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My understanding is that the snap only affected "intelligent" life in the universe (however the cosmic metaphysics of the Infinity Stones chose to define that). I mean, they kept throwing the word "intelligent" into all the dialog to make that point rather clear, didn't they?

I think in order to make an obsession with Lady Death work, they would have needed to establish Lady Death as a character long before hand, and introduce Thanos' obsession with her as well. Otherwise it just comes out of the blue, and it wouldn't resonate with audiences who will have never seen that unrequited relationship established in any way. It isn't the "personification of death" that is the problem, it is the unwillingness to develop the necessary characters and relationships ahead of time to make the story compelling. But also, and this isn't stated outright by the writers, the direction they chose allows them to make a socio-political statement about irresponsible plundering of natural resources and unrestricted population growth.

Thanos may technically be categorized as an alien, but for all intents and purposes he is human. And so long as he behaves like a human, audiences will "get" him. Falling in love with the personification of Death is not hard to make understandable if you make that personification appealing to your audience somehow.

I plotted a graph of Legendary Kong's growth, fitting it to two values we know (his size in 1973 and 2021), and one value I'm throwing in just for fun (his height as given in the promotional materials for the original 1933 film). Based on the resulting curve, it is evident that Legendary Kong is still on an upward growth trajectory.

Godzilla is tiny compared to the carrier? Now, granted, I can't tell exactly which carrier we're seeing, but a Nimitz class carrier is more than twice as long as the Legendary Godzilla is tall.

I honestly can't believe that Godzilla never wielded katana during the Showa era. I mean, the movies got so goofy that he looked and acted less like a giant, menacing saurian and more like Jacky Chan doing Godzilla cosplay.

If the Infinity Gauntlet allowed Thanos to do anything with/to the universe, then he could have installed a cosmic process that performed the same culling action whenever any planet's population outstripped its resources by some metric, combined with a process that restored the planet's resources a bit. This cosmic cron job would keep everything balanced, forever, especially for those intelligent species that caught on to what was happening and managed to curate their resources and manage their populations themselves. I get that Thanos was insane, but why couldn't he have thought like an insane engineer rather than just an insane bureaucrat?

Yes, setting is king. (I've been proselytizing this for years; glad to see everyone else starting to get on board...)

A book that is half "How To" and half "sample campaign" isn't a System Core Book, IMO. It is more of a genre supplement like Fantasy Hero. And to be perfectly honest, I don't think I ever hankered for a Psionics Hero genre book. I think a better approach would be to ditch the how-to stuff and just focus on a psionics campaign setting book. The psionics architecture in the setting would (or should) serve as a good How-To example in and of itself.

Rebooting seems to be their core creative ethos. It has kept their movie "franchises" from ever acquiring coherence and long-term marketplace traction.

Between Suicide Squad and Dark Phoenix, I would only agree to watch Dark Phoenix again. It was not great, but it was infinitely better than Suicide Squad. I think it is telling that Feige is taking his sweet time working mutants into the MCU and not rushing a new X-Men movie out the door just to cash in on the name recognition. He knows what the stakes are in terms of the fan reaction. He knows he only gets one chance to get it right. By contrast, WB/DC just constantly churns out rehashes of their main characters, fracturing the fanbase further with every release.

DC does not have a Feige equivalent. Geoff Johns is a semi-talented reprobate who managed to weasel his way into a Hollywood career only because he managed to pinch out a couple of decent comic book stories. All the other pretenders to the throne are directors who have neither the business/production savvy nor the creative vision necessary to achieve what Feige has achieved. In addition, WB/AT&T has never entrusted any single person with the creative freedom and financial resources necessary to do what Feige has been doing for the last dozen years.

Given the low (financial) stakes involved in comics you'd think that would be where you'd see new characters introduced and used to explore new ideas the most, but I guess that's not the case. You won't see that in movies very often because of the massive financial risks involved. Studios feel they have to play it safe at all times, and so rather than create new characters they mutate existing characters to fit with the social agenda du jour. That's why there's such a big push to race- and gender-bend well-known, existing characters rather than invent new ones. And as for writers who don't want to write superheroes, that extends to directors as well. For all his claims of loving the source material, Zach Snyder sure does love to tear the superhero genre apart and make it nearly unrecognizable.

