sandman
I'm pretty certain gods in Sandman work like in American Gods or Discworld, i.e., they're created by people believing in them (and die when people stop believing). See for instance Bast, who's surviving on a handful of old believers, if I recall correctly.
(That said I haven't seen season 2 of the adaptation, so maybe they changed it from the books and you're referencing that..?)
I remember that guy who did some minor parts in Hollywood (and also did some side work as a camera operator), was told he had no future in the business, became a carpenter to pay his bills, did some carpentry work for a minor producer who got him a minor role in some fledgling director's second (and first successful) film, said director liked him enough to hire him to read lines for his third film's castings, and since he turned out to be more charismatic than the guys who were actually auditioning ended giving him one of the main roles in said film... which turned on to be one of the most successful films of all time (mostly thanks to said director realising the power of merchandising). That carpenter went on to have a pretty good acting career in Hollywood after that, it turns out; he's still working now at over eighty years old.
That probably wouldn't happen these days, and Hollywood is the poorer for it.
Exactly.
What we did to dogs was monstrous.
Take a wolf and give it the brain of a neurotic brain damaged human toddler, biologically enslaved to us to the point of needing constant work and praise to avoid being a bad dog.
(And we didn't stop there; no, we had to keep meddling and turn them into misshapen shrunken parodies of themselves, living in constant pain and horror.)
I suppose it was somewhat fine back when we spent all day working together, but keeping that locked up all day in a small house or flat with nothing to do but bark at the occasional passerby is downright animal torture.
I don't need another reminder of humanity's hubris every time I get home. I have more than enough guilt as it is.
At least cats did it by themselves¹, on their own terms, and won't tolerate the kind of abuse most dogs routinely endure, if given an option.
1.– Except for designer breeds, of course. If cruel and unusual punishment had a place in society it'd be being applied to child abusers, people who talk or use their phone in theatres, and pet breeders.
I grew up with dogs. I swept several cubic metres of dog hair every spring and autumn for years. I've been on many several hour long trips in a car with a dog and no air conditioning, in the summer. (And I mean dogs, not those pocket abominations bred by people who obviously enjoy causing lifetime suffering to innocent animals.)
Yeah, if I meet a dog that hasn't been too badly trained and I have somewhere nearby to wash my hands and I don't need to keep my clothes clean and not covered in hair and drool I'll pet it, and tell it it's a good dog, and if I've got time and space I'll probably toss them a ball or a stick for them to catch for a bit.
But otherwise? Yeah, I can do without dogs. Too much work, too much brainless need for attention, too much stink, too much hair, and drool, and grease, and noise. And pain, when they go and die on you (I had the misfortune of living with a boxer for a few years; lovely animals, drool aside, but the way they suddenly explode into a ball of tumours at around five to six years old is just not right).
Cats are cleaner, smarter (sure, some dogs are smarter, but they're work dogs, and have no place in a house unless you can dedicate 150% of your time to them), much less needy (though they still do need attention, which is why I can't have one either, poor critter would spend most of its time alone, which is no life for a pet), live significantly longer, and you actually need to earn their love instead of them biologically having no choice but to love you.
These colours were chosen specifically so we wouldn't notice the nicotine coating everything.
Am I actually allowed to sit on this park bench?
That's the twist they went with?
Yeah, Gunn went with the old Twilight Zone plot, but the message got damaged in the crash so Clark thought “to serve man” meant to be helpful, and never learnt to cook.
(Plus, after growing up with the best versions of Ma and Pa Kent I've ever seen he wouldn't for a second have accepted the real message and he'd still have acted exactly the same way as he did when he believed it told him to help; Lara and Jor-El might be his biological parents, but his real parents, the ones who educated him, were always the Kents.)
That's the twist they went with? Isn't that just the plot of Dragon Ball?
Dragon Ball Z.
The plot of Dragon Ball is Journey to the West / boobs are fun / Toriyama forgot, let's do fights.
that makes things almost filmic
His early books literally started with a visual description of the reader's imagination "camera" gradually focusing on Great A'Tuin, the Disc, whatever region the action was going to happen in, and so on.
Filmic is exactly what he was going for.
From world war II (photoshopped).
I can't find the exact original image, but this appears to be an image of actor Christoph Waltz portraying Standartenführer Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's film Inglourious Basterds, photoshopped to make fun of Nintendo's notorious asshattery.
Help! Help! We're being repressed!
I think a good number of them have it educated out of them, by growing up in an environment where empathy is actively discouraged and portrayed as a negative trait.
There's also conditional empathy, where you're taught that there are certain groups to whom empathy doesn't apply (or that empathy only applies to your group), or applies to a lesser extent (e.g., your pet dog deserves empathy — unlike the neighbours' —, but that empathy only extends to taking it behind the shed and shooting it, not to paying for a veterinarian to take care of the minor problem it's suffering from).