Scavenger's reign is an extremely polished DEI turd. It is a show about a bunch of spacers being trapped in an unexplored alien planet with wild flora and fauna. I've seen a few people (mostly redditors) praise this show but surprisingly also people at the farms.
On the surface, I can see the appeal: It looks pretty.
But that's about where the positives end. This show is the absolute epitome of style over substance. It looks pretty but is about as well writen as the transformers, the world it sets ups is a blazing trashfire and the characters are like a parody of DEI. There are so many points to go over, I don't even know where to begin, I've made another comment about it in the smiling friends thread, but I figured I could re-organize it better and add to it, since it didn't even begin to scratch the tip of the iceberg:
Characters in scavengers reign have absurd ammounts of knowledge about the ecosystem that rely on ludicrously wild extrapolations that are based on ridiculously unintuitive interactions that there is no way they could have made on their own.
Who the fuck notices a landsquid slug crawling in the piss and shit and mud and goes "I gotta put THAT shit inside MY nostrills, YESTERDAY." Its so nice of nature to create a portable oxygen mask for humans!
Or who the fuck notices an alien bearbull and goes "Ima crawl up inside its asshole, do the konami code with its intenstines, thus making it poop out portable lightbulbs."
Watching how they LEARNED all the crazy shit they do would be waaaaayy more intresting than them already having the knowledge, because none of it feels earned. It feels like they have cheat codes, and as a result none of the animals in the ecosystem feel like real animals living in a real world, they feel either like traps or tools for a TV show that exist purely for the benefit of humans.
Its really nice of the devs that they made it so if punch the bull it poops out a torch for me and gave me free oxygen masks for the toxin area!
None of the animals in the ecosystem are thought out, like why in the world would the balloon thingies generate enough lift to carry a godamn human? How does that benefit them in their natural environment to expend so much energy for lift they clearly don't need and have no use for?
Oh right yeah, because the devs needed to give players a way to quickly climb upward, gotcha.
The world of scavengers reign doesn't feel like an alien planet, it feels like a theme park attraction/videogame. And while we're on animals, let's talk about hollow, shall we?
When I first saw hollow I was intrigued. "Oh ok, so this creature has an incredibly weak body making it unable to feed itself but uses telepathy to make others feed it! That's a cool and unique conce-" and then a few minutes later the same creature is performing hardcore metalbending telekinesis breaking appart reinforced steel while running at terminal velocity.
Why doesn't it use its telekinesis to feed itself? Why does it even need mental powers if it can literally run faster than a falling person?
And the culmination of that arc is hillarious. Hollow is afraid of the bigger creature of the same species, so he mind controls a malnourished human and the human takes it out with a fucking rock. May I remind you this creature can telepathically shred steel appart, but some dude with a rock killed it, ok lol.
Hollow in general is inconsistent as fuck. He can run faster than terminal velocity and shred steel with his mind but lets Azi stab him because he charges at her while she's holding a spear, and again, its not clear why he needs slaves when he can shred fucking steel with his mind.
How you're supposed to make a show like this, is that first you create the ecosystem and figure out all its intricacies, and animals and interactions and their natural lifecycles and such, and THEN you try to work out how humans would survive in it.
"But that's soo much woooork." Well then don't center your show around an alien ecosystem then, because that's literally the whole point you incompetent hacks. South Scrimshaw establishes a more robust, consistent and intresting ecology in one hour than this show does in 5.
The writers meanwhile did the exact opposite, they had the plot they wanted to tell with the humans, and designed the ecosystem around the script instead of the script around the ecosystem, which is why none of the animals feel like real animals, they feel either like traps or tools specifically designed to advance the plot for a TV series about humans.
I just love this reddit comment in particular:
Like WHAT biological reason (using any logic at all) would a critter evolve in such a way that a human (who dont' exist on this planet) can just pick it up and slap it on their face to create a gas mask? Why do weird fish things suddenly; blow up and fill with lighter than air gas(From nothing) when u ram your fist down it's throat? How does some random fruit guts when sprinkled with.. something else(air fish guts? idk) turns into perfect electrical cables that magically seek out sources of electricity? Dude crawls into some weird alien hippo monster's side-ass(or vag, idk) grabs some of it's innards and snatches a pair of ovary/fetus, and gets puked out, slaps them together to create light(Do these people not know how to make fire? ANd how the hell would anyone even LEARN how to do that to alien hippos to create light? do ppl just randomly crawl up random alien asses to learn new shit?)
This entire show, ignoring everything else (And so far the story isn't even gripping, maybe because of all the illogical stupidness with the fauna / flora is annoying the hell out of me) is just plain stupid cuz of how the creator imagined life on other planets would be, with nearly every single organism having 100% as-is use, that evolved just to be a direct and immediate benefit to humans. Where humans have never existed.
Btw this comment isn't even getting into half of the dumb shit in the show because it only covers the first episode, later on you get even more stupidity, like the instant folding bed plant, the instant portable umbrella plant, or the instant surgical needle plant.
The end result is that for anyone that actually gives a shit about the whole "ecosystem" aspect, it is impossible to get immersed in the alien world, because it fails to present itself as an alien ecosystem, instead presenting itself as an amusement park at best or an open world crafting survival game at worst. And whatever doesn't serve the plot is just weird for the sake of weird. Not because it has something interesting to say, not because it's going anywhere. It's just weird because "isn't this thing wierd!?" It's the sci-fi equivalent of "I'm so random!"
