Stuff I Watched in Spooky Season

It's "Spooky Season" but I haven't felt like watching a lot of horror movies.  There weren't any new ones that really sounded interesting to me, so this list only has one "horror" movie that wasn't really scary and is from 1970--not a Rifftrax one, so don't worry.  There isn't a lot of other stuff either, so don't worry that it'll be really long, Phantom Readers.

Shazam Fury of the Gods:

  In large part this movie failed because of the change of leadership at DC/WB--but also it's not a good movie.  While the first one was a fun origin story of a kid who gets Superman-level powers and in the end shares them with his five adopted brothers and sisters, this pretty quick gets off-brand by murdering a lot of people, including having the principal of the high school (or whatever) jump to his death, though they wisely don't show that.  But then there's a lot more murders reminiscent of the Hellboy remake the same year the first movie came out.  That movie was rated R and flopped so maybe don't copy that?  The city of Philadelphia is trapped in a dome like The Simpsons Movie or Under the Dome, but not a lot is made of that either; it doesn't really seem to inconvenience people much.  

While it was cool when Billy Batson shared his power with his family in the previous movie, the problem in a sequel is trying to do something with six superheroes.  So...just strip most of them of their powers and you don't have to focus much on them.  Basically the whole thing winds up being a long, dull slog instead of the fun of the first movie.  Helen Mirren gamely tries to be a villain while Lucy Liu takes the lion's share of the metaphoric mustache twirling as a fellow "Daughter of Atlas."  Since Shazam (aka original Captain Marvel) has existed since the 40s (with some gaps) you'd think they could have found a better story to use than this.  I remember reading one of Geoff Johns's comics about them exploring some of the other doors in the Rock of Eternity, which would have been a much better and more fun movie than this.  Far too late it brings back some of the fun of the first movie when Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman shows up for an almost literal deus ex machina.  Anyway, it's good the WB/Discovery merger killed this.  (2/5) (Fun Facts:  A mid-credits scene brings in characters from Peacemaker and makes fun of the Justice League/Justice Society names.  The end credits scene brings back Sivana and Dr. Mind or whoever the little bug is to inch that plot forward though it'll never come to anything.)

Only Murders in the Building Season 3:  I watched the first two seasons pretty much all at once.  I liked the first season but the second season got a little bloated with guest stars and subplots that didn't mean much.  Guess what?  This season is like that second one.  It adds a couple of big names in Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd.  We already saw Rudd "die" at the end of last season on the stage of Martin Short's new play but that was just a fake out.  Like "Who Shot Mr. Burns" they pronounced him dead at one hospital only to pronounce him alive at a better hospital.  Or something.  Then he dies a second time so he's actually murdered in the apartment building to maintain the accuracy of the title.

Meryl Streep is a struggling actress in Martin Short's play, and right from the start they really, REALLY want you to think she did it.  At one point in the penultimate episode she even "confesses" but you know it's not her.  I mean it's too obvious.  It's that Family Guy Law & Order joke about the biggest guest star being the killer.  There's a whole subplot about her being the secret mother of Rudd's brother, who's also his manager. So you're supposed to think she did it for him but that's not it.  That does help foreshadow who actually did it.  The second season I thought the solution only really worked if you worked backwards, but this one was more solid, though maybe more boring.

Besides Streep and Rudd, a chubby Matthew Broderick appears as a potential replacement for Rudd, except he's really annoying.  There are a trio of romantic subplots, one for each of the sleuths.  Again the cameos and red herrings and such can be more annoying than fun.  I didn't hate the show, but it's really more a parody of itself at this point.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  the end features the death of Steve Martin's stunt double, played by Jane Lynch, who will in theory be the 4th season's victim.)

Archer Final Season:  This review of DC's Blue Beetle used the term "aggressively okay" and that would really describe this final season of FXX's Archer.  It's not bad but for a final season it's pretty bland.  No attempt whatsoever is made to answer any longstanding questions like the identity of Archer's father, bring in any big guest stars, or even show Archer and Lana's daughter AJ.  The only thing they did this season was add a new agent to replace Lana and then they didn't really do anything with the new agent once she was part of the fold--she's barely even involved in the last couple of missions.  While this wasn't as bad as the three coma fantasy seasons or the infamous "Vice" season that really began the show's downward spiral, there was nothing epic about what should have been the epic conclusion of the 14-year run.  There will be 3 special episodes starting on December 17th to maybe salvage the end of the series. It would have been nice if they'd announced this before the "final" episode aired as I and many others posted basically, "This is it?  That was lame."  I'm not sure why they chose to basically prank their audience like that. (2.5/5)

Strays:  This movie came out in August or so but quickly fell to Barbenheimer and is now on Peacock.  Basically like the Seth Rogen movie Sausage Party it's an R-rated version of a kid's movie.  Instead of a Pixar movie, this is like The Incredible Journey or Homeward Bound in that it's about 4 stray dogs on an incredible journey.  Only it's so an abandoned dog named Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell) who wants to return to his abusive stoner owner (Will Forte) so he can bite his dick off.  He gets the help of a stray Boston terrier (voiced by Jamie Foxx) and two dogs with owners:  an Australian Shetland (voiced by Isla Fisher) and a Great Dane (voiced by Randall Park).  There are a lot of predictable jokes about poop, pee, and humping.  And some drug humor when they eat mushrooms.  Underneath all that is a story about toxic relationships and moving on from them.  So it's not just a bunch of raunchy jokes; there's some heart to it too. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  the movie is produced by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller who did The Lego Movie which also starred Will Ferrell.)

Buffaloed:  Peg (Zoey Deutch) grew up poor in Buffalo and goes to jail for scamming people with fake Bills tickets.  She gets out and goes to work for a sleazy debt collector (Jai Courtney) and then starts her own rival business.  Mayhem ensues!  Having experience in this area, the movie's "insights" into debt collection are not that accurate.  I mean there are laws and a lot of stuff they do is illegal.  Debts don't exist on just one slip of paper that you can set on fire to make your debt vanish.  Maybe if this had been set in the 80s, but these days everything is scanned into computers.  Still, it's an entertaining movie to watch Peg hustle like a sleazier version of Reese Witherspoon in Election.  (3/5) (Fun Facts:  Peg's mother is played by Judy Greer who was in Archer and Ant-Man.  Peg's brother is played by Noah Reid who was David's boyfriend/fiancé in the last few seasons of Schitt's Creek.  It's a little surprising an indie movie like this actually got permission to use the Buffalo Bills name and logo, though no players appear, I don't think.)

