically stands up to the bastards and gives up his life for the nazis right and this is a very similar thing to um what bill margot kicked off of politically incorrect for it's like look you can say a lot of things about this dude but he's fucking brave right like bill marl for people who don't know he had a show uh like a political talk show and someone called the people who drew the drove the planes into the towers on 911 cowards and he said listen you could say a lot of things about them but they're not cowards um and it's sort of the same thing you could say a lot of things about that dude but he's not a fucking coward like he puts down his fucking life right so i mean that's that's a that's part of why the movie is interesting is because that is a virtue and it's coming from someone who is like not just a nazi but like a a card carrying completely bought into the ideology piece of shit right then you have um uh zahler is the person who is probably responsible for the most death personally on his own hands and he doesn't even like it he doesn't like being reminded of it he doesn't like that he did it um it's not like his backstory isn't completely spelled out but it's certainly not the case that like all of the nazis are just being completely demonized i mean each of them have their own very sort of fragmented experiences of what exactly it would mean to be a nazi right and then you have landa who is perhaps the most pernicious of all of these people the person who is most knowingfully going out into the world to do evil and he doesn't buy into it at all he's completely like he's literally willing to take a bomb put it under hitler and blow them all up and that's what's gonna you know empower him the most so like the idea that the nazis are just this block of evil and it's just wrong it's just not supported by the text tonight well so not only do i think that is true that the film offers way more than gemmins evil gemmins are all nazis whatever than that period i also don't know that if the film was going to be majority pov from you know not the germans i don't know that that's necessarily a problem for the story they're telling um if it were true which i don't think it is like if it were that we only ever see germans gunned down in in scenes and that all the americans hate them and stuff i should be like yeah but this is the story of these characters moving through this land at this time they probably do feel that way um oh and and there's and there's the stiglitz the fucking german who defected and murdered a bunch of nazi officers got rescued and is not going to kill them like yeah it's just not supported by the text well but i know that yeah um but then there are people who just like literally because it's not how it went in history that it's sort of taking away from the actual people who were involved in what they did and stuff yeah i yeah i i think that's definitely looking way further into it like and plus it shuts off so many potentially interesting stories that you can tell about things that are you know based on kind of goes into a we've talked about historical acts quite a bit on e-fab sometimes so very controlled official degrees the problem i often take with it in many different ways but one of them is like how many people know how accurate braveheart is like i don't see the raising this problem with that film that i think most people would be like well yeah because braveheart wait is it not accurate you're like no not at all in no way basically there was a planet earth but it was like scotland i would i would see it i would see it as being so i personally would see it as being more of a problem if the movie was presenting itself is historically accurate but i think it's like really obvious that it's not for like it's almost cartoony and in a way yeah it's absolutely like yeah i just genre it's alt history to me like and you might be like well what makes something alt history versus is saving private ryan all history because it wouldn't have happened exactly the way that doesn't it's like well i get maybe that's not a quality but not in a way that people mean yeah it's not quite the way that we would because like inglorious bastards really happen is extreme revisionism bothers me when it's like subtle with the intention of being deceptive um with with in the case of inglorious bastards it's like it's having fun and it's building off the knowledge that you know what happened now here's this fun movie where we take a sharp left turn here's here's what would look like if this happened and it's so pulpy and ridiculous and it's a lot of fun i agree like the revisionism thing in that movie doesn't bother me at all and the thing is if someone if that's going to ruin the film for someone i guess fair enough like yeah like my my ex-fiance's mother just wouldn't enjoy violent films period and i'm not really going to argue with her but i don't think it's a fair to say well the movie is violent therefore it's bad right also to watch hostile and say enjoy it at every single scene shower who enjoy it no once upon a time in hollywood did the exact same thing it did with the manson murders and i saw people saying once again that's disrespectful to the reality of the situation it's like well no but the idea is to pay respect to the people who were what happened to them you know yeah so yeah that's the song that will be a conversation till the end of time i imagine but uh shall we move to the next in the randomization eliza for what is your favorite story the randomization that's like an amazing idea that would be j hello which episode of doctor who is it jay death comes to you silly shut up well yeah it is it's it's the episode that's called chibnall it's not out yet it's like like solo with chibnall chibnall a doctor who story the the the nude scene really was daring that's my favorite part no i mean um whenever like of course uh i think this has come up already that like whenever anyone has asked a question like this there's always a matter of man there are just so many you know um that choosing one would feel like you're doing a disservice to all the others so of course like i had to um i you know i i've just gone with a story that i'd like a lot um that that i guess um to say it would be this story has reached maximum tier for me that there are stories that i enjoy the same amount but there aren't any stories that i think i appreciate all or like more um and there are a lot of stories like that for me but the one i have just decided to bring with me for show and tell is chronicle which um well i watched with a mess or recently he showed you that film recently didn't he yeah yeah yeah matthew you showed me that film didn't you that was a good thing for metal to do i'm glad you did that you introduced me to one of my favorite stories of that i've liked since like it came out in 2012 just want to highlight as jay was answering someone said jay thought spaceballs was boring hasn't finished all the rigs like you've got to know that before jay gives the answer this metal created the movie just for you yeah that's true it's pretty cool yeah so um you know well what we're talking about example is like hot fuzz um chronicle isn't you know it's not um got hot fuzz does the thing um oh what were we talking about what were we calling it where um there's more elements to a story to get right and there thereby it's more impressive that that it doesn't have as many mistakes you know the juggler who juggles two balls successfully versus the juggler who juggles 10 000 balls successfully but drops three right mm-hmm yeah um chronicle isn't as isn't as complex it's not as much going on as as something like hot fuzz but everything it does have going on say for a few exceptions um like a few very small exceptions right uh it nails uh out of the park right nails it out of the park a mix of metaphors though um for me the thing that I find most impressive in the film is the characterization of the three main characters who are all very well realized within what is in in reality a very short movie um and you know there are scenes there are a very limited number of scenes with just these three characters but by the end of them they are more fully formed people than other characters that I think you know I've spent a full series of television with some some even good series of television I think I might have seen a character who was less well formed as a person than these three guys who all have very clear motivations understandings of the world moral compasses um all those kinds of things formed by the end of this story that you and you can see all of that in all of them you can see how their understanding of the world forms and how that informs all of their decisions and you can see how they interact with other people and all of these important things to understanding them as a person um and more meaningfully than that as well I think you get um a huge understanding of because you have such a an understanding of who these people are as characters you have an understanding of what it is that makes them change and you have an understanding of how while they may value each other as people they become um towards the end of the story um to be at the high point right before stuff starts going to shit um they are basically some of the worst possible people to be friends with each other not because their relationship isn't a positive one but just because they have a limited understanding of each other and don't know how to support each other when stuff actually starts going wrong and ultimately you have a scene where one character um has something go wrong for him that for him is the um that this this thing going wrong is one of the worst things that could have happened to him from his perspective his life he feels like in that moment that his life couldn't be going worse um and you have another character who doesn't really understand the perspectives of other people and for him this is something that would just you know happen to him casually this is the kind of thing that he's used to and and he tries this kind of thing a lot so he fails at this kind of thing a lot for him it's no big deal and he goes to this other character who is in a very mentally fragile position seeing this thing that's caused him this mental mental fragility um seeing it as something trivial that happens to him all the time and sees laughing at him as a an appropriate response uh this other this character who is being laughed at by one of the only people who considers to be his friends as is developing an insecurity already that these people aren't really his friends um is one of the most earned downfalls of a character from something so small as you were laughing at me at a time that that hurt my feelings as well i find the themes of the story to be incredibly valuable to me which chronicle is all about um i think it's no coincidence that it's told about high school students who are just ready getting ready to enter the world as functional or maybe you know not functional adults um chronicle is all about how these characters these people who have who are like 17 18 years old and don't have fully formed world views yet they haven't really had an opportunity to get out in the world and form a fully formed moral compass suddenly having power over other people thrust upon them um i think that's it's incredibly valuable to explore what that kind of thing does to other people because you know that's something that happens um and it's it especially you know i've seen this happen to a lot of people where they suddenly find themselves in a situation where moral questions are no longer something that is simply a neat little hypothetical to ask yourself about moral questions are hey i have power over this other person now because i'm an adult with money and a job and who knows you know or whatever situation i found myself in that i can have the ability to and i may not even be considering it but i do have my the ability to enact my will over another person um that a story that explores um the downfalls that other people have in handling that power maybe they don't handle it well maybe they do fuck up and other people are the ones who pay the price for their um not fully formed moral compass as an incredibly valuable thing i think to see explored and it speaks to me personally as something that i take immensely valuable lessons from i have done my little piece on that though yeah i like chronicle too um yeah i like chronicle too and it's yeah it's nothing to do with the themes but i always just thought it was funny how it's a shame that that movie kind of backs itself into a corner with its storytelling method because everything is told through like diegetic cameras if i'm recalling correctly criticizing the plot of the film that i think you are i totally agree well i don't think the cameras are done like brilliantly and then there's those few scenes right yeah i don't it's not the plot it's just there's no like god's eye in that movie it's all about like security cameras and like the the well the plot is contrived sometimes in this in the way that it forces a diegetic camera into the situation in order to capture what's happening it's not really a plot that's forced there it's more it's the framing device is forced um because you know in terms of plot it actually makes no difference that what like um that vlogger lady films really absurdly random stuff because and i do want to i do want to make it clear like as for a found footage film most of the stuff um most of the points where a camera is taken out it makes perfect sense right it's it's like oh yeah that character would have a camera there oh oh it's interesting that the camera this character chose to take the camera out at this point and it informs what we know about them as a person but then there are these just random our scenes particularly involving the subplot with a particular character where the character where the camera just appears it's literally it's my main gripe at the time yeah aside from that though i i really like the um like kids having powers and then like a mature exploration of that like oh yeah the fact of personality what would they do i thought that was really i'd never really seen that done in that way for an immature version watch bright burn everyone oh yeah you're gonna say man of steel same thing was if it was a crystallized singular element is it the character work all the themes which one do you prefer jailed you consider them inextricably linked oh i didn't well i mean they are pretty linked but um i think that it's the character work that i care about more at least this like at least right now it's something that both quite valuable way i think if you did take the um i don't i don't think you could ever tell the same story and completely separate the themes from it but if you really worked hard you know you mean it's not about high school students who are just about to uh get their first taste you know it's about i'm an old people now and you know you could still have the same characters be all but you know you could do loads of stuff to transcribe the themes from it and i still think it would be an incredibly valuable story to me but you know i do like them themes so i said you guys should not read much bugger watch much anime if that was something you've never seen before i think they're more so commenting on it being done well not i i don't know i don't know i don't get fucked virgin because there's a lot of things that do kids with powers yeah like the Incredibles i fucking love that's one of the great ones hey that was that was like totally a candidate for my other like for a story that i could have brought us like that's uh we already talked about rats in kitchens now we're doing kids with superpowers might genuinely be the story that i've seen the most times kids with superpowers um well Incredibles i mean specifically i think it might be my most rewashed movie great movie for me it's the line king too simba's pride don't laugh at him um anal clock sluts three speaking of cox lets uh john is your tune oh isn't it uh oh yeah it is okay um so uh when we're talking about the i was thinking like what what does it mean for like a story to be like the best story is it mean that it has to have like brevity while having the maximum amount of depth like the biblical stories would be an example like something like kane and abel or the tower of babel where it it has something really important to say and it doesn't take that long to say it and it's very fundamental to like existence you know but like if we're talking about like the best um movies uh i i had lord of the rings at the top of my list as well man friends copying rags huh wow what's up yeah let's talk about lord of the rings it's just got everything it's like dinosaurs yeah you tell i won't spend a lot of time on it because rags already no do outline most do it doesn't have an astronaut it's it's got spectacle it's got great characters it's got a hell of a climax it's like the it's the middle part with the the helm's deep fight the the a great setup in the fellowship of the ring um just he's mentioned the music yes of course the music you've got your great setup with hobbiton and then you know the call to adventure and leaving and going on the journey and the thick of battle and things froto gets really put through the ringer and he has you know sam there to help him who's like arguably the real hero at the at the heart of it because he kind of has the will to help proto along when proto eventually loses it near the the mountain and just just the the themes of um friendship and adventure and power corrupting absolutely and you've like these terrific visual effects and uh dragons and explosions and big monsters it's just got the whole it's just huge palette of like everything you know costumes just colors it's a feast for the senses and it's just got it hits all the storytelling beats that you would want um so that's that's as much as i'll say about lord of the rings but i'll to just cover something else the next one i had on my list was the fox and the hound for me personally similar to one yeah that's not a lot as a kid yeah it's uh yeah when pot is battling the bear it's like the ball rock on the bridge of kaza doom Gandalf yeah and you shout out pass and then the log breaks and they both fall into the water below yeah it's shockingly similar actually i think it's a ripple actually yeah and Todd does it of course just you know to protect his loved ones it's it's really it's actually it's basically the same thing hmm well uh fox and the hound is one of the most hardest hitting movies for me it's themes of like uh being forced to grow up a little quicker than you're prepared to being thrust into like unforgiving nature where everything's trying to kill you and uh and just um the obviously the the the theme of friendship and how you have the copper and Todd who are bonded by childhood friendship and they are raised into different camps where the camps are at war and it's like you are taught you are a dog you hunt foxes that's your job and they kind of fall into their roles but they they know it's kind of wrong but they're doing it anyway but in the end friendship ends up winning over and there's something really moving about that i love that you know you know Todd saves copper and his owner from the bear attack and really do and then like the guy's about to shoot Todd and the copper comes in and and stops him it's like the last second he's decided like no this he's my friend i don't really have any reason to hate him the hate that i'm supposed to feel for this other person is baseless it's a lie the truth is that we are friends i can't i can't hear anybody else right now love one another oh there we go we're back hey rags um hi wait can i always hear what i can hear everyone now rags who has gotten out there i've been hearing every i've been able to hear everyone this whole time yeah i yeah i get it was localized but i couldn't hear anyone for a moment but it seems like everyone's back so no it was you you uh you know i i also glitched out everybody was there yeah fringy no i no i couldn't hear anyone it still applies it seems like the majority of us could hear everything fine the goalpost is getting there that's all right john was still talking about the film oh okay joe yeah everything came through on my end so the audience would go back 30 seconds discussion of a film with hello hello you just cut out and i was i was like oh no go on don't stop and then no one said anything but chat we're still scrolling by and i was like oh this is odd okay well just to summarize quickly the themes of uh childhood friendship bonding through as children and then two people being raised into separate camps that are at war and you're supposed to fill fall into your role of like you're the dog you hunt foxes you're the fox you you avoid the the hunting dogs you are born enemies but they they're not really it's a lie and that's that they realize that's a lie at the very end and their friendship comes through and um i think the most the most important valuable thing that i drew from the film personally is just like a kid who's forced to grow up quicker than he's prepared to which i think is something that everybody can relate to you know as a kid there's some moment in your life i think for everyone where shit got a little too real and you realized what the real word world actually is and you know what life might be like as an adult and just that moment of terror washes washes over you but like and fox and hound deals with it in a realistic way but in the end it's okay like he finds a partner and it's like really bittersweet but it is a ultimately a positive ending i think and so yeah like i mean it's hard asking a film buff what their favorite