#but no i absolutely get why no one talks about exrid/op because it's so fucking underwhelming and awful

[lord-squiggletits]

There’s two different types of bad writing, and one of them is the kind that’s actually infuriating.

There’s bad writing that’s just bad 100% of the way through, or it’s otherwise so low quality that there’s nothing of value to be gained from it. When writing is this bad, you can just ignore it and forget about it because it has no skill, no value, no memorability whatsoever. You don’t develop strong feelings about it because the writing is so bad you can’t even hate it because you don’t care about it enough to complain about it.

And then there’s bad writing that actually has gems of quality in it: There were interesting concepts, or character relationships that seemed interesting, or a setting or other plot device that adds depth to the world. Except it’s executed in such a shoddy way that it makes you scream from how much worse the actual writing is compared to what it could have been in theory. Bad writing that’s bad because of wasted potential is 1000% worse than bad writing that’s just bad because it’s just good enough to make you want to enjoy it.

The latter type of bad writing is pretty much how I feel about Barber’s work in phase 2 and it really annoys me lmao. Because Barber got almost every plot point that I was looking forward to reading about (Earth politics, Pyra Magna, colonies, Optimus fucking Prime being my favorite character of the whole continuity) and managed to turn it into a snail-paced boring slog full of contrivances that don’t make sense and only exist to force a certain plot to happen, with virtually no character relationships that are interesting and sloppy political allegories that aren’t actually told through a good story and are basically just Barber puppeteering the characters to scream “THIS IS A POLITICAL ALLEGORY DO YOU GET IT” as if this is entertaining or #deep when really it’s just boring and annoying.