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Ranting
You all think that my opinion is the most important feature in anything you do. Before you eat breakfast in the morning, you say to yourself, "Would Kay eat this cereal?" When you go to work, you think to yourself, "What does Kay think about traffic lights?" Well, I've decided to help you out a bit by giving you my opinion on one of the most difficult distinctions on the internet:
I like reading reviews. I really do. I take a secret glee in reading what other people think of my favorite loved and favorite hated things. When the movie Gigli came out, I didn't even bother to see it: I just went straight to online reviewers like Mr. Cranky, the Flick Filosopher, and Rotten Tomatoes. Now, we are not looking at unbiased reviews here. Mr. Cranky's job is to tell you how much he hates basically every movie out there. The Flick Filosopher is an unrelentingly real person who spent the entire time at Pirates of the Caribbean thinking about how Orlando Bloom just HAD to kiss Keira Knightley, or Johnny Depp just HAD to kiss Keira Knightley, or Orlando Bloom just HAD to kiss Johnny Depp, or somebody had better kiss somebody, damnit! The romance is too there! I respect fangirlism in my reviewers, and I laugh at Mr. Cranky's cynicism because he unfailingly points out real stupidity -- the stupidities that make people en masse want to kill directors. ("Not only is lesbianism a transitory sexual preference, to be waved around like a Chanel purse, but it's also a great marketing tool!")
I also love the Ficbitches. They take really really BAD things that really really NEED to be torn to pieces, and do exactly that. They are unapologetically snarky and honest. And if every now and then they say something that annoys me, or you, then -- well, the same goes for every human being out there, including your best friend. You know I'm right; I'm Kay.
But that's what I'm talking about. You, o imaginary person who cares what I write here (unless of course I write something negative about a specific person, in which case he or she will jump out of the woodwork to be insulted), know that I am only kidding around when I say things like "You all think that my opinion is the most important feature in anything you do." I don't really believe that you think that. As a matter of fact, if you DO think that, I advise you to get counseling, because I am honestly not that smart a person.
But there are reviewers out there -- or "recappers", or "raters", or whatever they'd like to be called -- who think that just because they dare to have opinions, everyone with a working brain will have them.
I'll have to use an example. I was reading a "recap" of FF9. Okay, fine, great. FF9 had its good and its bad, but it was overall a great game.
Allow me to give you a hint, aspiring reviewers: do NOT reuse the same fucking joke over and over again until your reader DIES OF BOREDOM. It takes a lot of work to make a repeated joke get funnier instead of lamer.
That's what this recap did. It went through every scene in FF9 in painful detail and decided that at least once in every paragraph she was going to state that the programmers did something specifically as if they were screaming at the viewer, "LOOOOOOOOK!!!!!!! THIS ISN'T FF8!!!!!!1" I don't know about you, but when I played FF9, I thought about FF8 precisely once, and that was when I first saw Garnet and I went, "Hey, not Rinoa again!" But she turned out to not be Rinoa, and it was good. But WHY must EVERYBODY who thinks they know ANYTHING about Final Fantasy insist that every Final Fantasy is either striving to be the same or different from its predecessors? Can't you take the fucking game as it is? I don't think they were TRYING to make the airship look more medieval than the ship in FF8 specifically for the purpose of beating you over the head with a Not-FF8 Bat; I think maybe they made the airship look more medieval than the ship in FF8 because FF9 takes place in a medieval steampunk setting, as opposed to FF8, which took place in a distinctly more futuristic setting. So maybe you should, I don't know, stop talking about FF8 and get to talking about this game?
Some of these reviewers also have the really obnoxious tendency to go through the games with their own character names. I'm sure you think it's really funny that you named Cloud "Bitch", and maybe it was, among your other twelve-year-old friends, for the first ten minutes; but when you're writing a ten-part recap of every moment of plot in FF7, by page 16 when you say, "It's a starry night and Bitch is waiting by the well," the audience is profoundly not amused. Say once, "I called Cloud Bitch, because [insert witty joke here, assuming there is any joke besides It's insulting and that makes it funny! Duuuuhr!]..." and then call him Cloud for the rest of the recap because goddamnit you know perfectly well that's not his name.