movie is it's it's a that is a tough one it's like asking a right like where do you get your ideas from i don't fucking know dude like i managed to avoid answering the question technically yeah but for that for those reasons fox and the hound i would say 2001 for a different reason a space odyssey because of its scope i just it has the largest scope out of any movie i can think of for it like it goes literally from the dawn of man to the the pursuit of the infinite and whatever lies beyond that and doing it in this way that preserves the mystery of what the infinite is it doesn't spell everything out for you with like exposition and like i don't know if you ever saw this there's a sequel to 2001 called 2010 the year we made contact with john lithgow and it's like it does it goes to hollywood with it where it starts like telling you too much information and like forcing a bunch of drama where the first movie it preserved this kind of mystique of of like you know space and what's what's out there and it worked in its benefit that it didn't tell you everything that was happening it had this layer of like this really thick layer of like what the hell is going on especially at the end so yeah i'm rambling too much i'll stop there those those are my favorite stories a couple of them sweet um awesome passing sauce that leaves mr metal commander lost but certainly leased hey well i wanted to go with hot fuzz but trees said everything about it so i was just a little thank you thank well everyone else was talking so there's two there's two other stories and games that are really like but i don't really want to talk about them because if you don't know the stories you're getting heavily spoiled and there would be soma and outer wilds uh yeah i would i don't want to hear about outer wilds because i intend to play it so we gotta protect for free we have to protect soma not what needs to be protected spring is playing too much halo infinite uh yeah i love those stories they're really good outer wilds is on the game path and i was well so game pass is amazing game pass is amazing i started playing sea of thieves the other day with some pals because it was on it's actually had a great time uh and it's on the game pass and so got it rags what's the game you mentioned the other day about being a dwarf in a hole or whatever deep rock galactic that's the one that game is the shit y'all should play it all of us i want to be a dwarf in a hole you're actually a dwarf in space in a hole that's like a big hole has everything space is a it is a big hole it's an inverted hole it's just empty space here hey how do you know that how do you know that all of space isn't a hole in something much bigger now my mind is like a hole because i'm all that we're just losing it right now oh my goodness yeah i'm yeah yeah uh i was like what can i talk about then and then i was thinking i really like the whole story of kratos so far of god of war just where we are right now just the first three games were like just more fighting and gory and i don't think the story was like that great i think it was just the just a combination of what happened to him and us getting to play him and just fuck up all those gods in brutally violent ways it's just super fun and i really really like that and then we get the god of war 2018 and we suddenly get like a proper story with kratos and i was like oh shit that's that's that's good shit and which is also really topical because yesterday the pc release came out for god of war 2018 so i'm gonna check that out at some point i guess yeah i really like what the latest game did with that character but i do have to say i really enjoy the pulpy anger of like the character in the first three games i keep these people to a pulp you know rags you wanted christ santon apparently that's his name the wookiee to like do all kinds of fucking rough stuff or to non-sexual to uh to good ol boba in their fights and stuff god of war let's say they want they do i didn't say they couldn't if they wanted to that's those never the point jay my goodness sexual liberation is what you felt all about but overall it's the main point of efat but that's the thing yes but like you mentioned you know like fucking gouge's eyes out kratos does that to persiden yeah oh my god clown boys yeah yeah we did we saw that for the little clown boy stuff i yeah stream is down no apparently buffered for two seconds back oh people people are fucking drama it's not no okay well i'm i'm good this time refresh you full refresh you yeah no i agree with you because especially with 2018 so much more contemplative and somber but has the history of the first three games that are more of an exposed nerve of a story just like and i i just love that like god of war 2018 is really accessible for newcomers because you don't need to play any of the other games really but if you did you get like the best piece of fan service you've ever seen for me at least oh yeah like that's some of the best handled fan service yeah it was wonderful they were so restrained compatible they could have been when i first played it i didn't expect us to get the chaos blades back like ever it was like what we have we have a weapon now i think what the game did and the story was to try and earn your trust as its own thing and then it was like all right now do you trust us to actually bind it to the previous games and you're like all right that's how you do fucking fan service is to earn your respect with your own thing first yeah i don't give i don't give a shit that your new characters are meeting my old favorite characters i don't know these new characters yet oh you mean yeah they know that skywalker meets glumbo i don't know i don't care yeah it means rey rey is glumbo glumbo glumbo imagine that's the ending of rises skywalkers um he said it's like stranger who are you she says rey no no that doesn't feel right not anymore i'm glumbo i would have been glumbo i would have bought a second take it just to see that scene again rey schleenbleen i i i really i can i introduce you to crime mauler what crime crime crime i'm aware of this thing you speak phenomenon good i've only heard of it though i've never i would never indulge in such criminals i would never crime yes yeah i would take a bite out of it hey nice uh i was going to say right when we get to the 2018 one is like greatest and in the north saga i guess you could you could call it i was like uh i'm finally done with all these god killings i just want to chill with my family and my son and then the north's girls come it's like nah we want to fuck you up i was like oh man we just want to honor the dead mom and i was like no we're gonna fight a lot it's like really well i really like this because it's like almost like a uh one one shot movie almost the way they did it in the in the game was like really neat yeah i love the opening scene like you you know what it is about right away with them incinerating the mother it's like the the death of the anima or the feminine and now you have like this boy's only influence is this outrageously violent monster basically and it's like where's there's no yin to the yang like how is this kid gonna turn out yeah and he keeps the kid at a distance and uh we we can understand that's what i think this so it works about it because you're sitting there as a player of the other games like is it because is it because of all the other stuff and and the kid is just has no idea about any of it and the little references they have at first were like i think kratos spots some are like a greek sort of architectural is it like items in that place and he's just staring at them for a little bit and you get to watch him staring at them and you're just like is he gonna what is it it is a depiction of himself yeah a depiction of him i was like dad what what do you see in just frozen ground breaks like no nothing we need to move along i was like oh shit but yeah it's uh i really like it please don't fuck it up in the next one please i'll be very sad they probably will come on no stop it i also bring it out on steam immediately i found it quite difficult that game kicked my ass the combat oh i can see that i i started first play for i started it on heart and i changed back to i guess normal is this is just a normal one because man i was like this is tough i don't know how this game works yet i'm gonna go down one difficulty but then later on when you get the groove i felt like it was a bit too easy as soon as you figured out everything and started to level your shit yeah it's like dark souls where if you die you don't really feel cheated it's just like oh i fucked up there but it's like you it's so you got to be like so attentive all the time it's very easy from my mind to kind of drift and god i love dark souls but i fucking suck at it it's like i barely progressed in it at all it's like god i really want to enjoy this game but like i'm too bad i replayed it last year actually so i'm no hurry to bite on pc just now but i did the velkary fights all of them this time and man this last velkary i raged a lot on my streams when i was doing that fights that last velkary fight is a piece of shit i'm still not sure how fair it is really because sometimes the combinations of attacks you get it's like i don't know but it is doable it's doable i think it's just on the on the edge of being unfair i think i cheese the fuck out of demon souls and dark souls where like i'll encounter an enemy one at a time right and then you back up back up back up until you find the barrier the perimeter of that uh enemy's ai zone you know what i mean where like there's like a line that they all won't cross and it like they'll just like as soon as you cross that line they'll ignore you you kind of abuse that he's like go in for an attack stab them and then cross the line again you just keep doing that till they're dead okay talking about resident evil village i'm gonna try this video game is considered a story though yes what what was that so like you know how when you talk about a video you can talk about the story like what sorry i didn't mean to derail it i don't know we're talking about stories here um shall we move on to question three since we've we're now a lot of this two hours per question obviously yeah sure all right well three on the first one let me randomize this is our what are you guys i bet you guys super excited to see what the order is i am excited to see what the order is i'm in suspense oh yeah metal's got number one this time so metal double metal is your favorite character of all time right us a bit more oh is he a favorite character of all time i i had a really hard time with that one because there's no character to me that sprung out immediately because i cannot think of a character where like this is i like this super duper crazy a lot i don't know i don't know why this one was so hard for me to figure out well i guess everyone's answers today don't actually have to be definitive it's just whatever you come up with yeah yeah it's just what's the point of the stream hey leave metal no i'm gonna slap him no not again oh my ass yeah i i don't know i i just decided for now i really like creators a lot because well basically of the things i already said like the whole everything you went through and then as to uh get along with it i guess get along with his son is almost a proper way to say it because it almost feels like he doesn't really want to do anything with him but then he has he goes along it's like no i actually really like my son because it's like little hints of him trying to show affection it's like uh doesn't really like it i think you get a lot of whenever the sun gets into any level of danger kratos is like he'll switch into very furiously protecting him even though he's very distant yeah absolutely and that's like a couple of scenes where he's almost going to pat him on the on the shoulder or whatever and it's like he's like very uh hesitant in that way um and yeah just just him having to change his ways and actually confronting his past and sharing it with a with uh atreus even though he never wanted to but then you realized yeah i kind of have to because i put him in danger with my mere existence it's a really interesting position to put that character in the new game where like there's no mother he's raising this kid he has this responsibility he can't be the fucking psycho that he lost in the other games because he's just going to turn his kid into somebody maybe even worse that's right a crazy psycho dad can really have a bad influence on their children yeah yeah true but yeah but is it this is not my definitive answer because there's there's a lot of characters i like like there's a bunch of characters and like the haunting series that are really good they're really like i really like that he's suddenly forced to temper himself like um in the lack of a mother figure he's got to kind of serve struggling with the idea of serving both roles yeah and how like the game is just consistently dragging him back to the original trilogy he just doesn't want to yeah all the references like the repercussions and then just overt like items and conversations which like yeah and he's got to rage the fuck out to win at certain portions i don't want to be insane roid rage man anymore i have a beard now i just want to grill he did he wanted to grill he grilled his wife oh my goodness oh my god oh i guess that is more morally acceptable yeah well someone just said a lot that he's so slow to to anger in this one yeah he's like just when uh not odin uh uh who's the first boss you fight i forgot his name no wait but begins with a b boba boba when boba fed arrives at kratos house boulder i said i collapsed yeah boulder we very much insist him to just leave and he doesn't want to fight anymore this is like you don't want to have this fight and yeah it takes it takes a bit before he actually goes into action i think the first time we realized that he wants to protect his son most of the time is when we have to fight actual humans because he doesn't want him to kill a human because that's like a horrible thing to experience apparently even though he went around to killing so many people even innocent ones like i remember very well in god of war one two three was just civilians running around like oh i need help i'm just gonna rip those people apart yeah and we got four coming to ragnarok soon enough yeah please be on steam please or ragnarok um i guess i'm i'm next oh my um yeah well i can't tell you about my three favorite characters they're all off limits i'm gonna have to go with a different one um fucking pussy i know right you'll find out all about it well they're gonna eat simon buffy and who is the third who the fuck is simon yeah simon obby and franklin fuck simon i hate him it's funny because my character is called simon do you mean we've gone over the characters already or they're super secret we can't we don't no no i mean i'm three of mine i'm disqualifying i'll find others but there's so many to choose from anyway i'm gonna pick good ol tywin lannister because he's fucking legend now let's go over why why he's such a legend there's gonna be a combination of knowledge from the books like other lore stuff and then the show and the entire time picturing all of these events being done by charles dan specifically he's uh he's just a glorious representation of the character now it all begins or at least i'm gonna give a very crappy sort of summary of a lot of these events people in chat will get triggered but you'll follow along for why exactly i like him he was a part of um what we're a rich house and successful house but it started to go to shit because his dad basically like did a lot of whoring and chilled out and gave didn't uh follow up debts people had to the lannisters and it all started to fall apart no one gave a shit um i think his dad died uh oh no this this this this uh his dad was out for a walk one day i think and he came across two lions uh in the sort of area of land and he was like almost killed by them but he was uh he was actually rescued by house clagain with two dogs or three dogs i think i remember but the point is it was one of the most embarrassing things ever because the leader of house lannister was like terrified of being killed by the symbol of their house you know just optics didn't look great which is the the lion and so i think uh it became a point where um tywin his whole goal was to just raise lannister the lannisters back to power um and his whole like existence is all about his family the core value everything is is below family but his major flaw is that he's never actually taken consideration of his family on like an emotional level he's never understood them as people and he's never cared it's much more about what they represent um its successes in the that regard though he like took over and he made he was incredibly intelligent and assertive about basically every decision he makes and then just just pushes lannisters further higher and higher he um made specific marriages for bloodlines to get stronger he was the hand of the king and people liked him more than the king meaning like king's helper sort of thing but of westeros and uh he ended up i think he was actually fired because he became more popular because he was running everything so effectively that's a good optical decision i know it didn't make them good friends but tywin was fucking ruthless and uh he would always aim to pick the winning side unless of course the war has been waged against the lannisters specifically and uh that king uh caused like a major civil war the land tywin ended up asking to come into his gates to help defend him against the incoming war and then just slaughtered all of those people and uh ended up killing him and then took the sort of glory if you will have been like we defeated the king we're good guys and he managed to get his daughter to then marry the king that would take over and he just you know went away to get all uh castley rock just chilling out and probably living out the rest of his days because his daughter was gonna be of a decent power the bloodline of lannisters gonna sink into the but that's weird that's around where game of thrones begins as a show and um he's never given a shit about any of these relations he even talks vaguely about how much he doesn't like basically anybody he just hangs out with he doesn't and he doesn't talk to his family that much either but he's very much aware of the politics of everything and um i think and a lot of people agree that the intelligence of the show dies with him as a character like it's a it's more of a meta thing but it's just kind of funny to think about um he like as a lot of people know shawn beam he's in season one and he kind of uh kind of dies it's one of the famous events of season one because it's a really subversive sort of moment but it's actually like perfectly set up um when we first meet tywin he like one of the first things he said is how fucking stupid it was that they killed him and he was a great like hostage and he meant a lot but now we just pissed everybody off and it's such a great little intro because it's like he's not even thinking about it from a on a perspective or um even like a remotely emotional one just pragmatically thinking about the chess pieces on the board um and of course he's telling his sons exactly where to go what to do and how to use their armies does their best while he's gutting um i was going to say what is i think it's a stag which is the symbol for house baratheon which is the king that's just died like it he's just he's doing it for his own reasons in narrative but it's just wonderful some symbolism as well talking about whether or not like the leaders of these houses are all dead and he's just talking about how to make use of all of it um to fast forward then he starts fighting one of the like newer younger members of the stark family and he actually gets subverted by him and loses significantly loses his son um and he gets like incredibly fucking frustrated this is this is a scene where he's like talking to his commanders and they're all figuring out what the next best move is and he just repeats while shouting at them his son's been kidnapped because without jamie lannister tywin's fucked because the only other son he has is tyrian who he doesn't he sees as like a dead end and then he has a daughter that doesn't provide is so everything he's worked for will fall apart if jamie dies um and so then he like does a another subversive movie heads back to his own bloodlines kingdom as opposed to trying to continue fighting that war and then he starts fighting the war explicitly from writing letters he's just in king's landing for like i think two seasons he's just writing letters and talking to people and he ends up fully winning the war basically he manages to convince and push different people in different directions uh all through cunning every scene he has with every other character of significant power intelligence he just out maneuvers them um and of course the red wedding is the famous example of just he basically wipes out the stocks with a stroke of a pen because he convinced someone to do something several different ways and uh bought it with the power of marrying into the the king's bloodlines as well and he even has like a perspective on it like tyrian tries to rip into him for the idea of how fucked up it is to backstab people when they're expected to just have dinner at a place and then he's just likes better than thousands of men dying for no reason on a battlefield and you just like it'll make you pause with a lot of his logic and then there's just his presence he is this like 80 plus year old dude but wherever he goes and whoever he talks to they shut the fuck up because he's so intimidating