Please Mind Spoilers

Spoiler Town

Please Mind Spoilers

Last night was the second half premiere of Season 6 of the Walking Dead, and man….  was it a roller coaster.  I am not however going to talk much about the show, because I don’t want to give anything away for those who have yet to see it.  This seems like a sensible position, and it also tends to color my reactions on twitter…  because just like Star Wars Episode VII I didn’t want to be the one to rob the magic of the moment from anyone.  With a big show like this, there is always talk on Twitter about the inconsiderate nature of some, who start emoting about specific events on a show or a game immediately.  For me personally…  spoilers don’t mean that much and if I was going to watch a show or play a game in the first place…  I am still going to play said game/show even if I know the entire plot.  However I realize most people are not like this.  There are a lot of folks who love the thrill of not knowing if our team of stalwart heroes will survive the episode, or if they really can get out of this jam.  For the sake of the people who are not me, I’ve learned over the years how to share my excitement over something… and emote freely…  without actually giving much detail away.  So this largely involves focusing on my feelings, or the overall experience and not necessarily plot details.  Once I got used to it, I honestly find it a much more enjoyable way to share my experiences.

The above tweet is an example of something I said last night while watching the show.  It helped me to get the jitters out that were building up inside of me, but at the same time…  gave away nothing.  What Walking Dead episode doesn’t have a bunch of ups and downs… and while everyone who was also watching knew exactly what I was talking about…  it didn’t do anything to spoil the folks who get the show two full hours behind.  This isn’t just Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones, or whatever else happens to be the hot “It” property.  I would love to see this same logic applied to almost anything.  Games like Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, and The Secret World all have deep story content… that involves the same sort of ups and downs and plot twists you might expect from a novel.  In the guilds I have been responsible for, I have always tried to stress keeping guild chat as a spoiler free place so nobody had to accidentally log in and get all of that build up spoiled.  Some however are always careless, and while you can scold someone….  once the spoiler is in an open channel it is impossible to remove.  Mostly what I am asking for is for folks to be more considerate about the shared space we have be it Twitter or the chat channels in games themselves.  It is lovely that you don’t mind spoilers…. because largely I am in the same camp as you…  but be thoughtful of the folks who really do.  Is your few minutes of excitement really worth ruining someone else’s entire experience?

RWBY Season 3

 

Please Mind Spoilers

Another event from yesterday that could have been spoilerific… was the public release of the final episode of RWBY Season 3.  There is so much amazing stuff happening in this show right now… and a lot of stuff that also makes me super sad inside.  For similar reasons to Walking Dead, I am not going to go into a bunch of detail since I know folks are still catching up.  Over the last few weeks I have gone through this interesting evolution of not actually knowing what RWBY was really, to getting interested…  to binge watching my way through the entire series run to this point.  This means that I actually got to watch the last three episodes with the rest of the world as they were publicly released around noon on Sunday.  Now for sponsors they get access to the show on Saturday, and I honestly expect that come next season I will be counting myself among this number.  It isn’t often that I find something that I literally want to tell people to stop everything they are doing and “watch this thing now”, but with RWBY it definitely falls into that category.  There is just so much to love here, that it is going to be hard to cram it into a blog post.  Basically RWBY takes all of the parts of Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Naruto that I truly love…. and gets rid of all of the parts that annoy the fuck out of me. On top of that… it is populated with tons of awesome women characters….  who are not simply there for gratuitous eye candy.

There are a lot of aspects of Anime that are just lost on me, mostly because I don’t understand the Japanese Cultural references… or at least not all of them.  I’ve called RWBY an American Anime… but in truth it is more than that… it is a global internet Anime because in truth… the references and reactions that it draws upon could be understood by pretty much ANYONE using the internet and social media.  The most impressive thing about this show is how watching it compressed like this… has made me realize just how damned impressive the improvement from season to season has been.  The first season… while really good… was cludgy as hell, and it quite literally felt like they were using poser to do this (which they were).  From that point on however… they started to master the tools and by season 2 it was already feeling more like traditional animation.  Season 3 however skyrocketed that quality bar, and I would pretty much put the show up against anything in the air.  I really look forward to seeing just how much improved Season 4, because they are teetering on that edge of what traditional animation can provide…. but with motion capture and 2D rendering.  If you are already indoctrinated into RWBY, we need to talk… because so much shit is going on.  If you are not however… I highly suggest you catch up… this playlist has through S3 E6 but it is the best playlist I was able to find on YouTube.  Once you are hooked then it is time to go to the actual source and the Rooster Teeth RWBY page.  Most of the episodes are 12-16 minutes long, and it is well worth your time even if you squeeze them in between other activities.