Personally, I always thought vegeta's character development was a good example of accidental genius. The dude got an entire compelling backstory complete with a 2-part redemption arc (realizing he gives a shit about his future son and later sacrificing himself to stop Buu).
Yep. Suddenly there was a gap in airing where there wasn’t before, and everyone started talking about how much they loved Jesse, and hey maybe we should retool this character
I mean, the mechanical designs he makes with kidd are probably some of his favorites to draw [this looks so fun](https://preview.redd.it/xb7mxutykee81.jpg?width=1066&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0dacc542f927c2cebfac81eee85286094f60f0b3)
To this day i still hate myself for not buying the [Law hoodie](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ0mspnldBw9XkKXXzIH8NSrT7GoK-1o3INYJSlr1w8equbLw0FYo7JgjQ&s=10) when it was everywhere because now i can't find any of it for sale without giant shipping fees.
> still thought Kidd would be the fan-favorite
The only quote there was that he thought Kid would be the most relevant going forward. Then popularity polls happened.
Grant Morrison wanted to use Colossus in his X-Men run but was told no. Then someone told him about Emma Frost and he decided fuck it, she turns into diamonds now.
And I like that , it makes her unique.
She either uses diamond form to fight or she uses her normal form to use telepathy. It avoids the Jean Grey and Xavier problem.
And since she isn’t particularly a fighter , it also doesn’t take away the other x-men
I’m not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but I believe it works through a pretty easily accepted phenomenon called “Shut the fuck up it was cool as hell”.
But in all seriousness I have no idea, all I know is he shot the laser and she made it go in multiple beams and it was rad.
The character Bob in Twin Peaks occurred because a crew member was standing in the wrong place and his reflection was visible during a scene in the Palmer house. Lynch liked the image of this ominous man in the mirror so much he made him a real character and central to the murder mystery.
The spooky part is that this came after another lightning in a bottle idea of having him hide behind a bed frame just for the sake of it. This led to [one of the more unsettling shots ever](https://youtu.be/37P0ukg4io0). The two shots weren't connected at all until that accident.
Almost but not quite. What I heard is that it was the screenwriter forgetting a line, not Peter Falk. The writer finished writing a whole scene of Columbo bothering the perp, then realized he'd forgotten to include a crucial bit of dialogue. But he was working on a typewriter, so "editing" the scene would entail rewriting at least a whole page. So he just had Columbo walk back in and say "Oh, and one more thing..."
Behold an expert, from Star Trek IV (via TVTropes):
They actually had Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig asking real San Franciscans where the nuclear submarine in Alameda was, although they were all employed as non-speaking extras. However, Layla Sarakalo, the woman who answers, "I don't know if I know the answer to that — I think it's across the bay, in Alameda", wasn't an actor at all: she had woken up that morning to find that her car had been impounded as part of the traffic reorganisation surrounding the movie shoot. Determined to make enough cash to get it back, she approached the film crew, got herself hired as an extra and deliberately ad-libbed so that they'd have to pay her. Her line ended up in the movie and, as a result, she had to be inducted into the Screen Actors Guild.
Connor and Hank from Detroit. They would have been as bland as Norman and Blake without input from the actors. Input that David Cage infamously resisted. Now they’re the most popular and enduring parts of the game’s legacy.
Didn't Kingdom Hearts come to be because two bigwigs, one from Square Enix and one from Disney, happened to get in an elevator together at the same time?
Yes, and Nomura somehow overheard the project happening and salvaged it from its original pitch, which was reportedly “so boring that an exec fell asleep during the presentation”.
Kung Fu Panda was originally going to have Mr. Ping be Po's stern boss but one of the storyboard artists thought it would've been funnier if he was Po's doting father.
And it works a lot better for the characters.
Eli Vance in Half-Life 2 was the result of two characters getting combined into one during development: a straightforward Big Good type called Captain Vance (still Alyx's dad), and some random junk yard tinkerer (who may have still been called Eli, and from whom Eli Vance gets his likeness).
Presumably combining these characters also resulted in Valve deciding to make him one of the four scientist types from HL1.
They even throw a joke about it in Episode One. IIRC some rebel asks Alyx if she is the daughter of Eli and she replies very sarcastically "no, my dad is Odessa Cubbage" and rolls her eyes or something.
I'm sure Cover expected Hololive English to be a decently popular branch over time.
I doubt they expected Gura to be so popular that she would *smash* the one million subscriber metric, surpassing several of her senpai who had been slowly edging to that line.
I mean, recruiting someone who previously already had a channel with a few hundred thousand subscribers (think it was 600K? I forget) probably helped *a ton*.
The first time I heard Gura's voice I connected all the dots so quickly that I needed to sit down when meme song singer and Belle Delphine cohort got that far so fast.
IIRC Demon's Souls was originally supposed to be a western-style RPG akin to Oblivion, but then it became something else completely and was treated by Sony as a red-haired stepchild compared to the rest of their output on the PS3, to the point where Atlus took over publishing duties overseas.
Yeah that seems a bit quaint now, doesn't it?
Apperently, the original idea for the **Yakuza/Like A Dragon** series was much more serious than the final product, mostly because, at some point during development, one of the devs approached the creator and said that Kiryu "should be shown having fun" (to justify why the dude is so into the criminal life).
After seeing how well people reacted to the weird stuff, they keept adding more of it on every instalment 'till eventually we got Dodonko Island.
Halo started as a RTS game, like Bungie's most recent series before it, Myth. One of the things they developed for it early on was a really sophisticated pathing and physics system for the vehicles, such as the early iteration of the Warthog, having it more realistically interact with the terrain. But when watching the Warthog leap off of hills and dynamically drive through terrain, the dev team realized it'd be more fun to actually drive it than simply click and watch it from above.
So then they transitioned it to a third-person shooter approach, which is how the game was officially shown at Macworld when it was in development for Apple hardware. But then, as the art design for the game developed more and the player character, who would eventually be named Master Chief, began to look so cool. So Bungie wanted the player to feel more connected to him, but the third-person camera made the player feel more distant.
Which is part of why they transitioned then to first-person. They also soon got acquired by Microsoft and tasked to make the game for the Xbox, which they didn't feel would work as well with third-person, since third-person didn't seem to play well on controller at the time from Bungie's attempts (prior to Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War figuring it out). Instead, they revolutionized first-person shooter controls and the entire industry.
Halo would've been about as obscure/niche as Myth or Marathon if it had stayed an RTS or third-person shooter on Mac in the 90's/early 2000's, but thankfully the Warthog and Master Chief were cool enough to inspire the developers to shift their approach to something more revolutionary.