with all the experiences he's had and then you might think that as a result of knowing all of this about this person you'd be frustrated by his demise but it's not it's one of the most satisfying ways he could have gone which is that he tries to get rid of tyrian because of different mistakes and things that have happened along the way and um because he fails to understand most of the dynamics in his own family and he considers the line is to so above everyone else while referring to basically anybody with lower born to be like worthless peasants or whores um and i'm going with the book now people fuck the show on this one the uh he he like refers to an old person that his son was in love with as he refers to her as a whore which would be inaccurate considering the events and him doing that so naturally because he would always refer to them as lower than himself it is not something he's even necessarily thinking about but like it pisses off his son so much that he fucking shoots him with a crossbow uh while he's on the toilet like that because he's come at him at night for very specific reasons but he's like that's the way he goes out and i think in the book he even describes it as his bowels let loose like because he's dead there's nothing like the guy who's all about pride glory gold and red who's uh his family is everything he dies shitting himself on the toilet like it's it's perfect um and it's specifically because of his weak spot which was never ever actually understanding the people in his family only trying to push them up to the the best way they can be that's a quick summary without me having rewatched the show already read the books in a while i fucking adore that character because of how intelligent and cunning it all is behind very specific motivations but also flaws that intertangle with all of the things that pushed him in the first place i love the fact that he has reasoning behind a lot of it but he also at the same time is hypocritical in a lot of smaller ways that make him dynamic he's he's really fucking cool and charles dance made him perfect basically that was like the best casting you can get and just look at clips of tywin talking to people on youtube if you've never seen game of thrones you'll be entertained i guarantee it um yeah i just quickly he dies at the end of season four which is the last good season of game of thrones agreed yeah i made a list of ten to try and choose from and tywin was also on my list but that's not the one i was so fucking good yeah that's a very very character um but yeah now i was thinking i don't take much longer just to say that like i think my favorite characters are always going to have to be people that i can take a while to explain like more complex i think simplistic characters is nothing wrong with them necessarily but you know like emperor palpatine isn't just never going to be my favorite i'll say the performance that looks cool yeah and i like the performance but um you know what that means jay is next jay i have to follow that well i mean i was just saying i like a character you can do it hey hey hey i don't feel that i mean i i don't know if i could talk that long about any character like without scripting it beforehand and i'll tell you something now i haven't written a fucking script i didn't write a script either i just like tywin i know i know maybe we have different skills mumbleheim wow that's probably insensitive to some cultures oh is there drama i i'm sorry someone i gotta knock on the door and i had to step out for a moment that was um i really enjoyed listening to you talk about tywin he's a fucking legend yeah i am i i because i remember when i remember when season eight came out and i was your emotional support animal and you started showing me the episode and all the clips and stuff with tywin and you're like rags look at how amazing the show used to be look at how incredible these characters were look at how cool this motherfucker is oh my god rags can you see this these are the words he said and i said yeah this looks real like a really awesome show i'm i'm so sorry about what they did to your your beautiful baby and i was like damn now i like tywin a whole bunch because these clips he's showing me he's really cool yeah the same experience he's uh safe though he dies right before the show goes to shit so that there's no and they didn't do any like tony stock shit where they said like turns out to tywin rape babies just like what no no like no they leave him alone which is nice is there a single episode or a single season of television more disappointing than season eight of game of thrones i don't think there is i i would argue it's probably the worst fuck like like it's the worst because i think of legacy yeah um maybe doctor who's one of those seasons might be able to compare but like season eight game of thrones that fucking assassinate everyone and destroyed the whole thematic through line of the show it's just like that's some significant damage consider this consider that for almost a decade game of thrones had it was one of the most culturally significant uh tv shows that existed in media everyone knew about it even if you watched it or not it had it had invaded popular culture and the next episode and the fear of spoilers and the excitement that people had for every episode was incredible for almost a decade and then we get to the end of season eight and now nobody talks about it and if they do it is almost always horrifically negative about how the whole show was ruined by the end and it takes some serious work to destroy that lengthy and powerful of a legacy in such a way do you know that data dinklage recently said people were mad because the white people didn't get to walk off and i can't believe it's so fucking short-sighted of him to say that the other thing he said just quickly because i think he was like who cares anyway it's not real there's fucking dragons in it it was just like oh god i'm about to be dragging my balls across your face if you say that again yeah it's so sad it would have been a strong contender for my favorite show of all time and i i can't watch it i tried to watch it again like last year and i just i couldn't get through it and then i remember i watched one of baller's videos about season eight i was just fucking like furious it's like like tweeting about how fucking mad i wasn't gonna say anything important please it's it's the worst thing that ever happened let you know when i'm back in the land of trying to listen to both of you at the same time i've gone to the land of the ring race rags are shut the fuck up till it fixes that's what you can't see me and i can't hear you oh i heard metal oh god did it happen again hello i like your first instinct rags whenever you can't hear anyone is just talking sassad late instead of stopping nope nope because if i because here's the thing if i talk incessantly and i interrupt everything you say that means you can't say all that stuff without me because i want to hear what this is from a place of love because i want to hear what you have to say slap you in the balls out of love you can't because i'm dragging them across someone's face in chat so you're gonna slap his head too and you don't want that you can't i do that i think jay is adept enough to slap your balls without hitting the guy's face yeah he is that dexterous yes i would have how many people were talking so i was currently doing the rags both were well uh i guess is it is jay's turn right to dole god not again favorite you gotta be fucking again jay didn't even have the turn yet oh no no wait i think is i think his audio is gone again they want to go to sing rags you can't hear us can you nope we're back singapore we're in singapore now okay all right okay jay go do it all right take my turn again you know i've taken this question is just you know not favorite character of all time because i guess i guess if i were to do that it would probably do be it probably would be the doctor but that's not really fair um because we've got why not what we've got essentially there we've got um that that's essentially having several interpretations of the same character but because they're all in the same continuity you get to include them all as one i suppose i would have thought you'd pick a particular one rather than the entity as a whole but i i don't i don't think i would pick a particular one or i think i would particularly even though there's a 13 to think that i i get absolutely despised yeah that doesn't even count that's just a complete misunderstanding she doesn't she doesn't count um but um the character that i wanted to bring along was uh simon from misfits who i don't know who here is even familiar with misfits i know who is i just don't know who isn't not me i have not seen it but you told me to watch it multiple times so i've been doing a rewatch of misfits recently with fringy and man the strength of that show is it's character writing um more than anything else i think but um the standout character in all of them is simon um who is this so we have the setup of a um group of young offenders i think that's i think that's the most important part is that they're like we don't even need to talk about like the sci-fi stuff that happens in that show just to appreciate who they are as people and that they are um a group of young offenders who are essentially forced to work together by circumstance they are put in the same like community service service rotation that's how they know each other um and then shit happens to their group and they are forced to collaborate even though there was people they almost certainly are i think well they're a bunch of misfits they almost none of them would really be friends um outside of the show outside of the circumstances i i'd sincerely doubt that anyone would talk to any of the others uh and you have Nathan who is a um a fan favorite character he is often presented as a protagonist even though it's quite a flat team structure um and you know he's a i mean he's a master class in comic relief without making it annoying um and he has a he has a rich character in a and his own values and strengths and weaknesses and and you know exactly the kind of thing he's likely to say in any kind of situation but uh it's simon who has i think more nuances and complexities than any other character in the show he is a um you won't meet him he is incredibly socially distant from everyone else he is awkward and nervous he doesn't understand most social cues or the difference between the subtle differences that most people do understand there's a difference between coming across as awkward and and coming across as palatable to most people um i think the perfect example of that is a scene where he is asking a girl out he asks do you like food if you do we can go for some pizza and garlic dough balls in a very like matter effect um and also very clearly nervous demeanor um and there are all of these social nuances that he doesn't understand but he clearly he clearly does have um his own moral compass and heart in there um and as he grows it's really rewarding to see this guy um get his first proper people that he considers to be his friends um and to see the things that are significant to him and to see um how his sort of um how his how his life being socially distant from other people has informed his morals and his and the kind of decisions he's likely to make and his understanding of the world um he is a very satisfying character to see grow other than one arc that fringy and i am very going to controversially get angry about yeah it's like one fringy it's one of those popular arcs in the show i don't know why they assassinate him in like an episode it's yeah but it's it's really easy to separate it from the rest of the show so right fringy it's one of the most popular arcs in the show stop saying that it sounds like it's fringy's fault i don't like it fringy why did you make that arc so popular also um i don't know i don't know um because we're talking about writing i don't know really how much how fair it is to bring acting into it but holy fuck um iwan rion who plays in i was honestly one of my fucking like standout performances like i can't think of many performances i like better than him as simon he conveys so much nuance and emotion um he has to play the character getting possessed and is able to do full switches of demeanor like he's like you're like oh there's a different brain in that body now um he is fucking insane um scenes where he is um there is a scene where um let's say without spoiling it um some of the people that he has grown to consider his only friends over the course of the previous season he is now being found out in a way they found out information about him that as far as he is concerned risks their entire friendship with him collapsing and his performance in that scene is fucking amazing um fringy do you know the one i'm referring to based on that uh i think sorry i think i do yeah um yeah i don't i don't i can't um appreciate the the the melding of writing and performance that come together to form this character enough like he is through and through one of my favorites um and yeah as i said well i don't think i can pick a favorite character of all time but he is one that i i can't think of any you know it's the same rule as well i don't think i can pick a favorite of all time there are certainly characters who reach a level where they can't reach a higher level for me and these are just all the characters that i like as much as i'm capable of liking a character right writing and acting definitely go hand in hand oh yeah um like you a good actor can take bad writing sometimes and salvage something out of it usually it's not very good like but uh when both are good when you have a terrific actor with like top-notch material it creates this positive feedback loop where you end up with something really special i think yeah absolutely and as well the same way as you could the other way you can have a um some serviceable or even good material totally ruined by it just being delivered with an actor who doesn't really seem to give a shit about the material they're working yes we if you had like a really great material gal Gadot was delivering there would still be like characterization and things to complement we would just be like man sucks that she's the one delivering those lines honestly like um it can make dialogue feel so much less natural it can really rob dialogue of the implications that it would have being read by a more talented actor true with the way that words are said intonation and all that stuff yeah yeah well all right then it looks like next up magical is mr frong who is your favorite character of all time and why the caveats to start with would be that i'm pretty sure that i have a character who is among the favorites if not potentially my favorite um but i don't want to talk about him quite yet because he's he's from a series that i'm sure we'll get around to talking about in depth eventually um and also it can be hard to hone in on a single one and uh something else i was thinking about in relation to this question is how do i factor in like characters from comedies who are really static but who i really enjoy seeing so when i think about that i think about like homo simpson basal faulty like eric cartman sterling archer a lot of a lot of comedy characters who i really enjoy watching um who i guess would be would be up there with my favorite characters but i guess i feel like i have less to i feel like that conversation would be a lot harder to have at the moment so i decided not to talk about those ones uh and some other ones i was thinking about too um but for this conversation one of my favorite characters is dead evil and part of the reason why i like dead evil so much is because i struggle to think of other characters that are so ripe uh for the exploration of theme than dead evil there there are so many things that i don't even know that they were on purpose when the character was created um that just line up so well uh it's kind of unreal so when we think about who is dead evil who is this character so he's one of the few superheroes who is defined by a disability he's defined by what he can't do as opposed to what he can that's so cool that's such a unique things to have for a superhero who is defined by what they cannot do um and then you think about so many of these things again i i'm not sure that um that stan lee knew what he had created when he did this but a blind lawyer a blind catholic lawyer who dresses up like a demon and goes out into the night to beat up criminals now you said that's like that's that's a concept but it's like okay so we have a man who has decided that he wants to become part of a legal system you know part of the legal system uh and you know adhere to the tenets of the legal system in terms of like the rule of law specifically the rule of law is probably the important one um yet clearly he doesn't believe in this system or at least he thinks that the system is flawed in ways that he can remedy by going out into the street at night and exacting vigilante justice to create the world that he wants there are so much that you can explore that has been explored in stories about him about that the fact that he would make that decision and then we think about the moral implications of the things that he's doing because dad will generally adhere to like a no kill rule um and usually when we talk about it it's like batman a lot of the time his concern with the no kill rule is uh fear of like what he will become if he breaches that rule that he'll go down a really dark path and um and uh basically become unhinged like a lot of the time with spider man the reason why he doesn't want to kill the bad guys is because he is kind of like a he is pretty wholesome um and also the idea of like redemption and salvation and stuff and um but with with uh with matt he's a catholic so he believes that if he crosses certain lines that it will be basically condemning his soul and that's like a factor that he has to grapple with as well as the standard things right of can i rob somebody of the chance of redemption is it okay um is it okay to cross this line to create the world that i want um i think when you think about that it's like there are plenty of stories both in the comics and in the tv show that are that that explore these concepts but i think it is the thing that i find so interesting and appealing about dead evil is just how potent all of these sort of fundamental elements of his character are for like so many different types of stories you can explore about like the nature of being a superhero vigilante or like your concepts of justice or like morality redemption um and you get that like born again the man without fear uh dead of a yellow um uh i haven't read out but i've heard that has a lot of stuff in there too and then the tv show as well um and i mean and this is all putting to one side that dead of a has a real cool factor to him the costume is awesome the concept is really cool of like a yeah again a a blind man who has like heightened senses so he relies on hearing and smell and then he can leverage those uh in his professional career as well like as a lawyer there's certain advantage that he gets from being able to do that um yeah dead dead evil is awesome um he is he is really really cool great character and a really strong example of like theme married hardcore with with with a character it's it's it's difficult to think of like stories that you would that you could tell where you would not be able to pull something just from these fundamental ideas about justice and uh morality redemption yeah i uh i really like dead evil that's uh that's what i want to marry him did you like the man no way i really liked him in in no way home but again it's like a minute of time but i definitely was happy to see him i mean we talk about performances like charlie cox's perfect like i don't want to see him played by anybody else he's he's gonna play uh dead evil um i i do get worried about what they're gonna do especially best what i would be worried about what marvel would do with with a character that you love in phase four why would you worry about that oh by the way for anybody who isn't super familiar with comics who is interested in reading comics uh dead evil born again is um that that is a really fantastic uh like entry point um for for learning about dead evil it's pretty much like the quintessential story it's definitely worth reading amazing art i think that was uh massive charlie he did uh batmania one which was also him and frank miller which is another great comic too oh man those two made a lot of good comics um yeah uh that's about it all right another dynamic character so many layers and thematic relevance um gone yeah i believe it is now your turn once again oh sorry sorry wait one last thing i wanted to mention as well about dead evil because i someone reminded me in chat um that like a constant question that's raised about dead evil throughout all of his stories is like his intentions like you are you actually interested in helping people or do you just want to hurt people like do you like do you like uh being able to go out because this character sustained a lot of trauma in his life and it's like do you just use this as an excuse to go out to beat the shit out of people uh yeah i think it's easy to become resentful when you've lost your eyesight uh well it's it's a lot of things right is uh because his dad was a boxer who uh who ended up getting killed uh because he was used to because he didn't throw fight um that is definitely like a huge part of his history um and it's just again it's like god damn you really did not like like in every sort of core aspect of who this guy is you've leveraged