Yesssss, I totally agree on all counts. I LOVED exploring the island and learning about little things like their festivals and customs and local mysteries, and I loved that each area essentially has its own storyline you can follow as you earn shine sprites by plausibly helping people in need. Calling Super Mario 3D…

I loved Super Mario Sunshine but I agree that all of the "spray water to steer a boat" levels were pretty thoroughly bullshit.

I am genuinely surprised to hear that people consider SMS a black sheep or even a "failure". I adored it when it came out and I still love it every time I've played it since. I loved the atmosphere and cohesive world, I loved the clever level designs, and stuff like the FLUDD only expanded upon what Mario was already…

Yup. The new episodes had only been out for like an hour before I started seeing fanart of the new Lars as a Prince of Blood God Tier.

After seeing the sheer number of babies in the finale, I'm predicting that the next show will pretty much be Once Upon A Time: The Next Generation. The time jumps work perfectly to allow for all the babies (Neil, Robin, Gideon, Cinderella's baby) to be teenagers or adults or whatever and deal with their respective…

Another one of Once More With Feeling's major strengths was using a musical's tendency to have character openly sing their innermost thoughts. It was a really clever way to force the characters to face the things they'd been avoiding all along, like Xander and Anya having a whole song together about the things they…

To be fair, the novel also takes its sweet time before it lets you know what's going on. It all makes sense eventually.

I still maintain that the best ending for the whole series would have been at the end of the season 3 Zelena arc, when Emma got back from time traveling and learned the importance of Home (and accepted her feelings for Hook), Regina and Robin Hood were together, and Rumple & Belle were getting married and saying their…

How long until Rebecca and Josh get stranded on a mysterious island together?

To be fair, since they lost all of their possessions in the fire, the children DON'T purposely choose their clothes throughout most of the series, with the exception of the clothes they wore to Briny Beach. A running theme in the books is that all of the adults keep buying them clothing that is gaudy, itchy,…

Hmmmmmm, I like how The Magicians turned out but a Wes Anderson take on it would be really cool.

I was reading The Unauthorized Autobiography while staying with my grandparents, and when I got out of bed and asked them "What was that noise?" they got VERY concerned and were like "what? what noise? do you mean it sounds like there was someone outside?" and I had to quickly, awkwardly downplay it before it got…

THAT would be really cool. If this series does well, I'd love to see spinoff adaptations of TUA, the Beatrice Letters, and All The Wrong Questions.

I don't know if he necessarily believes he's GOOD, but he definitely doesn't think he's much worse than anyone else… and if everyone sucks, then he may as well try to come out on top. His cynical, nihilistic worldview is probably best exemplified by the last thing he says in the books:

I suppose so, and I definitely don't think the earlier books are BAD by any means, especially plot-wise. During my recent reread I just got the sense that it took a few books before Handler really got a handle (lol) on the personalities of the characters and the feel of the series and started REALLY having fun with…

The plan is for the series to cover all 13 of the books, 1-4 is just the first season! So fingers crossed that this first season does well enough for all of them to get made. The fact that Netflix is doing it gives me hope, since they seem to be pretty good about continuing even their more experimental series for a…

His main goal is to get a hold of their fortune, but since they don't actually get to touch any of it until they turn 18, he first tries to leverage his way into that "legally" so as not to draw suspicion, and then as they hop from guardian to guardian (all of whom are supposed to be on the lookout for him) he…

The Unauthorized Autobiography took the series to an entirely different level, and reeeeally opened my eyes to the power of literature, worldbuilding, and unconventional storytelling.

On the contrary, I'd argue that grey morality is a really strong theme in the second half of the series, as the children begin to have to break the law, lie, betray people, disguise themselves, and even burn down an entire building full of mostly innocent people in order to survive. You even learn that the Baudelaire…

Essentially, yeah. I mean, there are definitely a lot of horrific elements (kidnapping, murder, arson, a general feeling of being trapped and powerless) but it's offset by tongue-in-cheek writing, over-the-top characters, and the really absurd world they live in.