u/Aros001

I feel like I keep seeing people complain about anime like it's all one big monolith rather than just another entertainment medium with a variety of different genres and subcategories within it. Action, comedy, fantasy, horror, slice of life, sci-fi, so say nothing about certain demographics certain anime fall under like shonen and seinin that also run the gauntlet for what genre(s) they'll be, or common premise tropes like mecha and isekai that be used in multiple different demographics and go for different genres.

This is NO DIFFERENT than how every other form of entertainment medium works. Cartoons, live action TV, movies, radio, theater, comic books, video games, novels, f**king puppet shows, etc. None of them are all one thing. Each one has a variety of tones, genres, demographics, and approaches to their name, and likewise plenty of crap to their name too that eventually gets forgotten about while the actual good stuff gets remembered, talked about, and passed forward into the future.

If you were to watch 1000 movies, you wouldn't even scratch the surface of how many movies exist, and you sure as hell wouldn't be qualified to declare that movies are unwatchable garbage. In fact most people would call you a moron or at the very least someone who is just looking to try and start arguments with others if you were to give that take.

And it's the same (or at least should be) with anime. It's just another medium but we'll still get people trying to declare that all anime except for a few select exceptions is just terrible and garbage and only people with no taste or ability to think like it. Because they themselves have no ability to distinguish any anime from any other, or they do but they just simply don't want to. They see it as all one thing and thus whatever small sample they've experienced (if any) works as a perfect example for what the entire medium must be like. Because it's easier to go to complete extremes than just talk only about the specific anime that they didn't like and it makes them feel superior because if they don't like something that many others do then that must make them so much smarter than they are.

There's a question I'll see asked every now and then in the various fandoms I'm in, usually along the lines of "I'm multiple seasons into this show and I'm absolutely loving it, but I heard people didn't like the ending/I heard that [spoiler with no context] happens and that doesn't sound good to me, so should I just drop the series before it's too late?".

Now, to a certain extent I can understand the desire to not waste your time or the fear of getting your hopes up for nothing. But at the same time, if you are not only enjoying the story you're reading/watching but ACTIVELY so, meaning you're generally continuously engaged and so invested that you want to keep going, why drop it just because of a hypothetical? Why refuse to even give the story a chance to prove itself?

Most series aren't just good throughout 99% of their run and then suddenly take a left turn right into a brick wall. It certainly can and has happened, but far more commonly stories don't just suddenly become bad but rather steadily become bad over the course of their run, decreasing in quality and enjoyment over time because of bad choices by the writers or an inability to properly execute ideas.

I've had series that at one point I did really like but eventually dropped. The CW DC shows and Bleach's manga come to mind. But it wasn't because they just suddenly became bad. One day I realized that I hadn't been enjoying them for a while and was essentially just forcing myself to keep up with them, and why would I keep doing that when there are other series I'm more actively and consistently enjoying? Thus why I dropped them, not because someone told me they'd get bad but because I experienced the drop in quality/enjoyment for myself and decided for myself that it was not something worth continuing with.

I don't know, maybe it's just me but if you've liked what the writer has been doing with the story so far I feel like that should grant them at least some level of goodwill from you; enough to where you're at least willing to give them the chance to prove whether or not they can keep making as good story as they have been rather than just assuming they'll fail because you heard from some random corner of the internet that they will.

Heck, I created this post in part because someone had asked me recently if they should continue watching My Hero Academia because, while they're multiple seasons into the anime and been really loving it, they got a spoiler that >!All Might lives to the end!< and that >!Midoriya becomes Quirkless again!<, which were ideas they thought didn't sound very good, and MHA is actually a series where I've personally had a few times where an idea came up that I thought I wasn't going to like but then did like because of how I saw it actually play out in the story. A pretty immediate example is at the start of the very third episode where All Might tells Midoriya he'll be giving him his power, which was an idea I didn't think sounded very good, but since I liked the first two episodes I gave it a chance. And after actually watching episodes 3 and 4, my reaction was "Oh, wait, this is how they're handling this? Okay, I'm actually okay with this!" and One For All went on to be one of my favorite aspects of the series, both as a powerset on its own and for how it ties in with MHA's themes and ideas.

And my advice to the person who asked me if they should continue was along similar lines. I can't promise that they will like>! All Might living !<or >!Midoriya becoming Quirkless!< like I did, but seeing how those ideas actually play out has a large chance of actually making them work for them just like the story they've experienced thus far has been. And if they do drop the series before they see how those ideas play out, it should be because they're not enjoying the series anymore, not because they could hypothetically stop enjoying it later on.

