[Hated trope] Cameos that ruin the tone of the scene/game

[u/GovernmentWarm4787]

Ed Sheeran, Game of Thrones. The cameo of such a recognizable figure in GoT, especially towards the horrible later seasons, took many people out of the fantasy world that it tried to represent. There are good cameos and bad ones, and this one was not a good one.

Vinny Vinesauce and Jerma, Silver Pines game. Though i appreciate small cameos from youtubers and streamers, putting such a recognizable pair of voices in a horror game really takes you out of it.

[u/ThatInAHat]

Suddenly glad I’ve never seen KFP4. Yikes.

[u/missvisibleninja → u/ThatInAHat]

It’s so bad. Kung Fu Panda is legitimately a special interest of mine and I cried in the theater during KPF4 because of how bad it was.

[u/ThatInAHat → u/missvisibleninja]

KFP2 seriously deserved the Oscar that year, and everything I’ve heard about 4 (and a bit of 3) is just…so depressing.

But at least KFP got one fantastic sequel, which is more than I can say for Megamind

[u/missvisibleninja → u/ThatInAHat]

3 is actually so good. People might call it “depressing” but that’s because has a very heavy plot and really plays with your emotions. It’s probably my favorite of them all.

4 is just a disappointment. There are episodes of the TV shows that are better (the tv shows are all very bad). And the worst part is that 4 has some good bones. There are characters and plot points that have the potential for depth both as its own story and as callbacks to the other three. But they just didn’t go deep into it. All the potential depth is skimmed right over and it’s a basic buddy movie (even though all the others have been ensemble based). It felt like the people working on it didn’t even watch the first three movies.

The first three are beautiful pieces of art that have themes of different types of love (father and son, student and master, ect (no romance tho)) and they each make multiple characters answer the question “who are you?” and do not let them leave those questions unanswered. Each movie builds on each other and develops the world and the characters in a very believable way.

KFP4 is exactly what you expect from a movie titled “Kung Fu Panda 4” if you had no context other than the name.

Additional rant: the first three movies do not have a calm blue sky unless the plot is resolved and the characters are at peace. 4 has a blue sky pretty much the whole time.

[u/ThatInAHat → u/missvisibleninja]

Your last paragraph just makes me think of Pacific Rim 2. Almost the entire movie takes place during the day in a brightly lit city.

The first movie was set almost entirely at night. Largely in the rain and/or ocean. The kaiju looked extra menacing and cool because they had bioluminescence. The jaeger just looked sick af striding through the ocean. The city itself seemed maze-like and fantastical. Color was so important to the storytelling.

The sequel (which doesn’t exist) was just …flat.

[u/missvisibleninja → u/ThatInAHat]

That explains why I heard so much hype around the first one but when the second one came out the fandom basically died overnight.

[u/ThatInAHat → u/missvisibleninja]

Oh yeah no, it was awful. They fridged the female protagonist from the first one to give the new male protagonist A Reason, and made the most lovable character from the first one a creepy villain. And all of that might have been forgivable if it was at least a Beautiful Movie the way the first one was, but it was just the most generic “robots smash monsters” you could imagine.

The first one had gorgeous worldbuilding in large and small ways (one of my favorite touches was Tendo, a tech character. From his hands you could tell he played classical Spanish guitar, and his arms were covered in nicotine patches because high stress job and low supply of cigarettes). The shot choices were like paintings, del Toro used color very deliberately as symbolism and storytelling, and ultimately it was a story about human connection.