User blog:ZeVikingSif/My Way of Fixing A Broken Franchise

Another blog so soon? Hell yeah. Welcome to my third one this month, and this one is by far my favorite to discuss.

To discuss what this is about, i'm gonna go way back to the beginning. Remember, these are my opinions.

OS - For a long time, THIS was my favorite. I loved OS, watching it back in January 2006. What's not to love? It barely had any episodes that i despised *cough*MerryChristmas*cough*, and it had a lot of awesome things. All the Aliens were spectacular with the exception of Upchuck, a lot of the villains were awesome: Dr. Animo, Clancy, Driscoll, you name it. Even Vilgax was amazing here, he was a legitimate threat, and note a joke *cough*OV*cough*, or a Lucubra. There are barely things i hate about OS, and that makes an a-okay series in my book.

AF - My favorite series. I know people who despise this series (Alanomaly), and i don't understand why. Dwayne perfectly made Ben 10 more mature, he understood how to make Ben 10 work for the older audience. Kids and teens would enjoy the heck out of this. It's main selling point is the story and the characters, who knew Kevin would be such a cool ally? The Highbreed are one of the best villains in all of Ben 10. War of the Worlds was one of the best episodes Ben 10 entirely had to offer, the new aliens, say what you want about them being clones of the originals, are still pretty cool. Plus, they introduced Paradox! Freaking Paradox! What we need is another Dwayne, but that's for later on. Oh, and i don't mind Season 3, it's just not as good as the other seasons.

UA - At this point, everyone knows i hate UA. Everyone knows i think its undeserving of a series, Diagon sucks, i think season 2 is garbage, etc. And these things are true, from my point of view. People could defend to me to this day that UA was amazing, i still disagree. I'm sure a lot of people know this part: I freaking love Season 1. I love Aggregor, i love the Andromedas, i love the story. Even the intro was awesome, though it did lie. Ultimate Kevin, agree or disagree, is pretty awesome. My only problem with Season 1 is the bad fillers, Reflected Glory SUCKS. That Nemesis episode was okay, and Video Games was useless. But the series, and even franchise went DOWNHILL when S2 started. I will defend S1, but i will start hating on the rest. If you wanna know why i hate UA, visit my previous blog.

OV - Where do i begin? My relationship with OV is mixed, i will defend some things, and the rest i will beat down. When i start watching an arc, i always have the feeling that i should like OV but i can't. After an arc ends, i start thinking straight, and i must say, OV, when it takes two steps forward, it takes five steps back. When we have diversity, some of the designs looks retarded. When we get a better looking NRG, but why is he a garbage can? We finally have the old aliens back-- wait a minute, why is Stinfkly preggers? Oh god, XLR8, i loved you! I can go on and on about this, when it tries to get dark it ultimately goes nowhere, and there is no development with the characters. In the end, OV is a bad series, but it gets more right than UA.

Now, we got that out of the way, let's begin at the topic at hand. To me, and a bucketload of others, the franchise is now broken, but not beyond repair. Starting from UA, the franchise went down south, but there was a few visits in the right direction. It ultimately stayed in the south. What we need is another Dwayne, Ben 10 can still be salvaged. Despite me wanting the Avatar writers, that is only a dream, it won't ever happen. Weisman however CAN do Ben 10, he wrote Ken 10, he obviously has experience. Plus, he's only writing books now. #BringBackWeisman2015. Anyway, he can salvage the already broken universe. But right now, i'm not gonna talk about HOW or how he SHOULD fix it, though the second one can kinda fit in to an extent, i'm gonna talk about how i can fix it.

I'm gonna go through all the categories i can think of, and try to go into detail. First up would be the story.

Story
NOTE: This can go in many different directions. The main road ahead would be space roadtrip, and i would not mind that at all, in fact i'd be 100% cool with it. The only problem is, the franchise needs fixing before we can go with that storyline. I mean you could probably do both, but i'm gonna stick with my version... less difficult.

I don't mean to overuse this word, but it has to be here. The series needs to take a DARKER approach. What i mean is, better storylines, developed characters, a theme that gets you invested, all that. My version of what the new story should be is how i would play with all of these aspects. Let us begin!

The first thing we should see is Ben waking up in a wreckage. He is really confused, and all he sees are red skies, a lot of wrecked buildings and him waking up in rubble. All he can see is destruction, and he has no idea what's going on. And that can only mean one thing: AMNESIA.