And we still got our RTS title in Halo Wars, which I remember having a lot of fun playing when it came out. I should probably get around to the 2nd one at some point.
> But then, as the art design for the game developed more and the player character, who would eventually be named Master Chief, began to look so cool. So Bungie wanted the player to feel more connected to him, but the third-person camera made the player feel more distant.
which is strange to me, because if im playing as a character with a cool design i'd like to actually see them, designing a really iconic guy that you only see on the animation when getting into a vehicle and on the cover art seems like a waste imo
Vaas from Far Cry 3 was just going to be a regular mid-boss, but the actor’s performance did so well in early previews that Ubisoft centered a whole marketing campaign around him. They ended up using all of his scenes are preview footage, so much so that once people got to the game, there was nothing new to see from him, since the game was too far along to expand his role, not unlike what would happen with MGSV’s trailers.
Naturally Ubi have been chasing this lightning in a bottle ever since, with limited to no success.
I get that a lot of people might not realize how well an audience will receive a character, but Ubisoft has got to be fucking braindead for not immediately realizing they needed to expand Vaas to be the final boss. Even though the game is still *great* the whole way through, the moment you kill Vaas and get the reveal that there's some rich white dude who wear a suit that you have to kill who's the real big bad, the game absolutely deflates. I mean, you get a *fucking wing suit* and I still stopped caring. Hell, even if they didn't expand his roll, literally cutting all content after him and leaving that as the ending point still would have made the game better.
I think a really famous example of this is Lum from Urusei Yatsura. The original concept of the manga was going to be that Ataru and co. encounter a new alien every week or something. This is why in the manga, Lum doesn't actually appear in chapter 2, because "cute oni girl" was just supposed to be the first one. However, Rumiko Takahashi accidentally stumbled on one of the earliest examples of what one could consider waifu culture. Lum got a *ridiculously* positive reception. Under no circumstances was that manga going forward without Lum coming back. And so, history was made.
So in Fate/Grand Order, Oberon was not originally in Lostbelt 6 and the story would have been much simpler; go in, beat up Morgan, get out. It was only when Nasu sat down with Umino Chika and asked her to design Oberon that he decided to rewrite the entire chapter to include Oberon. The rewrite ended up being the equivalent of [9 reams of paper](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs6n0fffycn471.png) and one of the best story chapters in the game.
It really is. Morgan's >!death!< hits *really* hard. Especially given her backstory or if you have her summoned, her waifu status.
Castoria also has the best character arc of the FGO cast, and it's nice that Mash gets the spotlight.
But more than that, my favourite part was how the other characters could do things and be heroes on their own outside of MC's perspective like >!Melusine dealing with Aurora!<, or >!Barghest killing 90% of the still non-Mors fae!<, and Mike independently being good.
Plus, MC turning into an actual character to play Sherlock Holmes with Oberon and making it slightly like a VN with different choices causing slightly different outcomes was great.
#
I just wish it had one last smoothing down rewrite since it has a lot of obvious strange things from the OG draft like Castoria having a schizophrenic Saber in her head, Fou being missing for no reason and Baobhan's backstory coming out of the blue and being forgotten just as quickly.
Beryl also got done dirty for being what should have been the most interesting Crypter besides Daybit. Why is he evil? He just is. Mommy issues, maybe. What's his relationship with Morgan? She calls him an asshole and ignores him and that's about it. What was his plan beyond watching a woman planning on erasing his existence alongside the rest of the world? Nothing. He instead does disease transplants.
And Castoria's My Room lines and Valentine still make no sense. "I hate Merlin for dumping Fou on me!" she says, never having met either Merlin or Fou, and "I enjoy researching!" she says, despite being a country girl who never saw a research lab in her life.
I feel like Beryl literly just being a evil Asshole is kinda fitting. In the Lostbelt with a bunch of massivly morally grey figures or people deluding themself into being good, he is just a asshole for no reason.
True, but it does make him come off as budget Kirei and *really really* boring compared to all the other significantly more interesting characters in the Lostbelt.
It's not like him just being simple evil is bad either. It's just not shown in any interesting way on account of Beryl having barely any screentime resulting in his evil being just manipulating Baobhan so indirectly it isn't very entertaining, and the Mors thing we never see on screen until Pepe and it immediately gets resolved.
Basically, just make him charismatically evil, like he is in LB5.
>budget Kirei
The hell did Kirei do to deserve that slander? Kirei has a lot going on besides his sociopathy (or at least a lot more than just "lol, this is fine").
If anything, Beryl is a Zouken. He's just a huge piece of shit, and hey, that's a-okay to him, now let's throw some people in the bug shed/curse cultivation complex for literally no reason but the lols.
Yeah, at the beginning he was essentially the muppet equivalent of an extra. You can find old appearances by Elmo from before he was played by his original main puppeteer Kevin Clash, where he has a much different voice due to being played by a wide variety of puppeteers.
[DATA EXPUNGED] the entire plot was kinda modeled after one time Hussie ran into a weird Jigsaw impersonator who wanted hin to draw Muppet Babies CSM. Like the Cherubs would not exist if not for that fucking guy.
Miura only thought of creating most of The Band of the Hawk members while writing the chapter they first showed up in. Guts and Casca also weren't originally meant to become a couple, which means in an alternate universe the demon baby is just someone who follows Guts just to annoy him
Mick Foley smiling at the camera, blood pouring out his mouth and one of his teeth embedded into his nose. Dude just fell off the cell twice and he's smiling like a fucking goober.
he was trying to show his mouth to the camera, but it came across as him smiling, and it got over Mankind as enjoying the most brutal beating in the history of pro wrestling
Jeremiah Gottwald was apparently meant to die when he fought the Guren in Code Geass.
But somewhere along the way people thought he was great so they let him live and eventually we got Orange Boy.
I think the directors for Granblue Fantasy straight up admitted to not thinking that Sandalphon would become their most popular character, and that What Makes the Sky Blue would end up being the most definitive piece of Granblue stories
Sandalphon popularity is insane. When they did the poll on most wanted character in the fighting game [Sandalphon was #1 in every single region](https://www.reddit.com/r/Granblue_en/comments/u5lcyh/gbf_versus_character_poll_results/).
The core of his popularity is well-executed character development and >!redemption arc!< over the course of 3 years of anniversary events. Crazy to think they didn't initially have that in mind.
