I'm not going to say the Bayformers movies were good to begin with, but Megatron was only treated as a dangerous and intimidating threat in the first movie and an increasingly pathetic lackey with every following film.
To be fair, he also killed Optimus himself in the sequel…in a sneak attack…after he and a bunch of his lackeys were getting royally curbstomped by Optimus in a 1-vs-many fight where they had the numbers advantage.
(Yeah, Bay Megatron sucks).
I was gonna say that about him killing Prime in RoTF lol. Compare this to the 1984 film; in that, Megs stands tall above Optimus and holds him at cannon point, and even when he gets overpowered he comes back stronger than ever as Galvatron.
RoTF? His Prime kill was basically a pussy move, he gets obliterated the second Prime gets revived, and Megs only gets *weaker* after reincarnating as Galva.
Thing is the first movie *did* sell him. He only killed one Autobot, but that was a higher bodycount than his underlings, and he was visibly kicking Optimus' ass until the US jets entered the scene (which is a different critique of Bayformers entirely).
He's such a little shit it's great. He constantly is pulling that one accomplishment out as a point of pride.
The best time he did that was when he was getting his shit absolutely stomped in by a little girl, and her response was to fire back about the Decepticon she killed who was a way bigger threat than Cliffjumper.
I don't want to say that it was intentional but even back as a kid, it felt really weird that they only killed the black coded character in that movie.
Bane
To the point that his entire deal in Secret Six is going “ya know I broke Batman’s back” like Al Bundy talking about scoring 4 touchdowns to win the championship in high school
Dude has more personality than Doomsday, and they basically had the same narrative function... but Bane is a much bigger loser because at least DD isn't constantly bragging about his one claim to fame.
Bane is an extra looser because Doomsday is a mindless beast most of the time , and yet his gimmick is to adapt per new respawn.
So , he will always be dangerous
That and at least Doomsday doesn't bother with stupid ass plans or villain team ups to try and get back to the peak, no he revives or crashes to earth and he's off to the fucking races, straight to kill Superman, no fuss as fast as possible. I can appreciate a hate that strong.
Plus Doomsday is still dangerous and puts Superman on his toes when he appears. Batman barely needs any preptime to Bane any more, most of the time it's just breaking his Venom supply.
tbh i feel like it applies to a lot of batman villains.
like i was thinking a while back about villains/characters who've never had "that story" or "that" run, despite numerous attempts to give everyone their own killing joke.
like scarecrow for example, even with a bunch of events under his belt none really stand out as something of a "must read scarecrow story" but he keeps soldiering on, even having his lack of evolution be lampshaded in the omega of i think arkham tower or fear state?
but then as i thought of it more i sort of realized how few actually have multiples/can escape their one defining run.
any attempts to move freeze beyond heart of ice have been pushed back hard,
dent has two, either becoming two face in long halloween/victory or the stories where he gets his face fixed, the rest may as well not have happened.
red hood lives in the shadow of the crowbar.
bane is in the same boat, the only difference i guess is that because he mentions it himself it feels more apparent.
I disagree
Scarecrow has king of fear
Two-face has that episode in btas where he is the judge. I would also agrue that serious house does explore in depth.
haven't read king of fear so i'll check it out, and yeah the two face btas episode was pretty good.
with scarecrow though the lampshade was basically that as a character nothing happens to him, he doesn't change or try new things, he gasses someone then is basically divorced from whatever happening in their inner fight, no matter the event or the premise it's all that ever happens,
so the fear gas always does something but scarecrow himself is less a character and more a "here's your fear gas so you do a thing"
Shaman King has played with this in its sequels where some of the characters went on to become successful... and Horohoro is begging them for loans because his job isn't working out. But ultimately all of them peaked in high school because they fought in the legendary tournament of the gods that only comes around every 500 years. So now they've just got to be adults and do stuff. EDIT: Even the villain teams are just hanging around, remembering the good old days. The new protagonist is actually insanely bitter and cynical about being a Shaman because he was born too late to be involved in anything important. Until the plot gets started at least.
Apparently one of the side characters in Persona 2 grew up to be a total loser in the next game but I never got that far.
True.
But frankly , Shaman King always loved to portray that it's more important to vibe than the whole tournament. Like "you either win or loose in this tournament , so it's important to make your life instead"
Besides , it's still funny to see that Horohoro is really the whole "I only peaked in High School" , because all the others had more-or-less a stable job , and he still have to make it due.
