Let me tell you a bit about my feelings on reviews in general before we get started. I used to be one of those people that would get on IGN and see what score a game got and took that as a good representation as to the quality of it. I used to see the Rotten Tomato score and associate that number with the movie and go into that movie knowing that it might not be what I thought it would be. Well a few years ago the movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice came out and that changed my entire prospective. It got torn to shreds by critics and signaled the end of the DC movies before they even got a fair shot at getting started. I loved that movie and it was my personal favorite movie that year. I know that it's common knowledge that seeing a Rotten Tomato score doesn't mean that is how everyone feels about a movie but it's become such a big deal over the years. Companies are literally putting "Certified Fresh" stickers on Blu-rays now and it's not something I'm cool with. And I honestly stopped caring what places like IGN and GameSpot thought about games years before the BvS thing. There are so many games that I'll play during the course of a year that scored poor or didn't make a top 10 list. I do still listen to Giant Bomb content but I just know that I'm not gonna agree with them a lot. Like they didn't have Persona 5 or Horizon Zero Dawn on their top 10 games of the year in 2017 and that's so fucked! Ok, I've rambled about that long enough that you hopefully get where I'm coming from. Let's start going into the point of this post!
Saying things like "They don't get it" or "What were they thinking" when talking about entertainment is something that drives me fucking crazy! When people say stuff like that they are insinuating that the people making this movie/game/show doesn't understand the base-level concept of what they are doing! Yes they do! Michael Bay understood Transformers, the show runners making Game of Thrones fully understand the books, the director/writers of the most recent Hellboy movie understand/know the character, and Todd Howard/Bethesda understand the Fallout games and how to make and online game regardless how Fallout 76 turned out! The thing is that in all of those instances they chose to take the characters/situations in a different direction than you were used to! I'm not gonna lie and say that I grew up on the animated Transformers cause I barely watched it but I saw every Transformers movie in theaters and liked them all! I associate Transformers more with the movies than anything else!
An example I will always go to is the Nolan Batman movies. Those movies changed so much about almost every character in the Batman universe outside of Alfred and The Joker. Batman barley does any fighting in those movies until the end of the third one, Bane is a vastly different character with a vastly different reason for wearing a mask, Ra's Al Ghul is just a white dude with no Lazarus Pit. I say all that to bring up that people complain about movies changing characters and going against their original versions and they lose their minds but Nolan gets a total pass. I want to state real quick that I love The Dark Knight Trilogy and consider The Dark Knight to be one of the best movies of all time but still. It just bothers me when people's main complaint about a movie is that the characters change. And I know that some will argue that the Nolan movies were good and a movie like Suicide Squad was bad but I'd say that doesn't matter when it comes to the base level of characters changing. Someone liking something is individual based, not a universal truth.
So I want to move on to another thing that drives me crazy when it comes to examining entertainment and that's feeling entitled when it comes to how something should end. This is really showing it's ugly ass head with the final season of Game of Thrones. At the time of me writing this there are still two more episodes to go and my God the amount of bitching and complaing that is goin on is unreal! I am personally loving the final season and think it's going to end up being one of the most satisfying closings to a piece of entertainment of all time! People saying that this season feeling rushed...I just don't understand what you're talking about! They took two years to get all of this in order and film this final season! How the hell did they rush something when it took that long! I also want to throw out there that I'm a Lost defender and think that show ended the only way that it could've and made sense! It was perfect and I'll defend that show till I die as one of the best series ever made!
Look, I get that things that go on for a long time can end up having a conclusion that you didn't care for and I respect that. But doing nothing but complaining and saying they "ruined" something because the ending was different than you wanted is so entitled! You didn't make this, someone else did and it was their vision they saw till the end. I will always be angry with Bioware changing the end to Mass Effect 3 after people complained about it! That was the biggest gaming series in the history of the company and it should ended the way they wanted it to, not the way it was demanded to be! If you don't like the ending to something that's fine, just don't lose your shit over it and claim the entire thing was ruined because of it! It's petty!
Let's move on to the last point I want to make with this post and that's people going into reviews with an agenda. Reviews, to me, should be a look at the entire game/movie as a whole and analyzed looking at everything associated with it but more and more that's not what we are seeing. We are getting complaints about how "white" the cast of a movie is, how many females are in a movie, or anything else that offends anyone. I get that more women need to lead movies and I get that certain casts need to be more diverse to appeal to a wider audience and, for the most part, I feel we are headed in that direction. I also don't think the lead character of a movie should be a black female just for the sake of being different but it seems that groups of people feel that way. Good stories are very hard to come up with and the lead character has to be at the center of everything so a lot of thought needs to be put in there. If the story calls for a female then lead roll with it, if it calls for a male lead then roll with that.
I don't want it to sound like I'm some narrow minded person with the way I'm wording things but the SJW crowd is getting a little much with things. And the same can be said with the very Liberal thinking side. Like hating the new Star Wars movies just because Rey is the lead is dumb! It's one thing to see the movie and not care for the direction but to go in with an agenda like you're already judging it before you see it regardless of what you might say in a YouTube video. And it's the same with video games. The game Days Gone got flack for having a white guy as the lead for no reason other than just to do it it seems. The same thing happened when the lead character was revealed for the new Star Wars game Jedi: Fallen Order. To me, real diversity is when you don't judge someone by the color of their skin or the sex they are. Take Mad Max: Fury Road as an example. The lead character of that movie is Max but the character who the story revolves around is Furiosa. Technically Max was the main character but that was Furiosa's movie and it worked and it didn't matter who was male and who was female!
I feel like this turned into a bit of a rant but oh well haha! It's just been something I've been thinking about and I feel that people need to chill when it comes to criticizing things. These are forms of entertainment and regardless what you may think it's very fucking hard to make a movie, make a video game, write a book, make an album, make a tv show, and it's a miracle that we get as many of those things as we do now. If you don't like something just chill out and stop with the "They ruined my childhood" shit with everything. Bitch no they didn't! All the stuff you grew up with is still there! Use your voice but stop with these shitty clickbait titles to YouTube videos like "Does It Suck" cause that's leaning in with negativity from the start.
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