Cliches you can't stand
- Thread starter Mithras
- Start date
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Listen, don't be so rude to the horses. They were trying their best, and don't deserve to be profiled like that.
- Location
- Finland
That is only an excuse if none of the team ever even heard of the original.
The whole things about playing man or woman, and being able to have, or not have, let's call it romance, with people of any gender, was fairly important part about Odyssey's grassroots marketing.
It would be, odd, to say the least, if they were not aware of it. And only way they would not be is if they did no research on the game they were doing a DLC for, how the fuck was nobody watching what they were doing?
It's just, it's just such an obvious, and easy to avoid, mistake, that i have hard time imagining how it could ever comje to be without either intentional malice, of colossal incompetence.
Miath
Perpetual Depressant
- Location
- 1632 Revello Drive, Sunnydale California
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's not an excuse and I'm not excusing it, I despise it beyond words. I'm explaining why it was different.
- Location
- Somewhere
I think that was adefense of the original team, not the DLC one. And in the game industry, unless your name is Shigeru Miyamoto or Akira Toriyama, the company will give the rights to make DLC to whoever the fuck they want with or without your consent/approval.
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Not any more; just a DNA sample.
I've not played that DLC, and I'm not going to. Its fucking atrocious writing.
Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
- Location
- MI, USA
The bigger issue on Oddesy for the general public than the problematic nature of swinging into forced heterosexuality (most people don't engage on that sort of identity politics level, the bitching is liable to be over the forced romance as a general phenomenon abruptly removing previously-available player choice) is more likely the wildly-off-kilter take on sexuality for the relevant time period.
The way we think of homosexuality is not how the Greeks viewed it. Including the matter of not seeing girl on girl as actually being sex to begin with, which has led to some "fun" takes on Athena being a butch lesbian because Ancient Greek logic dictates that this doesn't violate the "virgin goddess" thing. If I'm rememering any of that correctly, at least.
More importantly, there were essentially "rules" on the acceptable kinds of gay for men, where they had strong bias against "bottoms" out of machismo outside pederasty, where the age gap justified the "passive" male on the basis of seniority.
Having the male option be a man in his mid 30s and several of the available partners be in the 16-23 age range, while triggering a lot of the "depraved homosexual" rhetoric and being a really messy age range to target to many, would offer room to more fully distinguish the romances of the two character options and bleed in more historic verisimilitude to those in the know.
And if you're going to have Ancient Greek enforced heterosexuality, it ought to be a matter of the "lie back and think of England" school of sex-as-business. The Greeks were staggeringly sexist in many ways, a strongly gay man taking on a wife as pure child-having civil duty and otherwise being awkwardly dismissive of her would not be very out of place to the "sniff test" of authenticity.
More important than any of this sexuality stuff for the realism sniff-test is the Spartan navy, which basically was never a thing and makes it clear that historic accuracy is no longer a serious concern.
- - -
To offer up my own peeve, the source of communication gap I despise the most is the excessive stoic. The person who refuses to discuss their issues to save "face" or takes that insinuation of vulnerability as an insult to their "honor". This is part of what is generally referred to as toxic masculinity by the intersectional types, but is better described as a general failure of an honor culture that is usually a feature of extreme machismo.
The main example of it I can think of on a woman is the form of "strong female character" that was tried with Samus in Other M. It's important to note that her fucked-up tone was an insistence on translation literalism, as such a tone is viewed as stoicism in Japan rather than dispassion or depression as it got viewed in the West.
Granted, more of the issues stem from using the manga-only characterization leading to people going in with a completely different take on the character and attempting to focus the entire game on a particularly vulnerable period of Samus' life, but the tone of her dialogue and other choices causing the failure to get the narrative across properly to the West is an example of this excessesive hard-headed stoicism.
