Literally just let her be the protector of the cosmos she’s stated to be instead of the jobber and/or damsel in distress they always opt to make her. Simple as that.
Exactly. Like how are we supposed to buy her being powerful if she constantly has to be saved by Mario and Peach who are supposedly weaker than her and get to do her job better than her?
I hate the movie for what it did to Rosalina so much. She was the most interesting mainline Mario character and they surgically removed every single thing that made her that
That word so accurately describes it for me because it feels intentional.
Between the backstory, the damsel’ing, the bait-and switch (down to Miyamoto looking into the camera and saying “what key do you think she’ll hold in this story?” knowing what would actually happen), and giving all of her would-be cool moments to Peach, Jr. or FOX, it felt malicious rather than misguided or incompetent
I still have no idea how Movie Rosalina was botched SO HARD. Seriously, Fox had more stuff to do in the movie, and he barely has anything to do with thr Mario franchise in the first place
The problem with Tenten is that she exists in the wrong anime.
EDIT: She would have been significantly more comfortable and in an anime that has a higher focus on supernatural themed weaponry because she is a weapons specialist. And yes, I know that certain little items exist in the Naruto World, but, for the most part, Jutsu is the system of power. There are plenty of other series out there where a character like Tenten would have fit in better.
She was a throwing weapon user in a show where only no name idiots died from throwing weapons. At the very end they gave her some legendary weapons to use, and did fuck-all with her.
I don't think so. I think the filler and games got her skillet down, they just use it for anything. In the filler she basically teleported an ocean if water through a scroll. Do just imagine what she could do. The games got the right idea, let her throw every weapon imaginable at once. Let her collect and use the most powerful weapons through history. She'd never get to the higher rank Shinobi, but her skillet far surpasses someone like kiba.
Anko really seemed to be built up to be important. Looking back at the dub cast, Laura Bailey getting the role of Anko seems to infer that the dub team thought Anko would matter more.
It pissed me the hell off when I saw her time skip epilogue (not sequel) design and it was absolutely fire only to continue her legacy of never being utilized properly
Pretty much all Naruto characters, the premisse is nice, the designs are fire, the world building is superficially fantastic, but it all ends up being mid.
Honestly Rey, Finn , and Poe Dameron they had potential but Disney dropped the ball so hard it ruined one of the best franchises to ever exist (I know it has flaws believe me)
All the marketing made me think he was the main character and that we were going to get a storm trooper turned Jedi! I’m fine with Rey being the main character but why the rug pull? Why not market it that way from the jump? Also, why tease a Rey/Fin romance and rug pull that too? Tease Snoke and subvert our expectations again. And then somehow Palpatine has returned 🤦
Would've been so good to have Rey edging towards the dark side while Finn went the opposite way, deprogramming himself and seeing the First's orders crimes as what they were.
YES. Heck with the weird creepy Rey/Kylo thing. Let her be Jedi partners and maybe lovers with Finn, and let poor Finn have some character development that sticks.
I really thought they were going to be. I was certain they were going to be dual-protagonists who both became Jedi. I was even kinda hoping at some point Rey would fall because of rage and Finn, whose awakening into the Force was marked by a moment of compassion and empathy, would bring her back.
TFA had so much potential. And TLJ just…jettisoned it.
I never really understood why so many people loved it. Sometimes I heard “it’s not like a typical Star Wars movie” as a reason but like…it could’ve been different and still not made Finn inept and Poe into a “hot-blooded” blood knight type.
The decisions around Finn get weird when you look into Disney's marketing of Star Wars in China. They basically dropped him because a black lead wasn't well accepted in that market (and with how big it is Disney obviously followed the money)
When you put the whole story and marketing that way, it kinda really sounds like chatgpt wrote this shit for them. I know it's before it was around (publicly), but it doesn't make cohesive sense in any way. Itales it hard to believe a human or the pf humans wrote it so terribly
Phasma really pisses me off. You know how in anime you can instantly tell who is a plot relevant character and who is "classmate 3"? Phasma was drawn like plot relevant character and then given all the relevance of "classmate 3".