something that's interesting and and i mean you know when you talk about villains kingpin is a really cool villain um bullseye is a cool villain electra is a cool character um he's got a lot of cool villains but uh yeah sorry so that's that's that's my piece yeah no worries very well um i'm going to go with Breaking Bad's Walter White good choice um it's uh or i was talking earlier about like how i think i consider characters as vehicles for themes and in the case of Walter White i would say it's pride and then anybody who's um looking for like brainstorming advice for stories like writing stories starting off with the seven sins is a pretty good jumping off point because any kind of interesting human behavior or motivation is basically comes down to one of those and um Walter White is a portrait of pride i think and what it can do to a person and it's a for all it's spectacle and you know almost comic book level tension and explosions not that they're that frequent or anything it does get a little bit pulpy and comic booky in rare instances but uh overall it's a realistic study of somebody just very milk toast limp dicked at the start i mean who's overqualified uh he knows he he's very good at what he does he's very talented he feels cheated with the whole thing with uh elliott schwarz gray matter losing the gray matter yeah losing the partnership uh just deeply resentful and he's kind of stewing in this resentment but he doesn't show it at all he's just very suppressed and um and then he has this cancer diagnosis and all of a sudden he's got a clock on his lifespan and he's questioning what he's done for his family and what he's going to leave them with and he just decides fuck it and sees a news report of how much money can be made um making and dealing drugs and justifies going through with it by saying that well the money that i make i'm going to leave it to my family and they don't have to know how i make this money but i'm going to make this money i'm going to give it to them i'm going to die and what i did won't matter all that matters is that my family is well off and sort of like it's the idea that you can that all the terrible shit you can justify in the name of like doing good by your your children your family making sure that they're in an okay place and um i love what the show does across the entire show uh his morality just swings from one end of the spectrum to the other and i like how it's a debate as to where exactly he became evil and there's an argument to be made that maybe he was evil all along and the circumstances just brought that out in him but i don't know about that personally i think i think what you do has a lot to do with your character and he never really did evil things until he went down this path of the drug trade and um but it's not like he went from good to bad and that's it i like that at the end of the show like he reaches rock bottom he's withering away and you see that there's still some good in him and he reaches this revelation in the last couple episodes that he wants to leave something positive behind yeah like he kind of he he did the drug thing he uh he went all the way to the top he rose and fell it was the archetypal story and then he's just at the bedrock now where he's about to die and it's like is this what i want to leave behind like my family my family hates me i've introduced all this poison i've produced all this poison for people like what what can i do that's like good well i can get well actually no like i was gonna say kind of save jesse but he doesn't attend on saving jesse when he when he goes for that final confrontation but he sees the predicament that he's in he like he thinks jesse's working with the nazis but that's not the case and uh but he does he does something good in the end and um you can it's arguable whether or not he got what he deserved in the end um i i think it's a satisfying ending maybe i mean i like season five the last season but it's definitely the most flawed season out of all of them and um they did a really they made a really ballsy move with introducing the the gun in the the opening scene of season five because they didn't they did that and not not really knowing where they were gonna go with it and i was i've read a lot about the writing process about how there's a lot of like like tough days in the writers room we're just like oh my fucking god how are we gonna pay this off like what can he do with this gun and uh i think they kind of wrote themselves into a corner there a little bit maybe they should have taken a more organic approach by not like introducing a flash forward and then having to service like pay off that flash forward yeah i think it did the exact kind of damage you'd expect something like that could do which is that it locked into a payoff that they weren't actually 100 on board with yeah that perhaps wasn't truly organic to that story if you were to just follow just like take a not a completely or well i guess suppose like if you just follow walter white organically what he would do beat for beat rather than just like figuring out these intense tent pole moments and then like building your way up to them in this kind of artificial paint by numbers way but i thought overall the breaking bad struck a good balance between an organic and a schematic approach to yeah compelling storytelling and i like i like the the the breadth of morality that that character encompasses like it's like going going from like i guess he was like you could consider him a good person in the beginning and then he just turns into this terrible monster but then you see that there's some redemption in him at the very end i think you have to stack a lot of what he decides to do in all the circumstances he ends up with when i think when he's like profiting hardcore and he's in a comfortable position of people knowing it's him earning the money like with a car wash i think he's willing to go back to being 100% altruistic but the second like jesse or hank start to threaten the empire he will threaten to kill them sort of thing yes he's very driven by ego narcissist hates charity doesn't want anything given to him anymore i think you see when hank is at his end so i think the waltz everything he says and does in that scene it just tells you it's like yeah he values hank's life more than he does all of the money he has yeah and that's gonna mean something right i was thinking of the characters like tony soprano i love that character but he doesn't really have much of an arc like he stays pretty consistent throughout the whole thing you know and so i prefer walter white in in like his transformation back and forth and it does it in a realistic way it's a very believable character yeah and i think a lot of people would cite i think jane's death would be the the moment where you go from probably being like i can kind of understand all this to be in like wow i think you're a bad person now yeah yeah polarizing for sure i would agree though that most people would gravitate towards that as the moment where it's like okay this character's like irredeemable now i think it's rough that scene that's really good though yeah this is i don't think anybody would like that's one of the avastated well-known pop culture characters that is known for an extensive arc that's uh takes place over five years really well done and really well performed oh yeah he was a fantastic Brian Cranston yeah and i just love that he comes from a comedy background thing with the comedians comics like that you put them in a dramatic role and they can just do it like a lot of the time like there's just something that they get about like the human experience was like Jim Carrey in the Truman show right that is a comedic role but it is also dramatic right same with Bob Odenkirk sketch comedy background uh same with a dramatic role and he's just excellent is it Jeff Daniels right from uh Dumb and Dumber sorry what's is that his name Jeff Daniels right Jeff Daniels yeah yeah he's really good in um in a lot of dramatic roles he was great in Steve Jobs Robin Williams yeah newsroom Robin Williams yeah good will hunting um yeah i was trying to think of another one i'm just there that'll come excellent choice and now we move to the doom portion of the discussion yeah so of the four questions most of them i pretty got an answer pretty quickly this was like excruciating trying to figure out uh which character i was going to choose so i guess kind of similar to some other people i don't have like a necessarily definitive answer but one one that comes closest right um now unfortunately this is from a film called akira that i'm pretty sure people haven't seen for the most part so i'm gonna quickly summarize some of the some of the back plot like my character is the colonel his actual name is colonel shikishima but he's never called that he's just called the colonel in the film the the basic background of the film is that uh also it's uh animated by the way which explains some of some of the things that happen um but it takes place in japan basically in 19 oh and there are people with psychic powers called espers and in 1988 there was an event it's sort of like the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that destroyed tokyo where one of these uh basically people with psychic powers exploded it's not really fully clarified basically they destroyed the city of tokyo and then the actual the story we see takes place in the distant future of 2019 um after tokyo has been rebuilt and uh the main yeah in the main uh the main plot revolves around um another wave of people gaining psychic powers and the other people who have psychic powers and the military's attempt to like basically keep them under control uh and it also deals with some political stuff uh it's it's an epic story in the sense that it has a lot of characters and a lot of plot um but i'm only really going to talk about uh the colonel character so the colonel is in charge of the military right um and i first saw this film when i was very young uh and i just like hated him um sort of instinctively it's like the military is bad why would we hurt people anybody who uses violence as a dick that kind of thing um and there's a point in the film where the colonel instigates a military coup so like obviously fuck this guy right um you know why would you do that you know that you not only are you using violence you're taking over the government it's undemocratic you're a piece of shit etc etc um but as i've gotten older i've realized that the colonel is the only character in the entire film it's an actual adult he's just doing the things that are that are required um to do what is in the best interest of everyone and like in the case of the uh military coup he does that because there's like another basically there's another pressing threat where tokyo could be destroyed again and the only way to do that um is to take power from the people who are stopping him and go over and try and stop tetsuo and basically try and save everyone's life um and it's just really interesting how the sort of thing that you would expect to be horrendous you know what could be much worse than uh a military commander taking over control of the government um two military commanders taking control of two governments but uh yeah but it's it's actually just the responsible and adult thing to do and basically everyone who surrounds him is uh like greedy and selfish and stupid and short-sighted and he's like one of the very few characters who is able to actually be an adult um it's really fascinating he has a he has a line uh he's talking to a scientist and the scientist is very um romantic and thinking about like what what they could possibly do what they could possibly explore you know what what could we possibly get by studying basically these these psychic people and he asks the colonel uh what do you believe colonel and he responds i'll tell you my job isn't to believe or disbelieve it's to act or not act and it's just such a good encapsulation of what must be the thought process of being in command of the military you know is i'm generally somewhat averse to themes but a lot of the reason the colonel is very interesting is that he's basically um an embodiment of of the theme of like responsible military leadership which isn't something i would usually be interested in but that's part of what makes him fascinating is that i would i have a natural aversion to him and in in spite of that his character is just wildly fascinating um there's another scene where he literally shoots the messenger someone someone that that's where he instigates the military coup they bring him the message that he's being stripped of his command and he literally tells him to shoot the messenger and it's probably the right thing to do it's just it's it's fascinating how um he's doing all of these things that on the surface seem uh horrendous and and and monstrous really but it's just what it's what has to happen um to save people's lives and the characters are very fascinating it's unfortunate that people probably haven't seen the film but maybe you should go watch it akira so it's really good i've seen i've seen clips and the animation's gorgeous i've watched it but it's been a long time so i don't remember it very well yeah the the animation is usually regarded as like one of the most beautiful films ever made that's pretty unquestionable but it gets a lot less respect for its like story which i think is quite good um i'm a big akira stan so go check it out with him being what you ended up choosing as your favorite character what do you think it says about your preferences for seeing what like what things you see in characters or what you like to see in characters so that that's kind of what's fascinating that's why i was so excruciating to choose because i i thought up all the different things that i would abstractly imagine to be really important and i realized that there wasn't any character that embodies all of them so like something that's really important to me are character relationships and um basically how character relationships change over time but that doesn't really happen in features all that much it's in tv shows have the time to pull that off but you don't get super complex exploration of that and and films all that much right um i mean the reason i guess the reason to choose him is sort of if there was a character that i would want to see more of more than anyone else and just to sort of explore like the mind of this character to see what else he was up to it would probably be him but yeah like i it's kind of fascinating that different characters are accomplishing wildly different things and i couldn't really think i i would i would be at my woodson trying to come up with like a handbook of what makes a good character because these people are so different like on my list you've got Mulan you've got larry david from curb your enthusiasm right tywin lannister kating cotar from snagskin new york like selene from before sunrise there's just nothing in common with these characters at all um they're wildly distinct and what makes them interesting and their place in the story and the kind of stories they're in i mean these are just kind of the people that i i guess i connect the most with and really would like to see more of um on screen oh it's not in mulan never mind just don't no more one enough mulan enough mulan mulan all right um all righty you only have one left mr mr rattleton here at the end who is your favorite character and why bringing up the proverbial rear so i i thought of a couple because there's a lot of characters i like i was really close to maybe doing one that's unexpected i almost chose boris sherbina from uh shernobyl uh scars guards character i really like him a whole bunch um but we gotta bring it back to middle earth and in a not so surprising pick i'm gonna go with boramir yeah of course i often put boramir with ferramir because the two of them have a very close and intertwined relationship as far as it relates to the things they say and do and of course with their father denathor it's a very interesting pairing slash triangle depending on how much you want to zoom out of it but boramir is who i'm going to be picking for this for this little efap episode so boramir is i guess if you're super casual and you watch the fellowship of the ring um and you don't really pay too much attention and you're not if you're dumb you will hate boramir you will think that he's just a standoffish jerk who is standing as an antagonist and is getting in the way of our our plucky hobbit heroes and our man aragorn and he's just being a jerk and he just wants to do things for himself but boramir is a fantastically put together character because he's one of the i must want to let so let's just take a view of the timeline here and we're gonna be using the definitive edition uh movies for this as we always should the extendeds right so we first meet boramir at the council of elrond and he really wants to protect gondor because from his perspective and as is legitimately accurate gondor has kind of been standing between mordor it's assaults and the rest of middle earth particularly at the key point of osgiliath the city at the river and he's been fighting and fighting and gondor has been fighting and fighting and men are dying and this has made him understandably a little a little upset it's made him a little upset that his countrymen die and his people suffer and so much resource uh resources of gondor have been going towards protecting everyone else and he thinks it's it's understood a little thankless you know that that they're putting so much effort into stopping mordor uh from advancing and so he shows up at the council of elrond with this perspective that he understandably has and he wants to use the ring's power in order to defeat sarin uh not really coming to grasp fully with the idea of its corrupting influence right but at the council it's decided that this fellowship of the ring this jewelry brigade if you will is going to band together and they're going to deliver the ring to mordor so it can be destroyed and boramir agrees he he even says after everyone gets together you have my bow my sword my axe are we great boramir comes in and says if that the the fate of all of us rests in you little one talking to frodo so he understands that it is pragmatically within his best interest and everyone's interest if even though it's not the ideal scenario that he wants and that dinner for once as we'll get to later as we'll discover in the two towers um it is best that he cooperate he's like the embodiment of a d and d group where every where you've got that one guy who doesn't really get his way his his key either the player or their character it's it's really not ideal what the party wants to do but he's like you know what it's still best for us if i help the party and we do what we need to do and our success is far more important than my personal feelings on the matter anyway so he goes along with the will of the council and he goes with the fellowship and throughout the fellowship of the ring we see that boramir even though he can be a bit rough and a little bit standoffish though for good reasons he has an immense amount of care and practical concern that goes into the well-being of his companions particularly to the ones who need it most there is a scene where he is shown specifically training mary and pippin in swordsmanship and instructing them how to parry and block blows and that sort of thing which is very very important remember excuse me it was i think when we were watching our lord of the rings breakthroughs or breakthroughs are watched together or whatever it was this was before the rise of skywalker came out and we were joking that thanks to boramir officially mary and pippin had more combat training than ray skywalker did because boramir cares about the safety of the people in his party who are the least capable of defending themselves he doesn't worry about legolas he doesn't worry about aragorn and all the stuff that they can do he's concerned about the hobbits right when they are escaping moria when they're leaving right we have that scene where they're walking down that that uh definitely not osha approved staircase and part of it crumbles and it falls away and crashes into the chasm below all of our heroes have to jump that chasm they have to jump across well i think gandalf goes first and behind him is boramir and in each arm he has mary and pippin he is jumping across with these two hobbits because he knows they probably can't make the jump and he has to help them what a chad now fast forward's a little bit to um when spoiler alert uh the ball rod again takes up you know gandalf and they fall into the pit it is boramir who runs back and grabs frodo who is a little dumbstruck by watching you know his friend fallen to the chasm it's boramir who comes back uh i think so i might be remembering it miss remembering it but i think it's boramir who does that he's very he he's very i guess goal oriented you know he takes action when he needs to so we get to rivendell after that and not sorry not to rivendell we get to the forest for sarah brorn and all of them are at i'm having a blank on the name of it and now that i'm kind of put on the spot a little bit but he has a conversation in the extended edition the proper edition of these movies he has a conversation with aragorn about what he feels he has to do for you know gondor and how gondor's suffering and how he it explains a great deal his relationship with aragorn and understanding aragorn's perspective trying to get aragorn to do what he needs to slash why are you behaving this way we learn a lot about him he's not a selfish guy gondor really is his top priority he's seen enough suffering and he