don’t rly remember the convo (too lazy to look it up) but i was under the impression he didn’t like it at all versus “everyone else besides my fave sucks”
Walky’s only real argument against Ultra Car in that convo is that it got bad ratings and didn’t run very long. When I was a teen I used to think it was very important to remind people who loved “failed” projects that they didn’t end because of malicious action, they ended because capitalism, even though those convos were never productive. I assume Walky was being that kinda shithead–he’s a telecom major, after all.
Schpoonman
Isn’t capitalism itself malicious action?
Wack'd
I mean in the sense that shows seldom get cancelled because execs really hate them, they usually just get cancelled because they’re not making money, which tends to be correlated to how many people like them.
Tan
> which tends to be correlated to how many people like them
It is legitimately shocking how much that is not the case, especially when it comes to cartoons.
Schpoonman
Exactly. How many HBO Max shows were finished, had fan support, and then shot in the back of the head for short-term monetary gain?
Taffy
Still mad about Infinity Train.
Freemage
The streaming situation in general has gotten weird. It’s still capitalism, but it’s a result of perverse incentives (a new show that draws in new viewers is considered more valuable than a show that has reached max market penetration, if they think the watchers of the older show will still stick around as subscribers).
Wack'd
I mean the insanity of the HBO Max situation is still more to do with money than, like, Zaslov personally hating Infinity Train or whatever but uh, yeah, I stopped making that argument for a reason. At a certain point it just does not matter.
Daniel M Ball
Capitalism is based on consensual exchange, not coercive. under capitalism, if party A and Party B agree that a transaction take place, it takes place, if one party or the other refuses, it does not.
For MALICIOUS action, you need a third party that can dictate or change the terms and benefits from that role…such as when a government fixes pricing or permits and enforces a Monopoly or oligopoly using the power of a gun-to-the-head to force transactions that are not agreed to by both parties.
For example, forcing Scottish peasants off their land for a fraction of the value of that land to sell it to a Lord for his private estate, or you can look to the very socialist actions of the Soviet Union in the Ukraine (look up “Holodomor”), the destruction of the Aral Sea for Comrade Stalin’s cotton fields, or the confiscation of businesses by the Third Reich.
If you want true malice, it takes a socialist to carry it out.
Correct that socialism and communism are not the same. The first is what early communists called “lower stage communism” as being the ownership, either directly (worker cooperatives) or through representative republic (socialist states, which have historically themselves also hosted numerous worker cooperatives), of productive capital by the laboring public. The later is something that is uncertain if it will ever exist at large scale, but offers a guiding post that many political parties have adopted as a name as it is an aspirational goal: a classless, stateless society. While communism has existed around the world in largely familial or otherwise tight-knit societies, what many Marxists would call “primitive communism”, there is yet to be a state that has progressed to the point of “withering away”, as Lenin put it, in the post-industrial world, and likely never will be while reactionary forces and global capitalism exist.
I would also recommend not using vapid terms like “Stalinism” to describe early experimental socialist states. Any well Marxist-Leninist that has seriously studied the history of the USSR will regale you with a litany of failures of the early-mid 20th century if you approach them in good faith and not spouting easily-debunked century old propaganda. It would be like holding “lack of women’s suffrage” or “19th century chattel slavery” against modern capitalism (though there are some unresolved contradictions remaining relating to those, looking at you private prison industrial complex). I would also recommend reading up on the actual mechanisms of Soviet democracy, since many in the west are of the delusion that Stalin was an absolute autocratic monarch during the time he was General Secretary of the Party or Chairman of the Council. While these were not elections like we imagine in the west, with the billions of dollars spent in advertising and marketable personality commercials for party-selected nominees and a job so alien to the average public experience we can hardly conceptualize it, Stalin was appointed by a democratically elected representative assembly. The term “soviet” literally means “an elected local, district, or national council”, and the soviet democracy generally consisted of each tier from the directly publicly voted on local level appointing a representative to the next tier higher. Many countries still use something akin to this today, since it allows constituents to be more participatory in their local elections, and less a volatile spectacle during national elections. There are drawbacks, of course, but it was still a democratic republic that followed constitutional rules. Funnily enough, if you actually list the powers of office, the President of the USA has more autocratic powers than pretty much any communist party leader (unless you count the CIA-backed Pol Pot, which why would you?) This isn’t to say that a democratic society means there can be no oppression or failures of administration, especially in a place still rich in Reactionary bigotries from the Czarist era, but it’s a bit more complicated than saying “Stalin bad”, especially when you consider that if you actually read the history, Krushev’s “destalinization” policy was responsible for much of the blaming of Stalin for governmental failures often caused by factionalists like Krushev himself.
