About Fiction
On Anime & Manga
Q: How many Dragon Ball characters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: One, but it'll take them three episodes to do it.
A: One, but it'll take them three episodes to do it.
— Old joke
On Film — Live-Action
"I really think there's more 'nothing' in this movie than in any movie we've seen."
— Mike's verdict on The Starfighters, Mystery Science Theater 3000
(While a group of stranded astronauts are silently trekking across a desert... not for the first time, or the last time.)
Kevin: Yes, Planet of the Dinosaurs! Hour after hour of hot walking action!
Bill: More wandering through the desert than the Book of Exodus!
Mike: More walking about than the movie Walkabout!
Kevin: More aimless meandering than a retirement home lawn on a nice Sunday!
"Make sure you arrive an hour late so you don't miss out on all the good bits."
— Martin/Molloy review of Titanic
"Brace yourself for two movies so unnecessarily long that they include five Volvo commercials, two montages of the previous Twilight movies, four games of chess, and the most. Stares. Ever."
— Honest Trailers on Twilight: Breaking Dawn (Parts 1 and 2)
"Then it cuts to him like, oh my God. That scene where Harry Osborn goes and talks to his dad, who's dying on his bed, and it's like, "Okay, here's the scene: You're disappointed in the dad and now you're gonna become evil." And it's like ten minutes long and it's just them talking back and forth. I started playing Poker on my phone. I did! I started playing Hold'em on my phone. I really did. I was just sitting there; I was just so bored. And there were so many scenes of talking and talking and talking; this movie was 2 hours and 22 minutes long."
— Mike Stoklasa, Half in the Bag on The Amazing Spider-Man 2
For the love of God! Cut half this shit out, c'mon!
Cause this is FILLER! Filling up the time! An hour and a half is just too long for uncreative minds! Whoo! Whoo!
"A big truck goes by and Howard shows signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as he panics and flashes back to his abduction. Which we saw ten minutes ago, and reflects a stress that is so severe...that it is never brought up again. Your movie is damn near two hours long. Hey, here's a thought - how about putting shit in there that actually has a point?"
"And it would be one thing if any of this made-up content was interesting, but it's not. In the last video I didn't really complain about the changes they made in the movies because the changes made for a better overall picture. I don't care about changes. I care when the changes are made out of desperation to add artificial conflict, and bring in characters purely for fan service and to stretch out a movie way past its run time. These changes aren't done in service of a better story; they are done to make the movie longer!"
"Legolas and Sauron being in this Trilogy adds nothing to the story of Bilbo Baggins: The Hobbit. I don't even think Bilbo meets Legolas!"
"And this movie really made me realize just how shit this Trilogy is. It doesn't feel anything like the source material and it doesn't even feel like it belongs with the overall series. In my last video I spent a lot of time praising the simple and effective aspects of Storytelling in the original trilogy and it's because of stuff like this. It's clearly not easy to pace a three hour movie appropriately. Even the guy who did it well three times in a row can't keep it up under these circumstances."
On Literature
"''... and the rest of the Book is dedicated to Hephaestus making Achilles new duds. In BOOK NINETEEN Achilles PUTS ON his new duds [such drama!]... yeah, this Epic kind of drags on in places..."
— Overly Sarcastic Productions summarizes The Iliad
It's here that Chloe has the flight attendant summon her father to hear her "extremely good news." We cut back to Rayford's point of view because this is how [co-author Jerry] Jenkins works: If Chloe sends her father a message, the next scene has to be of her father receiving that same message. This is part of his secret formula for cramming a 200-page novel into a mere 468 pages.
— Fred Clark critiquing Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days
Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last DaysOn Live-Action TV
Data reports the cave is unstable. Glad you're here, Professor. The shaking and falling rocks didn't tip me off at all. He goes with Worf and Picard to find an escape route. They blow out a wall, revealing... more caves! Which Picard suggests they head for. In screenwriting, this is generally known as "padding". For those less than cinematically inclined, just picture this: term paper due in thirty minutes. 100 words away from the minimum length. You get the picture.
On Music
You see, when you have this little footage, you apparently can't afford to cut any of it, so even though this movie is a scant 62 minutes, every scene goes on for-fucking-ever! That guy doing the bad Iggy Pop impression? Forever! The fountain dance? Forever! This song lasts seven whole minutes, and it feels like hours!
lasts seven whole minutes, and it feels like hours!—Todd in the Shadows, on A Certain Sacrifice
A Certain SacrificeOn Video Games
I'm not saying this story is flawless. It has huge problems. There are a ton of things that are actually really stupid in this story and I don't see anybody talking about any of them. For one, the pacing in this story is fucking awful. Immediately after Joel dies, we ruin all tension by making Ellie and Dina turn on generators and lackadaisically ride their horse around the city looking for treasure. [...] There's one flashback which I feel really could've fit better as the intro tutorial of the game, and then there are lots of flashbacks that don't serve any purpose at all. And then things get even worse when we stop playing as Ellie. About halfway through the game, we play as Abby and we see what she's been doing while Ellie was going on her lesbian murder hobo rampage, and when things first shifted over I was actually kind of hyped for this. I was excited to see the things that I've done, but in a new context. But that's not what Abby's story is. Abby's story follows a completely different plot which is 100% disconnected from what we experienced as Ellie. A big chunk of the Abby plot is based on finding medicine for this one girl, and then after hours of looking for the fucking medicine you give it to her, and then she just gets shot by the main villain, and then the main villain of Abby's plot immediately gets shot by the girl that he shot and then you realize that it just didn't fucking matter anyway. People like to say, "Oh, well since Ellie didn't kill Abby, I feel like I wasted my time." No dude, this is what it feels like to waste the player's time.