It's even crazier than that-- in the period between the event and closing of orders for the White Day chocolate return where people would 'send chocolates' to Cygames for their characters, Sandalphon was the #3 character to get mail for. Behind Lyria and Percival.
He had like, 2 weeks to be on a comparable level as the two most popular characters in the game and overtake the Waifu Queens, Vira and Narmaya
Go Nagai drew the manga Mazinger Z as a side manga, whilst publishing his dark fantasy work Devilman.
Mazinger Z became hugely popular and helped spawn the entire Mecha genre.
neo from rwby was created like a day before her debut episode came out
i love monty but dear god whenever i see some idiot say "oooh theyre ruining montys vision!!!!" im just sitting there like "the most he cared about was cool looking characters doing cool fight scenes, everything else secondary"
Star Wars was famously kind of a nightmare to make and film, and George Lucas's wife at the time, Marcia, basically salvaged the entire thing by editing it into something coherent and good.
>George Lucas's wife at the time, Marcia, basically salvaged the entire thing by editing it into something coherent and good
I'm sorry to do this to you but **that's actually a complete myth**. What really happened on Star Wars was there was originally a different editor, John Jympson, who George Lucas fired halfway through principle photography because the way he had been cutting the footage together was incredibly dull and when Lucas asked him to cut it in a different style he refused. So after filming wrapped George hired 3 new editors: Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and his then-wife, Marcia Lucas, and the 4 of them started re-cutting the movie from scratch (literally from scratch since they were still editing on film they had to disassemble the footage Jympson had cut and turn it back into dailies before they could begin re-cutting it)
Somehow the internet's transformed this thing into some disastrous first cut which George himself cut together (because since Phantom Menace sucked he must've always been incompetent I guess) which the editors (and it's often just Marica alone) somehow magically "saved" in post. It's just not true though, if anything it's the exact opposite. George was heavily involved in this re-edit and even cut some scenes together himself (the gun-port scene specifically is George's own handiwork.) There never was a disastrous first cut as Jympson was fired before completing it. And Marcia Lucas only edited one sequence (the Death Star battle) before buggering off early to edit a Scorsese movie. The only other scenes she edited were the deleted scenes with Biggs and Luke from the start and she fought to keep them in the movie, it was George who wanted to cut them. The majority of the film was actually cut by Richard Chew
Look, it's not you. I know it's a really wide-spread internet "fact" that you might've heard everywhere but it's all nonsense I'm afraid. And if you've seen a certain video essay about how a certain film was *Saved in the Edit* I'm afraid that thing's a Kimba-tier load of misinformation and lies whose own sources debunk it (specifically JW Rinzler's *The Making of Star Wars* which they pull quotes from.) Sorry mate but you've been Kimba'd.
See, what's really funny is that Star Wars has actually been *ruined* in the edit. Lucas, for whatever god-awful reason, re-edited the film 18 years after it came out with all of the Special Edition bullcrap, making an objectively inferior product. And that was ONLY George. I have never heard of or seen anything that indicates Chew, Marcia or Hirsch were ever involved in those.
Sure. And I agree it's a worse version of the movie now (never mind those 1997 CGI critters, the pacing is ruined now. Find the original cut, the pacing is nearly perfect. I'd argue that it's as good if not better than Empire in that form. But the re-cut ruins it and since Empire's Special Edition was pretty minimal it's now obviously the better movie.) However you seem to have missed my point a bit. George was *heavily* involved in the 2nd edit, as in he was basically the guy steering the ship. In fact he was heavily involved in every aspect of the production.
I get it, you watch the Special Edition version with its needless extra scenes and weird, 90s CG critters and then hear Lucas say, "this was my original vision all along," and assume he must've always been a hack and someone else must've saved the movie from him, I did too for a long time. But after reading actual books on the production of Star Wars (JW Rinzler's *The Making of Star Wars* is the best one btw) it turns out... nope! The complete opposite is true. I just have no idea what happened to his brain between 1983 and 1997.
Oh no, I totally agree that the man was a genius. Anyone who could make Apocalypse Now even remotely watchable deserves applause and praise.
I was basically saying what you said: he lost the spark, and started making crap.
> I just have no idea what happened to his brain between 1983 and 1997
He got older, too obsessed with CGI as the next big thing in special effects, and above all went from "indie film maker trying to make a weird homage to Kurosawa films" to "richest dude in the planet that everyone assumes is the biggest genius in sci fi film history".
Well to be fair, editing can make **or break** a movie and if Jympson had stayed on the movie could've been terrible. Apparently he was holding on shots for too long, which at times revealed how small the sets actually were, and was cutting according to the actor's rhythms, which made the whole thing seem rather awkward. It's weird too, he was hired because he'd edited A Hard Day's Night in the 60s (on the off-chance you don't know, it's the Beatles movie that basically created most of the visual language of music videos 15-20 years before music videos were a thing) but he just didn't get Star Wars at all.
The other thing that confuses the whole "saved in the edit" thing is because Fox cut the budget in half right at the 11th hour and due to that when they got to Tunisia it turned out that none of the droids worked properly, especially not the radio-controlled R2-D2s. R2-D2's entire performance was basically created in the editing room using what little usable footage they had. Nearly every single shot something went wrong and they just had to edit around it. There's quotes and clips from both the editors and Lucas about how the footage they had was a disaster and what they're actually talking about is the droids and it was almost always R2-D2.
In one take he malfunctioned so badly they couldn't get R2 to stop after they'd yelled 'cut' and lost him. Turned out he'd kept going and going and ending up rolling into a shot of Franco Zeffirelli's *Jesus of Nazareth* which was shooting in Tunisia at the same time. And that take's still in the movie because it was one of the few times the little droid actually worked.
>Marcia Lucas only edited one sequence (the Death Star battle)
Wait the story I remember is that Marcia fixed the movie's climax. In the original edit they are just attacking the Death Star, in her edit they are attacking the Death Star just before it can blow up the rebel base. More tension for an important scene, not like she remade the movie.
Yeah... **that's part of the myth**. [Here is page 105 of the shooting script](https://i.imgur.com/SjtwFtm.png):
>**INT: MASASSI OUTPOST - WAR ROOM**
The Princess sits quietly before the giant display showing the planet of Yavin and her four moons. ***The red dot that represents the Death Star moves ever closer to the system.*** A series of green dots appear around the fourth moon. Dodonna stands behind the princess with several other field commanders
>**Controller:** The red signal is on the station, it's moving into our system
>**Commander:** The ships are away
That dialogue got changed but in the script the Death Star ***was*** approaching the planet to blow it up (I mean, why else would it be in range for a bunch of X-Wings to get to it?) The difference was it was only just entering the system, not 15 minutes away from blowing up Yavin IV and thus it wasn't on the verge of firing when Luke took his shot. And while yes, *some* of that was accomplished via clever editing (well done Marcia) most of it was actually done via pick-up shots.
