Unrelated gripe: Complaints from what I can only describe as extremist casuals about even the idea of a competitive scene existing. Like most of the time the comp scene is off in its own little world with shit like ranked systems and forums or servers just for them. Also locals. Comp players love locals. Like comp players don't want to play with casuals and like...We don't. This crops up in a lot of games but fighting games, Smash (separated from fighting games because the Smash issue is distinct from how it appears with fighting games), Yugioh and Pokemon (both mainline games and tcg) have it real fucking bad. It's also often framed in this judgemental fashion of "Well we're playing for fun unlike the competitive players" when like...The training and tournaments and what not are playing for fun. It's just different definitions of fun which necessitate different spaces. I hate elitist dudebro comp players a lot but like. The elitist casuals bother me more.
I think it bothers me more because it's often so judgemental and making assumptions about why people play these games seriously. Like no I'm not doing it for internet points or because I need to win or whatever. I play fighting games more seriously than most because I want to live my very own shonen hero arc and I want to be in a community that values that and is based around it.
I didn't even realize there were elitist casual gamers. I mean it makes sense - get any group of people doing any activity and there's going to be some who go "well the way i do it is better than any other way, so i'm going to be obnoxious and hurtful about it", and if there are competitive gamers who go "fucking casuals" or whatever, drawing attention away from the competitive gamers who just want to enjoy their gaming in relative peace, then of course there are casual gamers who do the exact equivalent, drawing attention away from the casual gamers who, likewise, just want to game in peace. I wish both groups of assholes a very [forced to bother only each other so that everyone else doesn't have to deal with them]. They can join the world of civilized human beings when they are prepared to not be assholes in either direction.
Yeah it's a weird thing. It's very common among Smash players, often bringing up that "Smash isn't meant to be played that way". Which like. Who cares? With fighting games meanwhile the issues are had with the genre and its conceits as a whole. Bitching is often leveled at things like motions and tutorials being poor. That second complaint is a fair one as many games do have shitty tutorials. But even among the games that have good ones like Skullgirls and Rev 2 there's only so much a tutorial can do. You can't be made good at a fighting game by just playing through a tutorial. The game's still going to need practice and it's still going to be an uphill battle because...That's just fighting games and the appeal of them for their core fanbase. This all often gets framed with "I just want to be able to play the game" and like...You very much can play fighting games casually. Even more competitive players will pick up and play games casually just for funsies. To do it you just...Get the game and play with your friends. And hell I've seen some casual gaming groups in my life which are designed for people who aren't 100% dedicated to the game. You'll still run into skill difference issues because it's a competitive genre by nature but like. You can very much just buy the games and play them casually. Hell that's how most people who get into fighting games more regularly get into them. Woolie's Get Into Fighting Games For Fun series is a very good show of how this works. As like they literally just boot the bastard up and start playing rounds, often without even looking at the command lists. Card games the issue tends to focus around the issues of card games being pay to win affairs (a fair complaint and you can't really fix this without shit like free simulators that give you access to all the cards for free with no grind) or the want to play a particular archetype that sucks shit. Blue Eyes and Dark Magician as archetypes in Yugioh come to mind with that, since neither is very competitive but both are very popular. Resulting in people wanting to play those archetypes being constantly stomped at locals by shit like Invoked Shaddolls. And in general there often is born a kind of tension between players of less competitive decks and those playing the tier 1 decks. Sherry players were DETESTED at Force of Will locals before her ban because no one could compete against her save one other ruler. The tension can eventually birth an intense hatred of the concept of competitive players in tcgs. And like I understand these complaints, with both kinds of game and with card games especially. But it does kind of get irritating seeing people who study the game and who are into practicing and learning being talked shit about for having a different way of having fun.