The House That Dripped Blood (1970):  I read a review of this on The Other Side blog and thought it sounded interesting and it's streaming free just about everywhere:  Roku Channel, Freevee, Plex, Pluto TV, Tubi, etc.  Like later movies like Creepshow or Twilight Zone The Movie it's actually an anthology of different stories.  The framing device is that a Scotland Yard inspector goes to a country town to investigate a disappearance from a house and the local cop tells him about some strange incidents in the house prior to that.

The first story has a real Stephen King vibe as it's about a horror writer who rents this creepy old house in the country to work on his novel about a strangler named Dominick.  Then he starts to see Dominick and people get strangled.  Is it real or is he imagining it?  It was pretty decent with a couple of nice twists.  It could have been strung out longer if they hadn't needed to accommodate the other stories.

The second story stars Peter Cushing as a retired guy who rents the house thinking he'll get to chill out and take things easy.  But then he goes to the local wax museum (because what small country town doesn't have one of those?) and sees a statue that looks like some girl he used to love.  His friend (Joss Ackland, the bad guy from Lethal Weapon 2 and 1994's Miracle on 34th Street and the head wizard in the Discworld miniseries Hogfather) goes with him to the museum and is also obsessed with the statue.  The problem when you think about it is this story really has little to do with the house.  The evil in this case is really in the wax museum so it doesn't really fit with the theme.  And it's not even really an original idea; the Rifftrax movie Terror in the Wax Museum came out a couple years earlier than this.  It's not quite as bad as if they had just spliced this in from something else like the MST3K/Rifftrax movie Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders where they literally spliced in a segment from 1983 into the rest of the movie made in the mid-90s but still it doesn't really fit with the rest of the movie's segments.

(I was thinking about it and here's what I'd do with that second story:  instead of the wax museum, have a mannequin in the house that looks like the woman he used to love.  He at first tries to hide it but it keeps showing up and then he starts going all Lars & the Real Girl with it.  Locals see him with this mannequin and get concerned, so they call his friend Joss Ackland.  He shows up and also becomes obsessed with the mannequin and they fight over it and maybe the friend damages it so Peter Cushing kills him.  And then he dies or gets arrested and maybe we see the mannequin grin or laugh or something to indicate it's alive like an evil version of Mannequin.  Like the original it's not all that original but it at least fits the theme better.)

The third story stars Christopher Lee as a guy with a young daughter who moves into the house.  He hires a governess to take of the girl and teach her.  It seems like Lee is a jerk but then we find out just why that is.  Like the first story it's a neat segment that could have been strung out longer if they had, for instance, dropped the Cushing segment that didn't actually fit the theme.

The final story stars Jon Pertwee (the third Doctor Who) as a film star who rents the house while he's making a vampire movie.  A costume shop gives him a cloak that actually seems to make him a vampire.  While the evil originates from outside the house, most of the mayhem happens inside the house, so it's better than the second part.

Then there's a final bit to wrap up the framing segment that ties into the fourth story.  A real estate agent turns narrator, breaking the fourth wall to sum things up for us.

Overall it's not a bad watch, though not scary unless maybe you're under the age of 10.  (3/5)  A couple of Fun Facts:  at one point Pertwee is given a cloak that says "Shepperton Studios" in it and that's the studio where they made the movie.  This movie may perhaps feature the most godawful collection of neckerchiefs ever recorded on film.  I guess that was really a fashionable thing in England in 1970.  Ugh.

Quickdraw Season 1:  This 2013 series from Hulu was recommended to me for a while and so I finally decided to watch it.  Like Blazing Saddles, Maverick (the James Garner TV show or Mel Gibson movie, not the Tom Cruise movie), or The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr it's a Western comedy.  John Henry Hoyle (co-creator John Lehr) is the new sheriff of Great Bend, Kansas in 1875 and is determined to use his Harvard education to clean up the town.  He's aided by his bumbling deputy Eli and a mortician-turned-medical examiner.  And there's of course the mandatory prostitute/bar owner he falls in love with.  While Hoyle is a dumbass about a lot of things, we find out in a duel with the outlaw Cole Younger that Hoyle is a really good shot--hence the title of the show.  The first episode is a little weird as at the end Hoyle is shot twice and they tell him he's going to die, but the next episode he's fine and dandy.  So was that the end at the beginning or is it going to be a think like Kenny in South Park where he dies in every episode?  But then in another episode they mention that he has two bullets in him so I guess he recovered...somehow.  

This is the kind of show that really takes a few episodes to start coming together.  It never really rises to the greatness of Blazing Saddles but it's not bad.  With the sexual humor it's more on par with A Million Ways to Die in the West. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  An Amazon commercial mentions a warehouse in Great Bend, Kansas, which is the setting for this show so like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman or some of those old Westerns of the 50s and 60s I guess the setting is a real place, though unlikely anything like the TV show.)  (Content Warning for Right Wingers:  the season finale features Hoyle and his posse dressing in drag to get the drop on Cole Younger and his gang.  If you're in Florida you better keep your kids away from that or the secret police will probably put you in the gulag.)

Quickdraw Season 2:  There was a second season with 10 episodes instead of 8.  It's pretty much the same thing as the first season but a little better.  A recurring story throughout the season is Hoyle trying to get the prostitute/bar owner to marry him while Eli marries a prostitute named Pearl who is also Hoyle's stepdaughter.  There's a plague of grasshoppers that winds up with Eli becoming a farmer and a visit to the freed slave town of Nicodemus for a rodeo that leads to murder.  The last couple of episodes bring back Hoyle's supposedly dead wife and Hoyle and Cole Younger have to join forces against a bigger bad.  Overall I think this season was tighter and everything was coming together better.  It's just too bad it didn't get a third season to see if it could keep improving. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Halfway through the first season they started to use a theme song over the end credits but then in the second season they just continue the final scene while the credits run.) (Content Warning for Right Wingers: The 8th episode features Cole Younger dressing in drag when he attempts to escape from Hoyle, so kind of an inversion of the previous season.)

Max vs the Multiverse

Max and the Multiverse by Zachry Wheeler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It starts off with an interesting concept: one day a gamer named Max accidentally receives the ability to travel to a different part of the multiverse whenever he falls asleep. At first he goes to a world where dinosaurs co-exist with humans and then some less radical worlds before he ends up in a world much closer to Star Trek's Federation.

And then he gets embroiled in a plot over some MacGuffin. Really the only thing that saves it is his companion is his cat, who gets an artificial body and the ability to talk in a British accent. It's not really that funny for a "comedy." It's not on the same level as Hitchhiker's Guide or the Rex Nihilo books I read before this. I don't even think it's as good as my own book Chet Finley vs the Machines of Fate. Mostly because other than Ross the cat I didn't really warm to any of the characters. Zoey is just unpleasant and Max is a blank and the other one is...the other one. And really, the whole multiverse thing with Max really has no payoff. It doesn't really help in the end or anything. The MacGuffin is at least not a pure MacGuffin as it has some use, just not a lot.

