#Opinions and critiques are valid

[d3sertdream3r]

Twitter is the worst.

I should really just stop checking that app completely. I love the interesting threads people do, but the fandom reaction to the finale has gotten out of hand imo.

I totally understand having critiques about the finale, but the amount of people getting pissed over the fact that they didn’t get exactly what they wanted and throwing a tantrum over it is honestly pretty upsetting.

I love Sauron and Galadriel’s dynamic, and I would’ve liked more of it this season. But I find it really annoying how many Haladriel Twitter accounts are accusing the showrunners of misogyny and caving to far-right agendas just because they didn’t have Galadriel’s personal arc revolving around her interactions with Sauron. Giving her an arc away from him is literally the exact OPPOSITE of misogyny!

I know shippers are used to lots of other stories caving to far-right hatred, but I think it’s incredibly unfair to be so mean-spirited towards McPayne after everything they’ve done with this show. It may not be going exactly how you wanted, but that doesn’t make them evil.

And it’s especially infuriating to see vicious comments and mockery towards their respective religions. Attacking the lifestyle and beliefs of ANYBODY regardless of whether you personally agree with it or not over a goddamn TELEVISION SHOW is absolutely disgusting and immature. The showrunners haven’t gone out of their way to be harmful, they’ve been kind and respectful the whole time.

I always hope fandom will do better, and it always lets me down. At least the majority of the fans on here seem to be a lot more mature and have actual critiques instead of childish tantrums, because my god is it a cesspool on that bird app.

[dukeofthomas]

"Jason just needs to see things from his family's perspective and understand how much they love him (despite them never actually communicating or showing him through their actions)" is out. "The batfamily putting a single bit of effort into understanding Jason and reconciling with him on his own terms" is in.

[chaos0pikachu]

I have been told there's rancid discourse in the fandom and that is not super fly funky fresh of y'all

[fiddleyoumust]

I have never been more uninterested in anyone's opinion than people who don't like We Are and insist on tagging their negativity. No one cares that you hate joy, Susan. Get out of the tag and let the rest of us have fun.

[tanadrin]

do polls of the whole country tell us anything? don't you need to look at swing states?

National polls aren't useless, because movement in polls tends to correlate. If a national poll moves a couple points in one direction or another, that will tend to correlate with some degree of movement in several states. As I understand it, though, certain subgroups of states (e.g., ones with similar demographics) have much closer correlations in how their polls move, so that a shift in the polls in one Sun Belt state should correspond to a similar shift in the polls in another. This means you can make predictions like "If Donald Trump wins Virginia, he's probably winning a crushing victory nationally," because his performance in Virginia should correlate to his performance in many other states.

Swing state polls are very valuable, but keeping those correlations in mind helps to understand whether a swing state poll is an outlier or not. If a poll shows a shift in a certain direction, but that's not correlated with similar movement in similar states, it's worth questioning of that poll is accurate. Ditto if the poll shows unusual breakdown of results in demographic subgroups: if Trump is winning (say) 30% of young black voters, given the way demographics and party alignment usually break down, he should be winning a massive margin with other groups.

One reason I am not so bearish on Biden is that my understanding is that a lot of polls have had these demographic anomalies, with Trump's lead coming largely from support among younger, politically disengaged voters of color, and Biden, apparently, doing well with demographics like older whites. It is not a coincidence, in this view, that Trump seems to be performing unusually well with demographics that are particularly hard to poll in the modern polling landscape--response rates to telephone polls are very low among millennials and gen Z--and while there are various ways you can try to compensate for non-response bias, those depend on your model of the electorate.

Now, I am not extremely confident about this, because I am the furthest thing in the world from a polling expert, but as I understand it, there are two possible situations here:

One: the polls are broadly correct, and Trump is ahead. The election in November, if current trends continue, will feature a historic realignment of voters along demographic lines like age and race of the likes not seen since the 1960s (called "depolarization" by some commentators), perhaps driven by the rise in far-right internet media and social media.

