#bluerthanthoumaybe

[ponett]

Do you think there are media essentials to experience if you want to participate in a serious conversation?

Like "you've GOT to play Chrono Trigger if you wanna have good opinions on JRPGs" and anything else in an essentials list you would find on 4chan or somewhere?

I would say there are some things like that, but the list of things that I think are absolutely mandatory is very short. Sticking with video games, like, yeah, everyone who likes video games should have played Tetris and Minecraft at some point, but it's hard to make a longer list of entries in "the canon" that everyone has to play.

I mean, there are tons of games in the Game Designer Canon I've never played. Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 4, Rogue, BioShock, Deus Ex, Her Story, etc. I still need to get around to playing my copy of Disco Elysium. I played Outer Wilds briefly and thought it was neat but bounced off of it. There's just a lot of games out there, and there's never enough time to play all of the ones I want to play. So like, if someone told me they'd never played Super Mario 64, part of me would be like "what?!" and part of me would totally get it.

I guess when it comes to "serious conversations," particularly if you're trying to do some kind of criticism, it's just good to have familiarity with at least some of the "mandatory" entries in the genre you're talking about, even if it's unreasonable to expect everyone to have played all of them. Like, I don't expect everyone with JRPG opinions to have played every Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and Tales and Chrono and Pokemon and SMT and Kingdom Hearts and Xeno and Ys and Mana game. Lord knows I haven't! But if you wanna speak authoritatively on the genre then it's good to have played at least some of them.

I also just think it's good to use these lists of "mandatory" games/movies/etc. to branch out for your own good, rather than trying to impress anyone. Sometimes you might think you won't like something popular, but it ends up really clicking with you and opening the door for more new things you might like. Also, like, sometimes things are so popular that people take for granted the specific ways in which they're good, so when you approach them with fresh eyes it's like, whoa! This really is awesome in a way I didn't expect.

[blazehedgehog]

It wouldn't be a controversial opinion that writers should write stories with conflicts and imperfect characters. Characters who are too mean, friendships that are violent and etc. sometimes they should aim to make the audience feel uncomfortable. But when does the content of text becomes inappropriate? When does a writer fail to communicate their intentions well, misunderstands their audience's expectations, or proves doesn't have the standards or maturity to handle the concepts they're utilizing in their text?

This is a line in the sand I feel like a lot of people are wrestling with nowadays and there's a lot of complaints from people who think it's a media literacy problem that folks no longer want nuanced villains or flawed heroes. As in, people don't want moral ambiguity. They don't want a good character that is sometimes bad.

Like I said, some people see this as a failing of media literacy, and it can be, but I think it's also just a sign of the times we live in. We will have been going through eight, maybe even twelve years of looking at our neighbors and wondering if they own a red "Make America Great Again" baseball hat. And we wrestle with the possibility that those kinds of people could still have good parts about them, because the climate has really riled a lot of people up and amplified all manner of divisions.

And this is going to be some classic "I'm ignoring your question and just following my own train of thought" but I've even wondered if that is the point. We as a society used to live in harmony together more often and we've got a guy and his cronies that have turned everything into a battleground. It's divide and conquer.

I often think about when the pandemic was first starting, and I read a report from a doctor that one of the worst things Donald Trump could have done was make covid 19 into a political issue, because political issues divide people up and force people to pick a side about a thing that ultimately didn't have sides, because it was supposed to be more about "How much damage control can we accomplish before things get really bad?"

(Answer: barely any damage control, things went about as badly as humanly possible, and now somehow a felon is serving a second term in the white house.)

And the fact of the matter is, everything is political now. Down to the very notion of heroes and villains themselves. And clearly this isn't just something that effects "the bad people," a large portion of society is tired of it. They want easily digestible clarity.

So my answer there is more just "it depends on the era." It depends on the mood of your audience. You can fight back against that, you can swim upstream, and maybe you'll even be remembered as ahead of your time for that. But everything is off limits and nothing is off limits, you know what I mean?

