Your Premise Doesn’t Matter: Anime, Star Wars, Airbud, and D&D

Transcript

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You're listening to No Plot Only Lore, a podcast about games and the tables we play them at. Your DMs tonight and every

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night are Josh and Chris. You can find us on all podcast platforms or check us out at

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noplotonly.com. If you like what you hear today, please rate and review the show and share it with everyone you've

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ever met. Welcome back to No Plot Only Lore brought to you today by abject

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stupidity. I have been watching a slightly ridiculous amount of anime in a

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very specific genre, which is slice of life teen romance. because there is

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something about watching uh dumb anime babies have big feelings at each other

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that really appeals to me. That's I you I knew there was going to be trouble when you started like routinely watching

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anime like you know every once in a while something comes out and it's like oh this is like a big enough cultural

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impact or just like a really cool thing that like I'll tolerate it for a while right like the first season of One Punch

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Man or or you know an like an individual movie and then you were like no I watch

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anime every day now for like an hour and then you like at first I was like oh

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it's like just trying to work through. Like maybe he really wants to catch up on One Piece cuz it's really having a

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moment or or maybe he's like really just finally going to get through all that Naruto that he never could before. But

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no, no, you started telling me you watch emotional anime.

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Oh yeah, I I've started watching anime while I am walking on the treadmill to

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distract myself from the fact that walking on a treadmill is the most dreadfully boring thing that I can imagine. And I would actually rather

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just be distracted while doing that than

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be bored doing anything. So yeah, I I started watching anime and the stuff that I kind of gravitated towards was

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the stuff that had a bit of a slower pace to it so that I could keep up with it while I was walking. And uh that led

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to more than a married couple but not lovers which is possibly the dumbest

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concept for a romance thing I have ever seen. Even that sentence makes no sense.

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Right. So, the premise of this thing and the reason that we're talking about premises today is as part of the high

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school curriculum in this version of Japan, people in high school get

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randomly paired up with another student and then spend a month living with them that person as a married couple. Okay.

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So part of that almost makes sense in like one of those I don't know like like

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a Black Mirror episode where you can see that like idealistically maybe high schoolers should you know have some

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experience living with other human beings who aren't their parents before they're thrown out into the real world. But this is specifically it's not

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roommates. It's as a married couple. It is as a married couple and you are being graded. What do what are what is what's

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the syllabus? So, I don't I don't know. They've never actually described what the syllabus is,

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but like if you do married couple [ __ ] right? And they are constantly watching apparently. Like they've got like little

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black cameras in like the corners of the rooms and and stuff. If you do married people [ __ ] your points go up and you

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actually have like a point counter in your living room showing your points go up. Okay. But like legally, what is married people [ __ ]

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That is never explained. Oh my god. So it is it is also up to the kids to

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interpret what married people [ __ ] is. So a lot of it is just like random guess and testing and they never really get

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into like that part of it because the the couple in the main story line are

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both interested in people that are not their partner for this project. And so their goal is to be A students in this

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class because A students get to pick another partner from among the other A students. Okay. So, which is again

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[ __ ] stupid, but like what they could really be going cuz like okay, you want to do like married

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people [ __ ] like you go to Costco on a Saturday and you like file joint taxes

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or whatever, but like also a super married people thing and like it's actually sort of a requirement for but

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is like cheating like you right like having a secret lover

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elsewhere and keeping that from your spouse is married people [ __ ] I guess that would that would technically be

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some married people [ __ ] Like not some happily married people [ __ ] No, but it's married people [ __ ] So like do you

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get extra points in class for having an affair?

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I don't believe you're penalized for it, but I don't think you get extra points. You're not rewarded. Good. Good policy.

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You're not you're not rewarded, but yeah. Yeah. So, they're they're not encouraging you to go out and find extrammarital partners, but they're not

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like stopping like I would assume that at least some of these children have

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partners. Yeah. Like these are high schoolers. So, like they have romantic

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interests that are not the person that they are quote unquote married to. Correct. For the term of this class,

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which apparently goes for many months. But anyway, it got me thinking about

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some of the premises that we occasionally see for role playing games and how yours don't have to be good

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because there are a lot of really good stories out there that just have dog [ __ ] premises, right? You can start from

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an absolutely ridiculous place, but as long as like the people in the situation are real people, um then you know it'll

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it'll resonate. Well, yeah. And I think like one of the big things that I have kind of noticed

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in some of these absolutely terrible premises is that the more serious you

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take the premise, the more real the story seems,

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despite the fact that the premise makes absolutely no goddamn sense, right?