I also think that the more detail you go into about how bad a game was, the less it seems like you have legitimate complaints about the game and more it sounds like you're just needlessly bashing something that almost certainly countless people adored. (Well. Unless you're playing FF Mystic Quest.)
Example: In FFX, Tidus said to Auron, "You knew my old man, didn't you?" instead of "I heard you knew my old man, is that true?" thus enabling the recapper's miniscule brain to mistakenly believe that Tidus was realizing this for the first TIME in this scene, when what he was actually doing was asking for confirmation of something other people had told him. The recapper proceeded to bitch about this for four paragraphs.
Okay, fine. If you were using this as an example of why you think Tidus is a dumbass, four paragraphs bitching about his stupidity is fine, although I don't agree. (He ain't bright, but I don't think he's half as dumb as the reviewer.) But when you're just detailing one moment among the dozens of hours of gameplay, it doesn't deserve that much comment. Very little, in fact, does. Unless this was the turning point of the game for you and made you utterly loathe both Tidus and the game, then there is no earthly reason why you should dwell on it this much. Unless your purpose is not to educate or explore or entertain, but to senselessly, hatefully bash something, in which case, you don't deserve the right to talk. There's a difference between "sarcasm" and "psychotic hatred". I can't stand it when people have nothing intelligent to say beyond, "And then THIS happened and I HATED THAT TOO." At least try and pretend that there are reasons why other people would want to listen to your hateful ranting. If you hate it so much, don't go back and dwell on it; your psychiatrist says that it makes you tense. Which brings me to my final point:
Most of all, I think that if you dislike something, you should STOP PLAYING and/or READING and/or WATCHING it, and GO AWAY. If you don't even plan to make the best out of the situation, or never see anything worthwhile in it, then WHY are you subjecting yourself to it? Think of funny things to say (and not the SAME goddamn funny things) while you're doing it, or at LEAST don't subject the rest of us to your bitching and whining.
I have also read, in the same group of interest although not by the same people, a book/movie/something review "blog". In this blog, the two reviewers go chapter by chapter through every event in a book and... bash it, I guess, since all the books I was interested in looking at were dissed mercilessly. Especially of note, I found, were the Harry Potter book reviews. Because they were essentially, "This happened. I was disgusted. That happened. It was boring. This happened, and I hate this series. That happened, and it was SO PREDICTABLE AND INFANTILE AND UNINTERESTING AND CLICHED AND EVERYBODY IS SHALLOW AND STEREOTYPICAL AND..." Ad nauseam. And I definitely mean nauseam.
I have to say: Why do you keep reading? You know you hate these books. You don't even have a duty to inform the public: THEY know you hate them too. Really. Why do you continue to read when you're "pissed off over the very -existence- of this book"?
Because they think nothing is more important than their own talking. You can't possibly not want to hear their opinions. And goddamnit, they're not going to bother with any positive anything! If they dislike something, then there can't possibly be anything good about it, it has to be TOTALLY bad. Of course you think Harry Potter is as boring as they do, and therefore telling you it is boring is a legitimate review. Of course you want to read about how they renamed the main character "Bitch" for hours of text reading, and of course you think Tidus is a dumbass, and of course you believe that games have no personality beyond their relation, or lack thereof, to their immediate predecessors.
If you have nothing constructive to say, SHUT UP. PLEASE.
This has been an unapologetically selfish rant about a personal opinion, but if anybody reads this far, I want to know if I'm the only one who feels this way. Share? So I don't have to decide that you all feel the same way I do by default.
SOME people care.
Some of you may also note that I am using a lot of lj-cuts lately. That's because it's occurred to me that I often ramble on for screens of text, even just to say a very simple idea because I talk too much, and... most of you probably don't like me enough to care. ^^;;; So this is my gesture of mercy and appreciation to you for friending me.
