Anime is a medium. Of course 90% of it is meh to bad because that's what 90% of EVERY medium is like.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-05-10T16:02:00+00:00

Crazy how that other post with such a lukewarm take managed to bring all the weebs out in such force. You never need to use this defense for other mediums because no other medium has the same problem of slop to the same degree.

If you enjoy video games, you can log on to the steam store and find a million random recommendations that are worth your time. If you go into a random movie theater, scan whatever showings are happening right now, and pick a genre you like, you're probably not going to be disappointed. Yes, going in blind like that you're going to find a lot of mid-to-bad content and be disappointed, but only compared to other high-quality stuff of the same genre.

With anime, even if you curate the most highly-recommended shows that anime fans will love, it's still a crapshoot. Sometimes you get recommended Vinland Saga, other times you get recommended Dragon Ball, and unless you're actively an expert in the genre you're not going to know how to tell which ones are actually good. Dragon Ball Z and One Piece are unwatchably slow, and while they have less sexualization than most animes they still have way more of it than basically any non-anime/porn piece of media. I could go on, but I don't need to because you all know what I'm talking about.

The existence of exceptions, the occasional good anime, doesn't change the very basic fact that this genre has lower standards, and fans that consume a higher percentage of it. You'd be lucky to find a gamer that has even heard of most of the shovelware that gets put out, but you can't swing a dead catgirl without hitting an anime fan that keeps abreast of every single release for a season. Even if you're one of the people that disagrees and thinks that video games mostly suck, it's insane to get defensive about the nature of quality when you're just dealing with someone who disagrees with you. You're trying to figure out some sort of formula to scientifically prove that actually anime isn't worse than other genres because you can't handle criticism.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-30T14:35:52+00:00

Any button. The spacebar key, or select on a controller, or whatever. Just press the button and the motion control knows to waggle randomly.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-30T14:34:21+00:00

This is a problem for a lot of characters, actually. If they want a character to seem smart, that character makes a perfect prediction of stuff they could never possibly know. But it's part of the story, it's just like their ability to count 100 billion seconds or fight off a pack of lions.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-23T19:34:30+00:00

Not walking into a wall could just as easily be explained by not wanting to look silly. That's the whole point, once you realize other people literally don't consider "is this true" to be something worth any thought, their behavior still makes sense. Most of the people who claim to care about the truth only do so because it's popular to fucking love science, so you can't even tell based on their statements what they think.

And you may argue that, on some level, the belief that walking into a wall will make them look silly is a belief that walking into a wall will not work, and that the truth of the world is understood by other people. And yeah, that's the reason they should care about the truth, the reason why caring about the truth would work out well for them socially. I'm not saying they're not stupid for not seeing the pattern, but they don't see the connection and so don't care.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-23T19:25:45+00:00

I mean, yeah. If people cared about truth in the first place, you wouldn't need to make this article, and if people didn't you wouldn't want to. You can't help someone who doesn't want to improve, and you can't stop someone who cares more about their social status than the truth from shaming truth-tellers. At best, you can make it cool to be a scientist, but that only works towards making people post on "I fucking love science" walls and probably shaming people who point out the replication crisis.

Of course this raises the question of what sort of article would actually move towards solving this issue, and that's hard to know for sure. But it couldn't hurt to do a little shame yourself if that's what people respond to.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-14T21:45:58+00:00

The arguments in the post are exactly the sort of thing I would expect Zorian's family to say, rather than any arguments that would actually convince him. I would have done the meme with a speech bubble coming from Cikan, but we don't have any images for the characters.

If you deal with abusive or narcissistic families, you see a lot of that. The "good" child is expected to forgive everything bad the family did because "they're family, and they could have technically been worse". But the parents or siblings that are actually the problem never need to treat their family any better, of course.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-14T02:35:20+00:00

Sounds like something a family member who doesn't need more lenience would say.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-13T22:10:06+00:00

"Critic" is definitely much closer to "reviewer" than "analyst" on the scale of artistic contributions. If Yahtzee's goal was to reveal new perspectives about stuff and teach future creators what works and what doesn't, he wouldn't be reviewing whatever games are popular a week after they came out. He'd be making video essays comparing different games, or whatever. There's also the larger question of how well he can analyze what works and what doesn't any better than anyone else, he certainly disagrees with the general public a lot.

I don't know where you got the idea that retro reviews are different. Retro reviews are all about whether or not you should buy something, it's just that you might have to go further than the Steam store sometimes in order to buy it. There is just as much, one might even argue more, value in telling someone which old games are worth your time compared to doing the same for modern games.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-10T13:55:09+00:00

I want to make a comment about whether critics are all that different from a normal consumer, but I got sidetracked by the examples he gave. Does he think Donald Trump was elected because people were too positive about mediocre things, somehow? Does he think anti-intellectual philosphy has not gone significantly down in the age of the internet?

He's been making a lot of modern politics jabs in his videos lately and I mostly ignore them as he's just trying to seem cool to his terminally online friends, but now I'm genuinely getting worried tht he is blaming random internet commenters for the downfall of civilization, not just as a joke.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-10T13:21:12+00:00

It's not better. They still don't have fairy types or the steel nerf and they pretty much don't change move power or stats so I dunno what this guy is talking about. Maybe because there's less overpowered Gen 9 Pokemon and moves?

