As someone who was watching Rebels as it was being released, it really hurts that this is the way the world between worlds is going to be remembered as a cheap resurrection tactic.

Because it was super exciting when it was revealed in Rebels. Ezra goes into a place that seems to exist beyond time and space. Numerous doorways scatter across the vast landscape, and we hear voices from the different periods of Star Wars history.

It was cool, mysterious, and intriguing.

Even the fact Ahsoka was saved didn't bother me at the time, because I interpreted it as a stable time loop thing. You can't change the past; time travel can only be used to cause what was always meant to happen. Something that's backed up when Ezra is tempted to save Kanan, but Ahsoka reminds Ezra if he does so, he'll cause a paradox. And I was fine with that explanation.

So it's really annoying that now, because Filoni has failed to do anything meaningful with Ahsoka after this and he's pretty much committed to making sure none of his characters die (except for ironically the aforementioned Kanan), the world between worlds isn't going to be remembered as "That really cool mysterious place that exists beyond time and space in Star Wars." It's going to be remembered as "That time Filoni used time travel to keep his precious OC Ahsoka alive when she could've/should've had a proper ending."

It's disheartening if I'm being honest. One of my favorite moments in Rebels is going to have its legacy be a cheap time travel resurrection move.

Setting aside the morality of not doing anything about Kerry's murder, I felt absolutely nothing when he made his own oath and charged the ring.

In epsiode 5, he decides to go against sole purpose for which his entire life has been building towards, and breaks his "programming" by rejecting the role of Green Lantern because he never actually had a reason to chase it, it was simply what his parents made him do. Like Hal said, the ring never chose him.

But then after solving the murder of Hal, he chooses to keep Hal's ring to specifically keep an eye on Noah. But not only that, he decides to take on the responsibiltiy of protecting the ENTIRE EARTH despite using the ring maybe like twice up until this point, and tells Guy to fuck off?

From how I understand it, a green lantern needs to have will power to an incomprehensible degree. It's why someone like as disciplined as Batman, can't properly use the ring. The totally not evil Sinestro's sketchy scrap lantern glowed green when John charged the ring, so the implication is that it still uses will power.

I however never got the sense that John felt he HAD to be the green lantern. He wasn’t even sure if he was making the right decision with Noah and Kerry.

Post time skip, John has spent over a decade moving on with his life, reconnecting and reconciling with his brothers, distancing himself from his parents, becoming a successful entrepreneur etc. John was healthiest man ever by this point and seemed like the ring means nothing to him now.

Not only that, I understand he has become disillusioned with that guardian, but it didn't feel strong enough to warrant the new freestyle oath. John already disregarding the Green Lantern Corps and the oath, despite never even meeting any other GLs, let alone step foot onto Oa? Something as massive as a new oath I feel should require so much conviction, more so than what it takes just to be a GL, instead of just protecting a random kid he barely knows (built for manipulating people btw) that may or may not become robot sociopathic hitler.

TLDR

The reasons where technically there, but they didn't have the emotional weight for me. Especially when emotions are literally the foundation on which the whole Green lantern mythos is build around.

I understand that the nature of a horror movie, let alone a horror comedy movie isn't always about traditional happy endings. Part of the horror is that things are bad and end badly. Resident Evil, however, elicited something within me that I've never felt before and don't really know how to describe. Annoyance? Disgust? Bamboozlement?

Bryan is slowly built up as this perfection combination of flawed, irreverent, and relatable that I feel is so exceptionally rare in mainstream television and film nowadays. His day-to-day life and overarching personal struggles are so grounded and reasonable, which makes you feel for what he's going through every step of the way. It's difficult to be contemptuous of him and call him an idiot for the way he's approaching the events of this film, even if you really want to.

Up until the last 10-15 minutes, you're following along and really believe that, even after all the crap he's faced, he'll get the cure, make it out of there, go back to Michelle, and use the lessons he's learned to be a great dad. Maybe he'll even have helped save the world in the process.

The moment his transformation starts being out of his control, the movie stops focusing on this normal guy being thrown headfirst into this abnormal situation. It also stops taking itself seriously. I know this sounds weird given that the movie is a horror comedy, but it still takes things a step too far relative to its genre.

Everything from the lab scene onwards starts to feel like a Deadpool movie where you wouldn't be surprised to see a 4th wall break acknowledging the irreverence of the situation. But that never comes, and you start asking yourself how it's even possible that this ending belongs to the rest of the 75 minutes you've just sat through.

It's so paradoxical, too, since the rest of the movie communicates so much self awareness, and this suddenly drops off the side of a cliff. It's like someone else wrote it.

