User blog comment:Theworldismine/How awesome is omniverse now?/@comment-71.234.208.124-20130317225759/@comment-71.55.210.41-20130525163954

Ahhh... As someone who does like Omniverse, I'd honestly like to apologize for the other Omniverse enthusiasts who bashed your argument on the animation/design.

I will kinda agree with the one person who keeps stating that the animation is smoother than previous series, but the designs and overall look of the show are purely aesthetics, and there really is no way to say one design/look is better than another. Sure, it may be more detailed, but being detailed doesn't make it better. It's entirely opinion, you're completely right on that front.

On the rest of it... I never liked Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, simply because the characters didn't feel like they'd "developed", only like they'd "changed"--give me a second to explain what I mean by that. My biggest example of this would be Kevin Levin. The overall concept of what they did with him, turning him into a good guy? I like the idea! But I feel the execution was terribly done, especially with how much potential he had.

The retconning of his original backstory hit me hard. Remember how when we first met Kevin, he was living in an abandoned subway station? He told Ben that his parents "weren't thrilled to have a freak in the family". That leads me to assume that he was either kicked out of his home, or his parents made living there unbearable enough for him to run away, and his mutant powers were at the core of it. I felt bad for him, even though it didn't excuse his sociopathic tendencies.

Then the new show brought him back, and all of a sudden he wanted to help the good guys. As far as I could tell at the beginning, after the initial run in with the Forever Knights, it was solely because of that one Plumber who died. Which made no sense to me. Seriously. This is the guy who absolutely hated Ben ever since he met him, blamed him for everything that went wrong with him. And suddenly he does a complete heel-face-turn and joins the good guys. It didn't feel like development, it felt cheap.

Later on the brought in explanations, like how his dad used to be a Plumber and how his mom used to tell him stories about him. Now, let me just say, I liked Kevin as a mutant human kid. I liked that not everything in the series was always aliens, you know? Making Kevin (and Gwen) into aliens/alien hybrids made Alien Force and Ultimate Alien that much more bland for me. But the retconning of his original story of abandonment/outcastness, that suddenly took away something that I felt was vital to explaining why he was the way he was. I mean, think about it. AF/UA claims that Kevin's greatest wish is to be a Plumber like his dad. Now tie that in with how he used to be as a kid; a sociopathic power-hungry child who in the very first episode that introduced him, was willing to murder an entire train full of people just to make a payday. AF/UA also explained that Osmosians go crazy when they absorb too much power and all, but it just... By then any kind of explanations just felt like an after-thought to excuse, and poorly at that, all these drastic changes.

So much could've been done with the original version of Kevin. He could've had real development. He was a social reject who blamed every other living person for his mistakes because he felt like everyone saw him as a freak. I would have loved to see this person grow up and develop into someone who could be a hero. But the Kevin of AF/UA is not that kid, they altered that irreparably, and now his character by comparison (to both what he was and what he could've been) feels boring and lackluster.

Now, I didn't watch Alien Force and Ultimate Alien in it's entirety. I read enough summaries of the series to understand what occured in the plot, and I watch selective episodes that I felt would be interesting or funny (like episodes that featured Rath, for example). So I'm not all that invested in them. But basically, to me, when Omniverse came along? I felt that Ben, in Omniverse, was what Ben should have grown up to be. Yeah, he's still childish and everything, but come on, he's sixteen going on seventeen, to be perfectly honest, he reminds me of a lot of guys I knew in high school. AF/UA Ben did, too, but there was a powerful disconnect between the Ben of AF/UA and the original Ben that I really didn't like. I mean, seriously, in Pier Pressure Gwen described him as "well-mannered" and "sensitive". Think about the entire original series; was there a single episode in which you would have described Ben as either of those things? He didn't seem like an older Ben to me, he just... seemed like an entirely different character. Perhaps the changes can be attributed to the five year time skip, but without any context, it just all seemed wrong.

Omniverse has context, however. We see him contrasted up against his younger self every time we have a flashback. We even saw him contrasted up against a younger self from a different dimension! We can see he's grown up, even though he is still childish and immature (but again, sixteen/seventeen year olds aren't all stunningly mature, especially the male ones; the majority of teenage boys I've known had a lot in common with Omniverse Ben). The characterization isn't perfect, older!Ben could stand to be more mature, and younger!Ben is somewhat less mature than he was in the original show, even though the Ben from the flashbacks is supposed to be a year older than the Ben of the original series. (And let's not speak of eleven-year-old Gwen, who in Trouble Helix was horribly less mature than she was in the original series.) But to me, he just feels more like Ben in a way the Ben of AF and UA did not. Does that make any sense?