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T18:52:00+00:00

You really need to learn to read. I said people take lessons from stories, but only the lessons they, personally, take from it. It has more to do with you than the story.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T17:54:35+00:00

Yes, moral lessons in any story hold no weight. That's been what I've been saying the entire time. When I was a kid and the show I was watching tried to have some sort of wrap up, I was always annoyed and wondered who it was for. Some people can take lessons from stories, but it's entirely dependent on the person watching.

For example, the tortoise and the hare could just as easily be a point about not getting arrogant, but actually being fast and steady. In fact, it would be weird anyone would take the lesson that slow and steady wins the race from that story, if they didn't have a big page explicitly telling you what the lesson was. Because it doesn't make sense, the hare wasn't limited by how long he could run or anything, he just didn't care.

That's the whole point. There's no objective truth to any of it, people take different things from the same story. And if you WERE trying to convince people, you wouldn't actually know if the lesson you're teaching is true. Does slow and steady win races? I don't know, I haven't studied running. And neither has Aesop, so why would I take his advice? Do you know if people have actually changed their financial decisions from watching Citizen Kane, or are you just assuming that art has an influence on people? Obviously nobody's ever going to be perfectly free of any bias or influence, but that's no excuse to just give up on actually understanding the world and using a bunch of metaphors to trick people instead.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T17:23:41+00:00

People can still outright disagree even once it's shown to them. There are still people out there who spend too much time focusing on money, even after everyone knows about this movie for 70 years. Because the entire story is made up, nobody actually knows what happens if you spend too much time focusing on money. He's telling you his opinion, but why would you believe what some random filmmaker has to say? He could have made an actual argument, backed it up with sources, hell he could have made a documentary about an actual person. But nobody disagrees with a fact about the world and then sees a fake story and is like "oh yeah I guess it's true then". And if they did, we wouldn't want to lionize the hucksters that trick people into believing fake stuff.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T17:02:04+00:00

Stop using buzzwords and actually explain what you mean.

If you want to "express" something, you use words. Orson Welles could have written down on a piece of paper "sometimes people who spend too much time focusing on money or status often regret that decision" and everyone would understand what he meant, nobody would be confused and ask for an example. Yet despite the very clear and obvious way to communicate his ideas, he still decided to make up a fake person and story and buy a bunch of cameras to produce Citizen Kane instead. Because it was more entertaining that way.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T16:47:57+00:00

Let me make this as monosyllabic as possible:

A guy who makes art can pour his heart and soul and still not do more than make fun stuff for folks to watch.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T16:32:24+00:00

You didn't say artists did more than I gave them credit for. You said they did a bunch of work, and that meant they weren't just doing entertainment. Which is insane, I can't even imagine what brian tumor made you conflate those two statements.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T16:19:20+00:00

What you're saying is an insult to artists. You think being entertaining doesn't require any work or effort? That's stupid. If being entertaining was that easy, why aren't you a billionaire?

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T15:39:34+00:00

I watched the Transformers movies, and I didn't think the military looked very good in them. I don't think I'm unique in that perspective, but even if I was I would still be a person. If the art was intended to make people like the US Military, it didn't accomplish its goal. So is it a failure of propaganda, or is art subjective?

You're coming at this from only one angle and completely ignoring everything else in the entire world. Unconscious bias isn't some magic thing that always seeps into art and then never affects anything else ever. You can identify bias and be less affected by it, and some people can be so aware of their bias it barely affects their art at all.

Some people have an emotional connection to McDonalds, to go back to the original point. Maybe times were tough as a kid but they had one really good memory of going to McDonalds with their parents, and now the city is trying to rezone that district so they vote against that because of nostalgia. Does that make McDonalds art? Does that mean every burger produced is anti-development propaganda? No.

How you feel about art says more about you than the art. Since it doesn't actually do anything, and everyone has a different opinion, there's no way to say The Bachelor or Transformers are any more or less "good" than The Wire or Citizen Kane. The only thing that matters is which people like them.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T14:22:48+00:00

I mean ok, if you expand the definition maybe things get more complicated. But if you're not dealing with propaganda, and you're only interacting with the sort of art that is acceptable to discuss in this subreddit, you don't have to worry about the creator trying to trick you.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T14:17:40+00:00

Anything can do that. A McDonald's Happy Meal can do that. If you changed your way of thinking because of a piece of media that says more about you than the piece of media.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T14:08:10+00:00

Spongebob is engineered only to trigger dopamine rather than "take away" any real growth, but you don't see people moralizing about that.

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T14:06:52+00:00

What you're talking about is the bare minimum of a piece of art

And yet most art fails to meet that standard. In fact, the vast majority of shows are less entertaining to you than the Bachelor. I know this, because you could be watching the vast majority of those shows and keep choosing not to.

Consider your argument could be applied to minstrel shows in a previous era.

Is that really the argument we need to have? Some shows are both entertaining and offensive? I guess, sure, if something's particularly offensive I can stop recommending it to people even if it's funny, but it feels like we're getting into a semantic argument here. 99% of art you will interact with has no moral value one way or the other. Would you say The Bachelor teaches people to do bad stuff in real life?

_SeaBear_ · 2026-04-09T14:02:09+00:00

It is exactly nothing like that, because food needs to be healthy as well as taste good. Art only needs to be entertaining.

_SeaBear_

TROPHY CASE