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jasper-rolls · 7 years

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i talked about this a bit on twitter but i wanna elucidate on it here so here’s another fucking post about the fucking dream daddy shit because i cant stop myself from being annoyed by the back and forth and misrepresentation and vague posts trying to act like they’re just talking in general when its very obviously about this

strap in cause this is gonna be a long one

there are three points i want to make

1) criticism of media is important and needed, particularly in the realm of discussing representation and creator intent, since its overall purpose is to further discussion and foster overall improvement in future. criticism of a work isn’t always an attack on the people who like it

i mean, we’ve all been there. it sucks to read when someone’s talking down something you like a lot, especially if its something that’s very meaningful to you. it happens to me too - i can’t count the number of times i’ve read an article or essay ripping apart something i love and found it very difficult to disengage my personal feelings from it.

but unless the person making the criticism is specifically going out of their way to say “and all the people who LIKE this thing are fucking gibbering idiots who wouldn’t know good quality if it punched them in the face”, then the criticism isn’t an attack on you personally, and you have to find the place to disengage that emotional attachment and at least tolerate the criticism of the work. you may accept and agree with it or not, but understand that the critic is (probably) not directly attacking you

and raising potential problems on the representation side of the work is important, because it highlights potential problems for people interested in it that they might not have been aware of before, like creator’s personal views influencing development of the work, or unfortunate implications of plot beats within the work

there’s definitely legitimate cause for concern in game grumps involvement with dream daddy. in my personal experience, the grumps aren’t particularly forward thinking in a lot of respects - arin and danny are quick to lapse into bottom of the barrel racist accent humor (particularly with asian characters), or “hey, isn’t being gay kind of weird” straight guy nonsense. the understanding they’ve showcased of lgbt concepts and issues leaves a lot to be desired (last i remember, arin still considered “cisgender” to be a slur despite being told what it actually means)

and every time this is brought up, i see fans saying “oh but they’re better now, they’ve learned!” and i have to say, i still watch them fairly regularly and...they really haven’t! the “progress” is minimal at best, its like watching someone push a boulder up a hill. they haven’t really changed all that much in the last few years to be frank. so the concern with them being involved with, and putting their name on, a game where the focus is on mlm (and has transgender characters) has definite grounding, given how they’ve acted before.

and the cult ending naturally has unfortunate implications - the idea that every character in the game is being tricked into being forever single, their misery being used to fuel some sort of demon...i mean, given how gay people have been treated throughout history and in media, at the very least it’s pretty regressive. you can’t fault someone for reading the transcript and feeling a little sick

the raising and highlighting of these things isn’t a personal attack. it’s overall, to help people make an informed decision, and be aware of the things that aren’t so great - that might be a dealbreaker, on a personal level. criticism is valuable, and useful, and we should recognize it as such

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2) on the opposite hand, EVERYTHING we read, watch, or play is guaranteed to have a problematic element of some sort, and nothing you ever enjoy is perfect. expecting something to conform to a 100% ideologically pure standard is unreasonable and ultimately a fool’s game

my personal favourite game of all time, ever, is killer7. it’s the game that bought suda51 to prominence in the west. it’s a weird blend of first-person shooter, rail shooter, and rpg. the story is outright bizarre, with disorienting visuals and surreal events like a lucha wrestler headbutting a bullet out of midair, a ghostly man wrapped in bdsm gear popping up to give you advice, and giggling zombies that explode on contact

its also got quite a share of shitty moments - a rape scene, the female characters leave a lot to be desired, its got a frankly weird interpretation of a lot of psychological disorders, and a good chunk of the game is dedicated to character development of a pedophile

suffice to say it probably wouldn’t be a big hit with a lot of people here. but does this stuff mean its completely reprehensible, and not worth spending any time with? i did just tell you it’s my favourite game so you can probably guess how i’m going to respond to that rhetorical question. this post is long enough without me spending several more paragraphs explaining to you why i think killer7 is worth giving a shot, so i’m going to skip to the point that this example is illustrating - the things we love, our favourite things, are probably just as, or maybe even more problematic than the things we don’t.

