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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
I think that the whole spoiler argument is something that should by necessity exclude mystery stories, since the whole point of a mystery is to try and figure out what's up with it prior to the big reveal.

I certainly wouldn't have had as good a time reading Ghost Trick or Umineko if I hadn't had the opportunity to do my best "Charlie in the mailroom" impression trying to solve the plots.
 
Every time I see people talking about how people especially shouldn't spoil a particular work, I feel an urge to add that work to my ignore list.

-Morgan.
 
I would also like to say that just as there are some (primarily mystery) stories that should not be spoiled, there are other stories that absolutely should be.

I probably would've liked ToraDora a lot better had I known the endgame couple going in, and therefore that it wasn't a story about a developing boy-girl friendship each with their own romance subplots.

And no one should ever go into Saya no Uta without knowing just what you're going into.
 
'All stories revolve around conflict' is true... only if you have a very broad definition of what the word 'conflict' means.

(Incidentally, I've also seen people get really mad whenever someone suggests that not all stories revolve around conflict. Like even if you disagree, I don't see why the notion's worth getting vehement about)
 
Alchemist767676 said:
I think this is far more a problem of people's willingness to talk shit about things they haven't actually seen/read/played than it is of people being loose with spoilers from those works. That's my perennially unpopular opinion, if you haven't actually experienced the work in question, your opinion is worth less than nothing and should probably just be kept to yourself.
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How much of a work do you have to experience until you are allowed to put it down and proclaim it as trash?
 
Axslashel said:
How much of a work do you have to experience until you are allowed to put it down and proclaim it as trash?
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You see, the rule is actually very simple when it comes to criticism of things I like:

If you haven't experienced enough of the work, I'll arbitrarily declare your negative opinion invalid for not having personally experienced it, and if you've experienced too much of the work, I'll arbitrarily declare your negative opinion invalid because clearly you must have secretly enjoyed it or you wouldn't have kept going. That way, no matter what, I'm right and you're wrong! :V
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
'All stories revolve around conflict' is true... only if you have a very broad definition of what the word 'conflict' means.

(Incidentally, I've also seen people get really mad whenever someone suggests that not all stories revolve around conflict. Like even if you disagree, I don't see why the notion's worth getting vehement about)
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A narrative without at least the implications of change isn't a narrative. It is just a static description. Change involves one force overcoming another, conflict, transition. Stories are about conflict. Meaningful stories are about meaningful, relatable struggles.

"Revolve around conflict" is poetically ambiguous and perhaps overly strong. A porn story about a woman getting a plumber to clean her pipes has narrative conflict but I wouldn't exactly say it "revolves around conflict".
 
Broadly I think spoilers are neutral it depends on the person, I don't mind them, I definitely prefer knowing something about the work that'll make me interested in experiencing it than never hearing anything about it at all and missing out on something I could've enjoyed. Also the reverse hearing specifically what people like about something that would let me know oh I'd hate this ahead of time instead of wasting my time waiting for it to start being good.
 
Morganite said:
Every time I see people talking about how people especially shouldn't spoil a particular work, I feel an urge to add that work to my ignore list.

-Morgan.
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Personally I get an irresistable urge to read a plot synopsis.
Omegahugger said:
I probably would've liked ToraDora a lot better had I known the endgame couple going in, and therefore that it wasn't a story about a developing boy-girl friendship each with their own romance subplots.
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The ship name is literally the title.
 
Axslashel said:
The ship name is literally the title.
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A lot of shows are named after the main couple, doesn't mean said couple has to be romantic. For all I knew, it could've been set-up for Ryuuji and Taiga being half-siblings.

Besides, the summary of the very legitimate site I found the anime on focused on the plot, which was about two people growing closer together as their were pursuing other romances and with the rest of the class thinking they were dating as a result.

Which is a perfectly fine set-up for a romance between those two, that's just not the story I was sold. I would've accepted the storyline of Taiga's crush on Yusaku ending like a wet fart a lot more easily had I gone into the story knowing it was meant as a distraction.
 
About spoilers, I think that, if the story is truly good, people will not spoil it.

And no, a sudden plot-twist is not sufficient to make a story truly good. It's something that encompass the whole movie/game. Like, in my case, I have almost never saw people spoil Parasite. I don't care to be spoiled usually, but in this one, I am kinda glad to not have been spoiled. And I didn't even spoil the movie to others, which is something I will do with others movies.
 
Adloquium said:
My own opinion is probably unpopular, in the sense of "uncommon" or "not widely spread": I think FFX had a bad dub, which had nothing to do with the laughing scene.
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For the release date (2001) and the sheer length of the script it is fairly good, with a lot of the actors having moved from it to really great things. I think it is a good touchstone for dubbing of long video games like that, which has led to a lot of times nowadays the English version of a Square Enix game being definitive (See the English version of FFXVI which is objectively superior to the Japanese version). Kingdom Hearts is probably stronger, but that might mostly be because it had a bunch of official Disney actors.