Oh, and I guess I should mention the “socialism” of social democracies that have become popular among the “left”. Production is still generally help privately and the Labor – Employer dialectic still exists in full, so it’s really just capitalism with some safety valves for the ruling class to stave off revolution. For countries like Sweden and such it’s also predicated on the exports of military goods and exploitation of the “third-world” or “global south” or whatever term you prefer for the victims of imperialism. For these reasons and more, I don’t think it’s uncontroversial to say the social democracy and welfare is ill-equipped to tackle the contradictions inherent to capitalism. Much like the Nazis, using the term socialism is just piggybacking off the actual populism of revolutionary movements, though at least most social democrats have the conscious to not immediately turn it towards genocide…most…current events in Gaza prove how tenuous a lifeline Liberal squeamish is, sadly.
Additionally, in real-world capitalist societies in the west, the coercive/malicious role that systematic bigotries have played and still play in banking and loans, the housing market, wage theft and business can not be overstated.
Regardless of what your Totally Non-Political™ economics professor wants you to believe, free market economic theory just about never holds up outside a social vacuum.
Agreed. And there are insidious bigotries related to positioning of brownsites and reckless disregard in the production and disposition of environmentally toxic materials. Western capitalism will kill its granny for a buck.
Ymbrael
I’m sorry but if you think the Nazi’s were socialist in a remotely Marxist or anti-capitalist sense you don’t have a very good grasp of the Labor – Employer dialectic and it’s contradictions (or of history in general). The fascist state was conceived as and operated as a tool to whip the lower classes in line to private capital interests. The word “privatization” was literally coined to describe the process of collaboration with capitalists in the Third Reich. Monopolization isn’t the antithesis of capitalism, it is it’s goal, or at least the self-evident consequence of the system’s incentives and definitional class structure (markets=/=capitalism, the bourgeois – proletariat dialectic does, the means of trade is merely an expected consequence of the historical evolution of debt as a social construct).
Also: everyone’s favorite instance of landed reactionaries (kulaks, who were definitionally capitalists, they held capital, and exploited wage workers for profit margins) refusing to cooperate with central authority for their own profit and personal gain by selling crops to the west or outright burning them instead of letting the “dirty Russians” redistribute them during a natural drought isn’t actually that great of an argument against central authority as historically illiterate Liberals and Reactionaries think it is. There are plenty of problems with the Soviet administration of the early-mid 20th century (which Stalin had popular support in the elected national Soviet assembly, but Soviet democracy is a whole other thing that people are usually poorly educated on, often deliberately by their historical curriculum) but it also existed 80 years ago. If you want a real dressing down of the Soviets, listen to a modern communist in good faith, we’ll generally be more open to criticizing historical failures of experimental states when we aren’t having to address the most vapid of propaganda, much of it dating back to Goebbels himself.
I didn’t want to get into this on this usually peaceful forum, but I also refuse to let such misguided Red-Bashing go unaddressed. Also, as people have pointed out already, the passive threat of poverty in a capitalist economy is both maintained with the very real threat of state violence (the state is not separate from capitalism, if anything it is the enforcer of it without which “private property” could not exist) are absolutely coercive. The myth of consensual exchange in capitalism exists purely in the realm of idealism, and I use that word explicitly in the philosophical sense, that is to say the anti-thesis of materialism. Lack of class consciousness does not make wage labor consensual, if anything it only makes the superstructure (media, institutions, culture, education, ideology) that reaffirms that productive base (means of production, natural resources, and the relations of labor to production) all the more insidious.
