#can writers critique

[darkcrowprincess]

(Don't like don't read. Post hate and I'll block you)

Lawrusso thoughts: for me personally Daniel is the only one for Johnny. But I could see Daniel with several other people(besides Amanda 🤮, never Amanda). Kumiko, Terry Silver, Chozen. But god do I have a soft spot for Johnny and Daniel being together. I could maybe see Johnny and Allie have a second chance romance together if it was better written, Johnny actually had a decently written redemption arc, Daniel was happily married to Kumiko. But over all Lawrusso is my otp. I just all the romantic writing potential they could have if we lived in better world. Thank goodness for fanfiction.

They are soulmates I tell you! Soulmates!

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

The fans: Ugh Sonic was just so preachy. I mean obviously he's supposed to be the good guy, so any uncomfortableness I feel here and any way I feel like Sonic's choices are framed as being why some other people have shitty lives is just bad writing because he is obviously supposed to be right always, but this characterization makes no sense. Isn't he right for the things he did?

Ian Flynn, using Kitsunami to say the (barely even at this point) quiet part even louder: Hey it's almost like ever since the Mr. Tinker event we've been purposely running with the critique of Sonic as being more selfish than he appears. Sonic is upholding a system of Eggman v Sonic that currently benefits him and shuts down talk of how to improve the current system because he likes his own personal enjoyment and he's attached enough to Eggman that he'd rather Eggman pretend to be a good person than be stuck in prison for life. He doesn't even quite practice what he preaches. We are trying to show that the current hero v villain system and Sonic's recklessness currently affects some people poorly and that Sonic isn't a perfect hero.

[storybookhawke]

a bite-sized critique of Veilguard romances that someone might agree with: (no, i am not just shitting on the game)

the romance pacing was not great. like why did some romances get more than others? why did some romances have banters that talked about 'being great at kissing' when the characters hadn't kissed yet? why did some of them imply they were going on dates or making out when the characters haven't had even a single solid romantic moment yet?

i find having basically their first kiss happen 30 seconds before their first bone 98 hours into the game just... frustratingly paced. the point of the game isn't a romance but to include it so late into the game almost makes it feel like they added it all last minute (and who knows? maybe that was last).

i feel that one more scene would have helped immensely. perhaps a confession scene with a kiss, a very personal scene with the companion that they wouldn't have had with rook otherwise, then that last big scene would have been great. the other games did romance pacing really well, so it was strange to see them regress (to honestly a point they've not really had before).

i love the game, probably an 8.5/10 for me, but having a more fleshed out romance would have really pushed it into the 9.5-10/10 sphere in my mind. everything else was so so good!

[commsroom]

memoria is incredibly close to my heart, but when i listen to it now, it's hard not to think about the undertones re: how therapy as an institution handles disability. maxwell's objective was always to help hera get back to work, to find accommodations she could function under, or otherwise to replace her. "i'm sorry you feel like you can't do your job." maxwell presents her solutions in a less hostile framing, but her methods are the same ones cutter threatens hera with in her live show performance review (re: deleting her memories) and it's something she intends to do regardless of hera's consent. maxwell's practice aligns with goddard's interests, and of course it does. there's something about therapy as maintenance, and the treatment of the disabled mind and/or body as a broken machine.

hera is used to being condescended to and taunted for her limitations ("we all have our limits. you can't do what you can't do. it's not your fault.") and that intersects with her trauma ("i can't do this. i'm not good enough.") in a way that inherently ties her self worth to her ability to be useful and perform a job. as a result, she has a gut reaction to and a resistance to anyone suggesting she might not be capable of something, or that she might need help, and that makes her constantly push herself past her limits, causing real damage. the problem is that hera is disabled, there are things she can't do, and she hasn't been given the security or compassion to really come to terms with that. no amount of ways to manage doing her job will really help the core problem; she needs to be able to separate her concept of self worth from her productivity. "we get things wrong, and we get better." is a nice sentiment, but i think it applies more to interpersonal conflict than physical burnout. hera even directly calls back to and casts doubt on that specific line later in the show.

