Okay, so on Youtube, Wisecrack made a video discussing what went wrong with the execution of Batman v Superman and they did a good job analyzing what went wrong from a theming and philosophical standpoint. I'll link it here in case you haven't seen it yet because it's a good video from a channel that really does deserve every bit of support it gets. This post is not going to be talking about that, however.
What actually spawned today's topic is a comment thread I found on that video starting with a guy comparing Batman v Superman to the Shining and 2001 and that it's more talked about than Captain America: Civil War. Plenty of points were made about why Civil War is not talked about anymore but, as it stands, I saw enough comments that I wanted to reply to and the chain was too long to be able to add anything substantial to it so I'd like to discuss it here where I can discuss my points more in-depth and with more context than a simple reply would need.
The main subject of this post is not going to be about Batman v Superman and SAO specifically. More over, it's actually going to be more about why certain bad pieces of entertainment are talked about more than a lot of good ones and why certain bad ones are not talked about because that's a particular rebuttal I want to refute.
So first and foremost, one of the main responses to the whole "Batman v Superman vs Civil War" thing had a number of reasons posited, such as Marvel shoving out so many movies that Civil War got knocked down in the stampede and that Batman v Superman had themes that could be discussed while the Marvel Movies don't. However, one of the most pertinent things that I think is the main reason movies like this are talked about specifically in relation to channels like Wisecrack and Mother's Basement, is because you can learn a lot more from a failure than you can from a success. A complete failure has a lot more to be talked about than a decent success does and even if a failure and success are equal in absolute value (the distance from the number 0, in math terms) you still learn more from the failure than you do from the success.
Mother's Basement criticizes Sword Art Online as much as he does, not just because he hates it, although that's probably a big factor, but also because SAO has a lot of specific failures that are common in a lot of other bad anime of a similar type and SAO can be used as a medium to talk about what not to do in a way that anybody will be able to recognize when examples are brought up.
SAO's various problems are problems that many bad anime tend to have, specifically in the writing, characterization, and cinematography departments. And the games within the show of Sword Art Online are also a demonstration of how not to design a game as well without needing to play something like Sonic '06. While Mother's Basement may argue that both are equally bad, Sonic '06 is bad because of all of the technical problems, problems that could make a somewhat above average game if they eventually got patched out. SAO's game design problems are specifically about game design choices because, as far as we can tell, there aren't really any notable glitches or bugs in any of these games so the problems with them are going to have to be with how the games are designed, which is easier to see in a game like SAO which is polished to perfection but is poorly designed in the first place than in a game like Sonic '06 where, whether the game design is good or bad, you'd have to look past all the technical problems first before you can discern which it is and justify that perspective.
However, just being catastrophically bad isn't the only part of the equation. One person brought up the argument that Batman v Superman is more talked about because it's so much worse than Civil War and one of the youtube commentors brought up that, if that is true, Batman & Robin should be the most talked about movie ever since it's far worse than Batman v. Superman and nobody really remembers it for anything other than the nipples on the batsuit.
While that rebuttal does make an interesting point, it fails to see the entire picture, likely because the initial point he was refuting didn't reflect the entire picture. Yes, it is true that Batman v Superman is talked about a lot more than Batman & Robin. However, there's a very clear difference between these two movies that has determined this: Batman v. Superman was ambitious, while Batman & Robin was not. What I mean by that is that Batman v Superman tried to be great in so many areas and failed to execute many of them well, while Batman & Robin never wanted to be anything more than what it was.
Batman & Robin was not trying to be the best DC movie ever or even the best Batman movie ever. Batman & Robin was so heavily focused on marketing, merchandising, and generally selling out that it was clear that making money off of kids who can manipulate their parents was their biggest priority. Batman v Superman, on the other hand, had a lot it wanted to achieve but just didn't achieve much of that ambition.
All of this may sound obvious. It may be obvious to everyone reading this that these two movies had different priorities without me ever having to state it. However, the fact that this is obvious underlies the real core of the issue: Batman v Superman is a bigger failure than Batman & Robin, not because it was a worse movie, because it's not, but because it had a lot more it wanted to achieve and didn't get as far as it wanted to.
In this way, comparing Batman v Superman to Batman & Robin is comparing apples and oranges. Batman v Superman had a lot it wanted to achieve and didn't quite make it while Batman & Robin clearly wanted to settle and make easy money off of the marketing.
Herein lies the issue: Batman v Superman failed because it tried and didn't succeed, whereas Batman & Robin failed because it didn't try at all. You can learn more from a failure that tried to be successful than you can from a failure that never wanted to be anything more than just that.