And even that is unfair, because subnautica and rainworld both a stellar job making its alien ecosystems appear plausible and consistent, meaning scavenger's reign fails at it even by videogame standards, and let's not start comparing Scavenger's Reign to South Scrimshaw because at that point you've brought the heavyweight boxer into the toddler playpen.
If there's some credit I'll give this show is that it somehow manages to outstupid itself every single episode, reaching its absolute peak when the writers give up all pretence of pretending to giving a shit and just straight up have one of the characters perform a fucking magic kamehameha spirit bomb beam attack that legit comes out of nowhere.
But what about the characters? Surely they're the ones carrying the whole thing since the ecosystem literally revolves around them no? lol. Now we're getting into the fun part and the part where DEI ended up destroying whatever good writing could be salvaged.
The show has 4 main characters (5 if you count the robot).
Two black women and two white men. You can already guess where this is going.
Azi, the black lesbian with no tits and a shaved head, is intelligent enough to figure out how to survive and thrive on the alien planet working out all kinds of obscure and unintuitive interactions between flora and fauna, while being fast, agile, athletic and strong, but seems to pay 0 fucking mind when her robot which is basically her sole lifeline seems to be getting infected by a highly invasive species of fungus that's making it behave in weird ways and rewriting its code until its literally too late to do anything about without pissing off the fungus masquerading as the robot.
She spends most of the plot being a survivalist god while simutaneously ignoring the fact that her robot is being overrun with fungus that's making it act erratically. Her big moment is when she realizes the robot is a person but like... she always treated the robot with kindness and the robot literally behaved like this from minute one. So literally nothing changes.
So what is it? Is she an airheaded idiot, or a deeply investigative character that tries to figure out everything about the planet's ecology?
Kamen is one of the white men. His job is that he's incompetent and evil, and crashed the ship because he's incompetent, and he's a lush that spends most of the story being mindraped because he doesn't want to deal with the reality that he's a coward who abandoned his wife to die. Not much to say about him.
Ursula. This is where things get absurd. Ursula is basically a mary sue.
She can and does anything and everything (like azi) she's hyper competent at everything, and spends most of her screentime either rescuing sam or being an extreme solo survivalist to the point where she may as well be operating solo. She saves sam from the storm by suggesting they escape into the pods, she saves him from the giant monster tick, she figures out the stonegate on her own, she achieves nirvana after witnessing the flower, she saves sam from the mushroom man, she finds the cure for sam after he gets poisoned, and for good measure she becomes captain too.
Its really funny, the one time she gets in trouble that you could have had sam rescue her (at the toxin cave), sam just sits there and watches while she rescues herself.
Sam: Sam's job is to fuck up so ursula can rescue him to look good. That's about the end of his contribution to the plot. I don't remember a single thing Sam has actually done to contribute to their survival other than constantly needing to be rescued (or failing to rescue ursula) so ursula can rescue him (or herself) to look good in comparison. Its borderline comical how he somehow manages to need rescuing in every single episode.
So basically, the two white men are either evil or incompetent and contribute nothing to the plot other than fucking up to elevate the two black women that are both flawless survivalist hyper gods with inhumane levels of intuition (that is of course until the third black woman that is also a survivalist hyper god shows up), set in the backdrop of a poorly thought out ecosystem that's more arcadey than your average survival game on steam and only exists to serve whatever the plot needs at the moment with little to no care as to how it would actually work in practice.
Its really funny too btw, they introduce another white man in latter episodes (barry) and he's also an ultra incompetent borderline braindamaged idiot, and ANOTHER (white this tmie) woman and she is ALSO a survivalist hypergod (but she's also like, mean, so not as good as the black women). The writers legit could not help themselves on this one. 4 out of 4 women (3 of which are black) are survivalist hypergods, 3 out of 3 white men are incompetent fuckups that need constant rescue by the women every single time in nearly every single episode.
So, at the end, what is left? Trippy visuals? Yeah ok sure. I'll give you that, the show sure has trippy visuals. Anything else? No? And honestly, there's so much more shit to say, I haven't even begun scratching the surface.
The show has 100% approval on roten tomatoes and all the critics jizzed themselves five times over when they saw it. It won 2 emmies for best animated program (the megamind tv show deserved the award more than this) and an award for background animation (this one it did deserve).
The show was also cancelled after one season because nobody actually watched it on its original run on hbo, and was then picked up on netflix, which then also nobody bothered watching there either.
At the end of the day, shit writing is shit writing. You can substitute visuals for good story. You cannot substitute good story for visuals. People flocked to the OG one punch man comic despite the fact that it looked like the scribblings a third grader because the story was engaging and the characters vibrant, in this way its like the inverse one punch man.
Beautiful visuals, at the expense of bland characters, bad story, and attrocious worldbuilding. A pity really. If DEI hadn't mandated them to make all the black women ultra gods and all the white men incompetent or evil, maybe we might have gotten a story to match the visuals.
It is completely insane to me that studios are willing blow tens of thousands of man hours and several millions in animation but don't take 5 minutes to ensure the writers aren't lobotomized and going to crash the entire project with their shit writing. I just feel sorry for the background artists.
What's most important however, is that this is made by the same guys who made pantheon, who someone from the forum (this very thread even) told me was good, which has now irreversibly shaken my very trust in the right honorable insitution of the kiwifarms.
