#negative criticism

[family-trauma]

All of this and more for me.

Anyone else find the above difficult as well?

[geek-and-nerd-are-not-the-same]

Spoilers spoilers spoilers! Do not read if you haven’t finished the umbrella academy!

you know what really pissed me off about S4? Not that fucking ending which was fucking STUPID!!!!! (Yes, I’m pissed.) Or what about the fact that Luther (& the director!!) made a big fucking deal about how Sloane was missing and he was going to find her only for there to be no fucking follow through!! And don’t even get me STARTED on that whole strawberries affair all of a sudden like 2/3rds of the way in!!!

Allison made a big fucking stink about wanting her daughter AND 60’s husband, and he literally ran out on her????? Like high five Klaus for stepping up and being dad of the year, but my god! All of their lives were upheaved and ruined (granted, I know, they at least were ALIVE!

but point remains…)

wtf was the point of S3’s ending and everything they were hinting at if S4’s ending is what we were going to get?

[jiggerypokeryfiddlesticks]

CW: Negative criticism

So I finally watched AMC's Interview with the Vampire and while there were some good parts, overall it... wasn't great. There were so many problems that I wouldn't even know where to start. And it did the same shit as the IT movies. Like why bother changing the time period? So you can shoehorn in a dated reference to fucking Bezos? Really? They made one change which lead to another, which lead to another, and so on until the story was unrecognizable and all meaning was lost.

There are so many issues even in the first ten minutes that they might as well have called it Interview with a Vampire instead, cause it sure as hell isn't the vampire. The only resemblance these characters share with their book counterparts are their names. It seriously gave me flashbacks to that horrible Queen of the Dammed movie, exactly what I was afraid of. But, to be fair, at least this time it's actually queer. Though I could have done without the boring 'let's explain queerness to the straight audience' moments.

Also that shit with burning the original tapes was a fucking slap in the face to fans of the book and Anne Rice herself. Like fuck you Rolin Jones. Or... I wonder if some of the problem's are due to Christopher Rice. I mean one of the worst books I ever read he wrote. But I don't know how closely he was involved in the show.

Anyway, all that being said, I wish they had just made it an original vampire story, then I could have enjoyed it without getting pissed every five seconds. Because there were a lot of things that I did like about it, they just got drowned out. Maybe I'll change my opinion if and when season 2 comes out. I'd happily eat my words because, as annoyed as I am, I still want to see where they are going with it, but I don't know what they could do at this point to fix it.

[talesfromawannabewriter]

positive criticism vs negative criticism are not the same thing

positive criticism helps realize there are certain errors in the persons writing that should be rectified

negative criticism is just being an asshole because you didn’t like what the person wrote

Hey, if you don’t have something nice to say about other people’s creations (gifsets, art, fic etc)

then

don’t say anything at all.

[angelofdumpsterfires]

how i feel about all the changes in s3

[vulpixelates]

"bg3 set the new standard" "bg3 spoiled us" GIRL bg3 shipped unfinished with unequal content for the companions to favor the whitest man possible, and after treating the single black person in the companions like actual shit bc racists were mad about him even existing and they listened. this is not the standard i want for video games lmao

[baejax-the-great]

[zombolouge]

The thing is, it's not about the Therapy Speak. It's not that everyone who disliked DAV hates healthy communication as a dynamic in fiction. It's not even about only being allowed to be a good guy, really, because most of us did do that anyways (though the option not being there is a loss I grieve even if I never chose it myself, but that's another rant for another day).

It's that DAV does all that stuff at the expense of being believable. At the expense of characters being permitted to have personalities. At the expense of emotions behaving the way emotions actually work for people. At the expense of letting the plot build tension through the stakes we're forced to grapple with.