I like reading reviews. I really do. I take a secret glee in reading what other people think of my favorite loved and favorite hated things. When the movie Gigli came out, I didn't even bother to see it: I just went straight to online reviewers like Mr. Cranky, the Flick Filosopher, and Rotten Tomatoes. Now, we are not looking at unbiased reviews here. Mr. Cranky's job is to tell you how much he hates basically every movie out there. The Flick Filosopher is an unrelentingly real person who spent the entire time at Pirates of the Caribbean thinking about how Orlando Bloom just HAD to kiss Keira Knightley, or Johnny Depp just HAD to kiss Keira Knightley, or Orlando Bloom just HAD to kiss Johnny Depp, or somebody had better kiss somebody, damnit! The romance is too there! I respect fangirlism in my reviewers, and I laugh at Mr. Cranky's cynicism because he unfailingly points out real stupidity -- the stupidities that make people en masse want to kill directors. ("Not only is lesbianism a transitory sexual preference, to be waved around like a Chanel purse, but it's also a great marketing tool!")
I also love the Ficbitches. They take really really BAD things that really really NEED to be torn to pieces, and do exactly that. They are unapologetically snarky and honest. And if every now and then they say something that annoys me, or you, then -- well, the same goes for every human being out there, including your best friend. You know I'm right; I'm Kay.
But that's what I'm talking about. You, o imaginary person who cares what I write here (unless of course I write something negative about a specific person, in which case he or she will jump out of the woodwork to be insulted), know that I am only kidding around when I say things like "You all think that my opinion is the most important feature in anything you do." I don't really believe that you think that. As a matter of fact, if you DO think that, I advise you to get counseling, because I am honestly not that smart a person.
But there are reviewers out there -- or "recappers", or "raters", or whatever they'd like to be called -- who think that just because they dare to have opinions, everyone with a working brain will have them.
I'll have to use an example. I was reading a "recap" of FF9. Okay, fine, great. FF9 had its good and its bad, but it was overall a great game.
Allow me to give you a hint, aspiring reviewers: do NOT reuse the same fucking joke over and over again until your reader DIES OF BOREDOM. It takes a lot of work to make a repeated joke get funnier instead of lamer.
That's what this recap did. It went through every scene in FF9 in painful detail and decided that at least once in every paragraph she was going to state that the programmers did something specifically as if they were screaming at the viewer, "LOOOOOOOOK!!!!!!! THIS ISN'T FF8!!!!!!1" I don't know about you, but when I played FF9, I thought about FF8 precisely once, and that was when I first saw Garnet and I went, "Hey, not Rinoa again!" But she turned out to not be Rinoa, and it was good. But WHY must EVERYBODY who thinks they know ANYTHING about Final Fantasy insist that every Final Fantasy is either striving to be the same or different from its predecessors? Can't you take the fucking game as it is? I don't think they were TRYING to make the airship look more medieval than the ship in FF8 specifically for the purpose of beating you over the head with a Not-FF8 Bat; I think maybe they made the airship look more medieval than the ship in FF8 because FF9 takes place in a medieval steampunk setting, as opposed to FF8, which took place in a distinctly more futuristic setting. So maybe you should, I don't know, stop talking about FF8 and get to talking about this game?
Some of these reviewers also have the really obnoxious tendency to go through the games with their own character names. I'm sure you think it's really funny that you named Cloud "Bitch", and maybe it was, among your other twelve-year-old friends, for the first ten minutes; but when you're writing a ten-part recap of every moment of plot in FF7, by page 16 when you say, "It's a starry night and Bitch is waiting by the well," the audience is profoundly not amused. Say once, "I called Cloud Bitch, because [insert witty joke here, assuming there is any joke besides It's insulting and that makes it funny! Duuuuhr!]..." and then call him Cloud for the rest of the recap because goddamnit you know perfectly well that's not his name.
I also think that the more detail you go into about how bad a game was, the less it seems like you have legitimate complaints about the game and more it sounds like you're just needlessly bashing something that almost certainly countless people adored. (Well. Unless you're playing FF Mystic Quest.)