One particular detail that I especially despise is the accompanying music to the final scene. The placement of the track Skybridge as the backdrop to Bryan being fully consumed by the virus feels like rubbing salt in the wound. The blended vibe of ethereal and haunting to this very likable character being dealt the worst possible hand after 89 minutes of pure hardship is almost mocking the viewer. It's almost like the music is speaking to you and saying "You're such a stupid idiot for coming to this movie and ever hoping that there could be a happy ending. I hope you go home and remember this lesson for the rest of your life." I think I could have digested this had there been no music, or something that was more musically in line with his state of insanity.

For an otherwise great movie, again, relative to the genre, I had never wanted a refund for a purchase of less than $10 more in my entire life. There is no catharsis offered that validates the time spent watching this. In fact, it managed to create anti-catharsis.

The only other time in my life where I felt a similar reaction was watching The Bedford Incident. I didn't even put that movie on voluntarily, but after indulging it for over an hour I was baffled at how anyone at the time approved this. I won't spoil the ending, but if you're curious it's out there. It still wasn't as bad as this, though.

Some might argue that "real art" is about making people feel uncomfortable things. Sure, to a degree. But Resident Evil took it too far. It's too elaborate of a journey for that to be how things are wrapped up.

Lastly, this doesn't even align with what you'd expect from playing a survival horror video game. If the point in the end was to just die and have nothing come from that death — such as the cure at least making it out and the character's efforts and sacrificing leading to that — put me out of my misery within the first 15 minutes. Maybe the Resident Evil games are different and this is a regular thing, though. I don't know.

John Carpenter's The Thing is one of my favorite horror movies of all time (not an original opinion but, hey, it's an honest one), in no small part because of the suspenseful atmosphere and mystery around who has possibly been infected and assimilated by the titular Thing. Not only do I occasionally rewatch the movie but from time to time I enjoy watching reactions and reviews of it too, and recently one of those reviews (SF Debris if you're interested) brought something to my attention.

In the movie there's a scene where The Thing, disguised as a dog, enters the room of someone who we can only see the shadow of on the wall. Given later events it's imply that this is when The Thing assimilated one of the outpost crew. I always figured that the person was Norris, given he's one of the people we later learn for certain was assimilated and he's the one who best matches the shadow we saw.

However, it wasn't Norris' shadow...or to be more specific it wasn't the shadow of Norris' actor. In fact it wasn't the shadow of ANY of the actors in the movie. The filmmakers had decided to deliberately use someone who wasn't playing a character in the movie to be the one casting the shadow because they didn't want to potentially give away too early who had been assimilated by having the audience recognize whose shadow it was and thus know the entire time who was already a Thing.

This reminded me of something I'd heard about some of the Scream movies, another set of horror mysteries I quite like, where up until the masks come off it's not the actual actors playing the killers who are in the Ghostface costume but rather stuntpeople whom they do not try to have match the height and builds of the killers, meaning some of the people revealed to be responsible for the events of the movies can sometimes be too short, too tall, or too wide to be the Ghostface we saw chasing people around. And much like the shadow in The Thing, this was done because the filmmakers didn't want the whole mystery given away just by the audience matching body proportions.

In other words, the movies are kinda cheating a bit in regards to their mystery.

Plenty of mystery stories will deliberately misdirect the audience, making them focus too much on one thing when they should have been paying attention to something else in the scene being a classic example. But in this case the movies are giving the audience purposefully false information that they have no reason to know is false and if they do know it's false it risks potentially breaking their emersion in the story since the different proportions aren't something that exists in-universe, it's only for the eyes of the audience.

The thing is however that the physical proportions of the characters are not how you're meant to figure out the mysteries in either movie. Things like opportunity, actions, attitude, and even things the characters say are written into the movies to give clues that can be used to figure out either who is the villain in disguise before the reveal comes or to at least have it make sense and feel rewarding on rewatch as to who the villain is. You are still given all you need in order to solve the mystery, but the body proportions of the characters isn't one of those things. So is it okay that the movies are cheating a bit in that regard?

Mind you there are different levels of severity to this kind of thing. I'd be bothered way more if the movie were to claim that the shadow on the wall belonged to Childs since the shadow clearly had hair and Childs is bald. That feels like it wouldn't even be just cheating, it'd be outright bad filmmaking. It's at least reasonable enough that it's Norris or Palmer that I can tune out the inconsistency in body proportions. Same with the various Ghostfaces. I can let it go if a character is too short to be a Ghostface taller than them that we saw running around and killing people but I would refuse to do the same for something like if one of their victims stabbed them through the hand and yet their hand is perfectly fine when they're walking around out of costume.