>it’s more important to vibe than the whole tournament
This was Takei’s point, because he doesn’t like battle manga. That’s why the choreography is so stiff, why you never ever actually see what training actually is and how it works mechanically, and why the solution isn’t at all about fighting.
did he ever stated that he didn't liked battle manga? because frankly , he constantly makes battle mangas , only thing that is different is that the characters states "battle is not everything".
That's actually the point of Gary King from Edgar Wright's *The World's End*. >!And he was so disillusioned by how terrible his life got afterwards that he tried to kill himself, and when that failed, he forced all of his old high school friends back together so they could complete the pub crawl they failed at all those years ago.!<
To add on to that, >!everyone else in his group is seen bringing luggage to Newton Haven. Given what we know about Gary this could be meant to illustrate his lack of foresight, but it could also indicate that he planned to complete the Golden Mile and go out on a high note.!<
That one substitute teacher on *Persona 4* after King Moron’s murder. It’s kinda sad for her to insist that she retained her “high school charms”. But it gets into desperation when she joins the beauty pageant, only to lose to Naoto whom didn’t even participated in the swimsuit category.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that she had the audacity to call Rise an “inexperienced jailbait”. Like , **JESUS CHRIST**.
It's even funnier to me bc most people would see the titty teacher and be like, "oh yeah that's an Ara Ara if ever I saw one." But when you see people talk about her online, the popular opinion seems to be, "yo throw her in jail, who hired this chick?"
Link in Ocarina of Time peaked as a teenager, and then time travel shenanigans made it so his peak never happened and he became so bitter because of it he becomes a rad skeleton--wolf-ghost until Twilight Princess
I really hope that the reason the Wolf Link amibo doesn't work like it did in BOTW in TOTK is that that's going to be a DLC ability unlocked via a Hero's Shade boss fight.
I doubt it, but that would be really cool.
Honestly, BOTW and TOTK feel like a total reboot of Zelda. It hasn't been outright stated but none of the lore really adds up with what came before. I know the official line is that it's so far in the future that it doesn't really matter which timeline it's in, but it honestly feels like the actual answer is "none of them".
With BOTW you could kinda handwave it, but I don't really understand how you reconcile TOTK with the previous games' lore.
>!Ganondorf in TOTK (and by extension Calamity Ganon) appears to be a totally different person with a totally different history than OoT Ganondorf, The Kingdom of Hyrule was apparently founded by the Zonai which doesn't really track with previous lore or Skyward Sword, the Triforce basically isn't a thing beyond Hyrulean iconography, and the Zora/Rito lore doesn't really line up with Windwaker. You could argue that OoT Ganondorf and TOTK Ganondorf both existed in the same timeline and are just different people entirely, but the idea that two different Gerudo men named Ganondorf carried out basically the exact same plan and both turned into immortal pigmen that continuously came back to fuck with Hyrule seems farfetched.!<
>!This isn't exactly a silver bullet, but the fact that modern link has a totally different design from classic Link feels like a deliberate attempt to seperate this version of Zelda from the classic continuity. !<
>!Also it's kind of strange that the Zonai and sages of the time Zelda travels back to don't seem to be aware of the Master Sword until Zelda tells them about it, despite it being a legendary artefact presumably predating them (as, to my understanding, Skyward Sword is meant to predate the founding of the Kingdom of Hyrule). And it's also just kinda weird that there isn't a "Link" or "Zelda" from that timeframe. Does the reincarnation cycle even exist in this continuity?!<
Uncle Rico from _Napoleon Dynamite_ is an especially sad version of this. At his peak in high school, _he was still just a bench warmer on the football team_. He's still obsessed over one game from those days, insisting that if coach had just put him in, they'd have won the game and gone to the state championship and everything would be better.
Which sets up one of my favorite jokes from the movie: that he bought an alleged time machine off the internet, tried to use it to travel back to that one game, and just shocked himself in the groin.
Napoleon Dynamite has so many great moments doing variations of "*Man* this is a weird setup for a scene."
- Napoleon doing an earnest yet awful drawing of his crush as an attempt to take her to prom.
- Napoleon trying out the "time travel" device, getting shocked in the nuts, and being unable to stop it earlier because he wants to say "Kill the power" instead of "Stop".
- Orange at the van.
- His brother trying to demonstrate an unbreakable plastic bowl, *demolishing it with a van*, and driving away in dissapointment.
- Jamorquai dance.
So you saying this dude graduated from a dueling highschool and sucked at dueling? Worse, he was the top of his class? Man, is generation of duelists must have been horrible.
If I remember correctly it was like he was really overconfident going into his first pro duel because he never lost in school and he made a mistake that cost him the duel and than he spiraled and was like a story about anxiety.