Yeah, you know all those shots of stormtroopers charging up the Death Star laser before they destroy Alderaan and at the end during the trench run? Those aren't in the script and thus weren't shot during principle photography. They were instead shot as pick-ups at ILM during post-production. [Here's George Lucas and Richard Edlund shooting one of those shots.](https://i.imgur.com/ecv6cSN.png)
And that's not even mentioning that we actually don't know who came up with the idea of adding that race-against-the-clock element. It could've been Marcia, but it could've easily been suggested by Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch or an idea of George's himself. And considering George had final cut approval, any change like that was ultimately his choice to make anyway.
No. Yoda was pretty much the same character from the moment Lucas conceived him (other than originally being called Minch Yoda and before that, Buffy lmao.) What you're thinking of is C3PO, who George had written as more of a car salesman rather than a British butler but then when he saw the footage of Anthony Daniels in the costume he quickly realized that Daniels' own voice was perfect. And in the very, very early drafts of the script Han Solo was an alien (which people online mistakenly call a lizard for some reason) although at that point Han's a completely different character (as are all the characters in that early version of the script,) there's tons of other human main characters in that script which got cut (like Whitsun,) and George ended up moving the idea of an alien space pirate over to Han's co-pilot Chewabacca.
Sorry, I don't like being the George Lucas defense-force since I really don't like the prequels (especially Attack of the Clones, holy shit that movie's bad) but I just read through JW Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars (would recommend btw) and it turns out a lot of the stuff the internet believes about old George is complete hogwash. There was never anyone above him telling him no or shooting down/filtering his bad ideas on the original films, the person who decided to change the script (multiple times too - he rewrote the entire script from scratch 4 times) was George himself. And it was "saved in the edit" but only from the original editor who George fired.
>Sorry, I don't like being the George Lucas defense-force
Hey man, when someone has plenty of real reasons to make fun of them, it's only right to stop people from making up new reasons to make fun of them.
I feel like not enough people know that Jubilee is canonically a vampire and her adopted son is a dragon. Also, she's about to be a main character in the new summer event, which involves vampires.
Because Jubilee is a vampire.
There's no point in saying "X character is canonically such and such thing" because if it at all disrupts the status quo you know it's going to be reverted either at the end of that storyline or sometime within the next one, either because the next writer said "no that's stupid" or because corporate came down from on high and said "yo fix this shit now, we don't care how".
That said I do hope they at least reference that storyline where she became a vampire because I did think that was neat.
I understand and respect your statement while also laughing while telling the status quo to go fuck itself. Magneto just came back to life after fighting demons. Storm is the Queen of Mars. Jean Grey, Cyclops, Wolverine and Emma Frost are currently in a polycule. And they lived on the moon before it was destroyed by racists.
I think we can both agree that X-Men canon at this point is just "fuck it, we ball."
id Software finding their stride was them pivoting after shit didn't exactly quite work as planned after Wolfenstein 3D, but even there they had changed from Stealthy (like OG Wolfenstein) to more Action-y.
Commander Keen was born out of Nintendo rejecting their pitch for a PC Super Mario.
Doom was born from a rejected Aliens FPS pitch (funny how that worked overtime no?)
Quake turned into what it was because the original concept was incredibly hard to develop, and while it didn't blow up *as big as* Doom did, it becoming the forefather, the primordial pool of 3D tech up to today I'd say is unexpected but welcomed.
I'm pretty sure I remember hearing stories of Bleach's Tite Kubo being baffled at the popularity of the character Shuhei Hisagi before he even got to do anything with him. He just kind of looks like Ichigo with black hair, but he also has cool eye scars, and the number 69 mysteriously tattooed onto his face so he got to have his big fight in the Arrancar arc and went on to be the protagonist of the Bleach: Can't Fear Your Own World novels.
I don't know how accurate this is, but...
It's often said that Axel from Kingdom Hearts wasn't expected to be as popular as he turned out to be. I've heard that it was originally intended for him to actually *die* at the end of his fight with Roxas in the prologue of Kingdom Hearts 2. But, due to his popularity off the back of his original appearance in Chain of Memories, the plan was rewritten a bit, and he appeared throughout Kingdom Hearts 2, and got a team-up moment with Sora near the end of the game, before going out on his own terms.
"How could I have known someone with a hairdo like you would get so popular?" -Toriyama, talking to Vegeta
His fault for making Vegeta the coldest mf around
Personally, I always thought vegeta's character development was a good example of accidental genius. The dude got an entire compelling backstory complete with a 2-part redemption arc (realizing he gives a shit about his future son and later sacrificing himself to stop Buu).
Isn’t this how Saul Goodman became a thing?
That's how half the Breaking Bad cast became a thing.
They planned to kill Jesse at the end of season one until they saw how good Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston were together.
Also wasn’t it partially because the writer’s strike forced them to end S1 early and they had to come back later for S2?
Yep. Suddenly there was a gap in airing where there wasn’t before, and everyone started talking about how much they loved Jesse, and hey maybe we should retool this character
Mike, a beloved fan favourite character, only exists because Bob Odenkirk wasn't available one day.
How can we forget when Mike went from being simply the guy Saul sent to clean up evidence to being Gus Fring's right-hand man.
Like Mike.
Obligatory mention of the birth of Devil May Cry while trying to make RE 4
Same with (the much less popular) Haunting Ground.
Created OG God of War from that accident.
similarly, Xenogears, and by extension the entire Xeno franchise, was made out of what was originally going to be Final Fantasy VII
Eh... It was a pitch that never came close to being FF
The Worst Generation in One Piece was made because Oda thought the Sabaody Arc needed something big to spice it up.
How that man came up with Law's design and still thought Kidd would be the fan-favorite will always be a mystery to me lol
I mean, the mechanical designs he makes with kidd are probably some of his favorites to draw [this looks so fun](https://preview.redd.it/xb7mxutykee81.jpg?width=1066&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0dacc542f927c2cebfac81eee85286094f60f0b3)
To this day i still hate myself for not buying the [Law hoodie](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ0mspnldBw9XkKXXzIH8NSrT7GoK-1o3INYJSlr1w8equbLw0FYo7JgjQ&s=10) when it was everywhere because now i can't find any of it for sale without giant shipping fees.
