The reason you haven’t gotten an answer that you find satisfying is that there’s no agreed upon definition of what makes a movie “smart”. You seem to be saying that it by definition can’t be smart because it’s a kids show about robots that turn into cars and fight each other, but there are plenty of kids shows that I…

You’re making a lot of assumptions that we don’t really know are true. We can say with some degree of confidence that the Transformers movies being terrible was not disqualifying for the people that went to see them, but that doesn’t mean that we can assume that the audience didn’t care if they were good. Hell, I saw…

It depends on what we mean when we say smart, but it’s certainly more thoughtful in its approach than rest of the Transformers movies by a mile. It’s not some awards bait movie, but it’s also clear that the people working on it thought through the storytelling in addition to the technical aspects of the movie. As I…

I had a longer version, but I think the better approach is to just point to Bumblebee. Is that a great movie? No. Does it manage to tell a story about giant robots fighting while also developing both human and robot characters that the audience can care about? Yes. Bumblebee should be the bare minimum expectation for…

Disagree with your third paragraph. People knew that these movies weren’t good from the jump and a big reason why they weren’t good is that nobody cared about any of the characters and then in the action scenes they couldn’t understand what was happening to these characters that they didn’t really care about. 

Bay simply doesn’t know how to tell stories about real characters with real problems. Each movie should have had multiple scenes where Optimus just gets to talk to someone for a while about himself, his views on life, why he’s doing what he’s doing, tell a joke, etc. Every non-action scene in these movies is basically…

Made all the worse because it was so unnecessary that there is no explanation than it was absolutely intentional. They could have just make the girl 18 and nobody would have batted an eye, but they WANTED that weird and gross conversation.

I somehow missed the Han jacket debate, so I looked up pictures from Empire and...I don’t see blue at all. It all looks brown.

I suspect they’re saying that the show didn’t properly explain what was happening, so articles like this are needed to explain what was going on. The fact that this was a concept incorporated from some extended bits of canon isn’t a justification for leaving a novel concept unexplained to an audience that probably…

Yeah, but on Mutant Pride Month you probably wouldn’t trot out Apocalypse for the parade either.

I mean, the article starts with a quote from the showrunner referring to this reveal that says, “I think a good twist is telegraphing what’s going to happen, and then once it does, executing it without an ounce of pity or sentimentality.” Their theory is that twists should be telegraphed in a way that the audience…

A twist for the sake of a twist is pointless, and a twist that is only designed to surprise viewers is a cheap writing trick that only works the first time the audience sees it (if it even works that time). A good twist reveals something interesting about the characters and makes them more deep and interesting. I’m…

That executive may think that there's a value in having two separate brands, but it's not a distinction that literally anyone cares about or recognizes, so the benefits are pretty questionable.

I feel like the blurbs on these are mostly wrong. Also, maybe this is something changed in production, but the character is Juhani, not Juani.

I haven’t watched anything from the current season or the spinoff show, but I have watched through last season. Mostly it’s just a show that I know my wife doesn’t want to watch so when she goes on a work trip or something I have something I can watch without her. I don’t know whether I feel the show is as bad as the…

Yeah, I read the comic when it was new for a while, but eventually I just gave up because it was so mean. Not just the violence, though partly that, but it was just so relentlessly cynical that I realized it just wasn't fun to read.

I use Fantasy Grounds for my games, which is pretty slick. Demiplane looks very nice, but it’s hard to justify the cost when Fantasy Grounds more or less takes care of it.

Well, Pathfinder 1e grew out of D&D 3.5. THAC0 was from D&D 2e and was never part of Pathfinder. Like modern versions of D&D, characters have various ability scores which are used with a few modifiers relating to their weapons, to calculate their attempts to hit enemies, their armor class for turning away the hits of…

I don’t know how much of your comment is joking, but you know that that’s not really how Pathfinder works, right? Specifically in Second edition things like attacks, damage, and skills work pretty similarly between Pathfinder and D&D 5e.

Everything in the last couple of years in the TTRPG world just makes me happy that I primarily play Pathfinder.