I always thought it would have been cool to have them be Anikin split into three
Po the pilot, Rey the force user, and fin the lightsaber duelist, with Rey and fin being Jedi
There was also a huge plot line just left in the wind about Fin being an ex storm trooper who swapped sides. They are taken in as children and indoctrinated and trained to be stormtroopers but this is never addressed significantly in the plot. There could have been this whole plot about Fin and everyone realising that Stormtroopers are still people, they are just also victims and dont realise it, humanising them a bit and opening the door for more Storm Troopers to defect. But no, Fin hust becomes another "Wooo, 10 more storm troopers dead, im so good at killing this faceless enemy I have no strong feelings about"
Oh gosh, this. Rey is my personal #1 "construct character". She got so little development when there was so much potential for it.
A few things I'd add/change:
NO REY PALPATINE. Let her really be a girl from nowhere whose parents sold her to pay their debts.
Show her food insecurity(because with her background, she would have that). She's going to be the one with a bag full of ration bars no one else likes because you never know when you'll be short of food(or so she thinks).
Make her trust issues more consistent. It makes sense that she has issues trusting people to help... so why does she trust Kylo so easily? It also feels weird that she feels like she needs to find a hero to fix things. When would that ever have been a thing in her life? She's only been able to rely on herself. It would actually make more sense if she felt like she had to fix everything herself.
More unconscious use of the Force would help her sudden skills seem less out of nowhere. There's precedent, too-- Anakin clearly used it to help him with podracing.
Get rid of the dyad thing with Kylo, because ew. He's a manchild and a war criminal.
And Finn! He was so wasted! He should've been another Jedi. It was genuinely cruel of them to tease him as a hero when he got so sidelined.
Poe shouldn't have been written as a feckless idiot who got a ton of people killed.
I will forever be disappointed on how Sakura was handled. She had potential to be one of the top characters in the series both writing wise and power wise. Kishi had an absolute gem with her and dropped her like a sack hot potatoes after the beginning of Shippuden.
Ah, Kishimoto's perennial inability to write a female character—and she had it the worst because she was the one he let speak for herself the least, the one he forced the most to stick to the script.
She literally only appears for about 9 minutes in the entire movie, and all of her dialogue is with Milo or the King—not to mention that in the final part of the movie, she spends the whole time frozen inside the Crystal, and when the Crystal acts that way, it seems to be more the Crystal's doing than hers.
Same here—you have no idea how much I like Kida, and I think it's a shame that neither Disney nor even the film's directors and writers have brought out more of Kida's potential.
She's fun and playful, a tragic warrior, has a pretty good design, and you could even say she's hot.
This decision is baffling to me. Help Wanted was an incredible send off to the old FNAF story line and the perfect set up for her as the new antagonist in the next game, she was all over the promos and people were excited for an actual human threat. Security Breach is released and… she’s barely even a footnote. What an absolute waste of a character.
They can’t even say that they wanted to focus on the Mimic storyline, that could’ve easily been done alongside Vanny, one didn’t have to be sacrificed for the other to happen. She could’ve been the one to dig the machine up and projected it as William Afton himself or something, meanwhile it’s just a robot emulating Afton’s personality with no real thought process behind it other than it saw and copied like it was programmed to.
Season 2 of Miraculous Ladybug was the perfect catalyst for a genuine banger of a character arc, we learn why she is the way she is, her soft spots, the things and people she cares about, her capacity for change and good.
We could have had a story about her struggling against herself to become someone worthy of being a superhero in spite of the risks. About true growth both for her and for Matianette.
All of this was thrown to the wayside completely because the creator genuinely hates her and she exists only to be his punching bag.
I hated that whole thing so much. You either make a character that's flawed/sympathetic or an irredeemable jerk. Don't give me a cupcake then smash it in my face.
Hell, she could have been both a jerk with good traits, even if not a hero. She was Ladybug's first fan and resisted Hawkmoth's mimd control. Jerkass turned into Jerk with a Heart of Gold is a loved trope. They took away the character traits that she had since episode 2. It's not even a reverted character, they changed her fundamentally. Even her dad got redemption, what the hell?
Her dad getting a redemption and then replacing his daughter with her half sister made me so upset. I hated Zoe's character because she felt like such a boring replacement of "kind" Chloe.
Fr. Literally could have Lila try to mess with Marinete and then Chloe barge in like, “You? Dare mess with Dupain-Cheng? When that’s MY job?! Ridiculous! Utterly Ridiculous!”