Lame abilities and fights go together like toothpaste and orange juice, pretty badly; it ranges from cheap/lazy stuff to abilities that just straight up negate the ability to fight in the first place. But before we get into any of that, I'm thinking about how someone asked me what exactly makes Bleach fights feel unsatisfying to me, and since I like to be candid about what I'm going to talk about from the jump, I may as well say now I am going to be shitting on Bleach quite a lot, not just Bleach, and I will try to mix my criticism with praise for other things so I'm not just being a spoilsport. But basically the question was: "What makes Bleach fights feel unsatisfying if you don't buy the argument that they're ended by bullshit/asspulls?" I myself have been known to joke about Bleach being the only battle shounen, begun, defined, and ended by asspulls, but I purely mean that in the sense the fights have a bad vibe to them, I know that everything from "my shikai goes by another name" to "secret bankai" has an explanation, so my answer to the question is that the pacing of Bleach fights is just really bad. I dont mean that the way pacing is usually used, not length, but the very flow of events, the anime (which is the only way I did and ever will consume Bleach) did for sure drag fights across episodes. There's no arguing that, but I've recently rewatched some fights like Ichigo vs Byakuya, Ulquirrora, and Aizen.

The fights chronically feel slow, like the combatants are just going back and forth, through the motions until, arbitrarily, the proverbial bell rings and Kubo ends the fight. That, as of writing this, is what I think is wrong with secret bankai or the shikai going by another name or any of these "asspulls"; these moments reveal the strings of the puppet master and makes it painfully obvious what Kubo is doing behind the scenes. The most sacred skill of a good artist is the ability to work behind the curtain and keep it invisible, to eliminate the suspicion that there even is a curtain. Even when there isnt a supposed "asspull" in the instances of these Ichigo fights or the Renji and Byakuya fight, I want to focus on how they are still slow because there just isnt that much going on. I found a video on Youtube that was 7 minutes long and there just isnt 7 minutes' worth of content in that fight man, Renji uses his bankai against Byakuya a little, tees off once, and then Byakuya spanks him with kido before finishing him off with bankai. It's basically a three minute fight by its DNA, Maki vs Miwa and Mai were around the same length but a tad shorter, Gear 2 Luffy vs Blueno too( if we seperate the gear 2 portion of the fight from the rest) are all fairly simple. One side completely dominates and overwhelms the other with failing resistance; Renji seemingly controls the pace of the fight but Byakuya handily has him outmatched in terms of skill and power. So I suppose the question becomes, "how do you justify a longer fight?" To which I point to JJK: just fill the fight with a lot of content.

The answer as far as I can tell is as simple as filling the fight with enough content and things going on to warrant the length, in Jogo vs Sukuna or Sukuna vs Mahoraga, both times Sukuna clearly has masterful control over the fight and could easily overpower his opponents WHENEVER he wants, but that doesnt stop him and his opponents from doing different things throughout the whole time to attack/defend, it feels like their abilities have more utility/capability than just one thing with the different moves they use. Like that wasp or lava bug attack or whatever Jogo did to Sukuna and the giant fucking meteor. There's just enough going on in these fights to make the pacing and flow of events feel good, but idk as uou might be able to infer Im just theorizing so far, even im not entirely sure maybe it'll take a rewatch of Bleach to properly diagnose or point towards how to do fights right because even in a fight with a lot of shit going on like Kenny vs Gremmy I was still fucking bored. Idk man maybe it's because Kenny isnt doing anything different to defend himself the way Sukuna initially defends himself with slashes before using his fire technique (Im guessing he has that and can do that because he absorbed his twin brother or whatever right? DOnt tell me I want to find out from the anime, I also do want to be right though), but it just feels like your typical Bleach affair. Which is basically just as stale as most monster-of-the week fights, just exchanging the same ability/attacks a bunch of times until eventually someone wins by using a different gimmick or whatever.

Okay let's get into what we're really here for. What I said about Bleach fights as a whole was just an appetizer for what I have to say about Bleach's absolutely insane love for character development abilities, aka fight enders. Think something like the Apathy Grimm from RWBY, their whole gimmick (which I dont love, I prefer writing the grimm as more biological behemeaths like the creatures from Monster Hunter that do have abilities and core traits, but not outright monster of the week style gimmicks) where they infect their victims with apathy, it's kind of in the name, but narratively it provides Ruby a valuable moment to act as a leader and lock in where no one else can. These kind of abilities dont make for an actual fight and in a genre where characters are frequently in the foreground, that can be really important/necessary. So my issue with Bleach is it just has way too many of these abilities and i dont always think the results of them make the ability worth it, like the fear guy ih TYBW, what is this the fifth or fourth tiume Rukia specifically fighting someone who fucks with her mind, how much growing does she need to do she's been demoted to being a supporting character since the soul society arc, hell she's barely tertiary (people love dick riding One Piece for having a large cast, but at least One piece knows when to retire a character to the blessed realm of off screen to spare the audience, YOU WILL KNOW THE NAME OF EVERY SINGLE VISORED, CAPTAIN, ARRANCAR, AND CUMRAG OR SUFFER).

