Its quite hard to read a book that joyfully holds up a system where you have to serve in the military or your voice doesn't mean shit.ccdohl said:
The 50 Most Boring Opinions In Geek Culture - Part I
- Thread starter MovieBob
- Start date
Link isn't allowed to speak with more than sounds and grunts for 2 reasons:
1) Every time they have tried, I wanted to punch him in the face (this from a guy with a Zelda tattoo)
2) Because you are supposed to be Link. If he had gotten a voice in the past, he would be Link, an character you guide. However, they have chosen to leave him voiceless (in my opinion) because he is supposed to be someone you play as. You can't play as someone if every time the talk, you want to hurt them.
1) Every time they have tried, I wanted to punch him in the face (this from a guy with a Zelda tattoo)
2) Because you are supposed to be Link. If he had gotten a voice in the past, he would be Link, an character you guide. However, they have chosen to leave him voiceless (in my opinion) because he is supposed to be someone you play as. You can't play as someone if every time the talk, you want to hurt them.
I find this entire list pretentious, self-gratifying and generally boring.
Sounds like "Mainstream opinions are boring" or just a list of opinions Bob finds stupid.
Sounds like "Mainstream opinions are boring" or just a list of opinions Bob finds stupid.
Very, very true. A valid complaint is a still a valid complaint, whether it's the first time it's made or the thousandth.erttheking said:
Also, that is the first time I've ever heard anyone say that Starship Troopers the movie was better than the book. It boggles the mind.
Interesting thing about that Dragon Ball Z one. I loved it as a young kid, but when I hit about 12 I started to think less of it because of the yelling, powerlevels, etc. But as I've gotten older I've actually wrapped back around to liking it quite a bit. I love the whole father-son "passing the torch" thing that happens as the Cell arc progresses, for example, that's great drama. It's not a great show, but the only real complaint I still have with it is the padding, which they cut down a lot of in the recent re-release.
I don't normally say this, but honestly I feel I've read enough opinions on the subject of the Starship Troopers book in order to make a valid opinion on the nature of the book.ccdohl said:
I assume its roughly the same for 90% of the people who ***** about the nature of the Twilight books.
True story, I didn't even notice the bat-nipples when I watched those movies.
I also want to thank Bob for his "context" to the Disney Princess stuff. Context really is important and it's really short-sighted to call old works of fiction evil or bad for not conforming to modern standards.
Furthermore, knowing the context actually does give the films their use. Cinderella makes for an excellent discussion on how times have changed, because at the time when Cinderella was being told as a folk-tale, that really was all women could do.
I also want to thank Bob for his "context" to the Disney Princess stuff. Context really is important and it's really short-sighted to call old works of fiction evil or bad for not conforming to modern standards.
Furthermore, knowing the context actually does give the films their use. Cinderella makes for an excellent discussion on how times have changed, because at the time when Cinderella was being told as a folk-tale, that really was all women could do.
The society in the Starship Troopers Novel is unquestionably rather fascist (their ideology is centered around the State, and in order to wield the authority of the state, you must show your willingness to put your life on the line for it). It's still an interesting though experiment, though, which was something that Heinlein did in a number of his books. There's the Anarchism of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the weird incest family of To Sail Beyond The Sunset.
Too right.shintakie10 said:
I formed my equally valid opinion on the nature of Bronies in the exact same fashion.
The problem is that most cutscenes in games ARE bad cutscenes. Another issue is that most game developers don't seem to realize that they can tell their story through the medium in which they work instead of resorting to cinematic interludes. The song argument holds no water because music does not interrupt a motion picture. Imagine if the most important scenes and plot developments of every film was a wall of text instead of filmed.MovieBob said:
My tolerance for text scrolls in movies is the same as in cutscenes in games. They have their place in the prologue, epilogue and during important developments to explain things that can't be shown (Such as historical events that may unfold.) But notice how most historical movies work with the absence of all this and is able to trust that the viewer would understand.
Many Chinese movies fall into this trap. I don't mean that they would stop the action to impose text over the screen saying "After conquering Shanghai, the Japanese Imperial Army set its sights on the Chinese capital of Nanking" for historical facts surrounding a large abstract topic. Important events that revolve around its central characters are skipped and replaced with text scrolls.
Something like...
"Sergeant Lam's entire platoon was massacred. In order to escape the chaos he walked through enemy lines wearing an enemy uniform"
That's something I don't accept with film and the same can be said for video games.
I don't think that we should limit the amount of tools that developers can use or mandate how stories should be told. Just as I kick back and cheerfully enjoy the John Williams music and happily read the scrolling text at the start of every Star Wars movie, I enjoy the cinematics as rewards between missions in Blizzard games. But games that manage to present a rich narrative without resorting to interrupting cutscenes such as Half-Life, Portal, Bioshock, Dishonored, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Fallout, Dead Space, and The Elder Scrolls are richer for this.
In literature and film class we are taught "Show don't tell"
In games it should be "Do don't show"
The thing about long running silent protagonists is that fans are able to interpret and give the characters their own mental personality. When the tradition is broken, fans are usually dissapointed that the characterization doesn't match up or worse the character becomes bland and generic (Master Chief, Isaac Clarke) or even annoying (Samus, Link).MovieBob said:
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I agree that Japanese developers (or at least the animators) seem to like cutscenes more, that's somewhat unfair. My biggest disappointment this year was Max Payne 3. The third installment of one of my favorite franchises that was always self-aware of how ludicrous its subject matter is and had minimal and skippable cutscenes. Max Payne 3 had long unskippable cutscenes every 200 feet that tried to be serious but fell flat and seemed to believe that by dropping F-bombs it made it more adult and deep.Aiddon said:
The guy who defended the Last Airbender says this. But I feel you, I defended him up until that point.MovieBob said:
What I'm getting from this is "if you don't like something, just shut up and let it be."