There's also a weird refrain of... IDK what to call it, not "reverse sexism" but weird aggressive gender-essentialism about how fighting games bad because men are competitive. For sure, there are criticisms to be made of fgc and other competitive communities, "bro gamer" is a real type of guy that exist -- however, collaborative/team-based games aren't gonna become more popular through shitting on 1v1 games, no matter how many people act like they are. (Incidentally my pet theory about why people act like League and Dota are somehow uniquely toxic and horrible is because those are like the two games that actually benefit from a more team-focused approach to playing. They're a perfect hatesink for both individualistic gitguddery and people thinking being so nonconfrontational that you don't even play competitive games is a virtue.)
oh the gender essentialist thing drives me bonkers too. same with transformative vs. curative fandom shit where the "manly" curative fandom is treated as being bad. and i dunno it feels especially shitty when like you are a woman in at least the periphery of the fgc and you know for a fact how shitty it can be to be a woman in those spaces, especially if you're queer. because going "fighting games are bad because men are competitive" just brushes off the existence of competitive women or the very real problems women in the community face. as well as ignoring the fact that not everyone who plays the things seriously is playing to win. indeed, the most common advice i see given to people frustrated about losing all the time is that fighting games aren't about winning. they're about self improvement. and to really stick with the genre you need to change the mindset from "i want to win" to "i want to improve, even at little things" such that you can take joy out of lost matches because you got better at a thing.
Oh god, the transformative vs. curative false dichotomy gender binary. I didn't write a fucking study guide to the Umineko no Naku Koro Ni question arcs because I'm planning to give people plot trivia pop quizzes and shun anyone who gets a question wrong to prove my manly brilliance, I did it because the autismbrain loves explaining things to people. (Bonus points when the "transformative is the Superior And More Intellectual Way" thing shades into the separate Fandom Gripe where people insist that fan work is always and exclusively an expression of dissatisfaction with the source material.)
Hello is this published anywhere because do want. do want, so much, please provide, it would get me going on my reread so much faster.
I don't have the whole thing Officially Published yet since there's some big holes in Alliance of the Golden Witch that I keep not getting around to filling, but until such time as I do, Google Doc links: Spoiler Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 (incomplete) (If/when I finish the last summary bits and maybe add a final review roundup, I'll put it on AO3. Maybe the Steam community page too if I feel like the likelihood of it reaching more people who might need it is worth the risk of having to argue with people about why I am posting in the walkthrough section for a completely linear visual novel .)
Thank you! I won't spread it around, I'm just very glad to have it for personal use. (But once you do publish it, I know at least a couple of people whomst I could probably get into Umineko with just such a thing. The competitive urge to Demonstrate Smart is a good motivator, y'know?)
honest to god i don't write fic for shit i'm dissatisfied with. like i write fic because i am very satisfied and i want to see more of it. i'm not the sort of fan who creates like my preferred rwby in fanfic. the closest i might come to this is like my ideal transformers series. but it's not written out of like a distaste for what exists but because i want a fembot led transformers series with the token boy. and like so often the fanwork as expression of dissatisfaction thing frames fanfic as hate letters and like no. it's not a hate letter. it's a love letter. one that does, admittedly, stem from a dissatisfaction but like. i don't hate transformers??? i'm not angry at it for not having my perfect dream world of a show led by windblade and which has greenlight and blue motorcycle arcee and gauge and shit. i only want that series because i happen to like transformers a lot and i want more fembots and things centered around them.
I have written spitefic before, and I do understand the urge to take a hammer and fix the canon, but for me it's still always born out of a love for something that was there. There's a whole strain of talking-about-fandom where I sometimes find myself thinking, "...Have you considered reading things you actually like?"
I'm losing interest in a ship I used to love and I miss it, because I hate how the fandom handles it.
Sometimes there's just That One Thing about a particular series that strikes you, a concept, a motif, a character, etc... but that doesn't mean you actually like the rest of the canon at all. You just want to take that one idea and run with it. ... but at the same time, actually making things is like, hard work, and moaning about the lost potential that could have been is fun and easy!