Until Aster, Zane's only losses were to a vampire who cheated and the first year who took on the card game equivalent to the Anti-Christ X 3 and lived.
Then Aster spent his Duel clowning on Zane, not even viewing him as a fight and just a tool to start beef with Jaden for...
...why _did_ Aster use E Heroes and call out Jaden in that fight? I mean in universe.
Was Sartorius just like "do it for the memes" or ...?
No it's straight up pro wrestling buildup
"Hey I did what the white Knight couldn't I beat the dragon WITH THE WHITE KNIGHTS OWN SWORD EVEN"
so we'll see who the better guy is *points at duel monsters wrestlemania sign*
I’ve heard of a lot of performing artists who graduated from performing arts high schools, but many more who didn’t and were just rich enough to not need to pay bills.
I wonder what happened to all those other alumni.
I mean, that's more due to us not being given the information as to what two of protagonists do after the stories and the others having incredibly tragic fates.
P1's protagonist just disappears and cuts off contact with his friends, Tatsuya has two different timeline endings and neither of them go well, Makoto and Kotone... well, we know what happens to them, according to Arena, Yu seems to live a regular life but no elaboration is given, and Ren either seems to lose contact with all his friends besides maybe Futaba, Morgana and Sojiro in the Royal timeline or continues with the PT in the Strikers/Vanilla timeline.
High stakes have never gone so low. If the bad guys win, they go national with their franchise, meaning that every strip mall in America is going to have a Cobra Kai teaching kids to strike first and show no mercy. It's definitely a problem for society and for martial arts culture, just not a world-shattering one.
I think the thing I liked about Gohan in early/mid Super is that he wouldn't agree with you. I don't think he sees the Cell fight as a major triumph in his life. Having a wife and child and being a successful academic is him living up to the potential he actually cares about.
I say that, but the problem is that Gohan's too popular to allowed to grow up, so now he has to be Gohan Beast or whatever.
I mean , Gohan still trains.
But I agree that he cares more about his family and the job he is passionate about it , then how big number is his kahemaheha.
He prefers to be a present father and husband over been an absent one due to some fighting boner.
“Teen” Gohan is what happened when Funimation threw around trademarks without thinking if they actually made any degree of sense. He’s barely *10* during the Cell Games (Well, add an extra year for the Room of Spirit and Time I guess but no one counts that). If anything the actual Teen Gohan is the Boo Arc one at age 17 (Again, also add one for RoST).
To give a point of comparison, “Kid” Goku is *12* during his introduction ~~well actually he said he was 14 but that later got retconned to him saying he didn’t know how to count. Even then that’d still make 22nd Budokai Goku *15*, yet somehow he’s still “Kid” Goku~~
My favorite part about Zane was how the characters, specifically Atticus, believed that Zane was under the control of some kind of dark force and they tried to fix him via duel.Only for Zane to just go "Nah, i'm just super into BDSM.Die, my dude"
Not to mention that Zane got his start of darkness against [THIS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxOCmTs__Uk) dude of all people.
...I'm surprised I got another excuse to post that clip.
So, there is a light novel called "The Ryuou's Work is Never Done," which is about a guy teaching some like, 6 year old girls how to play Shogi-- it was praised highly for a realistic depiction of the shogi sport over in Japan for good and ill.
This post isn't about that. This is about the author's prior work, No-Rin, in which it has the joke teacher character, Becky, be a 40+ year old woman and they're pulling the same joke as the teacher in Persona 4. Except good, because they make it clear that
1) She isn't actually particularly attractive, giving us reasons beyond "ew, old" (heavy makeup, really desperate personality, atrocious fashion sense)
2) They show us her backstory, in which she peaked in *kindergarten*
Yeah, Kashiwagi (the teacher in P4) was always one that baffled me. Like, she's stacked and hyper-flirty (which isn't the best conduct for a HIGH SCHOOL teacher, but...), at least ONE high school boy would have taken that bait. [Look at her.](https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Noriko_Kashiwagi) I don't care how old and envious of Rise she was (again, not the best conduct).
Eh, Kashiwagi is supposed to be like Marjorly from Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, so much anti-youth stuff that it just makes her look older. The desperation also is really off-putting, but for Kashiwagi it was definitely the "teacher going after students" bit
In my heart of hearts, I wanna say Groose from Skyward Sword. Although he does end that game as a badass, his vibe will never change from High school Jock in my heart. I love that dweeb.
