On the Internet

www.youtube.com/watch?v=g708PmJAbuI

Goddamn Fett had some fire to spit

Hooooooooooolyyyyyyyyyy shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit! 

This may seem quite random, but here's a quick review of a quite good short fan film that's making the rounds around the Internet on YouTube. You might already know which one I'm talking about. It's Darth Maul: Apprentice.

Darth Maul is one of the few prequel characters to have a lasting popularity comparable to the characters of the original trilogy. He's instantly recognisable, badass, and all enigmatic and secretive. Of course, recently Maul has been given more of a spotlight in Star Wars canon after his appearances in The Clone Wars cartoon show and the comics. But while the official works work to continue Maul's story after his supposed death in Phantom Menace, many fans prefer to make fanfic about Maul's offscreen adventures prior to the first prequel, since he got so little focus in that movie.

The plot of this short film is very simple, and somewhat run-of-the-mill fan film material. Darth Sidious sends a group of Jedi on a wild goose chase where they end up encountering a young Sith still in training. The short is essentially one long, well choreographed fight scene in which Maul truly proves himself to be the badass he appears to be. Maul hardly ever says a word, and the actor lets his expressions speak for him. The effects are also outstanding. It honestly looks like an official Lucasarts production, with the starring actor looking extremely similar to Ray Park, the original Maul actor.

Notably, the short film invents a new, masked Jedi character to essentially act as Maul's equal and opposite, known only as "The Jedi Berserker" thanks to the credits. Mysterious, quiet yet expressive, possessing a distinguishable design, and being quite the badass himself, the Jedi Berserker, who I'll from here on out call Jeber, is indeed similar to Maul. Jeber also possesses a more savage fighting style that makes him seem more Sith-like than Jedi-like. Furthermore, he even has Maul's fierce tenacity and durability, so much so that he survives getting stabbed only to come back later in the film, no doubt through the same power of hate that got Maul through getting bisected and chucked down a hole.

Unfortunately, Jeber isn't the main Jedi character, he's not even a tritagonist. The main focus lies on a rather boring, generic Jedi character and his equally boring padawan, the latter of whom ends up being Maul's final opponent. The final battle between the padawan girl and Maul is really good, as Maul turns into a genuinely quite scary threat as the padawan is forced to retreat from the woods from him to a clearing. The fear factor comes in when you realise that she has little chance of ever escaping, as Maul is as relentless as a slasher villain. The padawan of course puts up a better fight against her stalker than most "final girls" in slasher flicks, because she has the force an' that.

But what more is there to say of Maul himself? Well, as I said earlier, his body language says more than words ever could. If he talked as much as he did in The Clone Wars, I doubt that this short would have been as good. There is still some moral ambiguity to the character, especially in the final scene, just before he is compelled to execute the padawan in front of his master. Maul hesitates as he looks into his valiant yet deathly afraid younger opponent after disarming her, and really has to pump himself up in order to through with the awful deed. Thanks to the good pacing, this change to a far darker tone is seamless.

Overall, I'd rate this 8/10. You have to be lenient, since it's a fan film with a tonne of effort and soul put into it, but the film still has faults. Primarily, the two main Jedi characters are really quite boring and too generic. Jeber really ought to have had a bigger role. I find it ironic that during a passion project built on expanding on an underdeveloped cool character, they end up not expanding on another underdeveloped cool character that they created. Maybe that was the intention? Secondly, I just don't really see it as the kind of short film that I could watch over and over again. I can watch the old Ryan vs. Dorkman short films again and again, but not this film, perhaps because Maul's a bit of an overused character that I don't particularly want to see much more of to be frank. What more can be done with this character?

A review of Death Battle. I know I've espoused my opinions on the show a couple times before and pointed out his flaws, but I felt like making a full review just for the hell of it.

Death Battle as a whole has been an inherently divisive topic among Internet surfers almost since the series began back in 2010. The idea of popular fictional characters fighting in video form was quite a refreshing concept, and the fact that the always endearing hosts, Wiz and Boomstick (played by Ben and Chad of Screwattack) actually do some research at all was novel.

Let's start with the positives. Wiz and Boomstick are likeable characters that play off each others' personalities extremely well, and we continue to learn more about them as the series go on. Believe it or not, but the two have received some noticeable character development since the inception of the series. Overtime, Wiz became less humourless but also more smug about his intellect, while Boomstick became more comically toxically masculine. Whether you think that these traits are a detriment or a positive thing is up to you, really, but I don't really mind it. Both represent the extreme opposite sides of fandoms well.

The battle animations are always entertaining, and only improved as time went by. Since it's called Death Battle they have to twist the characters' personalities a little to make them not above killing their opponents, but otherwise, the guys at Screwattack seem to generally get the characters they're animating personality wise. Some of the battle sequences are truly outstanding. As infamous as it is, the original Goku vs. Superman bout was simply epic.

But it's easy to see why people have problems with Death Battle. Their research is often not up to scratch. Too often. They have an awful tendency to not use specific versions of characters when those characters have plenty of different adaptations and alternate takes on them to choose from. This tends to occur in Death Battles involving characters from the franchises of Sonic the Hedgehog, Legend of Zelda and Godzilla, with the battle involving the latter being the most glaringly egregious. I'll get on to specific points a little later.

When it comes to fights involving characters from franchises that the hosts are perhaps less familiar with, they can be breezy with the facts; they brushed aside mysterious plot points in the Blazblue storyline by saying "Nobody knows!", yet apparently there were several explanations that could be easily discovered.

