#discourse criticism

[james-stark-the-writer]

you know, something that particularly irks me is when people talk about games journalists like they're actually corporations and not just people who are passionate about video games. like there's a post i keep seeing on my dash about how "IGN had a correct take for once" bc of some Mr. Beast review that idrc about, and it's like guys, you know people work there? it's not like a bunch of robots. and also, a lot of you are just repeating the rhetoric of gamergate and pretending like you don't know that. it's irritating.

like i still see people making "games journalist" jokes in 2024, when Dean Takahashi has literally explained in detail why that video was the way it was, and also a lot of you just do not understand what writing about games is about, and the fact that the video was initially already presented lightheartedly where he was aware of his own shortcomings.

and the post i keep seeing is particularly infuriating because every other reblog has tags like "oh can't believe IGN is right for once" and "they're always wrong but somehow they got this right" and it's like. do you all not realize people work there. people are occasionally wrong sometimes, not every take everybody has is correct, and IGN is run by people, just like every publication that does journalism. i think you all just don't understand art criticism and games journalism and how they interact, especially because games are one of the most expensive and time-consuming artforms to consume, so every outlet has to balance criticism with analyzing if it's worth the price and still keep the reviews interesting, especially in video form. i've actually seen people i know in real life take the "too much water" meme at face value and pretend like it's some wrong criticism as if Hoenn having too many water routes that get repetitive is not one of the most basic criticisms of the game. like you can argue they might be missing story context or whatever that actually deepens the discussion of the art itself, but every single person i've seen talking about it outside of art discussion spaces has just treated it like a meme that's making fun of IGN for being wrong, and not like they understand it's a funny, silly way to quickly communicate the basics of an idea in a graphic at the end of the video, which they assume you have context for from the rest of the fucking video. it's infuriating how quickly all of you adopt right wing rhetorics with no fucking thought about the narratives you're perpetuating.

[shyjusticewarrior]

At some point "fanfic can be as good as professional writing" became "fanfic should be as good as professional writing" and that's caused major damage to fandom spaces.

[mofsblog]

"This is some gay shit" Good. Silly. Fair enough. Doesn't inherently invalidate other interpretations of the relationship. Honestly yeah, it is kind of gay regardless of their canonical relationship status

"There's literally no platonic explanation for th-" WRONG!! KILLING YOU WITH AMATANORMATIVITY KILLING LOBSTERS 🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞����🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞

[automaticdata]

So, um.

I may be starting to get a weeeee bit annoyed with people on the r/Hermitcraft subreddit.

Like, when I made the meme that is still getting an insane amount of notes (holy crap thank you so much I am super flattered), it was understandable that people didn't know what it was in reference to. I went, "ah, probably should have linked Cleo's vid!" and lived and learned, you know?

But Cleo's video has been out for a week. It's only twenty minutes long, and the moment when they and Grian meet up is five minutes into the video.

And like. Grian seems to really want people to see his friends' videos? Like when Gem's snail arrived, he deliberately left that plot thread dangling to be answered in Gem's video. The guy has made an eight hour video showing off the other Hermits' bases. I also highly suspect that one reason Grian is one of the last people to upload collab videos he's in is because his higher subscriber count means his video will automatically racket up to the top of the recommended page, and he wants his friends' videos to get a head start on him.

So the fact that there's this significant amount of Grian fans who won't even watch five minutes of someone else's video to get an answer that Grian left hanging is ... it's just super disappointing, ngl.

And just. Don't even get me started on that "continuity error" comment. I actually had a pretty long response to that on reddit. TL;DR: it's not a continuity error because there's perfect continuity as long as you watch Cleo's video.

Grian does not have to fill in the gaps, that's not his responsibility, nor should it be. The point of a series like Hermitcraft is that you get multiple perspectives. If you're upset that one perspective doesn't show everything, then you shouldn't be watching SMPs.

[stheresya]

i love the way sansa is so proud to be catelyn's daughter. in a world where women are expected to assimilate to their husbands' world once they get married, there's sansa adopting her mother's gods into her creed, taking pride in having her mother's looks, often choosing to wear the colors of her mother's house and, most importantly, drawing strength from her mother's memory. what's so great about this is that it's not an act of spite against her father. she's just proud of being both stark and tully. it's like arya said: the woman is important too.

[vigilskept]

this whole idea in both the fandom and the games themselves that being a people attached to their past & a lost civilization is a failing whereas a celebration of the present is something to strive for wrt elven & dwarven culture is something that reads as fundamentally western & liberal to me.

[septembermonologues]

i love when i fall behind on bell's hells, see people being incredibly angry at orym with no context, and then when i catch up i find out it's over something like him (33 passive perception) overhearing a conversation that was happening out loud in the same room that he (33 passive perception) was in and him (33 passive perception) finding comfort in his friends (a normal thing for people to do) before he (33 passive perception) tuned out and away from them because he (33 passive perception) wasn't eavesdropping on purpose (he has a 33 passive perception and the conversation was happening in the same room)

[unhookedchalk48]

Might chug some haterade and write about how a lot of the CR fandom fails to understand mechanics as a form of storytelling and how that's part of what makes TTRPGs a unique medium.