The form of strength attributed to her rendered the vulnerability and obedience incomprehensible outside of Japan, because it's very particular to Japanese honor culture and the backstory unheard of outside Japan. So I suppose it's a very "meta" example of the peeve, as it applies to the choices in dialogue and broader narrative structure instead of the in-the-moment characterization, which gets complaints for the exact opposite reasons.
The way we think of homosexuality is not how the Greeks viewed it. Including the matter of not seeing girl on girl as actually being sex to begin with, which has led to some "fun" takes on Athena being a butch lesbian because Ancient Greek logic dictates that this doesn't violate the "virgin goddess" thing. If I'm rememering any of that correctly, at least.
More importantly, there were essentially "rules" on the acceptable kinds of gay for men, where they had strong bias against "bottoms" out of machismo outside pederasty, where the age gap justified the "passive" male on the basis of seniority.
Having the male option be a man in his mid 30s and several of the available partners be in the 16-23 age range, while triggering a lot of the "depraved homosexual" rhetoric and being a really messy age range to target to many, would offer room to more fully distinguish the romances of the two character options and bleed in more historic verisimilitude to those in the know.
And if you're going to have Ancient Greek enforced heterosexuality, it ought to be a matter of the "lie back and think of England" school of sex-as-business. The Greeks were staggeringly sexist in many ways, a strongly gay man taking on a wife as pure child-having civil duty and otherwise being awkwardly dismissive of her would not be very out of place to the "sniff test" of authenticity.
More important than any of this sexuality stuff for the realism sniff-test is the Spartan navy, which basically was never a thing and makes it clear that historic accuracy is no longer a serious concern.
- - -
To offer up my own peeve, the source of communication gap I despise the most is the excessive stoic. The person who refuses to discuss their issues to save "face" or takes that insinuation of vulnerability as an insult to their "honor". This is part of what is generally referred to as toxic masculinity by the intersectional types, but is better described as a general failure of an honor culture that is usually a feature of extreme machismo.
The main example of it I can think of on a woman is the form of "strong female character" that was tried with Samus in Other M. It's important to note that her fucked-up tone was an insistence on translation literalism, as such a tone is viewed as stoicism in Japan rather than dispassion or depression as it got viewed in the West.
Granted, more of the issues stem from using the manga-only characterization leading to people going in with a completely different take on the character and attempting to focus the entire game on a particularly vulnerable period of Samus' life, but the tone of her dialogue and other choices causing the failure to get the narrative across properly to the West is an example of this excessesive hard-headed stoicism.
The form of strength attributed to her rendered the vulnerability and obedience incomprehensible outside of Japan, because it's very particular to Japanese honor culture and the backstory unheard of outside Japan. So I suppose it's a very "meta" example of the peeve, as it applies to the choices in dialogue and broader narrative structure instead of the in-the-moment characterization, which gets complaints for the exact opposite reasons.
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10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Was it ever?
Assasins Creed has always come across as favoring a realistic aesthetic, but not caring at all about being at all realistic. It's a video game about ancient assasin order murdering the ancient illuminati, not a documentary.
Err, the Spartan Navy was definitely a thing, all those Perieki cities had a large role to play in that, it played quite some part in the Peloponnesian War and so on, Xenophon had some major bitching in store about Spartan navarchs., despite his pro-Sparta and generally aristocratic leanings.
Although I'm not too on the up and up about some AC game's historical setting, it might be long before that when Sparta was more focused on enforcing its settler state on the helots and Perieki cities, not that it really stopped before the Macedonians got to them, or further along in the classical era where they definitely had one.
Although I'm not too on the up and up about some AC game's historical setting, it might be long before that when Sparta was more focused on enforcing its settler state on the helots and Perieki cities, not that it really stopped before the Macedonians got to them, or further along in the classical era where they definitely had one.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Did you know there exist other games than Fallout 4 (and Stellaris)?
Sure. There's Skyrim and Cities: Skylines and Factorio and Mass Effect 3 and Oxygen Not Included and KSP, too. And I've just started in on Battletech.