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So like another another anime because I know you're a huge otaku and you [ __ ] love anime. That's [ __ ] me. Um,

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Bento is one that I watched when I was uh probably in my early

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20s and I was initially drawn to it because it was just a a tits and fight

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anime like that that whole genre of like there's big titties bouncing and somebody is getting into a martial arts

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fight. Um, but the whole thing, like the premise of the thing is that at midnight

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in this town, the grocery stores mark their bento half off. Yeah. And high

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school kids who are poor and wanting to eat good uh get into allout knuckle

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dragging brawls to get that halfp price bento. Right. Right. Right. So I And so

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there I just need to like um you really glossed over something here super quick.

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Uh tits and fight is not tits and fight is not a genre that I was aware existed.

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Um it is probably one of the most pervasive genres of anime. um

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it infects everything like a lot of the anime that you may see um just kind of like riding

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below the high quality stuff, right? Like if you if you hop on Crunchyroll and you look through like the the action

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titles, about 60% of those are going to be tits and fighting.

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Can you Where is going to be like fan service? Yeah. a whole bunch of people getting naked and like there's teasing

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and somebody's going to accidentally touch a boob and everybody's faces are going to turn red and then like nose bleeds are going to happen and like that

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part of it and then the rest of the show is people doing martial arts fight. Can

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you give me an example? Ronma one half is probably the like

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quintessential tits and fight anime. All right. It's uh that one is also a super dumb

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premise but I didn't write it down on on our notes. was too dumb even for us. Um,

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it dumb and like mildly problematic. Um, it's about a martial artist who went to

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China and fell in a mystic spring and now every time he gets wet, he turns into a woman. What?

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Every time he gets wet, he turns into a woman. Oh, is this like Naruto's like sexy

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jutsu or whatever the [ __ ] Uh, like kind of like that. And then like his his dad I guess turns into a

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panda. Oh gross. Um yeah. So it's just like weird transformation stuff. And

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then there's also like a romance plot because you need to get the titties in there. Um yeah. So Rono one half

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absolutely the the quintessential tits and fight anime. Um but there there's a

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lot of it. There's so much of it. Um not even my favorite genre. I'm I'm

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all about those like sweet romances. I I want to see them like spend 14 episodes

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maybe getting to a place where they might hold hands. Um I'm so

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lonely. I can't say anything. But

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we go I can't laugh this hard. It's I mean it's still I'm still in recovery.

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Yeah. No, you sound like you're dying. Oh my god. Anyways, [ __ ] Oh god.

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Anyways, uh what what's your what's your favorite shitty concept for

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um any piece of media that you've seen? Like just Okay.

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Um, I guess my favorite like dumb concept I I super love a movie where

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um the whole premise is just like legalism and the whole problem could be

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instantly solved by people not being so [ __ ] pedantic. Um, right. So the like

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rules lawyer is the movie. Yeah, exactly. Uh so I suggested for this uh

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Airbud uh Airbud Airbud a classic. Now you might not think Airbud is a genre

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but uh oh it is well I'm say people say people hear Airbud they're like well there's a lot of sequels but there's

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also uh alternative spin-offs like Most Valuable Primates uh who took the idea

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of what if a dog played basketball and extended it to what if a chimp played hockey. Uh, and I think that's which is as a

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Canadian. Yeah. Like that really resonates. Uh-huh. Exactly.

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Like I most of the people from my hometown who played a lot of hockey, I would not be able to tell them from a

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lineup of champs. Yeah. No, they are 100% primates.

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So yeah, I think I think I think that's what my like I'm

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not particularly drawn to like dumb stuff like you. I like don't please don't take that the wrong way, but um

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no, I appreciate really silly concepts

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in a lot of things in a way that I don't think everybody does. And I think that's okay.

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It's I don't know if I'd call it okay, but it's definitely your thing.

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Well, I mean, like, okay, it it kind of depends on how serious you want to get about it, cuz like if

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you if you go back and look at like the origins of Star Wars before people

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started taking Star Wars so goddamn serious, it is a def deeply goofy idea.

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I mean, I wasn't gonna I didn't want to be called out so quickly, but yeah.

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Um, a gentleman the other day on uh on Instagram was posting his like five

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favorite books that he owns and one of them was the original script for Star

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Wars. Um, like yeah, with its like first draft name, The Adventures of Luke

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Stariller and blah blah blah blah blah. And Jesus, that is Have you read it?

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I don't I want to maintain my relationship with Star Wars.