I'm actually going through something similar myself right now as I'm reading through the Classroom of the Elite light novels, where I've gotten some potential spoilers for later in the series because some f**king Youtubers love putting spoilers and clickbait right in the titles of their videos, and some of these spoilers sound like stuff I don't want to happen. But since I've been enjoying the series thus far, I have no reason to not give the story a fair chance of showing me how it'll handle this stuff. It has earned enough goodwill from me to deserve that much.

Some people online have gotten way too comfortable with not even bothering to read or watch the things they want to criticize, making whole posts and rants about what they've just heard secondhand that they've done or that they just assume they're doing. And if they have actually read/watched these stories and are coming up with these takes then that is SO MUCH WORSE because they're practically hallucinating an entirely different story than the one their eyes are taking in.

What set me off in this regard? The number of times I feel like I've seen someone condemn a series for giving its MC a harem with all the girls they've had romantically and sexually interested in them, even when that's not at all a thing in the series they're talking about!

The immediate example that comes to mind for me on this is Food Wars. I feel like I've seen multiple times where people have referred to it as a harem series, which...no. Like...not at all does it qualify as one. The main character Soma has two girls who show any romantic interest in him, one of whom gets SIGNIFICANTLY more focus than the other, so it's not even used for any love triangle stuff. There's Erina, arguably the main heroine of the series and the person Soma is most determined to get to admit his food is delicious, and Mito, who is a relatively minor character compared to others in the cast.

All the other female characters, from Alice to Kobayashi, have no romantic or sexual interest in Soma like those two do. Heck, Soma's best friend throughout the series is Megumi, and despite how close and supportive their relationship is there's never any implications of romantic feelings on either side between the two.

The best I can figure is that because the series has a lot of sexual fanservice some people just immediate conflate it with harem, even though those are not inherently the same thing or even inherently connected. That or they're using "harem" as a catch-all term for fanservice.

It's even worse when I've seen the harem claim made against series like My Dress-Up Darling or Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, where the male protagonist has ONE love interest and that's it. Stories where they only bring up the possibility of another love interest as a quick one-off gag and/or to make the direct statement that "Nah, this ain't happening.". Like, if you honestly think that Fujiwara has canonical romantic feelings for Shirogane, you did not fucking watch the show. She likes Shirogane as a friend and respects him but if there was ever even the slightest possibility of her having a romantic attraction to him it was smothered in its crib the second she had to help him learn volleyball, to say nothing for all the other areas she worked to train him in.

It feels like whenever I've seen someone talk about how much they hate Isekai and they'll list Goblin Slayer as an example. The only way you could ever have come to that conclusion would be if you've never actually watched the series or if you have a complete misunderstanding of what the terms you're using mean.

Like, you know it's bad when friggin' My Hero Academia gets this accusation thrown against it by some people, often listing Camie as one of the girls interested in Midoriya despite the fact that the two of them never even met! That was Toga, one of the only two girls in the series who likes Midoriya in that way, in disguise as Camie and the series makes that blatantly clear to the audience.

TL;DR: Just because a series has multiple waifus it doesn't mean all of them want the protagonist's dick.

Youtubers Miorus and ClownPuncher139 both recently made videos talking about the Turf War subplot in the video game Batman: Arkham City, discussing all the little details about how each faction would act and react as the story progressed as they gained or lost territory and supporters.

Despite being a game I've played several times alongside Arkham Asylum and Arkham Knight (I sadly don't have a system anymore that's capable of playing Arkham Origins) the videos were still a very interesting and enjoyable watch, having the entire conflict laid out and even pointing out some things I hadn't really noticed or thought about before, like how Poison Ivy, Bane, and Mister Freeze's presence in Amusement Mile is another big reason along with the flooding why that no faction can fully gain control of the area.

However, there's one aspect of the conflict that neither really touched on that much that occurred to me while listening to them both that I wanted to discuss, and that's how almost completely doomed Joker was to failure right from the start.

Outside of individuals who haven't picked a side and/or are trying to stay out of things entirely, there are four main factions within Arkham City. There's the main three of Joker, Penguin, and Two-Face, each of whom have carved out a section of the map to be their respective territories that they operate and wage war with each other from, and there's Hugo Strange's faction that overlooks all of them since he, the TYGER guards, and secretly Ra's al Ghul are the ones running the prison and even feeding weapons and information to the other factions in order to escalate their conflict with each other.