Half the fics out there take the conflicts between the characters in the previous games and resolve them. I do it myself ALL THE TIME because I like to find a path to resolution through just about any conflict, that's what fascinates me about telling these stories. But the higher the stakes, the harder a conflict is to resolve. You CAN resolve any conflict, you CAN communicate healthily through any emotion, but you can't skip the time it takes to process it all to even be able to communicate it. As someone whose got CPTSD and recovered from many Traumas, I can tell you that the TIME it takes to work through it is not something you can fast track, and the ups and downs of your emotions on that journey can't be skipped. It doesn't matter if you know exactly how to do it, exactly how it's going to feel, or exactly what the end state will be, you CAN'T speedrun it.

DAV has stakes that are astronomical, but nobody treats them that way. Nobody experiences denial - a common psychological reaction to being presented with information that shatters your worldview. Nobody expresses any distrust in the establishments handing out this information - something common among cultures that have at times been at war, even if those wars are "resolved" in the present. Nobody really ever breaks down - something that any person is capable of under extreme circumstances, especially when facing multiple crises of faith that challenge everything they thought they knew about themselves. Nobody blows their lid because they've been repressing the hell out of everything. Nobody grieves for southern Thedas, the entire thing dying off screen and giving you, the player, NO way to engage with it in any way.

Not to mention there are barely any inter-party conflicts, when there should be a lot more. Why is everyone (except Spite) fine with it if Emmrich sacrifices Manfred to become a lich? Why is everyone fine with Illario potentially being set free if he was working with the venatori and Elgar'nan, two sources that have actively attacked everyone in the party? Why doesn't Neve resent Lucanis if Treviso is picked? Why doesn't Harding get pissed off at Nevarra for having a secret society of liches that never helped during the Inquisition's war against the breach and corypheus? Why doesn't Harding feel ANYTHING about Ferelden and the rest of the south? Shouldn't Harding resent the fact that she's stuck in the north while her home dies?

All of these conflicts ARE resolvable, but not easily. And it's not believable that they're never brought up. It's not believable that these characters skip through everything that happens with like, barely a frowny face most of the time. In DAO, Alistair leaves if you don't treat his conflicts with respect. In DA2, your party members try to kill each other if you don't pay attention to their conflicts/emotional needs. In DAI, people can leave or betray you, Cassandra throws a chair at Varric and tries to body him out a window. ALL of these can be resolved but it takes effort, and the characters get to SHOW that they're bothered by them and struggling the way a person would when faced with those emotions.

The problem isn't the therapy speak, or that everyone is loyal and won't leave, or that they aren't mean to each other enough. It's that it's toxic positivity. It's toxic as fuck to imply that anger or grief should be smiled over or else you're giving up, and it's damaging to people to avoid engaging with their own negative emotional responses to extremely negative stimuli. It's pasting optimism over very real, very weighty issues, sweeping it all under the rug, and you keep waiting for the lid to blow off the pressure cooker that creates, but it never does. It never becomes anything that emulates real emotions, which is why the whole damn thing feels hollow. Everything's dying and nobody cares, not even about themselves, and that's NOT healthy communication.

It's bullshit, half-assed storytelling that didn't tell us the actual story, just the vague idea of what it could have been.

[kingboletes]

[unveiling-unguarding]

"People hated DA2 and Inquisition when they launched but love them now. The same thing will happen to DA:TV"

Like hell it will. Veilguard gives empty answers to empty questions with empty characters. There is nothing deeper to sustain it.

[family-trauma]

Yup, this right here, unfortunately. I tried to set boundaries and clearly told them to stop but I got much more criticism, was told to stop arguing and being disrespectful, was told that they have to constantly criticize me because I make mistakes that force them to criticize me and lastly it's because they love me lol.

I think I've become mostly insensitive to their words now after knowing that they are knowingly abusing me and unwilling to admit it.

[sauronism]

catching up to the gothic discourse prove my suspicion that a lot of people are afraid to wallow in discomfort when it comes to discussing heavier topics in the genre, without resorting to meme/shitpost talk. like, no, someone pointing out that count orlok assaulted ellen or lestat being abusive is not the same thing as being "puritans" or "an anti". neither does pointing out the racism in the genre. stop getting defensive when someone was being objective in their discussion, and not indulge in fanon rose tinted glasses.