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Okay. Uh I have read the first few pages. Uh there are copies of it that are available on the internet. Um and

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it's real hecking bad. I listen I understand that George Lucas

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is at best a flawed writer. I get that.

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Um, it doesn't make me love Star Wars less. I just know that Star Wars, like

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any good piece of art, um, is not it at its best on the first draft.

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Yeah. Well, and it it pulls from a very strong tradition from like the time of

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Lucas's childhood, like the those pulp science fiction things that we were seeing, you know, the the Buck Rogers

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and um like all of the the big funny looking like dildo spaceships and like

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yeah, like that that entire genre is very much what Star Wars pulls from. And

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so like that in itself, that genre is already fairly goofy, right? And in a

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lot of ways, I think what Star Wars did really effectively is they took that goofy premise and they played it so

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straight, right? Here's what I will say, too, is that like when it comes to like

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the movies, like he was smart enough to know that he should pull from better sources

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than himself himself. So when you talk about like how

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um you know Star Wars references like Rashimon and things like that right like

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it's it's definitely a much it punches above its its weight when it

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comes to like actual quality. So for sure I mean that I think

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needs to be recognized. Also true for Airbud though, right?

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Yeah. Yeah. more more true than I could possibly express. Um like we laugh about Airbud but like

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at the time pretty revolutionary. Okay. I don't think that it is possible

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to overstate the impact that Airbud had on our generation when we were kids. Oh,

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100%. Right. Like it was a phenomenon on par with the Ninja Turtles for a minute.

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There's like six of them, aren't there? just of the Airbud. And then I think

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they also branched like that franchise like that franchise specifically into a

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few different sports as well. Um cuz like Airbud specifically was basketball

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and then they did like um a couple of spin-offs with that dog. I know at one

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point he was playing like beach volleyball or something so and I mean like I'm sure he has a killer

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[ __ ] spike. Oh yeah. Um, yeah, I'm I'm I'm not worried about Bud's performance in any field of uh of

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athleticism other than the fact that like the dog's been dead for 15 years, but how dare you.

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[Laughter] I'm actually really surprised that they just didn't get another dog. I mean,

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every golden retriever looks identical. They could have so quickly replaced that thing. Yeah. Yeah. Just get another very

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well-trained golden retriever. Although like kudos to the the trainers and the owners for like training that dog to be

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as charismatic as it was. Oh, sure. Um, all right. So, Face Off. Yeah.

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One of my favorite stupid movies is just about a villain who decides to

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body swap with a cop and then go do crimes while wearing the

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cop's face. It is

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absolutely the worst premise for a movie that I

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have ever like witnessed. And they pull it off so

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well. Okay, maybe not well. It is incredibly hammy. They pulled it off.

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That's the best you could say. Yes, they pulled it off. There were many explosions. Uh, Nicholas Cage is

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brilliantly creepy and weird and charismatic in a way that I don't

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entirely understand. Yeah. Um, but yeah, stupid stupid idea for a movie. Um,

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killer clowns from outer space. Oh, yeah. It's just a bunch of aliens that

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look like clowns that are here to kill you. Wait, what was um Oh, Attack of the

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Killer Tomatoes. That's the other one. Yeah, that same that same area there.

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Yeah, like the the bee movie horror genre in its entirety, I think, lives in

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this space. Yeah. um with I think the main detractor being that I don't think

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a lot of the horror genre plays to it as straight as it

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could. Right. Right. Like it's very tongue-in-cheek, right? Like so one of the reasons that I have Shark NATO as

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low on our list as I do. Like I I understand that Shark NATO is a beloved film franchise for a lot of people and I

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do not want to detract from that at all. I'm the guy who watches a bunch of like shitty romance anime, but like

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Yeah. No, Shark NATO has like a a very voracious following. Like they they are

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hungry for more Shark NATO. That's right. Um Yeah. Like I I don't [ __ ] get it,

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but like I'm not here to yuck anybody's yum. Uh the the whole premise is there's a

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tornado and it's full of sharks. What was the there was a spin-off in a

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similar Piranha? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Is that is is Piranha

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Cyclone or something? Well, no. There there was there there was a movie there's Piranha 3D, but there's I think it's just called Piranha. Um I was going

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to say though, like is this are these movies like the

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Western Tits and Fight movies? [Laughter]

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Um, that's very possible. Um, I I know that there is definitely like I wouldn't

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call it a genre necessarily, but I guess like tits and fight isn't really a genre

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all on its own either. Um, yeah. No, there's definitely like a a throughine

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of taking an absolutely ridiculous premise and making a movie about it.

