It's weird, Breen is so... forgettable to me.

As an avid pre-Disney SW fan myself, fans weren't _that_ pissed at 7. Outside of it being ~~ANH again~~ very safe and Rey being too good at everything from the get-go with absolutely no character development to support that, 7 was met with mostly lukewarm reception. Not awful, but not great either. It played it safe and everyone could tell. Then Rian entered the picture. The individual that is [documented on video](https://youtu.be/K6qaclJf2GM) saying he wanted to make a movie that at least half of viewers hated. Well, mission accomplished, buddy. Tied up every loose end from 7 and tied up its own loose ends leaving absolutely no meaningful questions for 9. Not to mention half the movie could have been deleted with no consequence (seriously, what on earth was going on with the Canto arc?), multiple character assassinations, killed off a character with lots of potential to be a decent BBEG in the most unceremonious way ever, and introduced a _major_ canon-breaking scene. I feel bad for JJ on 9 honestly. How do you even follow up on 8? 7 was such a soft-ball lay-up for anyone to write a sequel to, and Disney thought the best guy for the job was Mr. I Want To Make A Movie That Passionate Fans Hate? Its almost like Rian was spiteful and wrote 8 to be bad on purpose because he didn't like that Abrams had written 7. Why they did not have JJ just write the whole trilogy is beyond me. Would definitely have been better than what we got, at least it would have been more coherent. At the very least, mid is better than awful. Maybe Rose Tico could have been a real character with actual development and purpose instead of a useless character with an entirely unnecessary death. The prequels are only viewed better now because 7, 8, and 9 proved something could be worse. As Qui-Gon Jinn said, "There is always a bigger fish."

we could do something crazy like create new IPs

I'm glad for Laidlaw not getting stuck on Half-Life. It's been a long time, people grow and move on. Imagine him feeling like this about Half-Life but writing for the sequel anyway out of a sense of duty, completion or other silly reason. It would be a total disaster. Half-Life: Alyx was fantastic, and felt like just another entry, a natural fit, in the Half-Life universe. This is not in spite of, nor because of, Laidlaw being absent from its development. There are simply a bunch of amazing people putting their heart and soul into these games. I do hope the next Half-Life entry will be a regular PC game though. I wouldn't wish it upon people who don't own VR to miss out on another excellent game. On a sidenote its crazy we got a Love Death & Robots episode based on Laidlaw's first book. Definitely gonna watch that.

There's so many great book series out there. Ian Banks' Culture Series, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin series, could re-do Altered Carbon *properly* and base it on the second book more faithfully; which was actually quite interesting. Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series. Terry Pratchett's last contribution in The Long Earth series. What happened to the supposed adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars series? Neal Asher's Polity series. Dan Simmon's Hyperion, anyone? And that's just a small fraction of more modern SciFi. None of these series really get a look in because we're still busy repeating the same formula ad nauseam until the fan base literally can't take ingesting another two hours of recycled dross. Let's try something new.

I enjoyed altered Carson's first season but was out I'm.ediately after s1e1. Wasnt aware of it being an interpretation of a book. Is the first season more accurate, or is season 2 shit for some other reason?

The first season does the detective noir thing pretty well, and doesn't deviate too far from the novel. They tried rolling the second book (Broken Angels) and the third book (Woken Furies) into one season, it didn't work out at all. Now I want to make an ai slop Altered Carson poster.

This is a great write-up. 8 puzzles me because I don't think Rian Johnson is a terrible writer or filmmaker. Knives Out was good, albeit maybe a bit smug at times with its own cleverness.

Thanks for the info! The aesthetics, acting, and writing seemed to take an immense dive; I was half convinced I wasn't even watching the same show. By the time I started s2e2 I had already googled and found out that it wasn't just me and that it doesnt get better (I tend not to search ahead of time to avoid spoilers). What a disappointment. I really liked the detective noir thing. I might have to check out the novels.

The same author did another similar novel called Thin Air, which you might like - it maintains that tech noir theming.

Which episode was that?