I'm probably going to pass on the sequels. That is all.

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Rex Nihilo is a Fun Sci-Fi Comedy Series

Way back in 2013 I reviewed Mercury Falls, a religious comedy sort of like Good Omens but maybe not as good--pun intended.  I think I got that book from Amazon Vine, back when they had tons of books along with cheap Chinese junk.  I never got around to reading any of the sequels to that though.  As an early Fun Fact:  Amazon published Mercury Falls (like 50 Shades of Grey and some other books it was originally self-pubbed before one of Amazon's new imprints snapped it up) and later produced the Good Omens TV series.

But the point of this entry isn't about that!  This is about the series Robert Kroese (who's from Grand Rapids--or Gren Repids as they say according to Richard Ford's The Sportswriter) wrote after that or maybe around the same time or whatever.  It's more of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy type thing as it's a sci-fi comedy.  Though it's not very much like Hitchhiker's Guide except for the basic genre.  Spaceballs might be a little better comparison or even my own Chet Finley vs The Machines of Fate.

The series focuses on Rex Nihilo, a con man who's basically like if Han Solo never went straight in Star Wars.  Instead of a Wookie, he has a robot named SASHA--Self-Arresting near-Sentient Heuristic Android or whatever--he seemingly bought with a load of machine parts.  Sasha is our narrator so we know that Rex is pretty much a dumbass, but Sasha is his property so she can't just leave him as much as she might want to.

The first book takes a lot of cues from Star Wars as Rex hooks up with the rebels of the "Revolting Front" and their leader Princess Wilhelmina (or Princess Willie, who is basically a fat Princess Leia) on a forest moon--so-called because there's one really big tree.  They're battling the Malarchian Empire, which has an armored henchman called Heinous Vlaak.  Unlike Spaceballs there is no placeholder for the Force.  

Rex wins a planet in a poker game but then finds himself saddled with over a billion credits in debt.  To pay this off he has a great idea:  get the Malarchian planet-killing weapon to blow up the planet and then petition the Empire to reimburse him for damages.  Most of the book is Rex ineptly playing both sides as things keep going wrong while Sasha is constantly at his side, trying to keep him alive.

There's a clever twist at the end that involves the Sp'ostles or Space Apostles who are sort of like Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons who go around trying to convert people to believe in their religion, which is dedicated to the vastness of space.

Overall this one was OK as an introduction to Rex, Sasha, and this universe.  Not particularly great.  I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads but 3.5 is probably more apt.

Aye, Robot by Robert Kroese
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The second book, Aye, Robot, picks up after the first one.  Rex and Sasha inadvertently become space pirates!  While the first one had a lot of Star Wars cues, this one really doesn't mimic other sci-fi properties quite as obviously, which is maybe why I liked it.  Also the author and me as the reader had settled into the characters and everything better.

I don't want to give a lot away but basically it involves the Sp'ostles in a big way and also a shit-ton of spaceship fuel.  Along the way, Rex and Sasha pick up some new friends:  the huge man-child pirate Boggs, the weirdly cobbled-together robot Donnie, and a robot parrot named Steve who used to belong to a famous pirate Rex and Sasha inadvertently kill.

This was my favorite of the series.  Maybe because it wasn't so overtly parodying things.  Maybe it was just a more fun story.  Or maybe because the characters get a chance to grow some more.

The Wrath of Cons by Robert Kroese
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The third book, Wrath of Cons, is a bit of a step back.  I gave them the same rating on Goodreads only because you can't do half-stars but definitely I'd say this would be 3.5 stars--and that's being generous.

When I first saw the title I was thinking of "cons" as sci-fi conventions, which itself might be a fun book.  But it actually is about the other kind of cons--as in con man cons, the things Rex specializes in.  Where the first book took cues from Star Wars, this one takes cues from Star Trek--notably the "Genesis Device" in Wrath of Khan--and the Wizard of Oz.  Maybe for those reasons--especially since I'm not an Oz fan--of that or the HBO prison series--I really didn't like this one as much.

When Rex and Sasha attempt to steal the plans to "Project Shiva"--the aforementioned Genesis-type device--they wind up on a ruined Earth populated solely by robots mimicking 19th and 20th Century writers.  After being rescued, they start trying to peddle new planets, which lands them in more trouble.  There's an ending that takes its cues from Search for Spock before the story ends a bit unceremoniously.

What really saves this book for me is I really came to like the characters, especially Sasha.  As the narrator we really get to understand Sasha's struggles in being a robot who's not only tethered to a doofus like Rex, but also is not allowed to have original thoughts thanks to legislation passed by the Malarchy to make sure there's no robot uprising.  Sasha's character really made me think of Jewbot/Robobot on the stop-motion series Supermansion--made by Crackle but now on Amazon Prime--in that he was also a sensitive, intelligent robot mostly stymied because the humans around him are idiots.  Really I think they'd be a great couple and if anyone would give a crap I'd go write a fanfic of it.

Most of the supporting cast is fun like the sexy black market operator Pepper--who has her own spinoff book--the childish but loyal friend Boggs, and the misfit robot Donnie, who starts to really become his own entity by the end.  Really Rex is the weakest link as he never really deviates from that selfish, arrogant, stupid grifter he was in the first book.  It's like when I watch Mike Tyson Mysteries and I really don't like the title character that much but the supporting cast is so good it really makes up for his deficiencies.  Though you have to wonder why everyone is so willing to sacrifice for Rex in the end because he really hasn't done much for any of them--except inadvertently to save his own ass.

Anyway, if you're looking for some fun sci-fi reads, then these are a lot of fun.  I don't remember if I got all three for free or if I got the first one free and the others on sale but the point is I didn't spend a lot on them.  If they're not on sale now you can probably just wait until they are.

There is a prequel called Out of the Soylent Planet that I actually picked up last April but forgot about so I read that one too. It would have been better to read it first, but whatever.

Out of the Soylent Planet (A Rex Nihilo Adventure) by Robert Kroese
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As far as prequels go this isn't too bad. Like all of the other books except the second one I'd actually give it 3.5 stars but I'm rounding up.