That's the kind of attitude that creates dystopian societies.
The right to be able to say when we don't like something is something we deserve. The right to complain en masse has served to create some great things, like the women's rights, civil rights, getting rid of child labor, taking lead out of children's toys, granting consumer rights...
Pretty much all progressive changes come from people just complaining. Sure this is just stuff in nerd culture (which may seem trivial) but "boring" as they may seem, maybe we should stop and consider they're boring because change is so slow that we have to KEEP making the complaints.
That's the kind of attitude that creates dystopian societies.
The right to be able to say when we don't like something is something we deserve. The right to complain en masse has served to create some great things, like the women's rights, civil rights, getting rid of child labor, taking lead out of children's toys, granting consumer rights...
Pretty much all progressive changes come from people just complaining. Sure this is just stuff in nerd culture (which may seem trivial) but "boring" as they may seem, maybe we should stop and consider they're boring because change is so slow that we have to KEEP making the complaints.
1. Lies! NGE was the greatest work of big mecha anime satire ever created... it's just no one got the joke.omegawyrm said:
2. To be fair, some of those visual novels ARE just weird Japanese porn. But if we bring those up we'd have to also bring up Lady Chatterly's Lover, and more recently, 50 shades of Grey.
3. Well... it does. That's why it needs orks. But being fair again, it's mostly the novels that take it too seriously. The rule books and such always have the goofy short stories pointing out the relative insanity of the world. I miss the old orks though. They went out of their way to be silly. I remember the old Stormboys used to be young orks rebelling against their culture by ironing their uniforms and polishing boots. Oh, and the snotling canon, which ripped a hole in the warp to transport snotlings inside tanks.
Ah, now I see the pattern in the 3 that immediately sprang to my mind. Each of those opinions are the ones most frequently used to shut down discussion about those topics, ignoring their subtleties and invalidating them outright. Actually a lot of the opinions Bob used were also in the form "____ should not be like ____" or "____ has no value". For me, personally, nothing bugs me more in the fandom communities than when people shut off avenues of thought or discussion without giving them proper consideration. FilmCritHulk once related a quote from Quentin Tarantino where he said "Never hate a movie, they have too much to teach you," which I've always found a much more fun and interesting way to engage with geek culture. That's really why I think Yahtzee is a mostly negative influence on the community, His opinions are so Influential and overwhelmingly negative that it shuts out almost all discussion, leaving only a fight between the defenders and the attackers to be had without subtlety or concession. And the most common complaints about the gaming community? Too polarized. Too negative. Too angry. Not that I'm laying all of that at any one person or group's feet, just using an example at hand.beniki said:
Evangelion is an excellent example of why the "worthiness" conversation is, for lack of a better term, boring. But that exact train of thought shuts down so many potentially great discussions and turns them into battles and does so pretty frequently. Eva is a giant, crazy, clusterfuck of insanity that anime fandom still hasn't nailed down after 16 YEARS of discussion. Was it a parody? an homage? depraved rantings of a depressed man? did the plot actually make any sense? why are so many eastern fans attached to Rei and so many western fans atttached to Asuka? Does Shinji make different decisions in 26 and 26'? Was End of Evangelion really the director's "revenge"? Evangelion is pretty important to me and I've loved the experience of being a fan of it. I think it provides a great illustration of why the negative opinions are the boring ones. A positive opinion represents an idea that can be digested and learned from, while a negative one says "This idea is not worthwhile. Do not change yourself to accommodate it. Stay as you already were."
Oh yeah, back on 40k. The orks are hilarious. They're my go to example for why the universe is in on its own joke. And the Angry Marines are why the fans are in on it. Also, the Caiaphas Cain novels do a great job of showing the universe as being over-the-top hilarious in its cruelty and remind me a lot of the Hitchhiker's Guide in that way.
My top boring oppinions
1. Bring back Firefly
2. Firefly is overrated
3. They Will never bring back Firefly, so stop moaning about it
I'm personally a subscriber to both 1 and 3, and I get the people in camp 2, but seriously, shut up about it.
I love that show, and in my heart I still want it back, but the rabbid fanbase makes me feel sick sometimes. Likewise, the people who make it their mission in life to tell everyone that Joss Whedon is overrated is just as tiresome, and so are the people who can't see a Browncoat without feeling the need to tell them how foolish they are for wanting more of what they love.
Every side of this argument makes me tired, I just wanna watch the reruns and weep in peace.
1. Bring back Firefly
2. Firefly is overrated
3. They Will never bring back Firefly, so stop moaning about it
I'm personally a subscriber to both 1 and 3, and I get the people in camp 2, but seriously, shut up about it.
I love that show, and in my heart I still want it back, but the rabbid fanbase makes me feel sick sometimes. Likewise, the people who make it their mission in life to tell everyone that Joss Whedon is overrated is just as tiresome, and so are the people who can't see a Browncoat without feeling the need to tell them how foolish they are for wanting more of what they love.
Every side of this argument makes me tired, I just wanna watch the reruns and weep in peace.