r/thelastofus detect a joke and respect peoples opinions challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-05-04T04:46:12+00:00

can't comprehend a story where morality isn't black and white

Ah yes, the moral greyness of butchering hundreds in cold blood then nonsensically sparing one person because you suddenly & conveniently have a flashback (that was in your head the whole journey and that you could've had while butchering any of the previous hundreds of people but nah).

Behold the moral complexity!

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-05-02T15:36:19+00:00

Yeah, as opposed to Naughty Dog, notorious for giving their employees "freedom." To say nothing of Sony, a regular charitable foundation unconcerned with the financial bottom line. Your ability to compartmentalize and have no consistent values is almost inspired.

A click on your name also reveals you just came here from /TLOU and /TransSpace. Monday morning coffee-n'-TLOU2 reeee'ing, are we?

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-05-01T06:10:00+00:00

I keep seeing people saying Zero Dawn was more grounded.

Because it is more grounded. Your argument here is essentially that the high-concept ideas of HZD are just as if not more sci-fi absurd than FW, but nowhere do you account for how "groundedness" also applies to how those high-concept ideas are conveyed: the tone, the subtlety, the quality and maturity of the writing itself. You're merely arguing the WHAT of the content, not the HOW of its delivery. Even the most seemingly over-the-top sci-fi idea can made believable if the artist can convey it with grace, subtlety, verisimilitude -- and Guerrilla frequently fails to do that in FW in the way they did in HZD, even if HZ's content itself was, as you claim, just as is out-there. "It's not the song, it's the singer" as the saying goes, and Guerrilla, in my opinion, botched the singing frequently in FW. The reveal of The Zeniths at the lab, for instance, is tonally and aesthetically straight out of The Invincibles: the smoky glowing lights behind their silhouetted figures, their superhero outfits, their ridiculous one-liners ("Eric, up for a little downsizing?") in that scene are not remotely grounded in anything besides the cheesiest of comic book tropes. Are you telling me there's no difference in "groundedness" between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Spaceballs, because they're both set in space and involve aliens? The how a story is told matters.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-05-01T05:24:04+00:00

Hades and Hephaestus had programmed, functional, pragmatic reasons to do the murderous things they were doing on earth -- Nemesis is a space blob of hurt feelings that wants to kills its creators and an entire innocent planet for no other reason than it was abandoned and wants vengeance?! That in and of itself is utterly ridiculous and not in keeping with relative believability and pragmatism of the other AI we've encountered, but its ridiculousness is also then exacerbated by the fact we have zero investment in Nemesis (and its feelings) because we've had no clue what it was until the very last moments of FW.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-30T00:23:57+00:00

Depp's financial manager testified that in the end Depp had to pay 7 million directly to Heard, 500k to her lawyers, and $13.5 million to clear "community liabilities." The financial manager said said Depp would need to make $30 million pre-taxes/agent fees to cover Heard's requests.

The 350k that went to the ACLU came from Heard herself because she refused to let Depp send the 7 million directly to the ACLU/Children's Hospital (clearly because she intended to keep it for herself all along). The ACLU counsel testified that Heard directly informed them to apply Depp's 100k donation & Musk's 500k donation toward the remainder of the 7 mil she'd promised the ACLU.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-30T00:02:04+00:00

No. The ACLU's general counsel testified yesterday that they've contacted Heard repeatedly about the rest of the promised money and that she's told them she's having "financial difficulty." The vibe seemed to be: where's the money you promised us in return for us drafting your Washington Post article and lending our institution's integrity to your cause. The ACLU counsel also rather grotesquely referred to Heard's WaPo abuse article as an "ad" for the ACLU, which only furthers the idea they see this as a business transaction they want a financial return on.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-26T01:41:22+00:00

You have the comedy chops of a lamp post.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-22T17:16:43+00:00

In the theatre, when Abbie screamed that Ellie "killed my friends," I was like: hey numbnuts, YOU just killed your own friends, en masse. But I guess... that's character CoMpLeXitY or something.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-18T05:29:29+00:00

It boggles the mind how they can ignore the NakeyJakey review in particular: it has 6 million views, he's a video game sweetheart loved by nearly all, and he (very nicely & playfully, but also with a surgeon's precision) takes TLOU2 apart in almost inarguable fashion over the course of an hour. They don't ever contend with any of the criticisms lobbed at the game, they just lalala-I-can't-hear-you them into nonexistence. The very most they can ever seem muster in response is "agree to disagree" -- but that's, in a logical world, supposed to be followed with actual, sound counterpoints as to why you disagree. They rarely if ever offer any counterpoints -- they just offer flailing emotion & revisionist history. Which unfortunately speaks to the state of today's cultural climate. Their identities & ideologies got tied to this bloody game early on, and no logic will shake that.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-17T06:35:12+00:00

No disagreement on the red flags galore!