It's the secret origin of Rex and Sasha! It starts like a version of Star Wars (the original) with Sasha as C-3PO. Only it's more like if Han Solo had bought Threepio rather than Uncle Owen and Luke. They wind up on a planet that grows soylent that's not made of people. It's turned into a nasty sorta diet shake appropriately called SLOP. The company that makes the product has completely enslaved the planet and so Rex and Sasha have to find a way to survive and escape. Which of course we know they do as this is a prequel. That's not as important as finding out just how they're going to do it. What crazy schemes are they going to pull off this time? That's really how these books work. That and Sasha. For a robot she's really a fleshed-out character. Though strange we never mention the acting thing before this. Or did it? I don't think so. Also, Rex is a bit smarter than in previous books it seems--maybe because his memory hasn't been tampered with so much.

My only complaint really is it runs a bit long versus other books, maybe because most of it is all on the same location, so it's not quite the galaxy-spanning adventure of previous books.

Anyway, if you haven't read this series yet, start with this one. It includes the novella The Chicolini Incident that was also at the end of the third book. So you can read that as well and then start right in with Starship Grifters.

That is all.

#

On a final note, if you want another fun sci-fi read, I also liked this book about time travel, burritos, and a hot lesbian robot!  Basically a loser food truck cook, a cute grad student, and a Neanderthal fuck up the timeline and have to put right what once went wrong.  Mayhem ensues!

Time Burrito by Aaron Frale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A funny time travel story that's part Bill and Ted, part Back to the Future, and very entertaining all the way through. I really enjoyed it and I'm a little jealous because my attempts to write comedy never really work out so well. I could take a few hints from this. Anyway, go and read it right meow!

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There you go, if any Phantom Readers actually read this and cared they'd have some more books to add to their lists.

The Irony of Being What You Claim to Hate

 Last week on Facebook there was an ad for "writing" or "engineering" AI books and I noticed something funny:  one person had posted a whatever it is from Blue Sky and then I noticed someone else say pretty much the same thing.

And as I pointed out, if you don't attribute the quote to someone, you're really not much better than the AI that takes existing writing to repurpose into "new" writing.

Not surprisingly, he didn't like that.  He came up with a variety of lame defenses.  "I didn't know who it was!"  Well then you should have at least said you heard from someone else, like the person who made that Blue Sky post did.  He didn't make it seem like he came up with that line--unlike you.

"Why does it matter?"  Well, because you're taking someone else's words and claiming credit for them.

"Every word you write has been used before!"  But you pretty much did a word-for-word reprint, just changing a tense and twisting a negative (nobody) to a positive (somebody).  

"I see no problem with repeating a phrase I agree with!"  Sure, but when you don't attribute it to someone else you're trying to pass it off as your own witticism when it's not.  It's basically stealing another comedian's joke.

"You only have 26 friends.  I wonder why that would be?"  Because I don't care and obviously being more popular doesn't make you more right or Kim Kardashian would be infallible.  (This is a tactic Trumpers like to use a lot.  "He's popular and you're no one!" or "He's rich and you're poor!"  As if those factors make someone's logic better.)

Then he concluded with, "You're boring!"  Nice going out on a first grade insult lifted from A Talking Cat!?!

As I mentioned on Facebook it's pretty ironic to decry "AI" by stealing content the way that the "AI" does.  It was like that old The Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob goes on TV to decry the evils of TV.  At least he was smart enough to point out the irony himself.

Anyway, if you want to rail against "AI," then don't do the same things that it does.  Come up with your own jokes or attribute them to someone else.  Or at least change a few more words to make it less obvious.

The Unluckiest Post: Rigged Online Games Mirror Real Life

Looking at the list of posts, I found the post that's not extremely recent that so far has the fewest number of views with 19.

I talked before about this game called Dice Dreams that came with my phone.  It was fun for a little while but as I wrote about, with each level the cost to build the "set" to advance to the next level kept getting higher and higher and taking longer and longer--unless of course you're willing to shell out a bunch of money.

Finally it got to the point a few months ago where I just abandoned the game and uninstalled it from my phone because it was getting to the point of tedium.  So I needed a new game as sort of my backup game when I had nothing to do on Empires & Puzzles, which is my primary game.  

I tried this game called Royal Match because it said it didn't require in-app purchases.  And of course it doesn't, but like Dice Dreams it gets to that point where if you don't start making in-app purchases you're going to get nowhere fast.  The levels in that game are mostly like a Candy Crush-type thing.  You know, match 3 or more things to clear the level.  It starts out pretty easy and I blazed through the first 300 levels in a week or so.  But then they start making the arbitrary maximum number of moves a lot lower, so basically the only way to win is to get a huge combination every single turn.  Or of course buy a bunch of continues and/or items.  When you first start playing you get some free items and can earn more, but as the levels get harder and harder, you slowly dwindle your supply.  The goal as always being to make you spend money.  Having been through that with Candy Crush years earlier, I quit by the time I got to level 500-something.

I briefly tried a couple of others before Facebook advertised a game called Transformers Earth Wars.  As you know if you actually read this blog, I've loved Transformers since the 80s, so a game featuring that was up my alley.  Instead of a match-3 game it's more of an RPG.  Like Empires & Puzzles, you build a base and mine raw materials (alloy, energon, and then "ore-13") to build more stuff.  You also get "crystals" to recruit main characters and "chips" to recruit the smaller Targetmasters or Micromasters, which for some reason includes smaller characters like Rattrap from Beast Wars.

The game won some love from me right away because I started out with Jetfire, my favorite Transformer.  And then it gave me a few more Jetfires:  the weird "Cybertron" one, the one based on the GI Joe Sky Striker (aka an F-14), and the Shattered Glass alternate universe variant.  I got some of my other faves like Grapple, Skids, Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime, Whirl, and two versions of Optimus Prime.  It was pretty fun for the first week or two getting new characters and building up my base and advancing on the story campaign and so on.  I even unlocked the Decepticons so I could recruit Megatron, Starscream, Bludgeon, and so on.  You don't have to build a separate base for them.

You can eventually get "Combiners" but to do that you have to get 5 characters of 3 stars or higher.  And then there's some other thing you have to do so they can go together or something.  I think right now the most I have is 3 characters in a set for "Optimus Maximus."  You can also get Titans like Omega Supreme, Metroplex, Fortress Maximus, Trypticon, or Scorponok, but I'm not really sure how. [Fun Fact:  I did eventually get enough characters for five different Combiners:  Optimus Maximus, Sky Reign, Superion, Victorion, and Magnaboss the Beast Wars Combiner.]

After a week or two the game started to do like a lot of these games.  It took longer and longer to advance to the next level and get new stuff for my base.  I couldn't make most of my characters more powerful because to "research" them to the next level could take over a day--unless of course you pay.  

