#indecisive-grenadier

I feel like they added the Marron scenes because they didn’t have any better options.

At first, it sort of makes sense, because Marron had been introduced somewhat recently, but then I realized that I wasn’t taking the three-year gap into account.    So it seems weird that Marron would still be carrying a torch after so long.   It’s kind of satisfying in a way for Krillin, but it’s weird. 

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized Toei didn’t have a lot of other choices for filler material.   All the major characters were on deck for the manga, leaving Roshi, Chaiotzu, and Oolong at Kame House.  I guess they could have brought back Launch, but it would have been just as awkward.    She would have barged in looking for Tien, puttered around for a while, then sneezed a few times and left.  

This is the same reason why there’s so many flashbacks and pointless scenes on Earth during the tail end of the Frieza Saga.    Everybody is on Earth, far removed from the main action, and they have nothing else to do in such a short span of time, so they ended up reflecting on everything that had happened up to that time.   They probably didn’t want to do it like that, but they had to work within the time frame of the manga storyline, and fit this stuff in around the production schedule.   

And this is why the filler gets such a hard time among the fandom, but I’ve always been impressed with how well Toei did whenever they had a big enough gap to tell a real story.   The Garlic Junior Saga worked pretty well because they had a full cast of characters to work with, and no canon to get in the way of the side story.   “Trouble on Arlia” worked because it was basically a bottle show.    Vegeta and Nappa wouldn’t be doing anything else for months, and Arlia was never seen before or after, so they had free rein to do whatever they wanted in that story.   

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner! I’m very glad you like my content, and I do feel bad I haven’t posted much lately. It’s been hard to have enough energy, social or otherwise, to do pretty much anything. I'm afraid I haven't heard that story before but I can get the jist of it. XD I can't say I'm an expert, but I do feel like there's quite a few sources behind the trend of "deep," angsty, bitter narratives nowadays.For one thing, a lot of the young up-and-coming writers, directors, et cetera, were growing up during the 1990s, a decade with a good deal of political turmoil and punctuated by things like the grunge era, and a background hum of "the world could end in a few years and we're all going to die." Disaffected teenagers, bitter about their parents decisions and feeling like they have very little control over their lives often grow up into bitter, angry adults, and thus produce bitter, angry media. Which ties into the nostalgic resurgance of many IPs from the 80's and 90's, many of which end up feeling very tonally different from the shows or movies these people watched as kids. For example, the big budget Transformers films which, as a whole, seem to have a bitter, cynical perspective of the entire cast (with the possible exception of making the military look good.) Or the remakes of horror classics like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween, where the protagonists are rude and argumentative or just plain unlikable, surrounded by casts of one note characters who don't really exist as people in the context of the story and are just there to be cannon fodder whose deaths have no impact because they aren't written as human beings. (There are of course remakes or nostalgic-themed media that DON'T wallow in bitterness, like the recent remake of It or Stranger things, but those bring their own baggage with them more often than not.)

In my experience, that cynical attitude also tends to come with people trying to be extremely Grown Up, usually when they aren't really. I've seen a great many people over the years, male and female, especially during their teenage years, try very hard to prove just how mature they are by showing off all the gritty, dark stories they like. They see optimism and hope as being something immature, something only aimed at kids, and they make fun of people who still like it after a certain age. That prickly, angry exterior is designed as a protection against being judged by their peers, and more often than not if you were to dig a bit, you'd find a sad, scared kid underneath. And honestly I was a pretty prickly teenager myself who didn't want to admit to people that she liked things that were "just for kids," but over time I've learned just how freeing it can be to put on a silly, self-indulgant movie or tv show and enjoy myself (and tell that inner critic to shut the heck up for once. XD) To use one of my favorite C. S. Lewis quotes:

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

I also think those attitudes tend to be reflections of the way the world is overall. We're so much more connected these days, and news is literally only a few key presses or mouse clicks away. Or, in some cases like on Tumblr or Facebook, just a brief scroll down, whether you wanted to see it or not. So we end up being flooded by wave after wave of depressing stories, political worries, doom and gloom predictions and sometimes outright lies. Its tiring, to say the least, and because the fear sells so much better, we see precious little uplifting stories to balance out the depressing ones. As a result, our media begins to reflect this as well. When the writers are scared and surrounded by depressing things, it's easy to work that into a story.

My hopes are still not high. Honestly, Power Rangers (with the possible exception of Dino Charge which was at least an interesting show, though I didn’t finish it) has been going so far downhill since RPM. Saban spent nearly a decade running the series into the ground by treating it as a show exclusively for 5-year-olds from 1993 without realizing that tastes and expectations for childrens’ shows have changed. And as for Hasbro, well hopefully they will do okay but as I’ve said, I’m not holding my breath. I’m glad they’re adapting Go-Busters, but at the same time I’ll reserve judgement on the finished product until it’s, well, finished.