[helaenamyqueen]

I found this on Reddit and it perfectly explains my problems with the show and the direction it has taken

[callahanisms]

yellowjackets i know your writer's room is mostly, if not all, white people.

mari being pit girl? okay fine. full circle moment. i have accepted and liked this theory since i saw the pilot.

but season 3? is such a fucking shit storm that reinforces everything non-white fans have been saying for such a long time. treating non-white characters as disposable and sidelining these characters for white ones.

and also. did NO ONE think it would be weird if shauna was the antler queen and then the hair she's collected is mari's? is that not WEIRD when you consider the VERY LONG history of white people using the parts of non-white people as war trophies, as decorations, as literal objects?

i stopped watching when i heard lottie died because i'm just fed up with the way the non-white people are treated in this show. treated as plotlines, as disposable, as trophies. never as people. doesn't even get into how this bleeds into fandom discourse. and yellowjackets has always been racist, but s3 really is just mask off about it. and i feel like we should sit down and actually talk about it.

[tevanbuckley]

leaked footage from the 911 writers room (2024)

[crescent-moon-mollymauk]

Ngl, sometimes this site makes me think I’m the only person enjoying the past few episodes of CR. How do you not get excited by the Bells Hells constantly being presented with only options A and B, getting an option C, and then saying “actually fuck this, here’s option D”? I can’t wait to see how this plays out. Will it fix every problem? No. Will it end up causing different problems? Probably. But I’m having a great time watching them come up with an unexpected answer.

[theangryman]

One person was banned almost immediately.

The other person was not banned until they made another post revealing that they were posting videos of their partner.

One person was harassed and bullied and told that they were lying.

One person was given advice, told about how they could improve their situation.

This is why kink is not safe. There is more compassion and kindness for someone who admits to wanting to kick their partner in the face than there is for someone who has received that treatment.

[bardicinspired]

Also while I'm on my Vax/Keyleth bullshit. I understand the criticisms that CR3 somehow took away the tradgedy of CR1's ending. But I have to disagree

And while I don't agree that Keyleth should've been Not Coping for 30 years, that was ultimately Marisha's decision and I respect it.

However CR3 didn't change the ultimate ending of Vax and Keyleth's relationship. Keyleth was always going to reunite with Vax, she even remarks upon it herself in CR1 "I'll see you again, Vax." -because while Keyleth is going to live for thousands of years she knows she will eventually die. And she knows that Vax is out there, waiting for that moment, just as in love with her as he was when the matron stole him away.

I mean if you know the love of your life is out there as a quasi-Death god, the afterlife is real, and he is still desperately in love with you wouldn't you find it hard to move on too?

What I'm saying is, the ultimate ending of Vax and Keyleth was always going to be reuniting. It was the time they were seperated that was the tradgedy. All CR3 did was shorten that time.

And you know? 30 years of mutual yearning is still tragic enough. On top of that, they are fundementally very different people than who they were when Vax died. Keyleth has 30 years of confidence, leadership, and life experience under her belt. Vax spent 30 years as the Grim Reaper and has forgotten what it is to be alive. They are different. They don't exactly fit together any more. They have to relearn who they are to each other and there's beauty in that but there's grief and tradgedy as well.

The Vax'ildan Keyleth knew died. The Keyleth Vax'ildan knew grew older & changed. They are strangers to each other and so very much in love. And they are reunited, as they always would've been. It just took several decades instead of several millennia.

[wardensantoineandevka]

genuinely, no criticism I have about Campaign 3 will ever be as harsh and insulting as people who keep trying to defend it by saying "why do you want coherence or stakes or narrative follow through from an actual play? it's a ttrpg game, you can't expect it to have these things. also, the ending being happy is more important than any of those things."

like, that is the meanest thing you can say about this campaign, the storytelling ability of the cast, and actual play as a narrative form. that you can't expect coherence and stakes and narrative follow through from any of it and that personal wish fulfillment is more important to the work than telling a good story.

that "defense" is perhaps the most belittling and demeaning of the show as an artwork and of the cast as storytellers and of the form as a medium I've seen in a while. genuinely meaner and more dismissive than any criticisms of this campaign I've seen.

"it's fine and good because you can't expect it to make sense or be anything other than self-indulgence" Jesus Christ. if a significant number of people tried to defend MY work like this, I'd spend the next several months doing some serious soul searching.

[luckthebard]

All the attempts to be like “well how can you expect C3 to cohere or each character to get a narratively satisfying ending, it’s a D&D game!” just sound silly to me because they’re trying to claim this in a fandom where a D&D game absolutely did achieve those things in 2 previously aired campaigns.