#Critical Control Points

[hello-eeveev]

man people really hate that orym still gets sad about his husband and father being murdered huh

not only is healing not linear and one’s progress shouldn’t be compared to someone else’s, but orym is actively in a situation that is bringing up that trauma and grief again and again, and you just want him to ignore that? to never talk about it??

like, I’ve been really stressed out lately in a way that’s bringing up a lot of old, tough memories and just a *smell* started to trigger a spiral, but you want orym to be perfectly reasonable when he’s dealing with the organization that killed his family, friends, and coworkers???

I also think that some of you just don’t like that Liam’s narration style utilizes a lot of imagery and parallels, because I’ve seen takes that are like ‘liam narrating orym being reminded of laudna’s past as she plays with her puppets shows that he doesn’t view laudna as a full person’ and ‘orym telling laudna that she has more love than delilah and that she deserves to live outside of delilah’s shadow means that he is incapable of viewing her beyond her history with delilah’—and with the latter take specifically: literally no? what? the whole recent arc has been laudna struggling to do that herself? how is orym trying to combat that view reinforcing it?

marisha frequently evokes delilah imagery in her narration of laudna and we all agree that it rules, so why is it suddenly Problematic that orym also thinks about these parallels? hot take I guess but I think it’s cool actually that liam pays attention to how his friend describes her character and has his own character engage with it.

[incomingalbatross]

I'm trying out another kindle unlimited author, recommended by a friend from school, and currently I am halfway through the first book of a trilogy trying to process "why don't I care about this protagonist" into something actually halfway analytical.

I think there's SOMETHING there about the difference between a powerless character (fine and cool) vs a passive one (hard for me to get invested). Even or especially if the character has the power to DO very little, I think creators need to show them caring about things! Making judgments! Having internal lines drawn or goals their limited choices are driven by!

But this MAY just be my definite personal bias toward liking characters who enter the scene with strong moral convictions.

[the-stars-are-warring]

Something something the first thing Arligan Zey does when he finds out that ARCs who want to desert get fucking assassinated by black ops hit squads (or perhaps fails to find definitive proof that it ISNT happening) is tell Maze that if he wants to leave Zey will get him the resources to do so.

Like. Yea man I'm normal.

[diskusaurus]

My biggest issue in Epic the Musical is Odysseus, actually. In this essay, I will....

[coltrevolver]

ohhhh. you think that mr reed was intended to be making valid points! it's okay I'll explain it in easier terms for you even though the film itself did it at least 20 times: mr reed is the bad guy :( and he thinks he's very very smart but he's actually not!! he just pretends! so when he makes a point, it's meant to be a shallow one! a strawman! we, the audience, are NOT meant to think it's a good one!! we're meant to think he's not making sense or that he's cherry picking, ok? sometimes, when he does make a half decent point, it's gonna be one that's already been said a million times before because he's a hypocrite and also steals other people's thoughts! ok, good job, I hope that helped you understand <3

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[keen-eye]

can’t believe that dean selling his soul for sam (making him feel the same guilt dean felt from john’s deal) inadvertently led to dean breaking the first seal (and confirming his sadism which explains a lot), kick starting the apocalypse (which dean blamed on sam even though they both wanted to kill lilith and didn’t know would release lucifer), leading to sam throwing himself into hell for an eternity of torture by the devil to right his “wrong”, all the while thinking he deserved it because dean never told him he didn’t, only that sam wasn’t strong enough

on top of all the other things that dean did/said to sam that sam would constantly be bringing up during arguments if he wasn’t as kind and wasn’t gaslit into believing they were his fault. instead sam holds dean’s hand and tries (and fails) to explain that often dean (convincing himself that he’s) helping people actually hurts them

[blueskyscribe]

~Earthspark spoilers~

So there was a lot I didn't like about Season 2 (batch 1) . . . but I do want to mention something that I've seen a lot of negative "discourse" about that I actually didn't have a problem with: Aftermath and Spitfire being inherently troublesome from the moment of their creation.

There's been this ongoing trend in internet media criticism to look at everything through a lens of realism. I've even seen a few people complaining about Robbie and Mo being in dangerous situations, like they're real children. But they aren't. They are fictional characters who exist so that real children can have fun imagining that they, too, can fight bad guys alongside their cool robot friends.

The Chaos Terrans are fictional robots created by a mystic artifact, an artifact that was fractured and malfunctioning when they were 'born'. I am not worried that kids will extrapolate that real children--who are not robots and not created by mystical artifacts--can be born evil based on seeing a cartoon using the very common Evil Clone trope. Please give children some credit.

