I read Wuxia (chinese cultivation novels) which can go on for over thousand chapters. And often the plot is repetitive and thin, but I like it over cheap dramatisation that can be solved if the two parties decided to talk to each other (when there's no other reason that prevent them other than not wanting to). I'd take talking and not agreeing or being powerless over not talking and creating misunderstanding every day. Especially when the plot is all about not creating the chance to talk.

"Not talking" is the laziest plot generator and, sadly, it rules out 80% of movies and books (for me) these days.

I was curious about what a “cultivation novel” is and found this blog post that explained it and wuxia / xianxia: https://www.mylifemytao.com/xianxia-wuxia-cultivation-and-mo...

> "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine"

Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else.

Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap).

Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government.

Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them.

(To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)

Haha, I love this. Strong opinions strongly held. Obviously you're not wrong, and I'm not arguing against this (mostly because I agree), but I do also think _some_ of the Marvel work can be quite....inspired (not sure thats too strong a stance, hear me out!), mostly around the animated medium. The What If series has been good, and I've loved the Spiderman animations, very similar to the recent TMNT movies. Just want to add the new Transformers animated movie was very enjoyable, which I wasn't expecting. So yeah, the Michael Bay-esque style gets old quickly in real life movies, but it can work really well when animated.

I'm sure alot of this can be traced back to Manga roots.

I was thinking more along the lines of simply the Hollywood movies where the dynamics are set by the enormous market forces which basically filters against anything which isn't lowest common denominator.

When you get down to comic books and animations, the market forces aren't quite so vicious and your "10% okay vs 90% of everything is crap" doesn't get so filtered out. Consequently, you get more of the standard curve--some stuff is bad, most stuff is average, some stuff is good, and a few gems poke up every now and then.

If Star Wars was originally just meant to sell toys, why was there no other movies like it, just to sell toys. Or if there was, what were they?