Many viewers have been critical of the fight animations for sometimes not making much sense, to which the hosts usually respond with something along the lines of "the animation is just an entertaining representation of the fight to show who would win, stop taking it so seriously, gawd". But that doesn't really excuse why Doomguy trundles along like a snail when fighting Master Chief and absorbs an unnecessary number of bullets in one episode when both characters are shown to possess super speed elsewhere in the video.

Telling your viewers not to take your content seriously can be quite patronising, honestly. It makes sense to say that when the content's supposed to be comedic, but when the hosts declare that they wish to settle debates "once and for all" at the start of every video, that indicates that they want the viewer to take it seriously. Yet the Screwattack lads always seem to react with exasperation whenever they're criticised or they spark debates. If anything they should be proud that their content can generate discussion. I understand that Death Battle in general is meant to be braindead entertainment, but it clearly isn't. If it were, why would the hosts put any effort into research at all? Seemingly a lot of that research seems to just go into finding out dumb little trivia facts about the characters to make the viewers giggle.

Now, you want to hear about the times when their research effed up, don't ya?

My biggest problem is with Godzilla vs. Gamera. Never at any point do the hosts make clear which version of Godzilla is being used. They don't even differentiate between the original from 1954 or any of his successors from the multiple different continuities. They do make reference to the 1998 American Godzilla being a different being at least, but that's really common knowledge by now. There's such massive differences in height, weight and power between the different Godzillas that it's beyond a joke, yet I don't recall this being addressed. The 2014 Big G for example is meant to be more than double the height of the original, yet we see that version of him pulling off tricks that only Showa Godzilla could do. This huge omission of facts makes me wonder how the hell they managed to decide a clear winner out of him and Gamera at all.

Oh, and there was that one time when they mistook a fan cover art detailing a JLA/Spider-Man crossover as an official story.

This sort of thing really pisses me off because it's spreading of false information. If I knew less about Godzilla, I would have probably just blindly believed what Wiz and Boomstick said. It's their job to do the research after all. Listen m8, I've got a first class degree in Godzillaomics. I know my shit.

Death Battle is generally at its worst when they make no distinction between different versions of one character. The whole thing about Dr. Robotnik from the shitty Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon just being one of many personality "phases" that the games' Robotnik went through is just straight bullshit. They made it up!

Death Battle is generally at its best when they use characters that have fewer alternate versions to get mixed up with and create great fight animations. Battles between fighting game characters are always good. Every episodes always have at least something entertaining about them. While you may learn a thing or two about classic figures, don't trust absolutely everything the hosts say.

No matter what I or other critics may say, Death Battle is a veritable internet juggernaut these days. Screwattack acknowledge that Death Battle is their primary source of income because it's just so goddamn popular. It had one of the largest page groups on TV Tropes, larger than those of most long running TV shows. People discuss the show all the time. I personally grew bored with the show long ago, yet sometimes watch it anyway because there isn't that much content on YouTube that really interests me. Did you know that they've made action figures of Minecraft YouTubers now? I mean, if you're gonna make action figures of anyone on YouTube, why would you make ones of Minecraft players? There is some great content still on YouTube, ya know. It just makes me laugh.

Didn't know that Thanos had some moves.

As you all probably know, there's a fair amount of "cancerous" content on YouTube. I've previously discussed how I dislike Thunderf00t's content, but there are a select few others whose content is frankly terrible, and I'm going to discuss their channels today.

First, there's the channel NoughtPointFourLive.

There's plenty of reasons to dislike .4's channel. While the premise may not sound bad at all, trust me when I say that his channel really is AIDS. Basically, .4 mostly showcases "Easter eggs" and other tidbits found within Grand Theft Auto V. He makes these videos at an impressive rate, and at first I wondered how so many Easter eggs could be in one game that no one else has covered.

Here's the thing, though. Every Easter egg that can possibly be found in GTAV has already been discovered. The "Easter eggs" that .4 often discusses can only really be considered as such if you really stretch the definition to its maximum leniency. He can drone on for nearly half an hour about a shocking, amazing Easter egg that is essentially just a couple of characters' names on a wall. And when I say "drone", I mean it. .4's voice is almost unrealistically formal and robotic, complete with emphasised accents on the wrong syllables. It's all the more weird and off putting because English is clearly not .4's second language or something based on his accent.

What annoys me most about .4 is that his video titles and thumbnails are painfully misleading, and that he will even reuse them to get views. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen videos that boldly declare that he has solved the "Mt. Chiliad Mural Mystery", only for him to essentially say, after half an hour of overhyping drivel, that he hasn't solved jackshit.

People have at least started to catch on to his conning and the comments to his videos often rightfully call him out on his antics. There are plenty of better options of channels to watch if you like watching videos about Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Second, there's NFKRZ.

Here's a channel I discovered fairly recently. NFKRZ is essentially a commentary channel, though I've heard that he used to make MLG videos. How swell (not very swell). Like most commentary channels, he's made the requisite feminist/meninist commentary video, a video about how Star Wars will become the next most cancerous film franchise after Minions (!?), and most notably, a bajillion or so videos about the "most hated man on the internet", Keemstar.

Now, okay, Keemstar is a pretty terrible person in mine and other's opinions. iDubbbz made an actually funny and insightful review of Keemstar's YouTune content (though a lot of his jabs against Keemstar are obviously exaggerated). NFKRZ, on the other hand, just rags on Keemstar all the time. It's not like he even has anything of value to say about Keemstar or his videos; he just picks on the guy constantly, making him no better than him as many people have pointed out. Yes, we get it. Keemstar looks a bit like a gnome. Get a life already.

However, unlike .4, NFKRZ is at least capable of very occasionally making some entertaining stuff. Some of his videos can get a small giggle out of me, but honestly, there's funnier stuff out there, so it's not worth sitting through NFKRZ videos.