While the slow boil is initially necessary to build suspense, there continue to be overlong sections in the mid-to-late game where absolutely bugger-all happens, like the one bit where you put on a space suit, plod along an external rig, mash a few keypads and then plod all the way back. You've built suspense, Alien: Isolation. It's a very nice suspense, you can stop building it now. No, I don't think it would look nicer with a conservatory! Put that trowel down before I smack you with it!
[Banjo-Tooie] has its moments, but Rare's mentality while making this game must have [been] "Big levels are great, so TOTALLY FREAKING GINORMOUS LEVELS must be TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME" and the game spreads itself too thin.
Data Riku: If you want to save me you need to revisit every single world.
Data Sora: I am slowly regretting my life choices.
Data Sora: I am slowly regretting my life choices.
This is gonna be a really short video. But it's a kinda short level, even for Yoshi's Island, it's — Bonus challenge! Oh, well, okay, we can artificially pad things up with Bonus Challenge here. (Whew!)
"The game says it takes fourteen hours to complete. If you knew where to go, it'd take three."
"Playing these three games [remakes/remasters] in 2023, I realized that triple-A gaming has lost something in the last two decades of game development… or, more accurately, triple-A gaming has has gained way too many things. Nowadays, a lot of triple-A games are bloated and top-heavy. They have gotten so big. Honestly, a lot of times, I feel like triple-A video games have gotten too big.
"Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate III, Starfield, Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarök, so many triple-A games have these massive, huge, sprawling open worlds. Worlds so large that most players will probably never see everything they have to offer. Hundreds of hours of content, incredible cinematic stories with cutscenes and acting, like something out of a big-budget blockbuster movie. Insanely detailed visuals, just gorgeous environments, better-looking than anything I could have imagined a video game's graphics being as a kid. Gameplay that is really complicated, like, so many different systems piled up on top of other systems. Ten different categories of things you can craft. RPG systems with dozens of different unlockable abilities. A hundred different ways you can approach every challenge.
"These games have huge, multi-hundred-million-dollar budgets, and even bigger development times. Like, when is the next time we're gonna see another Zelda or God of War game? It's probably going to be five years, six years, maybe even longer than that. Frankly, that's way too long, and as much as I love the way these series have been sort-of re-imagined in their newer releases, it is kind of a bummer that we'll probably never get another older-style, smaller-scale God of War or Zelda game ever again. Sometimes, I actually feel really intimidated by triple-A games. Maybe I'm just getting older and grumpier, but I don't want to have to learn how all these different new systems work every time I pick up a new game."
"Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate III, Starfield, Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarök, so many triple-A games have these massive, huge, sprawling open worlds. Worlds so large that most players will probably never see everything they have to offer. Hundreds of hours of content, incredible cinematic stories with cutscenes and acting, like something out of a big-budget blockbuster movie. Insanely detailed visuals, just gorgeous environments, better-looking than anything I could have imagined a video game's graphics being as a kid. Gameplay that is really complicated, like, so many different systems piled up on top of other systems. Ten different categories of things you can craft. RPG systems with dozens of different unlockable abilities. A hundred different ways you can approach every challenge.
"These games have huge, multi-hundred-million-dollar budgets, and even bigger development times. Like, when is the next time we're gonna see another Zelda or God of War game? It's probably going to be five years, six years, maybe even longer than that. Frankly, that's way too long, and as much as I love the way these series have been sort-of re-imagined in their newer releases, it is kind of a bummer that we'll probably never get another older-style, smaller-scale God of War or Zelda game ever again. Sometimes, I actually feel really intimidated by triple-A games. Maybe I'm just getting older and grumpier, but I don't want to have to learn how all these different new systems work every time I pick up a new game."
— FatBrett, as a preface for his argument that Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon breaks this mold
, as a preface for his argument that Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon breaks this mold On Western Animation
"Yes, you're reading that correctly and it's no lie: 72 minutes. They went over an hour with this one. And if you're wondering how they came up with enough material to fill a 72 minute run time when they barely had enough to fill a 22 minute run-time last movie, the answer is they didn't.
In Fiction
Anime & Manga
James: I don't get it. Why didn't we do this from the beginning?
Jessie: We have to fill a half hour.
Jessie: We have to fill a half hour.
— Pokémon: The Series, "Hypno's Naptime"
Literature
From a narrative point of view, in 105 pages nothing happens. Except this: 'What with one thing and another, three years passed.'
Western Animation
"Coming up next, we have nothing. We didn't have enough news to cover the whole show tonight, so I'm gonna say absolutely nothing in the cadence of a news story, and I hope I'll get away with it."
—Kip Schlezinger, The Amazing World of Gumball