NOTE: Do we really want another cocky Ben Tennyson? Look, i hate Ben in OV as much as the next guy, but we're gonna try to be better here. Everything is still canon, personalities are the same, designs are kinda not really the same. We're gonna try to stay consistant. But this is my way to make things fair, i wanna build up his character, continuing off The Ultimate Sacrifice. We don't want him to be cocky again, do we? We can't be cocky in the middle of all this.

As Ben keeps investigating, he finds a group of hobo-like aliens. We also see some familiar faces, Tack, the Plumbers' Kids, even Ken Tennyson (Gwen's brother). They all look shocked to see him, and Ben is just really creeped out to see strange creatures. They think he was dead, and we can have a couple flashbacks, pieces being pulled together as S1 Progresses. In the first flashback, we see some OS roadtrips, Aggregor from UA, and strangely, Eunice drinking smoothies.

NOTE: The reason i put "strangely" is because this isn't a scene from any show, that is completely new for this show. Nothing has been retconned, that scene is after the events of OV. You'll see.

The Plumbers Kids' starts explaining that Ben's been fighting a robot for weeks, and he was thought to be dead in a spaceship explosion. They also start explaining that Ben is wanted by the Plumbers. Ben starts asking questions, cue some exposition for the new fans of Ben 10 who started on this new series.

NOTE: TJ, on his fan fic page, had made a point about something. Omniverse does not explain ANYTHING. With this moment of exposition, and many more to come, the new fans can understand what happened during the previous four shows without seeing them or getting confuzzled.

This moment of exposition was interrupted by a loud noise. As they start searching around, a giant Plumbers Spaceship finds them. Ben is still confused, while the others are frightened. Multiple fighter jets start coming out of it, and everyone starts fighting back. Alan asks Ben to turn into someone, but Ben doesn't know how. After hiding for a minute or two, he finally activates the Omnitrix. In a slow, up-beat and strange theme, Ben goes through a transformation sequence. Chromastone! Ben doesn't know what to do, and he just starts firing lasers randomly, even a little friendly-fire going on. After a couple more minutes, more Plumbers start to come in, and they all get outnumbered. Even Ben times out. They all get teleported into the main Plumbers Ship. Handcuffs are automatically put on during the teleportation, explain that how you'd like. After Ben asks more questions, Alan begins to answer just a COUPLE, in which he eventually tells him to shut up. Everyone but Tack and Ben are taken into their prison cells, but the two are taken to some room. And out walks... drum roll please... Rook! You shouldn't be happy to see Rook, he's been after Ben since that robot fight. Tack, with his handcuffs taken off, walks beside Rook and reveals that they were both working together to ambush everyone.

NOTE: So many twists early on, luckily for the viewers, Rook and Tack were explained in the first exposition scene. And if you think neither Rook or Tack would do this, you don't even know the half of it.

After an argument, a few mentions of the robot, plus some blaming going on *cough*involvesgwen*cough*, Ben is sent to prison. And to make matters worse, Rook claims that Ben helped ambush everyone, which makes them all angry at Ben. Now insert a couple scenes here, Ben getting used to prison, a few cameo Aliens like Water Hazard and Snare-oh, and so on. The main part goes to a lot of scenes later, when Manny tries to oppose a Plumber officer, and gets beaten up. Ben helps him up, and reveals to everyone that he didn't do it for the millionth time. Ben prepares a mini-speech, "I don't know what's going on, and it does not matter. I was once weirded out by you guys, but i realize now, we humans are not much different from you guys. I will not stand here, and watch one of you get beaten up like that. Neither should you guys. It's time we get out of here! *insert ending here*". Unlucky for Ben, Tack was right there listening to the speech, and laughing. Everyone was sent to their cells. Though hours later, while Ben was trying to sleep but was just looking at the ceiling, all the hobo aliens broke through Ben's prison, and claimed they had a plan.