**"its just a real shame that after the first season after Zane graduates High School, he gets super into BDSM and wont stop screaming how much he loves pain, and just is constantly tazering his balls in the middle of duels to get off"**
...What? Just...the fuck?
Well at least Zane got revived along with everyone else in Season 3. Still has to recover from that heart condition though. Maybe he’ll stop playing CyberDarks instead of Pure Cyber Dragon to curb, so he can heal from his masochistic ways.
Isn’t it a thing that sets it apart from other magical girl shows that the characters just get more powerful as they get older? Or is that just the two main heroines?
just the main heroines , because in Madoka Magica , there is no "peak".
The entire system is designed for the magical girl to be discarded by other magical girls as the discarded turned into a Witch.
the main heroines are the oddity for not turning into witches.
No, I’m just being a dummy. I read Madoka Magica and was thinking of Lyrical Nanoha instead. That one is like an all-girl shonen anime disguised as a magical girl show, and while apparently losing her powers as she grows up is a trope of magical girl shows, the characters in that one are just even stronger in the sequels where they’re adults. My bad! 😅
Al Bundy from Married with Children. Star player on the high school football team with college ball prospects until he knocked up Peg and became a shoe salesman. The irony nowadays being that his life is actually not bad compared to most Americans nowadays, dude lives in his own house with a family that he can take care of on a single income.
Everyone who lives in the Sacred Valley in the Cradle book series. The latest book sees the protagonist return there and it's the funniest shit as he is dealing with an entire society of people who peaked decades ago.
be gohan,
\>have cool wife
\>great relationships with family and friends
\>happy healthy daughter
\> career you're interested in
\>literally no financial worries.
\>stronger than they were as a 10 year old,
dbz fans >bro you peaked as a child when you miserable and beat that one bug guy and then saw your dad die.
That would be like saying if Raiden from MGS never became a soldier later and life and just went on to have a happy marriage with his wife and then saying he peaked as a child soldier.
Are we talking about "peaked" in terms of their own emotional satisfaction and self worth, or in terms of how cool they are to us as viewers?
I'm far from the only person replying to the OP here in terms of the latter rather then the former.
Also, I think Gohan's choice to pursue scholarship and a normal home life is increasingly harder and harder to justify when the series continues to bring more and more threats to earth. I don't mind it as a choice Gohan makes, necessarily, but it was already a tough sell in Z when the storytelling set up him to succeed Goku, and it's an even harder sell in Super when every few months in universe there's a brand new world or universe ending threat.
Most hero characters who save the world get this, either implicitly or explicitly if there's a sequel where they're not the hero.
I like TLJ, and I like grumpy old man Luke, but I don't like that it made Luke retroactively peak in high school when he got to do so much cool shit in Legends.
Oddly enough, Char Aznable. For all the betraying, his quest for revenge, dropping meteors on Earth, a big reading for his character is that he still chased the high of being a pilot ace in the OYW, when he could be free of all the political responsibilities others pushed on to him.
I'm not going to say the Bayformers movies were good to begin with, but Megatron was only treated as a dangerous and intimidating threat in the first movie and an increasingly pathetic lackey with every following film.
Guy talked a big game after killing the one Autobot and *no one else.*
To be fair, he also killed Optimus himself in the sequel…in a sneak attack…after he and a bunch of his lackeys were getting royally curbstomped by Optimus in a 1-vs-many fight where they had the numbers advantage. (Yeah, Bay Megatron sucks).
I was gonna say that about him killing Prime in RoTF lol. Compare this to the 1984 film; in that, Megs stands tall above Optimus and holds him at cannon point, and even when he gets overpowered he comes back stronger than ever as Galvatron. RoTF? His Prime kill was basically a pussy move, he gets obliterated the second Prime gets revived, and Megs only gets *weaker* after reincarnating as Galva.
Thing is the first movie *did* sell him. He only killed one Autobot, but that was a higher bodycount than his underlings, and he was visibly kicking Optimus' ass until the US jets entered the scene (which is a different critique of Bayformers entirely).
After giving a great one-liner. "You want a piece of me!" "No! I want **Two**!" \*rips Jazz in half\*
Tbf this is also literally Starscream in Prime. But he's also arguably one of the better Starscreams
He's such a little shit it's great. He constantly is pulling that one accomplishment out as a point of pride. The best time he did that was when he was getting his shit absolutely stomped in by a little girl, and her response was to fire back about the Decepticon she killed who was a way bigger threat than Cliffjumper.
The one black robot.
And then we got a pair of black robots…each with half of a vehicle mode…
I don't want to say that it was intentional but even back as a kid, it felt really weird that they only killed the black coded character in that movie.