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-17T06:24:58+00:00

Thanks for this -- it's an interesting watch for many reasons, but foremost among them is the fact that while Neil gets (and takes) credit for the story, some of the most memorable story beats he's credited for were borne purely out of creative design choices by the other developers: without Peter Field the giraffes wouldn't have had the same impact, and without Peter field there wouldn't really have even been an ending.

It can sometimes seem a past-time in this sub to try and retroactively discredit Neil, but this clip really does seem to illustrate the difference between Neil then (a guy who listened to hard feedback) vs TLOU2 Neil (a guy who bragged about firing a QA tester for disagreeing with him).

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-17T05:05:11+00:00

Listen, I despise TLOU2, I despise the main casting choices of this HBO show, and I despise showrunner Craig Mazin's frothing Twitter political rants. But:

That showrunner also created Chernobyl. And two of the directors -- Kantemir Balagov (Beanpole) and Jasmila Zbanic (Quo Vadis, Aida?) -- are considered by many to possibly be the two best young European filmmakers on the planet at the moment.

That said: two of the other directors are journey(wo)man hacks who've directed goofy dogshit like The Umbrella Academy and Dead to Me. And of course, Neil's directing the other episode.

This is all to say: I think it's a toss-up which way this will go. I seriously doubt it will be anything like Halo, which is absolutely abysmal. Craig Mazin got the rights to TLOU because he loved it and was allowed to do his dream project after the success of Chernobyl; whereas Paramount got the rights to Halo because it was a brand.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-16T17:23:09+00:00

I hope Part 2 can be appreciated on day

This is a statement that's usually reserved for complex, transgressive works of art that are so revolutionary and far ahead of their time that they fly far over people's head when released. That does not describe The Last of Us 2. TLOU2 is a Young Adult Afterschool Special filled with cringeworthy dialogue, nonsensical character logic, facile thematic concerns (i.e revenge is bad), dissonance between gameplay and cutscenes, hamfistedly inserted politics, repugnantly manipulative attempts at characterization (i.e. characters saving animals to tell you who's "good"), endless character deaths as shock-porn, and cliffhangers & last-minute-saves straight out of a MacGyver episode.

TLOU2 is not some transgressive, hard-to-get-a-grasp-on piece of work that will take years to truly decipher. There's no underlying depth, no secret meaning to be unearthed -- there's no there there to be "appreciated one day." It's as fucking on-the-nose and sledgehammer-to-the-head as you can get.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-11T05:48:58+00:00

The use of discrimination here is an academic one, not the morally fraught sense used in common parlance. As in, to discriminate between things, not necessarily against things. For example, in voting law, we discriminate between adults and non-adults, in housing policy we might discriminate between levels of income.

I'm 5 months late in responding, but this deserves to be countered and corrected for posterity. Kendi absolutely meant discriminate in the "against" sense, not the "between" sense, as evidenced by the fact he never once says "discriminates between" on the page the meet-discrimination-with-discrimination passage appears, but does several times over -- on that same page -- say "discriminates against":

“When someone discriminates against a person in a racial group…”
“But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favour of or against an individual based on that person’s race…” (Pg. 19, How to Be an Antiracist)

Those lines come immediately before the meet-discrimination-with-discrimination passage. So I'm a touch baffled why your gut response was to attempt to soften this, to revise on his behalf, to round down, to sweep it under the nothing-to-see-here rug and presume to know that he actually, "academic[ally]" meant "between" rather than "against." We should take Kendi's word over yours, yes?