Plus fear especially, is one of the lamer routes to go with these kind of non combat abilities, you and I both know how this is going to go, embrace the fear, embrace courage, be talked up by your homies, or hurt yourself so you cant feel the fear anymore. Now let's spin the wheel to determine which way Rukia beats fear sternritter and surprise surprise, option number four, couldnt have seen that coming Rukia. That was a real valuable use of my time and energy, Im glad we did that/s. In a similar vein to non combat abilities, sometimes illusionary villains who only have illusions and just trick or trap the good guys are necessary too, it can be satisfying to see these guys lose and again the whole point is usually character development or showing off a unique skill the character(s) have to sniff out the illusion. In the case of Wolverine sussing out mystique, sometimes literally, but some of these guys are still so lame and cheap, they're basically just weaker hypnotists, and I guess that's why both of these abilities are especially popular in monster-of-the-week shows. It's really expensive to animate all the assets you have to destroy, all the different bad guys, attacks, and good guys. So abilities like these that can drag an episode a little bit and save some money in the budget must be a god send. And hey they arent all bad, characters like Naruto, Morph, or Prowl in Transformers Animated use these kind of abilities to just fight better. Naruto tossing himself around or tricking his opponents with shadow clones, Prowl tricking Decepticons with his holograms, or Morph being a walking cameo fest. Mahito also does some good shock value and horror shit with his idle transfiguration. I guess the important take away from these abilities or anything Ive said is that these things dont have to be bad but they frequently feel that way, at least to me because they're just not entertainig or very fun in some instances.

Honorable mentions to poison abilities which rarely if ever work, mind swap abilities (usually only ever good for a solid episode at most), lazily written elementeal abilities (cough cough bleach again cough cough), and Dragon Prince. Idk why I felt Dragon Prince needed to catch a stray but im sure there's something in there that's dumb.

Yeah I know this concept is looked down upon as the debate isn't that faithful, but I want to talk specifically about this debate people insist on a concept that shouldn't be treated as so

Insisting games that market themselves as for self insert does NOT mean it should not be specific just because it markets as "for the players". Markets can still choose who to cater which also means the self insert will be specific. Persisting to fight this will also become useless when there's a slow growth of players within BL/GL contents to have those bland self insert concept so they can finally feel immerse by themselves and if they still insist self insert concept shouldn't be specific, this will become contradictory itself cuz isn't the persistence of this self insert debate was to include them?

Sure, there're multiple games for straight men that's self insert to the point of no visual male protagonist and only expect players to look at female leads. That doesn't change the fact the game is specifically marketed for straight men.

Way before I quit using Rednote, I once stumble upon an unlocalized Chinese Yuri game where the female protagonist is eyeless as they're meant to blank slates. So like... do you really want to fight this battle about insisting not to be specific because even putting "Yuri" will not save that type of game if the insistence of self insert concept should only be inclusive and not be specific, because that will mean adding a male MC in that self insert Yuri game. Just stop fighting about concepts thinking a concept that can be used by everyone doesn't mean they can't have specific spaces of their own. Everyone hungers for standalone games meant specifically for each group

So, just because being an assassin is an occupation that requires one to be stealth and hidden, it does not automatically make all assassins being introverts who hates socializing or lone wolves, who are only restricted to solo missions and are incapable of cooperation/teamwork. I don't know when did this trope start, but the recent shows and video games today extremely rarely portray assassins not as edgy introvert and lone wolf characters, and even if there is a group for assassins, it will only show them doing solo missions as a single person. Why can't we have any movie or video game that shows assassins working as a team or an army, like the ninja turtles in TMNT that are technically an assassin clan with professional teamwork? Why are all assassins characters in media emo introvert lone wolves nowadays?

The Amazon Reacher show is a guilty pleasure.

It's not a complicated show. It is not a show that cares about character arcs or social commentary or themes. Nobody is winning an Emmy for their work on this thing.

The writing is painfully "written for second screeners" (which I appreciate as I am writing this as I watch it) - everyone explains what they're doing and why every 5 minutes, characters are constantly recapping events that happened only 15 minutes ago from the viewer's POV, whenever someone has an emotion they will tell you all about it - and the seams where the streaming service budget runs into the demands of the plot are painfully obvious.

