BurnTheFlagg

I did a shallow dive into the Asian combat sports “giant” last Fall, highlighting three surface-level issues that might have turned away potential new fans. If you couldn’t tell by my lame pun, not much (if any) improvement has been made since last time.

Submission grappling remains the most disrespected discipline in the promotion. Yet again, a single grappling title fight in the Welterweight division has been promoted since the year began; but as the co-main event to a Fight Night on Prime Video (and Sky Sports) card with no other title fights. That’s down from the two grappling championship matches from last year; the other being a Flyweight title fight at ONE Fight Night 38 on 6 December.

Two grappling title fights. Three in-total since my previous article was published. In-fact, the Lightweight division hasn’t seen any title fights in over two years; that championship was supposed to be defended this past June.

As of writing, this year has seen:

5 MMA title fights at Flyweight, Heavyweight, Featherweight, Strawweight, and Bantamweight.

6 Kickboxing title fights at Men’s Strawweight , Lightweight, (interim) Flyweight, Bantamweight, Heavyweight, and Women’s Strawweight.

7 Muay Thai title fights at Featherweight, Men’s Flyweight (vacant), Bantamweight, Men’s Atomweight, Women’s Atomweight, Men’s Flyweight again, and (interim ) Strawweight.

The Women’s strawwieght MMA division is no more, but submission grappling as a whole has become a bigger afterthought. Losing an MMA division on top of that only solidifies the narrative that ONE Championship has all but become a stand-up striking league.

That’s not a bad thing, mind you. ONE is, by-far, the biggest global platform for Muay Thai. No other promotion in the sport provides the same reach or notability. If you’ve watched a professional Muay Thai title fight, it was most likely from an ONE card. ONE also provides an alternative to established kickboxing promotions K-1, Glory, and RISE. In fact, ONE has actively been poaching several names from K-1 in order to fuel their expansion into the Japanese market.

When it comes to mixed martial arts, it’s still more fun to shit on the UFC then it is to watch them. The Rizin Fighting Federation has become the UFC’s de facto alternative thanks to its fan-friendly matchmaking, consistent event quality, and improved accessibility; but their existence is still invisible to casual MMA fans. The Professional Fighters League has established regional branches in the Middle East and Africa, but the PFL’s domestic U.S flagship is no Bellator MMA. Speaking of Bellator, the man who made that brand a household name is getting back into the promotor role next year.

The question isn’t if ONE Championship should exit the global MMA (and grappling) market. The question is if the global MMA market still needs ONE Championship, or needs ONE Championship to do better.

Not every AVGN episode is perfect, "the reviewer" acknowledges that they are unfamiliar with Crash Bandicoot, and I was expecting too much due to being very passionate about the franchise during in my "gamer phase", but this was weak nonetheless. They don't even try to properly critique any of the post-Naughty Dog games besides Wrath of Cortex and Crash of the Titans (on Nintendo Wii no less).

They shit on Crash Bash for being a Mario Party clone, yet they don't elaborate beyond "the mini-games suck".

The way they describe Crash and Cortex working together in Crash Twinsanity (regarded as the best post-Naughty Dog game) sounds as if they ignored the plot entirely.

I can tell you from experience that Crash Bandicoot Purple's fatal flaw was focusing too much on near-unbeatable mini-games instead of simple platforming; the second Crash GBA game also suffers from the same flaw. Yet, if you go by this video, you'd think the problem with this Spyro the Dragon crossover was that it had "nothing" to do with Crash Bandicoot.

No. Fucking. Shit.

The reason why Purple doesn't look like a Crash game is because it's actually the alternate colour counterpart (a la Pokemon) to Spyro Orange. Basic research flushed down the fucking toilet to make room for an unnecessarily large amount of toilet humor (and pointless cutaway gags) that this episode didn't need; nor the guest appearance, since Caddicarus ultimately contributes very little to helping newbies understand the franchise.

What makes a good Nerd episode, in my opinion, is when it combines informative, factual commentary and (fair) critique with (usually low-brow) comedy. This is an example of an AVGN episode that leans too heavily on the latter because the former is too shallow, and if masturbation jokes aren't your thing....

Again, my frustration with this video is simply because of the fondness I have for Crash Bandicoot; I wouldn't give a shit otherwise. There have been worse AVGN episodes in this regard, usually due to a lack of research.