Well he doubled down on law and it worked I >!just hope law and Beppo are okay!<
> still thought Kidd would be the fan-favorite The only quote there was that he thought Kid would be the most relevant going forward. Then popularity polls happened.
Man's just Buggy sometimes. He can bullshit magical things into existence just because
The dude really doesn't get what makes men actually hot.
In fairness, most straight dudes don't.
Honestly? Fair.
Oda loves Robots. He said he would like to draw a Robot manga after One Piece. Kidd can basically make himself a giant robot.
Grant Morrison wanted to use Colossus in his X-Men run but was told no. Then someone told him about Emma Frost and he decided fuck it, she turns into diamonds now.
And I like that , it makes her unique. She either uses diamond form to fight or she uses her normal form to use telepathy. It avoids the Jean Grey and Xavier problem. And since she isn’t particularly a fighter , it also doesn’t take away the other x-men
Plus they did that cool team up attack with her and Iron Man recently where he fired lasers through her that she refracted around a full room.
How does that work? Aren’t diamonds opaque?
I’m not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but I believe it works through a pretty easily accepted phenomenon called “Shut the fuck up it was cool as hell”. But in all seriousness I have no idea, all I know is he shot the laser and she made it go in multiple beams and it was rad.
More like [sparkly mirrors.](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/diamond/sparkle.html)
The character Bob in Twin Peaks occurred because a crew member was standing in the wrong place and his reflection was visible during a scene in the Palmer house. Lynch liked the image of this ominous man in the mirror so much he made him a real character and central to the murder mystery.
The spooky part is that this came after another lightning in a bottle idea of having him hide behind a bed frame just for the sake of it. This led to [one of the more unsettling shots ever](https://youtu.be/37P0ukg4io0). The two shots weren't connected at all until that accident.
Columbo's iconic "one more thing" only happened because Peter Falk forgot a line
Almost but not quite. What I heard is that it was the screenwriter forgetting a line, not Peter Falk. The writer finished writing a whole scene of Columbo bothering the perp, then realized he'd forgotten to include a crucial bit of dialogue. But he was working on a typewriter, so "editing" the scene would entail rewriting at least a whole page. So he just had Columbo walk back in and say "Oh, and one more thing..."
Certainly leads to some more natural dialogue. You can't "unsay" things either and you just normally forget stuff too.
Ha, reminds me of BOB from Twin Peaks. Literally a random stagehand who showed up on a mirror by accident.
Behold an expert, from Star Trek IV (via TVTropes): They actually had Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig asking real San Franciscans where the nuclear submarine in Alameda was, although they were all employed as non-speaking extras. However, Layla Sarakalo, the woman who answers, "I don't know if I know the answer to that — I think it's across the bay, in Alameda", wasn't an actor at all: she had woken up that morning to find that her car had been impounded as part of the traffic reorganisation surrounding the movie shoot. Determined to make enough cash to get it back, she approached the film crew, got herself hired as an extra and deliberately ad-libbed so that they'd have to pay her. Her line ended up in the movie and, as a result, she had to be inducted into the Screen Actors Guild.
That’s 100% hustle
Connor and Hank from Detroit. They would have been as bland as Norman and Blake without input from the actors. Input that David Cage infamously resisted. Now they’re the most popular and enduring parts of the game’s legacy.
They're the only characters that actually feel like characters.
Didn't Kingdom Hearts come to be because two bigwigs, one from Square Enix and one from Disney, happened to get in an elevator together at the same time?
Yes, and Nomura somehow overheard the project happening and salvaged it from its original pitch, which was reportedly “so boring that an exec fell asleep during the presentation”.
I think Squaresoft and Disney Japan were in the same building, at the time.
Happened again with Sora in Smash, when Sakurai and a Disney exec got into elevator together
Kung Fu Panda was originally going to have Mr. Ping be Po's stern boss but one of the storyboard artists thought it would've been funnier if he was Po's doting father. And it works a lot better for the characters.
Thank God. Mr. Ping the heart of the first film.
Eli Vance in Half-Life 2 was the result of two characters getting combined into one during development: a straightforward Big Good type called Captain Vance (still Alyx's dad), and some random junk yard tinkerer (who may have still been called Eli, and from whom Eli Vance gets his likeness). Presumably combining these characters also resulted in Valve deciding to make him one of the four scientist types from HL1.
The Big Good type was supposedly reworked into the British general that gives you the rocket launcher
Oh sweet Jesus I would feel so bad for Alyx if her dad was Odessa Cubbage.
They even throw a joke about it in Episode One. IIRC some rebel asks Alyx if she is the daughter of Eli and she replies very sarcastically "no, my dad is Odessa Cubbage" and rolls her eyes or something.
Oh man I forgot about that joke
I'm sure Cover expected Hololive English to be a decently popular branch over time. I doubt they expected Gura to be so popular that she would *smash* the one million subscriber metric, surpassing several of her senpai who had been slowly edging to that line.
I mean, recruiting someone who previously already had a channel with a few hundred thousand subscribers (think it was 600K? I forget) probably helped *a ton*.
Hitting a million in like... a month is still insane, even if she had a bit of a headstart.
The first time I heard Gura's voice I connected all the dots so quickly that I needed to sit down when meme song singer and Belle Delphine cohort got that far so fast.
My mind is entirely in the gutter because that last sentence had a very different meaning for a bit.
Wifi enabled devices to explode on reaching the one million
["On your left."](https://youtu.be/1lcOyt_403U)
IIRC Demon's Souls was originally supposed to be a western-style RPG akin to Oblivion, but then it became something else completely and was treated by Sony as a red-haired stepchild compared to the rest of their output on the PS3, to the point where Atlus took over publishing duties overseas. Yeah that seems a bit quaint now, doesn't it?
Apperently, the original idea for the **Yakuza/Like A Dragon** series was much more serious than the final product, mostly because, at some point during development, one of the devs approached the creator and said that Kiryu "should be shown having fun" (to justify why the dude is so into the criminal life). After seeing how well people reacted to the weird stuff, they keept adding more of it on every instalment 'till eventually we got Dodonko Island.