If anyone is going too far and breaking the rules of writing its simply because they aren't writing with a purpose. Stories are about a journey. A place that changes, a person that changes, a circumstance that changes. Often all three. The story ends when the change is complete. If you aren't writing with the intent on changing things and letting us watch that transformation complete itself, then you are simply writing a bad story. That's the problem, not pushing flawed heroes too far or whatever.

Otherwise, follow your heart. Not everybody will be able to keep up with where you're going, but as long as you're going somewhere, don't let anyone stop you.

[blazehedgehog]

Have you ever had that experience when you share the same opinions with unsavory people? Like thinking that modern American animation is too sterilized and safe, but having to share that opinion with John K and his sycophants. (for the record I do not think this)

I mean, in my Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric review I expressed my distaste for Sonic's blue arms. About how, to me, every time I saw blue arms on Sonic the Hedgehog, it was from somebody who did not understand the visual design of the character.

If Sonic had blue arms, it was a sign of bootleg merchandise, or a crummy low-rent licensing deal, or, broadly speaking, just a symptom of garbage. If you get his colors wrong, you messed up.

But then Sega, in their endless, infinite wisdom, said "It's okay for Sonic to have blue arms sometimes."

Even in that image right there! Look! His arms blend into his body so you can't see them! You fools!

But you know who else shares that sentiment? Chris Chan, apparently. And I actually had people get on my case about "siding with Chris Chan." If you base your entire personality on only liking the opposite of what Chris Chan does you better stop breathing air, buddy. Because Chris Chan also does that.

And blue arms on Sonic is still dumb! Look at this garbage!!!

If you think this looks normal you straight up don't understand character design! I will die mad about this!

[blazehedgehog]

I've been thinking about Rob Liefeld and how essentially he's the punching bag of comic book artists.

Guy who just makes mindless buff guys with exaggerated surface level appeal and can't even draw feet, one of the worst consequences of 90s era comics.

I've been thinking about that maybe we've been too mean towards such artists?

In 2000s/2010s, mediocrity and anything less than that, especially when it tried to be sincere, was relentlessly mocked, creating the cringe culture we lived through, while other figures were heralded and role models.

But now, one by one, a lot of the most beloved artists of that era are exposed to be not so good people, or just another brand of mediocre, the consequences of that era turned out to be very bad (2010 culture of commentary youtube, cyber bullying and lolcows) and people are starting to sincerely enjoy the works of the artists who were mocked once, or find something to appreciate about them.

So the question is, do you think audiences were too mean? We engaged in the culture of ridicule too much? And have we passed that era of ridicule and mockery?

I mean you're kind of touching on a different idea too, which is: in this culture where everybody is valid, where everybody deserves love and understanding and acceptance, how do we give and take criticism?

And the obvious answer there is that we are constructive. We do our best to suggest improvements. And when we can't be constructive, we don't "punch down." You level the playing field. Lift up people that are unfairly below you, drag down people that are unfairly above you.

Are we punching up at Rob Liefeld, or down? Well, have you ever walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of a big budget summer blockbuster?

Rob Liefeld has. Multiple times. He may not be executive rich, but a quick google estimates he has an eight figure net worth -- about $20 million. He probably owns a big house and lives very comfortably. It's almost guaranteed he doesn't have to work anymore, unless he wants to. Certainly, if I had $20 million dollars, I could absolutely stretch that to last the rest of my life. Easily!

So does he deserve it? Yeah, a little. Not a lot, but a little. There are worse artists than Rob Liefeld, but are they more successful than him? Not usually. So he's earned a "kick me" sign, I think. I don't think that's unfair to say.

But then you need to ask yourself a new question: did Rob Liefeld earn that "kick me" sign himself, or did the internet elevate him to that level of celebrity by making such an example of how bad his work is? This is where we get into "lolcows" and folks like Chris-chan, right?

(Serious answer about Rob Liefeld: No. Deadpool was popular and would have gotten these movies even without Liefeld being roasted over stumpy feet, tiny eyes or too much cross hatching)

Because there are damaged people who aren't going to walk away. People who kind of get trapped in a loop of just making things worse, and worse, and worse -- and the worse it gets, the more famous they get for "being worse." And it can start to look like punching up at a celebrity, but it's a celebrity that you created by being parasocial.