i’m not going to cite any further examples since i don’t know what you, the reader, personally enjoys or loves, but like...i guarantee you, its probably done something pretty shitty with its running time. i’m fairly confident i’ve never read or enjoyed something that didn’t at some point play into some shitty trope about lgbt people, or people of colour, or women - and if didn’t somehow, chances are it’s because it never showed them in the first place, because its focus is on straight, white, cis men, which is, naturally a problem of its own

if you’re willing to shrug off shitty opinions of creators of things you love, or bad tropes and plot elements in things you love, then why is it so different for the things you dislike? to write off dream daddy entirely, because of the involvement of game grumps, and the existence of one bad ending with shitty implications, and ignoring its more positive elements while praising the things you love that have more than likely done shitty stuff too is...frankly ridiculous

it perhaps may not seem like much to you, but dream daddy getting the kind of coverage and attention it has is...kind of a big deal as far as i’m concerned! games with narrative tend to be pretty hostile towards gay men*, so for a game that presents an overall sincere and positive representation of gay men to see this much attention and get to no. 1 seller on steam a significant step forward, i think. it’s not revolutionary, but personally, as a gay man, it means a lot to me, and i know a few other gay men who would feel the same, and that surely counts for something

and as far as killer7 goes, well...waypoint explains it better than i could, but i would just like to say: that pedophile character i mentioned? that part of the game ends with you beating him in a duel so hard, he falls over and gets eviscerated by a machine designed to cut out organs. so it’s not all bad.

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3) (this is the big one) this site has a big fucking problem with virtue signalling

perhaps its bad of me to assume something of people, but i’m going to go out on a limb and say at least one person immediately closed the tab the moment they read that line, and i wouldn’t blame them, because the problem with saying something like “virtue signalling” is that the alt-right and gamergaters have tried their absolute hardest to make that phrase essentially mean nothing by throwing it at anyone who shares a dissenting opinion of any kind. but despite their efforts, virtue signalling is a phrase that does actually have a meaning, and its the meaning i’m using here

i’m going to take a quick excerpt from hbomberguy’s video on the subject (it’s worth watching, it’s only 10 minutes long and pretty funny) - “The term was originally coined[...]to decry people who say, ‘I don’t like this thing very much’, in order to feel good about themselves, and then just, vote Labour every few years or whatever and take no stake in actually making things better.”

tumblr (or at least, the part of tumblr i engage with) does this, a LOT. it’s in the smug, one line “uhhhh, yikes, lmao 💅” rebuttals to arguments against the thesis of a given post. it’s in the strawman cartoons and chat posts that cast opponents of the OP as self-contradicting fools. it’s in the “so jot that down” responses, the “i’m side-eyeing everyone who isn’t reblogging this”, etc. etc. everyone has done this. you have probably engaged with this. i definitely have - at least one of my popular posts, if not more is, basically me, doing this thing! to be fair i had no intention those posts being popular, but then one never does, do they?

in the case of dream daddy, it’s “me: y’all:” image edits snarkily demonstrating how they’re SWERVING “that dad dating shit”, chat posts casting defenders points as “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST NEVER CRITICIZE ANYTHING EVER”, posts smugly announcing they’re going to pirate the game just to take money from arin hanson, as if that’s how game development works, and i think it’s what’s led to a huge amount of misrepresentation about this game in particular

i’ve seen people acting like the game grumps are like, directing and writing the game, when, as far as i’m aware, all they did was provide funding and voice acting. and the big thing that really got my goat, was someone describing the cult ending, and listing the implications i’ve already gone over myself, and then saying that this was the game’s true ending

this...literally could not be further from the truth. for starters, no-one has actually gotten this ending from playing through the game naturally. the reason? because you CAN’T. it was found through data-mining - it isn’t accessible through regular play. it’s either content that was cut from the game late in development, or, as the theory goes, intended to be a non-canonical or fake ending added in as halloween DLC come october (given the tone of the whole thing it sounds reasonable to me) which has, unfortunately, now been ruined due to this whole debacle

