Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26200221-20151211162449/@comment-24152851-20160216013541

Great Ochoa wrote:

Seeing Ben mature and grow up is important for Ben as a character. The problem, at least for me, with Ben in Alien Force wasn't that he was mature and serious. It was that he was bland and dull and boring at times. Ben no longer became that fun and entertaining of a character for me. It's fine to have Ben to be mature and serious but, at least in my opinion, Ben was too serious in Alien Force and as a result, he just wasn't that fun and entertaining of a character anymore. Yuri Lowenthal's performance didn't help much either. He and Ashley Johnson sounded pretty bored with voicing Ben and Gwen respectively at times and they both gave pretty bland and dull performances.

Again, Ben maturing is important for him as a character but just because Ben is maturing and growing up doesn't mean that they have to take away that cocky, impulsive, mischievous, etc attitude away from him because it took that energy he gave away as well. Ben being mature and serious did not make him a bad character but, at least in my opinion, it did do a significant amount of damage to him as a character. It's fine for Ben to be mature and serious but at the same time, make him a fun and entertaining character to watch as well. Don't take away certain aspects that made Ben such a fun, well-developed, and overall great character. Add something new to Ben. Keep everything that made Ben great and then improve him as a character even more by adding new concept and elements to him. Don't change something that's already great. Don't try to fix something that isn't broken. Make improvements instead. Add something new. Well it was explained that Ben grew out of his cockiness, especially after seeing Max's supposed death. He felt guilt stricken and stopped being a child. As for mischievousness, pretty sure he still had that in the sequels where he would sometimes troll others.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not much of a fan of cockiness in general. It's okay for a while, but I don't miss it when it's gone.

You're free to think whatever opinions you have on the characters, but I wish you'd stop criticizing the voice actors. They only voice the character how they're told to voice them. Yuri Lowenthal is more than capable of playing an immature character which he has done for countless other shows, his roles in Young Justice as Lagoon Boy and Icicle Jnr. being good examples. He's only serious in AF and UA because they told him to be. In Omniverse they told him to be more immature and cocky like OS Ben, which he was (even though I hated it).