Eh, I think there's just as many examples of burned out creatives not wanting to make a sequel, being forced to make a sequel, and it turning out poorly. A recent example would be Matrix 4. I agree that continuity is important, but I think inspiration is the most important thing. If somebody doesn't have a good story to tell in a universe, it doesn't matter if they have perfect attention to continuity, they're telling a bad story.

New stuff is for new IPs.... Fans want a G-man that operates within his original concept. It could go either way, the new blood writing for an old IP might be too scared to expand it in any meaningful way - see the newest starwars trilogy for the perfect example. Fans dont want more of the same, they want to be even more immersed with expanding lore, and they want it to be meaningful and worthwhile. Investors that want to milk an IP dont care if the property is expanded upon, they dilute the IP in search of profits. I hope HL3 gives us something worthwhile. I believe GabeN will make sure that happens.

> Rey being too good at everything from the get-go with absolutely no character development to support that I don't know where you seem to feel like this was just a lukewarm response to that. Male fans were absolutely unhinged with hatred over this point. The Wikipedia entry for Force Awakens literally has a portion dedicated to fan backlash, which also included backlash against Boyega with bullshit crybaby screams of "white genocide" and "cultural marxism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Force_Awakens#Fan_backlash

100% agree with this. So many cool sci fi concepts that would make great movies. The only thing I want to add is that I think short stories make for better adaptations into movies. They're much more similarly paced.

You felt bad for JJ because he brought back palpatine? He’s a fucking hack and doing that was a choice. Single-handedly ruined any potential the sequels had. How shocking that the guy who can’t write endings couldn’t write an ending.

I wish he'd been given all three movies.

I'd commit grave sins to be able to inhabit and play in Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. The bizarre post-human factions alone, so alien and horrifying in the best way. I'd *have* to go Ultra, though, no question. Could legit make for a really dark MMO. For sheer thrill and a tight looter-shooter game though, I'd be SO stoked for one using his Revenger universe. Ohhhh to crack those baubles, each a potential Pandora's box of hilariously dangerous relics involving hideous and unknown physics....one can dream.

He should go back to Oldmanmurray. He would be age appropriate now.

Wikipedia is not a reliable source, especially when it comes to general public opinion. It has the habit of magnifying minority/fringe opinions, or making tiny issues seem like they were a huge deal. According to the edit history of that page, that section did not exist on the page until 2023. Coincidentally, one of the 3 sources cited in that section was published in 2023. They also decided to add two Opinion Editorial articles, one from 2015, and the other from, take a guess, 2023. OpEds have no requirement to be factually correct, and therefore are in general, an awful source of actual information. Including these kinds of articles does not present an extension of good faith, and makes it look like the person adding them is doing it only to present a source, regardless of its credibility, so they can include whatever they are trying to add. All of those edits, including adding that section, were from the same person. That user never made an edit to that page until 2023. And they never made an edit to that page since. Since 2023, there have been 3 edits. One of them was apparently yesterday, which was instantly reverted. The second edit is interesting because it says "[...]presenting the controversy as being bigger than in reality would lend undue weight to fringe opinions." This edit was, of course, instantly reverted by the same person as before, but they are different from the person that added the Backlash section who was never seen again on this page since 2023. Looking at this new user's edit history on this page, they started editing the page in 2021 with only a single edit, 3 edits in both 2022 and 2023, and 2 edits in 2025. What is interesting about this user is that they only ever reverted changes to the page; they made no other edits except for reverting edits from other users. The point being, some users on Wikipedia will decide that they want a specific thing in a Wikipedia page, and will disregard any changes made to them in order to force what they want to be on that page. Sometimes this is warranted because of vandalism (which did not occur, from what I can tell, until yesterday), but most of the time it is because of personal bias from people who have more "trusted" Wikipedia accounts. Wikipedia listing opinions is of course, incredibly dangerous, as it can lead to the general public (who doesn't actually research something or check sources) believing whatever is on the page when they read it. This is why Wikipedia has a policy that doesnt allow individual/personal reviews of movies to be included in articles, for example. This is what makes Wikipedia such an unreliable source, and anyone quoting it should thoroughly review not only the sources cited but also the edit history of the page they are citing.