to do this kind of thing, to describe this as “the true ending” borders on being an out and out lie for the purpose of making dream daddy look way, way worse than it actually is. there’s no justice here, there’s no attempt to inform accurately. it’s “hey, check out how shitty this thing is! i’m good for disliking it, aren’t i? ignore the context, or the fact that i’m literally lying about what this is”

look, okay, i’m getting a little vitriolic - people can make mistakes, misunderstand things, it happens. everyone does it. me too. but this posing, this “look how good and cool i am, for not liking this thing”, it helps nothing at best and actively harms at worse. misrepresenting positions, context, and events for the purpose of satisfying the ego of whoever is making the statement - it helps no-one, except that person, in the most minor and meaningless of ways

i want to be clear - this final bit is just as much a memo for myself as it is for everyone reading this

be critical. don’t take things at face value. read into issues, understand context. get as close to the source of the issue at hand as you can, and determine the truth from there. resist the urge to be smug, detached, and dismiss those who disagree with your position - resist the urge to laugh at them, they may just not know. try and engage them in honest debate. if they resist that, if they don’t want to meet you on an equal footing you are within your rights to disengage.

be strong. support the things you love, and remember where the line is

we can all be better

*i’m not saying that other groups aren’t treated with hostility in games and gaming - trans women certainly get it really, really bad. just personally saying, in my experience as a gay man, the gaming community, and subsequently games with a focus on narrative themselves, have a sort of...special hatred of mlm. not necessarily worse, just...uniquely hostile

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unproduciblesmackdown · 7 years

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ohh my god all the Dress Code and Gender Norms stuff......for some reason most of our middle school experience seemed to be the most arbitrary shit like another teachers personal vendetta against anyone using a messenger bag. there was like one pair of girls who would do stuff like hold hands but somehow nobody really cared, teacher-wise anyway, maybe because they also had the mutual act between themselves of like "being weird" and always joking with each other, so possibly everyone was just dismissing it as a Weird Joke instead of the gay agenda. i mean even students didn't really care beyond people being like "ugh gay" because our middle school years were right on the cusp of people who used to say "thats gay" as an unironic insult but also kids starting to realize that gay people were real and you didnt have to pretend to think it was a big deal and disgusting and etc. i mean i remember even mostly in elementary school it was the scenario where people understood "gay" as a universal insult before they understood the actual definition and even when they learned what it meant it was more like giggling whispering than anyone on the anti gay warpath. like i think someone tried to tell me what lesbian meant in the hallway in third grade like its a general secret, as a precise parallel to this kid in like first grade saying he knew a bad word and writing a tiny "fuck" on the top of his worksheet to share the knowledge it was a wild time but by middle school none of the students really seemed to care about anything even if there were still shitty undercurrents......nobody even hardly fought or got bullied, when you did you could literally just ignore it fairly easily. and i guess the teachers were mostly just focused on ketchup? like middle school is kind of a formative time both socially and educationally but it also manages to be useless. and then theres high school but you know. my brother is 4 yrs younger and by the time he was like a junior/senior in high school people seemed a lot less shitty about stuff like gender rules and straightness, he was a bi theater-ish kid who took a cosmetology class for fun and he was pretty much straightforward a popular kid the whole time. and i mean he and his friends would independently be texting each other about institutional racism so, despite there still being shitheads obviously the overall quality of the actual students is going up. i honestly think its great that like, for me it seemed like everyone was figuring out they were allowed to not be straight around like mid to late teens, and now people in the earliest teens and even younger are already cool with not being cishet and etc. its the whole thing of like, people pointing out that ppl like to make fun of the Embarrassing Early Teen Blogger who has like twelve terms for their identity, but honestly thats pretty great considering how not-that-long ago ppl in the same age group weren't allowed to have any confidence about their identity, especially if it Deviated From The Norm / proper school guidelines and etc not that people arent still shit and like, especially school staff and rules and grownass adults still being shit about how anything thats not straight and cis and white enough = inappropriate for school and for life, but when it comes to the students themselves in middle school / high school age, i had a pretty Could-Be-A-Lot-Worse experience of people not caring / starting to get an inkling that it was fine if everyone wasnt straight and etc yet still had people saying "thats gay" and thinking it was funny, and the next set of students already seemed a lot better than that, and as far as i can tell its already more common for the preteen/teen people themselves to be even better even sooner. nice if the people like vice principals would change up as often as the student body but the point is that honestly teens are doing great, way better than a lot the people in the age group working at the schools they have to go through anyways. the classic "people are learning things about being people like a decade earlier than they used to and thats great" thing. like thank god for that and good for everyone