In order for supers to be proactive they have to have the authority to affect change on a scale that impacts society. In most superhero settings they don't have that. They operate outside the law and are rarely part of any sanctioned law enforcement body, which makes it difficult for them to have large-scale plans that compete with governments and militaries and such. So, in my view, it isn't just about tweaking adventure plots but re-architecting the campaign setting so that superheroes--or at least some of them--are legally authorized to do their thing. Whether you take a cynical approach (ala The Boys) or a more idealistic one is of course up to you, but I think it is an important first step.

Well, the publishing data leads to the following observation (on Wikipedia): "Around 1995, new World of Darkness releases were frequently top sellers, making White Wolf the second biggest publisher of tabletop role-playing games at the time after TSR, Inc., and by 2001, Vampire: The Masquerade was the second best selling tabletop role-playing game after TSR, Inc.'s Dungeons & Dragons." (emphasis mine) Now maybe that level of success doesn't mean much in your world, but it certainly does in mine, and I feel that any publisher with dreams of success in the TTRPG domain would do well to study what put them in such a position of marketplace dominance (behind TSR/D&D). Sure, they faltered here and there and they weren't perfect (no publisher is), but for a small team with only one prior notable RPG to their name (Ars Magica) they clearly did something right.

That one still has a very ape-like silhouette; I think breaking that up with some head and spine spikes would help a lot. 😀

Yeah, the mugato is a lot more like what I would expect a Japanese ape-like kaiju to look like. But they would also have added more reptilian skin features as well.

Isn't that what the Damage Control company is all about? I think Marvel has this mostly covered, at least in the comics.

I guess that wasn't obvious to me, nor do I suspect it is obvious to most folks who aren't either well-versed in primate anatomical structure or looking specifically for such differences. To my mind Kong just looks like a really big ape, and not a kaiju in the traditional Japanese sense.

While I think that, in at least a very literal sense, inflating King Kong to many times his height does indeed transform him into a kaiju, I'm beginning to sorta see things Spence's way. I've been thinking about the latest trailers wherein we see Kong punch Godzilla in the face and swing his 'zillaxe and so on, and the image of a 300+ foot-tall ape is looking, well, wrong to me. It is one thing to have saurian/alien monsters of that size--as they are all creatures of complete imagination--but apes are actual creatures that we are accustomed to only seeing as roughly man-sized. Even scaling King Kong up to a mere 50' or 60' (as in the original film) is a disbelief-suspending stretch, but the more I think on it, 350' looks completely incongruous. I guess I prefer my kaiju to not look exactly like a real-world animal in every way except for size, which as I think on it, also applies to Mothra. But even there I think if you design Mothra to not look exactly like a moth, but like a mutated alien moth-like creature, then it works better, IMO.

Except for Mothra and Hedorah, I still consider Japanese kaiju primarily lizard-based. Even when fused with other things, be they plants or mechanized parts, they are still mostly reptilian or saurian in appearance. King Caesar has fur, but they just couldn't resist the temptation to give him reptilian/saurian skin.

Okay, then maybe I can sell you on the same idea, but just expressed differently. Rather than think of Action Hero as a rewrite/revamp of Dark Champions, consider publishing an entirely new genre book on the same level as Champions, Fantasy Hero, and Star Hero, but called Action Hero. It would cover the territory of action/adventure cinema: war, spy/espionage, counter-terror, martial arts, whatever Fast/Furious is, etc. That would leave Dark Champions 6e to focus more clearly on vigilante justice and "dark superheroes", freeing it from the burden of being an ad hoc catch-all for everything and anything action-oriented in a modern setting.

Doom Patrol (HBO Max) I can't say that I like this show very much. It leans way too heavily into its absurdist/surrealist/weird style for my tastes. Moreover, all the main characters are either unlikeable, uninteresting, or both. The only character I find interesting--Jane--is an angry, b*tchy loner who is really unpleasant to be around. And I have this personal rule in which I won't waste my time on a tv show with a cast of characters I wouldn't want to hang out with if they existed in real life.

Had Hollywood seen fit to make a film adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu immediately after the success of King Kong, then Cthulhu might very well have been the first "American kaiju" on film. Oh what could have been...

The leap from 3rd edition to 6th will be a bit jarring. While the core mechanics are the same, a lot has changed since 3rd edition. IMO, a gentler transition would be to play 4e first and then, if you are still really into the game, try 6e. While 4e may not technically be "state of the art", I feel it is an easier rule set to digest and use than 6e.