wants to end right so we fast forward further and further and we get to amon hen and at amon hen boromir of course he this is the scene where he's he finally comes across frodo in the forest and he tries to take the ring from frodo it's corrupted him enough being around it has corrupted him enough even though previously he thought that it wouldn't do it it turns out that uh men are easily corrupted as it has we've been told before so he tries to get the ring from frodo frodo escapes and then boromir realizes what he's done and he is he's he's he feels awful about it he's he he basically weeps he feels terrible that he's had this weakness and that he gave into it and now the person that he needs to protect is running away from him for fear of their own safety and after this he of course fights and dies to defend uh mary and pippin in particular and he kind of he and it's a really big deal in this world that boromir dies and as boromir is dying you know he he says you know if i was if i could live i'd follow you to the end aragorn you're what's best for gondor and gondor is the most important thing um you know you're my king and things could have been great uh you know go get him for me and then he dies very sad um i think that when we were in episode 93 when we were talking about boromir as a character in the lord of the rings it came up that the significance of boromir's death is more vast than a lot of people might realize because of the familial i guess the the family situation the family drama with denithor boromir and feromir but we don't really learn this until later uh imagine if you will if boromir had survived amon hen either he didn't get shot or he survived his wounds um i thoroughly believe that he would have gone with aragorn legolas and gimley to go and rescue mary and pippin because he legitimately cares about their safety and he's a good guy he's very he is very heroic and chivalrous in that aspect um he would have been present at helms deep which politically is significant because he is acting as a representative of gondor so if he is risking his life to defend rohan from uh the white wizard and is present at helms deep that means a great deal between the movies as to gondor's uh relationship with rohan and rohan's uh their willingness to help gondor eventually they do but this would have definitely made that less of an issue because their direct representative essentially a quasi royal character the son of the steward himself is there helping at helms deep now even though it's not the most plot important uh extended scene that of course belonging to the death of saruman oh yeah i think my favorite extended scene is the scene between now this is a it takes place in the two towers that's where the scene is in the film but the event occurs before the event of the fellowship of the ring it's at osgiliath and this is after osgiliath is recaptured from the orcs because it's sort of a tug and a tug of war kind of battle at osgiliath between the orcs and between the men of gondor so osgiliath is retaken by the men of gondor from the orcs and everyone's having a great time it's a celebration this is legitimately good this is excellent and boromir's there who ferrimir's there and denithor enters he comes in to meet his sons and it's a big important celebration that they won this battle and denithor puts down ferrimir and he doesn't give him any respect he says if it wasn't for you ferrimir osgiliath would have never fallen and ferrimir says well we we were outnumbered we didn't have enough men if we had enough men we could have held it and denithor is like oh you're just making excuses you're not good for anything and boromir he comes to bat for his brother he says father this is a day of celebration like all this praise it belongs to ferrimir just as much as me because we both retook the city and he loves you he wants to do everything he can for you he fights and fights and fights for you and it shows how much boromir is ready to stand up to his father essentially and advocate for his brother who is legitimately a very talented and excellent human being as well the both of these brothers are and he's just not given what he needs to succeed essentially on multiple occasions by denithor as if denithor is setting up ferrimir to fail as well denithor says that ferrimir your failure your failure reflects poorly on me and because of the state of denithor's mind it makes you wonder is is denithor trying to make ferrimir fail so that it does look bad on him so he can be mad at ferrimir to justify his dismissal of him it's not exactly clear but i think you could make a pretty good argument for it but in osgiliath after they recapture it boromir is the one who is sent to go get the ring boromir is i mean ferrimir would have been a great choice of course ferrimir is a boss but denithor sends boromir he says your brother would fuck it up i want you to make sure it's done i want you to get you know there's whispers that you know they have the one ring and you know that's a big deal and you need to go get it for gondor and things will be great who will win this and we can stop all this bloodshed at least in his mind that's what's going to happen though it's also like oh are you just saying that because you're a bit corrupted by the yourself and you want the ring for you and it's not super clear but again i think you can make an argument for it so retroactively which is probably why they cut this extended scene retroactively we learn about ferrimir as a character and how much he cares for his brother he sees the earnestness of you know ferrimir and how much he tries and how it's not pleasing his father and his father's just shutting him down putting him down he sees in the same way how mary and pipin in particular they don't really belong here but they're they're trying they are putting themselves in danger on this quest and so he respects that and he teaches them stuff and he watches after him hell even before they get to moria when the spell is being cast by saruman on the on the mountains to make them fall and kill the fellowship it's boromir who says we need to go because the little ones are going to perish essentially those are those are constantly his primary concern and i think all of these together make boromir a guy who is it's a tragic story of an incredible guy who has understandably really kind of pushed to be corrupted in a way not just by his human nature but because of his experiences in his life concerning gondor and the blood that he's spilled with his countrymen to defend the world essentially and i it's tragic that a character like this had to meet that fate it's a it is a heroic death but it is tragic all the same and i'm super curious what would have happened if boromir would have lived what impact did his death have on denithor into driving him even further into madness and what influences politically and militarily would that have had um it probably would have had a lot of big consequences but we can only speculate but i've waxed long enough about my boy boromir and uh that that's my that's my choice i think in really you found 93 it was said by a certain almond skeptic that nobody would pick boromir as a favorite character because i'll be lame he changed his mind he would we showed him the light we showed him the light boromir is the correct decision he's a boromir is fucking legend i was i i i rewatched a scene or two just to sort of because he was on my mind um to just sort of watch the things he says and his attitude and of course shan bean does an insanely good job of portraying this character um it is it it's great to see how this movie because this ties into why i picked it as my favorite story or at least my favorite i guess favorite movie in my mind was what i was sort of going with here for whatever reason but they do so much with a character like boromir and the more you look into him the better he gets and i you know he's one of the a lot of the times in fiction you have these characters that you enjoy seeing and you really look up to him and you see that you know they had a tragic end and you just wish that it didn't happen you wish they could have kept going on and you wish they could have continued to be awesome into the future but that's boromir my boy i'm sure i couldn't don't catch you mentioned it just the the first thing he says to aragon after lutz is dead the little ones are they safe please if they took the little ones oh yeah that's it yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's so much material to sift through that's the thing it's just it's syndicative again of characters like it's not about can you even save me it's they've got them you got them you got to go save them they got them they got them i tried to stop them but i couldn't yeah um i really respect the role that his death played in emphasizing just how dangerous the ring is and then for a while all of a sudden realized okay i have to destroy this thing and i need to do it i can do that boromir because of what it's doing to my friend yeah the political impact of it that awesome scene when boromir loses his shit and tries to steal the ring yeah i love that scene so good because he tries to justify it to himself you know my countrymen are yeah they're dying mine it should be mine um yeah and then the moment he snaps out of it he's practically weeping i can't believe i've done this people had come away at a certain point thinking he was kind of the dick and it's just like man watch the movie how do you come away with that perspective when you see what happens the second that he realizes his mistake um it's i mean i it would it was really easy for me to maybe pair this with faramir because they are intertwined and faramir is another character i really really like and i think it gets an unfair shake um even more than boromir does because he's sort of set up to fail by denithor on multiple occasions i feel and he's been up to so much and he's so active in what he's doing in the at least in the world he's constantly working and fighting and he's very good at both of those things and he's doing his best and how he lets frodo go and i mean he gets a great wife you know that's good but faramir is great boromir is great and i was like i said i was going to choose borysherbina or potentially i'd molded in my mind i i almost chose rip uh who was of course the talking magical wisecracking skateboard voiced by dom delawiz who starred in the feature film the skateboard kid from 1993 i knew you were gonna like i asked of course i gave it i gave it a bit of thought uh a bit of a generic choice you know yeah i it would have been too obvious uh i think a case could have been made but faramir see we're gonna go with but i've been talking too much so we can i think theater as well but then again could just start naming all the characters in lord the rings i like yeah i guess just everyone is amazing and you have a bow story telling like how much does lord the rings come up it's like yeah it's not a surprise is it yeah well yeah and we'll never get another i've just i've come to terms with the fact that we're never going to get another good show coming out this year no yeah i um yeah i'm gonna watch it before i watch the trilogy we'll give it we'll give it the bow but like average i'm sure what's the uh what's the word on the street about the amazon show is it supposed to be like oh wow apparently it's got like an enormous budget something like four hundred and sixty million dollars also it must be good yeah definitely definitely expensive budget equals good well i mean that's at least promising i mean maybe they could match like the technical elements of filmmaking if even if they can't match the storytelling oh wow i mean like that point it's just frustrating to say it go to waste isn't it i mean it's sure like i'm trying to be optimistic okay i don't know okay i don't really get to be optimistic yeah um what for though i guess for those who don't know the deep e-fap lore when i got absolutely slammered on metal stream i was just drinking like straight uh that uh that honey bourbon that wild turkey man i was just a good whiskey oh yeah it was i was a horrific mistake and i remember afterwards in in stupor and in an alcohol fueled days after where i had just walked away from the computer uh just i guess i was lost i i distinctly remember laying in bed as tears streamed down my eyes crying for boromir's death like i was it's like an actual person had died and it was a tragedy and i was so so sad it just because it's it felt it was so real it just felt so real there's like fights on my most watched bot on youtube by the way well when you when you type metal commander into youtube this hop suggestion is drunk rags oh no oh my alcohol is a pathway to your fame metal oh my goodness well if you remember um a redditor once attributed your like rags your highest notable successes to knowing me and this is when i had like far far fewer subscribers than you this was written the most notable thing you've ever done is know me well so they they must think very highly of you metal is only famous by you who's only famous by me it's a it's a complicated social networking web um my my next birthday is coming up prepared to bourbon oh my god once a year is enough once a year i have hit the randomizer because we are our final question i actually had four prepared as a backup we will not need them um oh my god so that is apparently the order so john it's the last question what is your favorite medium for storytelling and why oh yeah hmm uh i'm not much of a book reader but i think books are the superior form like because you can go into an unlimited amount of detail you can make it as long as you want and uh uh you can explore everybody's mindset and uh you can leave however much you want to the imagination i mean you can at least the same things apply to film but with film you have to be conscious of the fact that people's butts get sore you know um in the seat and uh you you gotta wrap things up in like three hours max i would say but you know you can take your time with a novel and really elaborate and uh i mean that's not to say the other um forms are substantially lesser i mean there's masterpieces and all and all the different mediums but i mean i would say books are the the most uh efficient one at at telling like if you were to tell it like a masterpiece story you could probably do it most effectively in a book um that's just when you say efficiently what do you mean um well just that you can the relatively enormous amount of detail that you can go into i suppose and you you uh with film and television you're kind of relying on the you know picture say a thousand words sort of thing where you're what you're trying to convey to the audience might not entirely translate with the book it's like there's no you can leave no room for confusion you know it's just like this is what i'm trying to tell you um the what between film and television uh as much as i respect film and i think more masterpieces have been made in film and television i think television is actually has the potential at least to be more superior than film because of the length of time that you can stick with one character and you can really explore a character across a number of seasons and uh you just you simply can't do that with film you gotta you gotta really boil things down for like a for a movie experience and uh yeah i don't really have too much to say on it beyond that that's that's uh that's what i think yeah which puts doom a number two yeah so um my answer is easily i i prefer film over ever story over every other storytelling medium um i think that film is able to take like the best parts of every other medium and combine them like the potential like music on its own is like incredible right but music can also serve like music plus film accompaniment has so much more potential than just hearing a song and like um a screenplay can take a lot of the elements of a novel not not all of them um there's things a book can do that are are very difficult at the very least to do it in film and and like john said books can take their time um and books can uh you can interact with them you can interact with the story in much greater detail um but i think that the experience of watching a film is way more uh intense um in particular i think that film exceeds at suspension of disbelief and immersion um some a problem a huge problem i have reading books is i can always hear the author's voice and i have a very difficult time like actually suspending disbelief and immersing myself in the world i always feel like someone is telling the story to me and it kind of kills it um okay i can probably count on one hand the number of fiction books i've read in the last 10 years it's just very difficult for me to really get into whereas films like the suspension of disbelief is immediate unless they fuck something up right it's much easier at least for me to kind of immerse myself um and something i definitely do agree with is that i think television has the potential to vastly outperform features i just don't think it's happened yet um i mean probably for like budgetary and practical reasons um there's also the idea that uh television shows tend to go on a while and most of them kind of go on until they kill themselves seems to be um the trend you know there are i could make a list probably of 20 30 or 40 television shows where they have a particular season that's like a masterpiece but how many shows can i point to that are a masterpiece in their totality i don't know if there's 10 i mean maybe if i saw all of them right i could point out 10 but i could easily identify you know 100 films that i think are of the absolute top level of craft but that's happening with films as well isn't it that film series carry on until they kill themselves that yes that that is that is absolutely true um i mean i i personally would argue that just overall the quality of films has gone down substantially unfortunately in the last like decade um it's really depressing to me to compare like the output of the last decade to like the 70s or the 90s or something like that that's a whole other that's when the skateboard kid came out hey they're good decades there's a lot of banger stuff going on back then um yeah television has an amazing potential i just think that usually because of production reasons and practical limitations there isn't enough time to fully map everything out and and when something becomes profitable there's an incentive to keep it around until it goes sour which is sort of my problem with it um sometimes it doesn't happen and it's fantastic but yeah i think i think film is i mean film is easily my favorite storytelling medium nothing else really remotely comes close but i do think that it has some advantages i mean the only the only major competition i see is is literature um i actually looked a good deal into storytelling and songs and it's just not i don't think it really competes with literature or film um there are really good things about lyrics and music but i don't think that it really gets close to the storytelling potential of these other mediums i haven't really explored poetry all that much and like video games have the potential to tell great stories but i mean i think they don't even need to the vast majority of the time you know if i listed my 30 favorite video games of all time i couldn't even tell you the story of probably three fourths of them so yeah well there we are um that puts jay in the driver's seat this answered question next can i just be a little cock and say that they all have their merits and their own their own little things they're good for boom i wanted to do i find um i find pick one and you hate all the other ones yes to be particularly interesting on screen mediums to be particularly interesting because um they seem to be um one of the only mediums where the assumed format is baked into the medium itself so people will say film you hear film and people assume oh one installment story and then you know if there are more things in the same universe they're separate installments whereas tv it's like oh this is um something episodic that comes out in seasons whereas when you have um when people just say that you know pros that doesn't really come with that assumption you know you get novels but a novel can still contain like a huge number of different formats i feel it's less assumed what you're going to be doing with it in that case um which i find to be quite interesting so i i'm not sure whether to include i suppose on-screen formats as their own uh separate medium or to talk about tv and film separately and you know made for streaming productions um but i suppose i think i i i i guess they all do have their um their unique benefits um i find that video games are one of my personal least favorite for at least conveying a story you know i love games a lot but um and i think this might be biased by the fact that i just haven't found many games that contain the stories that would make me you know love the medium just for the story um maybe maybe soma will be that for me when i finally play i don't know but um yeah stringy yeah i'm for you now but um yeah i find that i find just the the stories of video games generally less involving um but i'm happy to accept this might be i think that the reason for this often is the fact that um a i mean certainly in a poor video game story you often see the story as an obstruction from the gameplay uh i find a game to be one of these a medium that more often than not falls into the trap of there are two separate reasons you're there rather than every reason you're there for it comes together to form a cohesive whole it's like um the story of a game often is something that you appreciate on a separate level to the