I’ll stop now, but let me assure you there is plenty of literature (hosted online and translated entirely free of charge in most cases) if you find any of my statements strange or involve words you aren’t super familiar with. I like to joke the reason Liberals and Reactionaries try to argue against “The Communist Manifesto” is because “Capital vol. I-III” is too long and dense for them to read without a secondary school teacher drilling them with weekly quizzes. It’s a shame too, even if it uses 19th century examples it’s entirely descriptive of Capitalism as a system, often in ways that seem almost supernaturally prescient. The little pamphlet that was handed out to workers in London in 1848 is a much easier windmill for our modern intellectual Don Quixotes, but is a relatively poor representation of the scientific rigor of Marxists.
Ymbrael
Typo in the third paragraph, when describing the coercive nature of capitalism I accidentally shifted one of the methods of the state being a tool of capitalism into the parentheses, resulting in some horrendous grammar. Should read something like:
“…the passive threat of poverty in a capitalist economy is both [a result of state ordained deeds and property rights to hoard production of goods and necessities, without which “private property” would not exist, and is] maintained with the very real threat of state violence [which is] absolutely coercive.”
While writing this correction I realized I should probably distinguish between “private property” and “personal property” since a lot of people unversed in Marxist literature might not make a distinction. “Private property” is used for profit-seeking production, as opposed to “personal property” which is your own property that you derive use-value from (tooth brush, home you live in, the device you are seeing this on, etc.). There is also “public property” and “worker cooperatives” where the labor force has some democratic input, directly or through something like a proletarian (worker focused) representative republic.
Psychie
I feel “it was cancelled before it really got a chance to hit it’s stride” is in fact a valid criticism. Granted, I also don’t recall the specifics of that convo so he could quite easily have been shitty about it. Like, no matter how good a failed project might have been, the fact that it was cut short in the first place means it’s not as good as it could have been if they were allowed to finish it. That in itself is a flaw, regardless of why it was cancelled, and a show of equal quality that was allowed to have more episodes and reach an actual conclusion (or even just peter out in quality until nobody cares that it was cancelled) will, in my opinion, be objectively better than the also really, really good show that was cut too soon, obviously through no fault of the show itself.
Bash
I actually think a show that peters out in quality is worse than one than got cancelled while it was still in it’s prime. There are less episodes, but what does exist is good. There’s no need to explain away the last two seasons.
Chris
(cough) (cough) thrones… (cough)
Max
(cough) (cough) Dexter (cough)
Freemage
I’ve heard more than one person in the last couple decades switch from “Damn FOX for never giving Firefly a proper chance,” to, “Thank God the FOX execs failed so badly they kept the show going on so long that Joss ruined it.”
Wack'd
Eh. Few shows are ever really finished, or even plan to be. The important thing is the show convinces you it told a complete, quality story.
McNitz
But the ones that do finish themselves out, like Breaking Bad, in my opinion do tend to noticeably better fulfill the “convince you it told a complete quality story” criteria.
Yes, I think that Ultra Car is meant to be Young Justice.
And Dorothy says it’s just better written than whatever Monkey Master is supposed to be.
Casi
monkey master in the DoA universe is probably akin to Teen Titans Go!
Casi
Nope, lets try again
Casi
maybe, lets roll again
Casi
last time
Clif
Did you roll better opinions? :–D
Ultracar may have been inspirational, but the sheer cartoon villainy of Monkey Master is unmatchable.
Wack'd
Yeah probably the show described as too smart and radical for normies is supposed to be [my favorite fandom] and the show described as kind of purile and dumb and pop-culture referencing is [my least favorite fandom]. All the evidence points in this direction
StClair
Just as well you never saw [show I liked], it would have been wasted on the likes of you.
Li
+1
I think it is especially unlikely that the “bad” show is supposed to be Teen Titans Go, as the closest they’ve ever gotten to expressing a negative opinion about TTG was Shortpacked!Lucy simultaneously going, “I don’t like Teen Titans Go, but I remember jerks being really mean to me for liking the old cartoon when I was a kid, and now the jerks being mean to kids are our age.”
Which, like. If I had to guess I’d say that’s where Willis lands themself: not liking Teen Titans Go very much, but recognizing that it was aimed at kids much younger than them, and having sympathy for the fans of it having to deal with a lot of grownups lashing out at them like it’s their fault Teen Titans got canceled.