Far more annoying to me was even though I had probably less than half of the characters, I kept summoning duplicates.  Those duplicates get recycled into some "shards" that can eventually used to summon new duplicates!  At least that's how it starts to feel.  I mean one time I had 9 summons and got 8 duplicates and 1 lesser version of a character I already have.  Another time I had 4 summons and got 3 2-star Arcees.  3 out of 4 tries!  I'm no C-3PO, but I'm pretty sure the odds of that happening if the system were truly random are pretty fucking remote.  Programmers might think they're being clever to rig things this way, but when something like that happens, it's like a cold shower and I think, "Well, this sucks."  Then I don't really want to play anymore.

And it sucks because I love Transformers and I like collecting the different characters just like I did in real life until they sort of got to the point where there weren't many new ones I wanted and I had no money anyway.  I want to play your game because I think it's pretty neat as sort of a Transformers RPG.  But you're making it so hard to like your game when you rig it so I can't hardly ever get new characters who are any good or upgrade the characters I have.

I know that the companies making games need money, but A) I don't have money and B) Even when I spend money it'll screw me over.  Thus there's not much incentive for me to spend what little I can afford.  That's how it's been with Empires & Puzzles for a while now but I don't want to quit because I've invested so much time and energy into building my camp and roster and so on.  Plus, ALL of these games are rigged the same way.  Unless you're going to play free solitaire or something, they're all going to do this bullshit to try to coerce you to spend money.

But the problem is the more they try to coerce you, the more it becomes drudgery instead of fun.  A month or so ago, Empires & Puzzles added a new list of daily goals that give you meager rewards.  I call it "homework" because that's basically what it is; it's like getting a bunch of assignments to do in your spare time.  That's really not fun.  I mean, who really likes homework?  Kids play games instead of doing homework, right?  The Transformers game has its own homework, though less so.  Each day there are 3 new goals to get points you can use to get meager rewards.  And you can eventually send your characters on "missions" that get them experience and some meager rewards.  The experience can help at first but when you can't "research" most of the characters, that starts to be less and less of an incentive.  Mostly I just do it to get some meager rewards like "Z-Energon" that can eventually be used to research two characters at the same time.  Though of course it'll probably take months to save up that much--unless I pay.

Everything is geared to making you pay, and pay, and pay.  And when you don't have money, it's kind of a reflection of how much it sucks being poor in real life.  In real life, most of the best experiences are reserved for those who can pay for them:  vacations, space tourism, fancy cars, good food/booze/drugs, and so on.  Occasionally us poors get some schadenfreude like when those rich guys died in that sub, but that's not too often.  Usually we have to content ourselves with what we can get and maybe we tell ourselves it's just as good or even better.  Like people who would say a McDonald's cheeseburger is as good or better than some fancy Kobe beef burger made by a famous chef.  Yeah, sure it is.  [eye roll]  Or like saying my Ford Focus is just as good as some rich dude's Bentley.  Ha ha, sure it is.

So eventually these games turn kind of sad because they only reinforce the income gap.  The 1% can afford to buy access to get all of the characters and make their base totally awesome.  Another percentage can buy a little access to get some good stuff.  And poor shits like me have to scrimp and save to make even the slightest progress.  It really does get sad and kinda depressing.

It would be nice to have a world where everyone could get equal access to fun stuff and nice things.  And where even our games aren't rigged to try to bleed us dry.  But that's not likely to happen, is it?

Originally Published on 7/28/23 5:35 AM

The Original Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends is Some Fun Nostalgia

I had originally put this in a "Stuff I Watched" entry but it got long enough that I figured I might as well put it in its own entry for people to not read.

Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends (1981):  While I was goofing around on Disney+ after watching Ahsoka, I remembered I had this in my queue to watch--or rewatch really since it was on in the early 80s Saturday mornings.  Probably with the success of Superfriends in its various iterations, Marvel launched a new Spider-Man animated series and since Spidey doesn't have a sidekick they needed to give him some "amazing friends."  One is Iceman, aka Bobby Drake, who was part of the X-Men.  The other was a new character called Firestar, aka Angelica Jones, who has fire powers.  They all live in Aunt May's house with Miss Lion the dog and go to ESU, which is Empire State University or Eastern State University or something like that.

The animation is not great, pretty much on par with Superfriends or other shows of the late 70s and early 80s.  The stories are pretty simple too for the most part.  Some of them involve Spider-Man villains like the Green Goblin, Electro, Shocker, and Scorpion.  Others involve other Marvel villains like Dr. Doom, Magneto, Juggernaut, and Loki--who's not as cute and debonair as the movie version.  As well besides the two "Amazing Friends" Spidey sometimes teams up with other Marvel heroes like the X-Men, Captain America, Thor, Dr. Strange, and the Hulk.

Overall I actually liked it better than Superfriends.  The stories aren't as weird as some of the Superfriends stories so it ages a little better.  There's even a little more mature material in Peter and Bobby both wanting to go out with Angelica.  There's also a decent episode where Peter thinks back to how not stopping a robber led to the death of his Uncle Ben, which is also a little mature for an early 80s kids show.  The last three episodes all feature a love interest of sorts.  The first has Spidey meeting a girl from the future and falling in love with her to the point he goes back with her to the future, except his 20th Century germs would kill everyone there so he has to go back.  The second involves Firestar and a former lover who has become a cyborg that goes rogue in the X-mansion, taking control of Cerebro to try to kill Firestar and the X-Men.  The last episode involves Iceman's sister who is under the control of a bad guy and so he has to stop her from taking control of a satellite that like a precursor to SkyNet would control a lot of the world's defenses.  These episodes aren't really well done but they at least make the attempt to not just be stupid quips and punching.

Obviously it's not a great series, but with a nostalgia filter it's not too terrible. (3/5)

(Fun Facts:  3 years after this show, Marvel produced the Transformers series and there are a lot of similarities.  Most notably the voice of Spidey, Dan Gilvezan, is also the voice of Bumblebee.  And of course Frank Welker is in both series, because there was probably a law passed in the 70s that you can't have an animated series without him.  Which I'm not saying is bad, just that the dude is in EVERYTHING in that era--and still in tons of stuff today.  There are also some of the same writers, the same generic "rock" music, and the same kind of scene transitions only with Spidey webbing instead of Autobot or Decepticon signs.  Some of the stories are even pretty similar like the one where Spidey and his friends go to Hollywood is a lot like "Hoist goes to Hollywood."

When not in her Firestar guise, Angelica looks almost identical to Mary Jane Watson in the comics, only her hair is usually brown instead of red.  Since MJ is never mentioned it seems like they were using Angelica in place of her.  Really if MJ had fire powers that might have made for some interesting comics.  As I noted previously, after this Firestar was added to the comics, though I don't think she ever really had her own title and only shows up periodically. 