On that note actually, I think that FF7R has been interesting because the English cast is insanely good but it has a ton of weird and borderline unforgivable technical issues to the recording of their script, it's really bizarre. Like a lot of times they are either way too loud or way too quiet. So I guess those technical problems do still exist to this day.
 
This could just be me being overly paranoid/thin skinned; but as someone who came to Marvel via the MCU and has been ride or die Avengers since 2012 it's kind of easy to forget just how much of their prominence on the comics side from Bendis through to Aaron was more or less artificial/manufactured.
 
king of hybrids said:
This could just be me being overly paranoid/thin skinned; but as someone who came to Marvel via the MCU and has been ride or die Avengers since 2012 it's kind of easy to forget just how much of their prominence on the comics side from Bendis through to Aaron was more or less artificial/manufactured.
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The Avengers are really interesting in the comics, I think because Marvel has two Superhero teams that are very much moreso the face of the comics: The Fantastic Four and the X-Men. The Avengers just end up falling by the wayside a little. This by no means means they didn't have great comics though, it just means they weren't as prominent as other teams at Marvel.
 
Kaiya said:
Seems like a good way to miss a lot of great stories but sure.
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It's a contrarian impulse, not a policy, and not one that actually comes up very often.

Still, I wonder if people realize the full implications of the things they say sometimes. Like, if someone says that being spoiled would totally ruin a work, then the implication is that it also wouldn't be worth consuming a second time... which really does raise serious doubts about whether it's worth consuming the first time. (That's fancy for "If it completely relies on some stupid twist to give it any value, then it's just shit!")

But the real answer is more likely "being spoiled wouldn't actually ruin the work for someone who isn't particularly bothered by spoilers".

Corti said:
About spoilers, I think that, if the story is truly good, people will not spoil it.
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Forums would not need threads with different levels of spoiler allowance if this was the case. One persons spoiler is another's discussion.

-Morgan.
 
Morganite said:
Still, I wonder if people realize the full implications of the things they say sometimes. Like, if someone says that being spoiled would totally ruin a work, then the implication is that it also wouldn't be worth consuming a second time... which really does raise serious doubts about whether it's worth consuming the first time. (That's fancy for "If it completely relies on some stupid twist to give it any value, then it's just shit!")
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I think it's important to differentiate between "this work relies entirely on a spoiler and has no rewatch value" and "this work is enhanced by not knowing anything the first time around and has a different appeal otherwise".

Mystery stories especially fit into the second box.
 
Squirtodyle said:
I think it's important to differentiate between "this work relies entirely on a spoiler and has no rewatch value" and "this work is enhanced by not knowing anything the first time around and has a different appeal otherwise".
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And the harder someone moves from "spoiling people who don't want to be spoiled is bad" to "spoiling this particular work is bad", the more I start wondering if it's the former. For my personal tastes, I don't even put mysteries in a different box; my enjoyment comes from seeing how the characters find the answer.

-Morgan.
 
Morganite said:
And the harder someone moves from "spoiling people who don't want to be spoiled is bad" to "spoiling this particular work is bad", the more I start wondering if it's the former. For my personal tastes, I don't even put mysteries in a different box; my enjoyment comes from seeing how the characters find the answer.
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I mean, I genuinely don't understand why.

The first time you consume a work can be a special experience, there's a reason "I wish I could play/watch/read this again for the first time" is an omnipresent expression for narrative-heavy works. The time that you go into a story without knowing what's going to happen is objectively different from follow up times. That doesn't mean those follow ups are bad, it just means that they don't have the exact special spark. That's not a failing, it's a reflection of how experience and memory works.
 
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The Captain Marvel movies are pretty good, and Brie Larson is a good actor. They're not the best MCU movies in my opinion, but they are fun, and I find the internet's hatred of Brie Larson to be baffling.
 
Hyperion 2.0 said:
The Captain Marvel movies are pretty good, and Brie Larson is a good actor. They're not the best MCU movies in my opinion, but they are fun, and I find the internet's hatred of Brie Larson to be baffling
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Captain Marvel had the misfortune of coming out just around the time the culture wars kicked into hyperdrive
Like,anti-sjw movement of early to mid 2010s had transformed into far more uglier,vindicative and downright sociopathic movements with many names but all believe pretty much the same things
 
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Hyperion 2.0 said:
The Captain Marvel movies are pretty good, and Brie Larson is a good actor. They're not the best MCU movies in my opinion, but they are fun, and I find the internet's hatred of Brie Larson to be baffling.
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The first one (Haven't seen the second) was basically the perfect ideal decent MCU movie. I don't think it was amazing or anything but I definitely remember enjoying it in theaters. The big thing is you could definitely take the same absurd granular ideologically driven ultra criticism to just about any average genre movie like it. Could probably do it to the Iron Man movies pretty easily.
 
"Internet misogynist culture warriors are wrong and weird" is not an unpopular position. I don't just mean on SV, normal people don't give a fuck about their target of the day. The Captain Marvel films made a shitton of money, I can't say how much influence they had but they were not particularly disliked and Brie Larson is by no means hated by normies.

I understand that this thread has a habit of including positions that are not exactly controversial but let's not go crazy :p
 
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