- Location
- The Old Dominion
Sparta was primarily a land power however they did in fact have a small fleet compete with a navarch, a admiral who could apparently only hold the office for a year and never be appointed again and a epistoleus, a second in command to the navarch whose office wasn't restricted by term limits though it is true the Spartans usually relied on their allies for naval forces.
During the Persian wars the Spartians sent 20 triremes to aid the naval efforts and during the Peloponnesian war( 431–404 BC) the Spartans eventually did did create a navy powerful enough to defeat the Athenian navy with the aid of Persian gold which was a major factor in their victory over Athens though the days of a spartan navy powerful enough to threaten Athens would die(with Persian help) in the Corinthian war(395 BC to 387 BC) along with Spartan land dominance(specially with (extremely wealthy internal interests preventing any reforms that could have led to possible recovery).
During the Persian wars the Spartians sent 20 triremes to aid the naval efforts and during the Peloponnesian war( 431–404 BC) the Spartans eventually did did create a navy powerful enough to defeat the Athenian navy with the aid of Persian gold which was a major factor in their victory over Athens though the days of a spartan navy powerful enough to threaten Athens would die(with Persian help) in the Corinthian war(395 BC to 387 BC) along with Spartan land dominance(specially with (extremely wealthy internal interests preventing any reforms that could have led to possible recovery).
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
So I've decided that the new worst sort of mission in a video game is where you're told to follow a character, fight a small number of enemies, then travel to a new location and fight a slightly higher number of enemies and do it several different times. It's just needless padding.
Made worse by that character having a speed between your walking and running speed.
That said, probably wrong thread.
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
I thought about putting in the unpopular gaming opinions thread, but I figured most people would agree so it's not really an unpopular opinion.
Have you read the personal accounts of women in their 60s, who buried their grandparents and their parents, and find themselves utterly alone because they're too old to have children? It's heartbreaking.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's even worse if you have to protect the person you're following. There's a reason everybody hates escort missions.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
But... there are plenty of women old enough to have children, who have (or had) children, who are utterly alone. Having children isn't magic, and having children specifically out of an intent to fulfill your personal emotional needs is often thought of as a Bad Idea (TM).
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And? Just because some women, like some men, have a psychological need to create a family does not mean that it's justified to categorically state that women are somehow broken if they're not interested in romance.
If most people truly need to make a family then there's even less reason to demonize those who don't, because they'll all just do it out of their own volition.
No, the only reason to shame anyone is if it's the product of ideological expectations rather than a "natural" order. And if it is, which it is, then it can and should be scrutinied, such as in the post you responded to.
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tankdrop24
Tread First into Hell
- Location
- The Center of the Universe: Toronto, Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Heartbreaking that apparently something is preventing these women from forming meaningful relationships that don't involve familiar or romantic love.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is also an important point, there is a massive difference between being unmarried and being alone. We're social animals thus being alone is not healthy but that doesn't mean that everyone needs to get married regardless of how they feel. Forming long-lasting friendships can serve that purpose more than adequately.
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Okay, this trope/cliche of family or romantic relationship life being our/my (women's, as a whole, because 'biology' when somehow other women become innovative solo acts with the same underlying biology, but la la la can't hear you) 'natural position' and what brings me happiness and fulfillment... despite loving the idea of settling down and raising a family, despite that I want romance, I would venture to say that a lot of women would rather have sexless friendships, sexless relationships with their significant other even. Because there's a lot of violent, angry pressure in real life to support this cliche, so seeing it in fiction makes me either roll my eyes or go into mild shock depending on how misogynistic it is.
Noted transphobic popular writer JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter, which had the main characters, Harry and Ginny, Hermione and Ron pair up, and only said Dumbledore was gay after her series was over acted like she supported lesbian and/or at least gay people and I had hope trans women as well. But saying, "You can call yourself whatever you like," suggests that we (trans women) are just 'calling ourselves women' and her hashtag confirmed she's no ally of the LGBTQI+ spectrum. So why do I bring this up? Because there's an undercurrent of revenge and hate against women who are not heterosexual, cisgender baked into this cliche.