There were 24 episodes of the series but you can only find 23 on Disney+.  The 12th episode is not available.  Looking it up on IMDB it's called "The Quest of the Red Skull" and features Spidey and his friends teaming up with "Hiawatha Smith" (an Indiana Jones ripoff) to go to Africa to stop the Red Skull from starting WWIII.  I guess in these enlightened times, Nazis are not as appropriate for kids as they were back in 1981.  Also, there could be some cultural stereotypes and just the name "Hiawatha Smith" sounds cringey.  The third episode is available but has a content warning.  The reason becomes clear pretty quick.  Sunfire the Japanese mutant with fire powers isn't so bad but his evil uncle is buck teeth or fangs away from being a WWII-era stereotype.  Yikes!

There were a couple of attempts at kind of a backdoor launch of an X-Men series.  Bobby and Angelica are both mutants who were part of the X-Men for a time.  One particular episode has Bobby and Angelica going to a reunion at the Xavier mansion that the Juggernaut interrupts to fight Spidey, his friends, and the X-Men including Charles Xavier, Cyclops, Storm, Phoenix, and Wolverine, who for some reason talks with an Australian accident.  That kind of winds up being prescient since they cast an Australian as Wolverine in the live action movies.  The second episode taking place in the Xavier mansion also features Nightcrawler, Colossus, Kitty Pryde (aka Sprite), and Thunderbird, whom I'm surprised didn't get this a content warning.

Spider-Man creator Stan Lee is the narrator in 17 of the 24 episodes, most of them in the first half and then it apparently tails off after that.  The title of this series was later revived, only with Miles Morales and Gwen Stacey as the amazing friends.)

Ahsoka Makes Me So Jealous of Filoni and Favreau

There will be spoilers ahead so don't complain about it, Phantom Readers.  Here's your spoiler space.

Ahsoka Tano

Hera Syndulla

After the long, looooong, dull run of Andor and ok season 3 of The Mandalorian, I was pretty excited for Ahsoka.  Finally a chance to wrap up the loose ends of Rebels like where Ezra and Thrawn went when the purr-gills (giant space whales) towed the Star Destroyer Chimaera away.  And catch up with Ahsoka, Hera, Sabine, and Chopper, only in live action instead of animation.

My initial reaction is that it's not perfect, but for fans of the animated series, your ship has almost literally come in.  And also fans of Star Wars who don't care about boring politics and bureaucracy and want some fucking lightsaber fights and space dogfights.  Yeeeeeeeah!

Like The Rise of Skywalker or Picard Season 3, you can make the charge that there's too much attempt at fan service.  While I still think The Last Jedi was a dumb, albeit nice-looking piece of crap, The Rise of Skywalker with its attempts to retcon was pretty bad too, only in a different way.  So I mostly agree with this meme someone posted in a Facebook group:

The Rise of Skywalker tried way too hard to please all the pissed-off fans after The Last Jedi.  It was trying to give people what studio suits thought they wanted and instead it satisfied almost no one.  Picard season 3 felt a little bit like that with some over-the-top fan service after a lot of people didn't like the second season--I didn't even like the first one.

In the case of The Clone Wars, The Mandalorian, and now Ahsoka, I don't think Dave Filoni and John Favreau are worrying so much about servicing fans in general so much as they're doing what pretty much anyone who was a kid in the late 70s/early 80s and loved the original movies would do.  Things like:

• Bringing Boba Fett back to life
• Showing Luke as a Jedi and not a whiny bitch
• Redeeming the prequel movies
• And now setting up an ersatz Heir to the Empire

I think they realize they were given a huge opportunity to play with the most awesome toybox in the whole universe and they're just going for it.  That makes me insanely jealous.  All I can do is scribble my little ideas on a stupid blog no one reads.  They actually get to bring their ideas to life!  Even if I don't always agree with everything, I admire that they're getting to do what so many of us fans never will.

I can't say this is a perfect show.  If you want to say Andor is better in terms of depth of story or such things, then maybe it is.  Andor was also boring as hell.  And you might say, "You just want lasers going pew-pew!"  And I'd say, "No, I want lightsabers going whoosh-whoosh!"  Honestly, I took inventory and realized the shows I liked the most were those that feature Jedi and Sith because to me Star Wars has first and foremost always been the Jedi and Sith and those freaking cool lightsabers.  I love that and I make no apologies.  I mean, come on, why do you think the Scarlet Knight has a magic sword that glows and cuts through almost anything?

So obviously I was set up to like this almost from the beginning because you have Ahsoka with her twin white lightsabers.  And then you have Sabine with Ezra's green saber.  And now two rogue Jedi--or whatever they are--with orange sabers.  They had never used orange before, but I did in a 1995 fanfic, so there.  That's 5 lightsabers right there!  Yeah, baby.

The first four episodes are a little slow at times as they maneuver the pieces to create the ship and recover the map to find where Thrawn and Ezra went.  The bad guys, led by a witch of Dathomir who I guess isn't Asajj Ventress in live action (Where the hell is she?  Google says she was killed off in a book.  Lame.), are trying to make a big hyperspace ring like the sort Jedi fighters used first in Episode II and then in The Clone Wars series.  Only this is pretty much a ship unto itself with enough power to make a long, harrowing journey.  Ahsoka, Sabine, and Hera are out to stop them, though Sabine is less sold on this as she wants to rescue Ezra.

I really ought to have rewatched the end of Rebels and such before this because I wasn't sure when Ahsoka took Sabine on as a student.  Or when Ahsoka met Professor Huyang (voiced by David Tennant), who's a droid who taught generations of Jedi how to build lightsabers and stuff.  They just sort of throw you into this and you either go with it or not, I guess.

It starts with Ahsoka doing sort of an Indiana Jones to try to get an artifact.  To try to decipher what the artifact means, she goes to Lothal, where Sabine is hanging out in Ezra's old lair.  Only then the rogue Jedi show up and take the artifact from Sabine and nearly kill her.  (Good thing she was just stabbed and not cut in half like Darth Maul or she'd have needed to get a set of robot spider legs.)

Once Sabine recovers, she and Ahsoka go to Corellia and like episode 3 of the latest season of The Mandalorian we see the problems in the New Republic in regard to former Imperials still in positions of authority.  It's sort of "the deep state" or really the problems that existed during Reconstruction and after in the South where you had to figure out what to do with all the Confederate supporters.

