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Robot Hobo posted:from what Michael said, it seems that a demon's supreme deception skills are also a 'superpower' in the same way. Michael was only good at deception in the first season because he was able to mix in a lot of truth with his lie. He really was anxious about running his first neighbourhood. He really does have a weird affectionate fascination with humans. He really is bumbling and neurotic and awkward. He hid one key fact, but he didn't have to do a whole lot of pretending, and that's how he kept up the lie. Nothing to do with powers.
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Oct 5, 2018 20:04
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I would say there is a contextual distinction in that Janet's sexy waitress outfit carries connotations of fetishized servility (the extreme endpoint of this trope being Hooters or maid cafes), whereas the delight at shirtless Chidi is mostly coupled with praise of how well he/Harper takes care of himself.
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Oct 23, 2018 03:39
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I love that the handshake has a trust fall in it.
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Oct 26, 2018 16:05
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If Pillboi keeps helping the elderly because he agrees that a mission to help the elderly is important, then that's a good enough motivation IMO.
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Oct 26, 2018 18:18
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JossiRossi posted:It felt like Tahani's "What a weird creep, why was I ever friends with him?" about Elon Musk might have been an adlib. Or a Jameela Jamil request. I could easily see it coming directly from the writer's room, as a way to deliberately course-correct from previous Musk namedrops and better match his increasing grodiness.
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Oct 26, 2018 19:15
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Shawn was probably just being extremely flippant about Florida's shockingly poor good/bad ratio. A lot of of the "[not really evil thing] docks you a ton of points" jokes could be attributed to demon snark.
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Oct 26, 2018 19:35
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Senor Tron posted:Do they get a cut of good points given for acts done by people they motivated to do good, like some supernatural Amway? I think so, that's how Mindy racked up all those posthumous points. She died before founding her charity, but then her sister used her plans to do it and that set in motion a shitload of good acts by others.
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Oct 27, 2018 08:49
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Possible theories for how the system is more hosed than we knew: No one ever gets into the Good Place: I don't like this one, there's enough indication it exists, and Janet can't have lied about the people that got in. Pascal's Wager disqualifies you: Doug is obviously Pascal's Wagering hardcore, and a great deal of other good people may be too, unfairly nullifying their points. This seems very possible, but they've already explored the theme of intention/motivation with Eleanor and Tahani in S1, and I'd like to think there's something less repetitive than that keeping Doug out. Shawn has somehow rigged the accounting process through scheming/bribery/coercion: Shawn is a naughty bitch, and you know he must have been dreaming of a scheme to funnel everyone into the Bad Place for a looong time. The team is on track to disqualifying the entire planet by revealing the points system: This one's fun because of the potential timey-wimeyness of it (and could tie into the above). Maybe Shawn knows they're on the path to doing something really drastic that fucks over everybody, or that they already have. And there's that manifesto Michael and Janet wrote a few episodes ago, still undiscovered...
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Nov 17, 2018 21:24
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1glitch0 posted:Maybe it's some kind of zero sum game. Doug gets points for making the little jerk happy, but each time he does the kid racks up more bad points. Like, you get 10 billion points for curing cancer, but an equal amount of negative points are distributed to everyone who could have cured cancer but didn't. Doug gets 10 points for trying to make amends for killing a snail, and now everyone on Earth who didn't try to make amends for killing a snail gets 10 bad points. So even if you try and do your best it only helps doom others. That'd be diabolic. If the accounting gets too hung up on casual chains of events, that would be an interesting systemic failure. But that seems to contradict the focus on intentions & motivations. From what we know, if you intended a good act, had a good motivation to do it, reasonably expected it to have a good result, and performed the act to the best of your ability, that's supposed to be enough. If it's not-- if there's always a nitpick about motivation or causal effects, and an actual qualifying good act is vanishingly rare-- then maybe that's the problem that Michael's about to discover.
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Nov 18, 2018 00:11
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If you're just eating a Heated Fruit then yeah it's going to seem mushy and gross compared to the cool, crisp, fresh version. It's all in the preparation. A baked apple is gross, but an apple pie with whipped/ice cream is wonderful. A warm squishy strawberry by itself is awful, but strawberry sauce on your waffles... mmmmm.