Technically there is also a fifth faction with members hidden among all the other factions except Strange's, which is Riddler's, with his members supplying him with information on what everyone is doing. However, he is largely uninvolved in the affairs of the turf war or the fate of Arkham City and seems primarily motivated by just wanting to prove himself smarter than Batman.

Because of Batman's involvement in Arkham City and how he disrupts everything that's been going on for the six months the prison has been operating, Two-Face is the one who ultimately comes out as the winner of the whole conflict despite his initial setback of being defeated and left hanging upside-down in the courthouse by Batman and Catwoman at the start of the game. He and his faction went into hiding and bided their time until Batman's actions against the other factions left them open and weak, where he then proceeded to completely take over nearly two-thirds of Arkham City, with the remains of Joker's faction holding up in the Industrial District as the only other faction left. Even with Catwoman beating him up near the end of the game to get her loot back Two-Face is still in a better position than everyone else, as he isn't locked up like Penguin and Riddler, nor is he dead like Strange and Joker, and his faction maintains control of their territories throughout the rest of the game.

But what if, hypothetically, Batman had never become involved? Who would likely be the winner then?

Hugo Strange is the one with the greatest odds of victory. The whole point of creating Arkham City was to gather all the worst criminal of Gotham (as well as Strange's own political enemies) and then kill them all with fire from the sky with Protocol 10. This would prove him a worthy successor to his master Ra's al Ghul and thus he'd be granted his title and control over all his resources, including the League of Assassins and the Lazarus Pit. But he did not start the countdown to Protocol 10 until after he threw Bruce Wayne into Arkham City because he also wanted to prove himself better than Batman and worthy of being his successor too by defeating him and saving Gotham in a way he never could. Technically Strange could have enacted his plan whenever he wanted and killed everyone.

However, his greatest challenge would likely be Penguin. His museum is built like a fortress, being shown to take several direct missile strikes from the Protocol 10 helicopters and taking only surface level damage while Two-Face's courtroom and Joker's steel mill had whole parts collapse. To take Penguin out TYGER operatives would have to go in an get him (it's doubtful Ra's would let Strange use League assassins since this whole thing is supposed to be Strange proving he's worthy of having them) and not only does Penguin have a considerable number of inmates working for him by that point but he also has a wide variety of firearms and explosives, signal jammers that disrupt electronic communication, a supply of Titan formula, a massive shark with an entire submerged room for him to swim around in, Mister Freeze's Freeze Gun, and Solomon Grundy in his basement. While Strange's forces do have the greater odds of success, especially since he gave Penguin some of this equipment so that he could escalate the turf war and thus he'd know what Penguin has, there is a strong enough possibility that Penguin's forces could outlast them by bunkering down.

And of course if Strange never enacts Protocol 10 in the first place specifically because Batman's yet to get involved, Penguin definitely has the best odds of winning the turf war against Two-Face and Joker since they have nothing that can complete with his forces even with the help Strange gave their sides too.

So Strange is the most probable victor of Arkham City if Batman never gets involved, then a tier below him is Penguin, especially if Strange just lets Arkham City continue to run as it has been, and Two-Face comes out as the overall victor if Batman does get involved because of how he takes advantage of the disruptions Batman causes the other factions.

But what about Joker?

Well, unfortunately for him, any path to victory is practically nonexistent. No matter how things play out, Joker can't win.

Because it doesn't matter whether Batman disrupts the other factions and allows Joker's faction to win the turf war. It doesn't matter whether Strange enacts Protocol 10 or not. It doesn't matter if Joker's men can get Mister Freeze back from Penguin or even if Mister Freeze had never been taken in the first place. Because none of that changes the fact that Joker is dying and a cure that can save him is practically impossible to be made.

The Titan formula Joker injected himself with during the climax of Batman: Arkham Asylum poisoned his blood and in the eighteen months between the events of the two games his health completely deteriorated, to the point that he does not survive the night Batman: Arkham City takes place on. His one hope was that Mister Freeze could be blackmailed into creating a cure, which he figured out how to do...except there was a major problem, and unknown to Joker it wasn't that Strange gave Freeze over to Penguin.