that's why eiffel matters so much to hera. when eiffel says "you can do anything" - he believes that, he has that kind of sincere faith in all of his friends, but he means it even when it's disproven. he's seen her fail. he's seen her make mistakes. it doesn't matter because it isn't about what he expects of her, it's about who she is to him. minkowski is the commander, even when she's not. hera can do anything, even when she can't. eiffel values people, not their jobs. if hera didn't have a supercomputer for a brain, she would still be the same to him; it's who she is and her companionship that he wants. i'm not saying that what maxwell did for hera was useless - it's effective therapy that gave her a clearer understanding of herself, and a framework to understand what's been happening to her; that's extremely valuable. but that alone would not have been enough. what hera thinks of at the end of memoria, what actually pulls her through, is the support and care that eiffel and minkowski continually show to her.

[lostburgerprince]

you can't "just add a few codexes". you have to write those codexes. you have to write them in the proper voice and style and so it doesn't just fit ONE specific person's worldstate but anyone who also may have made the same decision as them. (you might even have to write multiple variations of the SAME CODEX to account for gender/race/class/romance) you have to edit them. you have to decide where those codexes are going to appear. you have to put them somewhere where people who want to read them will find them. you have to program them showing up. you have to flag it so it only shows up in sPECIFIC versions of the game. (because god forbid it doesn't and breaks someone else's immersion) you have to bug test that. you have to hope it still works when it ships.

and after all that the people complaining might still pick up said codex and close out the window immediately. or run past it entirely and complain that they made a selection in the worldstate that never paid off.

and then you've just spent all that time fleshing out something that's just a small nod to a very small percentage of players. time you could have spent on the current plot or companions. time you could have spent on making *active* decisions matter. these things can easily take up weeks or months like you wouldn't fucking believe.

[musicalmoritz]

My specialty is taking characters that the fandom thinks can do no harm and highlighting their flaws to show that they do, in fact, dabble in asshole behavior

[askdacast]

No spoilers please, because I haven’t even started S3E4 yet (only Gaius clips), but I’m rather concerned that with the final episode of season 4 and presumably all of season 5 we are ALREADY hitting ‘Holy Week’

I’m pretty sure The Chosen crew + Dallas Jenkins have confirmed the show will be 7 seasons long?

This means the rough timeline we can expect is:

Season 5 will have the rest of Holy Week, the Last Supper, and Jesus already being arrested all within the season

If we are being EXTREMELY generous, Season 6 will be when we hit the actual crucifixion. But that, plus Easter Sunday, will take 1 episode each, and everything after that is the various epilogues within the gospels

So then what will season 7 be?? Are we going to hit Acts or keep strictly within the gospels until Jesus’ ascent back to heaven? I feel like the former has way too much content for a single season, and the latter will require a LOT of padding just to fit one season. Are we getting more??

I’m mostly just curious, how exactly is this show’s timeline going to go? And what do we have in store?

If I may be perfectly honest, I’m pretty concerned already how rushed Season 4 was. We know the gospels don’t give an exact time frame of what events happened when, but also that Jesus’ ministry lasted 3 years. Meanwhile, The Chosen feels like everything has been happening within the span of months. And I think it has clearly suffered for this pacing.

If there was any time where we should have seen more ‘padding’, a few more slower character-based scenes, or even a few more adaptations of other miracles and conversations between Jesus & the religious leaders (a la from John), I would’ve thought Season 4 would have been the perfect time for that.

But we don’t seem to be getting that since Season 4 instead opts to speed for the finish line, and to be honest I’m not sure if that was the best idea? We already have so many people complaining about how rushed Judas’ character arc is, for instance. I’m not going to comment about that yet until I’ve watched the episodes for myself, but I can definitely see where the concerns are coming from. It just doesn’t feel like we have enough time to get used to all the different character woes before the big bombshell hits.