Cue a lot of team building, and the prison escape. I don't wanna go into detail, you can probably imagine the escape. The only thing i wanna mention is an encounter between Ben as Rath against Rook. Short face-off, and they all manage to escape. After a chat between everyone on their escape pod thing, they each start promising they will explain everything to Ben. Though just when everything seems calm and happy, a freaking random missile approaches and hits the entire spaceship, destroying it offscreen. The final scene of this episode 1 is a repainted and modified Vilgax drone, telling the main robot that was mentioned earlier that Ben and his allies were destroyed. We then slowly see the robot in the shadows, but mainly the eyes. He kinda looks like Ultron... hmmm... and he's kinda feminine... AHA! I FIGURED IT OUT! IT WAS EU--

Rest of Story: The main story of Season 1 is Ben regaining his memories, meeting old and new allies and enemies, all that. You can tkae that in many directions, but the main villain of Season 1? EUNICE! Yes! We get flashbacks every now and then to what happened, but the villain is Eunice! You can just imagine what happens in the other episodes that follows, heck Ben doesn't even die by the missile. The last piece of story i'm going to mention is Eunice:

After the events of Omniverse and before the events of this show, Azmuth claimed she was incomplete. On a huge mission to save Chalybeas from Vilgax, she was the reason it failed. I don't care how it happens, she just fails. Gwen blames her a lot, and claims she's a monster. Ben agrees. Eunice goes nuts. She starts modifying herself, and she starts to look like Ultron. She now thinks she's above everyone, and starts to destroy all of Ben and his allies slowly, and starts to build a new world in her own image. In a battle, she purposely gave Ben amnesia, knowing the Omnitrix wasn't gonna let him die. She wanted to weaken him, and that missile in the ending prevented him from learning anything. A lot of things happened as well, some events that caused Rook and the Plumbers to turn on Ben, etc. The last mention i wanna say is: That Vilgax drone in the end. She visited Vilgax, thanking him for her transformation, and she pretty much destroyed him, and took all of his drones. There could be a lot of emotions going on in this first season.

Characters
Ben - We can probably say that amnesia is probably the best thing we can do for Ben right now. Trying to recover all of his lost memories, while trying to fight old demons and new ones coming his way, it's not a good time to be Ben. I wanted him to be a continuation of the guy we saw in Ultimate Sacrifice, and hopefully by the end of Season 2 (he still wont have his full memories by the end of S1), he can be a changed person. No longer cocky and arrogant, but relatable and a noble hero. Kinda layed back too.

Rook - He really hates Ben. No, he's against him now. This guy is even more mad than Mad Rook, he wants to bring down Ben. He thinks Ben doesn't deserve the Omnitrix after what happened, and wants to bring him to Galvan Prime to hopefully take it off. Who knows, Rook might be the primary antagonist for Season 2. He might restart the Rooters? Anyway, he is a changed man since Omniverse.

Eunice - Everything was mentioned above, but one thing that wasn't: She is sorta jealous of Gwen. She wants to destroy Gwen, but her wherabouts are unknown. Yeah.

I really don't have anything for anyone else.

Score/Intro
Intro: This can go either two ways. Traditional, where its a long intro showcasing cool aliens and stuff. Or, 5 seconds of the Ben 10 logo popping up with the awesome instrumental in the back. Personally, traditional would only work if this didn't try to be different. I go with change this time, 5 seconds will do.

Soundtrack: The Omniverse theme is repetitive as hell, no denying that. Why not go for something a little more serious this time? Something that shows us what this new show is made of, what we're hoping for is something that could capture both Ben 10, and something along the lines of Young Justice? The same soundtrack shouldn't be repeated every episode, at least change it up, or don't put it in at all. We need something with suspense, but not too dark and gritty. I'm not a big soundtrack guy, but the last thing i wanna mention is: Every Alien deserves their own theme, even characters and villains. They deserve their own groundbreaking theme, something that fits for them.

Examples: For Whampire, we'd go a bit more classical but with a hint of modernization. For Ben, we'd go from something slow and depressing, a lot of pianos, and build it up to a more epic scale, kinda like the instrumental for the Infinity War teaser. For Eunice, we'd go a bit more of a creepy vibe, just ripoff Ultron, nobody would mind. We need a lot of mixing up to do, instead of the same old repeats. Come on now.

The End
This is how i would redo Ben 10, and hopefully the next series would go along the lines of what i did. Some things may be too short or unexplained, but if you wanna see more, i'll try to update frequently in the comments, but only IF people ask for more. Any other things i'd like to see in a fifth series? Reach 100 Aliens, and this is probably a longshot but 10 seasons? More of the Anur System? Show all aliens/characters/villains? All i ask is for a smart series that knows what it's doing, and has some character development.

Do you guys like this blog? Comment stating the full thoughts! And Alan, if you ask me to wipe Nemuinas from existence/make them Anur Aliens, why not.