#i do feel good when i bitch about netflixvania though fuck that show that's the only instance i allow myself to feel smart

[beevean]

I've been kinda following the reaction to recent IDW, Frontiers and now Prime's story stuff and after reading enough threads and comments I started wondering: is the mainstream fandom really this easily emotionally manipulated?

I mean it like, you have IDW, you got Surge being painted as this badass and a portion of fandom claiming her as the new girlboss, but suddenly one panel of her looking sad and scared and people go "o no poor babby she has the feelies 🥺". Or the Prime clip with Sonic and Tails that's making rounds right now. Apparently the pretty standard parallel/alternate universe plot of "a character meets a slightly different version of a character they are familiar with so interaction is going to be a little awkward" is enough to make some go into crying all over the keyboard mode because muh feels and muh angst.

Concepts like these sound emotional on paper and they can be executed well, of course, but like, is the bare minimum drama really enough to illicit this strong of a reaction from people these days? Or do fans just... imagine this high intensity of feelings because there are none in the actual source material and then run purely on that?

I don't know. I really don't. I've been feeling so alienated, and I don't want to think that everyone else is stupid and I'm the smart one to not fall for these obvious emotional manipulations.

It's like I'm seeing something different. I don't see Surge having a panic attack: I see her behaving in a wildly OOC way, because this behavior comes out of nowhere - since when does Surge, whose personality has been since page 1 "fuck yeah I wanna fight!", care about "being hurt"?. I don't see Sonic being horrified at the discovery about the true origins of Surge and Kit: I see an asshole who immediately brushed it aside and went to fight a traumatized girl with a grin on his face.

Do you seriously interpret this as HORROR? He doesn't care! He doesn't! What are you guys seeing?!

I've already talked about Frontiers in length. I see the game as empty. There is nothing there. I can't feel bad for Sonic if he gets better 1 minute later. I can't feel bad for Sage's death if she spent most of her time on screen being stubborn (for sensible in-game reasons, but still). I can't feel bad for Eggman being all sad because THAT IS OUT OF CHARACTER. "oh but bowser can be evil and a dad" "oh but muh humanization" it's out of character, sorry. 31 years, and Eggman not once displayed any characteristic that would lead him to feel genuine affection for anyone, let alone an AI. No, Eggman saving Sonic from lava to preserve a Chaos Emerald doesn't count as a good action of his. Sure, Eggman saving Tails from Orbot in Colors was uncharacterisically nice... but you're not going to use an example from a game written by Pontaff, the people you consider on par with the 11th plague of Egypt, as source of good writing, right? You would be consistent, right? :)

I don't even care about Prime. I really don't. It slides off my brain. Oh, Tails became edgy because Sonic wasn't there, okay, sure, there are at least a dozen fanfictions like that.

(the fact that I watched Netflixvania right before Frontiers, and I went through a similar feeling of "why can I only feel rage at this poorly written mess?", doesn't help my mood. I genuinely felt like I lost all my ability to enjoy things)

But I know what's going on with Sonic. The idea that everything from 2010 to 2019 was horrible, flat, OOC and nothing but Cringe permeated the fanbase. So now, any kind of emotional moment, no matter how shallow and try hard, gets praised to high heavens. Add a good dose of Adventure nostalgia (because muh Meta Era if the games reference the Classics, but thank you Lord Flynn for saving the franchise if the games reference the Adventure era), and there you go. (meanwhile I'm still here getting my heartstrings pulled by that one scene of Sonic realizing that he's all alone on Lost Hex and it's all his fault...)

I'm being bitter. I also realize that I'm sounding like an arrogant cock, and I don't like it. I wish I could see what everyone else is seeing. I wish I could love Surge and think of her as the best villain the franchise has to offer. I wish I could gush about how deep Frontiers is. I wish I could be interested in Prime and have something to look forward to. This is not fun. I don't feel oh so smart bitching about stuff that others like, I feel like a thief of joy and not a nice person to be around.

And yet, something as simple as hearing Maria say to Shadow "you used to run so quickly on these slopes", implying that edgy anti hero Shadow used to play on the ARK like a normal child with her best friend before tragedy struck, makes me feel more awful than anything else I've mentioned. So it's not that there is something wrong with me.