Not only cancelled but cancelled in the middle of a tragic story arc.
Li
Okay? Again, not the fault of the kids who liked Teen Titans Go.
Wack'd
Teen Titans was not “cancelled in the middle of a tragic story arc”, the Terra finale was intended to tell the audience it’s okay to let go even though doing so is very sad.
Thag Simmons
Maybe in the broad sense that given how they were described Ultra-Car was probably more serialized while Dexter was more episodic and more comedic but I don’t think it’s the specific reference point
I don’t think they’re meant to be one to one with any real show. Ultra-Car has the Young Justice toy thing but it also has the Firefly thing of getting canned mid production on it’s first season. Given the premise and the gas leak season the best reference point for Dexter’s probably Pinky and the Brain
Azhrei Vep
I always visualize Dexter and Monkey Master as the unholy hybrid of Pinky and the Brain and PowerPuff Girls.
Em
Oh no, now I desperately want to watch that.
David DeLaney
… thou hast firmly cannoned my HEAD
–Dave, somewhere in paratime –
Kelibath
Young Justice was also canned too early, mainly because it (shock horror!) attracted as many female as male viewers if not slightly more. And of course that didn’t match their marketing strategies. Obviously the solution wasn’t to market more broadly, nooo.
thejeff
Dorothy said it was “smarter”, but that she liked Dexter better, for whatever that’s worth.
I don’t think it’s really intended as a parallel to anything other than Willis’s own works, but I like to think our universe’s equivalent would be My Life As A Teenage Robot. Trans themes + it got canceled due to low ratings
Nature versus nurture. She was raised by billionaires, even if the elder Ruttens were mostly fantastic parents they’re still slipping bits and pieces of their monstrousness into Carla’s development. She can be an asshole, but I wouldn’t fully write her off like that.
Dday
See, that’s not an irrational thing to say but it’s hard for me to process that idea while also remembering that she (okay, Ultra Car) was also exactly like this in the Walkyverse, where she was built by Joe and Rachel.
Clif
Joe and Rachel were mostly fantastic parents but still couldn’t help slipping bits and pieces of their monstrousness into Ultracar’s development.
Schpoonman
How’s that leather taste?
thejeff
It also couldn’t at all a defense mechanism tied to growing up trans in full public view.
It’s either just that she’s innately an asshole or it’s purely because she grew up rich.
Unclear if Booster means Walky’s being a good trans ally for helping Booster get out of a conversation or for putting up with Carla’s shenanigans in general.
Both but prolly meant helping them more than carla, otherwise booster could’ve said like “fine i’ll text my sister a picture of you and tell her to say hi to you next time in class”
278 thoughts on “Trans ally”
Ana Chronistic
hey, at least he says it’s SECOND best! lotta folks would vote it* WORST EVAR just for being Chinese
*generic inspecific “it” defined usually as a bilibili title
Angel
don’t rly remember the convo (too lazy to look it up) but i was under the impression he didn’t like it at all versus “everyone else besides my fave sucks”
Wack'd
Walky’s only real argument against Ultra Car in that convo is that it got bad ratings and didn’t run very long. When I was a teen I used to think it was very important to remind people who loved “failed” projects that they didn’t end because of malicious action, they ended because capitalism, even though those convos were never productive. I assume Walky was being that kinda shithead–he’s a telecom major, after all.
Schpoonman
Isn’t capitalism itself malicious action?
Wack'd
I mean in the sense that shows seldom get cancelled because execs really hate them, they usually just get cancelled because they’re not making money, which tends to be correlated to how many people like them.
Tan
> which tends to be correlated to how many people like them
It is legitimately shocking how much that is not the case, especially when it comes to cartoons.
Schpoonman
Exactly. How many HBO Max shows were finished, had fan support, and then shot in the back of the head for short-term monetary gain?
Taffy
Still mad about Infinity Train.
Freemage
The streaming situation in general has gotten weird. It’s still capitalism, but it’s a result of perverse incentives (a new show that draws in new viewers is considered more valuable than a show that has reached max market penetration, if they think the watchers of the older show will still stick around as subscribers).