The fourth episode has Ahsoka and Sabine going to some faraway planet to track down the bad guys only for Ahsoka to seemingly die and Sabine to let herself get taken captive while giving the bad guys the map they needed.

The fifth episode is mostly a dream or vision or some such thing where Ahsoka confronts Anakin and we even get live action flashbacks to The Clone Wars!  It's a little weird then because they show Rex but only in his armor because I guess they didn't have money to deepfake Temura Morrison who was the live action clones, whereas Dee Bradley Baker voices Rex in animation.  While maybe that doesn't move the plot forward a ton, it's pretty awesome.  And I choked up a bit to think of the redemption this gave Hayden Christiansen.  See, you give the poor guy some decent material and he's not that bad!  I mean I'm not going to give him an Emmy but still, he was a lot better than in the prequels because he wasn't saying dumb things about sand for instance.

Young Ezra Bridger

I was worried with the sixth episode that they were going to string us along for 40-50 minutes and only show Thrawn at the end and probably not Ezra.  But Thrawn shows up about halfway through and then Ezra closer to the end.  Other than Thrawn looks a little paunchy in live action I don't really have any problems--so far.  It was cool they actually made the Chimaera look beat up and the armor of the Stormtroopers is all scarred and patched like with duct tape.  You know, how it should look when you're stranded far from home for a long time, unlike, say Voyager where most of the time the ship and everything looked pristine despite there wasn't a Federation dry dock for thousands of light years!  I wondered if they'd make Ezra all whiny like Luke in The Last Jedi and maybe have him lose an eye or two or a limb or something, but he seemed whole and not a whiny bitch, so woo hoo!  It was neat to see in the credits Enoch, Thrawn's troop commander with a gold faceplate, is played by Wes Chatham, who played Amos in The Expanse.  So you have a Dr. Who and an actor from The Expanse in a Star Wars show.  That's epic.

The start of the penultimate episode is a little sad when C3PO shows up as Leia's proxy during Hera's trial.  While it's neat to have Threepio there, it brings home the fact that those of us who grew up with the original Star Wars are never really going to get much of our favorite characters in these shows or movies.  We might get a deepfaked Luke here or there or a mention of Leia or Han or Lando, or a droid or Wookie who can easily be played by another actor or CGI, but the only real stories for those old characters are going to be in books and comics.  Oh, what might have been if Lucas hadn't waited until 2012 to sell out to Disney!

Anyway, the rest of the episode then focuses on Ahsoka, Sabine, Ezra, and Thrawn.  They pretty obviously rip off the asteroid field thing from Empire, complete with Huyang saying one of the lines from that.  We get to see the tactical brilliance of Thrawn that like Rebels and the books is only spoiled by the failures of others (notably Baylan Skoll this time) or just plain good luck for our heroes.  There's a rematch between Baylan and Ahsoka that isn't that satisfying and a rematch between Sabine and Baylan's apprentice (with Ezra chipping in) that also isn't that satisfying.  But it sets up the final episode where surely Thrawn will return to take command of the Imperial Remnant.

And yea, verily, it came to pass!  Someone online mentioned Infinity War and the final episode was sort of like that, only less contrived.  Anyone with a brain knew Thrawn would have to return to the galaxy far, far away to set up the movie.  The way it happens is pretty awesome, especially if you like zombies.  That's right, zombie Stormtroopers!  It's not unheard of for Star Wars to have zombies.  I read a book pre-Disney about that and in The Clone Wars the Nightsisters raised the dead to fight Dooku and his troops.  This was just an extension of that.

I really need to consult some superfan site about what some of the stuff at the end means.  What was all that stuff in Thrawn's ship?  Bodies to reanimate?  The big statues were two of the three entities from those Clone Wars episodes on "Mortis" where Anakin has a chance to bring balance to the Force or whatever and they were shown in paintings on Lothal and such.  I'm not sure what the significance is or the significance of the female one being missing.  Or the significance of the white owl Ahsoka sees.  I'm sure it's supposed to call back to something or other.

I did read one mostly clickbait article that did help somewhat.  The owl is a symbol of "Daughter" who is the light side of the Force on Mortis.  It's probably significant that the owl is alive while the other two are stone statues.  Or maybe it's not.

Anyway, I'm sure Ahsoka and Sabine are only stuck there until the purr-gills come back to take them home, probably for the movie, though maybe there will be a season 2.  The obvious problem now is that Ray Stevenson is dead, so do they recast his character or deepfake it or what?  Probably the biggest weakness of the final episode was it didn't include him or the other rogue Jedi until the very end and we still don't really know much about what their deal was.  It was great, though, to hear Thrawn's version of trash talk to Ahsoka.  "Long live the Empire."  And then his ship jumps.  Mic drop! 

(Fun Fact:  If you read Timothy Zahn's canonical novel Thrawn: Alliances, it features a young Thrawn teaming up with Anakin Skywalker to recover a Republic shield generator before Thrawn joined the Empire.  Later Thrawn worked with Vader on the TIE Defender project and I'm pretty sure figured out Vader's true identity.  This was sorta referenced in how Thrawn knows Anakin and by extension, Ahsoka.)

I really enjoyed the series, to the point that I made sure to watch that final episode the night it aired because I didn't want to wait.  That's the mark of a good show these days when you can wait days, weeks, months, or years to stream it.

Thinking about it a few times, I thought that what Filoni is doing now is not replacing the crappy sequel movies but it does help to explain some things that weren't really explained in the movies.  Such as why the capital of the New Republic seemed to have moved, why the New Republic was in general so ineffective in combatting the First Order, and the origin of the First Order.

A devastating war with Thrawn akin to the 90s books by Timothy Zahn would help explain these things.  I think it's in Dark Force Rising, book 2 of Zahn's trilogy, that Thrawn blockaded the capital of Coruscant with cloaked asteroids.  Something like that (or even striking Coruscant with the asteroids like rebel Belters do to Earth in The Expanse) would explain why there was a new capital to get blown up by Starkiller Base.  It would also explain why the New Republic was so leery to do anything about the First Order, to the point Leia had to start her own resistance group.  And the defeat of Thrawn and the Remnant would leave the door open for Snoke and the First Order.

So instead of trying to retcon those movies out of existence like naïve fans thought might happen, I think Filoni and Favreau and others are trying to build a more solid bridge to those movies and redeem them like they have the prequels.

My theory is that we're going to see Thrawn and the witches create an army of zombies instead of clones like in the original Zahn books in order to try to bring the Empire back.  But of course it won't work and our heroes will somehow stop him, but not until there's been plenty of damage.  Basically any character who wasn't in the sequel movies like Ezra, Hera, Zeb, Mon Mothma, etc could be killed off.