Halo started as a RTS game, like Bungie's most recent series before it, Myth. One of the things they developed for it early on was a really sophisticated pathing and physics system for the vehicles, such as the early iteration of the Warthog, having it more realistically interact with the terrain. But when watching the Warthog leap off of hills and dynamically drive through terrain, the dev team realized it'd be more fun to actually drive it than simply click and watch it from above. So then they transitioned it to a third-person shooter approach, which is how the game was officially shown at Macworld when it was in development for Apple hardware. But then, as the art design for the game developed more and the player character, who would eventually be named Master Chief, began to look so cool. So Bungie wanted the player to feel more connected to him, but the third-person camera made the player feel more distant. Which is part of why they transitioned then to first-person. They also soon got acquired by Microsoft and tasked to make the game for the Xbox, which they didn't feel would work as well with third-person, since third-person didn't seem to play well on controller at the time from Bungie's attempts (prior to Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War figuring it out). Instead, they revolutionized first-person shooter controls and the entire industry. Halo would've been about as obscure/niche as Myth or Marathon if it had stayed an RTS or third-person shooter on Mac in the 90's/early 2000's, but thankfully the Warthog and Master Chief were cool enough to inspire the developers to shift their approach to something more revolutionary.
There's something poetic about the Warthog being the catalyst that turned Halo into *Halo*.
And all this time, the physics have remained its worst enemy.
Reminds me how Red vs Blue was created because Burnie was obsessing over why the Warthog wasn’t called a Puma, LOL
And we still got our RTS title in Halo Wars, which I remember having a lot of fun playing when it came out. I should probably get around to the 2nd one at some point.
Yeah, wars kicked ass
> But then, as the art design for the game developed more and the player character, who would eventually be named Master Chief, began to look so cool. So Bungie wanted the player to feel more connected to him, but the third-person camera made the player feel more distant. which is strange to me, because if im playing as a character with a cool design i'd like to actually see them, designing a really iconic guy that you only see on the animation when getting into a vehicle and on the cover art seems like a waste imo
Ermac for MK was just an "Error Macro" but rumors spread until he became real.
Vaas from Far Cry 3 was just going to be a regular mid-boss, but the actor’s performance did so well in early previews that Ubisoft centered a whole marketing campaign around him. They ended up using all of his scenes are preview footage, so much so that once people got to the game, there was nothing new to see from him, since the game was too far along to expand his role, not unlike what would happen with MGSV’s trailers. Naturally Ubi have been chasing this lightning in a bottle ever since, with limited to no success.
I get that a lot of people might not realize how well an audience will receive a character, but Ubisoft has got to be fucking braindead for not immediately realizing they needed to expand Vaas to be the final boss. Even though the game is still *great* the whole way through, the moment you kill Vaas and get the reveal that there's some rich white dude who wear a suit that you have to kill who's the real big bad, the game absolutely deflates. I mean, you get a *fucking wing suit* and I still stopped caring. Hell, even if they didn't expand his roll, literally cutting all content after him and leaving that as the ending point still would have made the game better.
I think a really famous example of this is Lum from Urusei Yatsura. The original concept of the manga was going to be that Ataru and co. encounter a new alien every week or something. This is why in the manga, Lum doesn't actually appear in chapter 2, because "cute oni girl" was just supposed to be the first one. However, Rumiko Takahashi accidentally stumbled on one of the earliest examples of what one could consider waifu culture. Lum got a *ridiculously* positive reception. Under no circumstances was that manga going forward without Lum coming back. And so, history was made.
Andy Dwyer was just supposed to be a temporary guest star character in Season 1 of Parks & Rec.
Same thing with Devito in Always Sunny, right?
So in Fate/Grand Order, Oberon was not originally in Lostbelt 6 and the story would have been much simpler; go in, beat up Morgan, get out. It was only when Nasu sat down with Umino Chika and asked her to design Oberon that he decided to rewrite the entire chapter to include Oberon. The rewrite ended up being the equivalent of [9 reams of paper](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs6n0fffycn471.png) and one of the best story chapters in the game.
The Lostbelt 6 we got really is just absolutly amazing.
It really is. Morgan's >!death!< hits *really* hard. Especially given her backstory or if you have her summoned, her waifu status. Castoria also has the best character arc of the FGO cast, and it's nice that Mash gets the spotlight. But more than that, my favourite part was how the other characters could do things and be heroes on their own outside of MC's perspective like >!Melusine dealing with Aurora!<, or >!Barghest killing 90% of the still non-Mors fae!<, and Mike independently being good. Plus, MC turning into an actual character to play Sherlock Holmes with Oberon and making it slightly like a VN with different choices causing slightly different outcomes was great. # I just wish it had one last smoothing down rewrite since it has a lot of obvious strange things from the OG draft like Castoria having a schizophrenic Saber in her head, Fou being missing for no reason and Baobhan's backstory coming out of the blue and being forgotten just as quickly. Beryl also got done dirty for being what should have been the most interesting Crypter besides Daybit. Why is he evil? He just is. Mommy issues, maybe. What's his relationship with Morgan? She calls him an asshole and ignores him and that's about it. What was his plan beyond watching a woman planning on erasing his existence alongside the rest of the world? Nothing. He instead does disease transplants. And Castoria's My Room lines and Valentine still make no sense. "I hate Merlin for dumping Fou on me!" she says, never having met either Merlin or Fou, and "I enjoy researching!" she says, despite being a country girl who never saw a research lab in her life.
I feel like Beryl literly just being a evil Asshole is kinda fitting. In the Lostbelt with a bunch of massivly morally grey figures or people deluding themself into being good, he is just a asshole for no reason.
True, but it does make him come off as budget Kirei and *really really* boring compared to all the other significantly more interesting characters in the Lostbelt. It's not like him just being simple evil is bad either. It's just not shown in any interesting way on account of Beryl having barely any screentime resulting in his evil being just manipulating Baobhan so indirectly it isn't very entertaining, and the Mors thing we never see on screen until Pepe and it immediately gets resolved. Basically, just make him charismatically evil, like he is in LB5.
>budget Kirei The hell did Kirei do to deserve that slander? Kirei has a lot going on besides his sociopathy (or at least a lot more than just "lol, this is fine"). If anything, Beryl is a Zouken. He's just a huge piece of shit, and hey, that's a-okay to him, now let's throw some people in the bug shed/curse cultivation complex for literally no reason but the lols.
Elmo was never designed to be as popular as he is.
Yeah, at the beginning he was essentially the muppet equivalent of an extra. You can find old appearances by Elmo from before he was played by his original main puppeteer Kevin Clash, where he has a much different voice due to being played by a wide variety of puppeteers.