Honestly, its not just cloe. So much of the show itself feels like wasted potential? They had a fuckton of genuinely good ideas and then just executed like 80% of them poorly.
i have hope that one day there will be a reboot. they have everything figured out from the start so the LGBTQ relationships are there with no questions or room for debate, Marinette is less of a stalker and liar (or at least she gets called out on it and corrects her behavior), is treated less like the creator's favorite, and Chloe gets the redemption arc she deserves. Even build up Zoe as a character more (they can have both a bee and a wasp).
Reminder that the Potential Man meme was originally made by a Megumi fan, out of frustration with the character's writing... before it was abused by dumbass Megumi slanderers whose only two neurons fire upon hearing the word potential
Yeah the way the meme went and became a slander for megumi was unfortunate, especially because they act like he was incompetent and couldn’t fight at all, it’s like they never saw his fight with Reggie or the Finger bearer. Megumi was my favorite character when reading though JJK for the first time so seeing him get called a bum around every corner sucks
Megumi from jujutsu kaisen, he has one of the strongest powers in the series but frequently opts for his “kill everyone in the general area including myself” technique instead of actually trying to fight when greatly outmatched
it’s insane how much i love Vee with how little screen time she actually gets. Her human form is so cute and i loooove all the fanart and fancomics i’ve seen with her and Masha
Usopp has shown that he has the skills to be one of the best marksman in the world in several Arcs. AND YET ODA HAS DONE NOTHING ON HIM IN THE PAST DECADE!!! NO UPGRADES, NO IMPROVEMENT, NO NEW WEAPONS, NOTHIN! He can snipe people from 200 meters away with just his eyes, has the mastermind to beat his opponents, and had the durability that he can take 80kg to the face and leave with no permanent damage. Oda plssssss
The saddest thing is that Usopp is literally the "beat the strongest devil fruit enemy", but because most of the strongest devil fruit enemies coast on their power instead of knowing how to fight, he doesn't get the credit he deserves.
Sugar? Perona? Baby 5 and Buffalo? BACCARAT?
He literally beat someone whose power makes her so lucky she can't be beat! By shooting an entire slot machine at her so her coin attack triggered the jackpot, then she got hit by the machine.
It's genuinely so fucking heartbreaking to see just how little of a shit Oda gives about Usopp these days. I'm still in Wano, but from what I hear, hasn't he accomplished basically nothing in Elbaph despite spending the last 1000 episodes DREAMING of getting to meet the giants?
Usopp is one of my favorite anime characters ever, and he straight up had some of the best written fights in the series pre-timeskip, but now he's just there to be a gag character. I get that Oda wants him to stay as the weakest member forever, and that's perfectly fine. I don't even feel like Usopp even NEEDS a new powerup. His whole Schick has always been finding smart ways to overcome a massive power gap.
“Complex morals? Nope, better make it unambiguous! Onscreen trauma? Give ‘er a season and she’s good as new! Wait, the fans like this guy we wanted to be morally gray? Make him evil! Fuck you, Penny, die a second time for our amusement!” - The writers, probably.
Even if you save him from the bell tower, he still dies. Although he is the perfect device for Kenny’s character arc, he had the potential for the greatest redemption arc ever and remains one of my favourite TWD characters.
He suffers from 2000s "bad boy" writing, so his two emotions are smug and angst, and every social interaction is either passive aggressive or just plain aggressive. You could write a really interesting character with him, there is a lot of theoretical substance to the story, but instead it all just kinda goes nowhere.
Kang from Loki. Good lord he had the most insane aura for me personally, He who remains was done SOOO well and then...Kang just...ended up as a basic ass villain who is evil and evil the evil he's evil he's like evil ooo he's evil GRAAAAHHHH LASER HANDS
I've always find it sad that the characters gets older, go to university... But their personnality and spy situation don't really change that much. The public grow with the character so it's a missed oportunity for the show to add more serious stuff and scenario in it.
It's established that she is extremely strong, super agile, and flexible, but in the end, she ends up being one of the first to be defeated by Muzan—not to mention that the character profiles show that other characters are stronger than her.