Predacons and Maximals were created very similarly in Beast Wars. Any time a Maximal protoform pod crashed, BW Megatron & Co would try to reprogram it into a Predacon, and if they succeeded then the new character would instantly join their faction and start burning the surrounding forest with a flamethrower or whatever. It's a conceit to hurry the new character into the plot, because it would be extremely boring if every new Beast Wars character spent three episodes philosophizing and studying Cybertronian history before choosing a side.

The goal of fiction is not to perfectly mimic reality.

[butwhatifidothis]

Genuinely can't understand how people can legitimately say "trying to argue that Crests are powerful and useful and writing Crests as being powerful and useful proves Edelgard right about how people wrongfully fixate on them" when Edelgard herself says she thinks she can only use her signature heavy armor because of Crests (study requests), and when she herself uses a Relic that was made specifically to be compatible with her twin Crests to use in fighting. Nearly her entire visual language as a character relies on her using her Crests, so the people trying to argue this just kinda point out how hypocritical she is lmao

[awkwardnerdylesbian]

why is this giving i think i need to put you down vibes

[septembermonologues]

how did dorym nation go from winning so hard to losing so hard in the span of 2 episodes....MAKE IT MAKE SENSE 😭😭😭

I. KNOW. i just keep thinking about how things would be different if dorian had been able to stay or pop in or even just if the sending stones worked. i think there's going to be so much pain and frustration and anger from dorian not necessarily with orym but like. i keep thinking about "no debts between us". and how whether it's internal and how orym is built or because watching the hells lately has put so much weight and responsibility on his shoulders, he's gotten to feel so indebted or something like that so as to make a deal essentially signing away his future with a hag to make up for it. but then there's an empathy there that i don't know the rest of the hells will quite have because dorian made a deal with a betrayer god to keep the crown keepers safe. they're cut from such a similar cloth in that way that i just wonder what kind of... warnings? dorian might have been able to pick up on that have slipped through the cracks without him because orym's been written off as the most stable one of the hells. i just. need to know how dorian is going to react.

[james-stark-the-writer]

just finished Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and it is a game written by cowards for cowards.

the final twist genuinely ruins the game. it's so stupid as a narrative decision. i hate it so much. it almost makes me understand what the people yelling about The Last Jedi being too subservient to its themes were yelling about (OBVIOUSLY not the ones that were being bigoted and loud and wrong about it, but just the ones who had actual issues with its narrative directions/execution). genuinely, the twist takes what could have been an extremely solid 8.5, maybe a 9/10 game down to a 4/10 game with nothing of interest to say deluding itself into thinking it's saying anything of worth by thoughtlessly repeating patterns as if that's supposed to generate meaning without any real effort of actually committing to that meaning, or seeing the world as anything beyond its basic binary worldview of Good and Bad.

putting that twist in fundamentally cuts the legs out from any actual, interesting and substantive critique it could have leveled at the legal system and our feelings about people on trial and their perceived guilt or innocence, and it just ends up reinforcing it as a power of good that Will Ultimately Prevail In The Search For Truth, as if that is even remotely a thing any legal system is concerned with, especially the one in the game that mostly just stumbles into The Right Choices because it's a game controlled by the player. it's frankly ideologically incoherent to the point of saying nothing because its critique is unfocused and toothless. best it can muster is "maybe some people are corrupt and lying, but if You take Advantage of The System, you can beat them" as if malicious compliance is supposed to change the system. fuck off.

ran out of tags but. i'm serious about this lol, i really hate it as a narrative and ideological choice. the game threatens to say something bold and interesting and then just pulls the rug out from underneath you. it sucks. it's very much like 12 Angry Men in that way, i think, except at least that movie Knows what it's saying and that its basic premise is its ideological downfall, this just doesn't really feel like it says anything much interesting or coherent, ultimately, because the criticism either drowns in the length and comedic nature of it, or just ultimately isn't focused and pointed and nuanced enough to actually say something meaningful. like ik someone's gonna do a "kid's game" thing but hello, kid's shit has always been nuanced and just bc it's "for kids" doesn't mean it has to abide by some binary ass morality that flattens all its interesting critique, especially when you're constantly led, structurally, to the more interesting and nuanced narrative choice only to have a twist completely ruin it and making it all feel like a waste of your time. plenty of things are nuanced and interesting and "for kids" without deflating their themes and messages by writing a stupid twist that undercuts the interesting parts of its arguments.

[agirlking]

Krafton truly knows how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, in regards to their mod rules.

[keen-eye]

Hello, Dean 🫵

[icharchivist]

Parody of myself moment

this was just the first turn of sentence i thought of this isn't my fault--

anyway clearer, uncut version of the dialogue

[hjemne]

MOTHERFUCKERS I AM GOING TO SURVIVE THE WEEK FROM HELL 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