They shouldn't have written that way

I want you to picture your least intelligent friend. You know the one. We’re not calling him dumb. You just had enough incidents you stopped running experiments to see how long it took for him to realize something.

Your buddy has gotten the deal of a life time as a writer. Some executive at Amazon Prime realized James Cameron Avatar and The Big Bang Theory can be filled with the same niche, and left AI to figure out the logistics, and the algorithm found two main players for this scheme: your buddy, and Chris Evans.

They have a 10 million budget, Chris Evans’s paycheck is 9.5 million dollars, and the your friend has to figure out the rest, they ran out of tokens.

Your buddy organized himself into a few rules.

• All characters are played by Chris Evans.
• They all are on a friends’ diner.
• They all wear a CGI ninja spandex; not for CGI, that is just what they wear.
• Nothing of it is ever addressed.
• Let the internet do its thing.

The show starts with a hate watch trend and then memes start to come out. It is approved for a second season, and because the show is not on Netflix, it is not cancelled after that. Third season comes in.

The characters actually have pretty good story arcs, but some criticism never goes away. It is hard for audiences to know who is who, they are all played by the same guy and they are all nudist aliens wearing that blue suit like if they are Captain America spotted from a distance. Nevertheless the true believer fans are there to defend it on reddit.

“I can’t tell the characters apart. I never really know if Ana Lee is Joanna or herself unless they have an interaction with Jacob”

And they got a defense:

“Well, actually it is because the aliens by lore do not wear any clothes and are played by the same actor, so they have the same body type.”

Response:

“Well, yeah, maybe they shouldn’t have written that way”

We also got someone else commenting on it:

“Chris Evans has more range than more countries’s anti-craft missiles, why the hell are they instructing him to have the same tone for all the characters?”

The response is…

“Well, canonically aliens do have personality but it is not manifested by voice or gestures, this would have been too human.”

And…

“Well, then maybe they shouldn’t have been written that way!”

Or…

“Why is the setting in a place with snacks… when all the characters have their mouth covered and can’t interact well with food?”

“This is a nods to friends, the reason why they have their mouth covered is because blue Chris Evans lips looked weird, and the denture sown directly to the suit was horrifying”

“Yes, but was the diner that important, then? They shouldn’t have written that way”

This is a very simplified version of a real thing. People either try to justify something stupid because of an arbitrary rule stated before, or they go meta trying to justify was it was written that way.

They don’t really realize what itself was written could have been a variable just as anything else.

When people criticize that when Thanos was stunned, unable to use the gems, that is the time where Doctor Strange could use his time stone and not be countered by him, to cut him off with a portal, kick starlord in the nuts, or whatever.

Some fans think because it was stated that 14 million versions of it it wouldn’t have worked… so that is why he didn’t… is a valid answer.

But it is not a blank check. Strange could only see the versions where he didn’t die (that is how the spell is implied to work on his movie), so maybe he did sacrifice himself and it worked, but he wouldn’t know that for sure. Maybe if he stuck to to the 14000606 future vision he’d seen that they could tell Thor to go for the head.

It only had to happen that way because the writers wanted. But that is not a variable in their minds.

Likewise, in Dragon Ball, when fans do some major mental gymnastic why Piccolo could totally face Freeza’s second form, or why Roshi was on the tournament of power instead of Buu, it is… “Well, actually it is because you don’t neeeed power level to do what he…” and “Buu was asleep!”

Yes, but the story constantly hammers that power matters for these things and Buu being asleep is just a handwave to not use him, Beerus could have slapped him, Whis could make some magic to wake him up, or they could just wish some dragon balls to keep him awake. They also introduced god ki that rises your power exponentially and it could have just as easily be used to have humans catch up.

Hell, we had decades for Piccolo to get a form and people said that wa just a sayan thing, and in Dragon Ball Super we get Golden Freeza and Gold-ish Piccolo. One was not even on the list of being alive for a transformation!

If they wanted that, then they shouldn’t have written it that way.

Sometimes it is a meta reason, for real things that happened. “Oh the manga was written week-by-week and Japan doesn’t believe in minor things as overworking, suicidal thoughts and pre-production” or “the show was meant to have only one season and the writers couldn’t bother to keep track of their retcons on a rewatch”, but that is not always a valid defense for: This could have done differently.

If you are drink driving, and you hit a firetruck, yes, the explanation for hitting the fire trunk is “I was drunk” and “I didn’t see you there”, but it is not a valid argument for “maybe you shouldn’t have gotten drunk and drive against a huge red truck”.

Anyway, on the fourth season, Buddy did retcon the clothes thing and that helped immensely with the show quality, and instead of handwaving as “someone invented fashion” he just never addressed it, and now people on reddit are defending him by saying “Well he didn’t think of it until the fourth season despite multiple warnings on the last 5 years”.

But well… maybe they shouldn’t…

PS: Not gonna lie, I kinda want to watch or write this show now. Chris Evans, if you’re reading this, I promise I’ll let you change your voice and use more gestures.