[nightslain]

☕️ the current state of things with mf netflix oof

Send me a ☕️ and a topic and I’ll talk about how I feel about it lol

As far as I’m concerned at this stage, Netflix is drunk on power and can do literally no good. Everything they touch turns to rot almost immediately or shortly thereafter, and even their products that are semi-decent are still just that; decent. I think everyone is sick to the teeth of hearing me bitch about Netflixvania at this point (though that has never stopped me complaining before), but really, that show is just a symptom of the disease itself, which is the company. I have yet to see them create something I completely and utterly enjoy and that doesn’t have an entire garbage dump in the place of its staff (even the shows I thought were harmless and well turned out to have absolutely vile people at the helm). Really, the only thing I actually use Netflix for nowadays is stuff they didn’t even create!

That being said, The Witcher is at least competent in that it’ was watchable and interesting at face value, but as most adult media is wont to do these days, they cram it full of nudity, sex and extremely OOC writing that veers pretty far from the vision of the books, which upon reading, spoiled the entire show for me immediately. You would not believe how different Geralt and Jaskier’s relationship is in the books, for example (and how much better.) Also, the amount of cut content that was necessitated by the runtime only served to weaken the overall product.

It’s kind of baffling to me how their shows and movies continue to thrive when they keep pumping out either mediocre or just downright bad, harmful products and peddling pretty nasty narratives and ideas to the masses, who just seem to lap it up without complaint (again, see my every other rant on Netflixvania which is among the Great Gods of all things Wretched.) Let alone their most recent fuck-up that they walked back with a shitty apology tweet and nothing else, which sadly says lot about how young women and girls are treated and viewed, and it just makes me want to die via a barbed wire baseball bat being forcefully plunged down my throat. At the very least, there are others more equipped than I am talking about that much on Youtube and every other platform, which I am glad about--it’s nice to see that people do have some sense and hard limits, at least.

[beevean]

Hearing you talk about seasons 3 onward of netflixvania makes me feel more and more secure in my decision to drop that show after season 2 spent more than half it's runtime with a bunch of douchebags I didn't care about sitting around at Dracula's castle complaining the entire time about how they weren't doing anything besides sitting around at Dracula's castle. I thought season 1 was perfect BECAUSE of how few episodes it was, so when I heard season 2 was bloated out to more than twice the episodes I had a creeping feeling that was going to end up being a detraction and not a benefit, and I was right.

Oh man, you missed out on the good stuff :^)

Season 2 is considered peak because of the finale mainly, and yes the finale is pretty good from an emotional standpoint (call me weak but I still am moved by the Bloody Tears cover and by Dracula's breakdown). It's just that getting there was a slooooooog. The heroes sit around in a library being "vitriolic best buds" (read: Alucard is a total bitch to Trevor for no good reason and sympathizes with the vampires that the Belmonts have killed, I rarely complain about how OOC Alucard is but dear god what happened to him), while the villain's side starts off as more interesting but it eventually boils down to "Carmilla #girlbosses around and uses an idiot to manipulate another idiot to manipulate Dracula to get her way". rip godbrand, literally the only entertaining villain, killed too soon.

Season 3 and Season 4 were painful to get through. S3 is basically useless misery porn the likes you'd find on FF.net in the 2010s, everyone except for darling babyboy Isaac suffers for no reason because we're "edgy" and "mature". Sypha learns that the world is cruel because a random dude turned out to be a child murderer, with Trevor being like "yep that's my life get used to it". Alucard gets seduced and betrayed mid-sex by two random OCs so that he can fall into misanthropy (for one episode). Hector goes through the exact same shit he did in S2 + rape by deception because why the fuck not. And S4 goes in the opposite direction, forcing a happy ending for nearly everyone regardless of how much they suffered (those two rapes I mentioned? might as well never happened), and even Dracula and Lisa are suddenly back and ready to live in peace, even though it completely fucks up with the whole structure of the damn series! Good luck with Nocturne now, assholes!

Season 1 was fairly boring for me, but it was mercifully short, and it was, in retrospect, the most faithful part of the show to C3. Still not perfect, not by a long shot, but for a movie turned into a season, it wasn't bad. Then Igarashi stopped keeping Ellis' writing in check, and the dude crashed completely to shoehorn his view of the series.