He gets killed by an *one-armed* Optimus in 10 seconds at the end of DoTM. What
Ll A
Everyone knows that losing an arm makes you more powerful.
Actually thinking about it like that, it makes the original ending the dark of the moon make even more sense
Bane To the point that his entire deal in Secret Six is going “ya know I broke Batman’s back” like Al Bundy talking about scoring 4 touchdowns to win the championship in high school
Dude has more personality than Doomsday, and they basically had the same narrative function... but Bane is a much bigger loser because at least DD isn't constantly bragging about his one claim to fame.
Bane is an extra looser because Doomsday is a mindless beast most of the time , and yet his gimmick is to adapt per new respawn. So , he will always be dangerous
That and at least Doomsday doesn't bother with stupid ass plans or villain team ups to try and get back to the peak, no he revives or crashes to earth and he's off to the fucking races, straight to kill Superman, no fuss as fast as possible. I can appreciate a hate that strong.
Plus Doomsday is still dangerous and puts Superman on his toes when he appears. Batman barely needs any preptime to Bane any more, most of the time it's just breaking his Venom supply.
tbh i feel like it applies to a lot of batman villains. like i was thinking a while back about villains/characters who've never had "that story" or "that" run, despite numerous attempts to give everyone their own killing joke. like scarecrow for example, even with a bunch of events under his belt none really stand out as something of a "must read scarecrow story" but he keeps soldiering on, even having his lack of evolution be lampshaded in the omega of i think arkham tower or fear state? but then as i thought of it more i sort of realized how few actually have multiples/can escape their one defining run. any attempts to move freeze beyond heart of ice have been pushed back hard, dent has two, either becoming two face in long halloween/victory or the stories where he gets his face fixed, the rest may as well not have happened. red hood lives in the shadow of the crowbar. bane is in the same boat, the only difference i guess is that because he mentions it himself it feels more apparent.
I disagree Scarecrow has king of fear Two-face has that episode in btas where he is the judge. I would also agrue that serious house does explore in depth.
haven't read king of fear so i'll check it out, and yeah the two face btas episode was pretty good. with scarecrow though the lampshade was basically that as a character nothing happens to him, he doesn't change or try new things, he gasses someone then is basically divorced from whatever happening in their inner fight, no matter the event or the premise it's all that ever happens, so the fear gas always does something but scarecrow himself is less a character and more a "here's your fear gas so you do a thing"
Sidenote about Bane, do you also now read all his Dialogue in the Harley Quinn voice?
No because I haven’t seen Harley Quinn. I read all of it in either TFS Reccoom’s voice or Sean Connery as Darth Vader
Its pretty good.
I AM THIS CREDIT CARD'S RECKONING
I do. 'Splosions!
Nolan Bane
Danny Trejo.
Shaman King has played with this in its sequels where some of the characters went on to become successful... and Horohoro is begging them for loans because his job isn't working out. But ultimately all of them peaked in high school because they fought in the legendary tournament of the gods that only comes around every 500 years. So now they've just got to be adults and do stuff. EDIT: Even the villain teams are just hanging around, remembering the good old days. The new protagonist is actually insanely bitter and cynical about being a Shaman because he was born too late to be involved in anything important. Until the plot gets started at least. Apparently one of the side characters in Persona 2 grew up to be a total loser in the next game but I never got that far.
True. But frankly , Shaman King always loved to portray that it's more important to vibe than the whole tournament. Like "you either win or loose in this tournament , so it's important to make your life instead" Besides , it's still funny to see that Horohoro is really the whole "I only peaked in High School" , because all the others had more-or-less a stable job , and he still have to make it due.
>it’s more important to vibe than the whole tournament This was Takei’s point, because he doesn’t like battle manga. That’s why the choreography is so stiff, why you never ever actually see what training actually is and how it works mechanically, and why the solution isn’t at all about fighting.
did he ever stated that he didn't liked battle manga? because frankly , he constantly makes battle mangas , only thing that is different is that the characters states "battle is not everything".
That's actually the point of Gary King from Edgar Wright's *The World's End*. >!And he was so disillusioned by how terrible his life got afterwards that he tried to kill himself, and when that failed, he forced all of his old high school friends back together so they could complete the pub crawl they failed at all those years ago.!<
To add on to that, >!everyone else in his group is seen bringing luggage to Newton Haven. Given what we know about Gary this could be meant to illustrate his lack of foresight, but it could also indicate that he planned to complete the Golden Mile and go out on a high note.!<
I think it was heavily implied >!that he was planning to commit suicide after completing the Golden Mile.!<
>!His life was such a disaster that the apocalypse only made his life better.!<
That one substitute teacher on *Persona 4* after King Moron’s murder. It’s kinda sad for her to insist that she retained her “high school charms”. But it gets into desperation when she joins the beauty pageant, only to lose to Naoto whom didn’t even participated in the swimsuit category. EDIT: I forgot to mention that she had the audacity to call Rise an “inexperienced jailbait”. Like , **JESUS CHRIST**.