Wack'd
I mean the insanity of the HBO Max situation is still more to do with money than, like, Zaslov personally hating Infinity Train or whatever but uh, yeah, I stopped making that argument for a reason. At a certain point it just does not matter.
Daniel M Ball
Capitalism is based on consensual exchange, not coercive. under capitalism, if party A and Party B agree that a transaction take place, it takes place, if one party or the other refuses, it does not.
For MALICIOUS action, you need a third party that can dictate or change the terms and benefits from that role…such as when a government fixes pricing or permits and enforces a Monopoly or oligopoly using the power of a gun-to-the-head to force transactions that are not agreed to by both parties.
For example, forcing Scottish peasants off their land for a fraction of the value of that land to sell it to a Lord for his private estate, or you can look to the very socialist actions of the Soviet Union in the Ukraine (look up “Holodomor”), the destruction of the Aral Sea for Comrade Stalin’s cotton fields, or the confiscation of businesses by the Third Reich.
If you want true malice, it takes a socialist to carry it out.
NGPZ
Re: true Malice,
Socialism ≠ Communism ≠ Stalinism ?
Ymbrael
Correct that socialism and communism are not the same. The first is what early communists called “lower stage communism” as being the ownership, either directly (worker cooperatives) or through representative republic (socialist states, which have historically themselves also hosted numerous worker cooperatives), of productive capital by the laboring public. The later is something that is uncertain if it will ever exist at large scale, but offers a guiding post that many political parties have adopted as a name as it is an aspirational goal: a classless, stateless society. While communism has existed around the world in largely familial or otherwise tight-knit societies, what many Marxists would call “primitive communism”, there is yet to be a state that has progressed to the point of “withering away”, as Lenin put it, in the post-industrial world, and likely never will be while reactionary forces and global capitalism exist.
I would also recommend not using vapid terms like “Stalinism” to describe early experimental socialist states. Any well Marxist-Leninist that has seriously studied the history of the USSR will regale you with a litany of failures of the early-mid 20th century if you approach them in good faith and not spouting easily-debunked century old propaganda. It would be like holding “lack of women’s suffrage” or “19th century chattel slavery” against modern capitalism (though there are some unresolved contradictions remaining relating to those, looking at you private prison industrial complex). I would also recommend reading up on the actual mechanisms of Soviet democracy, since many in the west are of the delusion that Stalin was an absolute autocratic monarch during the time he was General Secretary of the Party or Chairman of the Council. While these were not elections like we imagine in the west, with the billions of dollars spent in advertising and marketable personality commercials for party-selected nominees and a job so alien to the average public experience we can hardly conceptualize it, Stalin was appointed by a democratically elected representative assembly. The term “soviet” literally means “an elected local, district, or national council”, and the soviet democracy generally consisted of each tier from the directly publicly voted on local level appointing a representative to the next tier higher. Many countries still use something akin to this today, since it allows constituents to be more participatory in their local elections, and less a volatile spectacle during national elections. There are drawbacks, of course, but it was still a democratic republic that followed constitutional rules. Funnily enough, if you actually list the powers of office, the President of the USA has more autocratic powers than pretty much any communist party leader (unless you count the CIA-backed Pol Pot, which why would you?) This isn’t to say that a democratic society means there can be no oppression or failures of administration, especially in a place still rich in Reactionary bigotries from the Czarist era, but it’s a bit more complicated than saying “Stalin bad”, especially when you consider that if you actually read the history, Krushev’s “destalinization” policy was responsible for much of the blaming of Stalin for governmental failures often caused by factionalists like Krushev himself.
Oh, and I guess I should mention the “socialism” of social democracies that have become popular among the “left”. Production is still generally help privately and the Labor – Employer dialectic still exists in full, so it’s really just capitalism with some safety valves for the ruling class to stave off revolution. For countries like Sweden and such it’s also predicated on the exports of military goods and exploitation of the “third-world” or “global south” or whatever term you prefer for the victims of imperialism. For these reasons and more, I don’t think it’s uncontroversial to say the social democracy and welfare is ill-equipped to tackle the contradictions inherent to capitalism. Much like the Nazis, using the term socialism is just piggybacking off the actual populism of revolutionary movements, though at least most social democrats have the conscious to not immediately turn it towards genocide…most…current events in Gaza prove how tenuous a lifeline Liberal squeamish is, sadly.
