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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9825164" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah I think the problem is when people start getting overzealous or knee-jerking, or start bringing in extraneous political/cultural stuff, which we saw a lot with the SW sequels (prior to TRoS I would have rated them overall better than the PT, post-TRoS I can't really say that lol, though like the PT, even TRoS has a couple of fun bits).I think one other problematic issue we see today is that audiences (and this goes for videogames too) are often quite good at realizing they didn't enjoy something, or didn't enjoy it as much as they expected, but instead of saying "I thought it sucked", people always need to come up with reasons, and I blame twerps like me in part for this, because this is a real post-social-media or least post-forums thing, because if you just say "I didn't enjoy X", on forums or social media, twerps like me will always be < nasal whiner voice > "Welllll why didn't you like? Huh?? Explain!" (or worse). We can't just let people not like something, and because of that, those people have had inculcated in them a sense that they need to come up with reasons.But they're really spectacularly bad at identifying the actual reasons. The actual problems. This is very obvious from the specifics of a lot of the critiques of movies and videogames.Especially when they're quite subtle or complex in the ways they don't work. Like, the strongest criticisms of TLJ, the hardest to argue against, are around pacing and structure. I loved TLJ (as did my wife) genuinely on first watch, but on re-watches, the structural and pacing issues are pretty noticeable (and I think Johnson struggles with this a little even in his well-regarded mystery movies, I note).But most people aren't going to identify that. They just think "I didn't like it", and then they either get pressed on "why", or feel the need to pre-emptively come up with "why". And so they identify more superficial elements, or more minor elements they didn't vibe with, or worse, they read someone else's reasons (which may well be intentionally dishonest cultural warfare stuff, carefully phrased to pass inspection, like the attacks on the non-white and non-male actors in TLJ) and elevate those to being the reasons. Which can then make things pretty hard to discuss, because people tend to double-down on whatever they decided was the reason.The same also applies to praise, note, but seems to matter less. I've seen movies with pretty weak acting and scripting praised for those elements quite frequently, or terrible editing particularly praised for editing (or in one notable case, winning the Oscar for acting, my step-mum who is a director of photography had some choice words about that lol), but it's people just trying to come up with reasons why they liked something, when the actual reason is maybe "the movie just had a really charismatic lead and great pacing".(Of course all this and I still struggle to explain the very lukewarm critical reaction to The Running Man. I saw that movie. It was really good - very on-the-nose, but who cares, this is 2025, we could do with more on-the-nose stuff. It was a much better movie than half the action movies which were better reviewed this year. Oh well, it'll no doubt become a cult classic - a lot of movies that stand the test of time get weirdly lukewarm reactions at the time.)</blockquote>

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