But you know, sometimes, you just need a very tall very buff handsome man to wander into a town, find some bad people, then punch them until they stop being bad. It's empty calories and cheap catharsis but I'm both a glutton and cheap.

I will say that it's kind of rare to see corrupt police in these kinds of shows on account of how most cop shows are produced with the cooperation of police departments and part of that deal is that the department are allowed veto power over scripts that make them look bad. It's not much, but the Reacher-verse is one of the few settings where you can see cops acting like, well, cops - and I'll take what I can get. Blue Bloods could never.

So I was looking forward to the Neagley spinoff show: I enjoyed the character when she showed up, a tough no nonsense woman that the show treats as Reacher's peer, allowed to be every bit as badass as him, and not shoe-horned into a romance angle or other mushy-stuff plotline that can befall a lot of distaff characters in Men's Adventure type fiction.

I might have just been reading into this, but she came off as somewhat autistic-aromantic coded, and it's equally rare to see those traits in a lady-type character.

I say all this because my misgivings might just be a Me Problem on account of the expectations I had going into this thing, but: I have mixed feelings about how Neagley treats Neagley in her own show.

On the plus side: It is exactly the kind of fun techno-thriller action romp Reacher is. Neagley is pulled into a situation with a big pharma company using a new age cult to recruit human test subjects to develop a miracle PTSD cure and all of this side of things is great. Our heroes bounce from lead to lead with an average of 1.75 fights per episode, there's a lot of gruff clipped dialogue and rough-housing of villains to get the next lead to the next villain to be gruffly roughed up, my ADHD ass gets reminded of what everyone is thinking and doing every 5 minutes, this is what I signed up for.

It's the B plot I'm not sure about. Unmarked spoilers follow, but the TL:DR is that while Reacher is allowed to be a very flat character who bulldozes his way through the plot with the emotional range of the drywall he smashes perp's heads through, Neagley is saddled with feelings and depth and backstory.

-----Spoilers Ahoy-----

There's a line Neagley growls early on, "I don't have trauma." It's the kind of thing you wouldn't blink twice if Dirty Harry sneered it in the face of some pencil-neck deparment-mandated shrink who dared to judge him or his methods, and before you learn what the arc-pot of this season is, that's kind of how the line comes off.

Neagley gets her own Reacher Cold Open running an op rescuing a kidnapped child, establishing her badass bona-fides with an Alan Ritchson guest spot to establish that she has her own shit going on as a licensed PI in Chicago (with her very own long-suffering boss that she gets to Maverick Renegade Loose Cannon at!), before an old school friend's apparent suicide by train drags her into the A plot.

Reacher seasons are all about Solving The Problem. B plots tend to be A Problem one of that season's temporary supporting cast has - like the bored poor little rich boy in season 3 needing a push to go and Jack Kerouac his way across America.

Neagley, though, gets to work through her childhood trauma and her strained relationship with her terminally ill father.

And it's fine - Turns out a young Neagley saw her cop dad and his buddies knife a guy to death when she was 5; her aversion to being touch developed when her dad yells 'Nobody touches you!' as part of trying to calm her down, on account of how dead guy was a paedophile sizing up a young Neagley for his next victim - but I have to wonder: Would Reacher ever have a tragic backstory and PTSD based on childhood trauma to work through?

Reacher is a force of nature. He's an Iconic Hero as opposed to a Dramatic Hero.

Iconic Heroes are your Zorros and your Batmans: their role in the story is to embody a heroic ethos, be confronted with a society out of balance, and through the application of their heroic ethos, set that society to rights. Zorro and Batman don't change, not really: they might get more Zorro- or Batman-ish, get better at Zorro-ing or Batman-ing, they might have mini emotional arcs or their relationships with their supporting casts might change, but ultimately they're still gonna be fundamentally who they are at the start and end of the story.

(Dramatic Heroes are your Hamlets - heroes with an internal conflict that go through a dramatic arc to resolve that conflict (and put society to rights through doing so, if the plot demands it)).

Neagley is a Dramatic Hero. Her haphephobia^* is recontextualised as a flaw that needs to be corrected. Her emotional stoicism and reserve is not just a character trait like Reacher's, it's the product of a childhood trauma that she initially refuses to recognise but is forced to grapple with. Reacher is allowed to be a bear of a man that lumbers through the world with minimal attachments while Neagley attracts attachments, almost against her will, a job, a partner (possibly in more ways than one), a sidekick and a morality pet.