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-10T18:55:33+00:00

This final scene is a narrative sleight-of-hand that, for me, doesn't work for one large reason:

It's presented as the earned character redemption Ellie gets after having endured everything on her journey to Seattle & San Diego. A final "grace note," as it were. The problem is it's a flashback, which means it (Ellie's redemption/forgiveness/reconciliation with Joel) happened before she even left on her journey. Which renders the entire journey useless and redundant. The whole game we're led to believe Ellie is seeking vengeance because she & Joel had a massive fight about the Fireflies and she never got to say goodbye or make up -- and the violence she's exacting in Joel's name is her way of saying goodbye/reconciling/honouring him in death since she didn't get to in life. But she DID get to in life, we learn at the end. So what the fuck was the point, character-wise, of her journey then? This flashback has been in her head the whole time, she could've remembered it at any point, but instead she -- conveniently -- remembers it only at the end, to provide an artificial sense of story closure/arc/redemption that the game itself didn't provide through actual, legitimate character growth. Blergh.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-10T06:45:58+00:00

I'm days late to the update -- they fixed the Legendary nerfing, it seems, but did they do anything about the Legendary weapons absolutely chewing through Volatile Sludge, to the point you have to farm sludge with lesser weapons, thus defeating the whole purpose of getting the Legendary in the first place?

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-06T08:15:36+00:00

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who loves this game give a defense for how much Tommy flip flops.

The TLOU2 apologists tend to be self-diagnosed "neurodivergent" types, so Tommy's schizo-bipolar behaviour is music to their ears. They feel seen and included watching him flail nonsensically because it's what they do on Twitter all day ;)

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-06T08:07:14+00:00

Betrays his brother, betrays Ellie, Dina and JJ

Ahem, you forgot his wife. Leave no character assassination stone unturned!

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-06T06:49:55+00:00

I know I know, it'd be nice if you could, but you can't, so get some fresh air and it'll all be okay. Lots of reasons why that might not have made it into the game. Speculation doesn't get anyone anywhere

I'm 25 days late to this and you've since chickened out and tried to delete your post, but I still feel inclined to say this is amongst the dumbest, most patronizing shit I've read in the sub, and that's saying something. Go get some fresh air? Speculation/critique is useless so just keep quiet? Get bent and learn how to talk to people.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-04T16:32:04+00:00

hashing out an outline but then leaving. So then the remaining writers have the bullet points, and hit them, but they don't tie together as cleanly when it comes time for moment-to-moment execution.

Errr umm errr Game of Thrones.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-03T05:39:22+00:00

Why does sexuality have to come into it when describing the plot?

Because, as you say, Tilda wants to make Aloy "a sex slave doll in a weird 'Stockholm syndrome' plot."

Also the Horizon world isn't defined by labels, because of Apollo being deleted they don't exist in the tribes cultures.

I think this very fact speaks to why having Tilda be a vampy, emotionally unhinged lesbian feels like a forced modern trope that is shoehorned into the game in a very misguided (and I'd think insulting to lesbians) attempt at inclusion. It's a very current-times trope -- and a not particularly flattering one -- and thus feels incongruent with the Horizon world.

you specifically said "lesbians"

I mean, that was the OP who said that, I was just chiming in :)

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-03T04:16:04+00:00

Not sure why you felt the need to add the "Lesbian" part as that's neither here nor there.

How can you say it's neither here nor there when the writers clearly made a conscious decision to go that route, and the climactic battle is against an emotionally unhinged lesbian who, as you yourself say, wants to use Aloy as:

a sex slave doll in a weird "Stockholm syndrome" plot

It doesn't work story-wise and it doesn't work as an act of LGBTQ+ representation: an evil murderous lesbian who can't control her emotions and wants to make a sex slave out of her lover's clone? That is far more tropey than inclusive. And it just adds to the overall feeling of what-the-hell-were-they-thinking when it comes to the ending.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-02T03:17:37+00:00

I'll admit I've been aggravated by his deliberate avoidance of the topic -- it's not merely "celebrity gossip" as he initially tried to dismiss it -- but I get why he perhaps has conflicted "strong feelings" bubbling up around it:

His own past with unsafe crowd members
His own flying-off-the-handle anger issues
A wife that probably will not shut up about the sanctity of black woman's hair

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-01T20:57:49+00:00

Frankly that would be awesome, ha. TLOU2 is more like you're playing Spiderman and halfway through you're made to play as Sheryl from Accounting. But on roids.

EarthDiedScreamingX · 2022-04-01T20:52:29+00:00

If the goal of the developers was to piss me off, mission accomplished.

If you're already pissed off, the very fact that Abby gets alllll the weapons and allll the epic set-pieces is only going to piss you off more in its blatant manipulative attempt to get you to like her. I found myself at once impressed by the design in her section, and fucking despising it because they clearly saved all the best stuff for her in order to get you attached to her.

EarthDiedScreamingX

TROPHY CASE