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Dec 10, 2018 18:18
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After 5 centuries of no new arrivals, the good-placers gave up on paperwork and descended into hedonism.
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Dec 10, 2018 20:05
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There Bias Two posted:Does real world chronology have anything to do with afterlife chronology though? The Jeremy Bearimy effect means Mindy could've gone to the medium place before heaven was abandoned. I think they're talking about 521 Earth years, because that's the frame of reference that makes sense for analyzing "Which humans have been dying recently and where are they going?" The writers might cite "Jeremy Bearimy" in order to do a time travel arc, but I don't think they would use it to undermine the show's own exposition. "521 years" was meant to pique the audience's interest about a plot point. "gently caress time, when we said 521 years we meant 6 seconds, and when we said 6 seconds we meant 27 blorps" would be bad; it'd be throwing that story thread in the trash instead of resolving it.
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Dec 10, 2018 23:28
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The time stuff isn't trying to make sense. Jeremy Bearimy means "time works however we the writers need it to". When characters in the afterlife speak in the frame of reference of present-day Earth (521 years, still waiting for Joe Francis to die, etc), that's Jeremy Bearimy. When Michael goes through the door to undo events that have already happened, that's Jeremy Bearimy. It cannot be disentangled because it's deliberately bullshit and not actually important. If a character says "521 years ago" in reference to Earth, they mean 521 Earth years. If a character talks about the centuries the main characters spent getting reset in the afterlife, they mean afterlife centuries. Infer from context, recognize that everything is comedy nonsense magic, and accept that most of the throwaway lines about the nature of the afterlife and its denizens and their perception of space/time/morality are meant to be momentary gags rather than enticing dangling plot threads. Guy A. Person posted:In the first few episodes they imply it's the elite of the elite, but of course that's Bad Place lying to appeal to Tahani's arrogance, Chidi's obliviousness and mess with Eleanor and Jason. We don't actually know what the criteria are since we spent so much time in the Bad Place and our major source is Michael who doesn't seem to fully know either. So it turns out that if anything the Bad Place propaganda was being generous if anything, since nobody has gotten in. Yeah, this episode makes it apparent that Michael had to cobble together a lot of guesswork for his fake Good Place. All the demons there were playing up a parody of the sort of saint-like goody-two-shoes types they figured make the cut. The fact that it's even more restrictive than that, and no modern-day person can ever get in, is something only higher-ups like Shawn were aware of. Supercar Gautier fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Dec 13, 2018 |
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Dec 13, 2018 18:50
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Taear posted:The last time someone got into the good place is a massive deal and the main plot point though. Yep, it is a main plot point. You are supposed to wonder what happened 521 years ago. Which is why they're not going to undermine that plot point by revealing "Oh, we didn't mean Earth years, we meant nonsense looping afterlife years". If you have a theory about the story that involves the show sabotaging its own dramatic progression and stakes, it's probably not a good theory. This wipes out about 90% of the theories people come up with for this show.
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Dec 13, 2018 21:43
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Propaganda Machine posted:I'm getting the impression from this show that as well-thought-out as it is, it encourages the viewers to do some mental gymnastics to figure things out. I don't think this is a Something I find is that the themes on my mind are often a few (or many) steps ahead of what the show wants to talk about, and I have to back up and meet the show where it's currently at. Like, pretty much as soon as Janet played the audio recording of the Bad Place back in S1, my brain was at "infinite torture can never be a proportionate punishment for finite earthly sins, and Good Place denizens are morally flawed if they accept this system". And I kept waiting for Chidi in particular to echo that thought, but he never did. Instead, the show has taken its time untangling flaws in the method of judgment, and still arguably hasn't yet arrived at "this type of punishment would be wrong irrespective of judgment". I'm sure it will. Both thematically and plot-wise, the show works better if you follow it at face value and don't get impatient for it to address/explore the things you're analyzing.
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Dec 18, 2018 19:16
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where the script writes checks that it cannot cash, but there's definitely a sense of overanalysis going on here.
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Rather than riling him up, Pillboi or Donkey Doug might be effective at dragging Jason down.
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Jan 19, 2019 03:23
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Yeah and I thought for sure there would be some analysis of Donkey Doug too. You know, get the best Doug and the worst Doug and measure all Dougs against them.
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Jan 31, 2019 21:16
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