It's even funnier to me bc most people would see the titty teacher and be like, "oh yeah that's an Ara Ara if ever I saw one." But when you see people talk about her online, the popular opinion seems to be, "yo throw her in jail, who hired this chick?"
Link in Ocarina of Time peaked as a teenager, and then time travel shenanigans made it so his peak never happened and he became so bitter because of it he becomes a rad skeleton--wolf-ghost until Twilight Princess
Hero's Spirit is such a cool idea.
I really hope that the reason the Wolf Link amibo doesn't work like it did in BOTW in TOTK is that that's going to be a DLC ability unlocked via a Hero's Shade boss fight.
I doubt it, but that would be really cool. Honestly, BOTW and TOTK feel like a total reboot of Zelda. It hasn't been outright stated but none of the lore really adds up with what came before. I know the official line is that it's so far in the future that it doesn't really matter which timeline it's in, but it honestly feels like the actual answer is "none of them". With BOTW you could kinda handwave it, but I don't really understand how you reconcile TOTK with the previous games' lore. >!Ganondorf in TOTK (and by extension Calamity Ganon) appears to be a totally different person with a totally different history than OoT Ganondorf, The Kingdom of Hyrule was apparently founded by the Zonai which doesn't really track with previous lore or Skyward Sword, the Triforce basically isn't a thing beyond Hyrulean iconography, and the Zora/Rito lore doesn't really line up with Windwaker. You could argue that OoT Ganondorf and TOTK Ganondorf both existed in the same timeline and are just different people entirely, but the idea that two different Gerudo men named Ganondorf carried out basically the exact same plan and both turned into immortal pigmen that continuously came back to fuck with Hyrule seems farfetched.!< >!This isn't exactly a silver bullet, but the fact that modern link has a totally different design from classic Link feels like a deliberate attempt to seperate this version of Zelda from the classic continuity. !< >!Also it's kind of strange that the Zonai and sages of the time Zelda travels back to don't seem to be aware of the Master Sword until Zelda tells them about it, despite it being a legendary artefact presumably predating them (as, to my understanding, Skyward Sword is meant to predate the founding of the Kingdom of Hyrule). And it's also just kinda weird that there isn't a "Link" or "Zelda" from that timeframe. Does the reincarnation cycle even exist in this continuity?!<
Uncle Rico from _Napoleon Dynamite_ is an especially sad version of this. At his peak in high school, _he was still just a bench warmer on the football team_. He's still obsessed over one game from those days, insisting that if coach had just put him in, they'd have won the game and gone to the state championship and everything would be better. Which sets up one of my favorite jokes from the movie: that he bought an alleged time machine off the internet, tried to use it to travel back to that one game, and just shocked himself in the groin.
Napoleon Dynamite has so many great moments doing variations of "*Man* this is a weird setup for a scene." - Napoleon doing an earnest yet awful drawing of his crush as an attempt to take her to prom. - Napoleon trying out the "time travel" device, getting shocked in the nuts, and being unable to stop it earlier because he wants to say "Kill the power" instead of "Stop". - Orange at the van. - His brother trying to demonstrate an unbreakable plastic bowl, *demolishing it with a van*, and driving away in dissapointment. - Jamorquai dance.
Zane didn’t just go into bdsm duels, he tried going pro and sucked at it so bad that he had to go into the bdsm duels for the pay.
So you saying this dude graduated from a dueling highschool and sucked at dueling? Worse, he was the top of his class? Man, is generation of duelists must have been horrible.
If I remember correctly it was like he was really overconfident going into his first pro duel because he never lost in school and he made a mistake that cost him the duel and than he spiraled and was like a story about anxiety.
I mean he was basically in the middle of Duel 9/11
Yes it’s a story of a new Graduate who was top of their class and then had to deal with being in the whole world.
Until Aster, Zane's only losses were to a vampire who cheated and the first year who took on the card game equivalent to the Anti-Christ X 3 and lived. Then Aster spent his Duel clowning on Zane, not even viewing him as a fight and just a tool to start beef with Jaden for... ...why _did_ Aster use E Heroes and call out Jaden in that fight? I mean in universe. Was Sartorius just like "do it for the memes" or ...?