Think of it like in an action anime like My Hero Academia or Fate/Zero. Bakugo could learn from his failure with the Team exercise because he lost while trying to win. However, Mineta wouldn't be able to learn much from his failures because he never really tries all that hard.
Likewise, in Fate/Zero, it's fun to talk about the battle between Saber and Lancer because that fight was trying to be flashy and tactical at the same time. However, there's not really much to learn from Tokiomi's victory over Kariya other than insects are weak to fire.
Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad are talked about because they tried so hard and failed a bit too much while movies like Batman & Robin didn't try and because of that didn't really move from their starting position all that much.
Of course, there will eventually come a time where things like SAO and BvS will have their wells completely tapped and there will be nothing new left to say. SAO was like that before Ordinal Scale came out if you didn't include the design of the in-universe games, which Mother's Basement would, but eventually a time will come where everything that can be said has been said and no more interesting conversations can be had about it.
But even if the wells run dry, I still advise those in the movie, TV, and gaming business to learn from all of these discussions so that you don't make the same mistakes that all this stuff does.
Now, before I wrap this up, I want to go ahead and help you get started on your path of designing good movies, tv shows, anime, and video games by presenting you with some Youtube channels that have a lot of videos with a lot of content. No, I'm not being sponsored, and I'm not being paid in any way for these shoutouts, these are just channels that I personally have learned quite a bit from and would like to direct you toward.
If you want to learn more about designing Movies with Philosophical underpinnings you can use as inspiration, check out the aforementioned Wisecrack. They mostly tackle philosophy and book readings but they also have a series dedicated to fixing movies that could've been a lot better.
Wisecrack
If you want to learn more about cinematography, I am going to recommend the Film Theorists, not for the film theories, although those can be interesting but for the particular series that takes place on that channel called Frame-by-Frame, which discusses how you can use camera and perspective tricks, as well as other visual tricks to your advantage to convey certain things in your films.
The Film Theorists
If you want to learn more about how to build your own anime, I recommend the aforementioned Mother's Basement because, while he does have his fair-share of haters, many of them hate him because he hates Sword Art Online and not because any of his actual content is bad. While he does have a very small number of gaming videos, his channel is primarily about Anime and how you can construct an anime so his videos should help you.
Mother's Basement
And, if you want Game Design videos, to be honest, I don't have a particularly large amount of channels that are all about game design. While I do have a large number of videos I watch for Game Design and Game Tutorials, I usually do so from random Youtube searches rather than any particular channel which would have anything like that. That said, Mark Brown and his series Game Maker's Toolkit are incredibly useful for general game design ideas that can get your mind flowing. I can't say all of his videos have sparked creativity in me but his video on music design did get me thinking more about music implementation in my own games so that's something at least.
Mark Brown
Much like Mark Brown, Turbo Button does very little talking about the functionality of games and is more about general game design. However, while Mark Brown is very focused on general overviews for all kinds of games, Turbo Button is a lot more about doing a single video on a given topic and expanding on it as much as possible, especially in relation to single games that do things well or poorly. He also focuses a lot more on games that have a lot of action. Though he has done a number of videos on stealth and platforming games, the majority of his best videos are on First Person Shooters like Titan Fall 2 and Wolfenstein: The New Order or on Action Games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Nioh, and Darksiders 2. Between these two people, you should find something useful for your own Game Design learning.
Turbo Button
As for a channel dedicated to Game Design Tutorials, as in how to make specific functionality in a game or game engine, I find most of those in random Youtube searches because far too many youtube channels either used to make videos on it and don't anymore or have only started recently and I simply don't know about them until I start searching. That said, if you're a beginner in Game Design and you want to start using Unreal Engine 4 because it's free, beginner friendly, and you refuse to use Unity, like me, there's no better place to start than Virtus Learning Hub. Although I've evolved past needing him too much, and just look up various different sources for specific things I want to do, this guy has the most compact and straight to the point videos I've seen on Unreal Engine. By that, I mean his videos are all about getting functionality figured out and they're only as long as they need to be to accommodate the subject at hand. He has a variety of tutorials outside of Unreal Engine but all of them are in some way related to Game Design, Game Development, Game Art, or Gaming in general. He won't solve all your problems but he will give you a foundation, which I think is probably the most valuable single thing anyone can give you.
Virtus Learning Hub
And that wraps things up, thanks for reading and I hope I'll see you next time.
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