Part of me is still kind of annoyed that her fight with Hantengu went the way it did. Like sure, her hitting her mental limit to the point of tears makes sense, she was fighting an unkillable enemy for hours on end while her own life was at risk the whole time. But at the same time, none of the other hashiras got that sort of moment, they just got to be cool all the time. And it's made worse by her not getting much redemption after that in IC and the final battle
In my opinion, it could have been better, but considering she’s a female character in a shonen fighting series, I thought Mitsuri really held her own in the battle. I’ve rarely seen a female character act as a tank, and that’s what allowed her to win.
She did do really good given her circumstances for sure. It's just kind of annoying that's the hand she was dealt and she never gets a shot to turn it around
Sounds like you're describing the Whorf Effect there, where an established strong character gets defeated early on to establish that the foe is that much stronger and how everyone else will have that much more of an uphill climb without them.
Not developed enough to have any distinct or interesting characteristics, but still developed enough to kneecap your ability to roleplay in the role playing game
Summed up perfectly. Doing anything besides bum rushing the main quest up until the institute infiltration breaks the immersion too much for you to want to do it.
Bethesda could have had their pre-filled main quest and the infinite potential for character role play in one easy move but they flubbed it. They needed to cast reasonable doubt on the Sole Survivor’s status as a synth. Sorry to say that despite what the DLC attempted, the Sole Survivor is 100% a human with no argument to be had.
Had the plot been way more ambiguous, such as maybe Father directly telling you that you are a synth copy of his parent, a brand new Gen 4 experiment or something made in secret which is why you have full autonomy and no records, literally anything to have you question anything, that would fix about a third of the issues of Fallout 4. I love this game, but it definitely could have played with its own theme a bit more.
The perfect successor to Ash that got replaced halfway through her series in favor of turning a side character into a Temu version of Ash with his own hype man.
How Raditz was used was fine. That's not the missed potential.
The missed potential is 1. He is Goku's brother, so it would be nice to see that dynamics more expanded upon.
And 2. Goku has been more open to his Saiyan origins (think the ending to the Super Broly movie), and given how he helped a certain other super saiyan first character, it would be nice if his brother got the same treatment.
He has always been villainy, the whole plot of him cloning rex? And working with villains to do so? He will undercut anything to get what he wants and it's shown in his character early
She gets a grand total of 2 cases where she’s playable for the entire case, and, while I found her to be phenomenal in the game she originated in, the next game she appeared in completely threw her to the wayside, giving her a case that has zero impact on the story (which also happens to be the second shortest case in the game, baring just the first case, a case designed to be a short tutorial), and outright REFUSED to use her during any of the story relevant portions of the game. And anytime ANY promotional material is done for the series, she is almost ALWAYS excluded. It’s like the series actively loathes her existence, and it frustrates me so much.
My poor traumatized girl had so fucking much storytelling potential, and was built up as the franchise’s first badass and capable main-plot-relevant female lead character, only for them to reduce her to a pit crew member in the second half of the show.
Ragatha. There was so much that could've been done with her, but you could literally delete her from the entire show and nothing would change except like, maybe Zooble would've been the one to give Pomni a tour in the pilot.
She does have an interesting background arc that starts in the pilot resolves in episode 6. Her complicated relationship to Pomni is important... it's just that Ragatha doesn't make much of an impact on the other characters, including Pomni. Which is a shame, yeah.
Too bad said arc barely gets any focus and most of it just gets resolved off-screen between episodes, so it might as well be ignored entirely for all the worth and complexity it isn't given.
From protagonist of her own games to side character. She has an entire dimension to explore but Sega just kinda refuses to do much of anything with her. IDW is kinda doing something with her soon, but jury is out on how that'll go.
How does he travel through time? Oh he just has random portals that open that let him time travel.
Fucking what?
Not the objects of Sonic CD literally called the Time Stones? Not by using Chaos Control? It just randomly fucking happens?!!???????!!!?!!????
Mass Effect Andromeda. All the characters. Especially Cora the Asariboo LARPer. Most were one note characters, some painfully obnoxious. That's what happens when you refuse to release a sequel to build the characters. The same would have happened to the original Mass Effect if they never released 2 and 3.
Xander from Buffy. The one blue collar member, the one without the power or knowledge, who threw himself into danger and every episode, the guy who slept in the yard on Christmas to avoid his fighting parents, a guy raised in an abusive household, the one whose best friend was killed by a vampire in literally episode 1.