[scattered-winter]

it's not even that I think rwby is perfect because I KNOW there are a lot of flaws in the writing and how some things were handled (particularly the faunus racism plotline) but I will also be defending that show to my last breath because the only people who ever try and "critique" it are angry dudebros who can't STAND that the story revolves almost exclusively around women. and most of them haven't even watched past season 3.

[asterdeer]

me, complaining about writing problems to my therapist: i don't know, it's just not the same as it used to be..... i actually want to write now, but i'm not back in it the way i was and i don't know why it's not working

therapist: you don't know why writing is different after a two-year-long creative dead zone where you couldn't write anymore because of how ashamed it made you feel, and where you lost most of your writing community/friends you talked about writing with, and which also gave you a lot of shame and guilt around talking about writing with other people and asking other friends to read your stuff so even now you haven't sought out a new community or friend group because of the shame? you don't know why writing is different because for the first time you're trying to write alone, in a vacuum, without the support and camaraderie you've always had?

me: i mean. when you put it like that.

[joestarluxe]

man veilguard is fun while you're playing it and there are things i like but the elf racism issue is actually so uncomfortable i kinda....... don't want to play it anymore

white queer writers slapping superficially diverse traits (like having One (1) prominent nonbinary character*) on characters and patting themselves on the back meanwhile their writing wrt indigenous-coded characters is straight-up white christian imperialist propaganda

*not saying nonbinary rep is bad. i am nonbinary. queerphobes fuck off

[crowlore]

i remember it used to be a bit of a fandom pet peeve of mine that some people would forget that the gung ho guns and eye of michael were two separate groups with some membership overlap but then stampede came along and made the eom into a project of conrad’s backed by knives. another example of how the reboot feels like bad fanfiction.

[memento-mariii]

Villainess isekai as horror: your identity, your autonomy, your very own body is stolen and puppeteered by some unseen foreign entity. Not only do your loved ones fail to notice the change, they seem to genuinely prefer the copycat over the real you. Your entire existence was overwritten in a matter of seconds, and the worst part is, the world seems objectively better off for it.

[meloartist]

Yeah, I also want to see 2 season, especially Destiny and my favorite Delirium, but I'm also curius who will play Remiel and Duma.

[i think this ask was pre-s2 announcement bc 2022 but YEAH]

i'm a HUUUUUUUUUGE duma stan you dont even KNOW

[presiding]

What is your favourite thing about Billie Lurk?

(Answers are obvious possibly but i love when people talk about her👍)

thanks for the ask!! YEAH ME TOO I love when people talk about Billie! I can't say I have a favourite thing specifically, but I can explain why she's my fav. apologies for not taking this qn literally, but -

short answer: she’s really cool

& you can stop reading there, or, for the maybe 2 mutuals who might have time to read this my thoughts on her as a character, her meta, and her character as raw potential...

long answer:

i considered making this entire thing a gush so you could read a gush about Billie. but, part of what draws me to her is that she’s not always well written, and in fandom she’s underrated for a literal protagonist.

since you ask...

billie is a cool character

when I played Dh2 (hadn't played Dh1), I was excited to see a black woman with disabilities who was captaining a massive ship by herself. wow.

then I discovered Billie’s backstory with Deirdre, the way she responded to that, then having to survive while living on the run, and her bisexuality. as well as her history with daud & delilah. fascinating!

she’s an outsider who has so much to lose, and knows what it's like to lose everything - having lost everything not once but three times - but nevertheless speaks truth to power. she's so brave! she went and helped Emily & Corvo and she must have known they might kill her! plus, she’s smart, she’s funny, she gets shit done, she’s gorgeous.

but... the meta

mild critique of fandom & arkane incoming.

skip this bit if you want - you've been warned twice now - jump to tired Hayao Miyazaki and read from there if you'd like my thoughts on writing her.