That is absolutely undeserved.

[blazehedgehog]

This probably has been asked before but how do you feel about there being a character whose name is a nod to something that you are responsible for establishing? (I'm referring to Sage)

It's nice. It makes me happy. It's probably the most recognition I'm going to get for anything I've ever made or will ever make. Because at this stage, I will probably never work for or even collaborate with Sega on anything.

I don't have enough "official" experience or trust to ever qualify for one of their jobs, and I don't update my Youtube channel enough or pull in big enough numbers for them to ever even send me promotional packages for movies or games. Even when it comes to side projects, like the comics or animation or whatever, I will probably never touch those things behind the scenes. I don't have the connections or the social skills or maybe even the writing skills.

SAGE is my strongest legacy, and the most positive I've put out into the world. I have to fight back on impostor syndrome really hard to remind myself that it's okay to be proud of it. That I get to have the honor of being the founder. My doubts tell me "You barely ran it for two years out of the last 25" but I also stayed hands on for at least another four or five years after I gave it up. I helped a lot of friends and made sure deadlines could be met.

Sage being named after that means a lot to me. I left enough of a mark on something, somewhere that I helped change the face of the Sonic franchise. It may end up a footnote in a trivia section somewhere, one that doesn't even mention me, but I know, and that's what matters.

Leaving your mark on the world is what most people want, right? I can't complain. SAGE has been the work of many very talented hands, it has grown far beyond anything I had the ability to accomplish, but two of those hands were mine, and they were as important as anyone else's. And I'm not dead yet, so who knows what the unpredictable future still holds for me. Impostor syndrome is a liar, after all.

[blazehedgehog]

I've watched some clips of animators being at odds with older animators when it comes to decisions and they got me thinking.

Do you think there's a point when you know too much? When you're fully settled in your own biases and preferences that anything new feels off? Or can professionals keep an open mind with new sensibilities and the way language of art evolves?

You can never know too much. The problem is not knowing too much. The problem is when you think you know "enough".

But it's been a fact that, for example, with racism. You socialize someone with racial biases, you show them first hand, long term evidence of the truth, you give them a broad and robust understanding of what it's like to be that other person, and they become less racist.

What you call "keeping an open mind" is what should be called "being willing to continue learning."

The moment you dig your heels in and find yourself saying "the kids these days don't know the right way to do things" is the day you give up learning. People talk about smooth brain versus wrinkled brain, but that kind of stuff is when your brain turns to stone. Literally rocks in your head. And the clock is ticking until erosion does its job.

Never stop being willing to learn, never stop being willing to understand, and never stop considering the perspective of others.

[blazehedgehog]

If one decides to start a creative project about their favorite thing, be it fanart, fanfic, fangame etc. , which approach do you prefer, the creatives involved fully dedicating themselves to recreating and recapturing what made the original works...work, or make an active choice to be derivative (this doesn't mean artists are ignorant about the original material, not necessarily) How do you feel about either, and are there any other approach you can think of?

There's this guy who used to post at SFGHQ named Sam Beddoes who now runs Freakzone Games. He's made the official Manos: The Hands of Fate game, he did both AVGN Adventures, he's the project lead on that Toxic Crusaders beat'em'up, etc.

But he's an old guard Sonic head and I've heard him turn up on a couple of Sonic podcasts, specifically to talk fangames, and by his account he got really fed up with the Sonic fangaming scene when everybody became obsessed with perfectly replicating the Genesis games, because to him, all the creativity and magic went away.

I remember hearing that and both agreeing and disagreeing with him. And I have enough thoughts about it that I've actually considered doing a video about it, and about fangaming overall.

I think there is a stigma to replicating something perfectly that's very adjacent to people who are concerned about young artists who start out by tracing pictures other people have drawn. Plagiarism is a real, legitimate problem. But it's only a problem if you lie about tracing.

I'm of the mind that if you're starting out drawing, half the problem is just learning control. Tracing can be a valuable tool in helping you to understand hand motions and give you a perspective on the construction of an image. For the earliest beginners, I don't think there's any shame in starting out by tracing. It's building muscle memory. Just don't say you drew it.