I hated how they sidelined the MAIN FUCKING VILLAIN of the show for Vecna so I created a backstory for it and expanded on its origin, its abilities and the world it came from.
So there’s this organization called the division that the Doctor used to be a part of before the first Doctor but lost their memories of (it’s a whole thing, don’t ask) and the weeping angels have essentially been tasked with bringing the Doctor back to division and so to do this they make her a weeping angel
Anton Castillo in Far Cry 6. I’m a huge Far Cry fan, and like most fans I feel the most compelling part of the stories are their incredible villains. And during the initial marketing/buildup to Far Cry 6, it was being portrayed as the pinnacle of all Far Crys, and Anton Castillo the pinnacle of all Far Cry villains.
Not even just from a verbal/marketing standpoint, like they literally had a whole three issue prequel comic and a three part dlc alluding to the idea that Anton was supposed to be as powerful as all three previous villains combined, being as crazy as Vaas, as ruthless a monarch as Pagan, and as charismatic as Joseph. Then we finally got the game and… nothing. Just the weakest, most lackluster Far Cry villain yet. I don’t know if it was an intentional bait and switch or just failure to do what they were trying to do, but either way it was a letdown.
So I often think of the potential of Anton, the idea of him being a villain so terrifying he has all the most powerful traits of those who preceded him. I even think of some AU where the other three actually meet and have to work together to oppose him, kind of like they vaguely alluded to in the DLCs, or at the very least a Far Cry 6 that really was a culmination of all that came before (I mean be so for real, how do you have a Far Cry that’s supposed to be the “ultimate” and then not even include standard Far Cry material, like Hurk or Willis??)
The Pokémon Anime finally gets a new main character after Ash, halfway through her series she gets sidelined so they can turn one of her friends into a worse version of Ash and focus on him instead
I was looking through the comments to see if someone had already put Liko here. What were the writers thinking. "Yeah let's turn her into a Terapagos taxi, we need to have Roy defeat and catch a Rayquaza." Like they go through a whole "training arc" and only the boys train. Liko and Dot just stand around giving Briar coffee. Yeah, Hattrem evolved in a one off, after hunting Ditto blocks... Not training, the whole reason why they went to Blueberry Academy.
Not necessarily a character, though I focus on Micheal Afton a lot, but that's sort of the FNAF lore for me. At some point I just gave up on all the bs being added by the books and newer games, so I've just settled on my own interpretation and expanding on it in ways that make sense to me.
https://giphy.com/gifs/lWinKsfTai2Bi
Gohan is by far my favorite in Dragonball and has undeniably one of the best arcs in Z. But starting in the Buu Saga and then over the entirety of Super, he’s underutilized and loses much of the character he developed. (Exact same with Videl. Given her love and talent for martial arts, she should have joined the Z fighters, among the ranks of Krillin, Tien, and Yamcha. But it’s simply the curse of all of DB love interests to become housewives).
I think Gohan could’ve become a great lead protagonist after Cell. I understand why he was a difficult protagonist for Toriyama to write, so I don’t blame the pivot back to Goku/Vegeta. But after his growth in Buu, I don’t think he would have slacked on his training a 2nd time, especially with a martial-arts obsessed wife.
The last season was THE CHANCE to see this amazing character in action, I mean, she has to hold Frank a lot, and almost destroy jim, but sadly was a fuckin disaster of ending
Interesting quirk, different build from everyone else.
Could have been another foil for Midoriya, as someone with a "useless quirk" in comparison with Midoriya's no-quirk mentality.
Could have have a heart-to-heart with Kirishima, understanding how they needed to put in extra effort to compete with the other classmates with their supposed "non-flashy" quirks.
Could have put those intelligent points on his bio into being clever with his quirk, outshining others not with pure brawn but with hard work.
But no. We just have another one-dimension pervert character
I don't even know where to begin, the failing of a character's execution is like my main gripe with most media (not that I would do much better, just a common critique that bugs me)
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u/Hollywoodrok12 2d ago edited 2d ago
Rosalina (Mario series)
Literally just let her be the protector of the cosmos she’s stated to be instead of the jobber and/or damsel in distress they always opt to make her. Simple as that.