erttheking said:
Yeah see, I'm an artist, I write, and I have experience with people telling me I could've been handling the way I write women better. And I listened to them and I feel like I grew as an artist. Being an artist means knowing when you can improve and taking criticism into account, finding the ones that can actually help your work while ignoring the useless ones. The most important thing an artist needs to know is that they're not infallible, they will mess up, and they're gonna need someone else to point it out. Not shouting "Don't like, don't read"
But there's a bit of a difference between game narratives and other narratives. Game characters in general are horribly written, women have just as much of a crapshoot to go through as anyone else, mostly because make the story too complicated, and you're no longer making a game, you're writing. Not to say those games don't exist, but they don't sell well because people will read a book if they want that stuff for the most part and not sit at their computer for something visually unstimulating.
You can talk about growing as a writer all you want(seriously, drop the artist crap, it makes you look like you're grasping for a title less mundane than writer, otherwise I'd call myself a culinary artist because I make good food that sells for $40 a plate instead of chef or cook. But I'm a lazy guy that doesn't like adding on unnecessary words, so that might have something to do with it.) but there's a line when criticism stops being constructive and starts sounding more like "DO IT BECAUSE I AND MY TWO BUDDIES DEMAND IT." Not much positivity, alot of negativity. And people have a right to start telling them to shove off because if they're going to complain about a variant cover(seriously, it was a beautiful cover that had alot more character and humanity than most of the other Joker celebration variants), they obviously haven't read much between the covers.
I mean, it's like telling Clive Barker to stop writing crap that scares the shit out of Stephen King, it's what he does and what he's good at, why should he stop writing for his fanbase when they offer valid complaints like Hellraiser needing him to actually be involved with for the movies to make sense and be unsettling again, and not just be bloody schlockfests. Especially since he's thought up alot of crap about them and similar themes since Hellheart thirty years ago.
Or even Neil Gaiman needing to do less Stardust, American Gods and Sandman and instead doing more stuff like I Sold my Dad for a Goldfish because Death is too sexualized, AG appropriating culture, and pagan gods and whitewashing, the Star being too pretty for a star(all of which I've seen said unironically on here and other sites). The guy's done alot of wonderful things across a variety of genre's from children picture books(Goldfish), YA(Stardust) to very much adult retellings of the named Angels in Abrahamic religions and their duties(Real Angels of New York, I think that's the title).
It's a bunch of silly people demanding silly things for their own justification while not doing their part by supporting it for the reasons they read it, and that's why people have a problem with it. Because they're judging by covers and not by what's written inside most of the time, and the stuff they do complain about inside more often than not has been discussed to death for decades and the conclusion has mostly been they're free to do whatever they want because it's a work of fiction built on the decades it's been around. Sometimes Batman's a brooding bastard, othertimes he's a brooding bastard that goes mamabear mode when something happens to one of his proteges. Sometimes Wonder Woman's Diana Prince, professional typesetter and sighing-over-the-sight-of-a-chisled-chin'er, othertimes she's the homonculus that is outdone in strength by Superman, speed by the Flash, and intellect by Batman when they concentrate, but most other times is better than them and is fully capable of holding her own against Doomsday. And sometimes J'onn is the Martian Manhunter, othertimes he's just a worse and high-gamma'd(tv setting definition here) Superman with a better(or worse considering he's got an actual career that he can't just up and leave to go cover a story for as a cover) disguise.