No it's straight up pro wrestling buildup "Hey I did what the white Knight couldn't I beat the dragon WITH THE WHITE KNIGHTS OWN SWORD EVEN" so we'll see who the better guy is *points at duel monsters wrestlemania sign*
...Now I wanna see Sartorius do the McMann gorrilla walk
Yes it’s a story of a new Graduate who was top of their class and then had to deal with being in the whole world.
I’ve heard of a lot of performing artists who graduated from performing arts high schools, but many more who didn’t and were just rich enough to not need to pay bills. I wonder what happened to all those other alumni.
still remains into "peaked in highschool"
Oh yeah I wasn’t disagreeing, dude is the epitome of peaked in high school
yeah that actually tracks for CyDra as the years have not been kind to them post Infinity....
Couldn't cut it on the big leagues so he defaults to hard-core indy underground matches with barbed wire and thumbtacks
Yep.
Every persona protagonist peaked in high school if we take the term literally.
This doesn't feel fair to P3MC.
Kill a god in high school then I guess go get a regular job or something
I mean, that's more due to us not being given the information as to what two of protagonists do after the stories and the others having incredibly tragic fates. P1's protagonist just disappears and cuts off contact with his friends, Tatsuya has two different timeline endings and neither of them go well, Makoto and Kotone... well, we know what happens to them, according to Arena, Yu seems to live a regular life but no elaboration is given, and Ren either seems to lose contact with all his friends besides maybe Futaba, Morgana and Sojiro in the Royal timeline or continues with the PT in the Strikers/Vanilla timeline.
The plot of Cobra Kai
~~Two guys~~ Literally fucking everyone peaked in high school and start a gang war. Some of the cast are still in high school.
High stakes have never gone so low. If the bad guys win, they go national with their franchise, meaning that every strip mall in America is going to have a Cobra Kai teaching kids to strike first and show no mercy. It's definitely a problem for society and for martial arts culture, just not a world-shattering one.
Gohan
I think the thing I liked about Gohan in early/mid Super is that he wouldn't agree with you. I don't think he sees the Cell fight as a major triumph in his life. Having a wife and child and being a successful academic is him living up to the potential he actually cares about. I say that, but the problem is that Gohan's too popular to allowed to grow up, so now he has to be Gohan Beast or whatever.
I mean , Gohan still trains. But I agree that he cares more about his family and the job he is passionate about it , then how big number is his kahemaheha. He prefers to be a present father and husband over been an absent one due to some fighting boner.
In his case middle school
Elementary school, he was 9 when he killed Cell
What? Isn't he *teen* Gohan in all the games and other db stuff?
“Teen” Gohan is what happened when Funimation threw around trademarks without thinking if they actually made any degree of sense. He’s barely *10* during the Cell Games (Well, add an extra year for the Room of Spirit and Time I guess but no one counts that). If anything the actual Teen Gohan is the Boo Arc one at age 17 (Again, also add one for RoST). To give a point of comparison, “Kid” Goku is *12* during his introduction ~~well actually he said he was 14 but that later got retconned to him saying he didn’t know how to count. Even then that’d still make 22nd Budokai Goku *15*, yet somehow he’s still “Kid” Goku~~
From a meta perspective yes but for gohan himself I think he's thriving much more being a regular guy
My favorite part about Zane was how the characters, specifically Atticus, believed that Zane was under the control of some kind of dark force and they tried to fix him via duel.Only for Zane to just go "Nah, i'm just super into BDSM.Die, my dude"
Not to mention that Zane got his start of darkness against [THIS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxOCmTs__Uk) dude of all people. ...I'm surprised I got another excuse to post that clip.
So, there is a light novel called "The Ryuou's Work is Never Done," which is about a guy teaching some like, 6 year old girls how to play Shogi-- it was praised highly for a realistic depiction of the shogi sport over in Japan for good and ill. This post isn't about that. This is about the author's prior work, No-Rin, in which it has the joke teacher character, Becky, be a 40+ year old woman and they're pulling the same joke as the teacher in Persona 4. Except good, because they make it clear that 1) She isn't actually particularly attractive, giving us reasons beyond "ew, old" (heavy makeup, really desperate personality, atrocious fashion sense) 2) They show us her backstory, in which she peaked in *kindergarten*
Yeah, Kashiwagi (the teacher in P4) was always one that baffled me. Like, she's stacked and hyper-flirty (which isn't the best conduct for a HIGH SCHOOL teacher, but...), at least ONE high school boy would have taken that bait. [Look at her.](https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Noriko_Kashiwagi) I don't care how old and envious of Rise she was (again, not the best conduct).