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like um what's that one about like Jesus Christ and Velociraptors? Oh, Veloca

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Pastor. Veloca Pastor. Yeah. Um and like some of that is just like be movie

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schllock and that that's fine, but some of it is also played very straight and I

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think like Shark Nato kind of toes the line between playing it straight and tongue and cheek. Um I was not able to

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watch more than 10 minutes of that movie. Right. So, there's a there's been a series of

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those philosopher type [ __ ] movies on Amazon, and I have sort

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of I don't want to say like decrieded them, but I've not been like a fan of

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what they're doing. And I think it's because they were trying to take it

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like seriously, but like not seriously, so we could be like cool kids about

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it. And yeah, I feel like they lack the sort of authentically

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stupid that Shark NATO did. Like, yeah, these movies on on Prime are like very

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aware of what they're doing. And Shark NATO was not. They were just like, "What if?" No,

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Shark Shark NATO was absolutely just like a couple of guys that got high and were like, "What if there was a tornado

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full of sharks, bro?" Yep. And then they made a [ __ ] movie about it and a lot of people liked it.

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Um, no. I I think like a lot of the movies that I'm seeing from Amazon

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are one copying an aesthetic. Yeah. Right. Like there's a lot of the like

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grainy VHS um like 1980s styling that's happening

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in those films. And I know that a lot of that is on purpose, but I don't know that any of it is played because there's

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like a genuine appreciation for that look or if it's just because they think that's what's going to sell. Yeah.

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Right. You can almost smell the irony on them, you know? Well, and again, like going back to to Star

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Wars, it took the Goofy and it really played it with heart. Yeah. Right. And

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that is the same thing that I found with more than a married couple not but not

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lovers. Okay. Is it is a goofy [ __ ] premise, but I liked it because the

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characters were playing it straight. They took the the subject matter seriously. It was important to them that

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they do well in this absolutely ridiculous class that would not pass any

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kind of government like oversight. No, not at all. It's like I'm sorry. You want you you want to take a like first

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of all it was entirely husbands and wives because Japan is weird like that.

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And so like gay couples you you want want gay couples to get split up and

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like have to pretend to be a husband and wife with somebody that they're not. And then also the the hetero couples. We're

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just going to take horny teenagers and put them in the same housing unit for a month and hope nobody comes out

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pregnant. That seems fine. Maybe maybe that's the goal. Maybe maybe

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pregnant teenagers is what we're aiming at. Um but yeah, the the fact that they play

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it with heart and they like are exploring relationships within the goofy premise is the thing that makes it work

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for me. And I think like bringing it back to a gaming place Yeah.

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If you have your premise be something like dragons have taken over the world,

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right? Just every country is now ruled by a horrifying dragon king or queen. They

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are divvying up new borders that nobody like none of the humans respect.

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Um, you can make that really goofy and it is goofy on the like on face value,

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but you can also play it very very straight and have a really good time with it where you have like each of

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these like dragon royalty is their own personality and we have to like try and

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figure out how to handle this new normal and like what does it look like to be an adventurer when there are like lizard

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tyrants that are controlling everything around you, right? Like that there are opportunities for gameplay there that I

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think you can absolutely embrace or just treat them like they are really silly if

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you want to. So I think I think you kind of uh hit the nail on the head with

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like the the premise itself can be as stupid as you want as long as the experiences resonate, right?

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Um like the the point of the you know this

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dragon tyrant setting is not like the dragons themselves like you know you start picking away at it it's like well

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why the [ __ ] would dragons care about borders they can fly like blah blah blah things like that but when you ground part of that and

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like hey what's the lived experience of the people in this like horrific hell situation

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um then you know the goofiness sort of like I don't want to say it completely sloughs off, but like it

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gets muted by, you know, real experience.

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It's only goofy until you've lived it. Yeah. Right. like

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the recent history I think would be a a pretty good example of like that there

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is a bunch of ridiculous things that are happening all over the world that

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everybody thought would have been impossible once upon a time and we are living through them or we have lived through them recently and they were not

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funny. Yeah. And they're still not funny. So bringing some of

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that pathos to your games where you're dealing with like I don't know an ice

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dragon has taken over Neverwinter. Yeah. Okay. What do

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how are how are you going to roll with that? or you know like a an army of the undead has suddenly sprung up in the

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middle of a like heavily populated city. Cool. Where'd they come from? Like you

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don't just have that many dead bodies lying around all the time. So like they they have to have an origin. They have

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to have somebody who's leading them. They have to have some sort of organization somewhere. Yeah. That's