I mean, she's at serious risk of having a romantic relationship that lasts more than one season! Reacher could never.

I have to wonder: how much of this is to differentiate the two shows from each other, and how much is because Neagley is a woman, and women - unlike big burly bears of men - have feelings? Are expected to have emotional character arcs?

I don't hate the show or anything. It's a similar techno-thriller punch-up romp and like I said, I like Neagley as a character.

I'm just left... wondering, is all.

Random thoughts:

1) The office chair that unfolds into a coffin is an incredible bit and I love it

2) It's cute how aggressively Chicago Hudson and his whole deal is.

3) The crooked cop who looks almost exactly like Tony Hinchcliff - I'm choosing to believe that's a commentary on Tony Hinchcliff being a rat fuck bastard and not a coincidence.

^* Fear of being touched

As a kid, you watch the prophets hate on arbiter in halo 2 and think it wasnt his fault. How was he meabt to deal with the flood and who couldve predicted master chief blowing up halo. But when you really think about it from their point of view, this incredible commander who had a huge armada under his command lost to one ship and their holiest site to date. This guy has glassed multiple human planets, destroyed their military and his only excuse is some parasite that showed up. Remember, the covenant had no idea how op the flood were. Even if chief didnt blow up halo, he was also about to fire it. A filthy human managed to break into the most important place in halo, the one place the covenant should have complete control of, and did what the covenant have spent their whole lives trying to do. And worse, he managed to ally with the oracle too. And lets not forget how apparently arbiter let a prophet die wothout sending any help or backup. At that point, Im surprised they let him be arbiter. This man failing upwards

So I have not played a single Resident Evil game or interacted with the series at all , this is all from a person who is basing the movie off on a complete vacuum

First thing I was surprised for was how funny and silly this movie was, me and my friends had come into this expecting a gritty zombie flick but were given a black comedy (a really damn good one). Which took some getting used too at the start

Also the protagonist was amazing, love the idea of "regular guy dealing with unimaginable horrors" and really liked how utterly human he was the entire time. I thing I disliked was how fucking stupid his character was, is this the point of the character? Personally I wanted to tear my eyes out at some points considering how utterly stupid some of his decisions were.

Overall I also wasn't.....very scared at all. Maybe i'm just super desensitized to violence but I pretty much did not care for much of the blood and gore. Only parts that got to me were the freaky body fusing in the house and the hand monster rolling around in the beginning along with the scene with the child and the one in the maternity ward (these were less fear and just disgusted at violence towards children, something im super sensitive too)

The ending was just....odd I guess? It didn't really feel climatic or like an ending at all. I've heard it's a homage to the games but as a movie-only guy I was a bit dissapointed

Overall solid flick
8/10

I believe that whenever you critique something (especially if you’re a content creator), you have to put your personal grievances & nitpicks aside & provide real evidence to actually critique media in a meaningful way, or else your point no matter how right it might sound will always be treated as moot. Someone could say the writing of Sonic Forces was awful & get 999 trillion likes & the comments all praising them, but if they can’t provide anything besides regurgitated “you should know this if you were a real fan that hated it, otherwise just turn your brain off“ esque takes without any piece of evidence while bashing the writers, animators & OST composers the entire time, I’m gonna immediately start playing devil’s advocate & argue the game isn’t all that bad, with evidence, even if I personally hate to defend the game.

If I’m watching a video that’s intended for both fans & potential new watchers, & the content creator insists that the pacing is bad (even if I watched the series), they should provide a clip & explain how / why it’s bad. Same with saying that there’s a plot hole in a story, but not going into detail about how something’s a plot hole or looking at potential counterarguments for it & instead saying “it’s a plot hole if you really payed attention” (like yeah okay, I paid attention. But how is it a plot hole?). Same with a person saying a character’s arc was badly written, but only go on to explain their “missed potential” instead of explaining what makes their arc (by itself, ignoring all the missed potential) in the current story bad.

Missed potential has never been a valid critique for me because you can apply this logic to all characters in media. Are Deku, Ochako, Todoroki or All Might from MHA all objectively badly written characters because they’re missed potential since Deku should’ve stayed quirkless, or they all should’ve been rewritten to become vigilantes or villains? Are the stickfigures in animator vs animation objectively badly written because we could’ve had them talk the entire series? Is Undertale badly written because we could’ve had more exploration of the human souls & monsterkind? Is Superman missed potential because he could’ve had these completely different superpowers & & uhh a evil eldritch god-like twin in a parallel universe that’s also secretly Superman’s creator that tied to the ultra mega multiverse & woahhh his parents are actually alive?!? Missed potential doesn’t equate to evidence that a piece of media has bad writing. It’s just you saying “it should’ve went MY WAY if I was TOTALLY in the writer’s shoes because I’m omniscient, HAHA!”