Godzilla (personal bias, particularly against the GB game), ROB the Robot (an ultra rare example of The Irate Gamer episode being better; thank fuck that hatedom died down), Transformers (based on the Japanese-only series), Superman (which had nothing to do with the movie), Superman 64 (so bad it needed a remake), the Tiger Game.Com segment (though, in-fairness, the console speaks for itself), Bugs Bunny's Birthday Bash ("too easy"), McKids, Mega Man and so on.

...and, depending on how you look at this, it's not who you think it is.

How the fuck did we go from the rise and fall of Adrien Broner, to some dime-a-dozen Kick loser leeching off what little relevancy he has left?

Bonus question: why don't we see these human garbage Kick streamers get beat up more often? It's the best content these pathetic wastes of life will ever create.

S9 had a lot less shitty episodes than S8, which means S3 & S7 are still the worst.

Netflix has cancelled as many great animations as they have renewed other shows for one season too many (looking at you, Paradise PD). They spend billions of dollars on a million originals, and tax subscribers with endless price hikes (among other things) so they can afford them all — only to give little-to-no promotion to half of them, while cancelling the other half. It’s a waste of time, and it’s a waste of money.

Disney, on the flip side, you’d think would do a better job. Yet here we are, seven years after the acquisition of 21st Century Fox, and the best Disney+ and Hulu could do was Marvel shows, Star Wars shows, Fox sitcom revivals, and sequels to The Amazing World of Gumball and Adventure Time that Cartoon Network’s animation-hating corporate owners wanted nothing to do with.

Say what you will about Amazon as a corporation, but there is one element about its services that I’ve seen very few people talk about: Prime Video is the best streaming service you’re not watching when it comes to animation. You already know what shows in-particular I’m talking about; I don’t even need to say their names. So, with The Ghost in the Shell now streaming worldwide, it’s time to not only pay our respects to Prime Video; but to spotlight some of the other shows the platform has given us.

Not only did New Japan Pro Wrestling put (one of) their secondary title(s), the IWGP Global Heavyweight Championship, on someone not even the Japanese crowd wanted; they had him beat the previous champion in the latter's VERY FIRST DEFENSE via a three-way match.

They then made their new champion look like a chump by having a literal, in-universe, turncoat who jumped ship to All Elite Wrestling attack him after the match. 23 DAYS LATER, that same turncoat beats the champion and wins the title.

The Wolf vs House of Torture feud was next level awful (as with ANYTHING involving H.O.T. G.A.R.B.A.G.E), but this is proof that NJPW creative still has a fetish for hot potato title runs; especially if it will put over AEW. It's painfully obvious by now that retiring the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship and bringing back the IWGP Heavyweight Championship was a publicity stunt to trick overseas fans into thinking that NJPW was changing for the better; rather than addressing still-existing problems.

What the "Forbidden Door" has done to NJPW is no better than the sorry state of TNA and their partnership with WWE. The same WWE that just did THAT on Raw the same night.

Every promotion in CMLL's alliance is a fucking joke. AEW is an overrated dumpster fire that ruins every pro wrestling company that comes into its orbit (*looks at Stardom*), and ROH (case and point) is its glorified C-show. MLW is dogshit, has been dogshit since COVID, and will always be dogshit. And RevPro isn't even the best wrestling company in Europe.

This is the answer to the WWE / AAA / TNA alliance?

Stop me if you've seen this before.

Trailer music plays in the background.

Music cuts off before someone makes a quip or does something.

Repeat steps one and two.

Intense montage of action building to another music cut off and someone makes a quip or does something. Bonus points if it, or the entire trailer, is set to a song.

Title drop.

One random clip for the road.

Modern trailers and TV promos are so unoriginal. They don't do anything to stand out, let alone get me interested in whatever media they're trying to promote. As soon as someone does a creatively fresh trailer that goes viral, it too gets copied to oblivion.

Case and point: the trailer for Tubi's new adult animated series, Breaking Bear.

Try not to react challenge: succeeded

“Great! Just what the internet needs: another rant about MuchMusic!”

Give credit where credit is due: reports of MuchMusic’s death are greatly exaggerated by the bias-peddling, lazy bloggers and clickbait content farm writers of the internet. Probably the same stupid Canadians who also believe Teletoon died in 2023.