Similarly, my game development skills went way, way, way up about the time I started to analyze and perfectly replicate existing games. Like, the long canceled Sonic Forever project used an early enough version of the Sonic Worlds codebase that I had to read the Sonic Retro Physics Guide and use their data on how to add Knuckles in from scratch. My code matched how he worked in the Genesis games almost 1:1, because it was largely me just interpreting the values into something Clickteam Fusion could understand.

Something similar happened when, in 2012, I started (and never finished) a remake of my famous Mario Blue Twilight DX fangame. That's when I started really paying attention to how the source games worked so I could get a better sense of how a Mario game needed to "feel" in order to be correct.

And that trend continued with every fangame project I worked on following that, like when I figured I could make my own version of Sonic 2's Hidden Palace Zone, since I wasn't happy with the Retro Engine version. The idea was to be accurate above all else. In some cases, I'd even watch recordings of official gameplay in slow motion just so I could see exactly how the game was created, and in some cases, count frame by frame the duration of certain actions.

And all of this just makes me think of when I showed a friend my game jam game, OverBite. He complimented me on how nice the controls felt, in that kind of backhanded way where he said "When did you learn to make games feel so nice?"

Because if you go back to those really early games of mine, they all feel like garbage to control. And I attribute it to putting in a lot of time pulling apart the nuts and bolts of real retro games and putting a microscope up to why they work the way they do. Deconstructing all of their little nuances and sub-states and then trying to put it all back together again in a different programming language.

You learn a lot when you're forced to stop and understand why a piece of code exists in the way it does. Why there are all these little edge cases that you never notice but still exist to make a game feel just a little better.

At the end of the day, yes, Sam was right. Games need to have creativity and seeking out the perfect replication of the Sega Genesis Sonic games can feel somewhat futile. Every SAGE for the last ten years, there will be at least three games that instantly vanish from my memory because they are basic, plain Sonic Worlds Delta fangames with no style of their own. They just want to make Sonic 4 and we've had a lot of different Sonic 4s by now.

But the thing about learning is, you gotta learn the rules before you learn why and where to break them, because breaking (or at least bending) all of those boring, standardized rules is where your personal style starts to emerge, and that personal style is ultimately what people are going to be interested in at the end of the day.

So I think it is vitally important to start at 1:1 exact recreation and once you've made a comfortable replica, only then should you start asking yourself what you'd change and why. Make sure you understand the material before venturing further. You gotta learn to do it right first.

[blazehedgehog]

How do you feel about the Like a dragon/Yakuza series? Cause on a surface level at least, it has all the elements many take issue with in modern big budget games A big focus on a cinematic experience and realistic looking presentation. But I rarely hear that criticism for those games.

I dunno. They have different feels than what I'd consider a "cinematic" or "prestige" game.

For starters, Yakuza games aren't really any more cinematic than, say, an typical JRPG. You get a lavishly produced cutscene every few hours, but a lot of your dialog interactions aren't even voiced, as far as I remember.

A lot of scenes are classic scrolling text and canned animations.

Two, I think it's important that the Yakuza games do not take themselves seriously. Even Uncharted, with its pulpy adventure, still takes itself seriously.

The primary Yakuza game I've played is the first Judgment, and that's a game with claw grabber (UFO) machines, arcade games, drone races, there are questlines advertising real Japanese restaurants that are full of cheeky product placement dialog, there's a whole quest where you're photographing stray cats, a quest that's a big parody of Phoenix Wright where you have to gather evidence and make a case for who stole a cake, etc.

Like those games have a very serious core, make no mistake. but there's a lot more going on that runs a wide gamut. Prestige games mainly seem focused on being real, and dramatic, and "epic." Yakuza games will do whatever they want as long as its fun and interesting.

Prestige games are also seemingly in a race to see who can spend the most money. Again, we can go back to the Insomniac leaks to reveal Spider-man 2 cost half a billion dollars and they'll be lucky to break even, for a game most people might not even notice is any better looking or more technologically complex than the last one.