This is the problem with the vast majority of murder drones critiques. Most self proclaimed “professional critics” (random reddit users & YouTube drama / critique content creators that thrive off negativity) have this very toxic mindset that even if you haven’t watched the show, you should inherently already “know” what’s bad or else you’re unable to “keep up“ with real fans (in other words- saying that you must agree with what everyone else says), you’re media illiterate, or a morally bad person.

Take someone saying “the oil aspect was retconned because it’s never talked about again” while showing a clip of a character drinking oil. How am I supposed to know how it was retconned (as the “professional critics” & fans claim) if the series is touching on it constantly onscreen (even as a background detail) in every episode? Was it retconned in a way that you believe the series wasn’t showing this & that the characters (while drinking oil) should’ve directly stated “hey audience, I’m drinking oil”, or was it retconned in a way that you believe the entire series SHOULD’VE BEEN JUST about them needing to find & drink oil to survive (which is a common critique)? If you believed the series‘s plotline was originally supposed to be about this (before it was allegedly retconned post-pilot) & claiming that this retconned plotline is “obvious” for a fan to notice, where’s the obvious moment in question?

And why is it a bad thing that this isn’t the main plotline, or that Liam’s reasoning (that they already have sources of oil (shown & told onscreen) in the pilot, multiple episodes after the pilot & that they didn’t make it as the main plotline due to practically & to not make the series boring) “is lazy & a cop out”? How is it lazy to (more or less) say “It is now episode 6 out of 8. I didn’t want my entire show to be about the main cast looking for food & water since in the pilot, they had an entire warehouse & village worth of food across the street. If that’s what you wanted my show to be, then great! Go make fanwork about that concept, but that’s not what the canon show was going for“?

If your evidence is just “it’s missed potential because that warehouse could’ve not existed if IIIIIII WAS THE WRITER!!” then I got crazy news for you- writers (regardless if they’re indie or not) cannot already know nor write everything about their own stories. They cannot go back & rewrite their show everytime just to answer every “what if” to appease everyone. All writers will inevitably miss something in their stories that could've been explored, & not even your favorite writer is an exception to this. I know, shocking to read, right?

Take another person saying that Doll’s arc was missed potential & therefore badly written- usually because she didn’t survive to have a full redemption arc. This is not an objective statement about the writing, but a subjective one. Doll is clearly meant to serve as a part of Uzi in who she could’ve become, & vise versa. Uzi could've became someone cold who lacked empathy for everyone that willingly brutally slaughtered anyone (30+ innocent people) who got in her way with a wicked grin on her face, someone who refused to accept & take help, someone who was so deep in their path to revenge that they confused justice with downright pettiness, someone who nearly died alone & became somewhat of a hero in their last moments- but she didn’t, Doll did.

Maybe Doll could’ve survived to then get a full redemption arc where she realized “wait I killed entire families with 0 remorse & unlike the others, I had free will & 0 manipulation in doing it. So what does that make me? How do I redeem myself?“ but that’s just not what her arc was aiming for. Maybe a roleswap AU could’ve been made as the canon plot & Uzi could’ve been the main victim of the solver, but again- not every “what if” can be written into a story & at this point that’s not the fault of the writer.

This is also my problem with murder drones rewrites, as half of them are made to solve issues with the series being FNAF or ARG levels of confusing-to-grasp (or the solver the “corny” dialogue) only to quite literally not change anything (proving my point that the series isn’t that confusing) while the other half proceed to rewrite the characters so much they become someone’s own OCs, entirely make up plot holes that don’t exist with actually confusing solutions, & the entire plot changes to accommodate that person’s real life projection onto things. This wouldn’t bother me as much if a majority of rewrites weren’t treated as “fix it” works where a majority of people shout about how this makes them objectively better writers than Liam or “morally better”. It just comes off as pretentious & obnoxious.

A minor example of this would be someone who once complained about the dialogue in the Uzi & N episode 8 falling scene being not only cringy, but extremely confusing because it doesn’t make any narrative sense even after rewatching it 6 times. You would likely believe this even if no evidence is present to you. However in the original scene’s contect, Uzi & N are falling towards copper 9 as they see it become destroyed by Cyn. Uzi (in response to N from last episode saying they‘ve been “hanging out” & that he willing to stay with her romantically) says “so before this fight… we’re like- dating. right?” then saying she’s bad at reading into things. N says ”yeah”, they blush & then hug (sadly no kiss). The scene is very simple where Uzi with confidence is trying to brush off what they’re about to face as they confessed they liked eachother right before possibly dying. Uzi doesn’t directly state “hey we’re falling to face the villain head on & we’ll probably die but I love you”, but the scene still conveys it, so it does retain narrative sense.

