I’m usually not a massive Marvel Cinematic Universe fan, but a good friend is a sound editor/engineer at Skywalker Sound and did the sound for the What If series, so I watched the first couple that have been released so far to give him props and see what all the discussion was about for the past several months. I wasn’t really expecting to be surprised at all.
Turns out, it’s REALLY cool. They basically take a point in some story, and present an alternate timeline where something turned out very differently. It’s all animated, but for the most part, the voice actors are the real actors from the live action movies.
So what do you think? Anyone else watched any of these?
I would merge this in with the other thread, if we had a thread merge tool here. Unfortunately, the last time I tried to use it, I discovered that we don’t, and it made a horrible mess.
There is in fact a topic merge tool, and it works fine; I think what people were objecting to is the particular order they preferred the posts be merged in.
I didn’t even know about the series until this thread. Now I’ll be sure to catch it.
I was done buying comics by the time the What If… title came out but my younger brother still bought them and of course I’d read them. Just to make sure they were appropriate for younger bro.
Anyway, I remember really liking the What If series. The show does sound cool.
The merge tool does indeed leave them in the order they were in. I suppose we could have a “pick your poison” dialog that asks people if they want the posts to be in the original order of the topic they were merged from, or if they want all the posts to be mashed together.
It’s my opinion that keeping the sequence of the original topic is more important, so the posts should be transplanted together as a block, but I also feel you could make a valid case for the other “smush them all together” approach.
You’re arguing for keeping discussions threaded. “Keep the order the same” means that posts with earlier timestamps come earlier in the discussion, while posts with later timestamps come later in the discussion. Always do that, and you will, in fact, keep the sequence of the original topic. There will be some other posts in between, but that’s fine, because there are always other posts in between anyway.
Right. But what I think you are underestimating is the importance of sequence; in my experience most posts are replies to the post above them, whether the user indicated that (by pressing the reply button on the appropriate post, or quoting the post) or not. So when you splice a number of posts together purely based on timestamp, it could get weird for readers.
At any rate, I agree with you that offering a choice here is probably better since there is no one single correct answer when merging topics together. Sometimes one method (transplant as a single contiguous block at the bottom of the current discussion) will be better; sometimes the other (transplant as a mixed splice based on timestamp).
