“It’s not a politically progressive game: these identities are all in service of the game’s vision of the cyberpunk future, one that can feel implausible and alienating but also has hints of the world we live in today.”

In 2019 the movie industry made $41 billion and the music industry made $19 billion.
Video games made $152 billion.

The “mixed feelings” in the title come off more as overwhelmed ambivalence and fatigue in the article, than like you truly have had a mixed experience with good and bad game elements. Again and again and again you bring up things that seem subjectively good, and then qualify that by saying they left you cold,…

God damnit, now I gotta wait over an entire DAY before I can review bomb something because I hate trans people? What about my first amendment rights?!

I refuse to recognize any post-thac0 system. I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit in my time but I can’t abide these thac0less perverted infidels with their fucking AC10 and their pomade and poodle skirts and denim trousers. DISGUSTING.

GOOD.

I guess I missed the scene where Daenerys was burning random Meereenese pedestrians to death. 

My reasoning doesn’t even come close to saying that. It’s of course easy to find thematic parallels between things in the show and the real world, but “real-world revolutions turning on themselves after the consolidation of power” is not adequately reflected by what the show does with Dany.

Avengers: Age of Ultron introduced the deeply troubling, reductive idea that Black Widow saw herself as a monster because of the Red Room procedure that rendered her sterile (though some debate this).

People get more upset at watching civilians and children get burned down than they do at seeing slavers getting executed, imagine that.

So who else killed them?

Right. The Baratheons, Lannisters, and Starks were the ones that killed all the Valyrians.

Or, get this, people are actually upset about it and have good reason to be?

The problem with that list of Dany’s atrocities is that she always targeted people in positions of power in an attempt to protect the downtrodden. She was one only a few characters to consistently work to improve the lot of people below her in the series’ social systems.

Why do I suspect the early artwork everybody complained about was never meant to be the final graphics and we’re just now seeing what was always intended?

Tell that to Game of Thrones, which spent its first 7.2 seasons telling us that the characters who believed and acted as though “the stakes at play are the Iron Throne” were deluded fools who were missing the one true war that was staring them in the face—and then spent one episode completely flipping that and…

I think he’s saying that the writing of the show completely undermined the established stakes.

If you had to recalibrate a TV that was already calibrated correctly for all content EXCEPT GoT, then it’s GoT’s fault for poor mastering.

It.Was.Fucking.Poorly.Shot.