We’re coming up to 5 years since Canada’s once-iconic music station and youth entertainment brand pivoted to social media via TikTok on 7 July 2021. MuchMusic now boasts being “the most-followed Canadian entertainment brand.” I already gave owner Bell Media their flowers on Tumblr as I was covering the recent rebirth of former corporate sibling and French counterpart MusiquePlus (now owned by Remstar) on 11 June 2026 using the exact same strategy as Bell.

The majority of MuchMusic’s audience doesn’t watch traditional television, as “much” as it is a broken record at this point to remind you. Relaunching the brand across the channel’s preexisting social media accounts and a brand new TikTok account — a social media network rooted in music — was brilliant. No paywalls, no geo-blocking, no FOMO. If you can watch YouTube and TikTok, you can watch MuchMusic right now. In an era where streaming television has become so fragmented, MuchMusic is one of the few legacy brands whose content can be accessed on any and every platform.

Compare and contrast the misfired relaunch of Comcast’s G4 TV a few years ago.

We got this...

The worst part?

Canadian animation wasn't any better.

Neither was UK animation

Neither was Australian animation

P.S

I know I'm late to the party, but that's because I stopped following the miserable, incoherent mess of a story Chainsaw Man had become a long time ago. When you've read as many shitty manga as I have, or watched their equally-shitty anime adaptations, you start to notice a few familiar flags.

Cool character designs, crap characters.

Dark settings that never get better.

Overdone cliches that don't improve the plot, nor rewards the invested with a satisfying payoff.

All of the above were just from Owari no Seraph of the End alone, but damn-near every bad manga or light novel turned anime series suffers from the exact same problems.

In fairness, it's a general rule of thumb that the more "popular" a series is with English-speaking geeks, the more said geeks will feel disappointed with its ending. These are the same losers who get too invested in "the lore" instead of the actual plot, and will become upset when a major plot point ruins their bullshit fan theories.

Part of me looks forward to the overblown backlash Gooseworx will receive after The Amazing Digital Circus' final episode premieres on YouTube. Part of me hopes I won't be part of the inevitable angry mob. I digress.

Hating the endings to Attack on Titan (a miserable post-apocalyptic fantasy drama) and Jujitsu Kaisen is one thing, but anyone who had a problem with My Hero Academia's endgame didn't read enough bad DC and Marvel comic books. And this is coming from someone who absolutely hated the final fate of Himiko Toga.

Nutjobs would have you believe in some "curse" affecting popular shonen manga. The reality is shonen manga, light novels, and their anime adaptations are the Japanese equivalent of any given trashy teen drama. At best, the "fans" of such media are already too juvenile and immature to truly understand the themes of whatever the fuck they were obsessed with.

"Overrated no Ko", on the other hand...

It was vindication for yours truly when I learned of the backlash to Oshi no Ko's ending. You'd think so-called "otaku" would've learned their lesson after Erased / Boku dake ga Inai Machi.

Alas, the reincarnation bandwagon hadn't yet lost steam when the anime version of this sorry excuse for seinen became a mainstream success. Neither OnK's murder mystery plot, nor its commentary on the dark side of the Japanese idol industry, needed to be put in the overdone "starting again in a new life" box. It showed a lack of confidence on the part of the author that they would pigeon-hole their story into the reincarnation / isekai genre. Sure enough, the unneeded supernatural bullshit played a role in the series' controversial ending.

By now, you should recognize some reoccurring themes and warning signs to know a piece of shit literature or bad anime series. Chainsaw Man's downfall boils down to fans getting too attached to certain characters, and the author becoming too good at ruining their own creation to notice. Chainsaw Man exhibited such patterns that were no different to most of the "literature" I've talked about in this post.

The real tragedy of Chainsaw Man, however, was that it ultimately fell into the same trap as Dragon Ball and Bleach before it by ending on a story arc that was inferior to what came before it. The key difference is that the Majin Buu saga and the Thousand Year Blood War still have their fans; the anime version of the latter wouldn't even exist otherwise. Part 2 of Chainsaw Man started off weak, progressively got worse, and made fans regret picking up the series in the first place by the end of it.

Had Chainsaw Man began and ended with its 97-chapter "Public Safety Saga", and maybe a few epilogues, it would've been considered a cult classic.