XD Gosh, I still absolutely love the Cluefinders. I think I found the series right as I should have been growing out of it, around 6th grade, but I fell in love with the stories and characters and stuff so much that I still play the games on occasion to this day (plus it helps with thinking skills so, yay!) Fun fact, these games are the first ones I really remember doing fanart (and fanfiction) of, back in the ancient, ancient year of 2001. (And all of my old stuff is lost, and for good reason because it was garbage tbh.)

Personal favorite was always 4th grade because of the Egyptian theme, and the superhero stuff (and Charles Martinet as Alistair Loveless, eating literally all the scenery with his performance). I played the 6th grade game a lot even though it was the one game that didn’t feature Joni as the main protagonist (she’s literally the reason I love purple to this day), but my second favorite is probably the Search and Solve adventures (the one with the haunted amusement park.)

Oh man, let’s see. 3rd grade you know already so I’ll skip it.

4th grade has the kids going to Egypt to assist with the opening of a newly discovered tomb, only for the the professor to disappear shortly afterwards along with the contents of the tomb, and they have to hunt down not only him but a museum representative who’s trying to summon the god Set and obtain immense power. It’s kind of the black sheep of the games since you play the whole team at one time and Socrates the dog makes his only appearance, but the game’s overall campy and fun and has a much more supernatural vibe than the others in the series.

Math Adventures (it technically was released between 4th and 5th so I’ll put it here) has the kids journeying to the Himalayas to help a village of people recover a bunch of treasures that the locals claim were stolen by yeti, but the real culprit might be a bit more mundane than they think. This one was notoriously hard in its original release, and came with an updated re-release a few years later that cut out several supernatural elements in the story (like Laptrap gaining psychic abilities for finding clues) and completely re-done graphics. I personally think the original release has more meat to the story but the re-release is actually playable with the logic puzzles so eh.

5th grade brings a completely revamped set of character designs and sees them on an expedition in the pacific on Leslie’s grandfather’s ship, but a freak tsunami crashes the ship onto an island and everyone but Joni and Santiago are missing (though Leslie and Owen are just a call away at all times.) It’s a pretty freaky mystery as they explore both the surface of the island and the water below in search of their friends and the crew. I won’t spoil the surprise twist though. ;)

6th grade starts with Joni and Santiago getting sucked into the ground after venturing into a neighbor’s overgrown backyard after a lost frisbee, leaving you to play as Owen and Leslie for a change as you venture down into dark tunnels and caves filled with sentient plants who are preparing for war with the humans in response to the continuing pollution of the water supply in the area.

Reading Adventures (or the Mystery of the Missing Amulet as it was later branded) has the kids called to look in on a crashed meteorite in northern California, whereupon Joni promptly touches the dang thing and gets all four of them transported to an alien planet to help a beautiful princess save her people and defeat an evil witch. This marked the start of Joni and Owen being teamed up, with Santiago and Leslie becoming the designated hostages. It was a minor story that was added to a lot of the graded games as a bonus, and honestly I’d say it shows in the gameplay and graphics? It always felt a touch rushed to me. 

Search and Solve Adventures (or the Haunted Amusement Park) was the final game with the original cast, and has the kids heading out to an abandoned amusement park after dark to rescue a man trapped on one of the rides, but as they dig deeper they find someone’s been using the state-of-the-art animatronics in the park for nefarious purposes.

I’m lothe to include The Incredible Toy Store adventure, but to maybe save you the pain of the new voices here’s what I remember of the plot. The Cluefinders are heading to a huge new toy store in San Fransisco but when Leslie and Santiago go on ahead into the building, Owen and Joni get shrunk and end up inside the toy store and are forced to find a way to un-shrink themselves as well as helping Leslie and Santiago get to the top floor to rescue them. It’s honestly a pretty dull plot from what I remember, hampered by the bad voice cast and strays far, far away from the usual format (and the puzzles aren’t even that fun either.) And the Mystery Mansion Arcade bonus disc just has them captured by previous villains and forced to solve dangerous puzzles to escape their traps. It’s pointless and not very well made.

;) I saw that too! I love the idea personally. And like, as much as it is super tempting to have the two of them teamed up as the Mean counselors, there’s also part of me that loves the idea that the two of them just straight up can’t STAND each other for some reason or other, and do as much sniping at each other as they do as a team to other people.

I got the impression from Episode 131 that those six universes were put to the same test as the ones we saw in the Tournament of Power, and the winning team failed the test. 

I mean, it may not have been an eighty-person battle royal that time, but the finale made it clear that the King of Everything isn’t as capricious as his reputation suggests.   He erased the Future Blunks timeline because Zamasu had already destroyed it.    He erased the universes who lost the tournament, but only to see if the winning team would wish them back.   So if there really were six other universes beyond the dozen we know of, then he must have had a good reason to erase them.   The lower gods just don’t know what it was.