gameplay rather than the gameplay informing your understanding of the story which um creates an experience that i find to be um i mean detrimental to the actual story itself right you know when when there's something that is distracting you from from the story that you're there to absorb um and i think for that reason it's a lot of dissonance kind of thing yeah yeah well don't don't worry about it if anyone else wants to check it out i'm i'm all hey not that one shut up um it's the only medium that i think really has this this issue but i also think it's a matter of um i think a perfect game would combine gameplay and story much more effectively than i think most games do and that you would see a beautiful meld of um the gameplay is actually informing your understanding of the the characters and this and the world and and the plot and the story um i think maybe maybe games technology isn't there yet but maybe one day we will even have a game where you can make decisions in the heat of gameplay and characters will react as those characters would react in real time something like that could be you know make video games the ultimate medium for storytelling but we're not there yet as or at least i've not seen anything that delivers that yet have played disco elysium i am not right you might be interested in checking it out i'm gonna have a look i hear nothing but glowing things about disco elysium yeah it's um i don't want to say too much about it because it is it is probably the only game that i've played where i don't want to spoil the story and so i don't really want to talk about it that much but like that makes sense when when i when i start playing it i feel like i'm immersed in a story that is doing something that couldn't be accomplished through film or literature it's the only video game where i've ever felt that way that it's really exactly like what you said it's making a unique advantage of the yeah it's it's taking unique advantage of the medium of being a video game and doing something that you would have to be a video game tell a story in this way um and it's it's very funny and yeah i i i couldn't recommend disco elysium enough i bought it i just i bought it as you were talking based i just pecked for you so it reminds me of a speck ops the line like doing something really unique with the fact that it's a video game yeah you you can't really replicate that in film or any other medium yeah and this is um this is i'm sorry right no you go ahead first i was going to go and look to the engine okay so long so i was just gonna say there's a really unique quote or a really unique idea i heard from uh alan moore there's a very strange documentary called the mindscape of alan moore which is pretty weird um if you watch it be prepared it's pretty weird but he's the guy who wrote watchmen and he's talking about a lot of his thoughts about um the film industry and the industry of comic books and stuff like that and he said um they wrote watchmen to maximize the medium of a graphic novel or a comic book or whatever they wanted to do things that could only be done in a comic book and so he said that it was like fundamentally unadaptable because so many of the things that make that an endearing piece of literature couldn't exist in other formats they were specifically trying to do things that maximized the format of a comic book or graphic novel and i heard exactly the same things from tarantino when he was talking about um is uh the things he prioritizes in filmmaking he specifically wants to do things that maximize the medium of film and this is he's often given this response people will be like why are you moving so violent and part of his response is because violence looks so good on film you know film does violence better than any other medium can partially because of the suspension of disbelief and the immediacy of the experience so i think in general that's that's a really good goal to aspire for as an artist and whatever it is that you're doing is you you really want to do something uh intrinsic and unique to the the medium you're working with and yeah in video games there's the potential there but yeah disco at least seems the only example i've seen it's a great point yeah uh rags hi i'm not done i think jay said jay said the done so i guess you're too just done always a little little piece about tv and books and film that's okay i guess it's all right that's like three things you need to choose one yeah you can't just have three i want to uh because i feel like video games are a unique medium in what they are able to offer and everything else is just sort of a matter of choosing the right medium for your story in terms of um there are things that it is much more natural to convey as information in a in prose and then it is in in a visual medium and vice versa where you have you know um if you're if you're showing something something on film then you're always conveying well almost you're always conveying the the emotions the expressions of any character whose face is in frame you're always conveying or almost always conveying the environment that they're in and the distances from characters for each other and i think this um make you know it's a much more natural medium to accept for example convey the logistics of a fight scene very effectively um where in whereas in a um a a a in the medium of prose basically you're just going to have a fight scene described you in many ways you're just going to have to accept that that's the way it went because you can't actually see physically you know where the characters were standing when this began and and their sides compared to each other you could you only have the information that the author has chosen to give you whereas visually you can see basically everything and i think um it's it's really interesting to see um well it's a matter of choosing a medium for a particular story or knowing the strengths of your medium rather and not trying to do things that would be more suited to a different medium because i know maybe that's the medium you truly want to be working in or whatever that was my answer i think that's a good point j congratulations thank you rags because think of all those all those um like trying to use a i think fighting and fight scenes are an excellent way to sort of have that it's a really good example because trying to describe the nitty gritty little little things about a sword fight right in text form is um it it would be that would that would probably suck yeah you know if you're on screen right yeah and you want to have just you want to convey characters in a monologue that might seem really unnatural um you want to convey like a character's deep inner thoughts you're either going to have to do that in voiceover or fight or have them maybe or just find a way to imply it through their dialogue and you may not be able to find a way that is um just as natural as it would be to be able to just tell your um your your readers that by just putting it in the pros um so um my pick for best medium to convey a story is i have a feeling that fringy's gonna agree with me but i'm gonna say games wow j just said games kind of suck compared to the rest of them don't you know that games suck wow i shan't confirm or deny whether games bad games do suck i'm pretty sure that lego star wars the video game is not as good of a story experience as the star wars films um which films because it might be better oh that's good point correct so i'm going to say games but i'm not going to specify video games because the umbrella of games as a medium i think for this uh for the purposes of this question is best served if i give my top tier answer which is game sure but specifically tabletop role playing i knew it no no a pathfinder dnd vampire the masquerade whatever it may be right it's very unique so games are unique automatically because they have a an an interactive component they require you to do things uh you're not just a passive observer you need you as a player in some cases if we're gonna get meta some games stanley parable for instance uh require you to do things and but most games are the player playing as a character in that universe either role playing as whoever they want to be or as kind of a character that already exists in that world the tabletop role playing games on top of the necessarily interactive component that a game has is that it is it's live and you have a person a game master a dungeon master a gm or dm i'll probably alternate between you know using as we go here but essentially you have a dm who is the storyteller and the guide uh if you will they're the one who puts together worlds and stories they do the work of being the npcs describing events as they happen and there are other players who play generally as a character that they create to exist within whatever world that the gm is essentially setting out for a campaign or for a more sandboxy kind of adventure or whatever they want to do and what this does is it gives a unique scenario where you essentially have a live curator or a live storytelling master who can on the fly in response to something that a player does have the world change in specific ways so we already have um the interaction of a game the impacts that that has on the world but it allows for players and their in uh in their consequences the things that they do to transcend something that is already built for you most games don't really have a wide scope of things that you could do that's meaningful in terms of a narrative generally games that do they mark this as a big selling feature uh even things like fallout and maybe an elder skulls game or a witcher game or anything like that where there are multiple pathways to get through the game they're still very limited in the things that you can do and the things that you're allowed to do it's all pre coded and kind of pre approved in a sense whereas this has opened up to a much much much larger degree if you have someone a human mind there um especially if they're talented and dedicated who can give you the feedback for the things that the characters do and I love books I have I've fallen out of reading them mostly because of the time investment that it takes and I've loved many many books um I of course love movies it would be difficult to be a member of this podcast without liking movies I like tv shows I enjoy smoke signals and pictographs they're all great but I've always been a I think I'm a gamer at heart I enjoy the doing of things I enjoy the challenge of progressing through these things and I don't feel like there's any reason why a game specifically a tabletop role-playing game um has to suffer because of its because of the medium that it is a book for instance is not going to have a visual component to it for better or worse but it is it is a it is a hindrance on what they can provide and maybe that's kind of a good thing that people might enjoy about them but it simply isn't a part of them and they're also not interactive um you the only interaction you have with the book is maybe the conjuring up the aesthetics of it choose your own adventure um yeah oh that's true you have a choose your own adventure but in a sense I suppose that's a game uh but even then they're so very limited uh though I guess that's not necessarily a constraint of a medium it's a constraint of how many pathways do you want to design but I hadn't considered choose your own adventure books I had a cool Indiana Jones one when I was growing up best medium of all time is choose your own adventure books oh my goodness um and of course movies you have the visuals we are visual creatures primarily it helps us immensely to be able to see things um the you know being able to show something and all that it means I think that could be very very efficient um especially when you have a limited time but I think that if you have a really good GM who is talented and who is smart and who is good on their feet that you can potentially provide the greatest storytelling experiences because you can put players into the roles of characters to do things and to make decisions and to have all those things be things that the participants are doing themselves and I think that's the best way to I think it's only my favorite way to tell a story right when I feel like I'm a part of the world when I'm part of something um and I have to really think about you know how do I differentiate between myself and this character that I want to play what would my character do in this situation and I have to think about the logic of what they might think in the scenario that they're in what am I willing to sacrifice both in a medicine because it's a game you have often skills and abilities and things like that but your character also has motivations they have personalities they have goals and they have principles and they have limits to what they're willing to do to get the things that they want um and that offers such a unique experience that I think that's the thing that's the best way to tell a story is to stress your participants to become involved and to see what they do and to present to them a world and a setting where they can do those things so that's what I'll say a beautiful I didn't yeah I think it's all right I'm glad we got dnd representation I think a lot of people are very happy about that yeah I really have become quite interested in tabletop role-playing games and what they can provide I would be very interested to see us do one sometimes especially with all that we talk about in terms of stories and characters and what they do to be able to sort of craft these things for ourselves and to come up with characters and ideas that we curate and that we guide based on the references that we have and our thought process when it comes to consistency and you know our big storytelling you know the facets of that that are important I think it'd be interesting bringing what about you what do you think so I think when it comes to the uh the idea of like what is the best medium for storytelling I suppose there's like the three factors one what is your favorite two which one do you think has the highest number of like the best stories ever and then three which one do you think like at peak provides the best storytelling experience I'm not sure what I would say in terms of my favorite one because I do like the whole bunch of them um real like films video games uh books um tv shows of course that's basically all of in terms of the one that I think has the highest quantity of like top tier content I'd probably say it's film feels like we get a lot of there are a lot of great films to latch on to I think do you mention it before seemingly just by virtue of the way that television shows tend to be produced it's hard to find a tv show that is consistently great from beginnings to end usually it goes on for too long and then deteriorates at the finish line or at least that seems to be common um which is unfortunate uh because in a lot of ways if you were to compare like film and television it seems like having as little as you know like three episodes but as much as a hundred episodes or even more than that um that that just by having that if we have like comparable budgets comparable time to produce them then tv shows would have like more potential than film but I think that the medium that has the most potential for like the widest breadth of really great experiences with storytelling would be games uh I think that just makes sense to me um because a lot of games can do what film television do um but then there's also things that uh video games are very uniquely poised to do that uh no other medium can which is the interactive element um and then you think about the varieties in terms of interactivity you can go as straightforward as like mass effect where it's like you know you make choices that influence the how the story progresses and you can get into stuff like environmental storytelling how does a video game in uh how does a film present to you an environment that you can explore and read tidbits about and overhear conversations like you can in a stealth game or uh give you the branching choices with as much depth as you can get in like a video game like Deus Ex um and um you know like exploring an environment like in Metroid or um the video games give you the capacity to go at your own pace which can both benefit and detriment the experience and of course video games can have the problem of ludonarrative dissonance where uh the story that's being presented is uh very much mismatched with the gameplay but that feels to me more like an error in the in the process of like the decisions that you're making in terms of the game I think Matthew Matosa talked about it in like Bioshock Infinite you didn't have to make it a first person shooter but you did and because you did there were some serious compromises to the story whereas Abe's Odyssey which was the comparison had chosen to tell its story it chosen to be a certain type of game blended with the story that they were trying to tell and then you can achieve a similar effect um a similar story more effectively uh I think I think the problem is when I think about a lot of my favorite stories a lot of them aren't video games there are a lot of video games I think have cool stories and cool worlds um uh you know you think about like the world of Halo is really cool the world of Thief um Splinter Cell you know like Deus Ex uh like Zelda you know there's a lot of cool worlds in video games it seems like um but I you know I don't yeah I went when I think about like my favorite stories generally I'm going to be leaning to you know towards like tv shows films books and stuff but then there are some in video games that I really like um plenty of games I have that have really cool stories I but I I think it's a matter of video games of like the most potential to provide some really fucking cool and uh very diverse set of storytelling experiences um but I don't know that we're there yet um but hey who knows maybe maybe soon yeah it's sort of similar to my experience there's a lot of games where I feel super immersed in the world and things feel lived in and real but that's I mean that's not storytelling to me completely you know you need uh something going on right when you start looking at the the pieces of like character and plot and whatever um what yeah it just hasn't risen to the level of film yet I think a big limitation uh the video games have which is entirely self-imposed is that a lot of video games revolve around killing things and when you you know when you think about the number of stories that revolve around like killing things as a very central element of the plot it's pretty small like even think about diehard it's like there are plenty of scenes where there's no action there's just a lot of downtime where characters are talking um and getting development whereas like when you think about video games there is an expectation I think it's a fair expectation that the majority of the content is going to be gameplay uh and if you do like an uncharted thing where the majority of the gameplay is shooting people um I think that that limits the number of stories that you're going to be able to tell and it is a limitation that is not necessary right because you got a lot of like adventure point and click adventure games that are very very much focused on story like monkey island and stuff like that where um and then you see like the benefits of that right where you can focus a lot on uh on the writing and I guess there might even be an element now of like with so much of the emphasis on multiplayer games it seems like um you lose a bit in terms of the amount of uh teams that are like exploring the variety of different ways that you can do storytelling but but then there's a lot of indie developers who are exploring that a bit more so maybe it balances out I think it's really tricky with video games because as soon as you bring in the interactivity element you you you introduce like like the player is going to do the exact opposite of like what the game wants you to do like you because a lot of gamers will take the least obvious path to pick up all the you know secrets or you just do all the side quests first or whatever you know what I mean like it's very hard when you think about an open world game how do you keep the story chugging along how do you how do you deal with pacing when once you go into gameplay the player in a lot of ways sets the pace um yeah I think you got two options one or well you got more than two options but the the common options is one you railroad them hardcore and you make it so they can't like Max Payne 3 is a really cool story I like that game a lot but you you can't venture off the beaten part there was a very clear way that you need to go and then the game will stop constantly to be like all right story time like full-on cutscene story time slow walking time and then you end up with a pretty cool story but like if you want to actually have some freedom with it then you're out of luck and then on the other side I guess you have something like red dead redemption to another rock star game where you can just decide to spend like 10 hours going out fishing and playing poker how do you maintain the urgency of the story when uh when you're allowed to do these things and and do as much as you once um off the beaten track right it's it's really hard to um wait sorry someone in chat said heavy rain is a great example of excellent storytelling through gaming I disagree um I actually think that the quantic dream games are a pretty bad example I quantic dream games feel to me like um the very limited mindset of it can we make games more like films um is this david cage shit huh is this this this is the david cage yeah quantic dream is the david cage stuff where