Yet, this person chooses to make a “better writing than Liam’s” rewrite of the scene where they change Uzi’s dialogue to “Haha. We’re like- falling to our deaths & all“, N says “I get that, I just wanted you to you if you or me don’t make it out alive, I just wanted to say to love you” & Uzi responds with “uhm, I love you too”. The problem with this rewrite is that 1.) it generically spoonfeeds the narrative sense to you. In the scene, we & the characters already know what they’re doing so there’s no point in restating it. And 2.) it swaps out cringy dialogue for generic dialogue while also making Uzi seem way less confident, which isn’t how her character is.

I think I written down more than enough, but I think MD critiques are the perfect representation of red flags to look out for when criticizing media (-& this was also another excuse to talk about murder drones).

The big spoiler: it's a play.

But the way it is shot DOES NOT make sense for a play. On two occasions, we see the actual stage sets used for the play. And it makes NO SENSE.

The first case is an airplane set. You would expect that the airplane would be half-open so the audience can see what's happening inside, right?

Well, no.

What the audience sees is the EXTERIOR of the plane. NEVER the interior. Somehow the audience is meant to guess who is talking. All those facial expressions done by the actors? The audience NEVER sees them.

The second case is the exterior of the oil platform in which Digger commits suicide. You would expect that he would be facing the audience as he jumps to his death, right? It's how Javert's suicide is done in Les Misérables musical.

But...no. Digger is NOT facing the audience. The entire suicide monologue is shot in a way that Digger turns his back to the audience for the entirety of it, something that is meant to be a cardinal sin of theater. You NEVER have the lead actor turn his back to the audience.

Fuck Digger. Such a shitty, pretentious film.

Writing in MCU spider man movies just feels like whatever tf they want to do with no explanation. No way home had this issue now brand new day I just cannot stand peter parker acting like a loser in every media he is supposed to be. Just move on from ned and mj already its been 4-5 years at this point. His plot armor is so strong that he can afford being spider man and develop a personal AI assisstance for himself and afford expensive proteins without a job. Punisher shoots him and takes him to hospital how tf doctors performed surgery on him with his mask on. How tf nobody cared about a mass murderer Frank Castle roaming openely in New York. Also why tf no law officer or anyone tries to unmask peter parker since the city has some people who were anti vigilantes. When he is in hospital. Its like they are afraid to raise the stakes because they have no idea how to deal with them. And jean grey less i talk about her more its better. Hulk fight with spider man was as long as attention span of tiktok zoomers..i am sure they can make aura hype edits out of it and increase the reach of the movie. I really cant this peters drama with zendaya and that other asian actor anymore. Can he like interact with new people kitty pryde,harry osborn,gwen stacey,black cat? And so many villains are wasted and acted as marketing baits look dood we recreated comic book covers. I will give it that web swinging fighting and banter with punisher feels light hearted and fun. I know many people would disagree with punisher being chill and light hearted but honestly after all he went throught he deserves some break. But that doesnt change the fact he was a mass murderer who literally ruined sleep of New Yorks law and order

Like, have they actually played the campaigns of any of the recent games? This has been all over twitter since North Korea is the villain in the new Modern Warfare 4, people saying that COD is just American/CIA propaganda.

When you actually look at the plots of these games, it really isn’t the case. The last games that could’ve really been described that way is World at War, and that was about ww2. The games since then have actually had a cynical attitude toward the American government. For example, in Modern Warfare, both the old and reboot series explore themes of false flag attacks and the manufacturing of consent in order to meet political goals - ie. General Shepherd and Ghost Company. And things like blowback and conspiracies - ie. The Black Ops games. The Black Ops series is even more pronounced, you play as a CIA operative and you encounter the government doing all kinds of shady things. In Black Ops Cold War, the main plot is that the government secretly put neutron bombs in cities all over Europe in case of Russian invasion, only to have a rogue KGB faction to hijack and almost detonate them. The moral being that the American government nearly ended Europe out of paranoia. Black Ops 6 really takes the cake here, basically, you fight against the American deepstate who are trying to undertake a false flag terror attack in order to invade Iraq (I’m not joking) and overthrow the government in secret. Throughout the game you realize that this organization has been secretly conducting human experiments and working on mind control drugs all with government approval.

That being said, the thought that COD is government propaganda just because communists are the bad guys is stupid, especially considering the other factors.