26:36

happening, right? And so like you once you start like digging into those details and embracing that weirdness as

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the thing then it gets really easy to get invested in those instead of just

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being like h whatever lich army. Yeah. Yeah. Um that's dumb. I'm trying to think of

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like what would be the stupidest D&D campaign idea that we could do because like I've

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got a few that are are like borderline goofy. Mhm. But they still played really

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well. Like um there's a a halfling mafia in the

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city of Chara in Eberon, right? And the player characters were just a

27:22

bunch of like hokey farm kids who came to Sha to try and like make enough money

27:27

to pay for their sick mom's medicine, right? And they got like mixed up with the mob. So it was just like gangster

27:33

[ __ ] Dn D. Mhm. But again, like it it was played very straight like every time

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um the halfling character that was their handler had a very specific knock. Yeah.

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that he would do when he was like coming to like coming around to like give them a new mission. Yeah. And every time that

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knock happened, everybody's ears perked up and like the whole table got like really invested in whatever that was

27:58

about to happen with that character.

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Um, D&D Australia was dumb. That D&D in the body of a god was also

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dumb. Yeah. Yeah. The world is carved into the bones of a dead god. Um, there was a lot

28:17

of dumb stuff in that one that again we played pretty straight. Completely straight. I think I I can't think of a

28:23

time where we were like goofballs about it, you know.

28:28

Um, maybe the cliffs in the rib cage where the dragons were roosting was a a

28:35

little bit of like a a jokey session. Yeah, kind of. But like that I think part of that is that

28:43

it was a little tonally different from everything that we had done. Like previous to that we had a bunch of

28:48

dwarves who were living in huts that walked on chicken legs. Like everybody had a Baba Yaga hut. That's true. We did

28:53

have that. I do remember that. [Laughter] So, like compared to that, when you come

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across like a bunch of dragons roosting in in cliffs, then it's pretty easy to just be like, "Okay, we're not going to

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take this seriously because it's not goofy enough for this set." Yeah. Yeah. I I forgot about those dwarves.

29:12

Honestly, I really like those dwarves. They may be

29:18

my second favorite thing from that set. I don't get me wrong, I think they're great. I just kind of forgot they

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existed because, you know, I don't pay attention sometimes. Yeah. I'm still trying to figure out how

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to like make the library a bigger thing. Oh, yeah.

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Is like that that I think was like the cornerstone of that campaign in a lot of ways. Yeah. And uh probably the best

29:42

idea in it. But even then like okay so the the idea of the library is that it

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is a um caporeal connection to the plane of knowledge.

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And so it has every book that has ever been imagined in it. And they are teams of extreme librarians

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whose job it is to go into the library and either retrieve books for people who

30:13

have requested them or to try and put down super powerful books that are causing a ruckus in the library. That is

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so [ __ ] dumb and I love it. Yeah. I Yeah, the the librarians

30:28

themselves I think were some of the coolest NPCs we ever had to deal with because they were like the combination of like actual librarian and like

30:35

Indiana Jones and like Judge Dread. Yeah. Yeah. Just like a bunch of

30:41

like hyper competent, welldecked out, incredibly like prepared like

30:49

grownup boy and girl scouts who are really into reading. Yeah. of all the

30:56

things. Yeah. Yeah. They were so [ __ ] cool. Yeah. No, I I loved that whole

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premise even though it was probably the stupidest thing. No. No. The chicken

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huts. Come on, dude. Chicken huts. It's a [ __ ] chicken huts.

31:12

You can't pretend that the chicken huts like made any sense whatsoever.

31:17

They didn't, but everybody loved them. Oh, I'm not saying they didn't like deserve some love, but like what the

31:24

[ __ ] was that about and like the mode of transportation was

31:32

required because the dwarves lived on the planes. Yeah. And I think I was just

31:37

kind of like got enamored with the idea of like [ __ ] mountain dwarves, we're doing planes, dwarves. That actually

31:43

does sound 100% like you like just getting into the nitty-gritty on something that doesn't matter.

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Not even a little bit. And then Yeah. Just like pulling something out of that that resonates with people. Like I I

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remember you guys you guys got a chicken hut. Yeah. Like that was your base of operations. And that area of

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transportation was beloved. That best NPC in that entire campaign

32:12

was the chicken hut. Stupid chicken hut. Hey, thanks for making it all the way

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through this episode of Noplotonly Lore. If you're looking for more, you can always find us at

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noplotonlore.com and on all the very best podcast platforms. If you like what

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you heard today, please share, rate, and review the show to feed my never- ending need for attention and validation.