Meanwhile I think someone at Sega said "The Man Who Erased His Name" took them 18 months to put together, and since probably 50-75% of the game's story sequences don't even require voice acting or complex animation, they both go together quickly and don't cost much to make. That's not to say they're cheaply made games or that it's totally problem free, far from it, but they are more economical than something like a Horizon, or The Last of Us 2, or whatever.

I mean, Digital Foundry noted we haven't actually gotten a proper new Naughty Dog game since The Last of Us 2 in 2020. But in the last four years, we've gotten two Yakuza games? Three? Maybe even four? That's not to say quantity beats quality, and I think to some degree Sega should be careful about burning people out on this series and its spinoffs.

But whereas Spider-Man 2 could be a game that sinks Insomniac if it doesn't meet its nearly impossible sales figures, I don't think Sega's in too much danger if a Yakuza game under performs.

A cinematic/prestige game is something trying to pretend it's not a game at all and is an interactive movie. Very little about the Yakuza franchise has ever felt ashamed to be a video game.

[blazehedgehog]

New Virtua Fighter was announced and the last entry is getting some updates, any thoughts on Segas efforts of bringing their old ips back so far?

One Virtua Fighter does not make up for delisting:

NiGHTS into Dreams

Sega Bass Fishing

Crazy Taxi

Space Channel 5 part 2

Jet Set Radio

Daytona USA

Afterburner Climax

Sega Rally Online Arcade

Outrun 2 Online Arcade

Sonic the Fighters

Sega Rally REVO

Sega Ages: Shinobi

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

Alien Soldier

Alien Storm

Altered Beast

Beyond Oasis

Bio-Hazard Battle

Bonanza Bros

Columns

Columns III

Comix Zone

Crack Down

Decap Attack

Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine

Dynamite Headdy

Ecco Jr.

Ecco the Dolphin

Ecco: The Tides of Time

ESWAT: City Under Siege

Eternal Champions

Fatal Labyrinth

Flicky

Galaxy Force II

Gain Ground

Golden Axe

Golden Axe II

Golden Axe III

Gunstar Heroes

Kid Chameleon

Landstalker

Light Crusader

Phantasy Star II

Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom

Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium

Ristar

Shadow Dancer

Shining Force

Shining Force II

Shining in the Darkness

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

Sonic 3D Blast

Sonic Spinball

Space Channel 5: Part 2

Space Harrier II

Streets of Rage

Streets of Rage 2

Streets of Rage 3

Super Thunder Blade

Sword of Vermilion

The Revenge of Shinobi

ToeJam & Earl

ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkoton

VectorMan

VectorMan 2

Virtua Fighter 2

Wonder Boy in Monster World

Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair

We still haven't even heard any more news about the new Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi, Golden Axe, Shinobi or Streets of Rage games they announced over a year ago. Anything we've seen or heard has been classified as leaks, and not all of it sounds very positive.

Also, Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 would have absolutely been delisted with all the other games recently but I get the feeling somebody at Sega of America pumped the brakes on those two. They were announced to be delisted in other territories, but apparently have not been delisted anywhere as of yet.

They could have stopped more games from being delisted. While a few of these have to be delisted for licensing reasons (Daytona USA is a real life race event, Afterburner, Outrun and Sega Rally all contain licensed vehicles, etc.), there's no reason to delist NiGHTS, Space Channel 5, or 75-80% of those games.

The argument can be made that they'll just prep new versions of this stuff, but you know things are going to fall through the cracks. The PC is supposed to be the forever platform. It's insulting for them to do this.

[blazehedgehog]

I wasn't necessarily concerned about "we're being too mean towards Rob, we're punching down" rather "we're creating a culture ruthless meanness and we're justifying that behavior", that's why i brought up lolcows and 2010 youtube culture. I do believe when criticizing successful public figures, even when we had good reason, at some point was not really about the criticism, but participating in a culture of mockery.

Sure, but you can't always control what other people think or do. Everyone is going through their own mental stuff and some of them deal with it in toxic, destructive ways. And it's not your job to fix them or screen your posters. It just happens.

This is kind of the nature of the internet now. A joke between a few friends is just a couple clicks away from being exposed to thousands of eyes, who either don't lack the right context, or just straight up have some other problem that prevents them from understanding the tone or how to handle the situation.

