Yeah, I mean it’s not even “bad writing” really, in the case of either Redwall or HP. Redwall was always a little more serious from the start, while the underpinnings of both wizard and muggle society are exaggerated and silly - the Dursleys literally move from the suburbs to a tower in the ocean so Harry won’t get…

I think HP’s ethics are torn between the initial Roald Dahl-esque, over-the-top kids’ fantasy it was at the start, with comically odious characters like the Dursleys, and the actual world-building it tried to do later. I think there’s potential in Slytherin - drive and ambition and tackling less whimsical magic…

Of course his name is Tanner. I guess he’s been playing stupid games long enough that he was overdue to win a stupid prize.

It made me happy to see Themberchaud. He’s the best fat dragon. I call him Themberchonk.

BattleZoo designing an entire free ancestry for Pathfinder 2nd edition that lets you play an obnoxiously overpowered isekai protagonist gave me a laugh.

I always wondered why the hell people call ray tracing “RTX,” in the same way I wonder why they call microtransations “MTX.” I just assumed it was gamers being shit at coming up with shorthand for pretty much anything as usual.

They know what gets clicks, I guess. Wired used to be a pretty interesting magazine. Do they even have a magazine anymore?

When I was reading one of the major battles in Words of Radiance, I thought “Man, a Stormlight Archive musou game would be crazy, make it happen somebody.”

It is a weirdly hostile article. I’m not even sure what the point of it is, other than making sure everyone knows the author really hates Brandon Sanderson and his family. As a casual reader of Sanderson’s work, I’d say shrug and move on - seems like Kehe is miserable enough already.

It doesn’t count unless you make sure everyone knows.

It’s also perfectly in-character for a kid who’s been raised by a military force convinced of its own necessity in keeping humanity “civilized.” Being a kid in that world would suck. She’s naturally going to have a complicated and less-than-healthy perspective on violence.

Yeah, I just left that sub a few years back when it went from making fun of the ridiculous, melodramatic crap gamers say to just plain contrarianism and then something darker and more meanspirited. They’ve fallen into the same trap every circlejerk subreddit falls into.

That’s exactly where I’m at with it, and I find it weird that the morality of the Fireflies is apparently just never questioned.

It really is weird how the perception of Joel seems to change entirely on what online space you’re in, and neither type ever seems to get it right. Places like this and r/gamingcirclejerk see Joel as this horrific brutal monster worse than David, while r/gaming and right-wing YouTube chuds think he’s this morally…

It’s...LU BU!!!!

Yeah, I think Inquisition definitely threw the baby out with the bathwater. DA2 had a more stylized design, a focus on interpersonal relationships over time and changing geopolitics, etc., while Inquisition dialed back the stylization, made everyone “realistic” again in terms of appearance, and you were saving the…

For as rushed as the game part of the game was, I think DA2 is still one of the most unconventional games BioWare ever made, partly because of its laser focus on one small area, its history, and stakes that didn’t involve saving the world. The entire point of the game was that there was never a villain. There were a…

That’ll all have to wait for the Punch That Horse Jerk DLC.

“Virulently homophobic region censors lesbian kiss on TV” is so unsurprising that it’s barely news.

God, I had completely forgotten about that - as ridiculous as SF stereotypes still are, they used to be SO MUCH MORE. And he’s still the most Russian life form on the planet.