I am currently struggling mightily about whether or not to block people in the Dracula Daily tag, because on the one hand I'm generally enjoying the whole "block people for bad opinions" Tumblr strategy, but on the other hand this bad opinion is so unmoored from the text that I also kind of don't want to block them out of morbid curiosity about what they might post next. Because... apparently a bunch of people have decided that Lucy's mom is a horrible callous parent because she isn't concerned enough about Lucy's physical condition. Which the entire cast. Lucy included. Are collectively lying to her about because they've decided she'd drop dead the second anyone mentioned that anything happening to Lucy was even slightly concerning. Because this book was written in 1897, and the incredible frontiers of the future were gramophones, portable cameras, respectable women doing secretary work for their husbands instead of staying home all day every day, putting that weird guy who eats spiders in a room that has padding instead of locking him in the attic, and that if you inject person A's blood into person B when B is dying of blood loss sometimes B gets much better and sometimes they instantly die and no one knows why. There are a lot of interesting things to say about the parallels between the experience of chronic illness and the experience of being eaten by a Dracula, but instead of any of them for some reason a whole bunch of people have decided to get really angry at the fairly minor character of a sick old lady who told a man her daughter recently turned down a marriage proposal from that he probably didn't have to stay up all night watching her sleep for the second night in a row because even though she'd been looking pretty bad for the last two weeks she visibly got a million times better after one visit from a specialist.
I don't exactly have high expectations of gacha game fandoms, but being in the Arknights fandom is painful sometimes. I end up having to consult Gamepress and Wikia a fair bit because this is a game with a ton of characters and a ton of text and a lot of numbers to look up, and this is survivable whenever all I'm looking for is, like, stat numbers or transcripts of character profiles. But the problem is that this is also a game that is very dense with historical, literary, and zoological references and in-jokes, which has extremely extensive worldbuilding and character lore that they love to present via ambiguous breadcrumb trails and a whole lot of Big Themes about political philosophy, and while Gamepress and Wikia contributors are very good at, say, getting accurate information about skill upgrade costs, they apparently have significantly lower standards for "reading comprehension." So I'll be innocently trying to figure out if the translators whiffed it on an untranslatable Chinese pun again, or if I missed a Dostoevsky reference, or find a detail about a character who's never appeared onscreen that was only mentioned in the flavor text of a collectable item in an event a year ago, or just look through the profiles of every known character associated with a particular faction so I can fill out a conspiracy corkboard about that faction, and I'll get blindsided by some random thing that's just... stunningly wrong. It's included everything from misidentified birds to reading clearly-ironic dialogue literally to summary pages that are basically fanfiction to misidentifying the culprit of a murder mystery to mistaking a slang term for the name of a magical species to outright denying the possibility that a clear allusion to a thing could be about that thing. There's a "lore explained" page on Gamepress that claims that a character having big boobs is a reference to Japanese legends about tanuki having giant testicles and having a skill called "Space Out" means she's non-neurotypical, while completely failing to notice a fairly giant Touhou reference. The lyrics page for one character theme has had "prostrate" typoed as "prostate" for years, and the only reason that wasn't the final straw to make me figure out which of my uBlock filters has made the Wikia login button disappear and bypass it to become the Wiki Avenger is that the page is locked.
Also, I have to say it adds some extra layers to the usual sorts of Fandom Bad Takes I see around Tungl.hell when the fandom in question is extremely clear about being full of metaphors for real life. Shoutout to the person who insisted that there was no evidence that an organization called the Inquisition, operating in the nation of Iberia, had any religious affiliation.
Something rubs me the wrong way about people who cite the dominant social views of the time period a not-very-realistic fandom is set in as a sign the characters should be homophobic/racist/whatever. Like, JKR's views aside, does it really make that much sense for wizarding society to be against transforming one's body when their entire population from teenagers up can change themselves into canaries or armchairs and back with no ill effects as much as they like? They might not get why, but even if they weren't fans the reasoning wouldn't be identical to that of Muggle society in the 90s. And yeah, TF2 takes place in 1968, but I really doubt the character who went on an anti-Nazi vigilante spree after the war was over and confuses Sun Tzu with Noah is sufficiently aware of the dominant social paradigm to follow it strictly.
my fandom had a disappointing finale :/ there was no way it wasn't going to be disappointing, but I'm still disappointed.
Spoiler: tw rape I'd be less annoyed by the APH "defeat equals rape" fanon if writers who used it went all the logical way with it rather than picking specific "bad guys". Logically, various pairs would have both raped each other on different occasions, and I know of at least one occasion where by the canon timeline the winner would be a little kid and the loser wouldn't, giving me visions not dissimilar to this (probably NSFW, depicts animals humping and one of said animals is a baby one). After a certain point it just becomes tragicomic and I'm sad I haven't seen much in the way of deconstruction like that.