NGPZ
Additionally, in real-world capitalist societies in the west, the coercive/malicious role that systematic bigotries have played and still play in banking and loans, the housing market, wage theft and business can not be overstated.
Regardless of what your Totally Non-Political™ economics professor wants you to believe, free market economic theory just about never holds up outside a social vacuum.
elebenty
Agreed. And there are insidious bigotries related to positioning of brownsites and reckless disregard in the production and disposition of environmentally toxic materials. Western capitalism will kill its granny for a buck.
Ymbrael
I’m sorry but if you think the Nazi’s were socialist in a remotely Marxist or anti-capitalist sense you don’t have a very good grasp of the Labor – Employer dialectic and it’s contradictions (or of history in general). The fascist state was conceived as and operated as a tool to whip the lower classes in line to private capital interests. The word “privatization” was literally coined to describe the process of collaboration with capitalists in the Third Reich. Monopolization isn’t the antithesis of capitalism, it is it’s goal, or at least the self-evident consequence of the system’s incentives and definitional class structure (markets=/=capitalism, the bourgeois – proletariat dialectic does, the means of trade is merely an expected consequence of the historical evolution of debt as a social construct).
Also: everyone’s favorite instance of landed reactionaries (kulaks, who were definitionally capitalists, they held capital, and exploited wage workers for profit margins) refusing to cooperate with central authority for their own profit and personal gain by selling crops to the west or outright burning them instead of letting the “dirty Russians” redistribute them during a natural drought isn’t actually that great of an argument against central authority as historically illiterate Liberals and Reactionaries think it is. There are plenty of problems with the Soviet administration of the early-mid 20th century (which Stalin had popular support in the elected national Soviet assembly, but Soviet democracy is a whole other thing that people are usually poorly educated on, often deliberately by their historical curriculum) but it also existed 80 years ago. If you want a real dressing down of the Soviets, listen to a modern communist in good faith, we’ll generally be more open to criticizing historical failures of experimental states when we aren’t having to address the most vapid of propaganda, much of it dating back to Goebbels himself.
I didn’t want to get into this on this usually peaceful forum, but I also refuse to let such misguided Red-Bashing go unaddressed. Also, as people have pointed out already, the passive threat of poverty in a capitalist economy is both maintained with the very real threat of state violence (the state is not separate from capitalism, if anything it is the enforcer of it without which “private property” could not exist) are absolutely coercive. The myth of consensual exchange in capitalism exists purely in the realm of idealism, and I use that word explicitly in the philosophical sense, that is to say the anti-thesis of materialism. Lack of class consciousness does not make wage labor consensual, if anything it only makes the superstructure (media, institutions, culture, education, ideology) that reaffirms that productive base (means of production, natural resources, and the relations of labor to production) all the more insidious.
I’ll stop now, but let me assure you there is plenty of literature (hosted online and translated entirely free of charge in most cases) if you find any of my statements strange or involve words you aren’t super familiar with. I like to joke the reason Liberals and Reactionaries try to argue against “The Communist Manifesto” is because “Capital vol. I-III” is too long and dense for them to read without a secondary school teacher drilling them with weekly quizzes. It’s a shame too, even if it uses 19th century examples it’s entirely descriptive of Capitalism as a system, often in ways that seem almost supernaturally prescient. The little pamphlet that was handed out to workers in London in 1848 is a much easier windmill for our modern intellectual Don Quixotes, but is a relatively poor representation of the scientific rigor of Marxists.
Ymbrael
Typo in the third paragraph, when describing the coercive nature of capitalism I accidentally shifted one of the methods of the state being a tool of capitalism into the parentheses, resulting in some horrendous grammar. Should read something like:
“…the passive threat of poverty in a capitalist economy is both [a result of state ordained deeds and property rights to hoard production of goods and necessities, without which “private property” would not exist, and is] maintained with the very real threat of state violence [which is] absolutely coercive.”
