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Jun. 12th, 2015 03:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaSo, I'm currently watching Atop the 4th Wall from its beginning to where I got interested enough to start watching it (about three months ago). Its creator, Lewis Lovhaug, started it in late 2008, and as far as I can tell he was 21, maybe just barely 22, and just out of college at the time. (He looks even younger in the first handful of videos, like a teenager, but by the early 2009 ones he looks properly post-college-and-what-do-I-do-with-my-life, at least.) He's been updating it on a regular weekly schedule since then. I, uh, I have a lot to get through.
I've also watched a fair amount of the Channel Awesome shared universe stuff, including various crossovers, but specifically the three anniversary movies - Kickassia (which I confess I didn't finish because the sound was terrible), Suburban Knights (IMHO the best of the three despite its technical limitations), and To Boldly Flee (IMHO the most interesting of the three, despite being more deeply flawed than SK). And that means that I've been spoiled for a few bits of Linkara's (the character Lewis plays in his reviews and the shared Awesomeverse) background.
I'm somewhere in February of 2010 and I just hit the first review where those spoilers matter.
Specifically, he has an evil robot double, somewhat predictably named Mechakara, who is one of the primary antagonists of To Boldly Flee. He's made cameos in several reviews prior to this one, setting several one-off monsters on Linkara, but the review of Ultimates 3 #5 (which has Ultron and some robot doubles in it, har de har, Lewis) is performed by Mechakara rather than Linkara - and while the previous cameos gave his audience enough clues that they could have figured it out at the beginning of the review, and it should have become obvious several minutes before the reveal when Mechakara begins berating the audience for tolerating this crap if they hadn't twigged already, if you've seen To Boldly Flee (in which Mechakara does the same thing, replacing Linkara when the Nostalgia Critic summons all his reviewers), it's flatly obvious from shot one.
Now, my attitude towards spoilers is: if your story relies upon the shock value of a particular reveal - if, in other words, your story has no re-watch/re-read value - then it's probably not a very good story to begin with. I went into Sixth Sense half-spoiled; I knew one of the two main characters was dead to begin with, and figured out which one it was pretty quickly. I don't think it detracted significantly from my enjoyment of the film, and I think that's the key that Shyamalan has since forgotten - twists are extras, not the body of the work. Everyone knows the twist in Citizen Kane, and everyone still watches it anyway. So I didn't mind, really. Lewis had telegraphed it hard enough that I think most of his fans knew before the reveal, anyway, and his acting is good enough that Mechakara-imitating-Linkara does speak with a different voice than Linkara's usual one (the cadence is different, as are some of the word choices, and at least one point he makes regarding some of the cheap titillation in the book is phrased very, very differently from the way Linkara would have made the same point, if he'd made it at all).
But I do sort of wonder what it would have been like not to have known going in that Linkara-in-gloves is probably Mechakara, to have made that discovery during the review - and possibly to have thought that the calm, cold rant at the audience was Linkara speaking, only to find out that it's the evil robot double after all. I'm not watching these on Channel Awesome's site for reasons, so I'm not seeing the fans' comments in realtime (one of the aforementioned reasons is that ChanAwes's native commenters contain a lot of entitled dudebros and I'm not having any of that). But this is one case where, even though I don't mind being spoiled, I do miss a bit the experience I might have had otherwise.
I've also watched a fair amount of the Channel Awesome shared universe stuff, including various crossovers, but specifically the three anniversary movies - Kickassia (which I confess I didn't finish because the sound was terrible), Suburban Knights (IMHO the best of the three despite its technical limitations), and To Boldly Flee (IMHO the most interesting of the three, despite being more deeply flawed than SK). And that means that I've been spoiled for a few bits of Linkara's (the character Lewis plays in his reviews and the shared Awesomeverse) background.
I'm somewhere in February of 2010 and I just hit the first review where those spoilers matter.
Specifically, he has an evil robot double, somewhat predictably named Mechakara, who is one of the primary antagonists of To Boldly Flee. He's made cameos in several reviews prior to this one, setting several one-off monsters on Linkara, but the review of Ultimates 3 #5 (which has Ultron and some robot doubles in it, har de har, Lewis) is performed by Mechakara rather than Linkara - and while the previous cameos gave his audience enough clues that they could have figured it out at the beginning of the review, and it should have become obvious several minutes before the reveal when Mechakara begins berating the audience for tolerating this crap if they hadn't twigged already, if you've seen To Boldly Flee (in which Mechakara does the same thing, replacing Linkara when the Nostalgia Critic summons all his reviewers), it's flatly obvious from shot one.
Now, my attitude towards spoilers is: if your story relies upon the shock value of a particular reveal - if, in other words, your story has no re-watch/re-read value - then it's probably not a very good story to begin with. I went into Sixth Sense half-spoiled; I knew one of the two main characters was dead to begin with, and figured out which one it was pretty quickly. I don't think it detracted significantly from my enjoyment of the film, and I think that's the key that Shyamalan has since forgotten - twists are extras, not the body of the work. Everyone knows the twist in Citizen Kane, and everyone still watches it anyway. So I didn't mind, really. Lewis had telegraphed it hard enough that I think most of his fans knew before the reveal, anyway, and his acting is good enough that Mechakara-imitating-Linkara does speak with a different voice than Linkara's usual one (the cadence is different, as are some of the word choices, and at least one point he makes regarding some of the cheap titillation in the book is phrased very, very differently from the way Linkara would have made the same point, if he'd made it at all).
But I do sort of wonder what it would have been like not to have known going in that Linkara-in-gloves is probably Mechakara, to have made that discovery during the review - and possibly to have thought that the calm, cold rant at the audience was Linkara speaking, only to find out that it's the evil robot double after all. I'm not watching these on Channel Awesome's site for reasons, so I'm not seeing the fans' comments in realtime (one of the aforementioned reasons is that ChanAwes's native commenters contain a lot of entitled dudebros and I'm not having any of that). But this is one case where, even though I don't mind being spoiled, I do miss a bit the experience I might have had otherwise.