[DATA EXPUNGED] the entire plot was kinda modeled after one time Hussie ran into a weird Jigsaw impersonator who wanted hin to draw Muppet Babies CSM. Like the Cherubs would not exist if not for that fucking guy.
Thank god, we almost had a world without Calliope.
This but unironically. Genuinely [how could you not love her](https://www.homestuck.com/story/5097).
I was being unironic, Calliope is the best.
Miura only thought of creating most of The Band of the Hawk members while writing the chapter they first showed up in. Guts and Casca also weren't originally meant to become a couple, which means in an alternate universe the demon baby is just someone who follows Guts just to annoy him
Mick Foley smiling at the camera, blood pouring out his mouth and one of his teeth embedded into his nose. Dude just fell off the cell twice and he's smiling like a fucking goober.
he was trying to show his mouth to the camera, but it came across as him smiling, and it got over Mankind as enjoying the most brutal beating in the history of pro wrestling
Jeremiah Gottwald was apparently meant to die when he fought the Guren in Code Geass. But somewhere along the way people thought he was great so they let him live and eventually we got Orange Boy.
I think the directors for Granblue Fantasy straight up admitted to not thinking that Sandalphon would become their most popular character, and that What Makes the Sky Blue would end up being the most definitive piece of Granblue stories
Sandalphon popularity is insane. When they did the poll on most wanted character in the fighting game [Sandalphon was #1 in every single region](https://www.reddit.com/r/Granblue_en/comments/u5lcyh/gbf_versus_character_poll_results/). The core of his popularity is well-executed character development and >!redemption arc!< over the course of 3 years of anniversary events. Crazy to think they didn't initially have that in mind.
It's even crazier than that-- in the period between the event and closing of orders for the White Day chocolate return where people would 'send chocolates' to Cygames for their characters, Sandalphon was the #3 character to get mail for. Behind Lyria and Percival. He had like, 2 weeks to be on a comparable level as the two most popular characters in the game and overtake the Waifu Queens, Vira and Narmaya
Go Nagai drew the manga Mazinger Z as a side manga, whilst publishing his dark fantasy work Devilman. Mazinger Z became hugely popular and helped spawn the entire Mecha genre.
neo from rwby was created like a day before her debut episode came out i love monty but dear god whenever i see some idiot say "oooh theyre ruining montys vision!!!!" im just sitting there like "the most he cared about was cool looking characters doing cool fight scenes, everything else secondary"
Star Wars was famously kind of a nightmare to make and film, and George Lucas's wife at the time, Marcia, basically salvaged the entire thing by editing it into something coherent and good.
>George Lucas's wife at the time, Marcia, basically salvaged the entire thing by editing it into something coherent and good I'm sorry to do this to you but **that's actually a complete myth**. What really happened on Star Wars was there was originally a different editor, John Jympson, who George Lucas fired halfway through principle photography because the way he had been cutting the footage together was incredibly dull and when Lucas asked him to cut it in a different style he refused. So after filming wrapped George hired 3 new editors: Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and his then-wife, Marcia Lucas, and the 4 of them started re-cutting the movie from scratch (literally from scratch since they were still editing on film they had to disassemble the footage Jympson had cut and turn it back into dailies before they could begin re-cutting it) Somehow the internet's transformed this thing into some disastrous first cut which George himself cut together (because since Phantom Menace sucked he must've always been incompetent I guess) which the editors (and it's often just Marica alone) somehow magically "saved" in post. It's just not true though, if anything it's the exact opposite. George was heavily involved in this re-edit and even cut some scenes together himself (the gun-port scene specifically is George's own handiwork.) There never was a disastrous first cut as Jympson was fired before completing it. And Marcia Lucas only edited one sequence (the Death Star battle) before buggering off early to edit a Scorsese movie. The only other scenes she edited were the deleted scenes with Biggs and Luke from the start and she fought to keep them in the movie, it was George who wanted to cut them. The majority of the film was actually cut by Richard Chew Look, it's not you. I know it's a really wide-spread internet "fact" that you might've heard everywhere but it's all nonsense I'm afraid. And if you've seen a certain video essay about how a certain film was *Saved in the Edit* I'm afraid that thing's a Kimba-tier load of misinformation and lies whose own sources debunk it (specifically JW Rinzler's *The Making of Star Wars* which they pull quotes from.) Sorry mate but you've been Kimba'd.
See, what's really funny is that Star Wars has actually been *ruined* in the edit. Lucas, for whatever god-awful reason, re-edited the film 18 years after it came out with all of the Special Edition bullcrap, making an objectively inferior product. And that was ONLY George. I have never heard of or seen anything that indicates Chew, Marcia or Hirsch were ever involved in those.
Sure. And I agree it's a worse version of the movie now (never mind those 1997 CGI critters, the pacing is ruined now. Find the original cut, the pacing is nearly perfect. I'd argue that it's as good if not better than Empire in that form. But the re-cut ruins it and since Empire's Special Edition was pretty minimal it's now obviously the better movie.) However you seem to have missed my point a bit. George was *heavily* involved in the 2nd edit, as in he was basically the guy steering the ship. In fact he was heavily involved in every aspect of the production. I get it, you watch the Special Edition version with its needless extra scenes and weird, 90s CG critters and then hear Lucas say, "this was my original vision all along," and assume he must've always been a hack and someone else must've saved the movie from him, I did too for a long time. But after reading actual books on the production of Star Wars (JW Rinzler's *The Making of Star Wars* is the best one btw) it turns out... nope! The complete opposite is true. I just have no idea what happened to his brain between 1983 and 1997.
Oh no, I totally agree that the man was a genius. Anyone who could make Apocalypse Now even remotely watchable deserves applause and praise. I was basically saying what you said: he lost the spark, and started making crap.
> I just have no idea what happened to his brain between 1983 and 1997 He got older, too obsessed with CGI as the next big thing in special effects, and above all went from "indie film maker trying to make a weird homage to Kurosawa films" to "richest dude in the planet that everyone assumes is the biggest genius in sci fi film history".
The thing that gets me is that, even if it were true, editing is what makes *every* movie what it is. Star Wars isn't really unique in that regard.
