#personally my engagement with this topic is because i like hbomberguy stuff and his work

[corvidinthewoods]

keep seeing ppl make points in the notes of hbomberguy posts that actually get addressed in the video. like, no a fancier reporting system for plagiarism isnt the answer. he touched on that!! its more likely to be abused in bad faith. and even if it does work, the likely reputation of always being wrong will make it easy for the offender to gloss over it. like internet historian did. cause, as outlined in the essay, the existing copyright system actually functioned and took his video down but because it has so notoriously been wrong or misused in the past, IH was able to just say “it got copy striked” and a lot of people accepted it

#crow.txt #please. please. fucking. aaaa #i feel like #like #okay #personally my engagement with this topic is because i like hbomberguy stuff and his work #like yes i knew several of the subjects #but im not engaging to Take Down Somerton #i havent watched the music guy video #im engaging as a fan of hbomb #so i feel frustrated seeing people making arguments rhat have already been addressed #and its not even like. oh these people Suck #theyre just emgaging for different reasons and thats fine #genuinly #i think were just talking past eachother a bit cause were having two different conversations #talking tags #mild vent? i guess im venting my frustration idk

[itsclydebitches]

There's something really strange about how certain parts of the RWBY react so negatively to criticism of the show. There is a complete denial of the criticism, especially if its in good faith, for reasons only tangentially related to the critique. For example, the Youtuber hbomberguy made a really good faith critique of RWBY and I saw fans utterly dismissing it because he says he was a life long fan of Monty's work and they found screenshots from 2008 where he said he didn't like Monty. (1/2)

Yeah, outside of that primary point — that disliking an author/the author's work more generally doesn't automatically invalidate critique; there might be bias at play, yes, but it's not a foregone conclusion — there are a lot of complications there. One that I've actually been thinking about lately is this idea that opinions are not allowed to change over the course of our relationship with a text. There's this assumption that if you said you didn't like Monty in 2008 (whatever "didn't like Monty" even means in that instance — the person? The authorial persona? His company? Some works? All his works?) then you'd better either dislike his work the exact same amount now, or love it without question. No developing new or complicated opinions across twelve-odd years allowed. Which becomes the core of the, "Why are you watching if you hate it?" question that is constantly leveled at those who post critique. "Hate it" is an incredibly narrow approach to not at all easy to define feelings about a show and "hate" means something very different for every fan. For many, the knee-jerk response is simply, "I don't hate it. If I truly hated it I wouldn't still be watching." It's ouroboros eating its own tail: if you hate RWBY you shouldn't watch RWBY, but we watch it, so we must not hate it. Now what? The conversation often stalls when someone refuses to acknowledge that there's more to interacting with a text than the two neat boxes "I love it completely" and "I hate it completely."

But I'm getting off base here. The point is that changing opinions crops up a lot when discussing the critical side of the fandom, with some assuming that if you're critical now then you've always been critical and you're nothing but critical. The idea that you once loved RWBY and are now negotiating a different kind of interest in it, or that you're frustrated by the show while also enjoying other aspects is, it seems, not on the table. It's presented as that either/or situation: you like it, or you don't, and if you've got any gripes with the story, the author(s), or the company at any point... then you're in the "don't" category.

But beyond all that, I also mean that opinions aren't allowed to change in the sense of fans not acknowledging that online spaces are a kind of Wild West where opinions as a whole are incredibly malleable. To use myself as an example, I've posted A LOT of stuff about RWBY. That means I've said a lot of stuff and given how humans work... a lot of that stuff contradicts! Sometimes it's for easily explainable reasons — I got a new piece of information and changed my tune accordingly, a new Volume warmed me to a character or topic that I wasn't previously interested in, etc. — but other times it's just... a mess. Because our relationships with texts can be a mess. I've got posts where I'm criticizing Sun when talking about RWBY. I've got posts where I'm defending Sun when talking about Before the Dawn. I've got posts where I'm 100% backing Ozpin's choices. I've got posts where I acknowledge he really fucked up. I've got posts where I gush about how much I love Ruby's optimistic outlook. I've got posts where I express how much I can't stand her naive outlook. This stuff isn't static and it's certainly not neat and tidy. Not only do our opinions about texts and their creators often change over time, they don't always change across a set number of years for easy consumption by an outside observer. Sometimes your opinion changes daily. Hourly. Sometimes that occurs through conversations followers never see, posts that are later deleted, nothing but your own thoughts because we're not posting every hour of every day. And then you're back saying Thing #1 again because it's all just messy, repetitive conversation expressed via quickly written tweets and the like as an informal hobby. No one is double-checking our work here, demanding to know if we really, truly back what we're saying 100% because someone might one day drag it back out into the light and try to hold you accountable for it. Presenting any one, quickly expressed opinion from over a decade ago as some sort of 'gotcha' is in far more bad faith, imo, than the critique that's getting dismissed.

All of which is, of course, far from just a RWBY issue. We see this kind of behavior everywhere online, where past opinions, mistakes, or just casual responses are dredged up with the intention of erasing any and all present credibility. Pay no attention to what the person is saying now, instead form your opinion of them solely by what they said years ago, with no possible wiggle room allowed. Fans dismissing RWBY critique? That's fine. No one needs to engage with criticism of a favorite show — if anything, I highly encourage those who dislike critique to steer clear of it — so as frustrating as it can be on our end, it's the cleaner side of a very ugly coin. If the worst our community ever did was go, "Your critique is invalid because you said once in 2008 that you don't like Monty's stuff" and left it at that... said community would be a far kinder, gentler, safer place. As it stands, that urge to go digging for a 'gotcha' post generally leads to full-blown harassment (which, frankly, I'm sure hbomberguy got anyway). It is weird that fans are so eager to use an old screenshot to "disprove" a two and a half hour video... I just wish that's as far as that kind of behavior ever went.

#rwde #rwby #mymetas