The message I get from the cliche of women needing a romantic relationship is that I need a man alright. For protection against the hostility in society directed at women who are not in heterosexual relationships or are not cisgender. One of my favorite authors really let me down that day.
In my favorite movie of all time even (trigger warning it has graphic horror movie violence in the first scene, but I liked the story): Protagonist May becomes increasingly despondent even tho she's a successful vet tech and has an apartment, Adam is interested in her, Polly is interested in her. Why does she snap? Because the acts of sexy times or something break her brain and she somehow can't even be friends with them anymore? I feel like the dude was trying to say that an emotionally isolated girl would react realistically by becoming mentally deranged around boyfriends and/or girlfriends. Really? And these are presented as sympathetic motives by the (male) writer. Please honey.
Angela Bettis is amazing in this role tho.
So that's two example male and female hating on non-cisgender, non-heterosexual (May is bisexual) relationships?
And the cliche of "most trans women never take estrogen or get a surgery on their privates" is even in fiction too. I can't think of a portrayal of a trans woman that wasn't a straight man or straight cisgender lady if she has transitioned, which is both much rarer and represents to me as disrespectful, wanting a trans lady who actually isn't to represent us.
Noted transphobic popular writer JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter, which had the main characters, Harry and Ginny, Hermione and Ron pair up, and only said Dumbledore was gay after her series was over acted like she supported lesbian and/or at least gay people and I had hope trans women as well. But saying, "You can call yourself whatever you like," suggests that we (trans women) are just 'calling ourselves women' and her hashtag confirmed she's no ally of the LGBTQI+ spectrum. So why do I bring this up? Because there's an undercurrent of revenge and hate against women who are not heterosexual, cisgender baked into this cliche.
The message I get from the cliche of women needing a romantic relationship is that I need a man alright. For protection against the hostility in society directed at women who are not in heterosexual relationships or are not cisgender. One of my favorite authors really let me down that day.
In my favorite movie of all time even (trigger warning it has graphic horror movie violence in the first scene, but I liked the story): Protagonist May becomes increasingly despondent even tho she's a successful vet tech and has an apartment, Adam is interested in her, Polly is interested in her. Why does she snap? Because the acts of sexy times or something break her brain and she somehow can't even be friends with them anymore? I feel like the dude was trying to say that an emotionally isolated girl would react realistically by becoming mentally deranged around boyfriends and/or girlfriends. Really? And these are presented as sympathetic motives by the (male) writer. Please honey.
Angela Bettis is amazing in this role tho.
So that's two example male and female hating on non-cisgender, non-heterosexual (May is bisexual) relationships?
And the cliche of "most trans women never take estrogen or get a surgery on their privates" is even in fiction too. I can't think of a portrayal of a trans woman that wasn't a straight man or straight cisgender lady if she has transitioned, which is both much rarer and represents to me as disrespectful, wanting a trans lady who actually isn't to represent us.
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- Location
- Finland
Have you read personal accounts of people who did get children, and are alone anyway?
Or ones who did not have children or get married and are having time of their life?
What's your point?
- Location
- Canada
I have decided the cardinal sin of parodies is to completely misrepresent the thing your parodying and then mock it for the thing you added. Like... a harry potter parody that portrayed the good guys as total pacifists who want to win through the power of friendship and sparkles and then mocks the concept as lame and weak.
Captain Orsai
Davion Heavy Guards Captain
Honestly, it doesn't just apply to parodies; in general, suddenly inventing character/faction faults is really goddamned annoying (there's one example from the Battletech novels that particularly irks me because it's completely and totally unnecessary, and to boot a total 180 in attitude).
- Location
- Fairfax, VA
Which one, if its not gonna be too much of a derail or something to take over to the Battletech thread?