it feels like we are missing the uh right where we're trying to make it more like films and I mean it's kind of like you can get some really cool like the last of us is a really cool uh game and I like the story in the last of us a lot and it's definitely more leaning towards being cinematic that's an experience that you can offer but uh you do sometimes wonder if it feels like that is a not really fully taking advantage of the medium in the same way that you see with uh less conventional I haven't played uh the game what's it called stanley parable like isn't that a game very good has a really cool story but that it's really a story that would only work as a video game I think it can only work as a video right and so that that feels to me like uh the stuff that I found really interesting is what can we do it's one of the reasons why I like stealth games so much because when you think about environmental storytelling stealth games are really good at that it's like here's a place we're gonna put a bunch of information in this place that you can piece together to tell a story and if you listen over here conversations read stuff on computers and notes and things like that and just generally observe the way that even like if you're playing a game where there's a target how they navigate the environment there's a lot that you can pull as a story that you don't really get in a film or a tv show so to say I completely agree with like the whole environmental storytelling being awesome and particularly in stealth games but my least favorite form of that is like reading notes and computers and stuff uh I think I think it's hard it depends on how well written all that stuff is it's gonna be interesting well I always I always feel like uh thief is a really I will never stop being impressed by this decision but in the old thief games uh you'd get a map for the place that you're going to go to but the maps are diegetic they're like written in their hand written piece of paper like that just is this is a map and at the beginning of the game you get super detailed maps and the explanation as well this person you know they worked on the manner that there was a maid or something there and they gave me this really detailed map uh but then as the game progresses the maps start becoming more obtuse because there's information that's just missing where it's like he managed to get this far but he couldn't get any further this is the best that I could come up with as a map as like how fucking cool is that that it's like the map is telling a story of how of like the history of this place because of the lack of information that is available for that location what a cool idea and that's something you could do in films and television and books and stuff as well but like when you think about in a video game and the fact that it means that you as the player have no choice but to experience this situation I think that's the cool thing is it aligns you more with the with with Garrett uh the like the player character because you don't have extra information like you have as much information as he has and I guess that's the interesting thing when you think about storytelling uh is that when it comes to video games do you want to put a wedge between the player and the character or do you want to make it non-existent and what are the benefits of that like when you think about Halo it's an explicitly stated goal is that they made Master Chief as like as much of a blank slate as possible because it means that you are Master Chief and like you're in a certain sense you're a passive observer in the cutscenes but an active participant in gameplay uh conversely you know when you have a game I guess like the last of us too is probably a good example right Abby is a character she is a person with defined goals um and and and but the problem is like if you if you can't associate with that character and in fact if you actively dislike her it's going to be really hard for you to continue playing that game um and so it's that awkward part of like how do you balance that do you put that in the the gameplay do you have a character who's super well realized uh in cutscenes but then they never say anything in the gameplay um and it's always entirely in your control um and and you know I mean it seems like erring on the side of caution tends to work where you think about like the old Ratchet and Clank games where they had a lot of dialogue and a lot of characters talking to each other having fun banter and good conversation but when it was gameplay it was gameplay and nobody talks versus in the the remake where everybody's constantly fucking talking and then you hear the same lines over and over again as well in some games and it really takes you out of it it's like it is it's difficult it's difficult in the wind if to give credence to the tale to our pro playing game aspect is when you have these are often cooperative games essentially and you could have an NPC and a character I mean technically it's a PC because the GM is a player of a kind but you could have a player in a world or a character in a world and all of the different players could be interacting with this character and you could be running based on their relationship with them and the things that they do and say to that character you can have that same character almost simultaneously having two or three or four different stories whereas if you have like a movie there's only kind of one way that you see them behave in the events or as in something that's more interactive and on the fly providing of course you have a good storyteller but there's always a storyteller in a story you can see how this kind of character can be fully realized by putting them into multiple different scenarios within the same story to me playing the quantic dream games is a bit like netflix asking you if you're still watching to press x to continue or it's it goes too far on the side of being a movie where it just makes the interactive component feel meaningless like it's just because you play it's like this might as well just be a movie yeah exactly that's the way you arrive at it's like why would I not just watch a film at this point but it is hilarious game we played not too long ago that kind of almost made like it had a bad story with a bunch of asshole loser characters little hope in it yeah little hope and it was barely a game so it like took the took aspects of both story and game and they were both terrible it's like the worst possible way to yeah it really was it's a nightmare scenario it's the worst of both yeah that's the thing what do you do at that point like if it is the conversation right like you can have a great game with a bad story but you can't have a great game with bad gameplay that just seems to be like a general rule of thumb um and if so then you know how much how much should you be prioritizing uh story versus gameplay when you consider that a like a film or a book they have to have stories because that's what they are again doesn't have to have a story a story is optional so they they don't necessarily need to put their resources and effort and talent into making one of those if they just want to make something that's the purely gameplay yeah a mistake that often gets made is sort of shoehorning and story into games that don't need it that that's probably why it gets a bad wrap a lot of the time I mean it's similar to how films just kind of jam in a romantic subplot when they don't need it those usually pretty storytelling and gaming is so much younger than film and certainly books yeah yeah that's it's got room to grow we've had thousands of years of books and we've had about a century and 20 yeah films and we've had like 70 years of tv more than even 80 and you know same for like and then plays with thousands of years as well as far as games go we've had performance is still very old and games are what like 40 years old 50 years old and I mean games that have stories that are really important to them that's only been a thing since like the late 90s what and yeah I don't want to say that no no no because there'll be so many there'll be so many ones that actually did try to do stories in the early 90s like earlier Final Fantasy games and like those Mario RPGs and stuff like that those texts those text-based RPGs based adventure games taking seriously I because I don't want to buy it because it's one of the things that always annoyed me when it 2013 was like a particularly bad year for video games from what I remembered like there weren't a lot of games that came out a lot of the games I got praise like Bioshock Infinite was just like dog shit um and it felt like the era when it's like ah see video games are finally starting to tell stories I hate it I hate it so much because when you think about a lot of the best stories and video games you can pull a lot of them for before that time god damn the early days like ps2 xbox gamecube and I guess you can include Dreamcast as well oh boy we had a lot of games with great stories and great writing great great great writing like the Japanese series had great writing um I always know that people talk about Metal Gear Solid that that has cool stuff going on in the Grand Theft Auto games oh those are some well written like we're talking some tight like comedy and and world building uh and and all that sorry can you can you justify saying that jack and daxter has great writing jack and daxter is incredible jack and daxter are super so to clarify I think that the like jack two story I don't think that that works I'm pretty sure that it doesn't work yeah I'm just thinking like jack two's story doesn't really work jack one barely has a story and jack three is probably the strongest of the bunch but it still has a lot of the problems and but yeah great fucking characters and super sharp dialogue that's true that's the thing and and it's interesting to think about because I'm not sure how many people have said this but like jack and daxter the writing in those games may well be sharper than uncharted in terms of dialogue um oh and and also someone's mentioned sly cooper fucking great like surprisingly great story considering what it is fringy thinks that furry games have really good stories in them I was about to say that ratchet and clank is really sharp and funny too and that's that's a 50 50 it's a robot game too so um well I mean like the opposite like a human version of a furry is a flashy you know skinny um well on that no my answer would be that it seems to me the potential in games is all the other ones put together at least it could be um I know there's a distinction to be made that well yeah but you still have to like engage with it though so that's a level of interactivity or the interactivity as opposed to like just watching that can take away from being immersed and that's actually the way I kind of tackle the question I find my immersion currently um it seems to be film is the best bet um it would be tv if only they were more consistent but as for anyone over the shows it's so fucking hard to find a tv show that can stay consistent films are a much lower gamble because hey you can find a lot of tv shows that stay consistently bad okay Netflix comedy is a barely but then games I think at the very best and I've experienced a couple have been fucking phenomenal um but the thing is like this there's just I don't find well my maybe it's because of the fact that I don't consume as many games as I do films but uh films just seem more reliable though I I guess what I'm saying is I probably pick film but I think gaming is currently the winner uh if they were all pushed to their best outside of maybe if VR pushed to its best where you're like that level of immersion where it's and it's like you know fucking top tier production everything looks incredible I imagine that level of storytelling where you're walking around in a world yourself like that's probably gonna be one of the most incredible ways to consume stories as well um yeah I think for now because gaming has music in it it has reading in it it has the visuals the splinter and it has the ability for the the creators to take the camera from you and show you what they want to show you so like a an author intended experience or they can have it so that you're free to explore as you wish like it just seems gaming is the um a step up again I guess uh to interject because I think John Tuss on it briefly but it's probably worth talking about is that when it comes to like books which we haven't talked about a lot I think books have a unique strength uh and the same with the video games have a unique strength books also have the unique strength thing that uh the the like there's something about pros and just the fact that you have to like imagine what's happening that there's a certain effect that you can achieve with with books in terms of like really um provoke I guess not provoking evoking emotional responses to like things that you otherwise wouldn't get emotional responses to as easily in like film a really good description of like a cold breeze can kind of like emulate that effect in you in a way that you don't necessarily get by like watching somebody be cold on a screen um I see what you're coming from I think this is a problem of it's between people though because you could have the one guy say when they described Rivendell I was imagining this incredible place when I saw Lord the Rings and saw Rivendell I was like oh well that's fine I guess but then flipping it you could have someone who was like man it looks so much better in the movies than I had imagined well yeah that's that's an interesting one because I often hear people say this where it's like well with books it's your imagination and there's no imagination in like film it's presented to you and it's like yeah you know what that could be really fucking cool I don't like I don't like I don't want to discredit the idea of somebody else creating something really awesome that I can look at I don't want to like yeah like watching that Balrog it's like I guess I could have come up with something better in my imagination but what's impressive about Looney Tunes I could just imagine Bugs Bunny doing all this crazy shit it's like well the craft of the animation that's like a really big part of it it's a really cool experience that you can get and it's something you get right like that film television visual mediums and of course like you know books can't leverage music either or sound they can evoke sound but like music I guess is kind of absent or at least like score non-diagetic music um film and television they definitely have an edge over books in that regard in that the barrier between the audience and what's happening in the reality of the story is that it's thinnest or you're just you're seeing what's happening I think seeing real people really helps me get immersed in stories like yeah I think so um yeah and I guess it's uh it's kind of a I guess we haven't really I'm not sure if this is worth clarifying but I guess animation we're not including as a in this in the same way that we're talking about like film and television and stuff because of the fact that animation is present in film television and games yeah yeah I figure that makes sense because to clarify animation is fucking cool yeah contrary to random weird thoughts some people have is like we're very pro animation here okay just I don't know I guess like you know the simpsons is an animated show right look at all the references well we can't go with episode without a simpsons where we're going to nobody in particular we're talking about south park family guy even and um we recently talked about smiling friends we watched that day one like all of the Pixar classics a lot of the disney classics 101 Dalmatians we watched and that was such a pleasant coins experience yeah you guys saw we were the happiest the first one it was the next to one punch matter right you know and uh I like death note and I've been like in cowboy bebop that's a cool show Akira brought up I I think I will watch Akira um based on the recommendation I've always heard yeah I want to see it oh man hit me up when you see it I'd be curious to know what you think yeah it's it's a I think it's an incredibly good film but it's also very weird I'm always curious to see what people what people's reaction is I because I'm not super familiar with anime but um I know that Akira is often references one of the more influential uh anime like out there would like ghosts in the shell and stuff because they're both probably the single most influential yeah yeah yeah it's it's very cyberpunk and I guess that's interesting because a lot of the I know that I've seen comparisons and maybe I would change my mind if I watched the films uh like the anime films that uh Blade Runner was significantly influential in uh the development of the style of uh like cyberpunk anime which I guess is interesting again because Blade Runner was obviously influenced in some way by Japanese aesthetics yeah there's a big yeah Japanese uh cultural component in a lot of cyberpunk stuff now a lot of Japanese writing and words and you know the presence of Japanese companies makes Deus Ex super interesting because like Deus Ex doesn't have as much of that compared to a lot of other cyberpunk Deus Ex has a much more industrial no I don't want to because there's a lot of cyberpunk anime stuff that has like industrial it just seems like it has less of that like uh definitely the the reboot games have much more of like a sleek western minimalist kind of thing informing the designs uh really really quick note uh responding to someone in chat they said you're better off reading the accurate manga as the movie is a fraction of the story um I don't think the movie or the manga are particularly better or worse they're just profoundly different I don't even I don't regard them as the same story honestly like the the the plot's completely different some of the characters are completely different uh the emphasis are I mean it's it's insane how different the manga is from the film um I mean they're pretty much distinct I like if you read the manga and then saw the movie you would just be confused I think you're like wait uh nothing uh the same happens now this is interesting to me because I haven't read a lot of manga I read uh in fact I think the only ones I own is all you need is Kill which I thought was really cool and uh I think the first volume of One Punch Man and I read the first volume of One Punch Man before I watched the show and like it was uncanny like there were certain uh like key frames that were just pulled directly from the comics I think I want to watch them like dude is this like is the anime like a one-to-one adaptation of manga is that like how it works pretty much is yeah sometimes um right okay I mean in the case of in the case of Akira like I I'm assuming that nobody wants me to go into details of the differences but it's profoundly different yeah I mean like almost every almost every single character it has meaningfully different characteristics the plot is totally different it's like they said it's way longer there's like there's plot lines it's it's it's very very different yeah I guess that is the thing though like if you're adapting a long manga and you're turning it into a film you're gonna have to make decisions about what's a it I mean it's always the conversation right of like adaptation when it comes to film of something that's much bigger than that is uh what do we keep what do we cut what are the essentials and I mean it seems like generally a book like a full-length book doesn't strictly translate to a two-hour film like there's often more stuff in a book um someone mentioned a chat by the way which is worth clarifying Blightrunner was inspired by some french comics because France has had and I think still has a very active and prevalent graphic novel scene which is like big and popular culture let's go for it mues speaking of that yeah uh mathal we have a tool to the last one uh do you want to last and the least again sorry wait no we didn't talk comic okay fine okay just leave it's fine it's fine no I just I just figured it because maybe your decision don't no don't don't don't go the moment to smell the finally well because we're a week because I feel like we can't just include comic books with books right there's there's a difference in the visuals I would agree element they are different things um this is what Germany starts with maybe we don't have anything to really say about it at the moment because it's I'm personally personally I'm really inspired by comic books in my approach to film because I always think like when I'm writing a script or storyboarding it's like how would I frame this if I was drawing a comic book you know like if I think if you're if you're if you just make a film of something right off the bat it can be easy to base your shots around where physically you can place a camera or put a crane or whatever but like with comic books you have this god's eye you can put it anywhere and uh you know with me doing machinima I can put the camera anywhere I want and so I'm just like if this was a graphic novel how would this look like if this is a comic book how would this look I think that's the interesting aspect of wow there are a couple of things with comics because the the the main thing is because it's still images it's an emphasis on really strong if it was animation it would be like keyframes but like really strong images but also just how do we connect these images together like what is a good sequence um because I mean I know that that's Will Eisner said sequential art which is probably a good umbrella term for it um but also I guess the unique benefit of comic books is that in film there is one framing like