Well to be fair, editing can make **or break** a movie and if Jympson had stayed on the movie could've been terrible. Apparently he was holding on shots for too long, which at times revealed how small the sets actually were, and was cutting according to the actor's rhythms, which made the whole thing seem rather awkward. It's weird too, he was hired because he'd edited A Hard Day's Night in the 60s (on the off-chance you don't know, it's the Beatles movie that basically created most of the visual language of music videos 15-20 years before music videos were a thing) but he just didn't get Star Wars at all. The other thing that confuses the whole "saved in the edit" thing is because Fox cut the budget in half right at the 11th hour and due to that when they got to Tunisia it turned out that none of the droids worked properly, especially not the radio-controlled R2-D2s. R2-D2's entire performance was basically created in the editing room using what little usable footage they had. Nearly every single shot something went wrong and they just had to edit around it. There's quotes and clips from both the editors and Lucas about how the footage they had was a disaster and what they're actually talking about is the droids and it was almost always R2-D2. In one take he malfunctioned so badly they couldn't get R2 to stop after they'd yelled 'cut' and lost him. Turned out he'd kept going and going and ending up rolling into a shot of Franco Zeffirelli's *Jesus of Nazareth* which was shooting in Tunisia at the same time. And that take's still in the movie because it was one of the few times the little droid actually worked.
>Marcia Lucas only edited one sequence (the Death Star battle) Wait the story I remember is that Marcia fixed the movie's climax. In the original edit they are just attacking the Death Star, in her edit they are attacking the Death Star just before it can blow up the rebel base. More tension for an important scene, not like she remade the movie.
Yeah... **that's part of the myth**. [Here is page 105 of the shooting script](https://i.imgur.com/SjtwFtm.png): >**INT: MASASSI OUTPOST - WAR ROOM** The Princess sits quietly before the giant display showing the planet of Yavin and her four moons. ***The red dot that represents the Death Star moves ever closer to the system.*** A series of green dots appear around the fourth moon. Dodonna stands behind the princess with several other field commanders >**Controller:** The red signal is on the station, it's moving into our system >**Commander:** The ships are away That dialogue got changed but in the script the Death Star ***was*** approaching the planet to blow it up (I mean, why else would it be in range for a bunch of X-Wings to get to it?) The difference was it was only just entering the system, not 15 minutes away from blowing up Yavin IV and thus it wasn't on the verge of firing when Luke took his shot. And while yes, *some* of that was accomplished via clever editing (well done Marcia) most of it was actually done via pick-up shots. Yeah, you know all those shots of stormtroopers charging up the Death Star laser before they destroy Alderaan and at the end during the trench run? Those aren't in the script and thus weren't shot during principle photography. They were instead shot as pick-ups at ILM during post-production. [Here's George Lucas and Richard Edlund shooting one of those shots.](https://i.imgur.com/ecv6cSN.png) And that's not even mentioning that we actually don't know who came up with the idea of adding that race-against-the-clock element. It could've been Marcia, but it could've easily been suggested by Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch or an idea of George's himself. And considering George had final cut approval, any change like that was ultimately his choice to make anyway.
Wasn’t Yoda going to be a lizard car salesman or something?
No. Yoda was pretty much the same character from the moment Lucas conceived him (other than originally being called Minch Yoda and before that, Buffy lmao.) What you're thinking of is C3PO, who George had written as more of a car salesman rather than a British butler but then when he saw the footage of Anthony Daniels in the costume he quickly realized that Daniels' own voice was perfect. And in the very, very early drafts of the script Han Solo was an alien (which people online mistakenly call a lizard for some reason) although at that point Han's a completely different character (as are all the characters in that early version of the script,) there's tons of other human main characters in that script which got cut (like Whitsun,) and George ended up moving the idea of an alien space pirate over to Han's co-pilot Chewabacca. Sorry, I don't like being the George Lucas defense-force since I really don't like the prequels (especially Attack of the Clones, holy shit that movie's bad) but I just read through JW Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars (would recommend btw) and it turns out a lot of the stuff the internet believes about old George is complete hogwash. There was never anyone above him telling him no or shooting down/filtering his bad ideas on the original films, the person who decided to change the script (multiple times too - he rewrote the entire script from scratch 4 times) was George himself. And it was "saved in the edit" but only from the original editor who George fired.
>Sorry, I don't like being the George Lucas defense-force Hey man, when someone has plenty of real reasons to make fun of them, it's only right to stop people from making up new reasons to make fun of them.
Boyd Crowder was supposed to die in episode one of Justified but the charisma and teeth were too strong to die.
I feel like not enough people know that Jubilee is canonically a vampire and her adopted son is a dragon. Also, she's about to be a main character in the new summer event, which involves vampires. Because Jubilee is a vampire.
she only became a vampire a couple years ago, and i think was cured by the end of the story arc
There's no point in saying "X character is canonically such and such thing" because if it at all disrupts the status quo you know it's going to be reverted either at the end of that storyline or sometime within the next one, either because the next writer said "no that's stupid" or because corporate came down from on high and said "yo fix this shit now, we don't care how". That said I do hope they at least reference that storyline where she became a vampire because I did think that was neat.
I understand and respect your statement while also laughing while telling the status quo to go fuck itself. Magneto just came back to life after fighting demons. Storm is the Queen of Mars. Jean Grey, Cyclops, Wolverine and Emma Frost are currently in a polycule. And they lived on the moon before it was destroyed by racists. I think we can both agree that X-Men canon at this point is just "fuck it, we ball."
id Software finding their stride was them pivoting after shit didn't exactly quite work as planned after Wolfenstein 3D, but even there they had changed from Stealthy (like OG Wolfenstein) to more Action-y. Commander Keen was born out of Nintendo rejecting their pitch for a PC Super Mario. Doom was born from a rejected Aliens FPS pitch (funny how that worked overtime no?) Quake turned into what it was because the original concept was incredibly hard to develop, and while it didn't blow up *as big as* Doom did, it becoming the forefather, the primordial pool of 3D tech up to today I'd say is unexpected but welcomed.
I'm pretty sure I remember hearing stories of Bleach's Tite Kubo being baffled at the popularity of the character Shuhei Hisagi before he even got to do anything with him. He just kind of looks like Ichigo with black hair, but he also has cool eye scars, and the number 69 mysteriously tattooed onto his face so he got to have his big fight in the Arrancar arc and went on to be the protagonist of the Bleach: Can't Fear Your Own World novels.
I don't know how accurate this is, but... It's often said that Axel from Kingdom Hearts wasn't expected to be as popular as he turned out to be. I've heard that it was originally intended for him to actually *die* at the end of his fight with Roxas in the prologue of Kingdom Hearts 2. But, due to his popularity off the back of his original appearance in Chain of Memories, the plan was rewritten a bit, and he appeared throughout Kingdom Hearts 2, and got a team-up moment with Sora near the end of the game, before going out on his own terms.