So if someone is getting deservedly roasted, there's always a chance it could go bad. But you don't always know that, and I personally think you shouldn't let that stop you from calling people out who need to be called out. But you also need to constantly be aware of your own personal social media reach and who you are exposing what to.

It's complicated as heck and even if I think you shouldn't shy away from it, I understand if people find the pressure of being even the smallest amount of internet celebrity too much to handle. A good solution has been to have multiple accounts with varying levels of anonymity, I guess. That way you can be petty into an empty void without a bad audience latching on to a shitpost in the wrong way.

If anything has changed, it's more people being aware of that.

[blazehedgehog]

Has getting into anything intimidated you?

Like a series with a long history and legacy, a movie with a lot of expectations to live up to, a scene too passionate that spends most of their time having heated arguments.

A lot of comics feel impenetrable. At some point you just have to decide to jump in at the middle of a story arc, because these things are written so they're always in the middle of something, but it does sort of feel like you just have to put up with the references to plots you missed. Though there are more reasons I just don't read comics very much.

Long games definitely intimidate me. I watched GiantBomb's Persona 4 Endurance Run and I know:

How long it took them to just get done with the tutorial/opening segment (like 5-10 hours)

How long it took them to finish the rest of the game (almost 100 hours on the nose)

Unless I'm playing it on stream, I don't usually play games for hours and hours and hours uninterrupted. The longest a single solo session for me goes is maybe two hours maximum. Which is, roughly, how long an Endurance Run episode was, and it took them six months? Nine months? to clear Persona 4, because they were doing it in 60-90 minute chunks.

So, like, I'm really afraid to start:

Any Persona game

Any Shin Megami Tensei game

Any Dragon Quest

Any Bethesda game

I bought Skyrim maybe ten years ago, I've put 144 hours into it, and almost all of that has been on one single solitary character. I keep thinking about starting up something like Fallout New Vegas, because I've never played any Fallout games ever, but I also keep earmarking that as "once I finish Skyrim" and at this point I don't think I'm ever going to finish Skyrim.

[blazehedgehog]

do you have any thoughts on racing games focusing on street racing and tuner culture? Like 2000's Need For Speed games and Midnight Club.

For a long stretch of time, I couldn't stand it. I came up on Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 on PC, where tracks were set in exotic locales like Rome, or Hawaii, or the redwood forests of California. Sometimes, they had fun twists, like you actually drove over active lava flows in Hawaii, or there was a wildfire burning in California and part of the track was smoky.

And then along comes The Fast & The Furious and now games are just cities at night. Nothing interesting to look at, barely any landmarks, just wet highways and endless uninteresting shops and stripmalls. Jewelry stores and laundromats and bodegas, forever.

Now that we have a little bit of distance from things like that it doesn't bother me as much. I went back and played most of the first Need for Speed Underground, like, five years ago? Give or take? And I enjoyed myself.

But for a hot second, it felt like all we had was either Street Racing or Gran Turismo and neither was to my taste.

[blazehedgehog]

Are you familiar with the videos of "innuendo studios"? Specifically his videos focusing more on art and video games (there's even a Sonic one)

I've watched a handful of his videos over the years, yes, but nothing recently. With my ADHD memory problems its hard to remember specifics, but I know I've watched and enjoyed (or at least found interesting):

This is Phil Fish

Why Are You So Angry?

The Artist is Absent

A Case Study in Digital Radicalism

And though I haven't seen all of them, the few episodes I've seen of The Alt-Right Playbook are interesting.

Probably due for a rewatch on some of these.

His videos come across my recommends so infrequently that sometimes I don't recognize the videos as being from his channel, and I'll balk at the topic because it's, I dunno, political, and Youtube is bad at serving good political criticism.

But then I remember "oh right I've seen a lot of this guy's videos and he's actually really smart and good." Like, I watched "This is Phil Fish" when it was new and it's been in my monstrously huge favorites playlist basically forever.

[blazehedgehog]

Do you follow Stephanie Sterling's work?