throughout the film in terms of the size of the image I guess you have variations in aspect ratio but like generally it's it's pretty it's 16 by 9 or you know letterboxed like uh and film was 4 by 3 and then 16 by 9 video games are typically 16 by 9 but with comic books it's like you can basically do whatever shape you want uh for for a panel um which is like the I'd say that's probably like the unique element of of uh of comic books it's interesting to think about how those can inform storytelling like how do I convey this best without being able to move anything yeah that's a thought but that's it I'm done metal go for it no I got no I don't want to anymore oh boy magic all right uh yeah um no I legit just forgot what I was about to say no that's it look at your damage for me yeah thank you I'm sorry I'm sorry just say film that could be objectively correct answer uh so I think also that games at their peak are probably the best uh but then again as we mentioned a bunch of times already it's not being used well because at the end it's all about execution I mean you can execute it well and pretty much all of them I'd say but yeah uh storytelling in games pretty young still um but here VR is probably the one I want to touch on because I think I'm the only one with a VR set here right I don't think I have one oh you do um not a proper one like a phone one you know it's like a it is a little a built one I mean use a little VR with a little little bit severe yeah but I mean with games you can play there are games that you can get on you know I'm sorry I spoke yeah yeah me too I'm tempted to get a quest but I don't want to get zucked yeah it's funny because the quest is probably the best value but you have to be I think online all the time when you play or something uh but yeah I I played a whole bunch of VR on stream as well I think the last thing I finished was Half-Life Alyx and man there was some there's some good shit I I don't know if the story was super good but just the immersion in it was like really well executed which just reminds me it's like man Valve please make more games because you're really good at that stop making so much money and make games again that would be that would be nice uh does anyone played Resony will forward VR yet because I'm no that's interested in playing that quest exclusive I'm not allowed to play that uh that's kind of lame exclusives for VR headsets yeah there's only VR exclusive quest exclusives it's really annoying I did hear though there's VR mods for Resident Evil 2 and 3 remake I'm gonna I want to check those out apparently they're like yeah so that too if you if you go into VR you can play Skyrim a whole new way yeah no I'm good because the VR VR version is full price I think or something or like pretty pretty high priced oh there actually is of course there it's a separate version it's just meaning oh yeah okay no there's an actual sky Skyrim VR it's it's not surprising yeah uh so now I'm good it's probably moddable and shit but I don't I don't know it's Skyrim you know what's up uh but yeah it's very bad it's what I hear yeah some word on the street I was the well not sick of Skyrim yeah that's a good question uh yeah if it's very well executed you can utilize the gaming the gaming part of storytelling very well like I guess I'll go back to god of war 2018 like even if you're not doing the main story missions and you're just traveling around on your little or your little boat it's either atrius and kratos having conversations and giving you story from different timelines of the gods or stories about the mum or later when the giga chat mimir comes on the head and just starts telling stories and man you just want to go around with the boat and listen to his stories because it's so great he tells stories about the gods and it's just funny as well like it's just the game doesn't waste your time with like silence while you're rather around like it's giving you back stories and shows you the character characterizations of the different people and between them uh and the the side quests I remember one particular one because kratos is always like ah we don't have time for like silly side quests we're here for our goal but then we come across this one guy who lost his crew and he can relate to that guy he's like nah we should help him and then obviously atrius is like wait we said we're not doing any side quests like yeah but I basically just like yeah I like him because he sacrificed himself for his crew and I want to give him like closure and stuff uh yeah that's really well made but then again yeah as more said already your best bet is probably still movies and if you're really lucky tv shows uh because a lot of times just movies are still a fucking minefield right now too bad television production is an embarrassing disaster listen listen everyone listening right now okay movies are not in a good place but go back to the 1970s the 1990s there's a lot of great stuff back there okay great great great stuff if you want movies there's there's plenty of movies there we did it everyone further than that into the the 30s and the 40s no fuck all that it's overrated what we did it 28 questions in six hours and a half hour you're generous calling it 28 I was gonna say four well you see when you ask a question seven times you could call it the same question but when you're asking different people it ends up being different yeah answers and well maybe no same question maybe you should say maybe you should say four questions 28 answers okay yeah well yeah there you go 28 answers in six hours and a half an hour and a three minutes we did it nice what a strange evap we did today that's not yeah we're talking about stuff that we like that's excuse me yeah yeah we'll be back to normal at no time we need to make an inverse one of this where the questions are just like what do you hate the most about storytelling what story do you hate the most like oh cat what element of storytelling is the most destructive oh man I actually have an answer to that well I think there would actually be we could do that sometime if you guys roll over it we can do the evil version of this I'll take something I'll get to live up to my name look at that immediately in chat TLJ like yeah what's wrong with TLJ oh nothing nothing the letters itself they're fine I use them all yeah TL and J are very commonly used what story is the most poo hmm that would be a story yeah poo story I know I think I think a poo story too took what the original did I'm sorry shallow that's it's really called a poo story number two who is my favorite since character yeah three two resurrections racism on my Christmas um yeah I actually had some what well in the past hour no it was before we even this turn of this day god time went fast it was it was like two hours ago I've been reminded of an appointment I have this morning which means um I figured that the best thing to do was to just try and make sure everyone got their questions answered but I'm afraid if that was going to have to be cut short and by that I mean oh at what a little short six and a half hours that's true that's true we made a deal more than six wait wait a minute hold on it's more than wait oh my god right it's melting no it's six and a half hours that's about right we get the banner on your channel and it says long form like six and a half hours with the fuck I know that's almost too long I agree do nothing you're right thank you no no no mere six and a half hours that's embarrassing Mamiya you should be embarrassed Molo well I mean I brought you on so it's already like capped out we are we're already get shleamed on get shleamed on but yeah before we go we'll we'll do a little chat about what everyone's up to we'll go from left to right shall we shall we allow it is it on me it is on you doom person what are you up to in your doomland uh right now I'm working on a video on netflix's arcane that's pretty good and I'm going to be talking about uh why it is pretty good and how it could be better um that's uh it's about it right is there anything else you want is that it they usually you just take like a good 20 seconds even 30 all right I don't know you should talk about like how they're probably the best channel on youtube how everyone subscribe yeah if you want to go subscribe to my channel it's called moller uh we have about 300 000 subscribers it's pretty good yeah go uh go subscribe to that wow no i'm tumor media on youtube you guys subscribe if you want oh he's not really he's not really moller guys he's just joking damn oh shit I helped us all the time he went oh shit I know it was a convincing convincing uh charade facade that's right very well um you charade your latest video is still on jango correct yeah I haven't released a video I've canceled like three or four videos since last year but there will be there will be more soon oh okay you what's what are the other ones then what's what what you what you can do at moller oh the ones that got canceled um the one that's relevant to us is I was going to make a video called art is not subjective but I spent I spent about three weeks working on the script and at this point I think I'd rather eat glass than finish that video because it's seems like such a it seems like such a simple thing like I could explain the core argument and idea and maybe five minutes but it just there's so many ideas that branch off of it and there's all these things you have to explain otherwise you know you're not really doing the topic any service because people will just be like oh well what about that right and it just oh man I if I ever go back to the video I think it'll end up being legitimately two hours long which I guess yours is like two or three hours long so do it now I understand why it's uh it's a really unpleasant bag of marvels it's the kind of thing that you can't say and get away with unless you extensively describe it in anal levels of detail and carefulness and even then people will be like I didn't watch it but your video is wrong yeah it's just it's such a it's such a fashionable thing to say oh well it's subjective but like my my core problem with that is it just kind of undermines the purpose of discussion right it's like uh I actually have I actually don't think um saying that art isn't subjective is even the hottest take in that video the hottest take is that saying people's opinions are not equal some opinions actually are um more useful than others people like to say that and they will crumble in just an instant on that but everyone says it it's the simplest thing like are you actually going to tell me that if you talk to a six-year-old who's watching the movie for the first time that their opinion on how good a movie is is of equal weight to like you know martin scorsese like of course not yeah the six-year-old is way more insane at that point wait what yeah yeah it's a it's a really really pleasant discussion I look forward to going back to it yeah sweet well uh the free what about you what are you up to where did you go come back um I'm just gonna go just working on stuff it'll be done when it's done oh that's all I got for you have you worked on anything recently that may be coming out tomorrow uh no um no but all right that's right I'll be working on boba fat and it's been an adventure um that's that's coming out tomorrow isn't it yes it is on the mula channel it'll be premiering how exciting and oh my god we'll check out me metal rags springy and jay enjoying episode three boba fat which if you've seen yourself oh my um you're in for a treat and lots of editing went into it I'm betting you a lot we're gonna have some fun I love what I'm coming out of you that'll be like normally if I have time probably all righty I love funny bad stuff would you say it's funny bad um hilarious yeah I think it qualifies funny but I it's not because there are shows that are funny bad that I would watch on my own and I would not watch boba fat on my own yeah I'd never watch it alone I'd never watch it it'd be such a waste of time you may as well just look at the wiki summary but if you're with friends oh boy gonna be funny yeah yeah good okay I mean the gun train is like comedy gold the gun train jokes write themselves jay you have a channel no don't talk about it as with the previous few appearances on if I've made I'm still working on on a video about reaction content on twitch and youtube with a focus on his own piker he has the best reaction content probably gonna be 30 to 40 minutes long oh my god you're gonna be stealing his content to make money is what you're saying yes wow ultimate revenge jay one is a people you have any idea when that's coming up um well I was hoping to get it out before I left for christmas break um which right that was on the 21st of december 2021 wait we're past that what fuck when did we get it then I was hoping to get it done like pretty soon when I got back after christmas and then I got the koof and it felt very bad for several days the same thing that happened to me whoa oh my god it's yeah well the koof you know they say it's going around these days so you've seen the coronaviruses a slut wow yes well jay I also so I'm also working on a video on his son and I was probably going to mention you in it a certain a certain event that may have transpired I guess just clout chasing on these videos right now what you guys are clout chasers his son is a fucking legend leave him alone yeah you're writing on the coattails of legendary men now his son is a um a stalwart renaissance man you know and I I can only hope he's got a little renaissance shadow probably that's not nice don't make fun of me John what about you what are you doing what what what's happening I'm John Graham on YouTube I've been working on a show called Arby and the Chiefs since 2007 2008 is it done yet and uh no but I just finished the latest episode of it it's like an hour really good I watched it very good thank you very much so I'm I'll be premiering that publicly in the next few days I'm not exactly sure yet I'm waiting to hear back on a firm a few voice actors in regard to how they should be credited but anyway um I'm on the eighth season of my show it's about toys that come to life and encounter people online and sounds cringe you're right you should watch it anyway subscribe they're here they don't care about that sort of thing I love cringe and uh I'm JCJ Graham on Twitter as well that's you're you're in your eighth season yeah everything good happens in the eighth season so what I hear is that yeah um I'm working on a mainline video it's coming along that's all I can tell you is um and then we go yeah the the latest thing I made was with Fringy the Boba Fett which is gonna be fun it'll be tomorrow other than that you'll see me and these some of these fine peeps on the when Wednesday coming which in fact will begin with us covering all the super chats from today uh catch up style and then again the Saturday of Fappin's um that's that's that's that's that's that you know uh metal what about you you fuck you fuck that's very nice you motherfucker what am I gonna well if he was gay he wouldn't I mean yes if he was gay he wouldn't have fucked his mother whoa the fuck is he would his dad would have fucked him he would have tricked his father into fucking him in the butt step I feel like it's more of a line to cross to gay gay daddy butt sex I feel like I feel like it's um it's more of a line at the incest line is a it's a bigger line to cross than the I am not attracted to this gender line I think anyway on that note do you have a peer reviewed study to prove that no all right an opinion discarded okay now just show what's on the internet mates are easy but you've never even done incest rags well I was inside my mom for a few months but oh no it's like like like last year are you calling me a baby roller stream no you do an incest so on one hand twitch streams we're gonna be back on a regular basis uh soon I'm over I'm done with vacation times uh and also metal's forge is gonna come well not it's gonna be continue and it's gonna be a new one tomorrow about matrix resurrections and I'm sure it's gonna be yo that movies hmm yeah I'm gonna watch it tomorrow do all them the notes and stuff uh so good luck a fun day all things matrix because I'm stupid I'm just gonna do it on my own without any guests tomorrow so that's gonna be fun so uh quickly talk about a little bit about the the current twitch meta that's out there because it's very annoying to me and I hate it so oh yeah I'm so hateful that's all the dmca stuff I know there's nothing to hate about that they're making use of content they're entertaining people and these evil corporations are trying to be like oh is that a copyright it's bullshit really Hassan deserves to stream everything that's ever been made a funny a funny note on matrix resurrections the first time I saw anything about it was the rlm review and I legitimately couldn't tell if they deep faked the audio like I couldn't really believe that this was actually the movie oh their video I couldn't do it I couldn't do it I got like five minutes in and I was like I can't listen to this I can't do it I don't want to remember you this way no no the rlm video okay so they were positive uh if you watch matrix resurrections and you watch the video reviewing it it's hard to reconcile uh a little bit a little bit maybe I'll watch it after I watched the matrix for the record so it was it was a deep fake I still can't tell is is that like actually they clips from the movie if the movie's horribly ugly and horribly edited uh it's just to enjoy that man I might love watching that tomorrow that's gonna be a great sunday I mean like yeah you'll have a great time do it for the love of the craft well them giving sort of a flaccid endorsement of something that's pretty bad is not new I've been watching their it's I don't mind disagreeing with them if uh if they have their reasoning but like their reasoning for matrix resurrections sucked jay was just like it's it makes better commentary about how fans of franchises suck it's like okay okay talk about how it was executed you suck yeah CJ's doing it again can you believe it but yeah we want to know more about that I'm not CJ let's talk about it tomorrow it's gotta be a great time and then like I saw that all of it was horrible and I couldn't even watch it in one go but I loved it it was like wait what yeah yeah I saw a clip of the bathroom scene on YouTube and I thought I was watching an SNL skit or like an MTV movie awards kind of bit or I was like this isn't real is it this is from the movie that I don't know exactly you not being able to tell if it's real that's meta commentary on the matrix oh wow that's so deep yeah right that's exactly how I felt it's so bad you can't believe it that's just like meta man wait rags you're the last one say stuff about channel channel is currently and video is making in progress potentially like subscribe smash comment below in the description now in the description what well actually I put out I put a video my descriptions are on top I get it all out of the way up front and then my video is at the bottom of the page I encourage people to comment before they watch the video based on nothing but the description all right um however they do a lot I do I do have um I put out a video today about boba fat actually I was going to do one to release tomorrow but then I remember oh yeah that's right we've got e-fap today I got to talk about bohrmere and so we did I got a cry for bohrmere I got a cry for bohrmere but I put out a dog bites video uh today I should have one up sunday no tomorrow sunday I should have one out monday because today I'm not working on it because this is what I'm doing with my life uh so I'll have another one out monday I decided that what I was going to do for uh dog bites I'll make a regular channel video because I need to get used to using the new stuff I've got um you don't want to get some old things done because I got to get over the hump of some old projects until I could slide greasily and smooth into my new stuff that I want to do uh but yeah stay tuned for the deets uh I'll wait for the bulletins as events warrant um that is the news very well rags signing off is there anything you guys wanted to say before we turn the lights off great shadow legends great shadow legends I guess uh subscribed quib gift and I'll forget about the referral code e-fap which will get 20% off your first month or 15% off of a yearly membership uh let me see um I think that was I that's it for me I think if you want to if you want to learn how to use audible you can know and it made me laugh that's my story for the end I rarely get to talk about writing with other people so uh like who who also writes so this is really cool man thanks for having me this was this was pretty awesome for joining us all of us for sure it's it's it's particularly difficult in my experience to like actually discuss this stuff like I've been to a bunch of writing groups and my experiences in those gay places are pretty unpleasant yeah it is pretty gay it's it's not it's not fun this was much more fun that's so gay metal would go there with his dad in just almost seven hours we covered we covered quite a bit I think we did a good job hopefully hopefully the folks will like this out this this one you'll see us next week probably talking about some movie being better or worse than the video we're covering claims who knows what adventures we'll get up to until then sounds like an effect good bye everybody yeah fringin I gotta go watch uh Akira Akira oh namaste Akira Akira by the way the cropping is good mononoke he makes people in mononoke akira ii mononoke bye bye bye see you in the next video bye see you in the next video bye see you in the next video bye chat let's go