>Mister Freeze: "Creating an antidote to the disease that afflicts the clown was easy. Unfortunately the cure degrades too quickly. It needs a restorative element, some kind of reforming enzyme, without it, it breaks down before it can help the host.....Finding a suitable enzyme is not the only problem. It needs to adapted, bonded to human DNA. That will take decades."

Unlike all the other doctors who Strange gave to Joker, Freeze knows how to cure Joker's condition but the missing component he needs is, for as far as he is aware, impossible to get or create. The enzyme needed requires decades to bond with human DNA. Even if you want to argue that the stress and activity of the events of the game accelerated Joker's degenerating heath and that he could have lasted longer if he had taken proper rest, that gives him maybe a few extra days or weeks at most. He does not have years he can wait for the enzyme to finish and no matter what he or anyone else does he can't speed up that process. It doesn't matter who Joker kidnaps, threatens, hurts, or kills, it can't make happen something that genuinely can't happen. You can't fit five gallons into a thimble no matter how fast you poor and you can't fit 10+ years into a couple of days no matter how many doctors and mad scientists you make demands of.

Ra's al Ghul's blood holds the enzyme that can complete the cure, having had 600 years to bond with his DNA, but neither Freeze nor Joker even know he exists. In fact, not counting the ninjas of the League of Assassins, who consider it blasphemous to even speak his name, the only person in Arkham City who knows who Ra's is, let alone that he's in Arkham City, is Hugo Strange, and even if Joker would even think to ask him about this impossible enzyme he has ZERO reason to tell Joker anything, especially when it comes to his master. It doesn't matter to Strange whether or not Joker actually survives. The doctors and weapons he'd been giving him were solely to escalate the turf war and because of his own personal interest in Joker's psychology. In fact him giving Freeze to Penguin, and thus making it harder for Joker to be cured, after giving him to Joker in the first place was for those exact same reasons.

So even if Joker never lost access to Freeze, he'd still be facing his imminent death because the only way out of it was something that, as far as Freeze or anyone else can tell him, just simply doesn't exist and is physically incapable of being made in the time he has left.

Except...as the game plays out, the cure does get made. The enzyme was able to be found. The seemingly impossible was made to happen. How? Why?

Because Joker bet it all on Bats.

Joker was facing a situation that was even more hopeless than he already felt it was. He's dying. His enemies know it. Most of his men know it and are practically just waiting for it at this point before they jump ship. No doctors can cure him. The one person who maybe can cure him is in the hands of his biggest enemy in the turf war who wants him to die. And though he doesn't know it, the cure requires something that even its creator thinks is impossible to get. Day by day, any chance Joker has of surviving, let alone coming out on top in Arkham City, gets smaller and smaller until it's practically nonexistent.

So, with unmarked shipments of his tainted blood out into Gotham to ensure innocents would die too if a cure can't be found and an attempted assassination of Catwoman to get his attention, Joker made one final gamble. That somehow, someway, against all odds, Batman would be able to save him.

AND IT WORKED. Beyond what Joker ever could have hoped for.

Batman took down Penguin, Joker's biggest opponent in the turf war.

Batman rescued Mister Freeze so that he could complete the cure, even taking care of the additional difficulties that came up in making it, since he's one of the few people who knows about Ra's al Ghul.

Batman not only took down Hugo Strange, he also stopped Protocol 10 and even Ra's al Ghul, which Joker didn't even know were threats against him.

Brief as it was, Batman's actions even gave Joker a chance at using a Lazarus Pit and potentially become immortal, or at the very least heal his body from the damage of the last eighteen months.

Joker essentially spun a roulette wheel that had a 99.99999999% chance of failure and managed to hit the jackpot anyway, snatching victory from certain defeat!

...And then he jumped Batman and stabbed him in the shoulder, causing him to accidentally drop and shatter the cure on the ground before Joker had the chance to drink away.

........................He HAD it. He f**king HAD it. The cure was right there. His continued existence and everything he wanted had been right there in Batman's hand. And even though anyone else likely would have refused to give Joker the cure and have just let him die, well...

>Batman: "You want to know something funny? Even after everything you've done... I would have saved you." 

Joker bet on the one in a million chance that Batman would be able to save him, which ended up actually working far better what he ever could have hoped or planned for, and then right at the finish line Joker screwed himself over, metaphorically tripping and falling right on his face because he tied his own shoelaces together.

The biggest joke of the entire game...and Joker played it on himself.

>Joker: (Dying laughter) "That actually is...(COUGH COUGH!)... pretty funny...!"