[anxietycheesecake]

I'm gonna hold your hand as I say this one more time: people weren't expecting wwdits to become a IWTV style drama or a dramedy. Just because some of us wrote fanfics like that, it doesn't mean that was our expectation for the actual show. All we were asking for was an extension of the vibe from season 3.

Season 3 found the perfect balance between comedy, plot and emotional bits. The cliff hanger, the whole fight scene, Colin Robinson farting himself to death while everyone was genuinely upset, Nandor's depression played straight and the humor of the episode built around it, not laughing at it. We didn't make that up, it all literally happened. I don't think it was an insane expectaction to hope the show would follow the line it established after such a massive tonal shift, especially given how the season ended.

And though I personally didn't read into details and come up with predictions like other people did after Paul Simms looked me in the eye and told me they just threw spaghetti at the wall and this is the shit and fart show ma'am, I can't call them delusional either, because reading too much into things WAS REWARDED NEAR THE ENDING OF SEASON 3. People were right, Laszlo was acting weird around Colin Robinson, he knew something we didn't and that information tinted all his actions through the season. If you thought something was off, you were absolutely correct.

Why would people expect the show that consistently gave us banger after banger and went from generic sitcom to an actual plot and interesting characters while successfully keeping the sitcom vibe to become dumber? Why is it delusional to hope a show that has always been well-written to... continue to be well-written???

[cherry-delite]

Because I'm a design freak, I went and color picked the pallets of each main character for comparison.

For a "fun" lil' guessing game, they are presented unlabelled and in no particular order. These pallets are so unbelievably redundant that I actually put one character twice by mistake at first, and it took me way too long to realize.

[jzargo]

"you only hate aveline because you hate women" idk how to break it to you but the biggest woman-hater in the room is in fact aveline herself (slut-shames isabela every other breath) (calls merrill stupid) (does nothing when her guardsmen are accused of sexually assaulting an elven girl) (doesn't investigate a serial killer who specifically targets women)

[crossdressingdeath]

You know what the most frustrating thing about DAV criticism is at the moment? It's that I do in fact have criticisms. Quite a few, actually. It's a Bioware game, of course I have criticisms. No one I've spoken to or whose posts I've seen thinks it's perfect or above criticism. But the thing is, I—and I imagine a lot of other firmly positive blogs—know that if I share any of those criticisms, if I make posts discussing them and talk about the game's flaws, I will immediately be inundated by people using those complaints to insist that the whole game is garbage and the writing is bad and Bioware's a terrible studio who can't make good games and DAI (of all fucking games) was so much better and blah blah blah blah. I know that because it's happened every goddamn time I've made a less-than-positive post about DAV. And I don't have the energy to deal with that! The endless stream of bad faith criticism wears me down and having to constantly stop to defend a game I like when I'm trying to discuss its flaws because if I don't (and frankly half the time even if I do) people will use my posts to claim the whole game is garbage is exhausting, and fandom is supposed to be fun. So I can't discuss DAV's flaws on tumblr if I want to avoid that, and it is infuriating. I see people bitching about toxic positivity and people refusing to acknowledge the game's flaws, and I really want those people to take a second to consider: do the game's fans ignore its flaws and refuse to accept that anything about it is bad? Or have you created an environment that is so toxic that no one who likes the game wants to risk getting your attention by mentioning what's bad about it and they respond more aggressively than is warranted to even genuine critique in an attempt to ward you off? Because there will always be assholes who claim that genuine problems are Fine, Actually, Stop Being Such A Baby... but if people can't address the game's flaws in public without immediately getting dragged into five different arguments about how it is in fact ultimately a really solid game, they're not going to do it no matter how much they recognise those flaws.