While writing this correction I realized I should probably distinguish between “private property” and “personal property” since a lot of people unversed in Marxist literature might not make a distinction. “Private property” is used for profit-seeking production, as opposed to “personal property” which is your own property that you derive use-value from (tooth brush, home you live in, the device you are seeing this on, etc.). There is also “public property” and “worker cooperatives” where the labor force has some democratic input, directly or through something like a proletarian (worker focused) representative republic.
Psychie
I feel “it was cancelled before it really got a chance to hit it’s stride” is in fact a valid criticism. Granted, I also don’t recall the specifics of that convo so he could quite easily have been shitty about it. Like, no matter how good a failed project might have been, the fact that it was cut short in the first place means it’s not as good as it could have been if they were allowed to finish it. That in itself is a flaw, regardless of why it was cancelled, and a show of equal quality that was allowed to have more episodes and reach an actual conclusion (or even just peter out in quality until nobody cares that it was cancelled) will, in my opinion, be objectively better than the also really, really good show that was cut too soon, obviously through no fault of the show itself.
Bash
I actually think a show that peters out in quality is worse than one than got cancelled while it was still in it’s prime. There are less episodes, but what does exist is good. There’s no need to explain away the last two seasons.
Chris
(cough) (cough) thrones… (cough)
Max
(cough) (cough) Dexter (cough)
Freemage
I’ve heard more than one person in the last couple decades switch from “Damn FOX for never giving Firefly a proper chance,” to, “Thank God the FOX execs failed so badly they kept the show going on so long that Joss ruined it.”
Wack'd
Eh. Few shows are ever really finished, or even plan to be. The important thing is the show convinces you it told a complete, quality story.
McNitz
But the ones that do finish themselves out, like Breaking Bad, in my opinion do tend to noticeably better fulfill the “convince you it told a complete quality story” criteria.
Opus the Poet
Babylon 5 {cough] [cough}
Doctor_Who
Walky: Ugh, fine, I’ll go light the Charlie Signal.
(big spotlight of a seahorse illuminates the clouds)
Mark
This bids fair to be the finest comment of the day.
David DeLaney
*Charlie sits up suddenly, concentric circles funnelling into his head, exclamation points above it*
–Dave, almost exactly like Havoc’s don’t
Marvelman
Which cartoon show?
Doctor_Who
Ultra Car, naturally.
tim gueguen
Ultracar is Carla’s fav, while Walky’s is Dexter and Monkey Master.
Coatl
oh, natural enemies, I suposse.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Carla sees it that way. Walky credits UC as being second best. That’s a bloody high ranking from someone accused of hating the show.
RassilonTDavros
The Ultra Car cartoon. There was a subplot about it back in 2016 (starts here). You’d be forgiven for forgetting it, seeing as 2016 was 75 years ago.
C.T. Phipps
Yes, I think that Ultra Car is meant to be Young Justice.
And Dorothy says it’s just better written than whatever Monkey Master is supposed to be.
Casi
monkey master in the DoA universe is probably akin to Teen Titans Go!
Casi
Nope, lets try again
Casi
maybe, lets roll again
Casi
last time
Clif
Did you roll better opinions? :–D
Ultracar may have been inspirational, but the sheer cartoon villainy of Monkey Master is unmatchable.
Wack'd
Yeah probably the show described as too smart and radical for normies is supposed to be [my favorite fandom] and the show described as kind of purile and dumb and pop-culture referencing is [my least favorite fandom]. All the evidence points in this direction
StClair
Just as well you never saw [show I liked], it would have been wasted on the likes of you.
Li
+1
I think it is especially unlikely that the “bad” show is supposed to be Teen Titans Go, as the closest they’ve ever gotten to expressing a negative opinion about TTG was Shortpacked!Lucy simultaneously going, “I don’t like Teen Titans Go, but I remember jerks being really mean to me for liking the old cartoon when I was a kid, and now the jerks being mean to kids are our age.”
Which, like. If I had to guess I’d say that’s where Willis lands themself: not liking Teen Titans Go very much, but recognizing that it was aimed at kids much younger than them, and having sympathy for the fans of it having to deal with a lot of grownups lashing out at them like it’s their fault Teen Titans got canceled.