Two: the polls are broadly incorrect, and we should be more agnostic about the state of the race, or even assume Biden is a little ahead, because such a massive realignment is extremely unlikely to have occurred in only two years since the 2022 midterms (where no such realignment was in evidence, and Democrats broadly overperformed polls), and polling right now is plagued by historically low response rates in the same key demographics that give Trump his lead.

Some commentators, including commentators whose field is polling, seem to want to have it both ways: the demographic crosstabs are wrong, but the top-line polling numbers are right. I'm not sure how this can be true. On top of that, big political realignments usually take time (i.e., we should have at minimum seen some evidence of this coming in 2022), and are unlikely to occur in a race where both candidates have been president before.

So on balance I think the second scenario is more likely. Now, I am not a stats person, nor particularly knowledgeable about polls; all of this opinion is second-hand from other commentators. As such, I am not going to claim any kind if ironclad certainty about this, and you're perfectly entitled to rub it in my face if I turn out to be totally wrong. And if I do stumble across someone who does know the polls really well with an explanation of why I'm wrong (even just at the level of "you are factually wrong, here's why the crosstabs are actually perfectly normal") I may well revise my opinion.

[springbreak-ibelieveinyou]

most d20 and dropout fans i interact with or see are super nice and have nuanced opinions on things but some of them can be such a big yikes

[cephalofrog]

noah caldwell-gervais is the only motherfucker to have ever been correct about dark souls and elden rings' difficulty. no one else understands

[that-was-anticlimactic]

hottake but r.enee r.app actually wasn't that good in the new m.ean girls movie musical - y'all are just attracted to her

[binch-i-might-be]

Alexis Coe (the author) is quoting all the homoerotic descriptions of Washington's clapping thighs she has come across in biographies written by men. I love this book

[vault81]

you know what i lied im ranting and raving about it

[restinthewest]

Not what I usually post about and I’m not sure why I’m frothing with rage over this on a random Monday morning but here we are.

Malignant (James Wan) was one of my favorite movies of 2021. I like watching movie reviews on YouTube after I’ve seen a movie to see what other people thought and holy shit the film bro reviewers were even more annoying than usual over this film. “I just can’t tell if this is genuinely bad or if it’s trying to be over the top” this film could literally not be more clearly camp. The opening scene concludes with a doctor in a cartoon-level gothic hospital saying “it’s time to cut out the cancer” then it smash cuts to the credits playing with a bad rock song. It’s camp. “I guess it’s good if it was supposed to be an homage but it’s bad if it wasn’t” what a fucking cop out how bout you do your job and make an informed assessment about what you think the films intentions are and stick to your guns about whether you think it’s good or not.

Even worse everyone was like “James Wan’s work is solid otherwise but this was a total flop.” I don’t totally hate the conjuring universe or insidious or whatever but those films are formulaic, uncreative snooze fests that everyone goes nuts over for some reason I can’t decipher. At best they’re fine. Malignant was fun. It was brave. It was wild. It was hammy. It made me feel something why do people hate fun.

Also lots of people compared to Malignant to The Room which strikes me as completely absurd. Even if you think Malignant is bad, The Room isn’t the only other bad film ever made and there are very few comparisons to be made between the films. Let’s stop comparing every movie we think is bad to The Room 2k24.

[tonydaddingham]

I love TV Crowley and I don't think he's a bad/unfaithful adaptation of book Crowley I just. I wish that when he says things like "I'm going to run off to Alpha Centauri" or something along those lines, about abandoning the Earth, more emphasis is placed on the fact that He Would Not Actually Go Through With That. Like for as much as he threatens to do so, when it comes down to it he truly cannot bring himself to up and leave the humans like Gabriel and Beelzebub did. It would grate on him and he'd end up turning right back around and I want something other than Aziraphale to be the clear, immediate reason for it. Crowley notably hates the 14th century and that was the century where over a third of the population (245 million people) died due to a combination of the Great Famine and the Black Death. I think about that sometimes idk.