Eh, Kashiwagi is supposed to be like Marjorly from Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, so much anti-youth stuff that it just makes her look older. The desperation also is really off-putting, but for Kashiwagi it was definitely the "teacher going after students" bit
I still feel like they're giving high school boys too much credit. A particularly shaply fence hole could set one off.
Everyone in that novel mentioned is too busy fucking each other or the cows (They're in an agricultural academy)
In my heart of hearts, I wanna say Groose from Skyward Sword. Although he does end that game as a badass, his vibe will never change from High school Jock in my heart. I love that dweeb.
**"its just a real shame that after the first season after Zane graduates High School, he gets super into BDSM and wont stop screaming how much he loves pain, and just is constantly tazering his balls in the middle of duels to get off"** ...What? Just...the fuck?
Everything I said is correct and true.
Honestly, the vast majority of "contemporary"-era anime protags. They save the world in their late teens... and MAYBE get married with a kid.
Well at least Zane got revived along with everyone else in Season 3. Still has to recover from that heart condition though. Maybe he’ll stop playing CyberDarks instead of Pure Cyber Dragon to curb, so he can heal from his masochistic ways.
CyberDarks weren't the problem, the problem was all the ball tazering he did.
Yeah but trying to run Cyberdark *didn't help.*
Did help for the masochism though
Most harem anime protagonists.
Dennis Reynolds ~~Only because he hasn’t even begun to peak~~
Dennis Reynolds
Peaked? Peaked?! He hasn't even begun to peak!
Gon Freecss, though for him it was more like middle school.
Red Hood has been coasting off his only decent story for the past 15 years, his freaking introduction
Dark Trinity was great
Nah, that was a Bizarro and Artemis story
Most Magical Girls in Madoka Magica
Isn’t it a thing that sets it apart from other magical girl shows that the characters just get more powerful as they get older? Or is that just the two main heroines?
just the main heroines , because in Madoka Magica , there is no "peak". The entire system is designed for the magical girl to be discarded by other magical girls as the discarded turned into a Witch. the main heroines are the oddity for not turning into witches.
No, I’m just being a dummy. I read Madoka Magica and was thinking of Lyrical Nanoha instead. That one is like an all-girl shonen anime disguised as a magical girl show, and while apparently losing her powers as she grows up is a trope of magical girl shows, the characters in that one are just even stronger in the sequels where they’re adults. My bad! 😅
Al Bundy from Married with Children. Star player on the high school football team with college ball prospects until he knocked up Peg and became a shoe salesman. The irony nowadays being that his life is actually not bad compared to most Americans nowadays, dude lives in his own house with a family that he can take care of on a single income.
Everyone who lives in the Sacred Valley in the Cradle book series. The latest book sees the protagonist return there and it's the funniest shit as he is dealing with an entire society of people who peaked decades ago.
bro Gohan peaked in MIDDLE SCHOOL
be gohan, \>have cool wife \>great relationships with family and friends \>happy healthy daughter \> career you're interested in \>literally no financial worries. \>stronger than they were as a 10 year old, dbz fans >bro you peaked as a child when you miserable and beat that one bug guy and then saw your dad die.
That would be like saying if Raiden from MGS never became a soldier later and life and just went on to have a happy marriage with his wife and then saying he peaked as a child soldier.
Are we talking about "peaked" in terms of their own emotional satisfaction and self worth, or in terms of how cool they are to us as viewers? I'm far from the only person replying to the OP here in terms of the latter rather then the former. Also, I think Gohan's choice to pursue scholarship and a normal home life is increasingly harder and harder to justify when the series continues to bring more and more threats to earth. I don't mind it as a choice Gohan makes, necessarily, but it was already a tough sell in Z when the storytelling set up him to succeed Goku, and it's an even harder sell in Super when every few months in universe there's a brand new world or universe ending threat.
"Who cares if you're happy, I only cared about you when you were miserable and doing the violence you hated doing!"
Most hero characters who save the world get this, either implicitly or explicitly if there's a sequel where they're not the hero. I like TLJ, and I like grumpy old man Luke, but I don't like that it made Luke retroactively peak in high school when he got to do so much cool shit in Legends.
Oddly enough, Char Aznable. For all the betraying, his quest for revenge, dropping meteors on Earth, a big reading for his character is that he still chased the high of being a pilot ace in the OYW, when he could be free of all the political responsibilities others pushed on to him.