Example: In FFX, Tidus said to Auron, "You knew my old man, didn't you?" instead of "I heard you knew my old man, is that true?" thus enabling the recapper's miniscule brain to mistakenly believe that Tidus was realizing this for the first TIME in this scene, when what he was actually doing was asking for confirmation of something other people had told him. The recapper proceeded to bitch about this for four paragraphs.
Okay, fine. If you were using this as an example of why you think Tidus is a dumbass, four paragraphs bitching about his stupidity is fine, although I don't agree. (He ain't bright, but I don't think he's half as dumb as the reviewer.) But when you're just detailing one moment among the dozens of hours of gameplay, it doesn't deserve that much comment. Very little, in fact, does. Unless this was the turning point of the game for you and made you utterly loathe both Tidus and the game, then there is no earthly reason why you should dwell on it this much. Unless your purpose is not to educate or explore or entertain, but to senselessly, hatefully bash something, in which case, you don't deserve the right to talk. There's a difference between "sarcasm" and "psychotic hatred". I can't stand it when people have nothing intelligent to say beyond, "And then THIS happened and I HATED THAT TOO." At least try and pretend that there are reasons why other people would want to listen to your hateful ranting. If you hate it so much, don't go back and dwell on it; your psychiatrist says that it makes you tense. Which brings me to my final point:
Most of all, I think that if you dislike something, you should STOP PLAYING and/or READING and/or WATCHING it, and GO AWAY. If you don't even plan to make the best out of the situation, or never see anything worthwhile in it, then WHY are you subjecting yourself to it? Think of funny things to say (and not the SAME goddamn funny things) while you're doing it, or at LEAST don't subject the rest of us to your bitching and whining.
I have also read, in the same group of interest although not by the same people, a book/movie/something review "blog". In this blog, the two reviewers go chapter by chapter through every event in a book and... bash it, I guess, since all the books I was interested in looking at were dissed mercilessly. Especially of note, I found, were the Harry Potter book reviews. Because they were essentially, "This happened. I was disgusted. That happened. It was boring. This happened, and I hate this series. That happened, and it was SO PREDICTABLE AND INFANTILE AND UNINTERESTING AND CLICHED AND EVERYBODY IS SHALLOW AND STEREOTYPICAL AND..." Ad nauseam. And I definitely mean nauseam.
I have to say: Why do you keep reading? You know you hate these books. You don't even have a duty to inform the public: THEY know you hate them too. Really. Why do you continue to read when you're "pissed off over the very -existence- of this book"?
Because they think nothing is more important than their own talking. You can't possibly not want to hear their opinions. And goddamnit, they're not going to bother with any positive anything! If they dislike something, then there can't possibly be anything good about it, it has to be TOTALLY bad. Of course you think Harry Potter is as boring as they do, and therefore telling you it is boring is a legitimate review. Of course you want to read about how they renamed the main character "Bitch" for hours of text reading, and of course you think Tidus is a dumbass, and of course you believe that games have no personality beyond their relation, or lack thereof, to their immediate predecessors.
If you have nothing constructive to say, SHUT UP. PLEASE.
This has been an unapologetically selfish rant about a personal opinion, but if anybody reads this far, I want to know if I'm the only one who feels this way. Share? So I don't have to decide that you all feel the same way I do by default.
SOME people care.
Some of you may also note that I am using a lot of lj-cuts lately. That's because it's occurred to me that I often ramble on for screens of text, even just to say a very simple idea because I talk too much, and... most of you probably don't like me enough to care. ^^;;; So this is my gesture of mercy and appreciation to you for friending me.
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1. The Pure Fanboy- "D00d, this game isn't for Xbox, it is Teh Sux0r, Halo Rulez, This game is a two, the graphics aren't nearly as good as Halo, and there's no Shotgun." This is probably for, oh...Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8.
2. The Total Whiner (May be a #1 in disguise- be warned!) "This game has this gameplay function. I think it's stupid and gimmicky. I mean, who thought of something that so obviously sucks, because it sucks, because it does. I unfoundedly hate this part of the game, and thus this game, because that's that. "
3 is basically the game version of the Dissector form that has be so completely ranted out. So... yeah. Useless. And don't get me started on some of the positive reviews...