#unnecessarily long reply #that vp is shit #we had a really good middle school principle but she left my last year ugh

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nonbinarylink · 7 years

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All the love asks!

oh boyyyy here goes...

Blush : What do you do when you have a crush on someone?i haven’t had enough crushes to actually know? am just more comfortable around them i guess

Kiss : What’s the sweetest thing someone has done for you?hjgfkhgd idk.....my memory is awful :/ to be vague n generalise i’d say just stuff that a lot of thought’s gone into bc it’s way good n like super......validating?

Cuddle : Which one of your mutuals do you really want to hug right now?wren...........always

Heartbeat : What fictional character do you love?yang!!!!!! my precious kid

Romance : Perfect date?all dates are good dates? idk man

Joy : What truly makes you happy?more like who

Happiness : Who are your kin?yang probably

Love : Are you, or have you been, in love before?I Sure Am My Guy

Beloved : What do you love the most about yourself?that implies......that there’s at least one thing...........

Sweet: Favorite love song?apparently i have a bunch but if angels by the xx counts, that one

Cute : What’s your aesthetic?a mess that not even i could attempt to describe :/ i just like too much stuff n don’t even know if this’ referring to my own aes or just stuff i like, bc the answers are probably different idk

Thoughtful : If you could change your name, what would you call yourself?i mean i can change my name? n one day i will, i just have no idea what to yet

Charming : Who helps motivate you?what a surprise it’s wren

Beautiful : Who is your ideal significant other?my current one!!!!!!!! 💕💕

Affection : Who do you ship?idk anything thats not like stupidly heteronormative or just shitty? i really like seeing different dynamics between people so really anything goes.....

Kind : What Pokemon would you be?i wanna say something cool like charizard or growlithe but i probably wouldn’t wanna be something rare or anything that people’d be hype for? so just like something common n something people’d ignore i guess

Heart Beat : You’re getting coffee with a celebrity, who is it?preferably i wouldn’t be bc i don’t really care about any celebrities? although to me celebrity just means the stereotypical hollywood people that get too much media attention..... like i’d maybe say any of the mcelroys or mari n stacy from geekremix bc i watch a ton of their stuff n they’re all real cool? but i wouldn't have anything to say at all n would just be awkward so actually no one thanks that’s not a time for me

Giggle : Do you believe in love at first sight?not for myself? but love is more than just what you can see when lookin at a person so it sounds super unlikely? like super physical attraction, sure, but is not the same as love? so i guess i don’t idk

Laughter : Who can always make you laugh?i’m starting to see a pattern in my answers here........so maybe take a stab at the answer

Smile : What do you find attractive?i’d love to know tbh

Warmth : What is your happy place?a kinder future..

Huggable : What are your favorite flowers?idk shit about flowers but i’d love to

Soul Mate : Who is your best friend?hmmmmm

Unique : What qualities do you look for in other people?depends on what the person is to me? like i feel like everyone kinda has a role that they somehow fall into w whatever qualities they have? like it’s not conscious at all it just kinda happens n i also have to idea how to explain it better......

Trust : Do you trust people easily?i sure don’t

Dearest : What item is most dear to you?things i’ve gotten from other people i think? gifts n random treasures n things i got for myself but when i was with someone or something was happening at that time etc etc, i’m just stupidly sentimental

#asks #long post #i should do these under readmores or something they're always real long :/#anyways ty for indulging me #even if i didn't even answer a bunch n the rest were real vague like usual #i sound real negative but for real ty for a good questiony time :3 #anon

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