hi (again?) nonnie!!!✨ you're good dw, i got what you were saying and it's perfectly valid; ultimately as i added to the tags of the last ask, for many reasons it's difficult to accurately translate a character to screen when you don't have the more overt narration of their internal thought processes, because these give great influence to how the reader should view the character.

its not at all bad (the way that book crowley was depicted in tv crowley), there are elements i like about each more than i do about vice versa (same for aziraphale, and anathema, and madame tracy and- you get the idea), but he is in many ways different. and i trust that maybe we'll see the other facets of crowley's character in s3, by nature of s3 perhaps being more solid in the original plan for the GO story in general (again, bc t+n discussed it)... particularly those traits demonstrated more in the book, because if there's a particular season where i think this is going to necessary, it's that one.

might be worth having a read of this first ask that i got from LWA✨ (if youre new here, first of all welcome! and second, Longwinded Anon/LWA is a legend in these halls for dropping their analysis of different elements of the story and characters in my ask box from time to time... they have truly elevated my way of thinking about the story that's perhaps a tad more critical than most, but i think that's important!!!). anyway, this ask has a bit of critique on book vs show crowley that might of interest!!!✨

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

see the thing about ofmd is that i love me a good long rambling meta post, but i have kind of a hard time making them for this show because i went into it knowing i'm not really the target audience — i'm queer but in a romance-indifferent aroace way and while i occasionally enjoy comedies, they're not my preferred genre — and so most of the time when i start analyzing the writing or the character arcs or whatever my conclusion is that i can't reliably tell what was or wasn't a good narrative choice because i, like season 1 izzy hands, would have preferred ofmd if it was in a different genre. (which isn't to say it should have been in a different genre, just that i'm not the best at assessing comedies on their own terms)

[opheliagreen]

I think the RC writers should focus on making good stories instead of trying to please fans 😭

[memento-mariii]

Yes, thought-crime isn't, and shouldn't ever be, real. That just means the government can't criminalize you for thoughts you've only had in your head & not carried out into action though, it doesn't mean that every single thought you voluntarily and consciously* choose to have is all fine and dandy, morally speaking. Something not being a crime (and it being nigh impossible and generally an all-around terrible idea to even *attempt* to criminalize) ≠ said thing being morally correct or even morally neutral.

You're legally allowed to have opinions that are morally wrong. I'm legally allowed to judge you and call you out for it. I might even say it to your face. It might even hurt your feelings.

(*intrusive thoughts being a thing that exists)

[ryanlewisandclark]

Friends and foes, this feels like the moment to reference the cultural force that was Bob Ross.

“Anyone can paint!”

The power and effectiveness of The Joy of Painting as a series, and its success as a style of education, is rooted at its core to this three word maxim.

Anyone can paint!

The whole point of a Bob Ross, wet-on-wet style oil painting, is that countless people were encouraged to literally do it in their homes, taught how, taught theory and technique in casual language very quickly, and for those paintings to be of equal quality to the one produced on screen during the episode in real time (assuming you watched last episode and have your canvas ready).

Are Bob Ross’ paintings somehow less pleasing to observe, less interesting to consider, less meaningful creations not worthy of esteem or appreciation, less descriptive of their subject matter, less capable of inciting the titular joy of painting, simply because they are produced quickly through an intentionally accessible-ized method designed to produce countless remixes of identical quality?

I think the only way to answer yes is if art is exclusively a commodity and its only value is market value. As I reject that conclusion, I reject that response.

In point if fact, as you, dear internet denizen, may have already surmised from the tone of this post and it’s precedents, it is my firm belief that precisely the opposite is true.

Conflating Value with Ease of Production/Access sounds like an extractive trap to me.

Things are not only worth what they sell for.

The most horrifying aspect of parents saying "my kid could do that" about art is that they never ever ever mean "wow my kid is good enough to be in a museum" and they always always always mean "I want to disrespect you so much I'll do it by implying that this thing is just as worthless as the things my child makes with their hands" and right in front of them too. Your kids can hear you u know, and the things they make with their hands are the least worthless and most precious aspects of human life I'll kill u