i thought Death of the Outsider was going to be amazing and then... well. *sad trombone* i've written about that before so i won't keep banging on. i figured others must be disappointed too, so I joined a few fandom spaces in hopes of finding camaraderie.

most people with complaints about DotO didn’t like how the Outsider and Daud were handled. which is valid & I agree. but it seemed like most paid no attention to Billie; when people talk about her it’s with respect to Daud, as opposed to in her own right. you could argue for fandom misogyny because people don’t talk about adult Emily Kaldwin that much either, but in Billie's case, it’s misogynoir (compare & contrast with the popularity of thomas, particularly the popularity of thomas portrayed as a white man for no particular reason that i've been able to discern - i keep asking around, is it in the books???).

i think this is a LOT better now than it used to be, which is fantastic. or perhaps i have found the correct echo-chamber? ha.

ultimately, The Fandom is a fraction of the entire picture, and not even the important bit since The Fandom is not who these games are made for. you can't make money relying on only your hardcore fans even if all of them spent a fortune on merch, this is true for any AAA game.

while it's true that Billie is underrated from a fandom perspective - but Billie as an underwritten protagonist is squarely Arkane’s fault.

it was reasonable when she was a side character - the lack of info in Dh2 makes perfect sense (if anything there was more lore in Dh2 which is kind of wild)-

- but as a protagonist in Death of the Outsider?

.... there’s lousy writing, and there’s whatever is going on with Billie Lurk, a black woman who mostly exists as a foil or saviour for light-skinned characters. In her own game there’s barely any of her own lore except where it's relevant to saving two dudes.

lore hints at, but barely touches on what race means in the Dh universe (xenophobia is stronger in Dh1; separate essay i guess), but Arkane has patted themselves on the back for portraying non-white characters, which feels like the same thing as the aesthetic of diversity we're seeing in advertising currently because it’s in marketing trend guides. it's self-congratulatory and it's a missed opportunity for deeper storytelling.

you can see an example of diversity at its most shallow in the way that Billie’s written: there’s little engagement with her as an entire person with history & wants & preferences, and the world she walks through in that game feels like it has nothing to do with her. you could make a case for alienation as a theme, but then, how do you handle the titular premise of 'Dishonored' without ever letting Billie make changes in an environment without a chaos system? it's disappointing from that angle too.

in my opinion, whatever it's worth, it was an accident Arkane created such an awesome character - they needed someone to betray daud. congrats billie.

all this said, it makes her an underdog as far as characters to enjoy & create art & stories for. it's nice to find so many like-minded, switched on people! <3

billie's character potential

she’s got a wealth of unexplored lore, being deeply intertwined with both Karnaca & Dunwall’s fates & criminal underbellies, as well as her connections to the witches & whalers, and three Empresses.

she’s lived a few distinct lifetimes and in the games we get to meet her at two peaks (KoD & DotO) & a low (Dh2 as Meagan).

her voice is very distinct, her dry & often dark humour is entertaining & fun to write. her perspective is really interesting - she’s had the widest variety of void-powers of anyone canonically, and she’s also lived through the highest highs and lowest lows.

she's got everything going for her :) i couldn't really pick a fav thing!

[magnetic-dogz]

I think if you're a huge Sonic fan it's perfectly fine and valid to have critiques about the series and the way the writers handle it, because like. Y'know. It's healthy and shit to be able to critique your interests, even the ones you have the biggest attachment to. But if it's getting to a point where you're wishing the loss of a job, physical harm, or even death on people who have been creatively involved in the series because they "ruined it" then you need to dial it way wayyy back and also maybe get a hobby and perhaps seek therapy

[hoothalcyon]

this might be a really all or nothing take but I think we just shouldn't publicly critique fanfic on the grounds of grammar or writing style at all. if we want to keep fandom a healthy place where even amateur writers can feel welcomed and validated, then we have to cut it out.