Opus the Poet
Not only cancelled but cancelled in the middle of a tragic story arc.
Li
Okay? Again, not the fault of the kids who liked Teen Titans Go.
Wack'd
Teen Titans was not “cancelled in the middle of a tragic story arc”, the Terra finale was intended to tell the audience it’s okay to let go even though doing so is very sad.
Thag Simmons
Maybe in the broad sense that given how they were described Ultra-Car was probably more serialized while Dexter was more episodic and more comedic but I don’t think it’s the specific reference point
I don’t think they’re meant to be one to one with any real show. Ultra-Car has the Young Justice toy thing but it also has the Firefly thing of getting canned mid production on it’s first season. Given the premise and the gas leak season the best reference point for Dexter’s probably Pinky and the Brain
Azhrei Vep
I always visualize Dexter and Monkey Master as the unholy hybrid of Pinky and the Brain and PowerPuff Girls.
Em
Oh no, now I desperately want to watch that.
David DeLaney
… thou hast firmly cannoned my HEAD
–Dave, somewhere in paratime –
Kelibath
Young Justice was also canned too early, mainly because it (shock horror!) attracted as many female as male viewers if not slightly more. And of course that didn’t match their marketing strategies. Obviously the solution wasn’t to market more broadly, nooo.
thejeff
Dorothy said it was “smarter”, but that she liked Dexter better, for whatever that’s worth.
Kirt Dankmyer
I always assumed that Ultra Car was sort of a cartoon version of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercar_(TV_series)
Ari
I don’t think it’s really intended as a parallel to anything other than Willis’s own works, but I like to think our universe’s equivalent would be My Life As A Teenage Robot. Trans themes + it got canceled due to low ratings
Dday
Ahhh yes as I recall cell phones where still powered by coal, and Youtube videos were crafted the old fashioned way on the spinning wheel.
Mark
Interesting: I came here directly from a BBC article about batteries made from burnt waste cotton.
Clif
We’re they pro or con wasting and burning cotton?
David DeLaney
yes, that was well into the Before Times
–Dave, real good thing that particular Issue has not invaded the Walkywheres. it would be unbearable at 2 days per month
Jess
Walky’s expression in panel 4 is SUCH a mood
NGPZ
Re: Last Panel,
Wow Carla going straight for the jugular there 😮
HueSatLight
Still more interaction than Joe + Jennifer.
Schpoonman
Carla deserves love and support. It’s not her fault her parents are billionaires.
But goddamn, girl, come back once the sun’s fully up. It’s Sunday morning, right? Walky should at least be able to sleep in until Lucy posts up.
Durandal_1707
Being an insufferable narcissist kinda is her fault, though.
Schpoonman
Nature versus nurture. She was raised by billionaires, even if the elder Ruttens were mostly fantastic parents they’re still slipping bits and pieces of their monstrousness into Carla’s development. She can be an asshole, but I wouldn’t fully write her off like that.
Dday
See, that’s not an irrational thing to say but it’s hard for me to process that idea while also remembering that she (okay, Ultra Car) was also exactly like this in the Walkyverse, where she was built by Joe and Rachel.
Clif
Joe and Rachel were mostly fantastic parents but still couldn’t help slipping bits and pieces of their monstrousness into Ultracar’s development.
Schpoonman
How’s that leather taste?
thejeff
It also couldn’t at all a defense mechanism tied to growing up trans in full public view.
It’s either just that she’s innately an asshole or it’s purely because she grew up rich.
Hazel
Carla is the princess in a reincarnation webtoon and I love her for it.
nobodybasically
Unclear if Booster means Walky’s being a good trans ally for helping Booster get out of a conversation or for putting up with Carla’s shenanigans in general.
Schpoonman
Yes.
Dante
Both? /o/
Angel
Both but prolly meant helping them more than carla, otherwise booster could’ve said like “fine i’ll text my sister a picture of you and tell her to say hi to you next time in class”
Kelibath
Not sure if she’d remember that, or remember to check the text again to remember to do it, focus issues dependent… or if Carla would be fine with it
thejeff