So it’s not a big spoiler that I currently work as a copywriter for a toy retailer, mainly because I’m apparently now an adult and am obliged to tell anyone who’ll stay still about work. But this line of work has meant that I need to know way, WAY too much about the kind of… what we’ll call entertainment, that all the kids these days like indulging in when listening to their hippedy hop music. There’s lots of ways I can milk this for your entertainment and amusement, but for today, let’s start by picking on the dumbest elements of Ben 10.

Our brave protagonist, before he realises he can't actually fly.

Now Ben 10 is your everyday sort of eight year-old boy wish fufillment fare: a young boy finds a watch that’s so high tech it might as well be magic, that lets him turn into alien warriors, then starts fighting alien invaders, giant robots, and (for some reason) mercentile templar knightly orders. Ragging on the base concept is like kicking a puppy, so let’s talk about these aliens.

Following on with the wish-fufillment theme, the magic watch is plenty of big muscly aliens that could totally beat up Biffer Zonkins when he takes your lunch money, as well as fast ones, hard ones, massive stony ones, etc etc. And then there’s Alien X.

You can tell by the name it’s something stupid, right? And you’re right. Alien X is your stock nigh-omnipotent character, “ able to warp reality and time/space itself, becoming nearly invincible”. Thanks to the Ben 10 wiki for that line, and remind me to write about wikis another time. Naturally, it’d be a very boring show if one alien could do everything, so they built in a weakness, of course. And that weakness?

Erm…

Alien X (and his entire species) has split personalities. He literally can’t do anything without a majority of the personalities agreeing to do it. So if they’re in a funny mood, then no matter disintegrating rays for you, you’re not even walking around.

Yeah, just a little dumb here.

The face of utter, utter evolutionary redundance.

Bear in mind that any aliens Ben 10 has access to are actual alien species that have evolved, developed sentience, and been actual functioning creatures before being scanned by his magic watch. All the rest of them make sense as creatures (the strong alien developed on a warrior planet, the fast alien needed to hunt quickly, and the clockwork alien evolved to help Bandai expand the toy line). A schizophrenic demi-god who can’t even tie his shoelaces without having a ten-hour brainfart is not the sort of thing Darwin would be entertained by.

And it gets worse once you actually study these personalities. The default in-box personalities are “a voice of rage and aggression”, a “voice of love and compassion”, and… a ten year old boy who isn’t there when the aliens are out in the wild. So quite how the TWO basic personalities decide a MAJORITY of anything I’ll never know, let alone that they’re quite literally as opposite as can be. And just to compound the evolutionary pointlessness, they’re apparently millenia old, and still arguing about whether to save the goddamn dinosaurs.

Apparently, Ben has hacked his magic watch to lock away the stupid crazy alien to stop him accidently turning into Alien X, and being left standing around looking gormless when evil space pirahna are eating his girlfriend. When a ten year old boy has realised you’re a goddamn liability, it’s time to step back and re-evaluate how useless your species is.

Wasn’t that worth waiting for, everyone? Join me again soon, where I talk about how Mega Bloks encourage xenophobia or something.

So here’s the deal: getting confused between PHP and MySQL lead to me to nuking the entire old site from orbit. And to be fair, I’m not too shook up over it. I’ve decided Less Is More is just going to be my blog, the sort of blog that has my actual name on it and talks about the stuff I do as much as the rambling nonsense articles of old.

I’d also like it to be a writing exercise, so I’m publically pledging to do at least one update a week. And preferrably more. And preferrably the one-a-week to be interesting to read.

I’ll work out the rest of what goes here as I go along. So don’t expect the layout etc to stay anywhere similar to this. Seriously, WordPress’ default themes look like a butt.