I used to, but a lot of her work kind of struck the same notes over, and over, and over, and over. This was back in the, like, Day One: Gary's Incident days, back when Youtube and Patreon were talking about "having her back" on standing up to copyright trolls.

I think she does good, necessary work, but it was a lot of listening to her shout from a podium day after day about the same ills. Mind you, that's because there was always something to shout about, because the rate at which the rich and powerful in the game industry were constantly stepping in their own mess was unrelenting.

But it was also a lot of punditry and I got tired of hearing that kind of misery every other week.

[blazehedgehog]

Hello, I have a strange question to ask

I've been having some existential crisis about my understanding of art, but mostly when it comes to Sonic

I'd like to belive that there's no valid answer or approach to enjoying something that speaks to you and partaking in it no matter what, if folks have a better time relating to the musical side of the series and not many other aspects of it, that's fine, like a different era and aesthetic, no problem and I'll encourage it in practice. And I find telling someone "you have low/high standards" offensive honestly, it's way too assumptious.

But I'd be lying if the sea of criticism and hot tales online doesn't get to me, making me question maybe I'm wrong, maybe some opinions are more valuable than others. Like I know my preferences, but what if it all comes from ignorance, or me being lenient on others experiences is some sort of creative failure. Maybe the people who want their specific vision of what they love are onto something and are owed that, even tho it would put folks at even more odds.

I find it very disturbing, the idea of an absolute truth and aiming to find it is very comforting but I just hate the idea as well. It would mean disregarding voices that never had the chance to be heard, perspectives and experiences that don't fit within a coherent vision.

Like I'm from a country that was sanctioned to hell and my first language isn't English nor japanese so Sonic was never accessible for me, so I'm inherently biased against someone telling me something I enjoy is not for me.

A bit of followup to that ask: What I'm trying to say is that while I want to support artistic integrity and respect authorial intent, I just the idea of art being treated like a religion and words of artists (and in sonic's case forgotten manuals sometimes lol) to be treated like holy scripture with a specific "vision" or "direction" everyone should follow Also sorry for lengthy ask

This is definitely a hefty subject to be sure.

I spent 12 years as a paid critic. I wasn't paid very much, and the site wasn't very big, but I still took the job seriously enough that I developed a sense that at some point, you just have to plant your feet and establish your own opinion. You can't walk on eggshells around everyone forever. Battle lines have to be drawn for you to be who you are.

Avoiding conflict with strangers is one thing. But you have to express yourself, your intents, and your feelings at some point. By its very nature, that means you are going to be dismissing someone, somewhere. I don't think that can be avoided. Somebody out there will love the thing you hate, and that WILL generate a conflict.

What really and truly matters is how you are prepared for and handle that conflict. Not every disagreement has to be thermonuclear warfare. And sometimes you might want to defuse, and the other person doesn't. To me, that's just part of life. Have opinion, will argue.

I realize this is easier said than done, but if this kind of stuff bothers you, then... don't let it. It's the internet. If something is bothering you, it's easy to get away from it. Nobody is making you remain in the same argument for days or even weeks on end. Maybe this is just something that comes as you get older, but at some point I realized I valued my time more than just yelling at other people online all the time.

So I... stopped doing that. I put my thoughts out in to the world through places like this blog or my Youtube channel, and if people have a problem with the way I express my opinions, I try to express them better. I don't attack back, I just try to identify what they aren't understanding. Rarely does it start arguments anymore. Does it mean my opinions are right? Probably not. Not entirely, anyway. What even is right and wrong in this context? It's all just perspective.

And once you realize that, the idea of drawing a line in the sand, planting your feet and expressing your opinion, all the arguments and disagreements it may generate just become different perspectives. It doesn't mean you're wrong, it doesn't mean they're wrong, because nobody is wrong. It's all just from where you're looking at the thing from.

Given that we're just talking about Sonic the Hedgehog, and there are no guns, or knives, or real violence happening, ultimately you have to realize: who cares? Find your own happiness. This isn't the fate of the world. It's a cartoon hedgehog. And though you may have started an argument today, the sun will still rise tomorrow. Free yourself and enjoy it.