I have no doubt in my mind that other overrated "otaku bait" like Re:Zero and Spy X Family will meet the same fate. I'd like to believe the sudden drop-off in popularity for Go, Go Loser Ranger Reject and Kaiju No. 8 in the English-speaking world is a sign that some nerds are getting wise to the cookie-cutter crap being churned out by the "production committees" (for lack of a more accurate scapegoat). I'd say it's for the best given the ongoing discussion of too much anime being produced to meet unreasonable demands at the expense of fostering (even more) toxic work environments; all of which leads to said anime being of low-quality.

In both cases, the bad hand dealt to J.C. Staff that lead to the poorly-received second and third seasons of One Punch Man's anime was a blessing in disguise. Not only did the controversy highlight a serious issue in the Japanese anime industry, it killed the popularity of a once-promising superhero spoof turned bland, generic battle manga / webcomic.

The Americanization of what was already an American sport?

The Americanization of the Canadian version of the NFL?

The Americanization of the NFL's Canadian rip-off?

The Americanization of the NFL's Canadian bootleg?

Canadians are so fucking stupid.

The only time anyone should be complaining about the Americanization of football is in-regards to the FIFA World Cup needing a stupid concert on top of THREE opening ceremonies and a goddamn halftime show.

...only to then discover the Firefox forks (Waterfox and LibreWolf) that might actually be better than the original web browser.

Especially if you're an AIphobic caveman.

Also, LadyBird might finally become a thing this year.

Speaking of Reddit, the Bluesky subreddit's response was as stupid as you thought it would be. From questioning the "popularity" of Twitter, to bitching about how Bluesky doesn't need millions of users.

By that logic, there's nothing wrong with Tumblr being an afterthought because what's left of its userbase (myself included) after the porn ban aren't bots or Nazis.

You either die as a crappy pirate site, or live long enough to become a shitty streaming service.

Yes, I know the initial broadcast of any given anime could be censored on Japanese television. Are you aware of the fucking date in this screenshot? Multiple mergers, acquisitions, and corporate reshufflings yet "Crunchymation" couldn't find time to make sure all of their content was uncensored before they charged customers for it?

THIS is (almost) the kind of bullshit that birthed the infamous One Piece gentleman's agreement after what 4Kids did to the anime. I can't believe I'm saying this, but fuck Crunchyroll.

This is why my "capitalist currency" is exclusive to Netflix Anime and Prime Video. Never mind that both services have far better animated originals and exclusives than the overrated, overhyped, cookie-cutter garbage that Crunchyroll is forced to work with every other season.

Meanwhile, depending on where you live, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is not only streaming FOR FREE on Tubi; it's streaming UNCUT. As far as "simulcasts" (why are we still calling them that?) go, there's also BiliBili, Ani-One, Muse, and It's Anime by REMOW for more flexible options.

Only once you've exhausted the dozens of legal platforms for watching anime do you resort to piracy. Of course, If said anime was never released (uncut) outside Japan, common sense dictates that "the middle man" has lost all rights to complain about money they clearly don't want.

Otherwise: please support the official release.

Ouroboros.

Boomers recall it as the mark of a homunculus in Fullmetal Alchemist.

When you’ve been covering global broadcast industries as long as I have, this symbol becomes a perfect representation of how corporations blinded by greed have continually shot themselves in the foot chasing short-term gain at the expense of causing long-term harm to others. There’s no better example of this than the hopeless, misguided efforts of legacy media to compete with the Big Tech streaming companies.

I’ve already talked at length about how Paramount Skydance / Paramount Global / ViacomCBS / Viacom II (The “original” Viacom being the company formally known as CBS Corporation) and Warner Bros Discovery / AT&T’s WarnerMedia have tried to compete with Netflix. What they’ve done instead over the past six years was tarnish Hollywood, ruin American television, create an ocean of pink slips, and poetically, drive themselves into the ground. But because suits never learn, Paramount & WBD are reaching the finish line of a merger with each other. Not just another mega-merger that no one except the rich and stupid asked for, but a merger with the backing of the human garbage America re-elected as president, and the usual suspects of human rights violations in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

If that doesn’t embody what a horrible country the United States of America is, nothing will. Fortunately, America’s other legacy media giants have given the rest the world a few reasons to at least tolerate them...