Anyway, at least for now I'm excited to see where this goes and really, I wish I could have the chance to do something like this.  [sob]

Don't Get Reamed By Ream

I am appropriately putting this up on Insecure Writers Support Group Wednesday because I read about it on the IWSG site.  The author talked about using a site called Ream that's sort of like Wattpad crossed with Patreon--only far more difficult to set up than either of those.  Whenever I read about something new-ish like that or Ko-fi or Payhip I like to go see if I can give it a try because Amazon sucks and I would love to be mostly free of them.  Or at least to have another revenue stream.

I soon wished I hadn't bothered.  Trying to get anything going on Ream was just a debacle.  I don't know who designed it but it's not user friendly.  At all.

The first thing is in order to "launch" your account you have to choose whether to let them manage the sales tax/VAT or to do it yourself.  They take 10% of sales no matter what, but if you choose to let them handle the taxes you can't get paid until you have over $50, so good luck ever getting paid for most people.  Either way you have to sign up for a Stripe account, which I didn't feel like trying to do right then so I couldn't even "launch" an account.

I tried putting up a story just to see how it worked.  They have the option to load a file, buuuut it is a huge debacle.  First it demands you give it unfettered access to Google Drive.  I was using my Eric Filler account which I never really use for Drive, so OK, whatever, but there's no way I would give anyone total access to my regular Drive, where they could in theory rifle through my personal files that aren't related to stories.  That's a dealbreaker right there.

Anyway, the next problem is you can't use a PDF, MOBI, ePub, DOC, or anything common and sensible like that.  Nope, you've got to have a Google Docs file.  Which I write my rough drafts on Docs but I proofread and format them in Word before loading the finished product.  Still, at least I had some files to choose from so I picked one of my Payhip exclusive stories.  Buuuuut it won't load because you need chapter titles in headers.  But I haven't got any chapters!  I tried putting a header into the Google Docs file...and still got the message about headers.  Ugh, so forget about that.

Instead I just copied and pasted it into the site and that seemed to load.  But of course no one can read it since I haven't "launched" because I don't feel like going to sign up for Stripe.  I then haven't really gotten around to see what the "community" is like or anything.

I honestly don't know why they make it so difficult, especially with loading stories.  That whole thing about needing access to my Google Drive seems skeevy.  Why can't I just upload a file in a common format instead of Google Docs?  It's weird.

I thought about signing up with Stripe after PayPal took such a high percentage of my initial sales on Payhip, but it just seems like another hassle I don't really need at the moment and I have no idea if they'd want to charge monthly fees or anything like that.  I doubt I'd make enough money there for it to be worth the effort.

But you can poke around on there if you want.  Maybe your experience will be better.

Project Orpheus: Who Would You Save From Death?

 I was reading The Other Side blog a couple of weeks ago and he was talking about how in Baldur's Gate 3 one really popular character had to have her ending rewritten after popular outcry.  Then he and his son devised a campaign to rescue the character from Hell.  I had to look this up on Google/Wikipedia but it's like the Greek myth of Orpheus who went to Hades to fetch his wife, though like Lot's wife looked back when he wasn't supposed to.  I think there have been other similar stories, though I don't know them offhand.  Anyway, that explains the reference in the blog entry title.

It got me thinking about what fictional character I'd want to rescue from the afterlife.  It doesn't have to be traditional Christian Hell that would imply they were evil or something.  It could be anyone who died and stayed dead.  I mean I could say Optimus Prime in Transformers the Movie but he was brought back later on.  You could say Captain Kirk in Generations or Han Solo in The Force Awakens or Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi or something but they were all kinda old so they had a good run.  You might want to think of someone whose life was cut tragically short or short-ish.  Like Tony Stark or Wash in Firefly or Bambi's mom or Mufasa in The Lion King or something.

Thinking of Star Wars it'd be nice to rescue Amidala just so she could not die such a stupid death.  I mean the prequels weren't great but I think she deserves a little better than some ambiguous death during childbirth.  Though it'd be kind of dumb to save her just to kill her some other way.  But I suppose she wouldn't have to die again right away, right?

It would actually be really easy to do.  Just say that the droid medics gave her something to simulate death so Obi-Wan, the Emperor, and especially Vader would think she's dead.  And say that some other young woman who had died (or maybe even one of her bodyguards) was sent to Naboo to be buried.  In reality someone took her somewhere else for some reason to be determined.  Maybe do that for a season 2 of Obi-Wan Kenobi or something.  If Natalie Portman doesn't want to come back you could even recast it and just say she got some surgery to change her face.

All of TV, movie, and books is pretty broad.  I got thinking of my own stories.  What characters did I regret killing who I might want to bring back from the underworld? 

Plenty of characters died in Where You Belong.  Probably the most tragic was Frost's roommate Peter who got HIV from a tainted blood transfusion and killed himself when he found out.  That was pretty tragic.  It's not really one I regret.

There are a few deaths in the Scarlet Knight series.  Ian MacGregor dies at the end of the first book after the guilt of what he'd done caught up to him.  Aunt Gladys dies at the start of the first book after an early bout of Alzheimer's.  Percival Graves, the previous Scarlet Knight, dies in the third book to save Emma from the Black Dragoon.  

WOMBO AI drawing of young Sylvia

But probably the one I wound up regretting the most was killing off Sylvia Joubert, a witch who was a hairdresser and arms dealer.  In the first couple of books she was just sort of a foil to her sister Agnes who was a wise seamstress with some ability to see the future.  Sylvia was the gruff one better at fighting.  

It was in the fifth book where her character really took some turns and came into her own.  I developed a whole backstory of how she'd had an affair with Agnes's husband in the 18th Century, which had led to her having a daughter she gave away.  I eventually spun that into a prequel called Sisterhood.

But by then Sylvia had died at the end of the fifth one when she took an exploding reactor into space.  It was a tragic death and technically she was young at the time, though she had lived for centuries.  I did miss her in the next two stories, though her daughter Cecelia sort of filled in for her and she does appear after a fashion in a flashback to the 1940s in the sixth book, though she uses a different name so readers might not know who she is until near the end.  I brought back an alternate universe version of her in the eighth book who goes back to her world in the end.  So you can see how much I missed her that I kept using versions of her even after her death.  

Anyway, if she had survived I probably could have done more with her.  Maybe given her a spinoff series or something.  If anyone cared I could write a story to somehow bring her back.  Time travel or another alternate universe or something.  There are plenty of things to choose from in a superhero universe.

So there.  Who would you save?  Put it in the comments or write your own blog entry, why not?  That would be a good topic for one of those old-fashioned blogfest thingies.